Portugal was an undeveloped country itself- too poor to develop its colonies. Lacking capital to invest, Portugal encouraged large multinational Western companies to develop the colonies by setting up subsidiary companies in Africa. This sort of economic activity would, the Portuguese ruling class hoped, win for Portugal the political support of other Western governments in maintaining the status quo in the colonies, as multinationals put pressure on governments in Washington, London and other major Western capitals to back Portugal and protect their subsidiaries. The 'development' that did take place exploited rather than benefited the Africans.

To the Portuguese dictator Salazar, development meant large-scale white settlement. White immigration in Angola and Mozambique rose sharply. The pattern of exports reveals the use of the colonies as sources of cheap raw materials for European and North American industry and as reserves for cheap labour for South Africa. Angola produced iron ore, diamonds, cotton and coffee for the West, arid later on oil. Mozambique provided cashew nuts, sugar, cotton, tea and sisal. Guine exported groundnuts, palm kernels and vegetable oils.

The colonies in return provided a reserved market and a dumping ground for Portugal's cotton textile goods, refined sugar, and wines and spirits. The foreign (non-Portuguese) Western subsidiaries made huge profits from control of the export trade. The Portuguese made a middleman profit from capital inflows, royalties, profits tax and rents, while the African workers gained only their very low wages.

The Portuguese exploited African labour in a number of ways. First, they exploited agricultural labour by forcibly reducing the production of agricultural consumer goods and enforcing the cultivation of cash crops like cotton to serve metropolitan Portugal's nascent textiles industry.

African farmers were forced to grow cotton in certain designated areas, and to sell the raw cotton to the concession company of their area at prices fixed by the government far below world market prices. By the middle 1950s, half a million Africans in Mozambique alone were engaged in cotton cultivation.

Secondly, the Portuguese used Africans as forced or conscripted labour officially on roads and other public works and unofficially on plantations, and paid them only a token wage for such work.

Thirdly, they denied African workers the right to strike.

Fourthly, they virtually conscripted Africans as contract workers for mines and plantations in Angola and Mozambique, at low wages in poor conditions.

Fifthly, the Portuguese detained thousands of Africans in 'rehabilitation centres' and labour camps as punishment for labour unrest, for making complaints about not receiving contracted earnings, and for going on strike.

Sixthly, the Portuguese acted as recruiting agents for the South African mining companies, and to a lesser extent for the mining companies of Southern Rhodesia.

The colonial administration in Mozambique worked in league with the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association to recruit "voluntary labour' for the gold mines of the Transvaal. For every man recruited to serve a period of eighteen months, the Association paid the Mozambique colonial government (26s per head. (In I960 there were more than 400 000 Mozambican workers in South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. Their signing-on fees provided about one-third of the Mozambique administration's annual revenue.)

Such 'voluntary labour' tended to accept contracts with the Association in order to avoid the threat of punishment for allegedly being found to be 'idle' in Mozambique. The Portuguese philosophy on African labour is best summed up by Marcelo Caetano, Salazar's successor and prune minister from 1968 to 1974: 'The natives of Africa must be directed and organized by Europeans but are indispensable as auxiliaries. The blacks must be seen as productive elements organized, or to be organized, in an economy directed by whites.'4

One positive form of economic development that the Portuguese could be said to have undertaken is the construction of major public works like railways, ports and dams largely with British capital. However, the vast hydroelectric power schemes at Cunene in Angola and Cabora Bassa in Mozambique were built primarily to serve the energy needs of South Africa, not of the countries whose rivers they harness.

The Cabora Bassa Dam on the Zambesi began to be built in 1968 by Zambo, a consortium organized by the Anglo- American Corporation of South Africa with the participation of French, West German and Swedish firms, and financial backing from French, West German, Italian, South African, American and Portuguese banks.

The dam (completed after independence) is the largest in Africa, has flooded 1000 square miles and produces enough hydroelectric power to serve a radius of 900 miles. But little of the wealth the dam has begun to create will filter down to the African population of Mozambique. The main beneficiary of the dam is South Africa, the largest consumer of its power. Portugal backed the project for political rather than economic reasons, in an attempt to draw South Africa closer to Portugal and help her to prevent Mozambique winning independence.

To sum up at this point: the lack of any constitutional means of attaining democratic and majority rule and afterwards creating new societies made armed struggle necessary. The brutal suppression of non- violent protest between 1956 and I960 taught the lesson that only violence would remove Portuguese control. In 1956. 49 Lourenco Marques dockworkers were shot dead during a strike. In 1959, 50 Bissau dockworkers were also shot dead for striking. In I960, 600 unarmed demonstrators were killed at Mueda in northern Mozambique for protesting against agricultural policy, and 200 Angolans were killed or wounded for protesting against the arrest and public flogging of Agostinho Neto.

Angolans, Guineans and Mozambicans, seeing no prospect of any peaceful progress against-Portuguese fascism, had no alternative but to return to their long-standing tradition of armed resistance, a tradition nourished on almost continuous rebellion throughout several hundred years of colonial rule. It was only in 1913 in Angola, in the 1920s in Mozambique, and in 1936 in Guine that resistance to the imposition of colonial rule in the interior was finally crushed, a fact conveniently ignored by those who spoke of Portugal's four-hundred-year presence in Africa. This earlier resistance had taken the form of traditional-style uncoordinated local risings, led by traditional leaders; but from the 1950s a modern-style nationalism emerged, led by the Westernized elite and involving the urban workers.

New political parties were formed, predominantly the PAIGC (African Independence Party of Guine and Cape Verde) in 1954, led by Amilcar Cabral. and the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) in 1956, led by Neto. In the 1960s the PAIGC and MPLA turned to armed revolt. FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique) was founded in 1962 by Eduardo Mondlane for the specific purpose of armed liberation.

On 22 January 1961 Henrique Galvao, a former colonial inspector who had been jailed by the Salazar regime for reporting on colonial abuses, with a handful of followers seized the Portuguese liner Santa Maria in the Atlantic. Galvao was making a dramatic protest against the Lisbon dictatorship, and he called for reforms in Africa. However it was too late for reform. The Angolan uprising had already broken out earlier in the same month. Guerilla wars also broke out in Guine in 1963 and Mozambique in 1964. The Portuguese reacted to guerrilla activities in a number of ways.

First, they increased the pace of reforms. For example, in 1968 property qualifications for the franchise in Legislative Council elections were removed so that more Africans could vote.

Secondly, they stepped up 'development' by arranging concessions to multinational companies, for example in the Cabora Bassa Dam project. However, these cosmetic changes did nothing to stem the tide of guerilla, activity.

Thirdly, the Portuguese engaged in counter-revolutionary warfare. They sent in more forces, so that by 1970 they had about 200 000 troops in Africa, a huge figure for a country with only eight million people. Portugal came to spend 45 per cent of its national budget on the wars in Africa, but because of the country's poverty even this was not enough, so her armed forces had to be supplied with military equipment by its NATO allies- France provided military helicopters; bombs and bomber-planes came from the United States and West Germany. South Africa and Rhodesia assisted directly as allies in Angola and Mozambique. Hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly moved to fortified villages and their former homes were destroyed, to deny shelter and succour to guerillas.

Fourthly, the Portuguese campaigned hard to try to destroy the unity of the peoples of each colony. For example, in Angola they recruited the peoples of the south to fight against the peoples of the north. In Mozambique they did the same, stirring up anti-Makonde ethnicism against FRELIMO and its predominantly Makonde-origin leadership.

Fifthly, the Portuguese resorted to terror, by dropping napalm on villages, resorting to massacres like that at Wiriyamu and engaging in assassinations of guerrilla leaders tike Mondlane in 1969 and Cabral in 1973.

The Portuguese military response merely intensified the activities of the guerrillas who chalked up one military success after another and organized even more numerous liberated zones. The guerrillas benefited from the ability to hide among the population in the countryside and in its forests, from military training and arms provided by Algeria, Egypt and the communist countries, and from access to bases in neighbouring independent African states - places of safety where members could be recruited, trained and politically educated.

Political education among the guerrillas almost inevitably became predominantly Marxist; after all, Portugal fought with NATO arms but the guerrillas were supplied by the communists- Western aid to the freedom fighters was generally limited to refugee assistance. Some of the liberated zones were impressive examples of new societies in embryo, with democratic institutions, health and education programmes and agricultural reform. To give one example of development in these zones; as early as FRELIMO had established 100 schools with 10 000 pupils in northern Mozambique.

Much of the political ideology and development practice applied in the liberated zones was common to different territories, because the PAIGC, MPLA and FRELIMO formed a common party, CONCP, which held regular international meetings and shared ideas on politics and strategy.

The guerrillas in Portuguese Africa had achieved much by 1974, notably in Guine and Mozambique where they had brought large areas under their administration. However, in view of the fact that at that time Portuguese forces still controlled the major towns and lines of communications, it is probable that total liberation would have been delayed for many more years if radical Portuguese officers had not overthrown Caetano's government in Lisbon on 25 April 1974. Caetano had been more liberal than Salazar in Portugal but had brought no fundamental change in Africa! The Lisbon coup was carried out by captains and majors of the Armed Forces Movement determined to end colonial wars that had killed 8000 Portuguese soldiers and drained the national treasury in return for steady loss of territory. Their aim was also to improve the pay and conditions of their men, and to establish political democracy at home. The young officers were devoted to General Antonio de Spinola, a former Governor-General of Guine and a moderate conservative who had been dismissed by Caetano for writing a book, Portugal and the future, which had advocated a political as opposed to a military solution in Africa, Spinola had argued:

'. . . it is not national unity that is at stake but imperial unity, and today's conscience does not accept empires . . . The future of Portugal depends on an adequate solution to the war in which we are involved.''

Spinola's government immediately arranged ceasefires in the colonial wars, but it did not immediately grant independence to the colonies. In fact Spinola - like de Gaulle before him - flirted-'with an alternative solution of integration between the overseas provinces and the metropolitan country in Europe. Spinola favoured an imperial federation of democratic Portuguese-speaking states. The fall of Spinola was therefore essential for the independence of Portuguese Africa. The younger officers of the Armed Forces Movement soon lost their adulation for Spinola when he tried to moderate their radicalism at home as well as find a neo-colonial solution for the colonies that would by- pass or weaken the liberation movements.

Spinola had been brought into the ruling military junta to legitimize the coup but now it seemed to the young officers that he would undermine it. In September they combined with socialist and communist politicians to organize popular demonstrations for radical reforms at Home and independence for the colonies. Spinola went into exile. Guine's independence was recognized in the same month. September 1974 also saw an agreement between the Portuguese junta and FRELIMO on a transition to independence in June 3975, on FRELIMO's terms - that the government of Mozambique should be handed over to FRELIMO alone. It took longer to reach a settlement in Angola because of the divisions among the nationalists.

The revolutions in Portuguese Africa precipitated a revolution in Portugal itself; they have also spearheaded a revolution in the whole of southern Africa. The independence of Mozambique proved to be the decisive factor which shifted the balance of power away from the Smith regime in Rhodesia to the Patriotic Front guerrillas and thus led to Zimbabwe's independence in 1980. The independence of Angola and the eventual triumph of the MPLA in the Angolan civil war has considerably strengthened the position of SWAPO, the Namibian nationalist party and guerrilla organization. There can be little doubt that the attitude of the MPLA government in Luanda will significantly affect the future of South West Africa (Namibia), at the time of writing under South African control.

---