alternatehistory.com

First, some background about the build-up to the Makonde Rebellion, and the rebellion itself, since it's relatively obscure and many people won't have heard of it.

The largest and most destabilising armed confrontations in Portuguese East Africa during WW1 were not between Europeans working through imperial rivalries, but took the shape of African uprisings against colonial predation and rule. These uprisings are strongly commemorated in present-day Mozambique as key moments in national and nationalist histories, preserved in history textbooks, banknotes, political speeches and so on. Conscription – enforced military enrolment – was an acute wartime phenomenon in Europe as it became clear that the volunteers for the trenches were drying up. However, it had been a chronic phenomenon in colonial Mozambique (‘Portuguese East Africa’), where it was accentuated by the war from 1914.

‘Conscripts’ were not called conscripts, and colonialism was not called war. Many captured and enslaved people were sold to become the armed enforcers of large colonial estates. The historic phenomenon of military conscription in this territory operated within a broader but fragile apparatus of colonial extraction and predation, in which forced labour – agrarian, construction and military – went hand in hand. The colonial system in much of the territory until the nineteenth century depended on an inherited landholding system known as the prazos. These were private estates granted to initially Portuguese settlers by the Portuguese crown, which entitled the holder to utilise the resources and peoples inhabiting the lands as they broadly wished. This entailed in most cases attempting to force the peoples inhabiting the land (the ‘tenants’) to pay off what they owed in hut taxes or ‘rent’ with their labour on the prazo estates. Yet, the settlers were poorly equipped to manage their lands, barely able to stave off tropical disease and ill-supported by the Portuguese crown in terms of manpower.

As a result, there was also internal demand for Africans to become the armed enforcers within huge colonial estates. Whilst some did volunteer in return for a promise of no further re-sale by the owners, many of the private armies raised by the prazo-holders consisted of men who had been captured and enslaved elsewhere, and sold to prazo-holders. This kind of ‘conscription’ was of course not particularly stable. Whilst many of those sold chose to remain attached to the estates into which they were sold and enforce the predatory structure of the estates, prazo-holders also experienced multiple rebellions and desertions by their enslaved armies of enforcers. In particular, during the nineteenth century, productivity on the estates was so low due to the capacity of African communities to evade compulsion and the absence of investment, that prazo-holders began to try to sell off their enslaved armies to the lucrative slave trade headed for Brazil. The Chikunda – the slave armies of the prazos in the Zambesi region – mobilised and deserted to form autonomous and migratory communities from the late nineteenth century onwards.

In the wake of the Berlin conference in 1884, where Portugal had just about clung on to nominal imperial control of its African territories, it was forced ultimately to lease them to mostly British, French and German capital through the establishment of colonial companies from 1891. The Nyassa Company, the Mozambique Company and the Zambezia Company took over the vast lands formerly occupied by the prazos. Although better supplied with capital and administrative capacity, and run more like plantations than the former estates, the foundation of their extractive capacities was fundamentally the same – coerced military and agrarian labour based on ‘taxing’ the surrounding African populations, and, increasingly, supplying demand for migrant labour in South African mines. Between 1891 and 1929 these companies were the foundation of the colonial rural economy. Labour was not however limited to agricultural production – the infrastructure developed by these companies was also created by forced labour, known as chibalo.

As such, in Portuguese East Africa, where compulsion and violence were already written into the fabric of everyday life, the declaration and conduct of WW1 meant that conscription intensified and developed new and more aggressive forms. This produced a sharp acceleration in suffering amongst many of the populations – yet the enormous pile of bodies produced remains largely invisible to commemoration practices. One key aspect of this intensified conscription was in the practice of press-ganged military pack-slavery. Tens of thousands of Africans from the north of Mozambique – a relatively sparsely populated area – were forced to carry supplies and equipment for the Portuguese, British and German forces, following around the military detachments with even less equipment and provisions than the already poorly-prepared European and colonial soldiers.

Estimates of the total numbers of porters involved in the whole Allied campaign in East Africa are around 1,000,000, with up to 95,000 dead amongst those used by the British alone (c.600,000). A death rate of around 20% of the porters of the East Africa Carrier Corps is more than double the 9% death rate for British troops, reflecting active policies of imperial indifference to their conditions. Given the much worse conditions experienced by both troops and porters within the Portuguese army, the death rates are likely to be higher still. The biggest killers were not bullets but disease and malnutrition. Yet, for the Germans and the Portuguese, there are no clear numbers– the porters were never counted, their ultimate disposability being a founding assumption of those colonial war machines. One particularly chilling number is however offered by the then director of the Zambezia Company, who claimed to have sent 25,000 men as porters, of whom only 5,000 returned, and described those who returned as being in such a state as to cause horrors to onlookers.

The writings of Cardoso Mirão, a Portuguese sergeant serving in 1917, testify as much to the systematic de-humanisation of these men. His writings were suppressed by the fascist dictatorship which took power after 1926 for bringing the army in to disrepute: "They are not men, because they have no name. They are not soldiers, because they have no number. You do not call them, you count them. They are placed into formation by force of the stick, you put a cargo on their heads and that’s it." Amongst the inhabitants of northern Mozambique, which was being raided by German forces with regularity, forcible predation was not limited to those who were taken as porters, but imposed on the villages of the region, which were forced to deliver up food and supplies to passing armed forces of all stripes. The Nyassa Company had practised similar kinds of predation for decades – episodes are recorded where the women of Makonde villages were kidnapped, and held as hostages until their husbands and families delivered some kind of ‘taxation’ to the company.

Prior to the Makonde Uprising, the Portuguese didn't need lessons about the potential of rebellion in East Africa, particularly in Zambezia. This region had resisted integration successfully into Portuguese rule for centuries, culminating in a series of long armed struggles with the autonomous Barue people from 1880 which had only ended in 1902. Others further south, such as the Gazan king Ngungunhana, had only been finally defeated in 1895. Relations with the Ngoni people in the region had also been complex, turning largely on managing rivalry between them and the Barue.

The emergence of a huge uprising in 1917 by the Barue and Makombe leaders was only a surprise, then, to the extent that it successfully co-ordinated other groups such as the Sena and Yao to mobilise simultaneously against colonial rule. They were also joined by the Chikunda, the descendants of the enslaved armies from the prazos. The Barue recognised the spiritual and political leadership of the role of the Makombe (leader), although there was competition for that role. The immediate cause for the rebellion was an upsurge in the demand for forced labour, to work on infrastructure projects in support of the war effort, as well as the breaking of various promises around taxation by the Portuguese.

In the north of the country during the war, the Makonde increased their ongoing resistance against the Portuguese, facilitated by promises of German abolition of the hut tax and chibalo, which had also been made towards the Yao and Makua. As with the Barue, the demands for chibalo had increased as a result of the war demand for infrastructure, and the peoples of the plateau found that the autonomy that they had been used to was under threat. Whilst the Germans supplied arms, they did not fight alongside the Makonde, who had also never been fully incorporated into Portuguese rule.

Rather, fighters mobilised by Nkaloma 'Malapende' Mavinga, a powerful figure in Makonde history, had managed to fight the Portuguese forces in the bush and in the villages until 1917. The Portuguese finally mobilised 2,000 well-armed Yao against the Makonde, torching 150 Makonde villages for suspected collaboration with the Germans during between April and June in 1917. 'Malapende' could not bear to see his people subjected to the cruel conditions of forced labour, so he fled into exile.

Under the rebellion, which lasted from March until November 1917, i.r.o. 100,000 fled and hundreds of loyalists were killed. The Makonde Uprising defeated the colonial regime- seizing control of the present day Zambezia, Nampula, Niassa and Cabo Delgado Provinces, with roughly 20,000 rebels besieging the Portuguese in Tete Province. When the British refused to lend troops to the Portuguese, the Portuguese rapidly hired and deployed somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 well-armed, well-paid Ngoni mercenaries (in far greater numbers, and with better equipment, than those troops which they'd deployed against the Germans).

These mercenaries were given them free licence to plunder resources and to enslave women and children, tasked to put down the rebels with as much force as possible. Faced with the ensuing campaign of terrorism and slavery, many of the Barue leaders and the Makombe fled across the border to Malawi, and the Portuguese succeeded in quashing the rebellion by the end of the year. Repercussions of the rising continued as British administrators in Northern Rhodesia in 1918 struggled to compensate local civilians for their war service in this campaign, exacerbated by the famine of 1917–1918, and the Colonial Office subsequently banned the coercion of these local civilians into British service in the colony, which stranded British troops.

So, WI the Makonde Rebellion had achieved lasting success instead of the brief and swiftly extinguished success it did IOTL- if the Ngoni mercenaries had been defeated, and the Makonde leaders of the Uprising had managed to liberate Mozambique in its entirety and declared independence during, or in the immediate aftermath of, WW1? What would the consequences be? And what would be the best case scenario for TTL's Mozambique?
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