ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the place, image and experience of the Portuguese settlers sent by the Portuguese Estado Novo dictatorship to colonatos (state-sponsored rural settlements) in Angola (Cela and Cunene) and Mozambique (Limpopo) during the 1950s and 1960s. Trying to contribute to a more comprehensive vision of the white settler societies in “Portuguese Africa”, the research mobilises a wide range of primary sources (archival, printed and oral sources), of different nature and provenience (scientific publications, official discourses, newspapers and propaganda material). The Portuguese settlers came from different places and social classes in the metropole and, in Africa, formed a heterogeneous community with an a priori superior status than the Africans. The rural settlers established in the colonatos were only a tiny portion of the white population and did not corresponded to the expectations that the imperial state put on them – people who were attached to the land and hard-working and were a model of civilisation to the Africans. The majority of the Portuguese settlers, living in the main cities and working in the third sector, did not want to be confused with their rural, poor and illiterate countrymen, sometimes perceived as equal to the natives.
