Agostinho Ferreira da Rocha, Luanda Dreams (Luanda: Nova Imprensa, 2007)
… Luanda in the 1960s didn’t look much like a capital city. From a sleepy port town of 30,000 at the beginning of the century, it had grown to an outsize city of a million that housed just under a fifth of Angola’s population, and in doing so, it had acquired a half-finished appearance. Nearly the entire old town, except the forts and the cathedral, was razed to make room for department stores and freight terminals, and beyond that were industrial suburbs, massive apartment blocks constructed as part of public works projects, and the villas of the powerful. The oil boom of the 1950s brought mansions, as the newly rich vied for honors in conspicuous consumption, and more apartment blocks and
barracas in the outlying districts for those who came to find work. There was new construction everywhere, and though even the city’s harshest critics had to acknowledge its dynamism, they compared it wistfully with the elegance of Lisbon’s old city or the storied antiquity of Zanzibar. A boom town Luanda was; a crown jewel it was not.
Yet a capital was what, more and more, Luanda was becoming. The government, of course, still sat in Lisbon, and the Africans who now made up a majority of Portugal’s parliament went to Europe for their debates. But Luanda had become the political center of gravity, and it was the largest and richest city in the Portuguese Republic. Between 1952 and 1965, eight Portuguese banks and several other companies moved their head offices to Angola, and when an oil ministry was added to the cabinet in 1959, it set up shop in the metropolis that served the fields. By 1960, the legislature held annual two-week sessions in Luanda and Lourenço Marques, and there was talk of moving other government departments to Africa.
Luanda had even become a cultural center of sorts. It wasn’t the soul of Portugal – that was still Lisbon – nor was it as culturally creative as Mozambique, whose heritage was Arab and Indian as well as African and Portuguese. But quantity has a quality all its own, and the giant Luso-African melting pot that was Luanda had developed a dialect, a slang and a rhythm that was instantly recognizable wherever Portuguese was spoken. Luanda’s speech and fashion were emulated by street toughs in Lisbon, villagers in back-country Angola, even youths in Goa.
Many in metropolitan Portugal viewed all this with growing consternation. With two hundred thousand colonial troops on Portuguese soil, the coalition that overthrew the
Novo Reino had agreed to a unitary republic on the unspoken assumption that European cultural dominance would balance the African demographic majority. [1] But practice fell somewhat short of theory. Mozambican
chocalho music, with a complex Luso-African beat and lyrics that ranged from slyly ironic social commentary to comic modern riffs on folklore and legend, was a standard of Portuguese nightclubs and radio stations. The new Portuguese history curriculum unveiled in 1960 included all the territories that were now part of the Republic: Angolan and Timorese children learned of the ancient kingdoms of Iberia and the Portuguese Reconquista, but students in Porto and Coimbra were taught about the Kingdom of Kongo and the traders of Sofala. [2] As more Africans settled in the metropole after university, the unwritten rule that African civil servants would serve in Africa was increasingly honored in the breach, and a growing number of Portuguese people felt that they were being colonized by their colonies.
By the early 1960s, the Portuguese independence movement, which ten years before had consisted mostly of old men grumbling in taverns, had become a serious political force, winning by-elections in rural Portugal in 1961 and 1962. It would be the 1963 general election that brought matters to a head. The Socialist Solidarity Party, which had led the previous government, was returned to power, but the outgoing party leader had retired, and the central committee’s choice to replace him was the serving oil minister, Alvaro Nsimba. For the first time, Portugal’s prime minister would be an Angolan.
Nsimba was far from an African nationalist. He had come up as a Luanda machine politician with a patronage network that crossed racial lines, and he represented a district in which overseas Portuguese and
mestiços were the majority. In the party leadership election, he had won the support of Portuguese as well as African delegates. But he, and what he represented, were still a step too far for many Portuguese, and within days after the election, the major metropolitan cities were rocked with protests demanding that Portugal secede from its one-time empire. [3]
The protests came as a shock to the African provinces, where cross-racial patronage had been a fact of life for a generation and where politicians had misjudged the impact of Nsimba’s selection. Most worried of all were the overseas Portuguese. In a united Portugal, they were the middlemen between the metropole and Africa, and as such, a key link in the political and cultural chain. If the Republic broke up, they would be just another minority. And if Portugal left, the rest of the state
would break up: wealthier Angola and more populous Mozambique would compete for dominance, the smaller territories would choose sides or break away, and the already-restive princely states would become impossible to hold.
It was the overseas Portuguese, then, who acted as brokers between the government and the independence movement, and who persuaded both sides to meet in Lisbon. Nsimba, who was loyal to the idea of a multi-continental Portugal, proved willing to make concessions, as did the independence party, which realized that its support within the metropole was uncertain and that many Portuguese didn’t want a divorce from the overseas provinces. The talks progressed quickly, and in the fall of 1963, it was agreed that Portugal would have the status of a special province with its own legislature and broad internal autonomy. It would also have independent Consistory membership and the right to conduct diplomacy on issues other than citizenship, immigration, defense and finance.
This arrangement would not stop the blending of Portugal and Africa: people from the overseas provinces would continue to come to Europe for education and work, and many of them would stay. But it would provide sufficient distance to make the majority of metropolitan Portuguese comfortable. And asymmetric federalism would also solve some of the other problems left over from the imperial period: several of the princely states, such as the Kingdom of Lunda, were able to integrate themselves into the Republic in this way while maintaining autonomy, and Portuguese India, after negotiating a devolved administration, obtained associate status in the All-India Development Union and won for Goa the freedom of movement and trade that prevailed elsewhere on the subcontinent.
Other solutions were necessary for the rest of the princely states, which had no desire to join the Republic and were also discontented with a political status that was a relic of the colonial period. For them, the Nsimba administration looked to the precedent of the German Copperbelt, in which the protectorates had gained independence but kept economic, political and defensive ties to Germany. [4] The Central African Accords of 1965, modeled on Kazembe’s independence treaty, granted complete autonomy and international personalty to the princely states, with reciprocal freedom of movement between them and Portugal as well as a customs union and defensive alliance. These accords also included the British colony of Nyasaland, which had hitherto been unable to achieve dominion status because of its inability to defend itself from Portugal or to join South Africa because of Portuguese territory in the way. [5]. Representatives from all sides of the Nyasaland question had been in exploratory talks for a decade, and the accords were the comprehensive answer they’d been looking for: they brought Nyasaland within the Portuguese defensive umbrella and eliminated the threat of invasion, while protecting existing economic interests and granting the freedom of movement necessary for integration with South Africa. With the defensive issues eliminated, Britain released its claim on Nyasaland, which formed an independent government and quickly became the last country but one to join the South African Union.
These solutions would, however, beget other problems. In the former princely states, the struggle against colonialism gave way to a belated internal conflict over democratization. By 1967, copper-rich Yeke was in a state of low-grade civil war between its autocratic ruler and the nascent middle class and labor movement, and as with India during the 1920s, the Portuguese Republic’s defensive obligations to the monarchy and its powerful mining interests pulled it a different way from the policy that the ruling socialist coalition would have preferred. Several of the other petty states in the former Portuguese Central Africa followed by the end of the decade, dragging the Republic back into colonial warfare against its will and disrupting overland travel between Angola and Mozambique. The rerouting of Portuguese freight and passenger traffic through Kazembe and Matabeleland would play a large part in bringing the Copperbelt kingdoms and South Africa into the Central African Accords in the 1970s, but in the near term, they were a drag on the economy. The situation would also lead to legal trouble before the decade was out, with Yeke claiming in the Court of Arbitration that Portuguese demands for democratization as a condition of military aid violated the countries’ defensive treaty.
In the meantime, an increasing number of Africans questioned why, if metropolitan Portugal and several of the former princely states had their own autonomous governments, they should continue to have the same say in federal matters that they had before. During the late 1960s, several bills were submitted to the Portuguese parliament which would have prevented the metropolitan deputies from voting on matters within the provincial government’s competence. These bills were defeated by a coalition of deputies from the special provinces, overseas Portuguese, and machine politicians who had a vested interest in the status quo. However, the discontented members did succeed in having the Portuguese capital divided. The president of the Republic, who was also the Patriarch of Lisbon, would stay in Europe, but after 1970, the supreme court would sit in Lourenço Marques and the parliament would move into a hastily constructed capitol building in Luanda…
Anita van der Merwe, The Trekkers’ Land (Cape Town: New Holland, 2003)
… The State Universal Suffrage Act 1954 [6] caused panic among South Africa’s three remaining minority-ruled members, and none of them were willing to go down without a fight. Swaziland and Griqualand filed suit in the federal high court, arguing that the act was an unconstitutional intrusion into state control of citizenship and the form of state government. The South African Republic went even farther: its attorney general issued a legal opinion stating that the federal courts lacked jurisdiction to even rule on matters of internal state government, and sought a judgment in its own supreme court invalidating the act.
The Transvaal court, predictably, ruled that the law was unconstitutional, holding that the union treaty designated citizenship as a state rather than federal matter and that a mandate of universal suffrage at the state level was tantamount to requiring states to grant universal citizenship. The federal court took somewhat longer to rule, being delayed with lengthy battles over the recusal of certain judges, but in April 1957, it finally issued its decision. One judge believed that the court had no jurisdiction over state matters, and four more agreed that the act was an intrusion into state control over citizenship, but six – just enough to make up a majority – upheld the law as necessary to protect the individual rights granted by the union treaty.
Soon after the ruling was announced, Griqualand threw in the towel. Its government had been in negotiation with the All-South Africa Reform Congress for some time, and in 1958, they agreed on a constitutional package that combined a universal-suffrage lower house with an upper house of Griqua chiefs and set-asides for Griqua land tenure and cultural rights. The other two holdouts wouldn’t give up so easily. In May 1957, the King of Swaziland announced his state’s secession from South Africa, and the Transvaal legislature, characterizing the federal court decision as illegitimate, did likewise two months later.
The secessions were legal – the union treaty described South Africa as a voluntary association of independent states – but they proved more farcical than anything else. The federal courts ruled in 1959 that membership was all or nothing, and that by leaving South Africa, the seceding states had also left the customs union. Both briefly tried to get access to the sea through Mozambique, but Portugal had no desire to sacrifice the other South African states’ goodwill, and the talks came to nothing. Swaziland was largely self-sufficient, but the South African Republic had an export economy that had been built in an environment without tariff barriers, and living standards went into an immediate decline.
In the meantime, the Congress organized protests in both countries demanding reunion with South Africa, and in the Transvaal, the secessionist government quickly lost support even among the white population. Boers had been a minority among whites for some time, and the descendants of immigrants from Portugal, Britain and elsewhere in Europe had little patience for the nationalism that prompted the secession, and even many Boers were coming around to the transnational “cultural Afrikaner” model of the Cape Colony. The government fell in early 1961, and elections later brought in a coalition that announced its intention to rejoin South Africa and opened negotiations with the Congress.
Swaziland, as an absolute monarchy, couldn’t be influenced in this way, but without the South African Republic as an anchor, the king saw the writing on the wall. Congress-led demonstrations were making the capital increasingly unstable, and even a self-sufficient agrarian economy suffered without the Transvaal to absorb excess labor. In September 1961, Swaziland adopted a system similar to Zululand, with a parliament divided into a house of commons and house of nobles and a monarchy of limited power.
The South African Republic, with its hard-core Boer nationalists defiant to the end, adopted a more bizarre solution. The Republic itself would become a majority-rule state with universal citizenship and universal suffrage. But 17 non-contiguous enclaves with Boer majorities, amounting to just under half the Boer population, would rejoin South Africa separately as the Transvaal Boerestaat. This agricultural republic would be an economic and political backwater, but along with Stellaland, would be one of the few places where classical Voortrekker culture was preserved.
Ironically, in 1966, another decision by the federal high court, several of whose judges had been replaced in the interim, would find that protection of individual rights
was not a sufficient basis to uphold legislation that affected the form of state government, thus calling the State Universal Suffrage Act's constitutionality into question once more. But by then, the one-time holdout states all had functioning governments based on their new constitutions, and none of them was about to vote to return to the way things were. Universal suffrage had come to South Africa for good…
… The Afrikaners of the Cape Colony could hardly be more different from the culturally anxious nationalists of the Transvaal. Boers, Cape Coloureds and Cape Malays made up a comfortable majority of citizens, and as such, they were the polestar to which immigrants both black and white assimilated. The cultural influence did go both ways – the local Afrikaans dialect picked up Portuguese, Italian, Hindustani and Sesotho loanwords on top of the English, French and isiXhosa that were already there, and Carnival was an annual fixture in Cape Town beginning in 1959 – but second-generation immigrants spoke Afrikaans at home and adopted many of their neighbors’ folkways. Even the more established minorities were drawn in: the isiXhosa spoken in the Eastern Cape sounded strange in Transkei where the language had been kept pure, and the few Xhosa that had begun writing in Afrikaans in the 1930s grew to hundreds by the 1960s. IsiXhosa, like English, would remain a language enclave in the Cape, and the Xhosa would stay one of its most culturally cohesive peoples, but the drive for accessibility would lead those outside their heartland to use Afrikaans for business and increasingly as a cultural medium.
The Bobotie Indaba of 1891 [7], and Jan Smuts’ vision of Afrikaners as a people united by language rather than race, had now achieved its final form. The Cape still had its black, white and Coloured citizens, but by 1970 these distinctions mattered solely for purposes of physical description. What mattered, in the eyes of cosmopolitan Cape Town or the Boer and Coloured farmers of the west country, was that nearly everyone was an Afrikaner…
_______
[1] See post 5087.
[2]
Take that, Tintin.
[3] See post 5725.
[4] See post 5069.
[5] See post 5186.
[6] See post 5087.
[7] See post 1206.
