How Portugal left Mozambique
I'm at this moment in the Hoover Archives, working on the paper I'm writing about how the South African apartheid government spent 16 years trying to destabalize the newly independent Mozambique. I always knew the Portuguese were bastards and the worst out of all the colonizers (although that should not be interpreted as saying anything good about the British or the French, who were also bastards in Africa) but I just read something that I thought I'd quote here. I already knew that there were only a handful of Mozambicans who had received a college education but I couldn't remember the specifics. So here they are, here's what Portugal left Mozambique with at independence:
"Frelimo was left to run an effectively bankrupt country with virtually no trained people. The illiteracy rate was over ninety per cent. There were six economists, two agronomists, not a single geologist, and fewer than a thousand black high-school graduates in all of Mozambique. Of three hundred and fifty railroad engineers working in 1975, just one was black (and he was an agent of the Portuguese secret police.)”
William Finnegan, “A Reporter at Large: The Emergency-1,” The New Yorker (May 22, 1989): 43-76. Vic Ulmer Collection, Hoover Archives, Box 2, Folder 3.
"Frelimo was left to run an effectively bankrupt country with virtually no trained people. The illiteracy rate was over ninety per cent. There were six economists, two agronomists, not a single geologist, and fewer than a thousand black high-school graduates in all of Mozambique. Of three hundred and fifty railroad engineers working in 1975, just one was black (and he was an agent of the Portuguese secret police.)”
William Finnegan, “A Reporter at Large: The Emergency-1,” The New Yorker (May 22, 1989): 43-76. Vic Ulmer Collection, Hoover Archives, Box 2, Folder 3.
posted by Jessica Somewhere in the States at 10:50 AM
11 Comments:
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I must be missing some background here. I was bracing myself for some horrendous tale of savage butchery, and then - not very many high school graduates?
Was there a slaughter of native intellectuals? Was Mozambique a literate society like the Aztecs or Incas prior to European arrival? I truly don't know anything about Mozambique, these aren't rhetorical questions. Maybe without the Portuguese there was a society that would have generated tens of thousands of engineers, I don't know, and the Portuguese stripped generations of literacy and education.
It just struck me strangely. I mean, I expect an imperial power to grab whatever it wants and not give anything back. Weren't there any huge massacres that were far worse than neglecting advanced education? It just seems an odd thing to pick education neglect as the item that would put the Portuguese at the top of the "Worst Imperial Colonizers" list.
Well, the first important thing is to understand the distinction between imperialism and colonialism. The historical definition of imperialism is a sovereign power extending its control and influence over another sovereign power; usually, one sovereign power then dominates and, as you suggest rightly, takes as much as possible without giving any in return. This is why the United States is referred to as an imperial power. Alternatively, colonialism actually engages in some type of governmental rule over another territory, usually trying to extend a hegemonic control over all functioning systems within that territory. While it does not extend the same rights and benefits that it confers on its own citizens, it usually does engage in self-serving rhetoric about its desire to extend the benefits of its own great civilization to the other, less great civilization. In the parlance of British and French colonialism, this was known as the 3 c’s—Christianity, capitalism (sometimes alternatively referred to as commerce), and civilization (a western form of legal, educational, governmental, social and cultural norms). Given the rhetoric, most colonial powers failed miserably on all counts, but some did do better than others, notably the Brits.
So while you are correct, of course, that lack of education is not as high on the hierarchy of sins as mass destruction of physical lives, I do think that destruction of societies merits some note. Of course, the Portuguese did engage in terribly destructive behavior toward African bodies, beginning with the slave trade in the mid-15th century (which continued despite international bans in 1830s through the end of 19th century); further, they created systems of forced labor in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea Bissau and effectively enslaved well over half the local population; and when Africans agitated for independence, which they did in all the colonies of course, they engaged in a ten-year war in Mozambique, then supported destabilizing troops for another 16 years, and also, upon leaving, did things like filling water pipes with cement, destroying roads, etc. in order to render the country absolutely unmanageable. And yes, I do see these things as worse, sort of. But the majority of African states were functioning very well pre-introduction of Europe, despite the lack of writing, and certainly the Portuguese were guilty of going in and destroying that, all in the name of “uplifting the African” to their own level of religion and civilization. Then they pulled out, all the while spouting their propaganda about what a great deed they did for the African population and look at how much it’s appreciated. So yes, I do find the fact that they left the population in such critical need of good leadership, and deliberately destroyed what little infrastructure they brought, as particularly heinous. Not, perhaps, as heinous as their enslaving of the population at different times and places (known as the prazero system), but pretty damned shitty behavior in my book.
Here’s a brief, not very detailed history.
http://www.jlhs.nhusd.k12.ca.us/Classes/Social_Science/Mozambique/Mozambique_history.html
P.S. And yes, quite frankly, I think the slave trade constitutes a slaughter of African
intellectuals. (I am not using the term "native" because it's actually a very offensive term, used by colonial powers and settlers for Africans the way southerners in U.S. use the, well, n-word.) This does not mean that I'm ignoring the fact that Africans were partly complicit with the slave trade but--and here I'd go back to my earlier posting on "wealth in people" concept-- an "African slave" on the African continent had rights and their "owners" had obligations towards them, something the Atlantic slave trade utterly lacked. This was not common knowledge by Africans who sold other Africans to the Portuguese etc.
but I do agree that lack of providing education does not compare to genocide. etc...
And if you read my post from beginning to end, I am clearly not putting this at the TOP of any list of sins, as you think--I am merely quoting it as ONE example of A sin they committed against the Mozambican population.
It's true enough, I took the "I just read something I thought I'd quote here" as a more dramatic introduction than it was meant to be.
So what were the major city-states or whatever the form of organization was? I know a lot of societies developed varying levels of sophistication in astronomy and engineering. Does anyone know how far Mozambique had gotten pre-Euro?
The Shona, who occupied part of the area now known as Mozambique and part of the area now known as Zimbabwe, created an advanced and complicated civilization during 13th and 14th centuries.
The Gaza Kingdom was formed in 19th century from people who left what is now Kwa-Zulu/Natal.
Otherwise, I'm not sure--could find out, though. Probably much of it was based on the "house" and "big man" social forms.
But the interesting thing about Africans is that they did "what worked." If an advanced and complicated state system was working, they used it for a time, and then they would choose another system that, by European standards, was "less advanced" on the evolutionary scale of societies--a standard of judgment that has a lot of problems. African societies tended to move back and forth across the spectrum of societal formations, sometimes employing one form and sometimes another.
The Shona civilization is known as The Great Zimbabwe; you can see pictures of ruins online.
I know various European societies also went from city-based to hunter-gatherer societies at different times, although I'm guessing whoever set up the societal evolution scale didn't know that. :)
A question occurred to me about the imperial-colonial definition business: is there a technical term in History for times when one society sent scholars to another without any particular schemes to eventually conquer? I've heard of requests from ancient empires for scholars to come visit, where the empires were so distant there was no hope of subjugating one to the other for some time. I'm curious if that happened often enough for there even to be a word for it.
In the Muslim world, they're called Sufi scholars and masters, and they did in fact travel everywhere, at the request of states and also at their own behest, but there was (usually) no intention to use them as conduits to extend state power.
Missionaries and anthropologists sometimes were quite conscious of the fact that they were colluding with the colonial state, but other times were not conscious of it, even though they did in fact further the colonial state's cause. But some missionaries (and there's one in Malawi that I'm thinking of in particular) could repudiate the colonial state and initiate or inspire African revolts (though more commonly these were led by African prophets, who could sometimes be seen as the intellectuals of the day). So I would say that there were intellectuals called missionaries/anthropologists/ethnologists who did sometimes travel without the intention of furthering colonial ambitions but they usually did it anyway.
But even the sufi reference is suspect, as sufis in places like Zanzabari were sometimes quite powerful and spoke with/to/for the Omani rulers, at times serving as a broker between rulers and the people.
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