Portuguese tropical geography and decolonization in Africa: the case of Mozambique

Abstract

Portuguese decolonization involved the formal dissolution of an authoritarian regime which had maintained through law that all its colonies – euphemistically named ‘overseas provinces’ after 1951 – were integral parts of Portuguese territory. Dissolution came after a thirteen-year war (1961–1974) with three fronts, culminating in the bloodless Carnation Revolution of April 1974. Decolonization of Portugal's colonial empire precipitated the emergence of newly independent countries, including five in Africa alone. From the late 1940s through to the early 1970s, a small group of Portuguese geographers researched their country's overseas possessions within an authoritarian political and social context and with a concern for tropical conditions. After 1974 everything changed, and most geographers who were conducting fieldwork or had been stationed overseas returned to Lisbon. This paper considers the politics and practices of Portuguese geographical scholarship as it intersected with late colonialism and decolonization in Africa, and in terms of its concern with tropical geography. It seeks to contextualize Portuguese tropical geography in Africa by outlining the development of the Lisbon School of Geography. It also examines the late development of the university geography degrees in Mozambique and Angola. In particular, the paper engages with the intellectual biographies of three geographers who were deeply involved in the geography degrees created in Lourenço Marques (presently Maputo, Mozambique), and how their lives intersected with late colonial and post-independence Mozambique. The final sections discuss how the 1974 revolution, the transitional governments, independence and later the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique impacted on Portuguese geographical research and how these developments were bound up with the abrupt end of Portuguese tropical geography.