Portuguese Colonies In Africa Research Articles

International origin and development of nationalism: Generational transformation of East Timorese nationalism under Indonesia's occupation (1975–1999)

AbstractEast Timorese nationalism experienced a unique generational transition during Indonesia's occupation hinging onto internationalism in the changing world. In contrast to the existing literature on nationalism, which is overwhelmingly focused on earlier construction of nationalism and post‐independence nation building, this article offers a theoretical account of the transformation of nationalism from an older to newer generation through a socio‐historical analysis. In light of interactions between nationalism and internationalism, it argues that while the older generation relied on a Lusophone cosmology of anti‐colonialism derived from counterparts in Portuguese colonies in Africa in the 1960s, the younger generation took advantage of universal human rights advocacy in the 1990s in its aspiration for independence. In doing so, this study demonstrates both generational continuity and change in the construction, development and transformation of East Timorese nationalism.

Anticolonial poetics: forging solidarities and imagining futures

ABSTRACT This paper explores the construction of affective solidarities within and across the spaces and boundaries of colonized and racialized worlds in the works of militant poets of the Portuguese colonies in Africa. From the 1940s to the 1960s a distinct form of anticolonial poetry emerged written by a generation of Angolans and Mozambicans who became involved in the liberation struggles. The paper examines how poetry served as a vehicle to imagine and call into being various subjectivities and affective relations which actively countered the restrictions of colonialism and racism, especially on the part of the assimilados, the small educated elite constructed by Portuguese colonialism. Several important forms of anticolonial connectivity are expressed in these poems: connections with the broader African diaspora in North America, the Caribbean and Brazil; connections with all continental Africans; connections across the spaces of the Portuguese colonial empire – Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe; and connections of solidarity and unity between the assimilados and indígenas of the Portuguese colonies. These various dimensions of affective connection were constitutive of a new anticolonial imagination and looked towards liberated futures.

“En el principio era el verbo”: la escritura de Resistencia e identidad en las producciones de la Casa de los Estudiantes del Imperio

In the heart of the metropolis, between 1944 and 1965, the House of the Students of the Empire was responsible for the formation of a part of the African intellectuality that fought against Portuguese colonialism in Africa. Personalities such as Amílcar Cabral, Agostinho Neto among others would become fundamental characters in this fight against oppression. The aim of this article is to analyze some poems produced by members of the House which are compiled in the Antologias de Poesia da Casa dos Estudantes do Império, highlighting Angolan writers. Moreover, for a better understanding it is necessary a historical contextualization of the House and its role in the formation of an anticolonial and identity consciousness for these members, which would echo in the future in their countries of origin.

The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa: Memory, Narrative, and History, Elsa Peralta (ed.) (2022)

Review of: The Retornados from the Portuguese Colonies in Africa: Memory, Narrative, and History, Elsa Peralta (ed.) (2022) London: Routledge, 442 pp., ISBN 978-0-36770-399-8, h/bk, £120.00 ISBN 978-1-00314-615-5, e-book, £33.29

The problem of the use of the term “Portuguese Aljamía”

The portuguese term “Aljamía” means ʻtexts in Portuguese in Arabic scriptʼ since the beginning of the XXth century under the influence of D. Lopes. The word “Aljamía” appears in Portuguese documents of the XVth century to designate the Portuguese language as it was perceived by the Moors. Thus, the word “aljamía” has two meanings: the historical ʻforeign languageʼ (Portuguese) and the modern ʻtext in Portuguese in Arabic scriptʼ. These meanings correspond to the Spanish “Aljamía” and “Aljamiado”. However, not all scientists agree with the terminological use of the word “Aljamía” as an analogue of the Spanish “Aljamiado”. The term “Aljamía” technically means portuguese texts in Arabic script, but it has other cultural and historical references. Spanish texts in “Aljamiado” were created by Spanish Muslims who lost their knowledge of Arabic in the period after the Reconquista (XIII–XVII). The Arabic script was a sign of their cultural and religious identity. The reason for the use of Arabic alphabet in Portuguese documents (XVIth century) is different. The Arab governors of the portuguese colonies in Africa had to address their reports directly to the Portuguese king. They knew Portuguese only in spoken form and used the Arabic alphabet to write down the Portuguese language. These documents are an important source in the history of the Portuguese language, especially in historical phonetics. However, from a cultural and historical point of view, they are not comparable with Spanish and cannot belong to the corpus of manuscripts in “Aljamiado”.

Women’s Issues: African Writers Fighting Portuguese Colonialism in the 1950s

This essay approaches the literary production by female intellectuals who opposed Portuguese colonialism in Africa, recognising their active role in history, as well as the cultural and political processes that influenced their writing and its repercussions. Experiencing multiple forms of subalternity – of class, race and gender – women like Alda Espírito Santo, Alda Lara, Noémia de Sousa Deolinda Rodrigues and Manuela Margarido were committed to the creation of new ways of writing and forms of conceiving the world. Playing a fundamental role in the literary, political and cultural environment of the second half of the 20th century, they circulated in spaces in which they questioned male hegemony, discussing gender issues and exercising multiple forms of resistance. This article will consider how the demands of women in the process of political decolonisation have often been reduced to the label of ‘women’s issues’, the idea of unification of struggles having been privileged instead.

Ferreira, Ana Paula. Mulheres Escrevendo o Colonialismo Português na África

O livro de Ana Paula Ferreira é uma obra de fôlego que percorre a escrita de várias mulheres portuguesas, desde finais do século XIX até ao século XXI, enquadrando-as nas diferentes conjunturas políticas de Portugal ao longo deste período. Esta visão ampla, que relaciona o trabalho de várias autoras, consegue demonstrar o relevante contributo da escrita de um conjunto de mulheres que, cada qual a seu modo, se envolveu nos principais debates da sua época, deixando através da escrita um testemunho desses mesmos tempos.

The influence of German science on Cinchona and quinine research in Portugal in the second half of the 19th century.

This paper examines the contribution of three Portuguese scientists to Cinchona cultivation in the former Portuguese colonies in the second half of the 19th century, while discussing the importance of their studies in Germany to their professional lives. Portuguese pharmaceutical, medical, and botanical literature from the 19 th and 20 th century was reviewed, as well as books and articles regarding the history of pharmacy and medicine in Portugal. Cinchona bark, source of the antimalarial alkaloid quinine, is obtained from a South American plant, and was an important commodity in the 19th century. Many European nations (including Portugal) tried to acclimatize and cultivate Cinchona plants in their colonies. Pharmacist Joaquim dos Santos e Silva (1842-1906) performed chemical analysis of Cinchona bark samples from the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Forester Bernardino Barros Gomes (1839-1910) wrote a book with practical instructions for Cinchona cultivation and chronicled the history of Cinchona plantations in the British and Dutch colonies. In that work he also encouraged private planters to cultivate Cinchona. Forester Adolpho Frederico Möller (1842-1920), as inspector of the Botanical Garden of Coimbra, managed Cinchona plants' cultivation in the garden's nurseries, which were later sent to the colonies, and answered queries from Cinchona planters. Silva's chemistry studies in Germany were crucial to his career and the work of the three scientists was influenced and guided by their knowledge of German science and scientific culture.

The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage by John Harris

Reviewed by: The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage by John Harris Robert Colby (bio) Keywords Middle Passage, Slavery, Atlantic slave trade The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage. By John Harris. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 300. Cloth, $30.00.) On September 21, 1859, the barque Pamphylia slipped out of New York harbor. Though purportedly bound for Honduras on a sugar-trading circuit, all evidence pointed to a diff erent, more sinister destination. A Cuban [End Page 704] firm with ties to the slave trade had recently acquired the vessel but obscured its ownership through a charter to another, New York-based Cuban company. This crucial fiction offered the ship an all-important talisman: the right to sail under the U.S. flag. Four months later, however, a British cruiser patrolling for slavers apprehended the Pamphylia near the mouth of the Congo River with six hundred captive Africans aboard. Normally, a ship running under American colors would have been virtually immune from British scrutiny. But after timely intelligence put the warship on the lookout for the Pamphylia, U.S. sovereignty did not shield the slave traders. The British navy took custody of the enslaved, who still endured a simulacrum of the Middle Passage, steered first to St. Helena and then to the British Caribbean to be placed as apprentices. Nevertheless, from the perspective of both the British government and the slave dealers involved, an illicit slave-trading voyage had been successfully suppressed (169–74). In The Last Slave Ships, John Harris demonstrates the outsized role Americans played in the nearly five hundred slaving ventures launched between 1852 and the trade’s final demise in 1867. Though only a handful ended on U.S. soil (including the famous Clotilda and Wanderer), 91 percent took place on U.S.-built ships (59). Others were helmed by American captains, crewed in U.S. ports, or funded by capital laundered through American financial institutions. The confluence of these elements, moreover, made lower Manhattan a particularly convenient hub from which slave traders from Cuba, Brazil, and Portuguese colonies in Africa could continue their operations. The greatest benefit American participation offered slave traders, however, was the protective aegis of the star-spangled banner. The nineteenth century saw a series of nations gradually, though often half-heartedly, endorse efforts to suppress the slave trade. Americans celebrated their early abandonment of the traffic and, through a series of laws and treaties, nominally committed to its cessation. In their case, however, not only was the flesh weak but the spirit also was less than willing. Unless (and, in many cases, even if) slave dealers were caught in the act, prosecution was difficult; U.S. law left considerable loopholes through which suspected slavers could slink, including a failure to ban the equipment required for the trade and a cumbersome definition of citizenship. Ironically, the surviving slave trade also provided moral cover for American slaveholders and their allies who desired to annex Cuba even as they ignored U.S. complicity in that traffic. It was little wonder, then, that three-quarters of [End Page 705] the hundreds of slave ships descending on Africa in the 1850s and 1860s sailed under U.S. colors (59). Only the Republican Party’s ascendancy in the 1860s undercut Americans’ participation in the slave trade. Having campaigned against Democratic hypocrisy on the matter, the Lincoln administration cracked down on slave trafficking, passing new laws, deploying intelligence gathering tactics of the sort favored by the more-successful British, and aggressively prosecuting slave traders like Nathaniel Gordon. Most importantly, Secretary of State William Seward signed a landmark treaty removing many of the protections offered by U.S. colors. With the national government’s authority deployed more enthusiastically than ever before against the trade, the American resources so crucial to its survival dried up, leading to its ultimate demise in the late 1860s. In showing the importance of laws, treaties, and their enforcement to the slave trade, Harris adds a crucial political component to our understanding of the second slavery. This economic phenomenon certainly rested on surging global demand for slave-produced commodities...

O que tinha de ser: vivências coloniais em A. Lobo Antunes e V. S. Naipaul

A queda dos últimos impérios coloniais no século XX, nomeadamente as colónias portuguesas em África, é frequentemente descrita como um processo normal de mudança – a razão histórica ‘como tinha de ser’. As narrativas ficcionais, por seu lado, mostram-nos o lado de dentro da História, visto através do olhar de personagens individualizadas. Os romances de V.S. Naipaul e A. Lobo Antunes oferecem-nos testemunhos impressivos de luso-africanos tentando dar sentido às suas experiências falhadas ou debatendo-se com memórias traumáticas. Este texto analisa a forma como os dois autores produzem imagens subjetivas do processo de (des)colonização, partilhando alguns pontos de vista sobre um mundo em mudança.

A Casa dos Estudantes do Império (CEI), as poetas africanas da década de 50 e os filmes de Sarah Maldoror

Nos anos 50, em Lisboa, vários estudantes provenientes de diferentes colónias portuguesas em África encontraram-se na CEI –Casa dos Estudantes do Império, um centro cultural e de lazer para universitários e intelectuais vindos de África ou da Ásia. Sublinharia nomes como Amílcar Cabral (1924–1973), Mário Pinto de Andrade (1928–1990) e Agostinho Neto (1922–1979), famosos ativistas que, naquela altura, investiram em formas de resistência cultural contra o colonialismo, sendo a literatura um dos meios para despertar reflexão/ consciência política no meio estudantil. As mulheres que se destacaram neste meio cultural e académico foram Noémia de Sousa (1926–2002), Alda Lara (1930–1962) e Alda do Espírito Santo (1926–2010). Esta investigação reavalia o papel destas três mulheres na frente de intervenção cultural para a formação da consciência política coletiva que desembocou nas lutas de independência das colónias portuguesas. Estas três mulheres também são as primeiras autoras integradas nos respetivos sistemas literários nacionais, tornando-se figuras fundadoras numa genealogia do contributo literário das mulheres. No entanto, as suas obras também representam uma geração particular, enquadrada pela atmosfera da CEI. Como consequência do ativismo político desenvolvido nos corredores da CEI, alguns dos jovens intelectuais comprometidos tiveram de deixar Portugal, exilando-se em Paris, onde se reuniram em torno da revista Présence Africaine. Este artigo também explora a ligação da CEI a Paris, via Mário Pinto de Andrade e a sua mulher, a cineasta Sarah Maldoror (1938–),a qual adaptou textos de Luandino Vieiraao cinema(Monangambé, 1968,and Sambizanga, 1972). Na altura, o cinema de Maldoror foi um meio para divulgar internacionalmente o regime contra o qual o povo angolano lutava. O objetivo final desta investigação é explorar a articulação entre a obra destas quatro autoras e o ativismo política da CEI.

“Visualidade” educacional na Guiné-Bissau à luz da teoria de banda desenhada, ou seja, uma revisão trans/pós-colonial das ideias didáticas/pedagógicas no âmbito da lusofonia

The main purpose of the article is to present analysis of comic book Nô Pintcha which – as we state – is the exceptional example of visual representation of theory of education from period of early independence of former portuguese colonies in Africa. Nô Pintcha was published in 1978 during the summit of ministers of education and educators from Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé. Authors of Nô Pintcha considered comic book as a apendix to the basic literacy campaign in Guinea Bissau. Theory of education which was used during literacy campaign had origins of emancipatory popular education of Paulo Freire. Thus the analysis presented in this paper lies parallely in looking for the Nô Pintcha in perspective of comic book theory as well in looking for traces Freire’s theory.

New Uses for an Old and Abandoned Colonial Collection: The herpetological collection of the Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical (Lisbon, Portugal)

The herpetological collections of the Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical (Lisbon, Portugal) are the largest and most diverse collections of amphibians and reptiles in the country. These were collected in the mid-twentieth century in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia, and were the object of study of several naturalists that used them to describe and catalogue the herpetofauna of those areas. After the independence of these colonies in the mid 1970's, the research on this material nearly halted, and the collections became abandoned, without proper curation and lacking accessibility. In 2015, we started a process to recover these collections (Fig. 1). This encompassed basic curation, e.g. cleaning and substituting jars and fluid preservatives, cataloguing the entire collection, digitizing and georeferencing all the specimens, and making data available through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility at GBIF.org. While doing this, each specimen was also linked to its bibliographic data, its taxonomic identity carefully reviewed, and rare and important specimens (e.g., type specimens) flagged. Currently, the collection is completely accessible, both physically and electronically, and it is being used by researchers and students around the world. Some results have already been published including the description of species new to science (Ceríaco et al. 2016, Ceríaco et al. 2017, Ceríaco 2015, Soares et al. 2018), new country checklists, the publication of an Atlas of Angolan Herpetofauna (Marques et al. 2018), International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List assessments, and student training. This presentation provides an overview of the recovery process of the collection, discusses strategies on how to digitize and make historical collections available to the community, and demonstrates how biological collections amassed during colonial times can be of extreme importance to the study and preservation of present day biodiversity.

The blood that remains: card collections from the colonial anthropological missions

AbstractIn this paper I discuss the history of colonial collections through a focus on the social life of a set of blood group cards held by Portuguese institutions since the 1950s. Between the 1940s and 1960s, a series of anthropological field expeditions were organized by the Portuguese Overseas Science Research Board to the then Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia. A large number of samples of indigenous blood were collected on blood group paper cards in the course of these campaigns. The cards were then stored in Portugal and used for racial serological studies until the 1980s. Thereafter, the collection survived various institutional deaths. Throughout its post-colonial existence in Portuguese institutions, the cards seem to have moved ambivalently between a condition of valued asset and one of obsolete material. And yet they revealed a resilient capacity to mediate conceptions of historical time. Thus the essay asks what it might mean to approach these collections as colonial ‘chronotope’ – devices for connecting space and time – and how and why they endured through various ends, culminating as a genetically contaminated museum object.

Não somos “portugueses de segunda”: o estabelecimento de identidades mediadas pela memória e pelo esquecimento da colônia

Este artigo visa discutir a questão da libertação das colônias portuguesas em África e na Índia a partir de dois romances de perspectiva portuguesa: A casa-comboio (2010), de Raquel Ochoa, e O retorno (2011), de Dulce Maria Cardoso. Aqui, observaremos, especialmente, como a memória e o esquecimento da metrópole e da colônia, bem como o que é dito e o que não é dito pelas personagens, contribuem para a construção de identidades específicas.

Precisamos de uma identidade única e coesa? Uma questão de identificação nacional: a nação e identidade nacional em Moçambique

Através de uma análise histórico-sociológica sobre identidade nacional, nação e processos de identificação em Moçambique a partir da implementação do colonialismo português em África no século XX, busco estabelecer um diálogo crítico com estudos que abordam essas mesmas temáticas sobre a realidade moçambicana. Assim, por meio dos ensaios históricos, entrevistas e algumas obras literárias de João Paulo Borges Coelho, e em comunhão com outros autores, procuro demonstrar a complexidade e pluralidade de elementos que conformam as identidades individuais e coletivas no Moçambique independente.

Aspectos das inter-relações entre colonialismo, violência e interesses econômicos, representadas em O esplendor de Portugal, de António Lobo Antunes

Neste artigo, destacam-se alguns aspectos da visão crítica que se desenvolve no romance O esplendor de Portugal acerca do colonialismo português na África. Entre esses aspectos, priorizam-se aqui as inter-relações entre o desenvolvimento do sistema capitalista no mundo e o estabelecimento e manutenção das formas do colonialismo português em Angola, caracterizadas sobretudo pela violência. Além disso, apresentam-se algumas das maneiras como essas relações são construídas na narrativa.

Introduction: decolonising the “undecolonisable”? Portugal and the independence of Lusophone Africa

In 2015, Lusophone Africa celebrated 40 years since independence. Portuguese colonies in Africa became independent in the aftermath of two orders of interlinked events. The first was the fierce-armed opposition to the colonial order – through the action of nationalist movements and nationalist thinkers such as Amílcar Cabral – which escalated after 1960 when French and English colonies in Africa were achieving independence. The second was the Carnation Revolution, in 1974, which, despite having taken place in Lisbon, had powerful reverberations across Portuguese Africa. Here, I argue that the Carnation Revolution was a by-product of the emergence of nationalist movements in Africa, when it became apparent that popular uprisings there could not be won by conventional armed struggle. Or, to put it slightly different, anticolonial struggle in Africa opened the way not only for the end of Portuguese rule on the continent, but also for the demise of dictatorship in Portugal itself.

Wielojęzyczność społeczności dawnych portugalskich kolonii w Afryce

Multilingualism of the societies of former Portuguese colonies in Africa 
 The goal of the article is to present the multilingualism in the countries emerged from former Portuguese colonies in Africa where, alongside the official Portuguese, more or less numerous native African languages are to be found together with various mixed languages. All of the analysed countries are bi- or multilingual, in each the status of Portuguese is different, and so are the number and the status of national languages. In some, creole languages have developed while in others such mixed languages do not exist. One might ponder the reasons for this linguistic diversification, and as a result, observe both the differences and the shared characteristics of the analysed countries, and identify the factors that might have created this sharp contrast. It is the goal of the present paper to attempt to answer these questions.

Staphylococcus aureus in former Portuguese colonies from Africa and the Far East: missing data to help fill the world map

The aim of the present study was to determine the prevalence and risk factors for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) nasal carriage among patients and healthcare workers in Angola (ANG), São Tomé and Príncipe (STP), Cape Verde (CV) and East Timor (ET), and to characterize the antimicrobial susceptibility, virulence content and population structure of all S. aureus. Despite the importance of MRSA as a major human pathogen, data from these former Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia are scarce. A total of 2065 nasal swabs recovered between 2010–14 were included in the study. Antimicrobial susceptibility testing and molecular characterization of S. aureus showed: (i) a very high MRSA prevalence in ANG (61.6%), moderate in STP (25.5%), low in CV (5.6%) and null in ET; (ii) a high prevalence of Panton–Valentine leukocidin in STP (36.8%), ET (29.2%) and CV (28.3%) contrasting with ANG (7.9%); (iii) ST5-SCCmecIVa, ST8-IV/V and ST5-VI were the major MRSA clones in ANG (65.2%), STP (44.8%) and CV (50%), respectively; (iv) a high resistance to trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole in ANG (66.5%) and STP (50.9%), to rifampin in ANG (77.3%), and to tetracycline in STP (26.3%) and ET (20.8%); (v) three major methicillin-susceptible S. aureus clones (ST15, ST508, ST152) were present in all four countries. Age <18 years (OR 2.03, 95% CI 1.24–3.31), previous surgery (OR 2.45, 95% CI 1.24–4.83), no smoking (OR 4.04, 95% CI 1.05–15.50), and longer hospitalization (OR 2.53, 95% CI 1.49–4.28) were risk factors for MRSA carriage. This study provided the first comprehensive overview on MRSA in former Portuguese colonies in Africa and Asia, missing data in the world map.