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I know that in OTL, decolonization was a phenomenon with much momentum, and so pretty much inevitable. That said, Portugal, unlike many of the other colonial powers, was a full-blown dictatorship. If I understand correctly, Salazar attempted to make the African colonies the same status as metropolitan Portugal. Why didn't that work? Wouldn't that give them the same rights as the European provinces? In any case, could Portugal have came up with a better colonial policy that, while not preventing independence, would have allowed Angola and Mozambique to skip civil war and retain close ties to Portugal, a la Commonwealth of Nations? And I thought Portuguese racial policy was generally more lax compared to the other colonial nations.
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