Has anyone done a "Pink Map" TL? Brief googling doesn't show it.
N.B., not talking about the gay dating application. This Pink Map:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_Map
Short version: in 1889-90, the Portuguese made a short-lived attempt to link their two large African colonies together. Hey, start in Mozambique, go up the Zambezi River until you reach the headwaters -- a mere 2,000 kilometers or so -- and you're practically in Angola. It wasn't a completely insane idea.
Except, of course, for the British. The Brits weren't about to see their dreams of expansion cut off by a bunch of Iberians who were, really, no better than wogs themselves. They sent an ultimatum to the Portuguese: give up their Pink Map claims or the British would blockade their colony of Mozambique -- with the strong inference that blockade would quickly move to occupation and annexation. The Portuguese had to back down, and the British were free to move north into what's now Zimbabwe and Zambia.
Okay, so. Let's say the Portuguese are a little quicker off the mark, and are able to make their claim stick. (It's a handwave -- the British would have resisted even if the Portuguese claim had been much stronger -- but let's go with it.) The Portuguese eventually claim a supercolony consisting of Mozambique, Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe -- a massive area of southern Africa roughly half the size of the continental United States, stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and firmly blocking Britain's path of northward expansion.
In this TL there are no Rhodesias. The Portuguese may or may not get Katanga Province of Congo; the British very nearly snagged it OTL. (But let's say not; simpler.) Eventually a railway will be built, but it will run east-west across the continent instead of OTL's north-south line running from South Africa up through Zimbabwe and Zambia to the border with Congo. Knock-ons... is there still a Boer War? Probably.
It's hard to imagine Portugal governing such a stupendously immense colony, comfortably larger than even the Belgian Congo. OTOH, it's only about twice as big as the colonies they had OTL. And this terrain was pretty sparsely settled, back in the late 19th and early 20th -- Zambia, an area larger than Texas, had only two or three million inhabitants, and Zimbabwe around the same. So maybe.
How does this evolve through the 20th century? And what happens at independence?
Doug M.