Struggles and resistance beyond Portugal: civilizing mission and forced labor in Angola (1878-1914)

Author(s)

Leonardo de Oliveira Paes

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: Assis. 2022-05-09.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp). Faculdade de Ciências e Letras. Assis
• Defense date: 2021-12-15
• Advisor: Paulo Cesar Gonçalves

Abstract

The Portuguese colonial process had as guiding principles the civilizational rhetoric, based on the civilizing mission of leading African natives to higher levels of civilization, taking them out of their barbarism and savagery state that impeded their evolution. Certain rhetoric, expressly disseminated through the colonial projects of the years 800 and 900, made Portuguese colonization necessary and conducive to Western humanitarian principles, which consecrated the Portuguese imperialism benevolence character. The civilizational discourses ended up justifying and legitimizing the totality of Portuguese colonialist actions overseas and served as a basis for the construction of regulations and decrees that aimed at the massive recruitment of indigenous labor through compulsory and, therefore, forced labor. Native work was used as an essential instrument of the Portuguese civilizing mission as it was the most effective means of stimulating western habits responsible for uprooting native barbaric and savage customs and practices. Based on these precepts, legislations were formulated between the 19th and 20th centuries that made work mandatory as a moral and legal instrument, capable of being applied to African populations. The methods of coercion and manipulation used ended up generating external and internal complaints about the real conditions in which the natives were inserted, which also led to African resistance against Portuguese rule in their territories. Therefore, colonial empires are spaces of disputes, generated by a governance based on difference, in which imperial projects and their respective administrative strategies can suffer fluctuations according to international political conjunctures and internal demonstrations and revolts, generated precisely by borders created by the processes of differentiation in colonial policies. The entirety analysis of the Portuguese colonialist process, using discursive sources and legislative regulations, helps to understand that colonial dynamics is not a static process, but rather a mobile one, subject to oscillations and alterations from externally or internally. So, this dissertation aims to understand the dynamics of oscillation and its constitutive elements, understand the role of the Civilizing Mission used as a justification for the elaboration of the legislative apparatus, investigate the theme of forced labor in Portuguese colonial legislation produced in the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, in order to capture the mechanisms used by the colonizers with the objective of exerting control over the African labor force and, finally, reflect on the clashes and resistances within the Portuguese colonial system to understand its consequences in the area of legislation and to what extent these pressures caused damages in the Portuguese domain regarding the exploitation of African labor in Angola. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 18/25571-4 - Confrontations and resistances in the Portuguese overseas: civilizing mission and bonded labor in Angola (1878-1914)
• Grantee: Leonardo de Oliveira Paes
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master