Eduardo Vieira, The Church and the Colonial Question, 1920-60 (Luanda: Nova Imprensa, 1989)
… The Conclave of 1919, the second to be held in Rio, featured a church hierarchy much different from the previous one. To begin with, the Church had many more princes: Pope Celestine VI had aggressively elevated bishops and even parish priests to the cardinalate in order to put his stamp on the hierarchy, and there were now 117 cardinals as opposed to the 79 that had elected him to the papacy. But that was only the beginning. Celestine’s goal had been the formation of a College of Cardinals that would represent the Catholic world, and he had appointed men from the New World, Africa and Asia in record numbers, as well as Europeans whose experience had come in the pastoral trenches rather than in traditional circles of power. Celestine’s ideal Church was a street-fighter’s church, a church of the poor, and the 1919 Conclave was closer to that ideal than any for centuries before it.
The ultramontanes and reactionaries, whose hegemony had been unquestioned only a quarter-century before, were a distinct minority among the cardinals who gathered in Rio in August 1919. There were few if any who could be termed liberal: the Catholic Liberal movement was still, as it had been in 1905, a thing of the European and North American laity and lower priesthood rather than the upper hierarchy. But the Catholic left of Latin America and the Philippines was represented: conservative in doctrine but radical in its support of economic and social justice, and highly skeptical of entrenched elites. The populism of the Legion was there along with it, as were the movements of the center and right that had gained power in Belgium and the Andean republics. The Church of 1919 was as political as that of 1905 if not more so – in that, at least, Celestine had been unsuccessful – but its politics were more grass-roots and more attuned to industrial modernity, and were conscious of the global depression that was only just starting to ease.
The 1919 Conclave returned to Europe to choose a pope, electing the 52-year-old Archbishop of Rennes who took the throne as Benedict XV. In part, his election was a rebuke to the anti-clericalism of the French government, of which he was a vocal opponent. But he also shared Celestine’s emphasis on social justice, and though he lacked notable Legion sympathies, he had devoted his life to educating and providing sustenance for the poor. What’s more, he had served in several Church posts in West Africa and India, and the ongoing Indian war of independence had turned him into a critic of harsh colonial policies. It is thus not surprising that, although his papacy would be marked by engagement in the Venezuelan wars of 1922-27 and by an overhaul of the Catholic charitable and educational network, his impact would be felt most strongly in Africa.
The catalyst was the Portuguese election of 1919, which occurred less than a month after Benedict’s own. The Reconstruction Party, which favored a Catholic corporatist state on the Belgian model, won 46 percent of the vote and a commanding majority of parliamentary seats based on its pledge to emulate Belgium in mobilizing social support against the depression. [1] The Reconstructionists quickly moved to consolidate their power, redrawing the constitution in a way that, although formally non-partisan, made Portugal into an effective one-party state. The so-called
Novo Reino would evolve considerably over time, but it would dominate Portuguese politics well into the 1950s.
Under the Reconstructionists, as under previous governments, Portuguese citizens were encouraged to settle in Angola, Mozambique and the mining regions of Portuguese Central Africa. Subsidies for free settlers became the highest ever, and internal exile became the punishment for opponents of the
Novo Reino who hadn’t committed any prison offenses but were considered too dangerous to leave in Portugal proper. The Portuguese population in Africa, which had been 90,000 in 1910 [2] and 130,000 in 1918, approached 200,000 in 1922. And this would lead inexorably to the troubles that became known as
A Rotura – the rupture.
It would be inaccurate to say that the
Novo Reino caused the Rupture, as its roots went back decades or even centuries to the era of slavery. But the massive influx of settlers strained the colonial system in several ways. More settlers meant more of a hunger for land, and confiscation of African farms increased sharply; also, an increased need for infrastructure meant that forced labor obligations became longer and more frequent. Prominent African and
mestiço families found it harder to compete for jobs. In the back-country, the concessionaires, who were now important pillars of the corporate state, had effective impunity to coerce African labor and did so in order to earn profits with which to discharge their social welfare obligations.
Just as explosive was the
Novo Reino’s interference with African religious practices. Nearly everyone in Angola and Mozambique was nominally Catholic, but folk religion was common, and for the past half-century, the colonial authorities had generally left it alone. The Reconstructionists were different: like Tavares’ government in Peru [3], they regarded folk-religious practices as backward and abhorrent, and cracked down heavily on them, fining thousands for conducting unlawful rituals and putting the more tenacious ones in prison. This would have been explosive at the best of times, but in the 1910s and 20s, many of the folk-religious rites were centered on warding off the Congo fever, and their proponents believed that the
Novo Reino was leaving them helpless before the disease.
These factors combined into a perfect storm in June 1923, with near-simultaneous uprisings in Angola, Mozambique and the copper-mining region of Portuguese Central Africa. The rebels’ initial advances were beaten back quickly in the way that Portugal had handled the prior colonial revolts of the twentieth century: with a combination of Portuguese garrison troops, soldiers from the Katangese princely states and Congolese mercenaries. But the rebellion proved harder to root out entirely. The Great War had left the region awash in weapons, and there were places the rebels could go for shelter: Mutapa, nominally aligned to Portugal but worried that an increasingly repressive Catholic state might subvert its independence, and Sud-Kivu, where Dietmar Köhler’s wife came from one of the
mestiço families that the settlers had muscled aside. [4] Both Köhler and the Luba, whose trading network now extended throughout Portuguese Africa, were believed to be conduits for money and supplies, although the colonial government could never prove it.
By the end of 1923, the main areas of settlement had been pacified, but insurgency persisted in the back country, and marches in sympathy with the rebellion took place regularly in the major cities. It was the latter that scared the colonial administration the most, uniting as it did the educated urban Africans and
mestiços and the anti-regime Portuguese who had been sent to Africa as exiles. The government wanted to crush the demonstrations ruthlessly – but the presence of Augusto Cardinal Dias prevented them from doing so.
Dias was a street-fighter in Celestine’s mold: the second son of an educated Kimbundu family, he had fought in the Legion as a young man, joined the priesthood afterward, and ministered to a polyglot congregation in Luanda’s growing slums. His congregation’s concerns were the immediate needs of life, and he had fought to provide those needs to them, often acting as an intermediary between them and the government. Celestine had elevated him first to bishop and then to cardinal, and in the latter capacity, he had written a Catholic critique of colonialism. He had initially supported the Reconstructionist regime, but as conditions in Angola worsened and promised reforms failed to materialize, he threw his weight in favor of the opposition.
The cardinal’s participation put the
Novo Reino on the back foot: with the Church such an important underpinning of the state, such a high-ranking clergyman had to be handled with extreme care. It was April 1924 before the government decided to bite the bullet and arrest Dias, holding him in Luanda prison on charges of sedition. And when it did, its worst fears were realized: the people came out to demand his release despite the police who flooded the streets, and a general strike paralyzed the African ports.
It was at this point that Benedict intervened. Like Dias, he had originally given the
Novo Reino the benefit of the doubt and had supported its social-justice initiatives in Portugal. But its oppressive conduct in Africa had met with his disapproval, and the arrest of a cardinal was the final straw. In June, he declared that the Reconstructionist regime no longer had the Church’s support and pledged to ordain no more priests or bishops anywhere in the Portuguese empire until Dias was released.
El Salvador had ignored an identical sanction imposed by Benedict’s predecessor [5], but the
Novo Reino was not El Salvador: Catholicism was central to its legitimacy, and the withdrawal of Church support shattered its internal legitimacy. Portuguese churchgoers heard sermons against the regime every Sunday, and as rumors spread that Benedict might resort to the first interdiction of an entire nation since 1607, strikes and protests spread to Lisbon itself. Finally, on July 11, 1924, the colonial authorities were forced to back down, and Dias was released from prison to thunderous acclaim.
From that moment, the cardinal was effectively inviolate: he led protests with impunity, preached against Reconstructionist colonial policy in the Cathedral of the Holy Savior, and turned the cathedral into a gathering-place for dissidents. This in turn would lead to the
Novo Reino recognizing that it could not subdue the African colonies with force alone. In 1925, it announced a plan to phase out forced labor over a ten-year period and to extend the social programs of the Portuguese state to Africa, including an ambitious school-construction project and subsidies to the Church charities that supported Congo-fever orphans. The following year, Portuguese universities were opened to African secondary-school graduates, and by decade’s end, there were small Afro-Portuguese communities in Lisbon and Coimbra.
These measures were far from enough for the rebels, who demanded that forced labor end immediately and that colonial subjects be granted self-government and equality under the law. An increasing number of troops and settler militiamen were tied up protecting the main roads and copper mines, and the army redoubled its efforts against the insurgents in the countryside. But at the same time, the government opened cautious negotiations with the African clergy in Angola and Mozambique, holding out the promise that each colony might become a Reconstructionist polity of its own with the local Church as a powerful pillar of the state. In 1929, Dias would lead a delegation of clergy and laity to a round table in Lisbon, at which a more comprehensive package of reforms would be on the table…
Dieter Lisimba, German Africa in the Twentieth Century (Berlin: Allgemeine, 2008)
… The 1920s in nearly every corner of German Africa are known as “the time when it changed,” although in no two parts of the empire were the changes the same.
The 1910s in South-West Africa had begun with the promise of wealth, fueled by the discovery of diamonds under the southern coastal strip. The find was expected to attract immigrants, and it did, both European (not all of them German) and African. Some returned home during the depression, when the colony’s main industries – diamonds and beef – suffered from lack of demand, but the recovery that began at the end of the decade brought the settlers back redoubled. Immigrants came from all corners of Europe and the New World, and Africans streamed in from the Copperbelt protectorates and from Matabeleland, where the Imperial Party’s ascendancy had ushered in a vicious colonial war. And they worked profound changes on South-West African society.
The South-West African colony had fallen into a feudal pattern during the nineteenth century, with landowning German taking African families as vassals and estate managers [6], and the colonial government reflected this arrangement. Each district had its
Bauernkammer, of which all landowning heads of household were members, and these councils in turn elected representatives to the legislature in Windhoek. It was taken for granted, at the beginning, that the Europeans in the colony would all be either
Bauern or administrators, and that the Africans – except for those like the Nama and Rehoboth Basters who had made deals for territorial autonomy – would be tied into the system through their feudal patrons.
But in the twentieth century, many Africans became
Bauern, some through mixed marriage or adoption, and others through the freehold grants that had become common currency between German landowners and their high-ranking tenants. Military officers and senior noncoms could also choose land instead of a cash bonus when mustering out, and many did so. In 1920, about 20 percent of
Bauernkammer members were non-European, with the figure in some northern districts being as high as a third – and many of the European immigrants who had come to work the diamond fields were
not freeholders and thus without a direct voice in colonial affairs.
The call for greater democracy came first from these immigrants, and it was heavy with rhetoric about how white men should not be left out of councils in which black men were members, but the reforms would benefit Africans too. In 1924, the German government promulgated a new constitution for South-West Africa under which each district would have a two-house legislature with the
Bauernkammer as the upper house and an elected lower house, and in which the colony as a whole would have a directly elected lower house alongside the indirectly elected senate. The franchise was subject to an alternative property or education qualification which about a quarter of the Africans could meet.
This was a form of government that somewhat resembled the nineteenth-century German states, and in Germany itself it would have been backward, but in the colony it was an advance. Africans outnumbered Europeans by enough to constitute most of the electorate even with a qualified franchise, and the
Abgeordnetenhaus inaugurated in 1925 included 64 African members to 39 Germans. The Europeans would still hold the balance of power, both because the upper house was the more powerful one and because most Africans’ loyalties were still to their employers: the comfortable familial arrangements that had grown up since the 1880s had muted the ideological revolutions that had swept much of the rest of Africa. But the diamond miners, the upper African peasantry and the growing number of urban African professionals would ensure that the later 1920s and 1930s would be a time of modernization.
The growing importance of the diamond trade would also lead to greater cooperation between South-West Africa and the South African Union. Namaland, with its cultural ties to the Afrikaners, had been part of the union since its inception, but now the diamond companies and miners’ unions on both sides of the border wanted closer ties in order to protect prices. Negotiations for a joint marketing board had begun as early as 1911 before being cut short by the depression and the Imperial interregnum; they resumed again in 1923 after stability returned to South Africa, and in 1927, they bore fruit. The first meeting of the binational mining authority took place in January 1928, the same month that the Free Republic of Rehoboth, like Namaland before it, acceded to South Africa while remaining under German sovereignty…
… The collapse of the traditional monarchies in Barotseland and Kazembe had been a long time in coming. The Congo fever ravaged these kingdoms like no place else, even the Congo itself: traditional family structures in the Congo and Great Lakes were still strong, while the Copperbelt mining towns were full of transient single men and prostitutes. The effects of the disease broke down family patterns even further: many children would grow up as orphans, and the extended families that would have taken responsibility for them in other times were riddled with holes. Young men with money in their pockets disregarded established authorities; some became
de facto chiefs and patrons of their villages, but others turned to crime. By the end of the 1910s, the capital cities of Kazembe and Barotseland were as dangerous as any Wild West town, and banditry in the hinterland strained the royal armies to the breaking point. [7]
In 1922, the king of Kazembe threw in the towel, asking the copper companies to train a modern police force such as they had built in the mining towns. Over the next several years, he, and the king of Barotseland with him, all but invited the Germans to take over the government. Both kingdoms remained nominally independent, but advisors from the mining companies and the German civil service held most of the portfolios in their governments and took over key military commands. By 1930, both were virtually unrecognizable: the kings and traditional chiefs had been shunted aside, and the new men of substance – Great War veterans and educated ex-miners – had become the mainstay of the new civil services and parliaments. The change was a wrenching one, but after the upheaval of the previous years, most of the people accepted it: the old law and order had broken down, so they were willing to give a fair chance to any system that promised to bring a new kind of law and order.
And, paradoxically, the social breakdown of the 1910s and early 1920s would lead to new development. Crime and banditry had led to the Copperbelt being viewed as a hardship posting, meaning that German workers were hard to entice and that there was even more of a need for skilled African labor. Many of the junior engineers were already African by 1920, and as the decade progressed, they moved into increasingly senior posts. In 1924, as well, a consortium of mining companies founded the Copperbelt Technical College, with former mining engineer Maria Skłodowska-Linder as its chancellor. African secondary graduates no longer had to go to Germany to study engineering and science, and the college would draw students from hundreds of miles around.
The Copperbelt in 1930 was still a land ravaged by fever, and much of the new governments’ efforts for decades to come would be occupied by public health. But law had returned, prosperity was growing, and the population was second only to the Malê in its level of education. The emphasis on science was feeding a futurist ethos that borrowed much from Verne and his successors, and the elected parliaments were asserting themselves more and more…
… Madagascar had sat out the Great War and passed from French to German overlordship with hardly a murmur. Aside from a few vanilla and coffee planters and a naval station at Toamasina, few Germans settled in the Merina kingdom, and the German resident in Antananarivo stayed out of its internal affairs. The kingdom even expanded during the 1910s when Germany ceded the directly-ruled colonies of Bara and Antandroy for administrative convenience, reserving land for a second port at Tôlanaro. All this time, the Merina state modernized quietly in the manner of a moderately progressive Indian princely state, remaining autocratic but creating a professional civil service and building large-scale public works.
This, too, came to a head in the 1920s. The children educated in the Merina schools had grown up, and some of them had gone to German universities, and they were discontented with living in an absolute monarchy. Prominent among them were the capital’s small community of Muslims, who made up only seven percent of the population but who corresponded widely with Islamic reformists around the world. The new middle class of Anatananarivo and Toamasina were also increasingly intolerant of official corruption and extortion, and wanted a voice in the kingdom’s affairs.
The Democratic Party of Madagascar, the first political party in the nation, held its inaugural convention in 1925, and like the early All-India Reform Congress, was an eclectic collection of reformers and dissidents. The party was deeply factionalized, and not all its members wanted full democracy, but it provided a forum to criticize the monarchy and a base to organize against it. The monarchy at times flirted with banning the party and at other times with co-opting it: the king announced anti-corruption drives and prosecuted some particularly grasping officials, but refused to permit an elected legislature.
The dissidents could do little about this at first: they were an elite movement with little mass support, and had not yet reached the point where they could mobilize the people for change. But in 1929, a strike erupted among the plantation workers, which would embroil both the Democratic Party and the German trade unions before all was said and done…
… Kamerun, Ubangi-Shari and the German Congo stood, as they always had, in sharp contrast to the better-run colonies further south. Their main industries were rubber and forestry, and although the brutal days of wild-rubber harvesting were over, both were still labor-intensive and dependent on a ready supply of low-paid workers. All were also considered hardship posts for German civil servants, so much of the administration was left in the hands of concessionaires who considered the local population a resource to exploit. Except for a small elite group that had gained civil rights through education in Germany or service in the German military, forced labor and arbitrary justice – up to and including summary execution – were facts of daily life.
The pre-state peoples of these regions, weakened further by the Congo fever, were unable to organize an effective rebellion, although there were several futile ones. Those discontented with their lot, and there were many, had traditionally voted with their feet, fleeing to Gabon, to the N'Délé protectorate or even to the International Congo. But by 1920, other channels were opening. Mission schools, both those run openly by German Lutherans and Catholics and those operated underground by Carlsenists and prophetic Ibadis, had educated many children in the back country, and some of them had managed to go on to German universities. It would be one of them, Karl-Johan Nsilou, who would shock the German public with the exposé
Blood of the Forests.
Nsilou was a child of the Great War, born during the tumultuous year of 1895. The German missionaries who set up shop in his village saw promise in him and sponsored him for secondary school and college in Berlin. He returned in 1916 as a civil servant, holding several administrative posts in Douala, back-country Kamerun and the forestry districts of Ubangi-Shari. For more than a decade, he surreptitiously documented the concessionaires’ abuses, collecting documents and taking secret photographs. In 1927, he quit the civil service and moved to Berlin, where he compiled his notes and found a left-wing publishing house to print them.
Blood of the Forests has been compared to Mamadou Camara’s Congo trilogy [8] in its effect on the European public. The remoteness of the central African colonies had kept them largely out of the public consciousness, and Germans were shocked to learn that the practices in parts of these colonies rivaled those of the prewar Congo. And by coincidence – fortunate or otherwise – the publication of Nsilou’s book happened at the same time as the largest uprising yet to occur in this region, a massive revolt in the Ubangi-Shari fueled by East African arms. Rather than silently approving while the
Schutztruppe crushed the revolt, leftist and even centrist newspapers asked whether the rebels were exercising their natural rights.
By early 1928, the colonial troops – many of them recruited from Barotseland and Kazembe – did put the uprising down. But the fact-finding mission that followed in the wake of the troops led to abolition of the concession system and its replacement by direct administration. This was a long way from democracy or legal equality, but German Central Africa would enter the 1930s as a place governed by law, and that would open the door to other reforms…
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[1] See post 3545.
[2] See post 3196.
[3] See post 3570.
[4] See post 3108.
[5] See post 3665.
[6] See post 932.
[7] See post 3196.
[8] See post 1059.
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