ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION A systematic account of Portuguese colonialism in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries requires consideration of the dynamics of Portuguese expansion prior to this period. Yet in a chapter of this scope the necessity for brevity entails the sacrificing of the details. However, without the consideration of particular, concrete situations, the general picture cannot emerge. Considering that the collection and analysis of data are on-going activities, I attempt here to delineate the evolution of Portuguese colonialism from the materials available so far, with an emphasis on the tension between political change and economic stagnation, external dependence and internal ideology.Portuguese ambitions to begin with were limited but, having met with early successes in the fifteenth century, they became enmeshed in economic and strategic structures of world dimensions and complexity (36, pp.40-1). Boxer’s reference to the system as the ‘Portuguese Sea-Borne Empire’ is quite appropriate (14, p.2). Until this century, die form of capital which had dominated Portuguese operations had been merchant capital. The tendency of such capital to depend on the extraction of profits through the exploitation of die existing interconnections between productive and social systems resulted in Angola and Mozambique playing different roles in the Portuguese sea-borne empire prior to the twentieth century. While merchant capital was dominant, the Portuguese presence in Africa did not necessitate significant changes in socio-economic systems.The dominance of the slave trade in Portuguese Africa stifled all other forms of commerce and industry. The abolition of this trade, the harbinger of economic constriction, was a significant episode in the history of Angola and Mozambique. The timing and implementation of
its abolition has been correlated to broader trends in the ideological and economic transformation of Portugal, notwithstanding the local factors which determined the different responses of the two African territories under consideration.The inadequacy of the Portuguese economy to generate capital for colonial investment was a critical factor in the development of dependent capitalism. As Portugal allowed other colonial powers to participate in spoliation, Angola and Mozambique were subjected to contradictory patterns of transformation, destruction and preservation of their internal structures which resulted in a variety of systems of colonial occupation and exploitation (7, p.166). The resulting variations which emerged in Angola and Mozambique were a product of particular forms of external capitalist penetration, heterogeneous structures and distinctive responses of the indigenous people. The local ecologies and natural endowments were very important factors as well.The Estado Novo’s economic nationalism, with its acclaimed aim, of ‘Portugalisation’ of foreign capital, had limitations placed upon it by the centrality of foreign capital in the colonial economies. The success of the Estado Novo’s attempt to nationalise foreign capital in the colonies has been overestimated (66, p.4). In fact the participation of foreign capital in the extractive sectors in the colonial economies increased greatly in the post-Second World War period.The launching of the peoples’ liberation struggles in the 1960s served to accelerate Portugal’s dependency on foreign capital and military support for perpetuating its colonial presence in Angola and Mozambique. At the collapse of this nexus in 1974, Portugal bequeathed colonial economies which had been dominated by foreign rather than Portuguese capital. Western capitalists and the white supremacists of South Africa who stood to lose most from the liberation of Angola and Mozambique have continued to undermine the People’s Republics of Angola and Mozambique.
