Portuguese Angola and Mozambique

Portuguese Angola and Mozambique. The Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique were the oldest and among the last European possessions in Africa. Portugal's presence dated to the late fifteenth century, when its ships reached the Kongo coast and the Swahili ports, and by 1575 Paulo Dias de Novais had founded Luanda, the base from which Portugal slowly pushed into the Angolan interior. In Mozambique, Portuguese rule spread from coastal towns such as Mozambique Island and Sofala up the Zambezi valley, where settlers held vast prazo estates.

For centuries the colonies rested on the slave trade. Angola became the largest single source of enslaved Africans carried across the Atlantic, above all to Brazil, and the trade devastated the peoples of the interior while enriching merchants and the coastal towns. When the Atlantic slave trade was finally suppressed in the nineteenth century, Portugal turned to territorial conquest: after the Berlin Conference it fought a series of campaigns to occupy the interior, crushing the kingdoms and peoples of Angola and Mozambique by the early twentieth century.

Twentieth-century rule was built on forced labor and settler privilege. African farmers were compelled to grow cotton and to work on plantations and roads, while Portugal encouraged white immigration and kept education for Africans minimal. After 1961 liberation movements rose in both colonies: the MPLA, FNLA, and UNITA in Angola, and FRELIMO in Mozambique. Portugal fought long counterinsurgency wars that drained its army until the Carnation Revolution of 1974 in Lisbon ended the dictatorship, and both colonies became independent in 1975.

Independence was followed by devastating civil wars, fueled by the Cold War and by regional powers, which lasted in Angola until 2002 and in Mozambique until 1992. The Portuguese colonial period left the two countries with a shared language, cities such as Luanda and Maputo, and a bitter legacy of exploitation and war that shaped their modern history.

To read more about this topic:

Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Portuguese Colonialism in Africa Encyclopedia.com: Portugal's African Colonies Kawa African History: Portuguese Rule in Angola and Mozambique Cambridge History of Africa: Angola and Mozambique, 1870-1905