(Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series) Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo (Auth.) - The Civilising Mission' of Portuguese Colonialism, 1870-1930-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2015)

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ORIENTALISM AND RACE
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THE ‘CIVILISING MISSION’ OF PORTUGUESE COLONIALISM, 1870–1930
Peter F. Bang and C. A. Bayly (editors)
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ABOLITION AND EMPIRE IN SIERRA LEONE AND LIBERIA
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THE SHADOW OF COLONIALISM IN EUROPE’S MODERN PAST
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Robin Jeffrey
POLITICS, WOMEN AND WELL-BEING
How Kerala became a ‘Model’
Gerold Krozewski
MONEY AND THE END OF EMPIRE
British International Economic Policy and the Colonies, 1947–58
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INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES AND SETTLER COLONIALISM
Land Holding, Loss and Survival in an Interconnected World
Javed Majeed
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, TRAVEL AND POST-NATIONAL IDENTITY
Francine McKenzie
REDEFINING THE BONDS OF COMMONWEALTH 1939–1948
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Gabriel Paquette
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Sandhya L. Polu
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Sophus Reinert and Pernille Røge
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF EMPIRE IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD
Jonathan Saha
LAW, DISORDER AND THE COLONIAL STATE
Corruption in Burma c.1900
John Singleton and Paul Robertson
ECONOMIC RELATIONS BETWEEN BRITAIN AND AUSTRALASIA 1945–1970
Leonard Smith
INSANITY, RACE AND COLONIALISM
Managing Mental Disorder in the Post-Emancipation British Caribbean, 1838–1914
Miguel Suárez Bosa
ATLANTIC PORTS AND THE FIRST GLOBALISATION C. 1850–1930
Jerome Teelucksingh
LABOUR AND THE DECOLONIZATION STRUGGLE IN TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO
Julia Tischler
LIGHT AND POWER FOR A MULTIRACIAL NATION
The Kariba Dam Scheme in the Central African Federation
Erica Wald
VICE IN THE BARRACKS
Medicine, the Military and the Making of Colonial India, 1780–1868
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Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
The ‘Civilising Mission’ of
Portuguese Colonialism,
1870–1930
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo
Research Fellow, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon
Translated by
Stewart Lloyd-Jones
Revision: Margarida Fino Jerónimo/Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo
© Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo 2015
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Part I The ‘Civilisation Guild’: Native Labour and
Portuguese Colonialism
1 Between Benevolence and Inevitability: The ‘Civilising
Mission’ of Portuguese Colonialism 11
From Brussels to Berlin: the internationalisation
of African affairs 11
From Berlin to Brussels: civilising colonial sovereignty 17
Laws, clauses and inconsistencies: Portuguese
colonies and vigilantes of the empire 23
2 The ‘Civilisation Guild’ and the ‘Engineers of Depression’:
The Case of S. Thomé Cocoa 38
Justificatory memoranda and ‘humanitarian’
acts: civilising through work 38
Reports, conferences and boycotts: the ‘slave
cocoa’ of S. Thomé 46
‘More laws than mosquitos’: preserving the
pearls of the empire 54
White books, black souls 67
3 ‘Redemptive Labour’ and the Missionaries of the Alphabet 77
Work to civilise or educate to colonise? 77
On ‘the difficulties to make the natives work’ 89
Educating the bodies and the souls: myths and realities 96
Part II Colonialism without Borders
4 Bibles, Flags and Transnational Loyalties: Educating Empires 109
In the vanguard of civilisation: exporting educational
philanthropy to Africa 109
Spreading the social gospel: missionaries, educators and
social scientists 121
5 New Methods, Old Conclusions: The Ross Report 134
‘Colonisers par excellence’ 134
v
vi Contents
‘Without documentation and just with simple declarations,

we can end in a bad situation’ 147
The Social Gospel at the League of Nations 156
‘I must ask you not to quote from it in any way’ 165
Against another ‘defamatory campaign’: on methods
and interpretations 174
Manoeuvring the ‘sacred trust’ 188
Conclusion 195
Notes 199
Sources and Bibliography 238
Index 260
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to several individuals and insti-

tutions for their support. Without them this work would not exist, or
would be entirely different, for sure. First and foremost, I am obliged to
reckon the fundamental funding given by the Portuguese Foundation
for Science and Technology, especially regarding the collective research
project Internationalism and Empire: The Politics of Difference in the
Portuguese Colonial Empire in Comparative Perspective (1920–1975) (FCT-
PTDC/EPH-HIS/5176/2012), that I coordinate and in which part of this
research was developed. A special mention is due to the Institute of
Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon, to King’s College London –
namely to the History Department – to Brown University – namely
the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies – and to the Luso-
American Foundation for Development (FLAD), which in the last years
offered me excellent conditions to continue this research, which started
at the New University of Lisbon, at the Faculty of Human and Social
Sciences.
I have received generous encouragement and supportive criticism
from many sources. Not least, from numerous students that tolerantly
dialogued with me in the past fifteen years. Fortunately, throughout
my academic life I had the honour to learn and debate with many col-
leagues who helped me develop and improve my thoughts on these
subjects (or sometimes abandon them altogether). Amongst these, in
no particular order, I feel fortunate to mention: William Roger Louis,
Frederick Cooper, Francisco Bethencourt, Crawford Young, Martin
Thomas, Jason Parker, Filipa Vicente, Abdoolkarim Vakil, Corinna
Unger, Malyn Newitt, Dane Kennedy, Jean-François Bayart, Richard
Drayton, Sebastian Conrad, Ian Phimister, Philippa Levine, William
Clarence-Smith, Ryan Irwin, Andrew Zimmerman, Philip Murphy,
Sarah Stockwell, Martin Shipway, David Justino, Alexander Keese, Pedro
Tavares de Almeida, Margarida Marques, Jorge Pedreira, Rui Santos,
Nuno Domingos, Hugo Gonçalves Dores, Nuno Mota, Ana Prata, and
Carlos Silva.
I want to appreciate the suggestions and critical remarks made by
the anonymous reviewers of this volume. I also want to mention Jenny
McCall and Holly Tyler at Palgrave Macmillan: they know why.
vii
viii Acknowledgements
To the editors of Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series:

I am honoured to be a part of this excellent collection.
For reasons they certainly are aware of, I hope, I must express my
wholehearted gratefulness to Diogo Ramada Curto, Andrew Porter,
António Costa Pinto, Onésimo Teotónio de Almeida, and José Pedro
Monteiro. To be able to benefit from their knowledge and friendship is
a great privilege.
To my close family – Laura, Isabel, Vasco, Elsa, António, Luís, Pedro,
Vasco, Margarida, Manuel, Thibaud, Théo, Alice, Hugo, Manuel,
Gonçalo – the warmest word for a life of companionship and uncondi-
tional love.
To Magda: for the past, the present and the future.
I want to dedicate this book to my little boy Diogo. One day he will
fully understand why, I hope.
Introduction
In 1876, Henry Rowley wrote: ‘the instructions which these governors

[of African territories under Portuguese administration], major and
minor, received from the home government are admirable. The bless-
ings of civilization and Christianity are set forth in eloquent phraseol-
ogy, and the duty of extending such blessings urgently enforced […]
Theoretically, nothing can be better than the position, the policy, and
the character of the Portuguese in Africa […] Practically, nothing can be
worse or more humiliating’.1
In a certain sense, this quotation summarises the fundamental ques-
tion that is at the heart of this study.2 This book provides an historical
analysis of the formation and development of the doctrine of the civi-
lising mission in Portuguese colonialism since 1870, a crucial period in
international and national, imperial and colonial history.3 The funda-
mentals and justifications of the doctrine are analysed and their actual
materialisation assessed, thereby exploring the recurrent disjuncture
between them, especially in what relates to the most important aspect
of Portuguese colonial endeavour by the turn of the century: the recruit-
ment, employment, organisation and distribution of native labour. The
question of the trabalho indígena in the third Portuguese empire was at
the forefront of the country’s foreign, metropolitan and colonial poli-
cies, being promoted as the most important instrument that enabled
the native populations to enter the ‘civilisation guild’, as one important
colonial specialist stated at the time. The convoluted historical transi-
tion from an imperial configuration which focused on Brazil to another
one that was African-oriented was unquestionably marked by the resil-
ience of slavery and other modalities of forced or compulsory labour.4
Acknowledging metropolitan and colonial dynamics, this research
places the case of the Portuguese colonial empire within a wider,
1
2 The ‘Civilising Mission’ of Portuguese Colonialism
international and transnational framework, exploring the relationship

between the role of labour in colonial imagination and contexts –
namely in the definition of politics and policies of difference – and
the sociocultural representations of the native communities that legiti-
mised, from an ethical, ideological and political point of view, several
projects of the Portuguese (and European) new imperialism.5
In the Portuguese case, the enduring influence of racialised pro-
slavery standpoints in the metropolitan and colonial societies was
noteworthy. It marked the constitution of the third empire’s plural
political imagination and influenced the formulation of novel idioms
and repertoires of imperial and colonial legitimation (at the metropole,
overseas and internationally); namely those related to the doctrines and
policies of the ‘civilising mission’ that emerged within and across impe-
rial formations. This civilisational rationale, supported and nurtured
by old and resilient racialised outlooks, was particularly instrumental
in the creation and institutionalisation of a system of colonial labour,
which became the cornerstone of the organisation of the new imperial
and colonial political economies in the aftermath of the legal abolition
of the transatlantic slave trade. Legalised, organised and managed by
the empire-state (with local collaborators and not without resistance,
locally and internationally, and manifold appropriations), this system
was characterised by multiple modalities of coercion and compulsion
that substituted slavery from legal and practical points of view. At the
same time, the issue of native labour also became a theme, and a prob-
lem around which the Portuguese empire-state’s international relations
(not merely diplomatic) formed and evolved historically. As a political,
economic but also sociocultural repertoire of colonial rule and admin-
istration, and as an instrument of international engagement and legiti-
mation of the country as a civilised d and civilisingg imperial formation,
the native labour question assumed a ‘double centrality’, as argued else-
where. Given the political, economic, social and cultural consequences
of this centrality, the problem of native labour turned into a predictable
object of critical assessments, motivated by reformist outlooks, by pur-
poses of interimperial competition and moral differentiation, or, later
on, by idioms and movements that questioned the legitimacy of imperial
and colonial formations, demanded reformed politics and policies of
difference, and eventually insisted on political emancipation.6
This book analyses the international, metropolitan and, to a lesser
extent, colonial historical circumstances of the instrumental use of
idioms and repertoires of the ‘civilising mission’ and their close associa-
tion to a legalised compulsory system of native labour.7 For many, this
Introduction 3
state-coordinated scheme promoted labour conditions and relations

that were ‘analogous to slavery’.8 This volume demonstrates the pivotal
role that European doctrines of the ‘civilising mission’, certainly asso-
ciated with the original template provided by Victorian imperialism
and by the appearance of a ‘standard of civilization’ (diffused in an
international and interimperial level9), played in the emergence and
development of late nineteenth-century new imperialism, capturing its
importance in the histories of: humanitarian and anti-slavery move-
ments; evangelical and missionary revival and competition; the new
imperial moral and political economies; novel diplomacies of imperial-
ism; an evolving pan-European imperial science, and international and
colonial law. Portuguese international, metropolitan and, to a lesser
extent, colonial histories are therefore scrutinised as observatories of
global and transnational historical processes, appreciated in relation-
ship with other (old and emergent) imperial and colonial powers, and
interrogated within a wider analytical framework, which takes into
account the expansion of and the effective occupation by European
colonial rule (not without significant resistance and protest10) and the
growing internationalisation of imperial and colonial affairs, as a result
of multiple political, cultural, scientific and ethical developments.
This work comprises two parts. The ‘Civilisation Guild’: Native Labour
and Portuguese Colonialism, the first part of this book, focuses on the his-
torical constitution of the doctrine of the civilising mission in Portugal,
assessing its role in the tentative formation of new Brazils in Africa.
Capturing its genesis as a variation of the ideology of slavery that justi-
fied the secular existence and protracted abolition of the slave trade
in the Portuguese Euro-African-Brazilian empire, this part explores how
the ‘civilising mission’ doctrine became a vital element in the formulation
of a renewed foreign policy focused on imperial and colonial issues,
in the devising and promotion of political and cultural strategies of
nationalisation of the empire originated at the metropole (from State
institutions to scientific and religious, missionary ones), and in the con-
ception of imperial and colonial policies, namely those related to the
administration of native populations (the politics and policies of differ-
ence), and especially in what concerned their socioeconomic function
within the new colonial political and moral economy.11
The civilisational rhetoric was fundamental in the overall process of
maintenance and legitimation, especially at an international level, of a
model of recruitment and employment of labour that preserved several
elements characteristic of slavery. At the same time, it used the aboli-
tionist rationale to justify the expansion of the colonial administrative
apparatus: in order to effectively suppress the slave trade and slavery

itself, effective occupation was necessary and legitimate. The analy-
sis of the variety of forms of ‘civilised savagery’ (as one author aptly
described the colonial systems of labour) is fundamental to the study
of new imperialism.12 It is also crucial to the much needed reappraisal
of the widespread narratives of emancipation and abolitionism that
presume the end of slavery with the processes of its formal and legal
suppression. Mobilising political, economic and sociocultural aspects,
this work contributes to this purpose. The international debates and
historical events associated with these issues (from the Berlin West
Africa Conference to the Brussels Anti-slavery one) are identified and
analysed. Their impact on the constitution of a common normative
framework that legitimised colonial occupation and enabled the legali-
sation of forced labour is noted and explored.13 So is the fact that they
entailed the creation of fora where processes of collection, comparison
and circulation of knowledge (legal, moral, political, economic, scien-
tific) and repertoires of administration were fostered, which in turn
assisted the constitution of standards of (inter-)imperial accountability.
These are some of the main aspects addressed in the chapter ‘Between
Benevolence and Inevitability: The ‘Civilising Mission’ of Portuguese
Colonialism’.
Following the insights presented in the first chapter, the case of the
S. Thomé’s ‘slave cocoa’ is used as an exemplary historical observatory
of the politico-diplomatic and economic instrumental use given to the
‘civilising mission’.14 The definition of native policies, particularly those
related to the organisation and regulation of a native labour market
based on forced labour and characterised by conditions ‘analogous to
slavery’, is a rich example of those uses and abuses. Labour, forced if
necessary, was promoted to be the foremost civilising tool used within
the empire. Only through labour could the natives get a dignified place
at the ‘civilisation guild’. The ‘civilising mission’ was not based on the
propagation of the word, via education or evangelisation. Examining
the politico-administrative, diplomatic, economic, missionary and
educational aspects of Portuguese colonialism, as well as the main
discourses that developed its proclaimed civilising ends, the first part
of the book shows that the true ‘historical mission’ of the Portuguese
civilising programmes in Africa was to create the conditions in which to
prepare, or induce, the natives’ bodies and souls for work, compulsorily
if necessary. Theories of colonial pragmatism, economic interests and
racial and cultural prejudices, sustained by the propagation of scientific
forms of racism, thus determined.
Introduction 5
The chapters ‘The Civilisation Guild and the “Engineers of Depression”:

The Case of the S. Thomé Cocoa’ and ‘“Redemptive Labour” and the
Missionaries of the Alphabet’ explain why and demonstrate how this was
a reality. The intense and profuse outpouring of legislation focusing on
the administration of the colonies that supported the process described
above, which was disproportionally focused on labour and on the
so-called native policy, is a matter for special consideration in order to
ascertain the actual meaning of Reverend Rowley’s words. At the same
time, this succession of legal codifications – which governed the meth-
ods of effectivee colonisation of the colonial territories, and the models
of native labour, and affected a wide range of reformist programmes
(hygienist, educational, economic, moral, religious, administrative) – not
only reveals and denounces its ineffectiveness, but allows us to discern
the nature and modus operandii of the administrative implantation of the
Portuguese empire-state. As was the case with almost all colonial admin-
istrations, the type of political, economic and sociocultural authority
projected in the Portuguese colonies was spatially and socially concen-
trated, restricted to a few territorial outposts, and dependent on many
instances of local intermediation, including the process of labour recruit-
ment, in which the role of the administrative officials and of chefes de
posto, of the cipaios (native police) and of the local chiefs was fundamen-
tal. The men on the spot were surely decisive, but their action was not
completely disconnected from, or immune to, external problems and
dynamics.15
These two chapters are also illustrative of the impact of the inter-
nationalisation of imperial and colonial affairs addressed in the first
chapter. The ‘slave cocoa’ episode can only be properly understood if
we include in our analysis the process of international accountability
and legitimation of imperial rule and colonial administration, and its
growing importance. This process was later formally given substance
and scope at the League of Nations and International Labour Office/
Organisation commissions. Usually considered by the Portuguese
authorities as a mere instrument of imperial covetousness by other pow-
ers, and certainly motivated by specific economic interests, this event
also demonstrates the renewed interest and sensibility of metropolitan
populations regarding imperial issues, surely as a result, at least partially,
of the activism beyond borders, namely of the philanthropic associa-
tions and missionary societies.16
Notwithstanding the persistent disjuncture between legislation and
actual practices (a reality in many colonial situations), efforts to reno-
vate and improve the legal framework which dealt with native labour
conditions and relations in the Portuguese colonial empire, starting with

the codes of 1911 and 1914, were the answers given by the Portuguese
authorities to cope with the torrent of critical remarks coming from
numerous political, religious and economic personal and institutional
standpoints, and multiple geographies. The third chapter, for instance,
is particularly illustrative of the centrality of the circulation of idioms
and repertoires related to common problems of colonial administration
at international and transnational levels. Here, the assessment of the
question of native labour reveals the limitations and shortcomings of
the colonial powers’ capacity for political, economic and sociocultural
change, but it also shows the inadequacies of the doctrines of colonial
pragmatism to cope with the novel normative demands brought about
by the internationalisation of imperial and colonial affairs, as a result of
multiple historical developments, as stated above. In order to be under-
stood and managed, these developments required the colonial speciali-
sation of the existing scientific knowledge and the constitution of a new
type of colonial information, able to be compared and transferred, not
without numerous difficulties and failures, to Africa. In this sense, this
book also explores the international and transnational intersections of
politics and human and social sciences, as well as those of labour, race
and empire.17 The ‘imperialism of knowledge’, as an instrument of civi-
lised
d and civilising imperial and colonial rule and as a demonstration of
international integration, became central in the (inter-)imperial game.18
The second part of this book, Colonialism Without Borders, widens the
investigation carried out in the first part and reinforces its conclusions.
The first part shows how the efforts to understand the formation and
uses of the ‘civilising mission’ doctrine require an analytical framework
that integrates and articulates several scales of analysis, at the same time
refusing various procedures of methodological, analytical and historio-
graphical nationalisms; that is, an enquiry restricted to a single national or
imperial analytical framework, essentially focused on endogenous factors
(metropolitan or colonial).19 The same happens in order to explain the
actual employment of civilisingg programmes in a colonial context. The
chapters ‘Bibles, Flags and Transnational Loyalties: Educating Empires’
and ‘New Methods, Old Conclusions: The Ross Report’ reveal the need
for international and transnational approaches in order to compre-
hend, for instance: the causes and consequences of the humanitarian
and anti-slavery movements that converged on the imperial worlds;
the emergence of modernising and progressive movements focused on
the colonial contexts and respective problems (such as education and
economic and social development); the rise of colonial science. It also
Introduction 7
suggests the centrality of comparative analytical exercises. Focusing on

the global circumstances, on the international processes and on the
transnational actors that originated two major works on Africa – the two
volumes about Education in Africa by Thomas Jesse-Jones (1922/1925)
and Edward Ross’ Report on Employment of Native Labour in Portuguese
Africa (1925), the latter submitted to and appreciated at the League of
Nations – these two chapters provide sound evidence of how useful are
these methodological and analytical precepts. Accordingly, this book
critically examines the international and transnational circulation of
models of: native labour and colonial education; principles of scientific
colonial administration and paradigms of colonial science (from the
natural to the social sciences); theories and methods of racialisation of
the colonial populations; and ‘civilising missions’.
This second part also addresses an aspect that is frequently ignored or
downplayed in the history of the third Portuguese colonial empire: the
decisive impact of the expanding and intensifying internationalisation
of imperial issues promoted by the creation of the system of the League
of Nations in 1919.20 The institutionalisation of this process of interna-
tionalisation entailed the constitution of: standards of ‘good’ imperial
administration and colonial government; debates on and circulation of
idioms, norms and repertoires of action regarding the politics and poli-
cies of colonial rule, including those related to the politics and policies
of difference; and the establishment of systematic and institutionalised
mechanisms of comparable accountability and supervision. All these
aspects created the conditions for the emergence of reformist dynam-
ics, not least because they strengthened the critical assessments that
periodically originated from philanthropic or missionary societies, and
echoed across many newspapers throughout the world. The series of
events related to the Ross Report is just one illustration of how these
aspects profoundly impacted on national and colonial politics and poli-
cies. The suppression of forced recruitment to private ends determined
by the Code of Native Labour of 1928 is just one important example.
This book demonstrates the crucial role and the decisive relevance of
these international (not merely diplomatic) and transnational forces
and dynamics in the history of the Portuguese colonial empire.21
Part I
The ‘Civilisation Guild’:
Native Labour and Portuguese
Colonialism
1
Between Benevolence and
Inevitability: The ‘Civilising
Mission’ of Portuguese Colonialism
From Brussels to Berlin: the internationalisation

of African affairs
During the anti-slavery conference that took place in Brussels between

18 November 1889 and 2 July 1890, the Portuguese representatives
(Henrique Macedo, Portuguese ambassador in Brussels and former
minister of the navy and overseas; Augusto Castilho, a naval officer
who had been governor of Mozambique; Brito Capelo, an explorer and
officer in the Portuguese Navy; and Batalha Reis, consul in Newcastle)
were ‘armed with memoirs, documents and geographical charts’ with
which they would demonstrate Portugal’s secular ‘administrative,
scientific and humanitarian activity’ in Africa.1 The conference took
place under the sign of the scramble for Africa and of the legacy of
the Berlin Conference of 1884, and in particular under the 6th article
of the General Actt of February 1885.2 This article established and inter-
nationally consecrated the obligations upon all the powers exercising
sovereign rights or influence over colonial territories to bring home
‘the blessings of civilization’ and to ensure the ‘protection of the native
populations’ and ‘the improvement of the conditions of their moral
and material well-being’, reaffirming, in general, the aims to ‘abolish
slavery, and especially the slave trade’ in these territories. The generic
goal, as Marcelo Caetano wrote many years later, was to make the
natives ‘understand and appreciate the advantages of civilisation’; how-
ever, as we shall see, it meant much more than this.3
The General Actt harmonised the humanitarian and missionary demands
that traditionally coincided over the trafficking of slaves (and gradually
focused on slavery) with the various commercial and political interests
of the colonial powers, which were epitomised by the establishment
11
of free trade in the Congo and the colonial geographic definition of

the region which was organised by bilateral agreements and boundary
treaties that had been negotiated in parallel with the conference and
were based on a very limited knowledge of the territories in question.4
While the Protestant groups, particularly the Baptist Missionary Society
(BMS), which had since 1878 channelled its missionary efforts in the
region, and the humanitarian groups – in particular, the Anti-Slavery
Society, which had regularly denounced Portuguese involvement in the
persistence of this odious trade – had already shown themselves to be
extremely active in their opposition to the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of
1884 (which was signed, but never ratified), they redoubled their efforts
on the eve of the Berlin meeting. The fear of the closure of the evan-
gelical market in the Congo (and in other places in Africa) – a region
that had been involved in an intense ecclesiastical dispute that was
characterised by the conflict between the hegemonic plans of Cardinal
Charles Lavigerie and his Society of Missionaries of Africa (Société des
Missionaires d’Alger) and the evangelical proposals of the Portuguese, as
well as of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit (Congregation du Saint-
Esprit) which had been operating in Angola since 1866 and in Congo
since 1873 – ran in parallel with the worries regarding the closure of
commercial markets which steered protests organised by the leading
Manchester and Liverpool trade associations. These protests were led
by men such as James Hutton and William Mackinnon, whose con-
junctural colonial purposes were similar to those of King Leopold II,
and contributed to both the debate and to the non-ratification of the
Anglo-Portuguese agreement. The latter was above all determined by
the political calculations of – and the active resistance organised by –
Bismarck’s Germany and Jules Ferry’s France.5 The economic and politi-
cal motivations of their presence on the African continent that led to
the Berlin Conference were reinforced by the torrent of petitions and
submissions presented by the British religious and humanitarian sector.6
The circumstantial juxtaposition of ecclesiastical, political and economic
disputes, the historical manifestation of which can hardly be understood
outside the analytical framework that captures their interrelations on an
international, national and colonial level, facilitated the assertion and
enhanced the influence of religious and humanitarian factors in the
diplomatic processes that led to the Berlin Conference.7
On the eve of the conference, the Anti-Slavery Society asked the
Foreign Office to ensure the imminent multilateral negotiations in
Berlin specifically address the problem of slavery and the slave trade.
The instructions the British Government gave to its representatives
Native Labour and Portuguese Colonialism 13
(Percy Anderson of the Foreign Office and Edward Malet, ambassador

in Berlin) included reference to the need for them to ensure the ‘well-
being of the native races’. Assuming their traditional leadership in
relation to both causes – abolishing the slave trade and slavery – the
British representation hastened to be the first to suggest the inclusion
of an explicit reference to criminalisation of slave trafficking by land
or sea, perhaps fearing being beaten to it by Bismarck instincts or by
Leopold II’s return to a cause that had guided his early colonial vision,
but which had been progressively undermined by the principles of free
trade, ‘scientific’ exploration and of civilisation in a broad sense. The
assumed implications of the abolition of land trafficking were feared,
and the German and French representatives rejected them, albeit for
different reasons. Even Travers Twiss, a distinguished jurist associated
with the Foreign Office, advocate of Leopold II’s cause, and a figure
who was particularly involved in the discussions on the juridical status
in international law of a future ‘independent’ Congo State (the problem
of the sovereignty of a private commercial body that did not represent
an actual state), questioned the impact such a measure would have on
the disorganised African social system.8 As a result, maritime trafficking
was considered prohibited by international law. As for land traffick-
ing, the 9th article of the General Actt limited itself to saying it ‘ought
likewise to be regarded as forbidden’. The colonial powers undertook to
prevent the establishment of trafficking networks and markets in their
territories and to eradicate those that existed. Article 6 also included the
above-mentioned references to the protection of the moral and mate-
rial condition of the native populations. However, there was no specific
obligation to which each colonial power would be legally bounded, and
no reference to punitive mechanisms that could be applied for not com-
plying with this general undertaking: in sum, the absence of any actual
measure that ensured the application of the declared principles soon
led many to denounce the inconsequence of the conference’s ‘empty
humanitarianism’ and its ‘unintelligible philanthropy’.
Nevertheless, the Anti-Slavery Society focused on the positive aspect
of the problem. The trade of slaves by land was condemned, ‘native
well-being’ was consecrated as a right, and both aspects had an inter-
national impact. Moreover, during the meeting, the new Congo Free
State committed itself to preventing and abolishing both the trade in
slaves and slavery. In addition, the traffic in alcoholic beverages, which
was thought to be an obstacle to civilising the African population, was
also dealt with in Berlin. This pleased the missionaries, particularly
the Church Missionary Society, the humanitarian groups led by the
Aborigines’ Protection Society, and the many temperance societies that

were close to them. The latter sought to export to Africa their domestic
activities denouncing the social evils of alcohol, and aimed to prohibit
its consumption there.. As with slavery and the slave trade, the out-
come of the conference regarding alcohol disappointed many people’s
expectations – largely as a result of this trade being an important source
of income for the colonial administrations, accounting, in Germany’s
case, for around one-half of total African exports between 1878 and
1884. The important point to note, though, is that the question of stop-
ping the trade in alcohol was included in the catalogue of objectives
in the efforts to renew the colonial policies that were aimed at native
populations.9
The Berlin Conference is an excellent example of the legitimis-
ing role the humanitarian rhetoric of the colonial context played on
the politico-economic plans of the European states that competed to
include African territories either within their spheres of influence or
under their sovereignty. While the conference, which no representatives
of Africa attended, was mainly concerned with matters of international
and colonial policy, with commercial principles and modus operandi,
and with the juridical framework that would regulate the conference’s
central concern (the territorial regulation of Congo or Zaire by the
many European powers that had a direct or indirect interest or stake in
the area) and other aspects of the colonial enterprise, the truth is that its
humanitarian and religious dimensions were also debated in such a way
as to enable the justification of the colonial process and its expansionist
movements as an ethical imperative. To the arguments concerning the
economic and commercial order (those of scientific and technological
type and of evangelical origin, that supported and legitimated the colo-
nial projects and programmes) was now added an imperial ethic that
was to govern the exercise of colonial domination as a whole and which
was founded, as we have seen, in a civilisational obligation to ‘protect
the native tribes’ and to ‘further their moral and material well-being’.
This obligation rested on the promotion of the freedom to evangelise
and on free trade that was averse to traditional exclusionary and protec-
tionist mechanisms. Also crucial was the establishment of demarcated
areas of political and economic influence, generally guided by shared
principles of ‘civilised’ administration. In other words, processes of
colonisation and colonial domination were created as elixirs and guar-
antors of the enhanced morality, in the broadest sense of the phrase,
of the colonial contexts. The requirement to protect and to assist that
all colonial powers and religious, scientific and charitable institutions
dedicated to bringing the ‘benefits of civilisation’ – regardless of nation-

ality or confessional and denominational background – reinforced an
‘imperialism of benevolence’, anchored in a double motivation – religious
(guided by the aim to obtain converts to Christianity and coming from
Protestant sectors); and humanitarian (which sought to improve the
living conditions of non-Europeans) – which focused on the abolition
of slavery and the slave trade. The universalism of the main tenets of
European civilisation was considered to be unquestionable, and the
idea of the religious and secular civilising mission was shared by
the main colonial powers even if, from the historical point of view, it
was embodied differently and represented different notions of what the
cornerstones of European civilisation were. In doing so, it reflected the
radicalism of the Kulturkämpfe that swept across Europe during the mid-
dle of the nineteenth century.10
This ‘benevolent imperialism’ was progressively described as an ‘obli-
gation’, what Rudyard Kipling famously described as ‘the white man’s
burden’, marked by a growing recognition of the slow or inexistent
civilising effects of colonialism during the first decades of the nineteenth
century and by the gradual emergence of utilitarian ideas rooted in an
evolutionary perspective that explained racial differences and cultural
diversity. Social Darwinism soon led to, or, seen another way, legiti-
mated an ‘imperialism of inevitability’; that is, a view which considered
colonial expansion and the consequent domination of a civilisation as a
natural consequence of European and Western superiority that had been
translated into a social, political and economic variant of natural selec-
tion. In sum, the idea of the civilising mission incorporated different
motives and plans, from a belief in the possibility and the obligation to
share the pillars of civilisation with the non-European world to the asser-
tion of the opposite view. That opposite view is frequently ignored in the
historiography of the ‘civilising missions’, which tends to deliberately
obscure the existence of counter-currents to the civilising projects.11
In any event, it is clear that religious or secular philanthropic and
humanitarian motivations and rhetoric existed in European political
discourses throughout the nineteenth century, as did ideas of civilising
‘benevolence’ or ‘obligation’ and of the inevitability of expansion and
imperial domination that was justified by the supposed scientific evi-
dence of racial and cultural hierarchies. While they had not yet formed
a coherent and dominant ideological complex, had not constituted
monolithic and homogeneous ideological or theological blocs or neces-
sarily translated the defence of an umbilical cord between imperialism
or colonialism and missionary activity or evangelisation, it remains
a fact that this association was clearly stated both in Brussels and in
Berlin. Independently of the variable consideration and prioritisation of
the constituent elements of David Livingstone’s famous achievement –
the equation between trade and Christianity as inseparable factors of
civilisation – and of the greater or lesser preponderance of ‘benevolence’,
‘obligation’ or ‘inevitability’, the definition of colonial expansion as a
civilising imperative motivated by the spiritual and material elevation
of the African populations dominated both the declaration of principles
and the phraseology and articulation of the juridical codes that came
out of the Brussels and Berlin Conferences. It was just as important for
the efforts to mobilise national and international public opinion to the
colonial and imperial cause. A corollary of this was that the religious
and humanitarian motivations mentioned above sponsored, on the
side of much more prosaic and certainly more decisive motivations and
considerations, the scramble for and the partition of Africa.12
Even knowing a posteriori that most of the declaration of humanitar-
ian intent had no noticeable impact, and that the same was true of the
remainder of the directions that were outlined during the conference –
from the constitution of the Congo Free State as one of the monopolies
with exclusive rights to the involvement of the colonial administrations
in the perpetuation of conditions analogous to slavery – the discussions
that took place in Berlin left their mark on the decades that followed. As
H. L. Wesseling clearly stated, the political and social perception of the
importance of the humanitarian and philanthropic dimensions should
not be overlooked as a key factor in the development of the era’s colo-
nial diplomacy. While the definition of the new geography of colonial
Africa had not happened in Berlin, but had already been outlined long
before, particularly in the coastal zones and in a particularly visible
manner in the so-called ‘Congo question’, the meeting certainly served
to provide international legitimacy to the European colonial project on
the continent and, consequently, the participation of humanitarian and
religious groups in these processes cannot be assessed only on the fragile
nature of their demands in the diplomatic arena. In the same way as
the principle of ‘effective occupation’, which did not play the signifi-
cant role many insisted in attributing to it as the conference proceeded,
but which was to later obtain a meaning and a normative value that
was useful for settling territorial disputes in the colonial and imperial
context, the above-mentioned humanitarian matters (from slavery to
the trade of alcoholic drinks, through to the matter of trafficking arms)
acquired an undeniable prominence in the colonial and imperial pro-
cesses in the international, domestic and colonial arenas.13
From Berlin to Brussels: civilising colonial sovereignty
The realisation of a conference in Brussels, four years after the one in

Berlin, focusing precisely on these matters provides undeniable proof of
the importance of ‘civilising’ matters for European colonial expansion
during the second half of the nineteenth century. Similarly, the agita-
tion and competition between Catholic and Protestant missionaries, to
which we alluded above, was at the heart of the political and economic
processes that led to Brussels. Charles Martial Allemand Lavigerie’s anti-
slavery ‘crusade’, which emerged at the end of the 1870s as a counter-
part to Leopold II’s proposals, which were seen to be supported by the
anti-clerical sectors and by obscure Protestant interests, also played a
crucial role. The focus on the cause of slavery was an astute way used
by Lavigerie to position himself in the missionary competition within
the Propaganda Fide and the Holy See, which was accompanied by his
promotion of putative anti-clerical and Protestant threats. The slavery
cause also offered a golden opportunity for the Catholic Church to
become the leading institution in a cause that Europe supported, and
thus to recover from the blows it had received during the previous
decades. The choice of slavery as the motive of greatest imperative for
Catholic expansion in Africa during the period immediately preceding
and following the Berlin Conference proved a useful tool for influenc-
ing the European political and diplomatic sphere.14 On the strictly reli-
gious level, the deliberate association of slavery with Islamism on the
continent not only mobilised the Catholic sectors, but it also provided
them with another powerful tool that could be used and instrumental-
ised by those governments interested in intensifying or consolidating
their expansionist plans. Only the expansion and consolidation of
colonial domination could curtail the growth of the land-based slave
trade while simultaneously reducing the leak of faith and the growth of
Islamic political structures.15
In his missions to various European countries, Lavigerie offered
crude and often fantastic descriptions of slavery in Africa, and showed
a remarkable talent in the way he used the press as a means of increas-
ing the support base for his projects. With the enthusiasm he used
to convince Pope Leo XIII and the Church hierarchy to support his
proposal for new ecclesiastical divisions on the African continent,
Lavigerie recovered the humanitarian and philanthropic fervour that
had preceded Berlin, and expanded its horizons. Exploiting the power
of public sessions, rallies and new and economical methods of politi-
cal communication – in the Saint Sulpice church (1 July 1888) or in
London’s Princes Hall (31 July), Lavigerie moved the masses and cap-
tivated the political authorities, or, more accurately, convinced them
of the political benefits of joining his cause, both from the domestic
and the international point of view. In fact, Lavigerie mobilised the
European Catholics and their (small) antislavery societies, exploring
(and reinforcing) the existent transnational Catholic networks, which
were captivated by the ‘agite, agite!’ dictum of Pope Pius IX and ignited
by Leo XIII’s In Plurimis (5 May 1888), which deplored slavery at the
time of its abolition by Brazil. The traditional, cautious, Catholic pos-
ture towards the problem of slavery changed.16
Lavigerie was also able to capture attention outside the Catholic and
religious worlds. He won the support of such figures as Lord Granville
(who was the leader of the Opposition in the United Kingdom at the
time) and was received by the Prince of Wales. His message, and his
donation (50,000 francs), were also welcomed by the Anti-Slavery
Society. As expected, these connections and the impact of his com-
munications, which were always supported by the most convincing
oratory, triggered a new enthusiasm within the Anti-Slavery Society,
even if its committee sought to follow a path independent from that
outlined by Lavigerie. In any event, Lavigerie’s initiatives participated
in the reinforcement of the humanitarian and philanthropic cause in
the United Kingdom and led to a new offensive on the Foreign Office
and Parliament. Lavigerie’s activities were also noticed by other colonial
competitors. His presence in Brussels in August 1888 interested Leopold
II, who was able to understand the advantages that the antislavery
cause, and Lavigerie’s role in it, conveyed: they could be used as an
instrument to further legitimise his Congo endeavour. As already noted,
their relationship was difficult, but the political calculations of both
counselled a change in direction. Lavigerie supported Leopold II’s colo-
nial cause, while the King supported the Belgian Anti-Slavery Society,
which was created immediately after one of Lavigerie’s speeches. That
is, Leopold II strengthened his image as a ‘commendable philanthropic
sovereign’, in the words of Jean Stengers, while Lavigerie consolidated
his leadership of the international movement that was described as
being a new ‘crusade’. Obviously, the colonial interests involved soon
sought to nationalise the humanitarian and philanthropic cause in
accordance with their own aims and objectives. For example, in the
United Kingdom, the Foreign Office did not take long to seek control
of developments resulting from Lavigerie’s energetic attitude, and
immediately considered holding a conference in which the question of
slavery would be the main theme, which it had not been in Berlin. The
persistent failure of the naval strategy to combat the maritime trade in

slaves, the weakness and ineffectiveness of the war against the trade in
slaves on land, and the worrying increase in the arms trade in Africa
reinforced the need to debate the problem as a whole. In Germany,
Bismarck quickly understood the domestic political value of the anti-
slavery cause, and its use in the mobilisation of the country’s elite for
his colonial designs.17
As a result, and after several attempts to involve the British parlia-
ment, particularly the House of Commons, on 26 March 1889 the British
Anti-Slavery Society succeeded in securing parliamentary approval for
the need to hold an anti-slavery conference. Like Lavigerie, who was
planning a similar conference in Lucerne with the aim of increasing the
number of anti-slavery societies in Europe, a conference that eventually
took place in Paris in September 1890, the majority of European gov-
ernments were involved in the preliminary discussion concerning the
meeting, from Bismarck, who was in London at the time, to Leopold
II, who was interested in using the cause to justify the need to increase
tax in the Congo. On 24 August 1889, seventeen countries were invited
to attend the meeting in Brussels, with the aim of discussing the most
suitable means of dealing with the maritime and land trade in slaves.
Once more, these aims were filtered through the political and colonial
interests of the principal interested authorities. For example, Portugal
was quick to demand that the conference should not deal with territo-
rial matters (its dispute with the United Kingdom over the location of
Angola’s eastern boundary had not yet been solved) while France feared
the conference would be an excuse for the United Kingdom to reopen
diplomatically the matter of visiting rights to French ships.18
The Brussels Conference began on 18 November 1889 and was closely
followed by the press and by the most active sections in the humanitar-
ian movement, particularly by the British Anti-Slavery Society, which,
among other successes, managed to ensure the British representatives
submitted a collection of documents over the slave trade and slavery
during the session on 4 December. Just like the preliminary sessions,
the actual conference was influenced by the development of European
expansionist policies and the associated diplomatic situation. Against a
background of tensions between the United Kingdom and Germany in
East Africa and the British Ultimatum to Portugal of January 1890, the
conduct of the conference followed the rhythm of colonial events and
was guided by the European diplomatic game. As noted above, Portugal
sought to ensure territorial questions were not discussed. However,
from the start, its representatives proceeded in another way. Despite the
invitation to the meeting to decide the central theme of the suppres-

sion of the ‘slave trade in Africa’, rescuing the terms of the General Act
of Berlin and stressing the urgent need to militarise these efforts, and
for the corresponding expansion and occupation (again associating the
humanitarian aim with expansionist designs), the Portuguese repre-
sentatives soon reversed their strategy.19
During the first session of the conference, Augusto Castilho presented
a document titled Mémoire sur l’Abolition de l’Esclavage et de la Traite
des Noirs Territoire Portugais. On 23 November 1889, the Portuguese
presented the List of Offical Stations that Portugal Possesses in Africa,
which immediately generated opposition from the British and Belgian
representatives. Contrary to the demands they had made on the eve of
the meeting, the Portuguese sought, albeit indirectly, to address territo-
rial issues. Under the guise of a simple demonstration of the civilising
efforts the country had made in the African continent, exemplified by
the establishment of positions from which to launch their initiatives to
suppress the slave trade network and by the construction of a railway
network that would encourage the development of ‘legitimate trade’,
the list of ‘civilising stations’ included territories that were contested by
other powers, particularly by the United Kingdom and the Congo Free
State. Lord Vivian, one of the British dignitaries, challenged the docu-
ment, and was immediately supported by the Belgian Van Eetvelde.
Territorial questions were not within the competence of the conference.
Ambassador Henrique Macedo pointed out that the list sought only to
demonstrate the strategy the country was following in its involvement
in the humanitarian cause. Nevertheless, the majority of representatives
refused to collaborate with the Portuguese strategy.20
The matter was discussed again during the session held on 19
December. In a determined declaration strongly marked by the conflict
between Portugal and the United Kingdom on the continent, mainly
focusing on the question of the Zambezi, Lord Vivian challenged the
documents Portugal presented at the conference, noting that not only
should their presentation be condemned, but that its terms must also
be energetically refused. The references in the Mémoire in relation to
a British ‘tolerance’ of slavery and the existence of plans to establish
stations in territories over which Portuguese sovereignty was not rec-
ognised were strongly criticised. For their part, the representatives of
the Congo Free State reinforced the critiques, referring to the ‘flagrant
violations of rights’ of sovereignty that some of the proposed stations
implied. Consequently, debate on any aspect of on-going territorial dis-
putes was banned from the conference in the Belgian capital.21
The focus of attention was on the questions of the slave trade and
slavery, addressing some issues that had been touched upon in Berlin,
such as the trade in arms and alcoholic drinks. In respect of the slave
trade, emphasis was placed on the export of slaves, which immediately
led to a dispute between the United Kingdom and France in relation to
the tools of maritime vigilance (the recurring disagreement over visiting
rights). Despite this, important steps were taken towards a closer and
more effective inspection of maritime traffic. Another important issue
concerned the countries receiving the slaves. Controlling demand was
obviously fundamental for closing the market for slaves. The problem
of slavery remained. However, here, as was to be expected, a whole
range of opposition emerged, even if always camouflaged by the most
admirable declarations of principle and commitment to the abolition
of slavery. For example, shortly before the conference began, France
made known it was not disposed to debate the problem, in which it
was followed by Leopold II. As was the case in Berlin, the impact of
the effective measures against slavery in African societies was used as
the main argument in defence of a more cautious approach to the mat-
ter. Additionally, the problem of colonial sovereignty, which had in
the meantime been extended due to the innumerable expansions and
territorial occupations, always operated as the decisive principle in the
refusal to find collective means of regulating or ending slavery. In any
event, and despite all of the differences dictated by the political calculus
and coloured by nationalist ideals and by old and current rivalries, at
least the problem of the land-based trade in slaves on African territory
was approached seriously. The reason for this was not unexpected, since
it had been raised in Berlin: the abolition of the land-based slave trade
allowed the presentation of an anti-slavery policy, which functioned
as a resource legitimating occupation and colonial control. Only the
progressive organisation of an administrative, military, judicial and,
an important aspect, religious apparatus could create the conditions
necessary to effect the abolition of slavery. Consequently, the ‘civilis-
ing’ project necessarily depended on the increase and consolidation of
the presence and on the domination of the European colonial powers.22
The General Act,t which summarised the tumultuous meetings that
took place during the conference, clearly expressed this connection
between colonial occupation, the abolition of slavery and ‘civilisa-
tion’, consecrating and consolidating it in the imperial and colonial
rhetoric. In fact, following Berlin’s ‘civilising’ precepts, the General Act
of Brussels represented the central moment of correspondence between
the proposal to fight against slavery and the need for the effective
occupation of colonial territories. The end of slavery in the colonial

context depended on the effective occupation of their territories by the
colonial authorities which, in turn, became a necessary condition for
the civilisation of the native populations in the colonies. The organisa-
tion of an administrative, judicial, military and religious apparatus that
would be disseminated throughout the territory was defended, with
particular reference to the establishment of ‘strongly occupied stations’
in the interior of the African continent. The essential aim of these
stations – which since 1876 were celebrated as the essential tool in the
project to ‘civilise’ the African continent, on the occasion of the Brussels
Conference, which marked the emergence of Leopold II’s Association
Internationale Africaine (AIA, African International Association) as an
important piece in the colonial puzzle – was to serve as a ‘place for sup-
porting and, when necessary, a refuge for the indigenous population’,
supplying sanitation services, ensuring the ‘morality’ of trade, and, in
particular, overseeing the ‘contracts for the engagement of natives’,
according to Article 2 of the General Act.
The construction of a railway network which, along with a road
network, would ensure the circulation of goods, people and informa-
tion, and increase the institutional penetration of the colonial admin-
istrations, the establishment of telegraph lines and the organisation
of ‘expeditions’ that reinforced the project to repress slavery and to
solidify colonial occupation were the fundamental axes of the coloni-
alist strategy shared by the leading powers. One other set of measures
consisted in the restriction of the importation and trade in firearms,
ammunition and alcohol to natives, both of which aspects were consid-
ered as the fundamental coercive and persuasive means operating in the
slave system. However, in their articulation, as in Berlin, no concrete
disposition was established to oblige the signatories to eliminate the
trade, or even to create an administrative apparatus with this aim. The
fear that the choice of effective occupation as a condition sine qua non
of the anti-slavery efforts of the ‘civilising’ enterprise could be exploited
as justification for uncontrolled colonial expansion (which would cer-
tainly lead to a multiplication of colonial conflicts, in an area in which
the geography and the geopolitics were far from being commonly
agreed) was duly addressed: each signatory was only allowed to expand
and consolidate its colonial sovereignty over its domains and territorial
waters, and only if these were recognised as such by their partners.23
Despite the many weaknesses and the enormous distance that sepa-
rated the humanitarian rhetoric and the implementation of effective
policies that would de facto lead to the stated goal of abolishing slavery
and the slave trade, the General Act – which remained in force from
2 April 1892 until 1919 – returned these issues to the centre of the
colonial debate, in the same way reinforcing them as an indispensable
resource in the promotion of the colonial and imperial cause, moralis-
ing and improving its earlier practice. As Joseph Chamberlain, distin-
guished British colonial secretary (from 1895 to 1903), summarised in
1900, the supposed obligation to combat slavery and the slave trade as
a civilising factor became a precious casus belli that could be used ‘to
justify the imperial control’ of ‘savage countries’. This was an argument
frequently used during the first waves of colonial expansion in Africa
dating from the middle of the nineteenth century, and was to become
identified with the new imperialism. However, it is also necessary to
stress that, independently of the elusive nature of the dispositions that
emerged from the Berlin and Brussels Conferences and of the legitimat-
ing potential of the humanitarian rhetoric regarding colonial expan-
sionist ventures, the humanitarian and philanthropic factors, and the
causes against slavery, against the trafficking of weapons and against
the trade in alcoholic drinks became clear and important constraints
on colonial policies. At the same time, events such as the ones in Berlin
and Brussels increased the political and public weight of pressure groups
like the Anti-Slavery Society and the many similar organisations which
became international and national vigilantes of imperial formations.
As we shall see, the international environment regarding humanitarian
and philanthropic issues on the African continent, and the resultant
intensifying colonisation, greatly affected Portuguese colonialism at the
end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.24
Laws, clauses and inconsistencies: Portuguese

colonies and vigilantes of the empire
Portuguese presence in Brussels was marked by the clear demonstration

of a desire to proclaim the civilising virtues of Portuguese coloni-
alism, after decades of systematic accusations of sponsoring and
encouraging the slave trade and slavery. At a time of reinvigorated
renewal of international and transnational vigilance over the colo-
nial modi operandi, in which the civilising rhetoric assumed a special
weight, this position was given particular relevance by the authori-
ties. One of the most obvious aspects of this approach was based
on the systematic use of the abundant imperial and colonial legisla-
tion, either aiming to prove the antiquity of the abolitionist cause in
Portugal, or to demonstrate the civilising and humanitarian purposes
of Portugal’s African policy following the political disintegration of

the Luso-Brazilian Empire. In fact, the juridical codification of ‘native
labour’ in the Portuguese colonies, in its successive substantive modu-
lations and specifications, always operated as a support to legitimise
Portuguese colonial activity. It also played a central role in the devel-
opment of Portuguese colonial thought, as it provided recurrent and
indispensable justification for the putative exemplary and exceptional
nature of the Portuguese ‘civilising mission’ in Africa, of the nobility
and virtue of its aims. It also functioned as the main tool for chal-
lenging the torrent of accusations that were periodically aimed at the
Portuguese colonial enterprise and which denounced, firstly, the persis-
tent Portuguese involvement in the transatlantic slave trade in defiance
of mounting pressure and bilateral accords that banned it and, secondly,
the resilience of slave practices in all their forms – or, euphemistically,
of conditions analogous to slavery – in the Portuguese colonies or,
less drastically, the questionable humanitarianism of the native labour
system in the colonial situation.25
The abolitionist rhetoric and the civilising rhetoric, always closely
connected, were systematically anchored in the legislative corpus
designed in the country to regulate colonial affairs. Firstly, the main-
tenance of an abolitionist – and thereby civilising – rhetoric and ideol-
ogy through the juridical instrumentalisation of overseas affairs was
essentially destined to respond to the politico-diplomatic nature of
the relationship with the United Kingdom, focused particularly on the
problem of the abolition of the slave trade. Secondly, and particularly
following the undeniable internationalisation of the imperial and colo-
nial affairs, that is, of the multiplication and diversification of national,
transnational and, we should not forget, local and peripheral interests
focusing on the African continent from Egypt to the Congo, this close
relationship between the abolitionist and civilising rhetorics was to
become decisive for the country’s colonial strategies. This was not
simply a means to justify past and present colonial domination. In an
increasingly multilateral diplomatic context, which was marked by the
increasing complexity of networks of political, economic and religious
interests coinciding with the African colonial question, the promotion
of the Portuguese-proclaimed abolitionist and humanitarian (putative)
longstanding traditions also played an important role in the legitimisa-
tion of the country’s expansionist policy on the continent.26
Augusto Castilho’s Mémoire sur l’Abolition de l’Esclavage et de la Traite
des Noirs sur le Territoire Portugais, which was presented at the first ses-
sion of the Brussels Conference, constituted one of the many examples
in which the legislative dimension sustained the civilising rhetoric of

Portuguese colonialism, outlined in response to the latest developments
in the ‘Congo affair’ and to the colonial diplomatic game. It was also an
instance in which the abolitionist rhetoric and mythology was rescued
in order to strengthen the civilising rhetoric and become, as we noted
above, an indispensable element in the politico-economic strategies
associated with national territorial pretensions.
The Mémoire was a model historic-legislative compendium, in which
the defence of the purity of the intents of the Portuguese colonial pro-
ject was based on the reference to the legislation applied in the colonies,
the selection of which was aimed at ‘serving the legitimate declaration
of Portugal’s civilising efforts on the African continent, and defending
its good name and that of the glories it is certainly due for the commit-
ted, glorious and disinterested task that four centuries ago it completed
as a colonial power’. However, read and interpreted together with the
List of Official Stations Portugal Possesses in Africa and with its objec-
tives that were not publicly explained, the Mémoire acquires another
importance and another meaning. To the enunciation of past ‘civilising
efforts’ was clearly added the insinuation of the legitimacy of alleged
past and present rights, based not only on ‘historic rights’ but also on
the evidence of civilisingg juridical measures.
The appropriation of the idea of ‘civilising stations’ that was elabo-
rated in Brussels in 1876 – and which the Boletim da Sociedade de
Geografia de Lisboa considered to be a simple actualisation of the old
system of presídios (fortified military settlements), confirming once
more the precocity of the Portuguese colonial imagination, its legal
incorporation on 18 August 1881 (in a decree signed by Júlio Vilhena,
minister of navy and overseas) and its inclusion in a comprehensive
civilising doctrine in the appeal Ao Povo Português (To the Portuguese
People), which sought to rally resources in support of the country’s
colonial expansionist ambitions symbolised in the Rose-coloured Map,
in July of that same year, continued to be used as factors of politico-
diplomatic legitimacy in Brussels in 1889. The substance and purpose
of the 1881 decree – which determined that the territorialisation of
the proposed civilising stations aimed primarily at the civilisation of the
native population, alongside the functions of security and promoting
commerce – were restated and emphasised in the Mémoire, and in the
Portuguese position at the conference.27 However, the reinvention and
instrumentalisation of a more than questionable tradition of abolition-
ism and civilisation, full of myth making and reinforcing the longstanding
abolitionist mythology, was also based elsewhere.28
The beginning of this apologetic memoir of the ‘civilising virtues’ of

the Portuguese imperial endeavour also recalled, among other chronolog-
ically organised references to supposed national abolitionist efforts, the
preamble to the ‘humanitarian’ decree of 10 December 1836 (allegedly
written by Almeida Garrett). This document celebrated the absence of ‘a
single document in the entire first period of our discoveries that does not
prove that the first and almost only aim of the Portuguese government
was the civilisation of the people through the Gospel. Trade, which is
also civilising, was secondary; while domination was a related necessity,
not a goal’. This connection between trade and Christianity as aspects
of colonisation, which had an essential reference in David Livingstone,
was nationalised. The Portuguese ‘humanitarian zeal’ found in the Sá da
Bandeira’s decree ‘one of the most generous of modern progresses’. The
‘emancipation of the blacks and the repression of trade’ was the fruit of
the ‘spontaneity’ of Portuguese efforts to bring an end to the ‘infamous’
commerce. Alongside this parade of legislative texts, the Mémoire also
mentioned countless examples of diplomatic and ministerial correspond-
ence (‘selected superficially and at random from the most authentic of
national and foreign government sources’), as well as an extensive gal-
lery of foreign personalities confirming the general sense the Portuguese
sought to transmit in Brussels: the precocious and resolute will, the
humanitarian and civilising spontaneity of the Portuguese colonial
enterprise. The failures of the ‘abolitionist will’ and of the ‘humanitar-
ian’ and ‘emancipating’ policies, as well as of the ‘civilising’ efforts, were
explained as being caused by a lack of resources (at the same time stress-
ing Britain’s failures in this respect, despite its greater resources). They
were also explained by the resistance of the ‘hateful rage of the slave
traders’ or even by the intensive activities of the Arab communities.
The ‘purifying ideology’ outlined by Setembrismo (a liberal political
movement of the 1830s) was recovered by August Castilho and strongly
emphasised in his juridical realisation before the foreign diplomatic
representatives in Brussels. To them, this torrent of Portuguese legisla-
tion was presented as sufficient proof demonstrating the unquestionable
nature of the country’s abolitionist and humanitarian will. The material
result of the colonial legislation was ignored or simply evoked (and given
value) through a set of excerpts of declarations from ‘distinguished’
foreigners who, mainly, corroborated the perspective defended by the
Portuguese. Moreover, the abolitionist and humanitarian efforts had
been, and were, the result of the spontaneous attitude of the Portuguese
authorities, and not as a result of a systematic external pressure. These
efforts had been and continued to be driven by a civilising imperative.29
Repeatedly dubbed ‘memorable liberating law’, an expression that

would endure in Portuguese political and diplomatic texts, the law of 29
April 1875, signed by Andrade Corvo, would have concluded the ‘bril-
liant and humanitarian […] generous work of civilisation’ that ‘Portugal
had spontaneously undertaken’. Accordingly, it deserved a synopsis
of its provisions in the Mémoire, a document that, we must recall,
was presented and appreciated during the first session of the Brussels
Conference. The 1875 decree noted that within one year the servile
condition of the overseas provinces would be ‘entirely’ extinguished,
which would enable the definitive emancipation of the native popula-
tion, to whom the ‘same rights, benefits and privileges the sons of the
metropole’ possessed would be conferred. It created the post of curator-
general of the natives, an office designed to protect ‘the negroes from
any violations’ via the definition of the terms of public tutelage, and
also established a legal and punitive framework for ‘vagabondage’ that,
this way, emerged in association with legislation on the política indígena
(native policy). Later that year ‘the first draft of the Native Labour Code’
(Regulation of 29 December 1878) was outlined.30 In respect of Africa’s
eastern limits, only the presence of Islam and the persistence of ‘its
sad procession of retrograde, sensual and anti-civilising habits’, which
included its continued involvement in the slave trade, prevented the
legal and moral precepts that governed the Portuguese administration
from being fully effective. In the rest of the colonial territories, these
precepts had produced good results, it was argued.31 In a booklet on the
Brussels Conference published in 1892 by D. António Leitão e Castro,
the former prelate of Mozambique and Bishop of Angola, the author
stated that ‘slavery’ was ‘the foundation of the social system established
by Mohammed, which cannot exist without harems’. The ineptitude
and short-sightedness of the ‘civilised’ powers was denounced and criti-
cised: rather than strenuously confront this ‘institution’, ‘they mollify
and weep bitter tears’. The presence of the Arab world in Africa repre-
sented a justification and a plausible excuse both for the persistence
of slavery and for the need for military, administrative and missionary
expansions. Lavigerie, who understood this long before anyone else,
was followed by politicians and religious leaders from all over Europe.
For the Portuguese authorities, as Castilho and Leitão e Castro’s argu-
ments show, this fact acquired special importance when faced with
colonial geopolitical developments in East Africa, which involved, as
was the case in Congo, significant aspects of missionary competition.32
Another frequently enlisted example associated with the 1875 decree
resided in the decree signed by Tomás Ribeiro on 21 November 1878,
which would condition, essentially in terms of its declared intentions, the

political definition and legal framework for native labour during the final
quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth.
According to José Almada, this decree represented ‘the transition between
the regime of slavery and that of native labour’, reinforced the principle
of idleness as the only one likely to require the compulsory employment
of native services (idleness was determined by an absence from work for a
period greater than 15 days) and established the curator as the independ-
ent authority and the cornerstone of the colonial labour system, entirely
organised around the use of native manpower. While the decree of April
1875 did not absolutely condemn all obligations on former slaves to
work, then the 1878 regulations did: they ended the principle of public
tutelage and released all former slaves and libertos (freedmen) from any
labour obligations they had towards their former masters.
The same regulations also represented the start of a greater degree of
contractual specification as they stipulated the obligation to define in
detail the conditions and terms of contracts, from the nature of the work,
its duration (a maximum of five years), the monthly pay and the daily
ration, right up to the clothing to be provided to the worker. Similarly,
the penalties for non-compliance with the contract were simplified.
In the case of non-compliance by the worker, then they could lose their
ration and up to twice their salary. Employers who did not honour the
contract could be penalised through fines or by having their contracts
terminated, at the exclusive discretion of the curator. Independently of
the weaknesses in their statement and the contradictions between their
declared aims and the effective conditions in practice – not to mention
the obvious attempts to avoid the terms – both the 1875 decree and the
1878 regulations met two essential functions: they exemplified the claimed
reformist drive while simultaneously putting into practice, even if only
de jure, basic ‘civilising’ precepts such as the organisation and regula-
tion of a colonial labour market. Both were important resources in the
game of international diplomacy. They were and would continue to
be indispensible resources in the defence against the constant flurry of
critical assessments of Portuguese native policy in general, criticisms that
focused on denouncing the persistence of slavery practices and on the
continuation of unacceptable practices from the humanitarian and civi-
lising point of view during the transition to a colonial economy based
on legitimatee and lawful trade.33
In fact, the successive legal formulations relating to native policy
constituted the main repository for accusations of inefficiency and per-
versity to which the Portuguese colonial administration was subjected,
despite its efforts to legitimate in law its supposed abolitionist, humani-

tarian and civilising purposes. Originating from several sources, histori-
cally distributed in an almost cyclical way beginning with a focus on
the maritime slave trade and then slavery itself, the denunciation of the
organisation and use of native labour by the Portuguese authorities in
the colonial context had a common denominator: the attribution of an
irresolvable gap between the chronological succession of native policies,
supported by several sets of projects, dispositions, decrees and regula-
tions and the emergence of letters, reports, statements and interviews
revealing a systematic, effective and multiform system for the exploita-
tion of native labour. Such assessments laid bare the unmistakable traits
of the Portuguese colonial administration, exposing the sporadic and
ineffective nature of its authority and uncovering its participation in
the functioning of the system organised for the exploitation of native
labour. They highlighted the inconsistencies between the intentions
declared in the legal framework of the Portuguese colonial programmes
and their actual modi operandi.
Independently of the determination of the ‘real’ motivations behind
the reformist efforts in relation to the slave trade and slavery that
occurred with greater consistency after the middle of the century, it is
important to recognise the obstacles and blockages interposed between
the processes of politico-legislative decision making in metropolitan
Portugal and the means of (mis)appropriation and the eventual applica-
tion of these decisions and their subsequent management in the colo-
nial context. In any event, it is important to appreciate that the external
denunciations of the operation of Portuguese colonialism focused on
two inextricably linked questions: one relating to the slave trade and
slavery; the other concerning the characteristics and quality of the
Portuguese colonial administration. The discussions relating to the slave
trade between Portugal and the United Kingdom often involved more
than humanitarian contents, territorial and administrative motivations
and consequences: for instance, the persistence of protectionist policies
or the use of abolition of the slave trade as a factor in territorial occu-
pation and administrative modernisation.34 Likewise, the multilateral
discussions at the end of the century, which focused on slavery and on
the promotion of the civilisingg imperative and which involved, as we
have seen, other non-state actors, were also intimately connected to
logics of political competition and to judgements and evaluations of the
colonisers’ competences and aptitudes.
The attacks were frequently made on the manner in which the native
populations were administered d in the Portuguese colonies but were
also more ample, aimed at questioning the entire Portuguese colonial

structure. While during the first half of the nineteenth century this was
essentially a consequence of the Anglo-Portuguese diplomatic game, the
attacks on the administrative realities of the Portuguese colonial empire
in Africa and of the country’s involvement in slavery and the slave
trade came to be marked by a complex web of sources, which included
explorers and missionaries such as David Livingstone, and which were
intensified by the rivalry between Catholic and Protestant missionaries,
and the growth of local, national and transnational interests commit-
ted to resolving the many disputes that arose in the African continent
during the second half of the century. No longer confined to the strictly
official and diplomatic sphere, the debate over the Portuguese colonial
apparatus and the role it played in the persistence of the practice of
slavery was now running in many public and political arenas, involving
other historical actors operating in several geographic contexts.
The second half of the century, for example, was marked by the
consolidation of an organised and methodical challenge that had its
origins in the Anti-Slavery Society. During the 1850s and 1860s when
this association’s social and political influence had suffered a relative
decline, it revealed a clear interest in the persisting vestiges of the slave
trade. This was echoed in Livingstone’s findings, and was accompanied
by occasional reports in British newspapers, such as the Morning Herald
and The Times, denouncing the ‘venality of the Portuguese authorities’
in Mozambique and putting pressure on the British Government to
appoint a consul to the region to follow (critically and vigilantly) the
problem’s development.
In 1867, in association with the French Emancipation Committee
(Comité Français d’Émancipation) and the Spanish Abolitionist
Society (Sociedad Abolicionista Española), a representative from the
society travelled to Paris to take part in the Anti-Slavery Conference.
Taking place on 26–27 August and attracting delegates from the United
Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, Spain and the United States, this
conference represented the ideal opportunity to put pressure on sev-
eral world authorities. As a result of its meetings, letters were written
to a number of sovereigns including Emperor Pedro of Brazil, Queen
Isabel of Spain and Pope Pius IX. King Luís I of Portugal, who was
present at the meeting, was also confronted with a missive and with
a memorandum written by the representatives of the Anti-Slavery
Society and the French Emancipation Committee. The memorandum
was handed personally to the King, who agreed to receive a repre-
sentation from the societies in the Maraan Pavilion at the Tuileries
Palace on 28 July 1867. Here they would also be met by the Portuguese
ambassador to Paris (Viscount de Paiva) and the minister of foreign
affairs (Casal Ribeiro).
Mobilising the testimony of the ‘eminent philanthropic mission-
ary’ David Livingstone, the memorandum addressed the continuing
practices of slavery and of the slave trade in Mozambique and other
‘territories over which Portugal claims to exercise jurisdiction’, as well
as the resulting depopulation. The causes for this continuation were
attributed to two essential points: the ineffectiveness of the legislation
that supported the feeble reforms initiated, according to the representa-
tion, with the decree of April 1858; and the fact that Portuguese ports
remained closed to ‘legal’ and ‘legitimate trade’, which reinforced the
persistence of the slave trade (as noticeable on the East Coast as in the
trade in ‘freedmen’ from Luanda to S. Tomé and Príncipe) and which
compromised simultaneously the colonial administration. The repre-
sentatives of the French committee corroborated this line of argument.
To both groups, King Luís responded that many efforts had been made
to resolve the situation. Casal Ribeiro referred to the legislative meas-
ures as evidence. On 5 December 1867, after this meeting, the Anti-
Slavery Society, the French Emancipation Committee and the Spanish
Abolitionist Society wrote a letter to the King in which they stated that
the Portuguese possessions in Africa were ‘scenes of the most frighten-
ing trade in slaves’, which consequently implied the impossibility of
‘civilising’ the native populations.35
One decade later, the critical assessments from non-official spheres
such as philanthropic groups, humanitarian societies and missionary
circles, began to multiply, largely as a result of the growth of available
information sources. The extensive official correspondence between the
Portuguese and British Governments, which was partially published
in the Blue Books – correspondence which was generated by consu-
lar dispatches, local authority reports, and the sparse and repetitive,
but nonetheless important, published testimonies of people such as
Livingstone – was joined in the 1870s by contributions from such
people as the British naval captain G. L. Sullivan, who was involved in
preventing the slave trade in Zanzibar, Lieutenants Edward D. Young
and V. Lovett Cameron, the Reverend Henry Rowley and the mining
engineer Joachim John Monteiro. As we noted above, the changes to
the geopolitical and georeligious chessboards (without forgetting their
interrelations) focused on the African continent were determinant in
the increase and diversification of the critical focus over political, eco-
nomic and social processes in the colonial context.
Events as the 1876 Brussels Conference, and processes such as the

growth in the number of Catholic and Protestant missionary institutes
of several nationalities in the Congo and Nyassa, and the increase in
interimperial and intercolonial rivalries in Africa triggered an increase
in the number of reports, testimonies, memoranda and petitions relat-
ing to particular aspects of the colonial process in which those related
to the articulation of politico-territorial and humanitarian questions
clearly dominated. Therefore, it is not strange that the humanitarian
and philanthropic interest, which was highly critical of Portuguese
colonialism and was largely concentrated upon Mozambique between
1850 and 1860, had now spread to include Angola and its undefined
borders (both in the north and in the interior), which was a focus for
territorial disputes as much from the political as from the economic
and religious point of view. The case of the Congo emerges here as a
case study, and as a clear demonstration, of this assertion. The active
involvement of the Anti-Slavery Society and of the Baptist Missionary
Society in opposing the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1884, which was
full of denunciations of the participation, whether voluntary or invol-
untary, of the Portuguese colonial administration in the odioso comércio
(heinous trade) or in the inhuman (ab)use of native labour, represents
an unquestionable example.36
In September 1876, the Anti-Slavery Reporterr published a series of
articles denouncing the Portuguese colonial administration’s inabil-
ity or unwillingness to tackle the recruitment processes and use of
native labour. The following year, Lovett Cameron, a lieutenant in the
British Royal Navy who had been appointed by the Royal Geographic
Society to lead the Livingstone East Coast Expedition, was forceful in
his repetition of the accusations of slavery at a conference at the Paris
Geographical Society and said the same in dispatches to Lord Derby.
His Across Africa, which was a tool for planning and decision making
for Baptist missionary strategy in the Congo, and also very useful for
Leopold II’s diplomatic and public strategy, reinforced the fact. One
interesting aspect of this testimony is that, during the expedition,
Cameron signed several treaties with many native chiefs in the Congo,
and even declared, on 28 December, the Congo basin as a British protec-
torate, while repeating Livingstone’s accusations, albeit in more crude
terms. At the same time, Edward D. Young extended them to include
Portuguese East Africa.37
Both cases gave rise to a series of debates in the Chamber of Deputies
on 15–17 February 1877, which produced a statement from João
Andrade Corvo, the then minister of foreign affairs and minister of navy
and overseas. His refutation was based on the affirmation of the precoc-
ity of Portuguese legislation in relation to the moral and social status of
the natives before the application of British laws: ‘When in Great Britain
they begin studying the possibility of this fact [whether the “negro”
could be considered free when disembarking in the United Kingdom],
much time has already passed since Portugal approved such a law’. He
was, of course, talking about the 1761 law that granted freedom to all
slaves entering Portugal. The abolitionist myth reigned again, essentially
revived through the arguments of such figures as the Duke of Palmela,
Alexandre de Morais Sarmento and Sá de Bandeira, and promoting a
discourse that reproduced much of the Portuguese argument that had
recently challenged the opinions of Livingstone. This operation occurred
in a context which was marked once more by a diplomatic process that
sought to overcome the obstacles raised by Great Britain to Portugal’s
‘historic rights’ to the north of Ambriz, between the 5th, 12th and 8th
parallels in the southern latitude, via the promotion of a reformist colo-
nial. The on-going programme – which was based around the abolition
of slavery, in investment in public works, in the liberation of trade policy
and in defence of the principles of free trade – was considered as fun-
damental by Andrade Corvo, who intended to abandon the Portuguese
colonial tradition that was dependent on policies of exclusivist protec-
tionism and on the monopoly of trade. This was, in his carefully chosen
words, ‘anti-civilising’. It was also useful for the initiation and consolida-
tion of a plan for a diplomatic agreement with the United Kingdom.38
A new focus for contention was centred on the export of labour from
Angola to S. Thomé, which was intimately linked to the negotiations
initiated by Robert Morier, British ambassador to Lisbon, and Andrade
Corvo. In one of the dispatches at the root of these negotiations, which
was sent to Morier in December 1876, the foreign affairs minister
declared that the ‘last vestiges of forced labour’ had disappeared from
the Portuguese colonies. The islands of S. Thomé and Príncipe, which
we will discuss in greater detail below, deserved a special mention. Once
more, the recently introduced legal framework (which included the
‘memorable liberating law’ of 29 April 1875 at its head) was absolute
proof and, moreover, exemplified the strength of Portuguese colonial
reform. The complaints made by the British consul in Luanda, David
Hopkins, in relation to the terms of recruitment were contradicted by
the letter of the law. For its part, the Foreign Office also discounted
similar witnesses, probably in recognition of the primacy of the need to
move labour from one colonial territory to another (as was the case with
the annual export of 3,000 workers from Mozambique to Natal). The
interests of the two European states and of the colonial administrations

trumped official and non-official statements that, while not clearly
declaring the persistence of the heinous trade, still called attention to
the new and covert forms of forced labour, the effectiveness of which
lay precisely in the legal cover that supported them and their weakness
which could hardly be proved. It is important to appreciate that the
economic competition in the colonial milieu was increasingly fierce
and that the demand for labour affected all colonial powers, demanding
new strategies for recruitment in a context of progressive abandonment
of the old labour system.39
Above all, the rescue of slaves was defended as a ‘humanitarian act’,
given that they were captured in areas that were not contained in
Portugal’s politico-administrative sphere or in regions such as Liberia,
which allowed Portugal to rebut any accusations that it was the official
sponsor of the system. The uncertainty of and practical limitations of
colonial sovereignty proved to be particularly useful. The 1875 ‘labour
crisis’ in S. Thomé, which was the almost immediate consequence of
the local application of the decree published that April, could not be
allowed to upset the process of repositioning S. Thomé and Príncipe
within the empire, of its socio-economic restructuring and ‘recolonisa-
tion’, or the economy of the islands, which gained an important weight
within the empire. In any event, the 1875 legislation opened the way
for the regularisation and legitimacy of the importation of Angolan
labour. The ‘contract system’ of the process of recruitment, importation
and exploitation of Angolan labour not only solved a serious problem;
it also functioned as a powerful diplomatic and political tool. However,
the principles of moralisation and of modernisation inscribed in the
dispositions of the reformist legal codes, such as obligatory payment,
soon revealed themselves to be far too weak when faced with the nature
of the spatial, social, political and economic organisation of the ‘mael-
strom’ of Angolan labour.40
Generally speaking, except for the case of Mozambican workers’ emi-
gration to the French colonies of Mayotte and Nosy-be (1881), which
resulted in a renewal of requests for explanations from the Foreign
Office (which was particularly interested in the French involvement)
or the case of the revitalisation of the trade in Nyassa, which mobilised
the forces of the Protestant missionaries in the area, it was around the
question of the Congo that the humanitarian accusations were revived,
coming not from the Foreign Office, but from humanitarian, mission-
ary and economic groups interested in conditioning the progress of the
European relations in the region.
Unlike the labour situation in S. Thomé, that of the Congo was

involved in a complex politico-diplomatic framework. The first case was
used to the extent it served the twin purpose of working as an introduc-
tion to an assessment of the colonial realities in Angola and to permit
the introduction of the question of the persistence of the ‘anti-civilis-
ing’ and anti-modernising practices of Portuguese colonialism. Both
these aspects were extremely useful to the several sectors that opposed
the Anglo-Portuguese accord mentioned above. For example, in April
1883, on the occasion of a debate in the British House of Commons,
the critics of the agreement assumed as the focus of their opposition the
more than doubtful Portuguese activity in pursuit of their proclaimed
abolitionism. It was not the terms of the arrangement that concerned
them; above all it was a matter of principle, which was widely covered
in the press. From the political point of view and that of public opinion,
the combined strength of the chambers of commerce, the philanthropic
groups and the missionary societies was great.
One year later, a memorandum presented by the association to the
Foreign Office declared that its observations of the process of labour
recruitment in Angola for S. Thomé revealed ‘unquestionable proof’
that in reality very little had changed or was about to change in the
way in which the practice of slavery or analogous practices to it were
allowed, if not encouraged, within the Portuguese empire. To accept
Portuguese claims in relation to the Congo would be to positively sanc-
tion these facts, as well as to inflict serious damage on commercial and
religious freedom there.41
In 1884, the Anti-Slavery Reporterr published a number of documents
that pointed towards the continuation of slavery in the Portuguese col-
onies, and denounced the complacency of its authorities. These docu-
ments, which were based partially on the work of D. R. W. Bourke (the
Count of Mayo), De Rebus Africanis (1883), which sought precisely to
challenge Portuguese territorial demands in the Congo, were destined
to form a memorandum that was sent to Lord Granville at the Foreign
Office in reply to his request for more solid information that could sup-
port previously issued declarations. This memorandum was considered
to be a repository of irrefutable hard evidence of the manner in which,
following the abolition of slavery, the Portuguese authorities had devel-
oped a model for recruiting labour that, despite its careful legal formula-
tion, simply camouflaged the continuation of slavery. Works vigorously
devised against the on-going negotiations – the central goal of both
Bourke’s book and of the memorandum –included the case of S. Thomé
which, while not being fully assessed per se, was used to strengthen the
criticisms of the Portuguese colonial enterprise (in its administrative

and ‘civilising’ aspects) and to question the cosmetic operation put in
place with the incessant production of colonial legislation. The same
thing happened with the Baptist Missionary Society’s interventions,
which were ever more frequent and strongly linked to Leopold II’s
global strategy, particularly those produced by William Holman Bentley,
a prominent missionary in the Congo.42
In reply to these assessments, dated 31 June 1884, J. A. Corte Real,
former general-secretary of the government of Macau and Timor and a
member of the Lisbon Geographic Society, signed a short text denounc-
ing the ‘intentional insidiousness or malevolent ignorance’ that domi-
nated the exertions of the Anti-Slavery Society in association with the
British government, and which, following a path that had been ‘ably’
followed in previous decades, would be readily accepted by the latter as
providing legitimacy to its constant interference in Portugal’s colonial
affairs. Mayo’s arguments contained in the memorandum and which
owe much to the testimony of Joachim Monteiro were undermined to
the extent they were assessed as being the product of specific commer-
cial interests and economic interests (opposition to the protectionist
fiscal framework implemented in Angola) associated with the political
development of the Congo question. The proof of this was that one
of the documents cited in the Anti-Slavery Society’s campaign had
been rewritten by a ‘Congo businessman’. This anonymous contribu-
tion assumed a special importance in the association’s position which
stated that while slavery did not exist de jure, it certainly existed de
facto, under the disguise of free contracts. Unsurprisingly, Corte Real
rejected this interpretation. As was the case with ‘Chinese’ emigration
to and from British colonies, the circulation of native labour between
Portuguese colonies, with special reference to the case of the serviçais,
was ‘very legal’. The legal edifice applied in the first case, referred to
and used rhetorically, was practically indistinguishable from that cre-
ated by the Portuguese. For example, the dispositions of the regulation
governing the contracting of servants in the Portuguese colonies, which
was approved in the decree of 21 November 1878, was in all respects
similar to the 1871 Indian Act. Moreover, said Corte Real, the former
governor of S. Thomé (1880–1881), Vicente de Melo e Almada (the
second Viscount of Pindela) had clearly demonstrated the justness and
efficiency of the system created by the Portuguese.43
As noted above, the abandonment of the 1884 treaty and the
politico-diplomatic process that led to the Berlin Conference were con-
ditioned, albeit marginally, by the activities of the philanthropic and
humanitarian associations and by the missionary societies. In the case

of the former, they did not stop proclaiming the importance of the role
they played during the negotiations: a signed treaty that was never rati-
fied. The sometimes dubious links between humanitarian and religious
interests and economic and political interests were particularly effective
in the United Kingdom, and gave the former remarkable public notori-
ety, both in the metropole and internationally. The Portuguese colonies
were, and as we shall see, continued to be one of the prime objects
in their strategies for consolidation and for the continuation of their
activities. Despite their dissatisfaction with the political outcome of the
Berlin Conference (Portugal retained many of the territories it desired),
these sectors largely welcomed the general results of the meeting, par-
ticularly in respect of the already approached General Actt and its terms.
Devoting their attention to the humanitarian question and religious
and commercial freedom in Congo, despite the above mentioned limi-
tations, the vigilantes of the empire sought to reinforce these aspects in
Brussels and shifted their attention to those territories where they were
more prominent. The Anglo-Portuguese disputes in East Africa, which
again involved commercial and missionary interests, and which gener-
ated a new coalition of their respective representatives (for instance
between Scottish missions and the African Lakes Company), came to be
the focus, par excellence, for their activities.44
The international impact of the preparation for and realisation of
the Brussels Conference amplified, domestically and internationally,
their efforts, in some respects camouflaging the eminently territorial
and commercial aspects of their crusade against Portuguese interests. As
we saw, this emphasis on the civilising dimension, which was strongly
anchored in the legal codification that supposedly demonstrated its
existence in Augusto Castilho’s memorandum, was not innocent.
This emphasis allowed the rebuttal of accusations of the Portuguese
authorities’ involvement in slavery or analogous practices. It also
demonstrated, with particular help from the ‘List of Official Stations’,
the politico-administrative modernisation of Portuguese colonialism,
which allowed the country to embrace the then fashionable ‘civilising’
and the doctrine of ‘effective occupation’ that was established after the
Berlin Conference. During the final decade of the nineteenth century
and the first decade of the twentieth, the basis and effects of this argu-
ment were once again thoroughly questioned. As we shall see, they were
also widely invoked by the Portuguese authorities.
2
The ‘Civilisation Guild’ and the
‘Engineers of Depression’: The Case
of S. Thomé Cocoa
Justificatory memoranda and ‘humanitarian’

acts: civilising through work
A justificatory memorandum from 1906 about the model of native

labour employed in the Portuguese colonies – which was designed to
respond to the ‘propaganda, lately renewed with insistence’ that was
being levelled at the working conditions, particularly in S. Thomé
and Príncipe – emphasised the enduring attention the Portuguese
authorities devoted to their colonial possessions. The ‘principles of the
humanitarian and civilising tutelage’ that governed the actions of the
Portuguese colonial administration could be confirmed in the intense
torrent of legal acts that provided the framework for Portugal’s presence
in the colonies for half a century.1
In relation to native labour policy, with S. Thomé and Príncipe as a
privileged testament, this official document praised the liberalism of
the legislation and highlighted, by invoking such foreign figures as the
French explorer Auguste Chevalier, its ‘model system of labour’ sup-
ported by an extremely effective policy of medical and social assistance
which surrounded ‘natives with facilities and comforts from food to
hospitals, that are beyond those enjoyed by the working populations in
the civilised world’. This allusion to the ‘welfare state’ that characterised
the daily life of the ‘labourers in the fields and the workers in the cities’
was frequent in the official arguments that praised the general condi-
tions under which native labourers worked.2
In addition to this, the Portuguese government had the opportunity
to ‘favour, in perfect agreement with the ideas and in solidarity with a
humanitarian and civilising conviction’, the flow of native workers emi-
grating to the colonial territories of other powers, such as the British and
38
The ‘Civilisation Guild’ and the ‘Engineers of Depression’ 39
the French. This fact was used, as it had been in the past, as a guarantor
of the humanitarianism of the Portuguese legal framework in respect
of native labour and the efficacy of its supervisory dispositions, while,
at the same time, involving other colonial powers in the process. The
Portuguese were no exception. The supply of indigenous labour from
the Portuguese colonies to the Island of Réunion (Luso-French agree-
ment of 1887) and to the Transvaal mines (intercolonial agreement of
1901) were to be considered as the undeniable truth that ‘the contract
of native labour in the Portuguese colonies, [could not be] considered
either destructive of the negro’s freedom, nor contrary to the principles
proclaimed in the name of humanity and of civilisation’. After all, other
colonial powers signed these agreements and its terms … .3
Portuguese legislation was in full conformity with the intention to
educate the natives in the virtues of work, which would provide them
with a ‘better life’; and this without compromising their ‘complete
freedom’ to choose the means by which they could comply with this
‘moral and legal obligation’. These were the terms of the decree pub-
lished on 26 November 1899 by the minister of the colonies, Eduardo
Vilaça, which had António Enes as the main inspiration and resurrected
the terms of the debates that had taken place during the 1860s in rela-
tion to the regularisation of native labour and which chose indigenous
labour, compulsory or not, as the basis of the colonial project. Despite
the humanitarian rhetoric, actually, the provisions of this regulation
legitimated the development of a system of trading native labour that
led inexorably to the native working in terms that were defined by the
economic interests associated with the Portuguese colonial administra-
tion. It facilitated the use of the legal provisions on mandatory and
compulsory work by private parts, upon payment of a set amount to
the Curator, which also allowed the application of correctional labour
which was applied as a punishment to those who refused to comply
with the legal obligation to work, establishing conditions of physical
punishment. The exception provided in the law referred to natives
with sufficient capital to subsist alone, those already with a paid
profession and those producing goods for export. It also showed a dif-
ferentiation regarding gender (exclusion of women, who were exempt
in order not to interfere with the production of future labourers), age
(people over the age of 60 and under the age of 14 were exempt) and
health (the sick and disabled). Years before, in the ‘touchstone of all
studies of the modern Portuguese colonial administration’, as Marcelo
Caetano wrote about his report Moçambique, Enes had declared that
once the system of slavery had been abolished ‘the economic interests
would recommend the legislator to make all due diligence to profit and
conserve the working habits that it [slavery] imposes on the negroes’.
Against the legislation that represented ‘a type of declaration of negro
rights’, Enes denounced the instructions that forced the tribunals and
administrations to protect ‘the sacred right of idleness granted to the
Africans’. For him, ‘only through work’ could the latter ‘enter into
civilised society’.4
The recruitment of labour was to be supported by legally instituted
mechanisms that ensured the stability of native labour, enabled
the observance of its intentions and made its colonial investments
viable. That is, the colonial administration should minimise and
attenuate the level of risk involved in private colonial enterprises,
whether it be the shortage of manpower or the instability of their
services. One of the methods proposed by Enes, which was embodied
in the 1899 decree, was to please the native chiefs with the form of
payment and inducements to serve and to continue serving as assis-
tants in the requisition of workers. Cooperation could be manifold.
These inducements stemmed from the Cofre do Trabalho (Labour
Fund), which contained monies resulting from the emoluments paid
by those seeking labour and from the fines levied on those who
breached the regulations.
The legal ability to physically punish workers who transgressed the
terms of their contract was a crucial aspect of the 1899 regulation. In
his analysis of the problem of native labour in the Portuguese colo-
nies, Gomes dos Santos noted that, despite being legally prohibited,
Portuguese settlers presented the natives with ‘excessive punishments’,
to the extent that they viewed the natives as ‘animals of burden […] a
mere agricultural machine without rights or privileges’. It was a ‘question
of custom and not a problem of legislation’ that could only be resolved
following the long process of mechanisation of the colonial economy.5
Sampayo e Mello, author of an important study of política indígena
(native policy), later confirmed that despite not seeking to ‘repeal the
practice of moderate corporal punishments’, which he believed were
‘necessary and consistent with the moral level of African natives’, that
this should only be effected by the Curators and by the administrative
authorities. This ability to apply ‘moderate punishment’ (Article 19.5)
facilitated the widespread use of horsewhips in the Portuguese colonies.
Corporal punishment, independently of the degree of moderation that
characterised it, was only abolished from the native labour legislation
with the publication of the regulation of 27 May 1911, although the
same was not the case with the application of corrective punishments.
Another provision that enabled the emergence of abuses lay in the

fact that natives, in the case of contractual infraction, were not only
subject to a set legal penalty (of correctional labour of 15 to 90 days),
but were also obliged to return to work for the same employer. Since
the cost of paying a native who returned to work after a breach of
contract was, by law, reduced by two-thirds, this meant it was economi-
cally attractive to the employers for natives to breach their contract.
If we consider that the maximum duration of contracts allowed at the
time was five years, then it is possible to state that the legal architec-
ture for native labour contained in the 1899 decree established a set of
precedents that annulled the generally liberal philosophical principles
underlying the document. ‘Increasing our colonial wealth’ was, in the
end, the decisive criteria in native labour policy, being ‘inspired by the
practical necessities of helping companies in Africa, without which the
political occupation would not be effective’.6
Notwithstanding the terms of the 1899 regulation and the manner
in which it contained provisions that enabled practices that contra-
dicted the humanitarian language prevalent in Portuguese colonial
discourses (particularly those aimed at refuting foreign accusations),
the memória justificativa of 1906 confirmed that ‘the influence of the
institutions and the laws’ were not ‘a chimera’ and, to the extent that
the latter praised work as the cornerstone of the ‘civilising process’,
their role as driving forces of the modernised colonial enterprise could
not be doubted. This operation of reducing the process of ‘civilising’
the native population to an education through work constituted,
to many, the perfection of the humanitarian rhetoric, responding
simultaneously to the socio-economic conditions of the Portuguese
colonies and to the requirements of the colonial administration. The
Portuguese government’s plan, outlined in the memorandum, to cre-
ate professional vocational schools clearly demonstrated this point:
they were ‘practical schools for learning and preparing for redemp-
tive labour’, which was indispensable for providing the colonies with
‘disciplined and educated workers and assistants, taking advantage
of their natural aptitudes that routine sterilises’. As Enes wrote, ‘if
civilisation’ created the ‘spark’ of work it would create ‘a soul’. As
a consequence, the definition of an organisational model of native
labour, in which the matter of the circulation of labour assumed a
preponderant position given the positive signs in the economy of
S. Thomé, was, in itself and despite the contradictory nature of some
of its dispositions, a humanitarian and civilising act. This was the
rationale advocated.7
Some years before, at the 1st National Colonial Congress in 1901,

the Count of Penha Garcia declared that ‘in modern life education is
Archimedes’ lever, the employment of which can lead to the maximum
perfection of races and nationalities’, thereby justifying the need to
introduce the colonial topic into the curriculum of higher, secondary
and primary education, into agricultural and commercial training. The
principal goal was the spread of an education of ‘practical and current
nature’ that would provide ‘useful knowledge that is directly related
to the needs of our colonial growth’.8 However, this educational plan
had a potentially easily identifiable recipient: the emigrant, the settler.
As we shall see below, these desires were strongly associated with the
phenomenon of emigration to the African territories, implying the
envisaging of a programme of ‘preparatory education for settlers’, which
the state accepted as its obligation.9 What it could not do was produce
immediate tangible effects. The need for ‘legions of robust, disciplined
and cheap labourers’ would be met by other means, but was always
accompanied by the ‘great natural law’: the duty to work applied in the
process of civilising the native populations.10
As noted, the justificatory memorandum of 1906 sought to respond
to a series of insistent foreign accusations focusing on the native labour
model applied in the Portuguese colonies. Since 1900, the Anti-Slavery
Society had renewed its interest in the movement of labourers from
Angola to S. Thomé, once the eastern quarrel had more or less ended,
and chose it as the main subject for its Reporter. Once again, and as
the issue of November and December 1900 shows, Portugal’s colonial
administration was considered to be ineffective and corrupt, a descrip-
tion nuanced by the demonstration of qualities in the prosecution of
the slave trade, as exemplified by the case of S. Thomé. During the first
years of the twentieth century it was rare to find an issue of the Reporter
that did not find space for similar comments, frequently made by
local missionaries who played a crucial role in the illumination of the
problem of the continuing (compulsory) export of labour from Angola
to S. Thomé.
Principal among them were M. Z. Stober (the head of the small
Angola Evangelical Mission that since 1900 had kept in touch with
Travers Buxton, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society), Charles A. Swan
(member of the Plymouth Brethren missionary society who was sta-
tioned in Benguela in 1884 and in the Congo Free State after 1886)
and the Baptist George Grenfell (a veteran missionary who had been
in the Congo since 1878, and who was also one of the main sources of
information determining the public positions of the Baptist Missionary
Society). Despite the variable degrees of participation, the combination

of the efforts made by these humanitarian and missionary sectors had
a fairly considerable effect on the revival of interest in the question of
slavery and led, as we shall see, to the famous matter of the cocoa slave.
If we join these to the testimony of such figures as Roger Casement, at
that time British consul in the Congo Free State, H. R. Fox Bourne of
the Aborigines Protection Society and the contributions of the Belgian
and French anti-slavery societies, it is easy to understand the scope of
what we wrote above.11
In the same year in which appeared the justificatory memorandum,
Henry Nevinson, a member of the Anti-Slavery Society, published a
book titled A Modern Slavery, the result of research in West Africa in
1904–05 that had been planned after meetings with Fox Bourne and
Travers Buxton. This book identified and described the brutal manner
in which Angolan native labour was recruited and sent to the cocoa
plantations in S. Thomé and Príncipe. It summarised a series of articles
that had been published in Harper’s Monthly Magazine (which organised
and funded the journalistic research) between August 1905 and February
1906, and also articles from leading British newspapers such as The
Times, the Manchester Guardian and the African Mail. The result of this
research was clear: the distinction between the old slavery and the new
forms of contracted labour was merely one of formal definition. In addi-
tion to his observations, which were written in a dramatic tone that
added little to the catalogue of denunciations regarding the nature and
operation of the colonial administration and the methods of recruiting
and exploiting native labour in Angola and S. Thomé, Nevinson greatly
benefited from the collaboration he received from missionaries, mainly
Protestant, in Angola. Echoing Roger Casement, Nevinson described
in a terse phrase life in the plantations: ‘No change, no rest, no hope’.
Nevertheless, the legislation continued to grow.12
In fact, some years before, conscious of the growing economic impor-
tance of the development of agriculture on S. Thomé, and of the need
to resolve the labour and associated problems, the Portuguese authori-
ties established one more legal instrument: the law of 29 January 1903,
which we shall discuss in greater detail below. Its main objective was
to guarantee a stable flow of native labour from the other Portuguese
colonies to the island. As one would expect, this objective was accom-
panied by a suitable declaration of the supposed humanitarian basis of
a legal text that consolidated, for example, the principle of wages and
diminished the importance of the monetary benefits received by the
labour-recruiting agents. Accordingly, the British ambassador since 1902,
Martin Gosselin (British delegate to the Brussels Conference of 1889–90

and former assistant under-secretary of state for foreign affairs) was
informed that the law was intended as a response to the criticisms raised
precisely by the United Kingdom. Nevertheless, despite the promotion
of these orders, which were superficially reforming and could be used as
demonstrations of the humanitarian spirit that lay behind the articula-
tion of the law, the challenge to the general objectives of the law and its
planned application in Angola was immediate. The economic and labour
consequences, as well as the implications in terms of the colony’s image,
were analysed in pamphlets such as Ao Paizz and in such newspapers as
A Defeza de Angola. On 19 May 1904, this latter publication explained
how a system that benefited the few (the farmers of S. Thomé) to the
detriment of the many (Angolan natives and settlers) was unacceptable.
The main point was, however, another: the drain of Angola’s manpower
had to be stopped. The progress of the Angolan colony was at risk, an
assessment the British consul, Arthur Nightingale, confirmed.13
One year later, the Revista Portuguesa Colonial e Marítima published
a pamphlet responding to Nevinson’s diatribes, which it reduced to
mere economic interests masquerading as pseudo-humanitarianism.
Its rejection of the bankruptcy Nevinson foresaw for Angola, which
was simultaneously a cause and a symptom of the inequities of the
Portuguese colonial administration, was explained as being the result of
the competition of interest in respect of colonial produce. Through its
imposition of a tax on the aguardente produced in Angola, the Brussels
Conference had created the conditions for the colony’s economic crisis.
In addition to its interest in limiting Angolan competition in the spirits
trade, they were now seeking to undermine the cocoa trade in S. Thomé.
The matter of labour was irrelevant, only significant to the extent that
it hid many obscure reasons. This was the only intention justifying the
‘inaccuracies and falsehoods’ contained in Nevinson’s book, which also
repeated some of the cases referred to by Lovett Cameron years before.
His insistence in challenging the model of importing African manpower
from the Portuguese colonies was, according to the anonymous author
of this document, quite simply to hinder the production of cocoa and
to weaken its position within the colonial economy: ‘If they stop […]
this importation, the farms and the plantations will have to close and
national cocoa will disappear from the markets’. The British philanthro-
pists were described as ‘engineers of the depression’ that the competi-
tion in the cocoa market wish to see fall over S. Thomé and Príncipe.
Their humanitarianism was little more than an attempt to manipulate
the competition in trade.14
In addition to repeating the justificatory memorandum of 1906,

the pamphlet also contained several reports by foreign personalities,
such as the above-mentioned Auguste Chevalier, ‘distinguished French
naturalist’, who in 1905 wrote his report at the request of the governor
of French West Africa, the ‘German botanist’ Dr Strunk, Théo Masui
and Harry Johnston, former British consular agent in Mozambique.
While with the memorandum the goal was to recall the ‘trustworthi-
ness and rightness’ of the Portuguese government, traces of which
were recognised in ‘all of the political and colonial press’ as evidenced
by the extensive list of foreign journals and newspapers, in the case
of the four reports referred to, they took the view that the best way to
respond to the attacks from ‘Portugal’s detractors’ would be to publish
the unsuspicious, because external, impressions of several visitors to
the Portuguese colonies in the West of the African continent. The
invocation and manipulation of testimonies by foreigners were con-
solidated as a systematic resource in the public operations designed
to prove the domestic and international legitimacy of Portuguese
colonialism.15
The employment of a gallery of foreigners who defended the virtues
of Portuguese colonisation, with or without documentary evidence,
was equally a recurring strategy in undermining many of the sources
of accusations. This obstinacy not only revealed an obvious procedure
confirming the existence of contrary testimonies that, also being made
by foreigners, diminished the possibilities of internal appropriation by
the political opposition. The diversity of the summoned testimonies of
missionaries such as Harry Johnston, who had been the British consul
to Portuguese West Africa and vice-president of the Anti-Slavery Society,
and of naturalists such as Charles Gravier, professor at the Museum
National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, and the German prince Alfred
Löewenstein-Werthein Freudemberg, director of the cocoa plantations
in Cameroon, and by the English writer Mary Kingsley, author of West
African Studies, unveiled an extremely important aspect: the colonial
question – the experiences, practices and colonial discourses – was
a variable product of combinations of colonisation projects, secured
in the complex articulation of knowledge and of language, of proce-
dures and of techniques, methods and private interests that were not
exhausted within the national territories, but which rather had an inter-
national and colonial expression that involved transnational actors and
which largely transcended the mere reason of the states. In short, the
colonial question became an increasingly international and transna-
tional domain.
Reports, conferences and boycotts: the ‘slave

cocoa’ of S. Thomé
The case of the slave cocoa was an excellent example of this matter,
involving the Cadbury Brothers Ltd, the British humanitarian and
missionary sectors, the Foreign Office and the Portuguese political
authorities and commercial interests – both metropolitan and colonial
(in Angola and S. Thomé). The company, internationally renowned in
the cocoa and chocolate industries and a leading symbol of progressive
management (a paternalist style of management characterised by the
predominance of a profoundly Christian trade ethic and by innovative
labour policies), was always deeply involved in the imperial economy
where – not without ambiguities, as we shall see – it projected the
social reformism and philanthropy that dominated its domestic public
interventions. Deeply liberal and supported by a national newspaper,
The Daily News (which was owned by George Cadbury), the Cadbury
family had, since the last decade of the nineteenth century, strong
connections to the Anti-Slavery Society and embraced its causes. In
addition to its commercial interests in the empire, the company and
the family professed the humanitarianism in vogue at that time. These
two aspects, associated with their domestic political interests, often
saw them become involved in public disputes with the Conservative
Government of Arthur Balfour (1902–05) and its acolytes. Outlined
during the Boer War (1899–1902), this opposition involved other facets
of imperialism, particularly the matter of the importation of Chinese
‘Coolies’ to the Transvaal and the problem of the Congo Free State (and
the constitution in 1904 of the Congo Reform Association16), which the
Cadburys vehemently opposed. Therefore, it is not surprising that their
involvement in the cocoa trade – in which S. Thomé was indisputably
important as a centre of the international economy of the product that
was, as we have seen, also being scrutinised in relation to its retrograde
labour methods – was to become the object of instrumentalisation by
conservative forces (and respective official bodies) in British society; and
that similar accusations to the ones made by the Cadburys were turned
back against them.17
In fact, while George Cadbury was sponsoring the campaign against
British involvement in the matter of ‘Chinese slavery’ and William
Cadbury was generously financing the Congo Reform Association
and its secretary, E. D. Morel (and his family), both were projecting
a public image of vigilance and criticism of the colonial and imperial
modus operandi. They paid particular attention to the new methods of
exploiting labour, and were involved in the denunciation of the exist-

ence of similar problems in S. Thomé; subjects followed very closely by
the British press.18
The articles and book by Nevinson were widely distributed and placed
the Cadburys in a difficult position from which they wanted to escape
at all costs. To do so they employed a series of delaying tactics that
were intended to shift the humanitarian focus to the Congo Free State,
partially connected to that of S. Thomé, to the extent that the process
of recruiting native labour for the cocoa plantations also involved the
population of that state. William Cadbury had been aware since 1902 of
the problem of importing a labour force to S. Thomé, as the correspond-
ence he maintained with Harry H. Johnston and E. D. Morel shows. In
the same way that the Portuguese government declared fundamental
the conciliation of politico-economic aspects and the need to protect
them in the legal texts, the Cadburys also made efforts to conciliate
their commercial interests and humanitarian principles in metropolitan
and colonial situations.19
As we have seen, the humanitarian and missionary pressure in rela-
tion to S. Thomé got its second wind after the turn of the century. Along
with the situation in the Congo Free State, the question of S. Thomé
became one of the main chances to continue to gain broad public and
political recognition for the humanitarian and missionary circles. In
mid-1902, Travers Buxton introduced M. Z. Stober to William Cadbury
with the clear intention of involving him in a campaign he wanted to
launch against the state of affairs in the Portuguese colonies of Angola
and S. Thomé. The missionary recounted what he knew about the
process of recruiting labour for the island, but he could not convince
Cadbury to make an immediate decision. The same did not happen
with Fox Bourne of the Aborigines Protection Society, who quickly pre-
pared a memorandum for the Foreign Office in which he denounced
the clear violations of the terms of the General Act of Berlin by the
Portuguese authorities.
The growing public impact of the situation led Cadbury to visit Lisbon
during the spring of 1903 in order to ascertain the veracity of some of
the rumours reproaching the inequities of the model for recruiting
servants in Angola and transporting them to S. Thomé.20 His scheduled
set of meetings was arranged by Baron Carl de Merck, who had worked
with Cecil Rhodes and was now employed by the great Portuguese
banker Henri de Burnay, whose company traded in many colonial
products, from cotton to tobacco and cocoa. After some meetings with
General Rafael Gorjão, who was then minister of the navy and overseas
(after being governor-general of Mozambique), and the British diplo-

matic representative in Portugal, Martin Gosselin (who warned of the
implications any excessive measures might have on British interests in
Transvaal), Cadbury then met with some cocoa farmers: first the Count
of Vale Flôr, then Francisco Mantero, arguably the two most important
plantation owners. Rebutting the rumours Cadbury mentioned, the
farmers suggested he should visit S. Thomé and Príncipe. The cocoa
companies, Cadbury Brothers, J. S. Fry and Sons, Rowntree and Co. and
Stollwerck Brothers sponsored the preparation of a report confirming
the persistence of rumours emanating from the Aborigines Protection
Society and the Anti-Slavery Society. At the same time, Cadbury asked
these associations to soften their criticisms, a request supported by Sir
Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, in a concerted approach
undertaken in October 1906. The Liberal Government that was then
in power aimed to resolve the question of Transvaal labour quickly and
without fuss, and so repeated that the substitution of Chinese work-
ers with labour from the Portuguese colonies was the more appropri-
ate solution. The departure of Joseph Burtt, a personal friend of the
Cadburys, to Africa in June 1905, as the leader of the investigation into
the operation of the native labour system in the Portuguese colonies,
more specifically in Angola and S. Thomé, enabled the desires of the
Cadburys and of Grey to be partially achieved.21
The report resulting from the investigation into ‘the conditions of
coloured serviçais on the cocoa plantations or roças’ of S. Thomé was
written by Burtt and the medical doctor W. Claude Horton, who gave
his scientificc seal of approval in the final pages. It was organised around
three essential points. The first related to the survey’s methodology:
the stages and duration of the journey, the points of inquiry, the peo-
ple contacted and information sources. In an expedition of almost two
years, spent equally in S. Thomé, Angola and Mozambique, Burtt vis-
ited around 40 farms and followed the principal ‘slave routes’, which
led him and Horton (who visited Africa for only four months) from
Catumbela (close to the port of Lobito) to the Zambezi river, passing
through Bié, Bailundo and Mochico. Carrying a ‘letter of introduc-
tion from the cocoa companies’ and another from the plenipotentiary
British minister in Lisbon, Maurice de Bunsen, and with a number
of letters of introduction from landowners living in the capital, the
authors of this report made contact with the main figures of the
Portuguese colonial administration, including the colonial governors,
British diplomats, missionaries and merchants operating in the ter-
ritories visited.22
A large part of the report was dedicated to the characterisation of some

of the crucial aspects of the native labour system in use in the colony
of S. Thomé and Príncipe. Identifying the commercial and economic
importance cocoa had for the islands and the Portuguese colonial enter-
prise, Burtt noted that the fundamental aspects of the daily lives of the
labourers, from the nature of the work – which he considered ‘neither
difficult nor heavy’ – to its duration – nine hours each day and five on
Sundays. As for the food, housing and sanitation supplied to the labour-
ers, Burtt’s report highlighted the variety and sufficiency of the former,
noted a clear improvement in the labourers’ habitation, and recognised
the ‘progressive tendency towards improvement and comfort’. As for
the system of punishment in use in the colony, the report emphasises
the wide use of corporal punishment meted out with a ‘paddle’ or with
a ‘rubber belt’, while in certain circumstances there was recourse to a
‘leather strap called a chicote [whip]’. The report added: ‘What value do
laws and decrees have before the chicote?’ Finally, Burtt provided details
of the native labour recruitment process, describing its compulsory
and violent nature, particularly in Angola, since in Mozambique he
saw ‘the natives eagerly offer themselves to go to work in the mines
of the Transvaal’. The conclusion left no doubts and pointed to the
inefficiency of the ‘system established by the decrees’: ‘the coloureds’
were ‘objects of commercial transactions, which, whether called com-
missions or sales, put large profits in the pockets of those who transact
them’. However, for reasons that are not explained, some months after
submitting his report, Burtt asked his sponsors to include an addendum,
in which he sought to negate the ‘not entirely fair impression given of
the plantation owners’. The symptomatic phrase used to describe this
system – ‘if this is not slavery, then I do not know any word in the
English language that can correctly describe it’ – was, at the very least,
mitigated by the requested alteration.23
The year 1907 was a decisive one for the development of the ques-
tion of slave cocoa. In March, the Foreign Office received a copy of Burtt
and Horton’s report. In July, the question was frequently debated in the
British parliament and was discussed by the British public and press.
As a result, both the Foreign Office and the Cadburys had to act. The
former claimed Burtt’s description revealed (and confirmed) a situation
that truly violated the humanitarian precepts that came out of both
Berlin and Brussels, and was much more serious than the one in the
Congo. Moreover, the solution of the Transvaal (potential) problem
seemed to be assured. The latter understood its delaying strategy had
to be urgently reviewed, beginning with the demand for a new source
of cocoa, which began in September. Fox Bourne and Buxton began to

despair at the attitude of the chocolatiers, and hardened their public
approach to their participation in, and benefiting from, the matter.
Consequently, an edited version of Burtt’s report was sent to Lisbon in
July. The announcement of yet another accusatory article by Nevinson
in the Fortnightly Review, the increasing involvement of the Liverpool
Chamber of Commerce, which at the end of September approved a
resolution calling for a boycott of S. Thomé cocoa, and an article enti-
tled ‘Slave grown cocoa, responsibility of the Quaker manufacturers’
in the Daily Graphicc on 3 October, which the chocolate manufacturers
threatened with a quite effective legal action, were decisive factors in
Cadbury’s change of stance and strategy, beginning with the attempt
to discredit, always with the valuable assistance of Morel’s, Stober’s and
Nevinson’s testimonies in relation to their involvement. The Foreign
Office was soon held responsible for the restraint and delay in the adop-
tion of a critical position by the Bournville businessmen. The visit to
Lisbon to meet representatives of the Colonial Centre was the last of
the set of measures.24
Burtt’s report was heard during a non-stop eight-hour conference in
the main auditorium of Lisbon’s Colonial Centre on 28 November 1907,
which brought Burtt and Cadbury, who had requested the conference,
together with the S. Thomé landowners, with the intention of evaluat-
ing the ‘agricultural problem’ in S. Thomé and Príncipe colony.25 The
commission of roceiros enumerated a series of omissions and errors in
Burtt’s report. Their challenges were organised according to each of
the colonies. For S. Thomé, which was the subject of Burtt’s report, the
commission centred on the repudiation of the charges against corporal
punishment, claiming that the ‘respect’ the labourers had for the farm
administrators was a consequence of the proprietors’ ‘moral authority’,
based on the ‘good treatment’ of their workers. The flight of workers
was explained as being related to ‘causes connected with superstition’.
The image of an idyllic life enjoyed by labourers was supported by
further observations concerning: the teaching of the arts and crafts
and of agricultural life, the stimulus to encourage natives to convert to
Christianity and eschew the ‘vice of alcohol’, the need to end polygamy,
and the establishment of families under the auspices of the ‘solemn
acts of Catholic Christianity’. These civilising efforts added to a flawless
policy of receiving and accommodating imported labourers, both of
which aspects were justified by the small flow of repatriates.26
The comments were less exuberant in relation to Angola and
Mozambique. In the case of the former, the cases of the mistreatment
of natives, or of the violation of their freedoms mentioned in Burtt’s

report, occurred in regions where no ‘permanent government or police
authority existed’. This therefore exonerated the government and the
colonial administration from the accusation of sponsoring or permitting
the clandestine trade Burtt claimed existed there. As for Mozambique,
the S. Thomé plantation owners’ commission focused its criticisms on
the ‘ultra-optimistic’ reports Burtt wrote in relation to the Mozambican
emigrants to Transvaal. The commission’s accusing finger noted the
very same aspect: the low levels of repatriation of workers from the
mines of Transvaal to Mozambique. The farmers from S. Thomé warned
that they would have to resort to Mozambican labour in order to over-
come the irregularity of the flow of labourers from Angola.27
In the telegraphed conclusions of this conference it was written
that the ‘human and liberal sentiments’ that characterised Burtt’s and
Cadbury’s concerns were shared by the commission of farmers, in the
same way that both claimed repatriation was a fundamental aspect of
native labour policy. For the farmers, the implementation of a repatria-
tion process would permit those so repatriated to take ‘the good news
about their treatment on the islands’ back to their native land. It also
stated that each repatriated labourer was to receive £20 when he dis-
embarked in Angola and that, should he wish to renew his contract, he
would receive a 10 per cent increase in pay. As for the regularisation of
the legal compliance on the recruitment of manpower in Angola, the
effectiveness of the intentions depended on the increased ‘vigilance’ of
the Portuguese colonial administration in its hinterlands.28
On 10 December that year, Cadbury received the conference report
and noted the positive nature of the measures the commission included
in a memorandum they sent to the minister of the navy and over-
seas territories, to the point of promising its ‘public exposure in the
British press’ which would certainly honour the actions taken by the
Portuguese government. On 21 January 1908, Cadbury extended his
gratitude to the commission for its ‘continued interest’ in relation to
the matter of the repatriation of labourers in S. Thomé; however, this
did not stop him from seeking clarifications and from restating his
threats to suspend the privileged trade relations he maintained with
the cocoa producers of S. Thomé. In fact, on returning home, Cadbury
ordered the publication of a press release in which he threatened, for
the first time, to follow the path marked out by the businessmen and
traders of Liverpool in the event of Portugal and its colonial adminis-
tration not solving the problems identified by many: to boycott cocoa
from S. Thomé. By communicating this decision to the Portuguese
authorities and to the farmers, Cadbury was informed that the matter
of labour was to be the object of new reformist measures. Domestic
pressure on the Cadburys, increased by political turbulence in Portugal
after the regicide of 1 February 1908, combined with promises of a new
legal framework, served to calm the quarrel over slave cocoa – although
not for long.29
In 1907, William Cadbury stated his ‘conscience does not allow us
to continue purchasing the prime materials for our industry, if we can-
not be certain that in the future it will be produced using a system of
free labour’.30 At the beginning of 1908 an alternative to S. Thomé was
found: the British colony of the Gold Coast (on the Gulf of Guinea).
In July 1908, Cadbury sent a letter to Francisco Mantero in which he
noted that the ‘British public’ were ‘agitated about the descriptions
flooding the British newspapers regarding the condition of native
labourers in the Portuguese colonies. He added that they could, from
one moment to the next, ‘refuse to purchase chocolate manufactured
with cocoa harvested’ in S. Thomé and Príncipe. The Agricultural
Commission replied, saying that their concerns in resolving the matter
were not confined to the prospect of losing the British market (‘if this
market is lost we will find others’), but rather with how ‘to remove the
last pretexts of plausibility from the British campaign to discredit’ the
Portuguese. In September, after a year waiting for the changes prom-
ised by the Portuguese governing bodies, Cadbury, with Burtt and,
secretly, the missionary Charles A. Swan (who went on to publish The
Slavery of Todayy [1909]) travelled to S. Thomé and Angola in the name
of the cocoa industries, to evaluate the process of contracting and
re-contracting native labour. Among other concerns, the related legal
processes, namely those at the courts in Angola, were to be inspected.
On 26 September, the Evening Standard, the Conservative competitor of
the Daily News, accused the Cadbury brothers of actively participating
in profits from the exploitation of labour that was based on the slavery
practised in Portuguese West Africa. Unlike the earlier example of the
Daily Graphic, the Evening Standard d did not back down before the pres-
sures exerted by the Cadburys.31
On 17 March 1909, the Cadbury brothers led a boycott of cocoa
imported from the same Portuguese colony, justifying it as a formal
protest against the working conditions offered to the labourers from
their recruitment to their remuneration. They were joined the follow-
ing day by Stollwerck and Brothers, chocolate manufacturers originally
from Germany. The collapse in the price of cocoa on the international
markets certainly helped with this decision, along with the discovery of
a relatively secure alternative source of the raw material and the begin-
ning of a painful lawsuit. Following his visit to S. Thomé and Príncipe
in 1908, Cadbury summarised the main ‘defects’ of the manpower
recruitment system in the following terms. First, he noted the official
bodies’ avoidance of responsibility when confronted with abuses com-
mitted by the recruiting agents, particularly in the interior of Angola.
Second, he claimed the wording of the legislation that framed the
contractual process excluded, in practice, ‘native freedom’. Third, he
referred to the ‘excessive mortality on the islands’, which in his opin-
ion was not the result of poor food and abusive ‘treatment’, but rather
of a whole range of ‘causes’ that included the method of recruitment,
the five-year duration of the contract, the ‘excessive working hours,
62 per week, including work on Sundays’, and finally, the ‘unhealthy
accommodation’ in the workers’ villages. Anaemia and dysentery were
usually given as the medical reasons for the high mortality rate in S.
Thomé and Príncipe. The fourth defect was the ineffectiveness of the
‘repatriation laws’, stressing that the curators themselves shared in the
‘injustice’ of this process. It was in relation to these points that Cadbury
advocated greater government intervention and vigilance, based on the
mobilisation of ‘disinterested official bodies’ that could prevent the
chain of non-compliance with the laws that characterised the processes
of recruiting and repatriating native labour in the Portuguese colonies.
None of these assessments added much to the testimonies of Stober,
Nevinson or Burtt; but Cadbury only wrote them from 1908–09. In
April 1909, a report by Lieutenant-Captain Francisco Paula Cid, the
former governor of Benguela and of S. Thomé, who had been appointed
by the Portuguese government to make an in loco assessment of the
situation, called for serious reforms to the Portuguese labour policies
in the colonial situation (he proposed compulsory repatriation). On 29
July that year, Manuel da Terra Viana, the minister of the colonies, sus-
pended the recruitment of Angolan manpower. It was too late.32
The following year, in a document entitled O Cacau de S. Thomé:
Resposta ao relatorio da missão Cadbury, Burtt, e Swan nas provincias de
S. Thomé e Principe e de Angola em 1908, which was published anony-
mously, it was confirmed ‘for the first time in the world, for the boycott
of a commercial product to be proclaimed, not in the name of inter-
national resentments or through the threat of war, but in the name of
the illegitimate interests of industrialism disguised as philanthropy’.
Cadbury, it alleged, who ‘wanted to be the referee of the value of cocoa’
from S. Thomé and Príncipe, ‘regulating the quotas’ and, ultimately,
provoking an increase in the price of labour through strategies designed
to make its acquisition more difficult, had manipulated to his heart’s

content the Anti-Slavery Society, the Foreign Office and the Liverpool
Chamber of Commerce in order to achieve his pseudo-philanthropic
goals and to realise his ‘plan of mercantile speculation’. Cadbury was
the supreme engineer of the depression.33 Around ten years later the
boycott remained effective, but it was not seen to have caused any
financial damage. The losses caused by the successive waves of denun-
ciation, the palpable result of which resided in the boycott, were largely
remitted to the moral sphere. The campaigns to discredit the Portuguese
colonial administration (and the boycott) were taken as having roots in
the political game between the liberals (which included the chocolate
industrialists) and the unionists, who accused the former, at the time
in government, of ‘favouring coloured slavery by buying Portuguese
cocoa’.34 Beyond this argument, which was always accompanied by the
most admirable declarations of humanitarian abnegation, the constant
renewal of the legal codification of colonial affairs – particularly those
relating to native policy – continued to be the main weapon against
foreign accusations.
‘More laws than mosquitos’: preserving the

pearls of the empire35
The supposed conciliation of ‘native rights and duties’ with ‘the special
interests in manpower in the colonies’, contained in the terms of the
decree law published on 26 December 1902, did not bring an end to
the deviations to its terms or to the widespread mistrust towards its
effective motivations and consequences. The general regulation that
was published on 29 January 1903, which synthesised and clarified the
laws of 1899 and 1902, did not have the desired effect. Nevertheless,
it did consecrate the defence of the imperative need for manpower in
the colonies, especially in S. Thomé. As was stated in its preamble, the
regulatory structure sought to ensure S. Thomé was not deprived of the
manpower necessary for its agricultural development. Despite repeating
the intentions to alter the maximum duration of contracts from five
to three years, and to improve the level of pay and the general condi-
tions of movement and transport of labourers, the decree of 17 July
1909 – that had been promised by the minister of the colonies Ayres de
Ornellas to the representatives of the British chocolate manufacturers
and the British minister Francis Villiers – did not solve the problem of
repatriation: it did not make it obligatory, as the British Foreign Office,
chocolate manufacturers and philanthropists had demanded. Nor did
it remove suspicions concerning the model of contracting indigenous

labour, which included the ability to seek legal recourse to accusations
of vagabondage and the consequent transformation into a system of
forced labour. Promulgated shortly after the publication of the books
by Charles A. Swan and William Cadbury, the 1909 decree clearly fitted
in the tradition of deliberately delaying the resolution of politico-dip-
lomatic problems through the instrumental production of an abundant
legislation, characterised by elusively worded content.36
As we have seen, one of the aspects that most interested the critics
of the native labour system, and which exemplified the differences
between the stated intentions, the legal codification and the reality in
the colonial situation, was the repatriation problem. During the Lisbon
conference mentioned previously, the commission of farmers and land-
owners, led by Francisco Mantero, said the repatriation fund contained
around £100,000 (500,000 escudos), which was to be transferred to the
Bank of S. Thomé by 31 December, where it would be administered by
the Local Emigration Council.37 It established a set amount to be paid
to each repatriated native the moment they disembarked in Angola.
However, this sum resulted from a deduction made from the salary of
each serviçal, amounting to exactly half of their total salary. The legiti-
macy of this measure was supported by the argument that the natives
spent all of their salaries in the plantation stores.
Despite the Portuguese government having introduced rules govern-
ing the repatriation process through the regulations of 31 December
1908, which reorganised the services provided by the Labour and
Repatriation Fund, reviewed the parameters for rehiring and ended the
practice of company stores, the complaints that the rules were ineffec-
tive and were being ignored continued. At the end of 1907, William
Cadbury stated ‘the good laws’ that established repatriation were a
‘dead letter’. Despite the many promises and many laws, the situa-
tion had not yet changed.38 Mantero responded that, strictly speaking,
forced or obligatory repatriation was ‘a crime against individual free-
dom and against humanity’. He asked: ‘Why force the black man to
leave the land of freedom where he learned the saving value of work
and became a socially important unit?’ Membership of the ‘committee
of civilisation’ could not be put in jeopardy by the return to a ‘state of
pristine existence that is incompatible with progress and with the frater-
nity that our detractors so loudly proclaim’, he concluded.39
The most common complaint resulted from the fact there was a large
disparity between the number of workers contracted and the number
repatriated.40 In a letter dated 15 July 1912 and signed by John St Loe
Strachey, which was forwarded by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines

Protection Society to Edward Grey, John H. Harris and three other
activists of the association’s cause, it was noted that in 1911 there
were around 30,000 labourers ready for repatriation, but only 385 had
been released. To show that this was not new, it noted that ‘during the
past 25 years more than 60,000 men were shipped to the islands, and,
according to the declaration made by the British secretary of state to the
House of Commons on the third day of this month, only 800 had their
freedom restored to them’. This committee proposed the establishment
of an ‘international commission’ comprising representatives from the
British, Belgian and Portuguese governments, assisted by ‘individuals
with a knowledge of the native languages and nature of the hinterlands
of Angola, Congo and Rhodesia’.
This proposal was the result of the discovery that the contingent
of serviçais included individuals from the Belgian and British colonial
territories, the same happening in reverse, the emigration of Angolans
to Belgian Congo and of Mozambicans to Rhodesia. The circulation of
native manpower in the African colonial territories created a complex
and diverse market. With some exceptions, such as the movement of
Mozambicans to the Transvaal, the migratory currents were not stable
and were subject to the economic priorities of the several colonising
powers, while not depending absolutely on their will.41 The inclusion
of specialists who had knowledge of the interior of Angola, Congo and
Rhodesia, was connected to the need to study the best way to proceed
towards the integration of repatriated labourers, since the entire repa-
triation process was clearly failing. According to a letter of May 1911
from Drummond-Hay, the British consul in Luanda, to the Foreign
Office, whether as a result of defaulting on payments through the
repatriation funds or whether because after so many years’ absence from
their homes, and without any particularly attractive reason to (re)settle,
through possessing a parcel of land, the majority of repatriated labour-
ers began drinking.42
The persistence of independent criticisms of the conditions suffered
by native labourers in the Portuguese colonies – focused on the planta-
tion economy of S. Thomé, but associated as well with the modi operandi
of the entire colonial complex – demanded the renewal of official chal-
lenges. In 1910, the Portuguese government published another memória
justificativa concerning the native labour regime in the Portuguese colo-
nies, the informative and rhetorical content of which was very similar
to that published four years earlier. On the one hand, the abundance of
references to the Portuguese legislative framework, the authors of which
‘were often ahead of the modern evangelists on the demand to protect

the black race’, prevailed. On the other, it repeated the apologetic argu-
ments that had already been analysed in the work sent to the 1889–90
Brussels Conference.43
In 1911, through the regulations of 27 May, the legal architecture of
the native labour system was subjected to yet another cosmetic change
that did not lead to any significant reduction in the level of external
criticism. The recruitment of labour depended on receiving authorisa-
tion from the governors-general of the provinces, who had to assess the
recruiting agent’s morals by signing a copy of his criminal record. The
labour contracts were now individual, being the natives obliged to sign
by marking it with their fingerprint. Additionally, the new contracts
had to include details of the employers’ obligations. The main exam-
ples were the establishment of a minimum wage and the prohibition of
measures obliging the labourer to purchase goods from the company
stores. The inclusion of this clause showed that the disposition con-
tained in the 31 December 1908 regulations, which officially closed the
company stores, had had no effect. One of the dispositions contained
in this regulation, and one that was fiercely contested, concerned the
possibility of the requisition by private individuals of natives who
have been condemned to carry out correctional labour, but whom the
administration was unable or unwilling to employ. In this way, the pri-
vate interests had acquired the same rights as employers of compulsory
labour; that is, they were legally protected in the application of moder-
ate corrective measures. If, as we noted above, this regulation abolished
the ability to apply corporal punishment, it nevertheless reinforced the
right to apply punishment on the workers, under the label ‘compas-
sionate trusteeship’ by the employer. Article 18 established that it was
permitted by equating labourers with minors, in accordance with the
Civil Code. Evasions, addictions, disobedience, drunkenness and reluc-
tance to work all warranted the civilising paternalism of the employers,
private individuals and the Portuguese authorities.44
S. Thomé and Príncipe continued to be looked upon as a privileged
locus for the persistence of slave-like practices, although the gaze
also extended to other Portuguese colonies, particularly Angola and
Mozambique. The reformulation of the rules contained in the regula-
tions of 17 August 1880, elaborated by the Viscount of São Januário, the
main objective of which was to keep natives in S. Thomé (the duration
of contracts was not limited and the obligation to repatriate labourers
was not mentioned), had no effect. Nor were critics silenced by the crea-
tion in 1903, through the provincial regulation of 29 January emulating
the Angolan provincial decree of 16 July 1902, of a Central Labour and

Emigration Commission comprising farmers and men appointed by
the government (or by the divisional heads of the overseas territories’
directorates-general) from a local Labour and Emigration Council of
native workers in S. Thomé. The plans, regulations and oversight of the
processes of recruiting and repatriating contracted labour – from the
appointment of emigration agents, through determining the effective
requirements for labour and for its distribution among the plantation
owners, to the management of the repatriation funds – seemed unable
to overcome the informal practices and private interests (including
those of the official authorities) that governed the trade in native
labour in the interior of the Portuguese colonies. For example, the
workers retained the legal right to deposit two months’ salary at their
provenance to provide for their families; however, these sums could
be moved by the recruiting agents and used according to criteria they
found convenient, without having to formally justify their decision.
The curator had to sign for the movement of these funds, but he had
no power to either prevent or supervise them.45
Angola was the traditional reserve for native labour. The close link
was justified both by the geographical proximity and by the fact the
‘Angolan native, who in general has a remarkable aptitude for work’
can ‘easily adapt to the conditions, be interested in his work, improve
the land and be so content that he will not think about repatriation’.46
However, as we noted above, this did not prevent the decree of 29 July
1909 and the Royal edict of 22 November, which suspended ‘entirely
the recruitment of native Angolans for the province of S. Thomé and
Príncipe’ for a period of six months, to ensure – ‘under the active and
direct supervision of the authorities’ – the definition of the ‘itinerar-
ies of the natives’ journeys from the interior to the coast and their
treatment during this journey’.47 In addition to establishing the routes
that permitted greater oversight over and control of the processes of
recruiting, moving and repatriating groups of labourers, the decree also
ensured the labourers were watched from their recruitment until their
return. The need to propose improvements was an indictment of the
ineffectiveness of the previous regulations, since already in 1906 the
Portuguese government had issued instructions to the general govern-
ment of Angola to establish the ‘routes taken by the contractors’ and,
a year later, had ordered an investigation into the conditions through
which Angolan natives were recruited for S. Thomé. This investigation,
as we saw above, was carried out by Francisco Paula Cid in 1908. Cid’s
survey was to form the bases of the General Regulations of 17 July 1909
and the two documents discussed above, which were ratified by the
minister Manuel Terra Viana. In the report that preceded the publica-
tion of the documents, Terra Viana noted that this was justified not only
because it provided ‘greater assurances of oversight’, but also because it
‘protected Portugal’s prestige’, thereby preventing ‘complaints based on
humanitarian pretexts’.48
These regulations represented a clear example of the relationship
between the problem of native labour and the nature, scope and limita-
tions of the administrative apparatus in Portugal’s colonial territories.
Angola was divided into several recruitment territories, and it was only
within those in which the Portuguese administration had effective
jurisdiction that it was able to proceed to the engagement of native
labour. As a strategy for enhancing the infrastructural power of the
state, the formula of mobile interventionism was also seen to be useful in
order to reorganise the overall system of native labour.49 The regulations
contained an abundance of prohibitive mechanisms concerning some
of the aspects most often cited as unacceptable practices in relation to
the general principles of colonisation described at Berlin and Brussels.
A complex route for the movement of labour was organised, which
included medical and feeding stations, with a clear definition of the
competences and duties of the agents involved, creating the ‘great book
of the identity’ of the natives, based on their ancestry, their geographic
and administrative origins and their work.50 However, the cascade of
legislation and the succession of improvements constituted an obvious
symptom of the Portuguese administration’s supervisory weaknesses.51
As José Almada was later to write, ‘through prohibitions and pre-
cautions’ of the 17 July 1909 decree it was possible to measure ‘how
unsatisfactory the state of affairs were’ before its publication. It also
demonstrated that ‘the natives continue in perfect ignorance of their
rights’, which often results in them being automatically rehired.
Moreover, the labour contracts remain associated with property,
meaning the sale of the property implies the transferral of the labour
contracts attached to it. However, according to the same testimony,
the above-mentioned decree did not solve such matters as the pay-
ments to the repatriation funds. According to a report by Higino Durão
into the operation of the Repatriation Fund at the end of 1909, the
processing of sums destined to each labourer involved 36 individual
accounting operations, which multiplied by the 25,000 labourers came
to 900,000 operations.52
The prosperity in the islands of S. Thomé and Príncipe between the
end of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth
was largely the result of a private labour system that was based on
the exploitation of manpower imported from the other Portuguese
colonies. The system of coffee plantations and their economic and
commercial value in the colony were replaced by the vigorous produc-
tion of cocoa, after 1892. The islands became major cocoa producers
during the first decade of the twentieth century, and were not to be
affected by far-reaching changes to the means of recruiting the neces-
sary manpower. The cultivation of both coffee and cocoa were based
on a system of labour involving the importation of workers who were
undercontracted, at least according to the successive laws regulating
native labour. The economic protection of the pearls of empire in the
garden of Africa became an absolute and almost exclusive priority that
dominated Portuguese political and diplomatic logic associated with its
colonial sphere.
In fact, according to A. Miranda Guedes in an official report into six
months of the government and administration of S. Thomé between 29
November 1910 and 5 June 1911, not even the turbulence caused by the
proclamation of the republic affected its agricultural output. The aim
of the report was to seek to ‘put an end to the serious incidents’ taking
place on the islands and, at the same time, to ensure the ‘moralisation
of the services and administration of the province’. On finding, in his
words, ‘the debris of government’, Miranda Guedes stated it was abso-
lutely essential to instil respect for the law and its agents, particularly in
relation to the ‘intense and brilliantly productive labour in this thriv-
ing colony’. This did not mean that, from a strictly productive point of
view, the condition of agricultural labour was not operating in the ‘most
perfect normality, although they have initiated and persisted with repa-
triation, which until now was thought impossible without causing great
and perilous unrest among the Angolan labourers’. The potential prob-
lems were relegated to another level: ‘the great imbalance in agricultural
life, which is the colony’s driving force, between the leaders and the led.
A little less than 80 per cent of the population has to be managed in its
labour, disciplined in its activities, educated in its primitiveness by the
five per cent (or less, because we have to discount the administrators
and traders) that comprise the European population’.
The probable source of the colony’s social and political problems was
a result of its population structure and, above all, its ethnic and cul-
tural diversity. On the one hand there was a European population that
demanded ‘what is most advanced in trends and aspirations’; while on
the other there was the ‘native labouring mass’, governed by the most
‘backward education, that results in an absolute ignorance of even the
most elementary human obligations: to work’. The intermediate posi-

tion was occupied by the natives, ‘degraded by their ethnic conditions’
and suffering from the ‘imperfections of both of the groups amongst
which they live’. For Ernesto Vasconcelos, as for Count Sousa e Faro, the
danger rested with the native population, the ‘unprogressive natives’,
the ‘freed slaves, the Tongas and the lazy’. Their persistent reluctance to
work, the ‘corrupting’ and ‘bad example’ of the natives (with the excep-
tion of the angolares) – both the legacy of the habits of the degredados –
had a ‘nefarious influence’ upon the serviçais, which was exemplified
by the freed slaves, the ‘parasites of the plantations’, who supplied
the labourers with brandy in exchange for cocoa, coffee and the little
money they received from the landowners. This fact meant the legisla-
tion was adjusted for each of the ‘layers’, which was also the case with
efforts in education: the natives had to receive ‘advanced instruction’,
while the proposal for the serviçais was the ‘extended’ instruction of the
‘method of João de Deus’. In any event, both had to converge at the
same goal: ‘ennobling work, religion-work, virtue-work’.53
In 1911, Miranda Guedes quoted António Enes and one of his
paragraphs turned into an imperial maxim: ‘our national legislation is
devoted to giving the black freedom, including the freedom to live as
brutes, and rights […] I wish that first it gave him work and the duty
to work, not to enrich Europe with its profits, but to civilise Africa
through his efforts’. The combination of commercial goals and the need
to acquire labour, ‘the necessary balance of labour and production’,
always wrapped up in a civilising project,t would be achieved through the
possibility to generate ‘adequate migratory flows’ that would unleash
a movement of ‘recruitment for a short and fixed duration, with guar-
anteed return, obligatory, and with the minimum of expenditure’.
Regulated recruitment and compulsory repatriation were one solution
to the problem of the lack of manpower, but it also involved ‘cheapen-
ing’ it, according to Miranda Guedes.54
The proportion of Angolan labourers in the population of the S. Thomé
colony confirmed the importance this group had within its social and
economic structure.55 While the data available can be questionable and
the alterations in categories during the last decades of the nineteenth
century and the first years of the twentieth may lead to results that are
short in detail, it is nonetheless clear that, in a short space of time, not
only did the population of the colony of S. Thomé increase considerably
but the large proportion of serviçais in this increase is unquestionable.
According to Ernesto de Vasconcelos, in 1878 the population of the
island of S. Thomé was around 18,266 inhabitants, while in 1892 it was
around 22,000, including 9,400 natives of S. Thomé, 600 Europeans

and 12,006 serviçais. Three years later there were 12,500 ‘natives’,
1,500 white men, 1,500 ‘non-native blacks’ and 14,500 serviçais on S.
Thomé, in a total of about 30000 inhabitants. By 1900, the territory of
S. Thomé and Príncipe had a population of 42,130 inhabitants, includ-
ing 1,187 ‘whites’, 280 ‘mulattos’ and 40,663 ‘blacks’.56 However, other
quantitative accounts, which follow the model advanced by Ernesto de
Vasconcelos, fixed the population of S. Thomé at 37,776 (with 4,327
on the island of Príncipe), distributed as follows: 1,012 ‘whites’, 17,553
‘blacks and mixed race’ and 19,211 serviçais.57 As Miranda Guedes
claimed, the importance of the serviçais was such that the ‘centres of
production’ coincided with the ‘centres of population’.58
The first General Census of the salaried native population was con-
ducted in 1918. There were two main reasons behind the need to carry
out a census of native manpower. The first lay in the increasing need
to rationalise resources in a growing plantation economy, in a process
associated with one of the first moments of asserting a colonial science,
a modern form of organising the imperial and colonial endeavours,
namely its crucial labour market. The instability of supply and the
extreme urgency in furnishing labour to the islands meant it was essen-
tial to organise a methodical and planned system of native labour man-
agement. The second aspect, which is clearly linked to the first, resulted
from the need to rebut the data included in the foreign criticisms with
an appearance of scientific rigour and veracity. It was important ‘to
argue with facts, maps, documents and graphics, contrasting vague gen-
eralisations and irritating suppositions with firmer and irrefutable proof’.59
In A. Correia de Aguiar’s report which preceded the presentation of
the 1918 census data and was submitted to the governor of the province
of S. Thomé, he wrote that there had been several attempts to conduct
a census of the salaried native population. However, for reasons associ-
ated with the severe administrative shortcomings and lack of resources
such as the ‘paper crisis and the lack of steamships’, all attempts had
culminated in scant ‘appreciable practical results’. In 1915, shortly after
Correia de Aguiar had begun as curator-general, he instructed each
plantation to send his office a list of all serviçais in each property, with
details of their origins, their offspring and their current whereabouts
(as part of an attempt to quantify those who had fled and who were
illegally absent). The accumulated data was so incomplete that in 1917
it was made compulsory to include this information in the payment
papers demanded by the Native Labour Regulations of 14 October
1914. The lack of response by the agricultural proprietors had been
justified by arguing ‘there was not, at the time the law was introduced,
any obligation to supply this information, and consequently no legal
sanction could be applied’. The structure of the census was designed to
capture two distinct groups. The first was the serviçais who had been
in S. Thomé and Príncipe since before 1903; the second was those who
had come to the colony after that date. Despite the recognised failures
in the collection of the information (‘the incomplete communications
network’ that was at the root of the ‘lack of any postal service to homes
outside the city’ and the failure to ‘deliver and receive census maps and
forms’), the reporter did not hesitate to state that in July 1918 there
were 39,650 native labourers (33,950 men and 5655 women), of whom
1,633 were fugitives. A total of 39,372 had ‘written contracts’, while
233 (mainly women) had only ‘verbal contracts’. All of them were in an
absolutely acceptable situation according to the standards defined by
the civilising rhetoric, and were clearly indispensible for the preserva-
tion of one of the cornerstones of the colonial economy: cocoa.60
Cocoa from S. Thomé was one of the most important products in
the Portuguese colonial economy, with a total export of 322,342 tons
between 1888 and 1911.61 The main markets were the United Kingdom,
the United States, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
While, for William Cadbury, Britain was the main consumer market for
this product in 1910 (accounting for one-third of the colony’s output,
which represented one-sixth of total world production of cocoa), the
data presented by José Almada, who at the time was private secretary to
the minister of foreign affairs, claimed the United States and Germany
were the main partners in the business of cocoa, which had to be re-
exported from Lisbon.62 The trade in cocoa was subject to protectionist
tariffs, which tripled the export taxes levied when transported on for-
eign vessels.63
Quite clearly, S. Thomé occupied an extremely important place in
the Portuguese colonial economy. Given its importance, a series of
well-organised and active politico-economic interests were focused on
its development, in a process backed financially by the Banco Nacional
Ultramarino.64 The garden of Africa, ‘the richest and most promis-
ing of all the Portuguese colonies, by the extent and intensity of its
plantations and by the value of its products’, had an auspicious future
that was dependent upon ‘the greater or lesser availability of native
labour’. This was the unsteady part of the ‘system’.65 On 22 May 1901,
during discussions prior to the National Colonial Conference of that
year, Paulo Monteiro Cancella, a member of the Lisbon Geographical
Society, farmer and president of the Colonial Centre, presented a paper
titled ‘Impressions of a voyage to the islands of S. Thomé and Príncipe’

which highlighted the importance the supply of indigenous manpower
had for the economic development of the islands. Denouncing the
state of disrepair in which successive governments had left S. Thomé,
through recourse to illuminating examples of the disorganisation of
the port of the city of S. Thomé, the conditions of extremely poor
hygiene in which its inhabitants lived, the scarcity and ineffectiveness
of its police force and the consequently high levels of (native) crime,
Monteiro Cancella isolated the ‘question of the serviçais’ as being the
most important and most problematic aspect of the colony’s daily life.
Assuming to represent the interest of the Colonial Centre, one of the
most important pressure group focused on colonial affairs, Cancella
explained the essential principles of this association’s proposals in rela-
tion to the problems in acquiring native labour to work in agriculture,
particularly in the coffee and cocoa plantations. A crucial suggestion
comprised the establishment of a ‘prisoner of war camp’ on S. Thomé,
to house prisoners from the many ‘wars against the gentile’ in the colo-
nies, that is the pacification campaigns of the late nineteenth century
and early twentieth century. Given the constancy of colonial conflicts,
this could be an interesting solution to supply additional manpower.66
Rather than simply ‘burning their huts’, Portuguese troops should
‘make the villagers prisoners and deport them to other provinces’,
where they could be used to perform public works or be handed over to
the farmers for a determined number of years, with the farmers being
responsible for their transportation. There were two objectives behind
this proposal. The first was that the process would prevent those ele-
ments of unrest from remaining in the colony in which they had
risen up, while at the same time setting an example for the rest of the
population. The second was that the government of S. Thomé would
continue to ‘compete’ with the farm owners in the acquisition of con-
tracted labour, a fact that was due to the parallel need of the colonial
administration to recruit workers to perform public works. Given the
shortage of migration from the metropole, the provincial government
was forced to use native labour, which partially explained the poor
condition of S. Thomé’s infrastructural development. At the same time,
Cancella demanded that the colonial administration should adopt a
different attitude in all areas of the colonial economic enterprise in
which the question of manpower had a central role. If these proposals
were put into practice, ‘the dark cloud of fear about the lack of work-
ers that hangs over the heads of the S. Thomé farmers like a sword of
Damocles would disappear’.67
One of the leading economic interests operating in S. Thomé and

Príncipe was the Francisco Mantero Company Ltd. Originally from
Spain, Francisco Mantero, William Cadbury’s main contact and a cru-
cial individual in the question off slave cocoa, belonged to a family that
was connected to the coffee plantations in S. Thomé and which had
had connections with the colony since the middle of the nineteenth
century. Mantero wrote one of the essential statements in the network
of discourses on the methods of labour organisation in the plantation
economy that characterised the islands of S. Thomé and Príncipe. His
political and economic involvement did not prevent him from writing
his testimony on a series of considerations, denunciations and justifica-
tions that had placed this Portuguese colony at the centre of Portuguese
colonialism at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning
of the twentieth.68 Together with António de Sousa Lara, Mantero
belonged to and led some colonial pressure groups, and helped to estab-
lish the Colonial Centre in 1899.69
His 1910 work, which he published at his own expense, comprised a
glorification of the colonisers and farmers of S. Thomé, as well as of those
foreigners who defended ‘Portugal in the British and North American
press’, such as Lieutenant Colonel J. A. Wyllie of the British army in
India.70 A commonplace in the Portuguese colonial literature, Mantero
identified a series of ‘explorers, travellers, French and German men of
science’ who confirmed the ‘model nature of agricultural work’ and
the ‘complete freedom’ of the African workers, as the above-mentioned
example of Auguste Chevalier confirmed. Replete with photographs of
magnanimous Portuguese explorers and renowned foreign apologists
and others, his work sought to record efforts in the fields of sanitation,
hygiene and the education of farmers. It sought also to categorise the
variety of ‘indigenous types’ from the various Portuguese colonies, and
contained a collection of documents that were crucial for understand-
ing the troubled relationship between the colonial authorities, the
Portuguese plantation owners and the British chocolate manufacturers
and philanthropists. For Mantero, his book was justified by evidence
that ‘since little more than a year ago [when] we began the emigration of
workers from our province of Mozambique, there has been no calumny
that those interested in emigration to the Transvaal have not sought
[to use] to turn the heads of black Mozambicans [against] going to S.
Thomé, preaching all sorts of horrors, from the eternal litany of slavery
and the terrors of the stormy and billowing seas […] to the mutilations
by which those naive enough to come to our island are transformed
through being hobbled and having their noses and eyelids cut off!’71
A year after the publication of the book A mão-de-obra em S. Thomé e

Príncipe, a collection of documents defending the Portuguese position
in S. Thomé was published in English. Translated by none other than
Colonel J. A. Wyllie, this book was not a simple reproduction in English
of Mantero’s book. As he stated in his introductory note, it was a reor-
ganised and updated version. The set of documents presented included
an introduction by Wyllie, a speech Mantero had delivered to ministers
and parliamentarians in February 1911, a memorandum from the mer-
chant community in Lisbon, an extensive series of excerpts from articles
in Portuguese, British and ‘African’ newspapers, parts from conferences
in which several of the personalities were involved, speeches in the
British parliament and official correspondence. In this series of accusa-
tions and counter-accusations, of proof and counter-proof and of rhe-
torical jousting, this was a year full of an endless accumulation of new
facts, of systematic publication of official and private correspondence,
of numerous appendices with statistics (scientificc data was crucial), and
was marked by the (re)introduction of old and new testimonies before
an imagined court of national and international public opinions. The
consequences of the slave cocoa boycott had to be mitigated.
The inclusion of Wyllie in the pantheon of foreign apologists for the
cause and the civilising methods of Portuguese colonisation was clearly
justified. Not only because he stressed the nobility of the Portuguese
colonial project’s intention, but also because he unmasked the interests
of the Anti-Slavery Society, which he considered an ‘illusory anony-
mous society’ that should be registered as the ‘British Commercial and
Philanthropic Union Ltd’ in ‘legal’ concordance with its true purpose.
As important, he suggested that the administrative procedures adopted
by other colonial powers were much less restrained than those of the
Portuguese in Africa. In any event, what was at the heart of these
colonial projects was the option considered to be both urgent and
inevitable: the rescue of manpower in the African interior, this dense
and dark area of resistance to so many colonial administrations. Wyllie
compared the ‘system of rescue’ employed by the Portuguese in Angola
to the policy of the ‘extermination of poisonous snakes’ by the British
government in India, which included a set of payments for their skins.
According to him, in the same way in which the Hindu population
had reared and reproduced the most deadly reptiles with the intention
of profiting from the British civilisingg efforts, the ‘fierce African rulers’
had accumulated a ‘stock of hostages and criminals’, sentenced them to
death and invited the Portuguese representatives to assist in their execu-
tion, seeking the same result. Sure of the ‘humanitarian and agricultural
interests’ that drove the coloniser, the native chief created the ideal
conditions for this to materialise, both morally and economically.
The two aspects combined therefore pushed the urgency of the raids
(razias) as well as the need for them to be established as a recurring and
systematic practice: the ‘brutality and diabolic ferocity’ of ‘men of the
coloured race’ and the disproportion between the ‘vastness of the task’
of colonisation and the ‘machinery’ available to operate on the razias.
Wyllie concluded that ‘the roots of evil were African – purely African’.72
For Mantero, this assumption had been reinforced by the diplomatic
geometry of the Berlin Conference and perpetuated by the noticeable
jurisdictional weaknesses of the colonial administrations, by the evi-
dent shortcomings of colonial rule. The justification of the recruitment
of manpower as a humanitarian act persisted, being intensely advocated
by the numerous politico-economic standpoints with vested interests in
imperial expansion and consolidation. After the boycott, it is illuminat-
ing to note that Wyllie’s opinions were presented in a book that sought
to provide the Portuguese version of the S. Thomé question.73
White books, black souls
As we have seen, the first decade of the twentieth century witnessed

the concertation of critical testimonies about the native labour system
in the Portuguese colonies. These increased and intensified pressure on
the British Foreign Office and government and on the Portuguese gov-
ernment and its colonial administration, due largely to the high jour-
nalistic profile such accusations enjoyed. Leading publications, such
as The Spectator,
r whose editor John St Loe Strachey was a recognised
humanist and had connections to John H. Harris and the Anti-Slavery
Society, and the Journal de Genève, endowed these matters with enor-
mous public exposure.74 In 1910, Edward Grey received a large delega-
tion from the Anti-Slavery Society which included such people as Lord
Mayo (a title won in the meantime), Henry Nevinson, George Cadbury
and the Rev. John H. Harris, accompanied by six members of the British
parliament. On 14 November that same year, a delegation composed
of Burtt, Nevinson and Harris travelled to Lisbon with the intention of
inducing substantial changes in the Portuguese colonies’ labour regula-
tions. They were mainly focused on amending the terms governing the
repatriation of serfs, which these men demanded must be obligatory.
On the Portuguese side, the minister of foreign affairs, Bernardino
Machado, and the governor-general of Angola, Manuel Maria Coelho,
welcomed this delegation, just as they had welcomed the formation
of an anti-slavery society in Portugal that same day, and promised to

introduce real measures that would appease the distinguished visitors.75
In 1912, the Foreign Office began publishing the White Books,
intended to inform the British parliament. These brought together
translations of legislation relating to native labour in S. Thomé and
Angola, extracts from official reports and documents, varied correspond-
ence and personal accounts. This conferred visibility upon the interests
at stake, confirming the intensification of the pressure exerted by the
Anti-Slavery Society or by its individual members to the Foreign Office.
It illuminated as well the initiatives the latter was taking alongside the
Portuguese government, beginning with a request for information and,
later on, by the detachment of consular supervision to evaluate the
execution of the legal dispositions that had been decreed in Lisbon. In
Document 24 of the White Book of 1912 (more precisely in a letter of
November 1910 to the Portuguese government), Francis Villiers claimed
the continuation of ‘cordial relations’ between Portugal and the United
Kingdom did not depend on the implementation of deep changes to the
model of native labour employment.76
Criticisms of the manpower recruitment process in Portuguese colo-
nial territories on the African continent and denunciation of the inef-
fectiveness of successive legal acts that had sought to regulate it came
not only from abroad, nor was it, obviously, exhausted in the matter of
serviçais from S. Thomé and Príncipe. In 1911, Alberto Correia published
a short book entitled A Exploração do Indígena no Distrito de Mossamedes.
Its contents noted the reaffirmation of the ‘life of extortions, of
miseries and of subjugations that victimise, vex, exploit, rented and
reduced to the lowest expression of human dignity the native labourer,
named and proclaimed as the hired serf’. A frequent contributor to the
Angolan press, where he wrote under pseudonyms in Voz de Angola
and Realidade, Alberto Correia sought to challenge an open letter that
the Mossamedes-based agricultural and fishing company Viúva Bastos
& Filhos had sent to the governor-general of Angola, Manuel Maria
Coelho. In this, the firm had complained about the need to defend the
industries, agriculturalists and fishermen of this district from accusa-
tions of ‘negro-phobia’. An outraged Correia decided to expose what he
believed to be the reality of the system of hiring natives in Mossamedes,
highlighting the discrepancy between the declared precepts and the
Portuguese law on native labour and its practical expression: ‘the agri-
cultural labourers, apparently contracted (which remains to be seen and
to be proved) to the firm [Viúva Bastos & Filhos] under the terms of the
decree of 16 July 1902, live, or rather, vegetate in the most disgusting
and miserable huts’. He added that not one of the obligations deriving
from this decree was observed. The most serious of all accusations of
non-compliance with the law, which was inadvertently assumed by
the company, stemmed from the fact that children of former native
employees remained in the service of and dependent upon the employ-
ers who had contracted their parents.77
In June 1913, the Revista Colonial published an article signed by
Lieutenant Vieira Branco, in which he stated the government of the
district of Mossamedes had appointed a commission to investigate the
doubts and accusations that were frequently made about the methods
of administering the native manpower system in this district (Licence
no. 13, 25 April 1913). The main task of this commission was to visit
all the native population centres and inform each one of their freedom
to choose the enterprise with which they could sign contracts. If 30 per
cent of the employees decided to leave a particular employer, the com-
mission would provide a guide confirming this option. The remaining
70 per cent would be compelled to remain for a period never exceed-
ing three months, but only if the owner wished to enforce this legal
option. Only Viúva Bastos & Filhos, the most important company in
the district, decided to force its native employees to comply with this
condition.78
Shortly after the publication of the 1912 White Book, a pamphlet with
the title Alma Negra: Depoimento sobre a Questão dos Serviçais de S. Thomé,
written by Jerónimo Paiva de Carvalho, a former curator on Príncipe
island, was released.79 For five years, Paiva de Carvalho evaluated, ‘with-
out arousing the suspicion of the farmers, the normal formula for agri-
cultural processes and the general way in which they exploited black
labour’, which led him to conclude that ‘the existence of slavery on the
islands is a fact, although it presents itself to the public as a regime of
free employment’. Paiva de Carvalho stressed the matter of repatriation,
the modus operandi of contracts and the inefficiency and ineffectiveness
of the laws, considering that his testimony had ‘real value’ as it was that
of an official who was responsible for ‘thousands of rehirings’.80
Not unexpectedly, this publication unleashed an intense polemic
that led to a parliamentary interpellation to the government and to the
establishment of an inquiry into its origins and veracity. Despite deny-
ing, in a letter published in the newspaper O Mundo on 10 February
1913, that he was the author of the pamphlet, Paiva de Carvalho does
in fact appear to have been responsible for this accusation, which Freire
de Andrade interpreted as a mere means by which William Cadbury
could reply to the fact the first White Book had been ‘favourable to
Portugal’ and had explained the inconsistencies that existed between

the accusations made and the evidence possessed by the British phi-
lanthropists and economic interests. Alfredo da Silva, a professor at
the Oporto Industrial and Commercial Institute (Instituto Industrial
e Comercial do Porto) and secretary of the Portuguese Anti-Slavery
Society, translator of William Cadbury’s book, paid for the publication
of the pamphlet, which was quickly taken up and used by the Anti-
Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, which published it in English
with the title Slavery in West Africa on 15 March 1913. Eight days later,
Freire de Andrade wrote a letter to The Spectatorr in which he rebutted
the information contained in the pamphlet and sought to undermine
the credibility of its author by referring to the existence of a document
written by Paiva de Carvalho in 1907, with the title O trabalho indígena
em São Tomé e Príncipe: Monografia refutando as acusações feitas contra ele
no estrangeiro (Native Labour in São Thomé and Príncipe: Monograph
rebutting the accusations made against it abroad).81
That same year (1913), in a short document titled O Monstro da
Escravatura, Alfredo da Silva made his defence against the accusations to
which he had been subjected. It is an extremely interesting document
insofar as it allows us to further examine the relationship between the
philanthropists, the British chocolate manufacturers, the government
and the Portuguese plantation owners. Alfredo da Silva offers us an
account that enables us to reconstruct the key moments in the Alma
Negra case and allows us to identify the constitution of the Portuguese
Anti-Slavery Society.82 The main purpose of establishing the latter was
to explain to the public the matter of native labour in the African terri-
tories under Portuguese administration, showing the ‘need for reforms’
while, like the anti-slavery societies elsewhere, fighting to put an end to
the ‘campaign to discredit Portugal’. On 21 October 1910, a document
by Alfredo da Silva, and signed by such individuals as Pires Avelanoso
and Norton de Matos, was made public. It expressed ‘the urgent need to
establish a Portuguese anti-slavery society’ that would join the ‘global
movement to protect the so-called inferior races’.83
On 19 April 1913, William Cadbury wrote to The Spectator, r copying
the letter Paiva de Carvalho had sent him in July 1911. In this, the latter
had proposed to sell his report for £200, which he later explained was
because he was being persecuted by the plantation owners. Cadbury
was not interested and forwarded the matter to Alfredo da Silva. Despite
not being impressed with Paiva de Carvalho’s account, Alfredo da Silva
decided to meet him, telling him he would help publish the docu-
ment on the proviso that he would be allowed to make ‘some small
alterations’ and re-write the end, in which he ‘would pay homage for
what the government of the Republic, according to the Anti-Slavery
Society, has already done to put an end to the abuses’. In 1912, the final
print run of 2,000 copies was completed and distributed to members
of the Anti-Slavery Society, to the government, to civil governors, to
parliamentary deputies and to libraries.84
One of the main representatives of the Anti-Slavery Society, as pre-
viously mentioned, was the Rev. John Harris, who had served as its
general secretary since 1912. Over a period of two years Harris made
short visits to the islands of S. Thomé and Príncipe, to Angola and to
the Congo, and took advantage of his time to write several letters and
articles with details of his impressions. These he then sent to maga-
zines that shared his association’s interests, particularly to John St Loe
Strachey’s Spectator. In one of these letters, which was published in the
Contemporary Review w in May 1912 and included in White Book, Africa
Number 2 (1913), with the title ‘Portuguese Slavery’, Harris insisted on
the ‘existence of slavery in the agricultural plantations of S. Thomé and
Príncipe’ and praised the ‘infinite patience’ of Fox Bourne, Nevinson,
Cadbury and Burtt in denouncing it. Despite stating that the S. Thomé
municipal council deserved ‘considerable praise for its public gardens,
water supply and the several miles of road that are the equal of any in
West Africa’, and the plantation owners for their ‘workshops for the
construction of […] schools for children and infirmaries for the sick’,
Harris noted that such efforts resulted from the profits generated by
a system of slavery that was centred in the Angolan interior. Availing
himself of the trial in the case of William Cadbury vs the Evening
Standard,85 Harris supported his allegations by referring to the fact that
serviçais were comprised in the list of ‘stock and tools’ included in the
assets of a plantation that was being sold. The commodification of
native labour, and its inclusion in the ‘same way as animals and build-
ings’, was incontrovertible evidence of the place of contracted labour in
the plantation economy. The indignation assumed such a level that, in
a letter addressed to the Foreign Office, Harris threatened – in the name
of the Anti-Slavery Society – ‘to concentrate his attention on our own
system of contracted labour’, particularly in respect of the condition of
those working in the mines of South Africa.86
The excessive focus on the Portuguese colonies of S. Thomé and
Angola, to the detriment of its eastern possessions, was not acciden-
tal. The accusations of disproportionality in the Anti-Slavery Society’s
criticisms and the presentation of facts produced by elements within the
Foreign Office did not contribute to calming humanitarian tempers.87
The same was true in respect of the measures taken by the Portuguese
government that sought to improve the methods of the native labour sys-
tem incorporated in the law of 27 May 1911. These restated the freedom
of contract that assisted workers and which introduced rigorous restric-
tions on the receipt of emoluments by curators or agents and employees
of the emigration societies, in relation to the number of natives engaged.
The decree of 20 July 1912 obliged the plantation owners of S. Thomé to
establish an emigration council modelled on its South African congener,
the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association. On 2 November 1912, its
statutes were approved. The aims of 1903 had not been achieved, despite
the Jornal de Benguela claiming, in its analysis of the recruitment and hir-
ing process, that it could not uncover any imperfections in or abuses of
the system, while also noting the natives’ satisfaction.88
However, for Harris the fundamental point was not the ‘sale and
transportation of slaves’ anymore, which had ‘nominally’ ended, but
rather the ‘slavery of the plantations’. In an unexpected statement, this
Protestant philanthropist did not identify the volume of work to which
the natives were subjected as one of the unacceptable reasons for the
labour organisation of S. Thomé’s plantation economy: ‘the normal
work of the slaves cannot be considered arduous. It is the monotony
that makes it repugnant to the temperament of the African who is a
lover of freedom’. However, the change in the accusatory focus did not
signify the beginning of a lull in the flow of information that had been
established between the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society,
the Foreign Office, the Portuguese and British consular delegations, the
representatives of economic interests involved in the colonial economy,
the occasional actors and those without any direct connection with the
model of native labour recruitment and management in the Portuguese
colonies. After sending a delegation to Lisbon that included E. W.
Brooks, Joseph Burtt, John Harris, Joseph King, Georgina King Lewis and
Henri W. Nevinson, shortly after the proclamation of the republic in
Portugal, the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society had an arti-
cle published in The Spectatorr on 13 July 1912 (the year in which Harris’s
book Dawn in Darkest Africa was published) in which they demanded
the United Kingdom renounce the treaties of alliance with Portugal
‘since it is a slave country and it is not worth Britain being dishonoured
by being associated with Portuguese slavery’.89
At the end of 1913, the Lisbon Commercial Association (Associação
Comercial de Lisboa) sent Carlos Gomes and Carreiro do Rego to
London to assess the willingness of the Cadbury company to end
its boycott of cocoa from S. Thomé. The response was delivered in a
letter at the beginning of the following year, in which as a result of

the positive information contained in the White Book, Africa, Number
1 (1914), Cadbury would have no ‘qualms about purchasing products
from that colony’; however, the reactivation of trade relations between
the producers of cocoa in S. Thomé and Príncipe and the chocolate
manufacturers involved in the boycott experienced a major setback. A
missionary called J. Sidney Bowskill of the Baptist Missionary Society’s
mission in São Salvador in the Congo was arrested (19 February 1914),
accused of having been associated with a native uprising in Belgian
Congo and in a large part of Portuguese Congo, the famous Congo
revolt led by Álvaro Buta.90 Bowskill accused Portugal of having been
responsible for the revolt, identifying the forced recruitment of 1,500
natives from the region for the plantations in S. Thomé as the uprising’s
cause. Newspapers such as Christian World d carried news of the events as
well as Bowskill’s interpretation. Bowskill became an important source
of information in respect of the ‘history of the native rebellion against
the cruelty of the Portuguese who would drag them off to carry out
atrocious work as slaves on the cocoa islands of S. Thomé and Príncipe’.
According to the 1914 report of the S. Thomé and Príncipe Emigration
Society, the Congo revolt had been motivated by the reluctance of the
native population to pay the taxes levied on their huts. However, not all
witnesses agreed with the definition of the Portuguese colonial admin-
istration as a ‘marvellous catalogue of good intentions’, as Cadbury
described it in the preface to his book Os Serviçais em São Tomé. Some
contributed to a different picture.91
The unequivocally favourable contribution of the White Books was in
large part the result of a succession of reports from British diplomatic
representatives, such as those signed by the British consul-general in
Portuguese West Africa, H. Hall Hall, dated July and October 1916. In
the conclusion to his second report, Hall Hall wrote that, after having
evaluated the results of the administrative measures in respect of the
native labour system, ‘the moment had arrived to recommence trade
relations between the British companies and the cocoa cultivators’. The
following February, the British foreign minister, A. J. Balfour, sent a
communiqué to Lancelot Carnegie, Britain’s representative in Lisbon, in
which he declared that the publication of Hall Hall’s reports should lead
to the lifting of the boycott, to the extent that the companies them-
selves have ‘come to the opinion that […] the terms of the contracts
made […] those that have been renewed, and the conditions of repa-
triation are entirely satisfactory’. The irregularities could only emerge
‘in regions that are still so poorly illuminated by the intense light of
civilisation’, to which can only be imputed on ‘individual responsibil-

ity, so to speak’.92
In an article published in the Bournville Works Magazine in July 1917,
Joseph Burtt stated that ‘the plantations of S. Thomé, which in the past
had been cultivated by slaves, were now worked by free men who return
to their homes at the end of their contract’. It was his belief that this
change was the result of the ‘firm protests of the British and American
chocolate manufacturers’ which, motivated by a refusal to use in their
factories a product that had been cultivated by slave labour, had exerted
pressure to ensure the regular improvement of the native labour system
in the Portuguese colonies. Coercion no longer moved the caravans
of natives; rather it was ‘free will, which is the good father of human
effort’. As Burtt wrote, ‘seen from a distance, the caravan still looks like
a giant black snake winding its way through the vegetation, but the fear
has disappeared and death no longer plays the gruesome games it once
played’. He concluded: ‘the long journey has been transformed into a
romantic adventure’. However, if the irregularities, the abuses and the
crimes attached to the whole system of native labour were supposedly
explained by the intermittence of the civilising light, the persistence of
the failures of the repatriation process had a more real and identifiable
cause.93
Correia de Aguiar was appointed to head a committee preparing a
report into the working conditions for native labourers on the islands
of S. Thomé and Príncipe that was established in the wake of a memo-
randum sent by the British legation in Lisbon to the Portuguese Foreign
Affairs Ministry on 24 November 1917. This document contained
an evaluation of the overall native labour system in the Portuguese
colonies, and particularly in S. Thomé, and was organised around three
essential points: mortality on the islands, which was the responsibil-
ity of the Portuguese colonial administration’s sanitation and health
policies; rehiring and repatriation, which was related to the model and
management of native labour, its legal framework and the applicabil-
ity of its principles and dispositions; and finally, the reliability of the
statistics supplied by the Portuguese administrative services, which were
intimately connected with the entire colonial structure in Portuguese
Africa. The same memorandum was later sent to the League of Nations,
and led to the preparation of a report by the S. Thomé and Príncipe
Emigration Society.94
Repatriation continued to be the crucial subject, although it was
no longer generating the intense accusations that it had previously.
Despite acknowledging the improvements in the repatriation process,
the memorandum from the British representatives shared the views

expressed by Burtt in his article: serious flaws persisted. The basic criti-
cism concerned the slowness and instability of the flow of returnees in
the middle of the second decade of the twentieth century. According to
Correia de Aguiar’s report, this criticism was recognised and accepted by
the Portuguese; however, it could not be explained by any factor indica-
tive of the failure of the Portuguese colonial administration to comply
with or apply the law. The reasons for this situation were to be found
in the instability of the means and resources that had been caused by
the First World War. The most significant factor was the ‘insuperable
transport crisis’ and the consequent reduction in the space available
in which to move colonial goods and products or to return serviçais to
their homes. The order of priorities in the transportation and circula-
tion of goods and people was straightforward: officers, soldiers, military
provisions and supplies necessary to meet the needs of the belligerent
parties, the transportation of colonial products to consumer markets
and, finally, if possible, the repatriation of serviçais. The British vice-
consul in Luanda, Cassels, confirmed this assessment in a communiqué
sent to Hall Hall on 16 January 1915. Wartime demands and the cor-
responding irregularity of maritime transport were debilitating for the
colonial economy, both for the accumulation of raw materials and in
the reduction of the value of exports. The Colonial Centre, the Lisbon
Commercial Association and the Central Association of Portuguese
Agriculture and Industry called for the government to take measures to
re-establish the quantity and regularity of maritime transports.95
The ‘tonnage crisis’, as Ernesto Vilhena characterised it in an exten-
sive article published in O Século on 3 March 1918, was insuperable.
However, another argument was put forward to prevent the possibility
of the fall in the flow of repatriations being interpreted as a result of the
Portuguese colonial authorities’ and plantation owners’ exploitation of
the war situation: ‘the retention here [in S. Thomé] of so many people,
against their will, can be nothing but detrimental to the interests of
agriculture and, consequently, for the progress of the province. In short,
the short-term benefit will in the future lead to serious damage’. In addi-
tion to feeding the continuation of criticisms, this situation was seen to
undermine the message of the good treatment and good working con-
ditions that the repatriated workers were supposed to take home with
them, ‘incapable as they are of understanding that their repatriation is
prevented by the shortage of ships caused by the conflict in Europe’.
To this fact was added another: the serviçais, particularly those from
Mozambique, had ‘a certain education’ and carefully controlled their
worktime. Consequently, in the management of the accumulated con-

tingents of serviçais, the curator-general divided them into two types:
the ‘old type Angolan serviçais’ who had disembarked in S. Thomé
before 1903; and those who disembarked after that date. Once the lat-
ter group ‘had signed contracts defined with the presumably clear idea
of the time that they had agreed to work’, they would be the first to
occupy the limited spaces the National Navigation Company had made
available. Repatriation did not end completely, but it focused exclu-
sively on those serviçais who had been considered to be most favoured
by civilisation and those who had the most recent contracts.96 This
created a ‘class of reprobate [serviçais]’ mired in a legal void, destitute
of the rights that had been progressively included in the legislation on
native labour over the years. They were heavily discriminated against
and penalised by application of the numerous pieces of legislation pro-
moted in the last years.97
3
‘Redemptive Labour’ and the
Missionaries of the Alphabet
Work to civilise or educate to colonise?
Faced with the irregular and fluid nature of available labour, to which
the epidemics of disease contributed greatly, the renewal and repro-
duction of serviçais had to be intensified and the mechanisms of its
protection reinforced without openly impairing the humanitarian
and civilising declarations supporting the legitimacy of Portuguese
colonisation. If to this scenario we add the pressures generated by the
anti-slavery campaigns of British humanitarian groups, we can frame
the geographical broadening of labour recruitment undertaken by the
Portuguese. However, there were even more prosaic reasons for the
implantation of a system of contracted work, based on the circulation of
groups of labourers through the colonies. It could result from voluntary
options seeking to secure capital to meet the tax demands made by colo-
nial administrations, or it might represent the product of several types
of forced or coerced labour recruitment. It might even result because,
according to Sampayo e Mello, ‘the stability of labour’ – ‘an inescapable
precondition of colonial exploitation’ – had become ‘almost impossible
to achieve in the regime of free contract in which the blacks so easily
accept as transgress’.1
It was not just a response to the need for labour generated by
adverse hygiene and sanitary conditions, or a way to satisfy diplo-
matic demands for reorganised recruitment processes and methods.
Seldom was it thought that the emigration of groups of native labour-
ers would be seen as a benefit from the economic and social point of
view. The exclusive employment of local labour was, on the contrary,
strongly defended because it avoided ‘the often heart-breaking incon-
veniences of native acclimatisation’ and permitted the reduction of
77
‘recruitment, transport, repatriation, sustenance and medical expenses’

that increased the cost of imported labour. It was recognised that the
importation of labour led to a ‘great demoralisation that, caused by the
gender disparity among the immigrants, did not take long to spread
throughout the native populations’ and resulted, in the terms of a colo-
nial sociologyy that had been in fashion since the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, in the formation of ‘ephemeral groups characterised by
a fictitious abnormality of social constitution’. The same problem was
identified concerning emigration from the metropole to Portuguese
colonies, characterised by the imbalance between the volume of male
and female emigration. This reality promoted numerous demands for
the emigration of families or calls for an education that was specifically
geared towards the emigrant.2 It is precisely in this line of thinking that
was inscribed part of the criticism of the repatriation of native labour,
to the extent that only the territorial establishment of the immigrant
populations could facilitate the social balance necessary for economic
development.3
European emigration represented a solution proposed and supported
by several ‘colonial theorists’, as they were then frequently labelled.
One of the most considered proposals at the beginning of the century
was that of George Poullet Scrope. He was a British geologist, political
economist and advocate of emigration to the colonial worlds as a solu-
tion to ‘problems of poverty and over-population’, Scrope was seen
as a reference for those who wanted the state to subsidise European
emigration in a contract that involved the application of a tax on the
worker’s salary, as he suggested in his 1830 The Common Cause of the
Landlord, Tenant, and Labourer.4 Criticised for subjecting the workers to
a ‘form of slavery’, this proposal was perfected by putting the onus in
the process onto the ‘capitalists’, although with eventual effects on the
labourers’ salaries, to the extent that if the supply of labour was abun-
dant, the pay they received would be reduced. The identification of the
‘original vices’ in these proposals was accompanied by the unsuitability
of the ‘white body’ and of ‘its conditions of life’ to the climatic condi-
tions that characterised the African continent. That is, as an alternative
to the dependence on native labour, managed European emigration
was criticised. However, even when it wasn’t, it was unlikely that the
migratory flows would reach the volume necessary for them even to be
considered a serious option for transforming the labour problem in the
colonial context.5
Regarding Portuguese emigration to the African territories, the central
problem was as much in the small scale of the migratory flow as in the
‘Redemptive Labour’ and the Missionaries of the Alphabet 79
migrants’ lack of technical and professional qualifications. In 1899,

around 17,774 Portuguese left the country – mainly for Brazil (13,348),
followed by Portuguese West Africa (1,193).6 Just eight years later, the
number of emigrants more than doubled to 41,950, with an increasing
disproportion between those going to Brazil (31,483) and those going
to Africa (636). Portugal’s African territories were not proving attrac-
tive to those ‘fugitives’ from Portugal. No matter how much effort the
Portuguese state made to make Africa the preferred destination for
Portuguese emigrants, the truth is that these attempts ‘failed, and from
the ruins only extremely damaging despondency emerged’. After noting
that ‘our emigrants are generally from the indigent classes’, therefore
incapable of promoting the ‘important transfer of capital’ indispensa-
ble for the economic development of the colonies, some called for the
elaboration of a programme that would mobilise and encourage poten-
tial emigrants of a different type to move to the African territories under
Portuguese control.7
However, the fact is that the programmes for the ‘white colonisation’
of African territories under Portuguese jurisdiction represented another
example of the disparity between ambitious legislative projects and con-
vincing political declarations and the actual realities in the colonies. As
Henrique Galvão pointed out later, the abundance of legislation and the
equally numerous affirmations of principles and great goals were not
matched by significant examples of colonisation and economic invest-
ment. The rhetoric contained in the empire’s legal output meant noth-
ing when faced with the failure of mass occupation and of any extensive
economic development in the Portuguese colonial project.8 The social
and technical skills of the Portuguese colonists do not fully explain the
undeniable failures of successive Portuguese occupation and colonisa-
tion plans. As Gomes dos Santos noted, the Portuguese failed to respond
to the demands of the colonising enterprise. It was up to the state to
develop a methodical colonisation programme, from conducting ‘sci-
entific research’ to ‘advertising […] their colonies’ natural resources and
the means of exploiting them’. However, these proposals were not at all
directed towards the colonial labour problem.9
Faced with these limitations, the Portuguese state found itself obliged
to follow colonisation policies that provided direct support and finance
to the settlers, thereby limiting its ability to intervene indirectly by
channelling the limited investment funds into the colonial infrastruc-
tural aspects. In this way, the more reliable option, even though it had
few tangible results and inhibited its own realisation, was to control the
entire process of African emigration, from the recruitment and selection
of settlers to providing them with free transport, through the provision

of the raw materials necessary for economic activity, mainly agriculture,
or through the provision of housing. The proportion of unemployed
within the overall contingent of emigrants during the first six years of
the twentieth century exceeded 50 per cent. The most probable cause
of emigration, according to data collected at the time, was the ‘desire to
improve one’s lot’, and the settlers’ most common goal was to ‘exercise
their profession’.10
This was the main justification for the need to regulate the emigration
process, especially in order to prevent the persistence of the ‘precarious
situation of the unsuspecting emigrants, driven with closed eyes to a
difficult environment’.11 In 1901, Henrique Barahona da Costa recalled
that João Andrade Corvo, who was also responsible for organising
public-works expeditions in Angola, S. Thomé and Mozambique, said
to the expeditionary forces that the most adequate and important ser-
vice they could provide the country was to return alive, thereby ending
the mistrust and fear the colonial possessions inspired in Portugal.12 Of
all of the Portuguese colonies, Angola was the one that mainly raised
strongly repulsive images, associated with the insalubrious nature of
its territory and the inevitable hostility and putative barbarism of its
natives.13 It was essential to strike a balance, no matter how unstable,
between the standard description and socio-cultural classification of the
African people and the preparation of an order of colonial information
and propaganda that would attract Portuguese to get involved in the
process of colonisation.
Emigration was seen as a factor that impacted negatively on the
country’s social and economic balance. Once the state could not oppose
emigration, ‘a fact of simple individual responsibility based on the
freedom of the citizen’, according to José Francisco da Silva in the 1901
Colonial Conference, it had to channel it, turning it to the advantage
of the national economy and colonial project. The ‘emigration problem’
had to be raised to the ‘category of national problem’ and considered
in association with improvements to the Portuguese colonial admin-
istration, replicating some debates of almost a century earlier.14 In the
1820s, the prevention of the circulation of enslaved African manpower
to Brazil was considered crucial to imperial renewal after the declaration
of Brazilian Independence in 1822 (only recognised by the Portuguese
in 1825). Personalities such as Francisco Solano Constâncio clearly saw
this decision as an instrument for African colonial economic and com-
mercial development, with the additional advantage of creating prob-
lems for independent Brazil.15
In the first decades of the twentieth century, imperial renewal was

still a project, with different challenges but also similar problems.
The control of human mobility was still thought of in imperial and
colonial terms. Studies into the causes and conditions of emigration
should be accompanied by the emergence of a new order of colonial
knowledge, based both on the production of information over the
colonies’ social and economic geography and in the preparation of
colonial instruction manuals. The Lisbon Geographic Society’s emigra-
tion committee should establish an ‘inquiry into the conditions for
recruiting emigrants’, organise ‘commissions […] of clarification and
protection for emigrants’ in Portugal and ‘research groups’ overseas,
these latter destined to analyse the following matters: firstly, to conduct
regular studies of those African regions potentially more hospitable to
Portuguese emigrants, to understand the ‘climate, the quality of the
land, appropriate crops, the native people and their customs, native
labour and the means of communication’; secondly, to prepare ‘accu-
rate and simple budgets the emigrant can use to evaluate the probabil-
ity of achieving a profit’; thirdly, to promote ‘the appropriate education
to the character of the provinces that feed the majority of Portuguese
emigration’, with special attention to the ‘girls’, which should be
accompanied by the organisation of ‘commissions’ guided by women
whose ‘respectability guarantees the emigrant an austere, dignified and
caring environment’.16
It was within this programme of action, which was given strong
backing by many colonial scientists in 1901, that there were calls for
the dissemination of knowledge about the scientificc aspects of the colo-
nies’ ‘zoological, botanical and mineral geography’, and a number of
disciplines – such as ‘colonial administration and legislation’, ‘colonial
agriculture’ and ‘colonial hygiene’ – were established.17 Ernesto de
Vasconcellos even proposed the establishment of a ‘colonial institute’
that would plan the ‘overseas functionalism’, while the Count of Penha
Garcia insisted on the ‘organisation of a colonial museum as a centre
for colonial information’. Following the example of the British Imperial
Institute (created in 1887, after the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of
1886), it would comprise ‘scientific’ and ‘commercial’ collections which
included an emigration section supplying ‘useful and precise informa-
tion to emigrants’ in the form of ‘small emigrant books and guides’.18
The goal was common and was based on the obligation of the state ‘to
publicise helpful information’ about the colonies, with the intention
of ‘preparing an enlightened public opinion and of strengthening the
relationship between the people of the metropole and our colonial
empire’.19 In order to achieve this, it was first necessary to produce, col-

lect and organise information about the colonies and about the imperial
question, with a view to providing visibility of the country’s colonial
dimension, based on ‘collections of maps, statistics, graphics, navigation
charts, freight timetables, photographs, dioramas’ and the creation of
a ‘colonial bibliography’, as advocated by the Count of Penha Garcia.20
In the same important moment of reflection upon imperial issues, prob-
lems and prospects, Domingos de Oliveira suggested that the imperative
process of stabilisingg colonial law and unifying colonial administrative
action should be based on the ‘organisation of a methodical colonial
bibliography’ and on the ‘coordination of knowledge about the political
and social way of being’ in the colonial worlds. These were the ‘direct
means’ that would enable a proper administration of the empire, of its
human and material resources. In the debates regarding the thesis under
analysis during the gathering, Conde Penha Garcia stressed the impor-
tance of a ‘scarcely known science with an arid nature’ that should be
instrumental in the development of colonial affairs: ‘Bibliographia’.21
In 1912, Carlos Mello Geraldes, full-professor of the Colonial Section
of the Institute of Agronomy at the University of Lisbon, published
a long report based on a research expedition he had made between
August and October of 1910 to several European scientific institutions
and sites. Although his expedition was focused on institutions devoted
to agricultural problems, his major quest was for comparative models
of information-gathering, organisation and dissemination related to
imperial issues. The major goal was to understand how scientific, mod-
ern ways of knowledge production and application could foster new
institutional arrangements for colonial administration and bolster new
forms of colonial development and colonial propaganda.22
From the Jardin Tropical de Nogent-sur-Marne (which since 1899
had followed the model of Kew Gardens – also visited and analysed by
Geraldes – and was related to a network of jardins d’essais throughout
the French colonies) to the Africa Museum at Tervuren (created in 1897
in relation to the International Exhibition of Brussels and as a symbol
of Leopold II’s grand and impetuous imperial designs) and the Imperial
Institute, among other places visited, Geraldes surveyed the institu-
tional models and the technical and scientific articulations that could
enhance the ‘material and moral progress’ of the colonial worlds via
everything that ‘informs, vulgarises and educates’. Echoing what he
understood to be the main aim of the Imperial Institute, for instance,
he emphasised the crucial importance of promoting the ‘coordination
and propaganda of commercial, technical and scientific information’
about colonial produce, to instruct those who would carry out the busi-
ness of administration and also, and not least, to stimulate ‘colonisa-
tion’. The ‘great practical value’ of the ‘Gardens, Museums and Colonial
Laboratories, and also Schools of Colonial Agriculture’ was undeniable.
They were ‘fundamental bodies’ in the great purpose of a ‘solid and
rational development of colonial economy’. Colonial museums could
not continue to be ‘cold and funereal museum-necropolises’; they should
be a ‘lively’ synthesis of ‘the colonies’ way of being’ and, at the same
time, they should nurture ‘the colonial idea’ and prepare and foster ‘colo-
nial action’. Following some of the ideas already inscribed in the debates
that occurred in 1901 during the First Colonial Congress in Portugal,
Geraldes exemplified how Conde da Penha Garcia’s proposals for the
creation of new ‘centres of colonial information’ should be carried out,
highlighting and praising similar informational and propagandistic
functions and aims.23
Alongside other examples of the growing importance and impact of
interimperial and intercolonial cooperation, such as the International
Colonial Institute (which we will address later on; hereafter ICI),
Geralde’s report illustrates a particular moment in the emergence of sci-
entific languages and methods – the sciência colonial – closely associated
with the tentative consolidation of the Portuguese colonial venture in
the early twentieth century. As Carneiro de Moura argued, like many
others, the longstanding ‘empirical character’ of the ‘art of colonising’
was being replaced, or should be replaced, by the ‘science of colonisa-
tion’.24 Moreover, the report also exemplifies an important moment in
which the question of the nature, the quality and the depth of infor-
mation regarding the imperial venture was declared to be central in the
process of empire-building and colonial state-formation. A new order
and a new type of colonial information were crucial to create the con-
ditions for the establishment of the early colonial state, after the first
wave of pacification campaigns of the late nineteenth century.25
This set of concerns had an additional purpose. A 1913 report by the
directorship of the Lisbon Geographic Society referring to works car-
ried out by a Commission for the Examination of Colonial Problems
(appointed on 11 December 1911) stated that the ‘best way of respond-
ing to our detractors’ would rest in the adoption of ‘a series of measures
that […] demonstrate our colonial knowledge’ in a practical and ‘scien-
tific’ manner. The anthropological and ethnographic, geographical and
geological, mineral, zoological and botanical knowledge of the empire
was scarce; the ‘economic regime’ (labour legislation and practices, set-
tlement schemes, property regulations, fiscal and commercial regimes,
maritime and land communications) was undeveloped or lacked order

and direction; and the colonial politics and policies, both internation-
ally, at the metropole and in the colonies, needed a ‘means to assure
our colonial rule’. Calling for an ‘overseas resurgence’ and for the crea-
tion of a ‘colonial opinion’, the Lisbon Geographic Society attacked
the instability of successive Portuguese colonial administrations and
the absence of any ‘practical’ direction, echoing the interminable
series of speeches delivered within this institution since its creation.
The commission identified a series of ‘overseas problems’ that urgently
required proper study. Listing a series of geographic, geological, min-
eral, botanical (‘with the goal of developing the agricultural and arbo-
real wealth of our colonies’ and the ‘creation of farms and plantations
designed to exploit native plants’), zoological, anthropological and
ethnographic studies, the report addressed the aspects related to the
economic regime and to the Portuguese colonial administration that
were considered most problematic. In the case of the economic regime,
the central questions could not fail to be, predictably, the need to regu-
late native labour, the definition of a programme of public works that
would solve the weaknesses of terrestrial and fluvial communications,
the establishment of a coordinated ‘Luso-colonial’ trade policy and the
specification of ‘land laws’. In the case of the colonial administration,
the essential question related to the ‘need to elaborate a grand plan
[…] to be adopted independently of the political views of the parties in
government’. Portuguese colonial administration was ‘uncertain’ and
had no ‘practical and clear orientation’. It required well-defined struc-
tures of politico-administrative, fiscal and military authority. With ten
years having passed since the solemn conferences of the first Colonial
Congress in Portugal, the principles and aims of occupation and scien-
tificc colonisation of Portuguese colonies were renewed. However, the
inconsequence of that congress was simultaneously recognised, both
in the reinstated requirement of an actual arrangement of colonial
information, of an effective and managed form of occupation of its ter-
ritories, and of an efficient and unproblematic system of native labour
recruitment, distribution and use. The problem of native labour and
the lack of human, material and financial resources and information on
the colonial realities were just three items in an extensive and complex
catalogue of imperial problems that only a colonial science could solve
and overcome.26
Returning to the problem of colonial emigration, the emigration of
Asians and the recourse to ‘coolies’ – Indian or Chinese labour27 – was
another of the recommended solutions that was employed, allowing an
attenuation of ‘the effects of the crisis that followed the disappearance

of slavery from the colonies’. Recognition of their resilience to work,
their ‘exceptional sobriety’ and the fact that they received lower salaries
did not constitute sufficient virtues to overcome an unacceptable char-
acteristic of the colonial civilisingg project: they were bearers of the ‘evils
of Asian civilisation’ by the simple reason of belonging to the ‘lower
classes’ of the societies from which they came. This assumption led a
distinguished colonial theorist to state that the large-scale immigration
of ‘coolies’ would be more dangerous than the maintenance of slavery.28
The recourse to contingents of workers from Africa was, therefore,
inevitable even because, as Marnoco e Souza noted, slavery revealed the
‘black race’s aptitude for work and the strength of their resistance’.29
As a commission comprising António Enes, Luís Poças Falcão, Anselmo
de Andrade, Brito Godins and Paiva Couceiro stated in its 1899 report,
Relatório sobre o Trabalho dos Indígenas (Report into the Work of Natives),
‘planting Angola, Guinea, Mozambique with the spontaneous work of
the whites […] would be the same as sowing ruin’, as it is only the ‘black
man’ who can ‘fertilise scorched Africa’. Since they were dealing with
a ‘race’ that had not yet produced ‘by their own spontaneous efforts
any rudiment of civilisation’ it was unlikely they would bring ‘legions
of workers of progress unless we exercise over them every incentive
and every compulsion of a tutelage […] [that is] energetic and powerful
on its processes’. Since the individual independence of each ‘rational
being’ must not be taken as ‘a tabernacle that is so intangible that it
can not be affected by the State’, then it would be absolutely acceptable
for ‘compulsion’ to be exercised over ‘almost unthinking and impulsive
creatures’, diverting them from an idleness that is ‘more ruinous than
gambling, more deleterious than salacity and almost as annihilating
as suicide’.30
The paradigm of the obligation to work as an instrument of civi-
lisation (work to civilise), clearly associated with an imperialism of
obligation and of inevitability, predominated and, with some slight
adaptations (as we shall see in the second part of this book), continued
to dominate governing imperial rationales. Far from transforming the
essential nature of the matter, the politico-diplomatic and economic
process that led to the question of slave cocoa fostered some refinement
in the justification of labour models in the colonial context, which
owed much to the fundaments of the emerging colonial science and its
traces of social Darwinism.
The labour recruitment model in the African territories contained,
moreover, a series of economic advantages that translated into a
reduction in the cost of capitalist ventures, which were realised follow-

ing the effective occupation of the colonies at the end of the nineteenth
century. When the length of the contract was for a relatively short
duration (from two to five years31), the employers succeeded in reduc-
ing their costs on health and education services to the minimum. The
responsibility for these expenses passed to the public purse. On the
other hand, the fact that the groups of serviçais continued to be con-
tracted (independently of the degree of freedom to choose how this
happened and the actual terms of the legal framework) meant that the
regulation of the contract process included severe penalties on both
parties for non-compliance with the terms of the contract. Desertion
and absenteeism were subject to penal sanction and were more easily
controllable and used as a punitive or dissuading mechanism, to the
extent to which the workers, removed from their own communities and
isolated on the plantations or in the mines, had no particularly attrac-
tive destinations around them. The working conditions also favoured
the exploitation of daily labour, facilitating the supervision and control
of labourers and making their hours of work more flexible. It also pre-
vented the development of a proletarian consciousness.32
Despite constituting a civilisingg inevitability for the colonial theorists
and an efficient solution for the capitalist and commercial interests, as
well as for the colonial administrations, the model of contracted labour
that was based on emigration also had its disadvantages. The fact that
the salaries were so low meant that the work proposals were seen as
unattractive. This generated recruitment methods that were somewhat
inconsistent with the much vaunted freedom of contract and the
clearly rhetorical niceties contained within the regulations of putative
civilising humanism. In the same process, the curators and the cipaios
justified the career regulations in the colonial public administration
and acquired a great deal of importance throughout the native labour
system which operated in the Portuguese colonies, to the extent that
Miranda Guedes had warned that the curatorship should be awarded to
a magistrate who could impose ‘an impartial and absolutely independ-
ent line’ and that the ‘curator’s fees and the staff of the curator’s office’
should be terminated.33 When established, the regulation and legalisa-
tion of the process of importing labour – whether forced or contracted –
created optimal conditions for continuity and for the development
of the colonial economy, without, however, guaranteeing the end of
traditional abuses that were conditioned by the colonial political, eco-
nomic and social contexts and by the metropolitan colonial ideology.
However, there were a few bumps along the way.
Two factors heightened the practical instability of the model of native

labour organisation, and demanded new strategies. On the one hand,
the cost of recruiting labour had increased in proportion to the involve-
ment of intermediaries in a market regulated by a public administration
that was itself experiencing recruitment difficulties and budget cuts.
The signatories to a document entitled Representação dos Agricultores e
Comerciantes de S. Tomé à Camara dos Deputados contra o Decreto de 1
de Outubro de 1913 (Representation from the farmers and traders of S.
Thomé to the Chamber of Deputies against the 1 October 1913 decree)
said, among other things, that they were ‘vexed’ by the publication of
the decree because it continued to recognise and to authorise the posi-
tion of recruitment agents and emigration of serviçais. Their extinction
was proposed to the extent that it would at least enable the regulation
of the ‘mercantile speculation’ that was a characteristic of the system of
recruiting native labour and, at the same time, it would ‘considerably’
reduce ‘the price of labour in this province’.34 On the other hand, not
all of the areas covered by the antennae of the many colonial admin-
istrations had an elevated population density and were sources of an
abundant supply of manpower. If it had been any other way, the his-
torical persistence of the razias (raids) would not have made any sense.
The need for manpower for the development in the capitalist sphere
collided with the weaknesses of the colonial administrations and the
merely arterial nature of their reach in the territories. Competition for
native labour resources increased, involving the majority of the colonial
powers. The native was as valuable as the colonial produce in a sys-
tem of trade that was growing irrepressibly. The state and the colonial
administration had to ‘guarantee the necessary labour’ to the settlers in
the same way, according to Ruy Ennes Ulrich, as they had to ‘provide
all the means of protection and support, in order to facilitate the devel-
opment of their businesses and provide them with an advantage over
foreign competition’.35
The existence of a competitive market designed around labour migra-
tion and the conjectural constraints of political nature demanded the
ability of the employers to innovate and to adapt, as well as the need for
closer attention to be paid by the colonial administrations. The estab-
lishment of the Empresa Agrícola de Lugela in Mozambique in 1906,
which was a symbol of the geographical reorientation of the labour mar-
ket in the Portuguese colonies, and in the formation of which Francisco
Mantero played a crucial role, represented an example of the farmers’
response to the lack of serviçais available to the plantation economy in
S. Thomé and Príncipe. The prazos of Milange, Lugela and Lomwe, had
been subcontracted to the Zambezi Company, but, for reasons associ-

ated with accessibility, the presence of the tsetse and the continuing
resistance of the natives, were not advantageous from the agricultural
point of view. The Empresa Agrícola de Lugela exploited their isolation
and the region’s population density by establishing more or less explicit
compulsory recruitment processes, with a view to supplying labour to S.
Thomé. In 1911, the British consul in Mozambique, Reginald Maugham,
visited Lugella and found himself in a once densely populated region
that was now almost empty and in extreme poverty. Maugham had been
sent by Edward Grey to Lourenço Marques with the task of evaluating
the system for recruiting serviçais from Mozambique. The colony of
Mozambique had replaced Angola as the main source of serviçais for S.
Thomé after the denunciation of manpower recruitment from Angola.36
Faced with the fact the governors of the districts were not obliged to
report their involvement in the recruitment of labour to the governor-
general in Lourenço Marques, Maugham communicated to Grey with
reference to the testimony of René Wuilleumier, the British consular
agent in Quelimane.37 On reading Wuilleumier’s description of the
recruitment process, Grey ordered Maugham to go to Quelimane.
Criticising the involvement of the official responsible for emigration
to S. Thomé, Wuilleumier had stressed the involvement of colonial
officials who ought to have been supervising the labour contracts:
payments to the doctors for assessment and certificates of the physical
condition of the natives and the payments to the curators. According
to him, the method of recruitment depended on the offer of small sums
of money and items of clothing to each native who showed willingness
to go to S. Thomé, claiming that this consent represented a signed con-
tract.38 Once contracted, the workers were told to sing in order to deflect
any suspicions and second thoughts.
Making up a reasonable excuse for his journey (hunting), Maugham
took a three-week trip to Lugella. However, the recruitment process
involved trips to the more remote areas in the territory, which were led
by the cipaios. Those who could not prove themselves to be employed
were accused of being vagabonds. The 1875 decree, as well as those
reformulations that followed, were skilfully applied. Maugham’s report
was sent to Edward Grey where it unquestionably became the basis for
the many pressures that continued to be exerted on Portugal, and the
epicentre of which was the model of contracted labour that sustained
the Portuguese colonial economy. Despite the complaints of the plan-
tation owners, the Portuguese colonial administration promoted and
protected – directly or indirectly – their interests.39
On ‘the difficulties to make the natives work’
Unlike what was happening with the European population, in which

the ‘habit of work’ had ‘a long-established heredity’ and was a ‘fatal
consequence of the many needs of civilised men’, the African popula-
tions were frequently described as having deficient ‘faculties for work’
and a reduced ‘productive capacity’, characteristics that were a con-
sequence of the ‘rudimentary’ nature of their ‘needs’. The ‘exuberant
fertility of the tropical zones’ enabled them to feed themselves without
working (‘bananas, bushels of peanuts, sorghum and cassava’) and
provided ‘the doses of alcohol indispensible to drumming and drunk-
enness’. This was the manner in which Sampayo e Mello described the
view that associated the African native with a predisposition to laziness:
a view he did not share. He did not disagree because he saw anything
to the contrary, but rather because it was only to be expected, given the
‘social condition’ of their evolution: ‘If work is an unbreakable chain
welded to human existence by the civilised condition; if work is a habit
that necessity generates and civilisation confirms; if finally as a cause
or as an effect it is inseparably linked to the perfection of the social
condition, how can we reasonably demand the negro savage to work in
the same way as the civilised whites?’ It was by establishing a critical
perspective to Oliveira Martins’s or Lucien Aspe-Fleurimont’s defence of
the regime of compulsory native labour that Sampayo e Mello explained
and concluded his reasoning: ‘We do not want to abruptly impose hab-
its of which they know nothing’, for while compulsory labour offered
immediate advantages, it also had pernicious effects on the ‘social pro-
gress of their people’. The question was above all about the patient and
persistent induction of the native into the way of work that was based
on the creation of new ‘needs’ that force them to accept it. However,
according to Marnoco e Souza, support for redemptive labour had not
yet entered ‘the basic and backward mind of the negro savage. The
negro believes all paid work is slavery’.40
As we have seen, persisting denunciations of the labour regime in the
Portuguese colonies and the urgency of responding to them generated
less scientificc considerations. Based on the unquestioned assumption
that ‘blacks are not friends of work, which they can easily shy away
from because they have no needs’, Freire de Andrade summed up the
efforts made by the colonising powers to overcome their alleged pre-
disposition to idleness, presenting a list of complementary processes
that could promote ‘civilisation’: ‘the taxes’, ‘the repressive vagrancy
laws’, the ‘labour contracts’, the ‘corvée’ and ‘slavery’.41 What was
important in Freire de Andrade’s typology (which was clearly indebted

to the works of Marnoco e Souza and Sampayo e Mello, and in which
‘slavery’ appears to emerge as a first, even if unacceptable, solution
to the natives’ alleged resistance to organised work), is precisely the
articulation of a ‘native’ socio-cultural and psychological representa-
tion. This was based on the analogy of laziness and vagabondage with
a set of models and programmes for the ‘direct or indirect’ socialisation
of labour, and was inserted into an old civilising rhetoric. The abolition
of slavery created new problems that demanded new solutions. Work,
whether forced or not, was transformed into a mechanism for punish-
ing idleness and, therefore, was a mechanism of civilisation. Civilisation
was an obligation and, given the condition of the social evolution of the
native populations, it was also inevitable. This circular logic that had
dominated Portuguese colonial texts and discourses since the end of the
nineteenth century was adequate for the politico-economic demands of
colonisation and enabled the management of external pressures.
In a lengthy and illuminating report published in 1913 as an official
reply to the contents of John H. Harris’s book, Portuguese Slavery: British
Dilemma (1913), but which actually focused on challenging many dif-
ferent accusations, Freire de Andrade, who was director-general of the
colonies at the time, outlined his views in the chapter entitled ‘The dif-
ficulties of getting the natives to work’.42 The recognition that the ‘com-
mercial and industrial interests’ in the colonies required an increase in
the labour productivity of the natives involved a rethink of the forms
of recruitment, organisation and regulation of ‘native labour’. The main
obstacle preventing the implementation of a new model for incorporat-
ing and satisfactorily exploiting ‘native labour’ in the colonial economy
lay in the ‘doubtful capacity and natural inclination’ of the natives to
work. Age-old customs like domestic slavery, which had allowed ‘the
introduction of the slave trade’ in the past ‘with all of its demoralising
effects’, reinforced these tendencies towards ‘laziness, inaction and iner-
tia’ that characterise the native people, and particularly those of Angola:
‘The black of Angola is effectively a savage and one of the lowest on
the scales of civilisation and intelligence’. As far as Freire de Andrade
was concerned, the matter was simple and the main conundrum was
the same as ever: either leave the ‘native to follow his own inclina-
tion, without developing the country’s agriculture and industry, and
therefore not civilise them’, or look ‘to force them, through humane,
just and legal means, to work to benefit themselves and civilisation’.43
It was only through the latter that they would become able to enter the
‘guild of civilisation’.44
Neither Christian propaganda nor religious education had the civilis-

ing virtues of work, insofar as they were not capable of undoing habits
that ‘are rooted in the body and in the spirit’. Freire de Andrade also
added that ‘in the Christian and educated kaffirr of today it is not dif-
ficult to find the savage underneath an artificial layer with which they
attempt to cover themselves’. ‘Disguised on the outside’, he supposedly
believed ‘that he is what he is not’ and assumes to possess ‘rights that
in civilised communities were only achieved and understood in an evo-
lutionary process that took centuries to reach this point’.45 The reply to
this ‘dilemma’ was provided in the ‘opinion of Mr Chamberlain’, British
secretary of state for the colonies, by quoting from a speech he gave in
the House of Commons on 6 May 1898: ‘But with a race of this kind I
doubt very much whether you can do it [induce the natives to work]
merely by preaching. I think that something in the nature of induce-
ment, stimulus, or pressure is absolutely necessary if you are to secure a
result which is desirable in the interests of humanity and civilisation’.46
The recognised ‘methods’ for obtaining native manpower fell into
two types: the direct and the indirect. In the former there were two
possible solutions, one of which looked to the re-establishment of slav-
ery, the other to compulsory labour. At the heart of the latter were the
solutions of the native tax, the repression of vagabondage, the develop-
ment of needs, the regulation of the labour contract (submitted to a
legal framework) and professional education. Despite the fact that direct
methods were clearly understood as unacceptable within the most var-
ied political discourses and national and international legal codes, the
fact is that during the first decade of the twentieth century there were
colonialist groups which assessed re-implantating the slavery system,
which was the fruit of the conjugation of social Darwinist perspectives
with the evident concerns about the lack of native manpower and with
the perceived ineffectiveness of the indirect approach. In face of the
natives’ supposed resistance to work, the rejection of the introduction
on the African continent of the ‘ideas of civilised men on matters of
freedom and equality’ was inevitable, said Aspe-Fleurimont, one of the
authors representing the tendency that called for the reintroduction of
slavery.47
Given the negative nature of the complex of representations projected
on the native people – governed by an evolutionist-type civilisational
rationale which was an argumentative resource serving philanthropic
and humanitarian programmes, and also at the service of retrograde
and racist positions – it would be impossible to justify the propagation
of the beneficent European civilisation ‘with its arsenal of complicated
rules on matters of individual and property law’ and its ‘political, judi-
cial and administrative machinations’. This was not about proposing
the abandonment of the African territories, but rather of ‘opportunisti-
cally’ defending the use of an ‘ages old institution, universal, accepted
by all and that the local authorities are obliged to tolerate, at least
among the natives. It is slavery, a harsh word, but which in truth differs
essentially from what it was before, with its cortege of serfs, of horrors
and cruelties’. The old native institution of domestic slavery would
ensure the success of a return to slavery. Domestic slavery, which was
considered highly advantageous for the chiefs and based on the prac-
tices of ‘mestiços, criminals and natives’ served, on the other hand, to
justify the persistence of slavery in Africa, diverting the responsibility
from the colonial administration and private interests.48 In sum, under
certain circumstances civilisation could depend on the reintroduction
of slavery. Resistance to the instrument par excellence of the civilising
mission – work – determined it.
As well as being viewed as offensive to the morality and the dominant
humanism (but of other kinds of ‘humanism’), the possibility of rein-
troducing slavery prompted a review of the past, particularly focusing
on an evaluation of its economic impact. On the one hand were argu-
ments that stressed that the slavery model was indispensable given the
initial shortages and inadequacies of the means of production. These
arguments stressed that slavery had provided a significant develop-
ment in the volume of wealth extracted from the colonies, as well as
diversifying the production of colonial foodstuffs. As expected, despite
ascertaining the fact that the system of slavery was more expensive,
the defence of the model was based on its providing a flow of available
native labour that would be unattainable if African people’s initiative
alone were relied upon. Slavery, ran the argument, was vital for meeting
the demands of the European presence in the colonies. On the other
hand, there were arguments concerning the social balance in colonial
societies. These denounced the brevity of slavery’s economic benefits
and stressed the perverse effects of this ‘institution’: it formed morally
and economically ‘abnormal societies deprived of all of the elements
of industrial stability, entirely handed over to the production of luxury
goods for export’, leading to intensive exploitation and the subsequent
depletion of the soil.49
The compulsory labour system constituted an alternative for those
who did not have the courage to propose the reintroduction of slavery.
The end was the same: ensuring through coercion the necessary native
manpower to prosecute the colonisers’ programme, whether through
the execution of public works or in respect of the supply of labour to

private companies. There were three types of procedure underpinning
compulsory labour: the corvée, the provision of services and the requisi-
tion. The corvée was based on the principle of the obligation to provide
unpaid service to the community for a length of time that varied from
colony to colony. Strictly speaking, it was a tax that was paid with
work and which was open to many abuses, from the ‘construction of
works that were of no use to either the natives or the settlers’ up to its
use for the profit of individuals. The provision of services and requisi-
tions were similar, and were those most commonly used in Africa, with
the requisition of porters being the most frequent.50 The roots of this
procedure can be found in the affirmation of the need to prevent the
neglect of natives ‘to miserable and reckless idleness, harmful to the
race and ruinous to the colony’. Additionally, if Europeans were subject
to compulsory military service and were ‘morally constrained to work’,
the application of the model of forced native labour left no doubts
about its legitimacy, particularly when directed towards ‘creating within
the natives an intermediate condition somewhere between the fierce
idleness of those who surrender and the free labour regime adopted in
Europe’.51
However, the indirect methods were favoured by the majority of
colonial theorists, to the extent they were considered ‘sufficient to keep
the black from inactivity’ while not implying the dissemination of the
idea among the ‘limited and impressionable [native] spirit’ that work
was a ‘heavy and hateful burden’, ‘an unjust imposition of the domina-
tors’.52 One of the most common indirect methods was the ‘native tax’,
the fairness of which was justified as ‘compensation for the peace and
security’ European domination had brought to the African continent.53
The existence of this tax, which was imposed, for example, as a tax on
huts as a type of property tax, forced the native to work given that the
level of the tax was always disproportionate to the natives’ ability to
pay. Another process commonly applied was, as we have seen, the sup-
pression of vagabondage, the basic purpose of which was to annul the
banana-patch civilisation, to use the expression coined by Paul Reinsch
to summarise the nature of what, as he saw it, was the daily life of the
African people and, more importantly, a possible strategy used by them
to evade the laws on vagrancy. The return to a banana-patch civilisation
was a potential and undesirable consequence of vagrancy laws.54
In 1901, Francisco Mantero called for the application of firm legal
penalties for vagabondage, suggesting the creation of ‘corps of urban
and rural police charged especially with the pursuit of vagrants’ and the
‘establishment of prisons in each council area for incorrigible vagrants,

using them for roadwork and for cleaning’.55 In the reports that testify
to the work of Freire de Andrade’s government in Mozambique, it is
stated that vagabondage could not be seen as a ‘black privilege’, arguing
that ‘the needs of civilisation in the large cities require the most difficult
and terrible effort from the white man, woman and even child superior
to that which is supplicated to and paid, via an enormous salary, to the
African negro’.56 However, for both Sampayo e Mello and Marnoco e
Souza, stamping down on vagabondage brought many problems since
it was a habit based on a ‘secular tradition’ of the African people. This
explained the forms of resistance Africans adopted to its suppression,
extending from the purchase of a small parcel of land (which exempted
them from the law) to fleeing to the regions in which vagabondage
was not subjected to penalties that could be converted to compulsory
labour.57 The need to ‘amputate the natives’ moral weaknesses, such as
their innate indolence and their immobile routine’ suggested the appli-
cation of ‘slow and gradual methods’ that did not violate the ‘native
institutions’.58
The first of these methods was based on the ‘development of the
[natives’] needs’, insofar as the main motive for labour activity was
rooted in the desire to satisfy their ‘physical needs’. While the needs of
the African people were few, the solution was found in ‘complicating’
them, particularly through ‘coexistence with the whites’ and ‘a skilled
and active commercial propaganda’.59 Echoing the rationale promoted
in the 1870s and 1880s, especially in what related to the civilising role
of the civilising stations advocated by many since the Geographical
Conference of 1878, António Almada Negreiros argued, in a mémoire
delivered during the 1900 International Colonial Conference, that the
‘merchant’ was the main agent of the civilising project, a central figure
in a large movement dominated by the intensification of non-military
trade and scientific expeditions, with the clear aim of hastening the
diversification of the native people’s needs.60 Commercial trade was
established as a means of cultural miscegenation and as an instrument
of civilisation, to the extent it warranted the prior assessment of com-
mercial agents and the close control of the contents of the bags of sales-
men travelling through African territories – largely due to the increasing
commercialisation of alcoholic spirits. Also considered was the estab-
lishment of ‘trade missions’ to train and educate ‘colonial merchants’
on how to travel to the African territories (‘while the numerous and
intricate problems of tropical pathology are not yet resolved’) to serve
as mechanisms for civilisation with the specific goal of facilitating the
‘incorporation of the native’. Commerce was, alongside the Catholic

missions, ‘one of the main elements in the spread of our political influ-
ence and for the expansion of our educational processes’.61
Freire de Andrade pointed in a direction that was similar in aims, but
different in means. ‘While the black can wander about half naked or
only wearing rags […] we have neither missionaries nor reasoning to
convince the native to abandon the habits they have acquired through
centuries of practice.’ Sampayo e Mello shared this view, noting that
it was necessary to recognise ‘the benefits – for the increase in trade
and manpower – that resulted from the regulations introduced in
some British colonies that obliged natives to dress in a similar way to
Europeans’.62 In conjunction with professional training, which was a
key measure, albeit with limited resonance, the decree of 18 January
1906 (whose general lines of had been designed by Moreira Júnior) regu-
lating labour contracts ended the repertoire of official efforts aimed at
improving the native labour market. For Freire de Andrade, this measure
was a result of the native people’s ‘rude and childish spirit’.63
The format of colonial education was an inevitable product of the
colonial projects, practices and rhetoric that had emerged since the
end of the nineteenth century. One of its main supports came from
the group of intellectuals linked with the Lisbon Geographical Society’s
African Commission, comprising Luciano Cordeiro, Simões Raposo,
Fernando Pedroso, Adolfo Coelho and Jaime Moniz.64 This group estab-
lished a discourse that was articulated around the universalist principles
of the Enlightenment and dominated by reforming and evolutionary
logics that were applied to the definition of a colonial policy in which
education served as an instrument of civilisation and a vehicle for
understanding African affairs. Nonetheless, this concept had no relation
with native people’s education in colonial situations. Another ideologi-
cal support, that remained aloof from the rhetoric of the pastoral and
humanist proposals, had its main reference in the work of Oliveira
Martins, particularly his book O Brasil e as Colónias Portuguesas (1880).
Strongly framed within the theories of ‘social Darwinism’, of which
Oliveira Martins was one of the main supporters, the central ideas of
this position were based on the political pragmatism that he considered
should govern a renewed programme of colonial reform. This political
pragmatism had one essential aspect: the demystification of the dis-
courses that established a form of romanticism around the Portuguese
colonial question. As António Enes stated, colonial exploitation should
take place ‘without scruples, without preconceptions and without
chimeras’. The colonial policy should, in this sense, assume that the
fundamental essence of colonial relations was the economic develop-

ment of the metropole; in other words, the colonial project should be
governed by the exploitation and profitability of colonial produce and,
as was clear, of its people, especially if duly prepared for the ‘guild of
civilisation’. Besides António Enes, Oliveira Martins’s vision was also
echoed in the works of Eduardo da Costa, Mouzinho de Albuquerque
and Paiva Couceiro. The implications of this colonial pragmatism in
the colonial educational field were clear: ‘The idea of educating negroes
is absurd, not only given History, but also by virtue of the mental
capacities of these inferior races’. However, educating forr and through
work could not be disregarded, being the cornerstone of a pragmatic
colonial policy.65
Educating the bodies and the souls: myths and realities
Within the civilisingg discourses, education forr and through work was
clearly given more value than schooling. The absence of a school net-
work and the infrequent opening times of those few schools which
existed did not imply that ‘the means employed to promote the advance
of the natives’ morality and civilisation are any less effective, because to
this very noble intention are currently devoted a large number of sta-
tions and missionary institutes’. However, other priorities were raised in
the civilisingg programme. ‘The progress of the native by all means that
tend to increase their spiritual culture and modify their savage habits’
and inspiring within them ‘the more salutary principles of civilisa-
tion’ was declared to be an important goal for the Portuguese colonial
administration. Nevertheless, achieving this stated goal depended on
processes other than the creation of a school system, no matter how
limited it was. While not seeking to ensure the ‘moral progress of the
natives’, the ‘material improvements’ competed ‘powerfully in taming
their rudeness’: ‘a railway that penetrated the hinterland is a powerful
beam, the light of which will attract all of those rude and savage men’.
The realisation of these material improvements, the aim of which was
to ‘open new markets to commerce, provide new labour to industry and
extract the most extraordinary of riches from the soil’ were ‘safe meth-
ods’ for civilising the native people. Meanwhile, the natives’ ‘moral
progress’ was left to the missionaries.66
Criticism of the religious civilising methods by those who were
responsible for the administration of the colonies was frequent, reveal-
ing the legacy of the nineteenth-century religious question, particu-
larly when viewed in the colonial context. In fact, since the 1870s
and especially since the 1880s, debates over the desired nature of
Church–state relations within the overall imperial and colonial pro-
jects abounded. The discussions and controversies about the role that
missionaries should play in the process were important examples. The
necessity of missionaries to enhance imperial and colonial expansion-
ism was generally accepted, even in anticlerical circles, in which there
was a clear distinction between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘colonial’ sides
of the problem. The notorious pronouncement of Léon Gambetta –
‘anticlericalism [was] not an article of exportation’ – was embraced by
many in Portugal. The definition of a political role within a missionary
policy prevailed.67 The same happened with the critical views of the
type of missionaries that existed at the time. As a report made by the
Overseas Mission Commission of the Lisbon Geographical Society in
1880 stated, ‘our missionary can at his best be only a priest, but only a
priest […] he baptises and believes to have converted’. What was needed
was to ‘create a missionary, because we really don’t have one’. The avail-
able missionaries voiced a ‘dubious Portuguese’, knew ‘a little bit of
Latin, some theology’, ‘never handled a barometer, a compass, a rifle’.
As importantly, they failed to show a modicum of acquaintance with
industry, science, commerce and modern civilisation.68 More impor-
tantly, they failed to meet the double goal set to them by personalities
such as Barbosa du Bocage, an influential politician of the time: on one
hand, a moral and religious goal, aimed to get the native’s approval; on
the other, a practical, economic one, aimed at the instillation of respect
for the rights of proprietorship and the habit of work.69
Decades later, similar critical assessments were offered regarding the
missionary work and professed means of acculturation. António Enes
clearly stated his reservations in respect of the efficacy of the mis-
sionaries’ methods: ‘they seek to abruptly convert savages into saints,
the feral into martyrs. They imagine education is enough to obliterate
the nature of the race and neutralise the effects of the climate and the
social environment’. The chance of converting them to civilisation
through ‘religious metaphysics’ was minimal. Considered a ‘religion
without dogma, without mystery, without philosophy, without mysti-
cism’, ‘a religion for weak minds and for people with natural customs’,
‘Mohammedanism’ was the model to follow insofar as it was seen as dis-
playing an extreme malleability in its adaptation to the primitive state
of evolution in which the indigenous people were considered to be. As
in the past, the solution for turning the Christian missionary movement
into a powerful aid in the civilising project – including the instillation
of habits of work, of course – meant a reformulation of its contents and
pedagogical methods. ‘Without losing interest in Heaven’, missionar-

ies should put ‘the zeal and abnegation that faith inspires in them at
the service of civilisation’ by promoting ‘national and social interests’.
Unlike the professors, who ‘taught the letter and not the spirit’, the mis-
sionaries should be dignified representatives of Portuguese colonisation
by ‘teaching [the natives] to adore the cross […] and the Portuguese
flag’, using their ‘moral authority’ to strengthen and assist the ‘political
authority’ and adopting a methodology that was ‘less exclusive and reli-
giously inflexible, and more practically civilising’. Enes concluded that
the missionary should adhere to a curriculum driven by ‘religion and by
sociological sciences, by the Church and by the State’, simultaneously
ministering in the interests of the ‘spiritual and the temporal, the sacred
and the profane, the Catholic and the national’.
Eduardo da Costa, another important colonial expert and protago-
nist, summed up the missionary task in the necessary conjugation
of the political and educational dimensions. The missionary priest
should be simultaneously – ‘doctor, farmer, mechanic and primary
school teacher’ – simply because the ‘disgraceful condition of things’ in
Mozambican public instruction demanded strategies that were defined
between the state and the Church. In Enes’s words, ‘the righteous task
of saving souls for God must be reconciled with the training of bodies
for work’, rescuing the natives from the supposedly terrible moral and
social condition in which they had lived since the beginning of time,
and turning them into productive forces in the colonisers’ enterprise.
According to him, this was so because the native docility indicated the
plasticity of character. It was necessary to permanently reinforce native
education: ‘if they receive the [educational] imprint with the softness
of wax, they will reject it with the elasticity of rubber’. The discipline of
work would ensure that this goal would be met.70
One of the aspects frequently commented upon, from António Enes
and Mouzinho de Albuquerque to Freire de Andrade, was the problem of
competition between the missionaries. The large number of Protestant
missions in Angola and Mozambique was believed to be prejudicial and
its effects adverse to the nationalisingg proposals of the Portuguese colo-
nial complex; the re-emergence of arguments mobilised at the start of
competition between missionaries in Africa during the second half of
the nineteenth century, to which there is a reference in the beginning of
this book. Hence, the importance attributed to the Portuguese language
as a crucial factor in the nationalisingg civilisation. Referring to the matter
of Protestant missions, Freire de Andrade stated that the wish to prevent
them from spreading was inconsequential, leaving the responsibility
to establish a cooperation agreement to the colonial administration,

imposing a series of obligations upon them, supervising their activi-
ties in order to limit the chances they had of contributing towards the
denationalisation of the souls of those who had been colonised. The
regulation of native education in foreign missions was introduced in
1907. One of the clauses in the cooperation agreement imposed upon
them the obligation to use the Portuguese language. This in no way
meant the emergence of a purely literary education or training, or that
it resulted in a significant improvement in the field of either official or
religious education in the African territories under Portuguese jurisdic-
tion. Education should have a very practical and instrumental dimen-
sion, in which teaching in the Portuguese language had to be a priority,
along with training of a specific art and craft. It should also be directed
towards training native bodies for work.71
On 25 December 1908, a group of Mozambique natives linked to
the African Guild (Grémio Africano) of Lourenço Marques published
a journal titled O Africano, and subtitled Propaganda Issue in Favour of
Education. The Grémio Africano comprised a group of educated mulat-
tos and blacks who decided to challenge the discriminatory practices
of the Portuguese colonial administration. Including those who had
received a Catholic education (and who spoke Portuguese) and those
who had been educated by Protestant missionaries (and who generally
spoke English or Ronga), this native association was responsible for the
publication of O Africano, which only published one issue, and, follow-
ing an interregnum of around ten years, of Brado Africano.72 Bilingual
(Portuguese and Landim), the only issue of O Africano was dedicated
exclusively to the indignation of a native people that was tired of ‘the
yoke of those who we believed able to civilise’. According to the pub-
lication’s editors, nothing had been done in exchange for their ‘sub-
mission’. ‘Not roads, not wells, not workshops, not schools!’ Only the
‘white wine for the blacks and the complete, absolute, unchallenged,
freedom to get the abominably drunkness sister of dementia’.73
The declared objective of this indignation was the construction of a
‘school in which they will teach the children – the men of tomorrow –
the truth about the horrors of addiction’. ‘Humanity is not for prayers’,
it was stated, with the intention of denouncing the insufficiency of
the missionaries’ methods in the current circumstances. At the heart
of this consideration was the fact that the exercise of missionary activi-
ties was being implemented using local dialects and not the Portuguese
language. The creation of a school for teaching Portuguese would allow
the ‘diversion of the flow of adepts from the missions’ to the state. It
was also viewed as essential for natives to be allowed to enter the public
administration.74 Just as happened with English in the British colonies,
Portuguese was the language of colonial domination and should be the
language of upward social mobility for Mozambican natives.75
Years before, in 1901, in Angola, a set of eleven texts was published
in Voz d’Angola clamando no deserto, written by anonymous filhos do país
(sons of the country) against a piece published in the newspaper Gazeta
de Loanda on 26 March 1901 (‘Contra lei, pela grey’), which echoed a
traditional racialised conception of the colonial society and advocated
discrimination based on racial stereotyping. As usual, for instance, indo-
lence was promoted as being a natural characteristic of the natives that
should be punished. In reply, following a tradition of protest already
dominating the Farol do Povo (a local publication of the 1880s), Voz
d’Angola clamando no deserto strongly attacked the policies for educating
and training the native people, defending the black man’s moral nobil-
ity and challenging the accusations of indolence and predisposition to
laziness to which the native people were subjected, and which were
used to defend the idea of the redemptive labour.76
The generalised official disinterest on the problematic matter of edu-
cation in Africa showed some signs of changing in 1910 – at least within
the body of administrative and legal texts – just as Sampayo e Mello
published his book Política Indígena. Back in 1901, in the aftermath of
the First National Colonial Conference, António Cabreira had attacked
the fact that native education in the colonies had not been debated,
which was incomprehensible given that it was one of the two crucial
axes for the moral and economic progress of the Portuguese colonies;
the other being metropolitan colonial instruction, especially for admin-
istrative posts.77 Sampayo e Mello’s book contained an ambitious reform
programme grounded in the transformation of Portuguese colonial
activity. Its principle goal comprised criticism of the evolutionary and
racial preconceptions identified above. Native colonial instruction was
fundamental for the development of the colonial enterprise. At the
same time, Sampayo e Mello rejected the calls for equality and equity
that ignored the social and cultural characteristics of the native people.
In this double rejection, Sampayo e Mello supported the functional
importance of native education for the successful development of colo-
nial policy, and proposed the preparation of a programme to organise
education, to be applied along with the plans for the economic develop-
ment of each colony.
Colonisation was the necessary result of the coming together of
‘a great many influential inputs’, among which were the religious
missions and the primary schools that were regarded as being on the
same level as ease of communication, supervision of native labour
and material development. While the economic factors were the ‘fuel
for social evolution’, the ‘progressive activities exercised in the moral
field’ were ‘active cells in the evolving super-organism’. The missions,
powerful ‘lubricants’ of the moral progress of the ‘native soul’, were
thought absolutely necessary for the ‘psychological evolution […] and
the cleansing of consciences’, but should, in order for lay education to
function, exceed ‘mere proselytism’ and extend their activities to the
‘secular domain, driven always by the motive for the expansion of the
territory and nation to which it belongs’. For Sampayo e Mello it was
important to devise an ambitious and rational policy of selection and
education of missionaries and teachers, adjusted to the socio-cultural
and ethnic characteristics of the natives and to the more pressing needs
of each colony.
In the 1880s the idea was to create a ‘geographer-missionary’, an
ideal-type of a modern, politically conscious and scientific mission-
ary. Decades later, the purpose was similar. For Sampayo e Mello the
recruitment and instruction of missionaries and teachers should move
in modern directions. It should be a policy that could neutralise the
‘pseudo-scientific arguments’ that postulate the natives’ inferior phy-
sique and intellect. Like Marnoco e Souza years before, he supported his
position by referring to examples of ‘eminent American scientists’, such
as Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. On the other hand, in an aspect
that is crucial for understanding what was to happen during the 1930s
and 1940s, Sampayo e Mello suggested that the activities of missionar-
ies should be subsidised and supported by the state, in a collaboration
that would create the conditions for a future transition: the movement
towards a widespread public, primary and technical (of secondary
level), education would be based on already existing structures, that is
the tried and tested activities of the missions. This would not entail the
disappearance of the missions, as some colonial theorists, such as Leroy
Beaulieu, had sought. Sampayo e Mello summarised: ‘by educating the
metropole, we become respectable; by educating the natives of the colo-
nial territories, we become respected’.78
However, despite the constant and repeated declaration of principles,
and of strategicc changes, to the ‘civilising mission’ doctrine, colonial
education in the African territories remained undeveloped in practice.
One example lay in the creation of official and lay civilising missions
in 1913 (Decree 233, 22 November), which sought to promote and
spread the Portuguese language, educate farmers and labourers and
disseminate principles of hygiene and of moral and material decency

among the natives of the Portuguese colonies.79 To ensure there was
no emergence of ‘pseudo-educated and pseudo-civilised blacks’, as
Norton de Matos was to write later, a native education policy was fol-
lowed, the purpose of which was to ‘create workers and artisans, with
qualifications adequate for the needs of the regions’, dividing it between
education designed for women (which stressed home economics)
and education designed for men (which promoted manual labour).80 In
1917, the College of Overseas Missions (Colégio das Missões Ultramarinas)
was converted into the Colonial Missions Institute (Instituto das Missões
Coloniais), with the task of providing human resources to the civilis-
ing missions. Four years later, faced with a shortage of missionaries in
Portuguese Africa, the College of the Mission of Secular Priests (Colégio
das Missões dos Padres Seculares) was established in Tomar. The field of
missionary work was only one more example of the widespread scarcity
of resources in the colonial context.81
The School Inspectorate for the Province of Mozambique was cre-
ated in 1919. The inspectors of primary education were to prepare
annual reports on the general condition of primary education. The first
inspector was J. V. Solipa Norte, an important personality in Lourenço
Marques and a prominent advocate of the Republican political project.
His report found serious weaknesses in colonial education in the African
context. The first conclusion he drew from his inspection concerned
the non-existence of a census of the school and infant population
in the province and the absence of any general statistics concerning
education. The chaotic state of the education’s administrative services
was highlighted by the facts that the inspector did not have access to
a ‘typewriter […] with a complete keyboard’ on which he could draft
confidential documents and there was no registration of teachers. The
second aspect noted by the inspector concerned his evaluation of the
pedagogic impact in the province’s schools. With respect to reading,
Solipa Norte was peremptory: ‘This discipline is, in general, very far
behind’. The majority of pupils did not understand the meaning of
the lines they were asked to read – not even the simplest sentences.
Moreover, some teachers admitted that they had never provided such
instruction. Spelling, writing and arithmetic were in the same condi-
tion as reading. Not complying with the timetable, without any proper
hygiene provision, the lack or poor condition of school furniture,
school failure, the apathy of teachers, in sum an impressive list of defi-
ciencies at the schools visited was mentioned by the inspectors. If the
basic aim of primary school education in Mozambique, ‘a land surveyed
and invaded by agents of denationalisation’, was the transmission

of the patriotic values and of the nation’s historical greatness, Solipa
Norte concluded that the only activity that conformed to this legal
obligation was the raising of the national flag, which was done in only
‘two schools’.
As a result of his inspections he was able to state that in Mozambique
‘primary education’ ‘almost’ did not exist. The civilising and educating
missions stalled with the lack of structural conditions that characterised
primary education. Not even the ‘workshop-schools of ‘general-profes-
sional-agricultural’ primary education attenuated the diagnosis: there
were supposedly ‘153 schools with the pompous title of technical, pro-
fessional, agricultural primaries, the majority of which were impossible
to monitor or know with any precision where they are’. The evaluation
of the ‘ability’ and quality of the teachers completed this black report
on the reality of education designed for the native people. It would be
necessary to form a group of ‘worker-teachers, charged with attending
to the body and spirit of a worthy race’. Only then would it be possible
to raise ‘high, full of light and prestige, the heroic name of Portugal’.82
While the colonial education projects and their programmatic princi-
ples (political, moral, economic, legislative) abounded under the sign of
exhaustive repetition, both in respect of the education of settlers and
of the education of natives, the truth is that the reality and the results
of public instruction in the Portuguese colonies had not undergone any
significant change.
In 1924, José Santa Rita took this fact and stated that the most press-
ing colonial issues, from the economy to public administration and
education, had been sufficiently ‘addressed and debated by competent
specialists’, but that ‘there was a failure in putting the theory into
practice’. The consensus over the inappropriate nature of ‘assimilatory
and purely literary instruction’ and the need to invest in workshops for
the bodies did not produce any palpable results on the ground.83 The
Boletim Económico e Estatístico de Moçambique of 1928 contained a docu-
ment titled ‘Esboço histórico e estatístico da instrução na colónia de
Moçambique’ (Historical and statistical overview of education in the
Mozambique colony), which was written by Lieutenant Mário Costa
and which had received an award from the Permanent Commission for
Statistics.84
This document was presented by António Barradas, a scholar, medical
doctor and teacher of geography and history at the 5 October Lyceum
in Lourenço Marques. Although we do not know if António Barradas
was a member of the commission’s assessment jury or whether he
occupied any position within the Central Statistics Office, it is curious

to note that he launched some criticisms of the presented work. Firstly,
he noted that any work of a historical nature that examines education
in Mozambique could only be a summary analysis of primary educa-
tion, since ‘secondary education in Mozambique has not yet existed a
dozen years’. On the other hand, citing the example of the residential
school of João de Deus da Namacha, it notes that ‘specialised train-
ing’ (arts and crafts, commerce, posts and telegraphs, surveying) was
precarious, and only ‘domestic instruction’ was classified as useful and
consistent. Associated with this last point, the author noted the need to
organise education in Mozambique. If the establishment of the General-
Directorate for Education by the High Commissioner, Brito Camacho,
in 1921 provided ‘a glimmer of hope’, it had vanished by 1922.
Returning to Solipa Norte’s report, Lieutenant Mário Costa repeated
the claim that in 1919 there were 153 schools in the colony. Barradas
disputed this figure quite vehemently: ‘There are not two dozen schools
worthy of the name. The rest are simply huts in which some almost
illiterate natives teach other natives the Our Father and pretend to
teach them how to scribble and spell four words’. Continuing, Barradas
claimed that this mistaken projection counted huts in which were
taught ‘verses from the Qur’an’ and schools from which the pupils
leave speaking ‘Arabic, Landim and perhaps English’, but not a word of
Portuguese. He concluded by stating that ‘the use of the arms and the
minds of the Africans, the valorisation of native human capital through
the schools, is a problem that has not even been put into the equation
in Mozambique. And it is no trivial task: it is enough to think there are
around 700,000 children to teach’. In other words, not even education
forr work was a palpable reality. Mário Costa finished his critique with a
sentence worth recording: ‘today it is not only necessary to have peo-
ple to inspectt the schools. We need to have someone to come up with
a plan for education that can be applied to the colony’.85 Regardless of
the disagreements, Mário Costa confirmed Barradas’s interpretation,
claiming that whoever looked at the graphics showing the evolution of
native colonial education would arrive at the conclusion that there had
been ‘progress’; however, he quickly added that ‘turtles also walk’. The
same complaints and criticisms were made about the precarious status
and incompetence of the ‘missionaries of literacy’, about the lack of a
school infrastructure, about the similarity between the books used in
the colonies and in the metropole and about the disorganisation of the
official administrative bodies that were responsible for ensuring compli-
ance with the law. To all of this was added the fact that in 1924 there
were around 105 schools, ‘huts or otherwise’, belonging to foreign mis-

sions, in which the teachers barely spoke a word of Portuguese and did
not have ‘love for Portugal’.86
In 1926, João Belo, then minister of the colonies, closed the lay civi-
lising missions and the Colonial Missions Institute, concentrating the
entire education programme in the hands of the Portuguese Catholic
missions. That year, the Organic Statute for the Portuguese Catholic
Missions in Africa and Timor (Estatuto Orgânico das Missões Católicas
Portuguesas de África e Timor) (Decree 12 485, 13 October) was pub-
lished. Its preamble stated that around 8,500,000 ‘souls’ inhabited the
Portuguese colonial territories. It was necessary to civilise and nation-
alise these ‘millions of human beings’, ‘to bring them out of the sav-
agery in which a majority find themselves and into a progressive social
state’, providing them with the ‘moral and material advantages of a
well-formed family’, of agriculture, commerce and industry. The exten-
sion of the military occupation, the expansion of the administrative
machinery, the growth of the road and rail networks, the development
of maritime and fluvial navigation, the promotion of settlement and
trade and the fragile expansion of education services were not sufficient
reasons to pour the benefits of civilisation and nationalisation on the
native people. Such a task could only be realised through the Catholic
missions. This institutional retreat by the state from the task of educat-
ing the colonial populations not only solved the problem of its appar-
ent uninterest or incapacity to establish an official education system, it
also enabled a response to the many foreign missions that were moving
into Portugal’s African territories. ‘Protected by powerful societies’ with
the ability to mobilise resources that were incomparably superior to
those of the Portuguese nation, the foreign missions were accused of
serving ‘interests that were opposed to our rights’ and being in the pay
of European and North American institutions, providing material for
the ‘many publications and speeches full of rumours against Portugal’.
Their supposed anti-national effect created a demand that the authori-
ties step up their efforts to control those putative threats, which was
even more important in the wake of the disaster that was the Law of
Separation of Church and State (1911) and the establishment of lay
civilising missions that had encouraged the growth of foreign missions
in Portuguese territory.87
The general programme of the national missions was to ‘promote the
interests of the Portuguese colonial empire and to encourage its moral,
intellectual and material progress’. To achieve this, it was necessary
to articulate three essential elements in the programmatic content of
native education and training. The first was the obligation to teach the
Portuguese language, which could be done, provisionally, through the
use of the ‘native language’. The second was the need to develop agri-
cultural and fishing training, technical and professional training and
domestic skills, with which the native could gradually improve ‘their
rudimentary and primitive working practices’. The third concerned the
need to pass on knowledge of sanitation to the natives, and to provide
the necessary assistance through the establishment of hospitals, nursing
homes and crèches. It was all to be achieved according to the inviola-
ble principle of ‘dignifying through work’. The education of souls was
formally placed in the hands of the missions, although the education
of the bodies remained the priority. This fact was not lost on the many
transnational humanitarian and philanthropic bodies, both religious
and laic, that continued to monitor and assess the models of education
and labour that were in operation in the Portuguese colonies.88
Part II
Colonialism without Borders
4
Bibles, Flags and Transnational
Loyalties: Educating Empires
In the vanguard of civilisation: exporting educational

philanthropy to Africa
As we saw in Part I of this study, reflections on possible models of native

labour organisation, woven into the comparison of different colonis-
ing experiences and in the circulation of printed material throughout
the colonies (colonisation manuals, proceedings of colonial confer-
ences, comparative colonial law annuals, official publications from the
Institut Colonial International [ICI]1), always dominated the formula-
tion of Portuguese colonialism’s civilising intentions. The evolution and
refinement of the manner in which the matter of native labour in the
Portuguese colonies was approached and managed, through an abun-
dance of legislation that was always marked by its emphasis on the edu-
cation of bodies to work as thee instruments of civilisation, was not enough
to calm, silence or contain the strong criticisms which could not be kept
within the borders of colonial sovereignty could not contain. The multi-
national, multi-racial and pluri-denominational nature of the humanitar-
ian and missionary groups, which were driven by eminently global and
supra-imperial perspectives, frequently clashed with the logics of exercis-
ing colonial sovereignty. The Bible did not always follow the flag, and
missionaries’ activities often tended towards transnational cooperation.2
The emergence of the Protestant missionary interests’ coordinat-
ing institutional bodies dates from the end of the eighteenth century.
These experienced a significant growth during the second half of the
nineteenth century, focusing on the establishment of a corpus of peda-
gogical and bibliographical references that could be used in the exercise
of their missionary work and, later on, in the development of the infra-
structural conditions that would enable them to train and disperse their
109
missionaries. The creation of the Baptist Missionary Society in 1792 and

the Church Missionary Society in 1799, both of which made use of the
developing commercial channels and of the expansion of British territo-
ries, were examples of the overseas spread of reformist religious faiths.3
Following the two sporadic international meetings (in London and
New York in 1854), the 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh
marked – together with the creation in 1921 of the International
Missionary Council (IMC), whose general-secretary was J. H. Oldham –
the inception of an international and transnational strategy for coop-
eration between missions.4
One of the principal goals of this strategy was the redefinition of the
modi operandi of trade in Africa, affecting not only networks for the
commercialisation of native labour (especially those which retained
vestiges of slavery), but also those responsible for the plantation econ-
omy, which were thought to represent a backward social order. These
evangelists believed in a free labour model and in a regulated trade
that would encourage the joint development of the mother countries
and the colonial territories they occupied, which did not prevent them
from being viewed as the tribunes populi of the colonial administrations.
They did not generally oppose the colonial phenomenon, to the extent
that it represented an excellent way for the expansion of missions and
was a condition that made the ‘civilising mission’ possible; however,
their expansionist motives were principally based on theological fac-
tors and as spokespeople for the African population their activities were
often inconvenient to local interests. As Oldham said in 1920, ‘for the
Christian, nationality is not the ultimate loyalty. His ultimate allegiance
is to Christian fellowship’.5 The problem of freedom of evangelisation
was, of course, a central issue. An important report was prepared by
Abbé Livingston Warnshuis, to be discussed at the IMC meeting in
Oxford in 1923, which included an analysis of the circumstances in
Angola and Mozambique regarding state–missions relations, rights of
evangelisation and education.6
Another of the essential aspects of the missionary projects was
the need to unleash a vast process for educating the African people.
This could contribute decisively towards their spiritual and social
elevation and reposition them within the hierarchy of colonial social
relations. The limited number of institutions for educating natives on
the African continent was an undeniable fact that demanded bringing
together considerable human and material resources capable of over-
coming, among other things, the deeply rooted systems of representa-
tion that weighed over the social and individual characteristics of the
Bibles, Flags and Transnational Loyalties 111
native people. However, the need to place education within the ‘civilis-
ing’ project was anchored in the mobilisation of a whole repertoire of
stereotypes that allegedly characterised the African people (although
from a less deterministic viewpoint) and accepted, without question,
the imperial trusteeship paradigm as a guarantor of the civilising goals
of the British colonial enterprise, both in economic (exploitation of
resources) and assistance (the well-being of the native) terms. This
would eventually culminate in Frederick Lugard’s dual mandate doc-
trine. The language and foundations of racial hierarchy theories had
been appropriated and effortlessly accommodated into the contem-
porary imperialist paradigms of obligation and inevitability. The only
difference was in the greater emphasis the matter of education received
in the promotion of a programme of paternalist development in the
colonial context, the models for which originated in the United States.7
Under the active leadership of Booker T. Washington and with the col-
laboration of Robert E. Park, the International Conference on the Negro
took place in 1912 in Tuskegee, Alabama, at the Tuskegee Institute,
which was one of the most important black education institutes in the
United States.8 The main conclusions of this meeting pointed towards
the need to spread the American experience of educating its black com-
munities to Africa.9 That same year, the Phelps-Stokes Fund, based in
New York, funded a survey into the condition of Negro education in
the United States that was to serve as a reference for later surveys into
the conditions of education in Africa.10 Also in 1912, J. H. Oldham
visited the Tuskegee Institute and was convinced of the obligation to
transfer its principles and educational models to Africa, especially to
British Africa. The Phelps-Stokes Fund survey, conducted by Thomas
Jesse Jones, a professor at the Hampton Institute from 1902 to 1909,
was published in 1917 with the title Negro Education. Its main finding,
which was soon to be transposed to colonial Africa, was that Negro
education had to focus essentially on industrial and agricultural train-
ing, and that literary education should be disregarded. The vocational
education proposed by Booker T. Washington should be given priority,
provoking a persistent split between those who were most concerned
with the education of the blacks, led by Booker T. Washington, Jesse
Jones and W. E. B. DuBois.11
In 1919, the American Baptist Foreign Missionary Society decided to
begin a process that was to lead to the realisation of a survey into the
state of education in Africa. As expected, the Phelps-Stokes Fund was
asked to organise the survey through its African Education Commission,
headed by Thomas Jesse Jones.12 According to the introduction by
Anson Phelps Stokes, director of the fund’s Educational Committee,

Jesse Jones was chosen because of his experience as director of the
Hampton Institute, ‘the oldest and probably most successful of schools
for American negroes’, and because of his collaboration with the US
government’s Bureau of Education, the activities of which focused on
analysing the behaviour of ‘racial groups’. A recipient of the University
of Columbia’s Grant Squires Prize for his book Negro Education, Jesse
Jones, who was a sociologist at that university, showed growing signs of
concern for the fate and well-being of that community, and this cou-
pled with his academic prestige justified his selection to lead this exer-
cise. In 1922, the Phelps-Stokes Fund published a voluminous report on
‘Education in Africa’ which was sent to the head offices of American
and British Protestant missions, with ramifications in Africa.13
The report was split into two parts. The first consisted of general
considerations on the African continent, its people, their customs and
traditions, which were reconciled with the precepts of an educational
programme for Africa. The second part contained detailed reports on
Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, the British dominions of South
Africa, Angola, Belgian Congo and Liberia, and was full of images that
were suggestive of the African social context and maps that displayed
the colonial divisions. This report, as its introduction explained, was
intended, as an information manual able to serve as an indispensable
reference source, for all those ‘interested in improving the status of
the Natives of Africa’. Identifying and describing their ‘educational
conditions and needs’ – excluding the native people of North Africa,
on account of the ‘dominance of Mohammedanism’ which rendered
‘the problem of education under Christian auspices a very different
and difficult one’; and those of East Africa, for lack of means – was
determined a priority at the 1919 vote and signed by the administrators
of the Phelps-Stokes Fund. It set out a reply to the systematic requests
from the representatives of many North American missionary societies,
including the American Baptist Foreign Mission –which, through its
secretary James Henry Franklin, formulated a concrete response that
was to launch the entire process – and the American Baptist Foreign
Missionary Society, which had been operating in Luanda since 1885.
One of the principles which governed the preparation of this journey
and rendered it rather like an ethnographic expedition, centred as much
on the settlers as on the natives, was the cooperation of the Protestant
missionary organisations. Some colonial officials intervened in the pro-
cess, notably the High Commissioner for Angola, Norton de Matos, who
offered all necessary assistance. Passing through a truly international
network of missionary organisations, Jesse Jones undertook his prelimi-

nary journey in April and May 1920, a trip that served to coordinate
all stages of the itinerary which was both evangelically and scientifically
prospective, and would be taken by the appointed commission. In addi-
tion to the report’s editor, the commission was made up of six people:
a translator from the Fanti tribe (‘Gold Coast, West Africa’), schooled
at the English Wesleyan Mission School (‘Cape Coast Castle’) and who
had received a degree in economy and sociology in the United States;
a missionary medical doctor who had graduated from the University of
Iowa and who had served at the American Board in Angola for a long
time; a married couple who were missionaries within the United Free
Church of Scotland, who represented the British missionary societies
and brought the ‘best educational and religious influences of Scotland’;
the secretary of the commission, appointed by virtue of having been a
‘government supervisor of technical training of coloured soldiers in a
number of Negro schools’; and, finally, a minister from the American
Board in Angola who eventually quitted from the position. The expedi-
tion began on 25 August 1920, the date they left Liverpool for Africa,
where they arrived in Sierra Leone on 4 September. It ended in Belgian
Congo on 2 August 1921. Their time in Angola, where they spent much
time at Lobito Bay, lasted from 27 January to 10 March 1921, although
the leader of the expedition left Luanda on 2 February.
The findings of the mission, which were published in part in the
Church Missionary Review w (the most widely circulated and prestigious
journal in the English-speaking missionary world), described the
‘methodology’ used in the preparation and execution of this philan-
thropic programme, emphasising both the ethnographic and scientific
contours: mobilising ‘methods’, collecting data and ‘facts’, both in
the preparatory phase and during the actual ‘field work’, surveying
‘population’ categories and drawing ‘conclusions’. From an extensive
preliminary study carried out in the United Kingdom and the United
States, through publications ‘carefully collected so that there might be
behind all investigations a solid phalanx of facts’, contacts were estab-
lished with a variety of institutional human resources (administrators,
directors of educational bodies, of medical services, of public works, of
agriculture and of the prison system), as well as formal meetings and
conferences with ‘chambers of commerce’ and with ‘representatives’ of
the economic world. At the same time, they sought to promote within
‘each section of the community’ a degree of ‘sympathy’ for the cause
of education and to establish ‘intimate relations with many varying
African groups’: ‘the educated and the uneducated, the barrister; the
clerk, the preacher, the teacher, the farmer, the blacksmith, and the
fisherman; the women and the girls, in the homes and the schools’. To
the African native were dedicated the most exuberant words of gratitude
‘for the sincerity of their welcome’, in a list that represented in fact the
unequivocal existence of a network of civilising interests that crossed
and went beyond precise political units, regime types, religious forma-
tions and socio-professional standards, even if sometimes blessed with
a remarkable nationalist spirit, especially during international conflicts.
According to the African Education Commission, the results were
assessed by two senior ‘Gold Coast’ officials, and specially by the intense
and diffuse circulation of preliminary recommendations and reports to
governments and missionary committees, that were translated into
French and formed the basis for a series of conferences in the United
Kingdom, the United States, Belgium and France. At the same time, a
number of ‘African educators’ were invited to the United States; but
the list of invitees did not include any Portuguese ‘educator’. Words of
heartfelt admiration were dedicated to the missionaries, who were ‘the
advance agents of civilisation’: the members of the African Education
Commission did not see a ‘hopeful future for Africa unless the forces of
Christian education’ were ‘greatly strengthened’. In an almost perfect
copy of his Negro Education, Jesse Jones’s report stressed the need to
favour an industrial and agricultural education that was adapted to the
socio-economic situation of each colony and its respective native popu-
lation, beginning with the split between education for the upper levels
and for the African masses.14
In the case of Portugal, the Jesse Jones Commission was highly critical
of the conditions of native education in Angola, mirroring the evalua-
tions which Solipa Norte, António Barradas, Mário Costa and the edi-
tors of O Africano had made in relation to Mozambique. The lack and
inadequacy of school services was the report’s first conclusion, which
was followed by the finding that the few exceptions that existed were
the result of missionary efforts. Belying the traditional physiological,
psychological and sociological classifications that positioned Angolan
natives on the primitive level of civilisation’s evolution, the commis-
sion went on to criticise the statistics about their numbers and geo-
graphical distribution. The colonial administration’s lack of interest
was reinforced by the observation that there existed no translations of
the ‘Bible, religious books, elementary text books, and pamphlets of
practical advice on health and other subjects’, unlike in the main
missions – in other words, the foreign missions. The colony’s overall
progress was not in proportion to the centuries of control the Portuguese
government and its colonial administration had exercised over it, given
that the development of the native people was assessed to have been
diminutive and insignificant. The failure of the immigration policy
resulted in many concessions being granted to the settlers, who ended
up with more power than the official representatives, as was proved
by the ‘unfortunate methods practiced by employers to obtain cheap
labour’. The commission was advised of, and directly witnessed, many
irregularities: ‘Many clear instances of irregularities in the methods
of obtaining labor were brought to the attention of the Commission,
and some very striking irregularities were observed by members of the
Commission’. These methods were seen ‘as generally recognized to
be not only morally but economically unsound, and they have been
accordingly condemned in international practice’. In the field of edu-
cation alone, the inability of the colonial authorities to implement a
programme of civilising emancipation through education was undeni-
able, and the difficulties they caused the foreign missions were incom-
prehensible. The obligation to use the Portuguese language within the
missions (a fact that was considered to violate ‘international policy’),
the need to submit the civilising programme to the governor-general,
and the requirement to submit an annual report of their progress were
the aspects upon which Jesse Jones’s report focused. Nevertheless, the
report praised the work of the missionaries; work that was often carried
out under adverse conditions and with the ‘lack of food and depopula-
tion of the districts through disease and pressure for labor’. Basically,
the commission’s recommendations were exactly the same as those
which had been made since the beginning of the century, and which
had dominated the speeches and legislation on the education of the
native people in the Portuguese colonies. However, as usual, there was
an abysmal distance between these words and the colonial reality.15
In his diary, Jesse Jones movingly described one of the moments in
which he was confronted with local realities regarding forced labour.
Henry S. Hollenbeck, a doctor and missionary of the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions in Angola, was visited by twenty
young men at the mission and Jesse Jones was able to get some informa-
tion about their living conditions: ‘their story was filled with pathos’,
he wrote. ‘Soldiers’ had taken them from their village. The ‘company’
for which ‘they were working provided neither clothes nor money
with which to obtain clothing’; they only received ‘a certain amount
of rice and a pitifully small sum of money to buy fish’. As a result, they
declared themselves to be ‘continuously hungry’. Despite having been
‘turned over to a large shipping concern as contract labour’, ‘they had
made no agreements, signed no papers, and knew not how long they
were to serve, nor the conditions of service’. These were ‘black young
men clothed in rough sack-cloth, tied by the chains of selfishness, sub-
jected to conditions in many respects worse than that of slavery’. They
‘worked long hours, often carrying heavy loads’, and in case they com-
plained ‘they were subjected to severe punishment’. It was ‘difficult to
imagine social or economic conditions […] more subversive for the pro-
gress and the prosperity of the colony’. In a letter to Joseph H. Oldham,
he concluded that ‘the situation in the Portuguese colonies is by no
means favourable’. He recognised Norton de Matos’s efforts to ‘the
general improvement of Angola’ but the existence of ‘unwise policies
in dealing with labour’ was unquestionable and should be transmitted
to the Portuguese colonial administration without hesitation, seizing
the opportunity provided by the welcoming posture demonstrated by
Norton de Matos.16
As noted briefly above, Norton de Matos was of great help to the
Phelps-Stokes educational enterprise. To J. H. Oldham he declared his
willingness to establish ‘intimate co-operation’ with the ‘civilising
societies, Portuguese and Foreign, religious or lay’, as this was the ‘only
method of developing as rapidly as possible the education of the native
races’ of Angola. Jesse Jones recognised this and, despite testimonies
such as the ones mentioned above, praised some aspects of the colony.
The hospitals surpassed ‘all that we have seen on this tour’ and the ‘use
of cattle for agricultural purposes and transport’ should be replicated by
‘all’ other colonies: the commission he presided over would ‘take pleas-
ure in observing all the favourable phases of colonial development in
Angola’. Notwithstanding his appreciation, Jesse Jones mentioned some
aspects that should be carefully considered by the Portuguese authori-
ties. First, following the Belgian model, a commission focused on the
assessment of ‘all the conditions that relate to the welfare of the [colo-
nial] people’ should be created. What motivated this recommendation
was the evaluation of ‘the unfortunate influence of certain methods of
obtaining labour’, especially ‘on the products of the educational efforts
in the interior’. Jesse Jones used the case of the twenty young men
reported above to exemplify his point of view. Alongside humanitar-
ian reasons, contemporary doctrines advised a different approach: the
promotion of a ‘healthful, prosperous rural area’ was a declared aim of
‘economists and sanitarians the world over at the present’, he noted.
Second, he emphasised the need to encourage the teaching of hygiene
and sanitation, and the creation of a ‘strong department of health’
within the colonial administration. Finally, as expected, he advised
Norton de Matos to explore the relation between ‘education’ and

‘industrial and agricultural needs of people’, a matter in which ‘British
and American societies’ and the ‘philanthropic fund’ he represented
were interested and expert.
Of course, Jesse Jones was willing to collaborate with Norton de
Matos’s reformist drive, and in several letters he offered plenty of ‘rec-
ommendations’. ‘Co-operation’ was the ‘fundamental policy’ of the
Phelps-Stokes Fund. In April 1921 he re-stated his readiness to do so,
but he also reproduced a letter, ‘personal and unofficial’, in which the
labour conditions in Angola were denounced as critical: ‘conditions are
very unsettled because of the acute labour situation […] The gloom that
has fallen upon the Natives is pathetic’. As important, the letter pointed
to ‘open persecution of adherents of the Missions by Government
officials’. Again, Jesse Jones repeated the need to constitute a commis-
sion to deal with native policies, which should involve Catholic and
Protestant missionaries, representatives of ‘commercial concerns’, and
government officials. A. L. Warnshuis of the IMC made the same sug-
gestion: the Belgian Royal Commission on Native Affairs should be
replicated in Angola and other colonial territories.17
Simultaneously, important local actors such as John T. Tucker were
also pleased with Norton de Matos’s declared aims and projected poli-
cies. In August 1921, Tucker wrote that ‘we are greatly pleased at the
new turn in affairs in Angola under Norton de Matos’. A few months
later, he declared that the high-commissioner had a ‘most praiseworthy
courage’ and was ‘determined to make a clean sweep of the old abuses’.
Local evangelical forces were also interested in improving the forms
of cooperation with the government, forming a common front – the
Angola Missions Conference – with the ‘sole purpose of evangelizing
and educating the black’. The topics debated in the first meeting, from
the work of native evangelists to the use of local dialects and the mili-
tary recruitment of natives (with a view to exempt those with a modi-
cum of education in missions schools), were communicated to Norton
de Matos as a sign of appreciation and as a proof of their willingness to
cooperate. But, as we will continue to see, the real issue rested not on
the numerous ‘humanitarian’ legal codes, decrees, or policies promoted
by the Portuguese authorities.18
Years later Jesse Jones met Frederick Lugard. The former conqueror
of Uganda, a central figure in the ICI and for thirteen years the British
representative on the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League
of Nations, Lugard was one of the main theorists of colonial admin-
istration, particularly in relation to the specification of the double
nature of international mandates over tropical territories. The mandates

conferred ‘responsibility before the international community for the
clearance and civilising of the land in the interest and for the benefit of
all nations’ and, on the other hand, imposed the duty to promote and
increase the ‘well-being’ and ‘progress’ of the native people. His work
provided an illuminating example of the way in which an evolution-
ist reasoning, which was no longer merely involved in procedures of
biological classification and ordering but also entailed cultural analysis,
was able to coordinate colonial and imperial programmes. His contribu-
tion reveals, nonetheless, a crucial aspect for the understanding of a less
linear view of the operations to classify the native people organically,
insofar as this order derived from an appreciation of their typological
diversity, with the criteria being the complexity of their social organisa-
tion. By splitting the indigenous people of that part of tropical Africa
under British rule into three groups (primitive tribes, advanced com-
munities and Europeanised Africans), as he did in The Dual Mandate in
British Tropical Africa, Lugard made the exercise of colonial administra-
tion more complex and segmented the tactics of domination and legiti-
mised, so to speak, the entire colonial enterprise through its scientific
accommodation with the heterogeneity of the people to be civilised.
The deconstruction of the ‘indigenous’ category thus supported, in a
manner that at the time was considered progressive, the perfecting of
colonialism’s global strategy, which was visible, for example, in the
cooption of the native elites and in the establishment of a progressively
indirect administration.19
Lugard was appointed the official advisor to the Committee on
Education in Tropical Africa by the Duke of Devonshire, secretary of
state for the British colonies. This committee was established following
a conference on the progress of education in Africa, which took place in
the Colonial Office in June 1923. Jesse Jones was among those present
at this conference. The constitution of this committee was a result of
the recognition, on the part of the British colonial administrations, of
the hegemony the Christian missions exercised in respect of the educa-
tion of the native people and came about in the wake of Jesse Jones’s
report.20 Both the philosophyy of international mandates and its double
organic specification placed the education of the respective populations
at the centre of its main objectives. Based on a network of philanthropic,
missionary, political and scientific interests, the committee brought
together figures such as Joseph H. Oldham (Jesse Jones declined an invi-
tation to head the committee), as well as several missionaries (including
Catholics) and scholars of the question of education. This committee of
‘specialists’ was organised in several subcommittees – which focused on

themes such as ‘Professor Huxley’s proposals for a biological education
in East Africa’, ‘Religious education in official schools’ and ‘Education
for local authorities’ – and collaborated in the preparation of the 1925
White Book, Educational Policy in British Tropical Africa, sponsored by the
crucial Advisory Committee on Native Education.21
The projection of the central educational principles of international
mandates and the obvious debt to the principles advocated by Booker
T. Washington were clear: ‘Education must be adapted to the mentality,
the aptitudes, the occupations and the traditions of the various peoples,
conserving as far as possible all sound and healthy elements of the
fabric of their social life’. Despite the different points of view, the com-
mittee’s final report represented a compromise between the British state
and the philanthropic and missionary sectors in relation to the impor-
tance of native education, while also unifying the views on either side
of the Atlantic. Jesse Jones’s report seemed to promote the ‘rebirth’ of
education in Africa and was, simultaneously, appropriated by the British
state as a means of consolidating the dominant colonial paradigm. The
philanthropic and missionary sector’s defence of industrial and agricul-
tural training was welcomed by all those who were struggling with the
problem of organising a labour system within the colonial situation.22
Despite references to the lack of resources contained in Jones’s
first report, which resulted from the exclusion of East Africa from
the programme to investigate the educational reality in the African
colonies, the Phelps-Stokes Fund supported a second African Education
Commission to extend the programme to include South Africa, Central
and East Africa. In the introduction to this report, Anson Phelps Stokes
said that the main questions that were of concern to humanity, such
as the globalisation of the economy, the epidemics (of ‘illness’ or of
‘Bolshevism’) and armed conflicts, could only be controlled by ‘modern
science’ and by an enlightened ‘public opinion’. Civilisation’s general
tendencies could be transformed and its progress accelerated by the
conscientious leadership of many agencies such as government, trade,
religion and, of course, education. The commission’s contribution
focused on the two final pillars of a reformist and progressive pro-
gramme. Cooperation between states, the regulation and liberalisation
of the native labour system that sustained colonial trade (and putting
an end to its exploitation, which was considered to be particularly
evident in the Portuguese colonies), spreading the word of God in asso-
ciation with higher social concerns and the intransigent and necessary
education of the native people, all constituted the general precepts
that directed this programme. The educational postulates mobilised

in this introduction did not differ from those which had directed the
first report and governed the majority of colonial discourses on this
subject. The institutions that supported both reports’ preparation, and
the people who prepared them, were the same. The predominance of
Protestant missionaries and of people associated with philanthropic
and humanitarian institutes remained evident. Transnational loyalties
continued to prevail.23
As with Jesse Jones’s first report, this document greatly exceeded the
traditional format of official reports, in that it contained an analysis of
the geographical, social and economic framework in the colonies and
a short explanation of the history of colonial occupation. The report’s
first sentence is enlightening in respect of the committee’s assessment
of the condition of native education in Mozambique and of the state of
the colonial administration, which in all aspects mirrors what had been
said about Angola: the colony’s general problems, specifically those
related to education, were seen to be without possible ‘resolution’. The
administrative division of the colony, portrayed as a strange and confus-
ing distribution of political and geographical districts, and the weakness
of the central administration prevented the development of a universal,
coherent education policy. This fact had subsequent repercussions for
the application of public programmes. The example given was that of
the massive native emigration to the attractive ‘opportunities’ offered in
the South African mines. Another factor that was mentioned concerned
the ineffectiveness of colonial legislation, particularly that relating to
education. Quoting one anonymous ‘Portuguese student of administra-
tion’, the commission registered the disorganisation, and contradic-
tory nature, of legislation on education. Laws abounded but a country
with ‘40,000 laws’ is one ‘without law’. This profusion of codifying
memorandums, fraught with inconsistencies and contradictions, was
interpreted as being extremely convenient for those who used the ambi-
guities and failures of the laws in order to impose their own interests
and interpretations. As happened in Angola, the statistical services came
in for strong criticism. The same was also true in respect of native educa-
tion, reinforcing the idea that despite the colonial administration’s clear
lack of interest in providing this, it would not permit the educational
services of the missions to function instead. The biggest obstacle lay in
the numerous ‘interpretations’ that emerged in the analysis of the law.
The commission concluded, with some sarcasm, that it was important
that the Portuguese officials understand that the celebration of the
glorious past was not enough to solve the actual problems of the time.
These were apparently without resolution such was the disorder in the
Portuguese colony of Mozambique.24 Regarding Angola, some addi-
tional notes were inserted in the 1925 volume. The hopeful expecta-
tions of 1921, essentially related to a positive appreciation of Norton de
Matos’s statesmanship, were now abandoned. Matos had resigned and
the absence was highlighted of a ‘substantial guarantee that the princi-
ples of sound economics, sound sociology and sound education will be
effectively applied in the colonial reorganization absolutely essential to
the future of the Colony and its people’.25
Considered together, the documents and events we have analysed,
along with such events as the creation of the International Institute of
African Languages (IIAL) in 1926 – which was closely associated with
missionary interests26 – clearly revealed a movement towards the desire
to learn about Africa and the customs and traditions of its people; in more
simple terms, it entailed the internationalisation of African affairs. As
we can see in the first issue of the journal Africa, the IIAL journal that
was issued in 1928 with the aim of publishing the results and conclu-
sions of African studies, the general objective was not only to ‘educate’
the Africans, but to educate the rest of the world about Africa.27 On
the other hand, these documents can be viewed as products associated
with the emergence of philanthropic and humanitarian associations
that focused on the regeneration of the social fabric and on the integra-
tion of ethnic minorities, which had an increasingly transnational and
international nature and reach. The central concern that coordinated
and motivated each phase of this civilising programme articulated itself
with the progressive legacy that emerged in the United States at the
end of the nineteenth century. Regardless of the precise meaning of this
progressivism, whether understood as a socio-cultural worldview devoid
of independence in the ideological plan and as a social movement, as a
defined set of moral and humanitarian intentions or as a consistent pro-
gramme of political and social reform, what was clearly the most crucial
aim was the emergence of a social movement whose main concerns
were the effects modernisation and industrialisation had on American
society, which were soon to be exported around the world.28
Spreading the social gospel: missionaries, educators and

social scientists
Moved by an obvious belief in the ability to transform social structures

and the possibility of regulating their inequalities, this progressive
movement emphasised, as a general guideline, the need for order and
social stability, the cornerstone of which was constituted by the state

and the governing institutions. It is possible to discern two distinct
reformist and programmatic axes within it. The first of these concerned
a set of organisational models and procedures through which society
should operate. The main aims of the movement’s programme were the
spread of scientific rationalism through society, the adoption of models
and procedures based on the rigour of the scientific method even in the
simplest social activities, and the establishment of a bureaucracy com-
posed of specialists and technocrats. As the representatives of pragma-
tism William James and Charles S. Peirce argued, modern society should
be governed by the systematic test of scientific investigation, and not
by moral principles and ideals. From Thorstein Veblen and Richard
Ely to Edward A. Ross and Lester Frank Ward, this set of programmatic
principles gained the support of a wide network of social scientists and
produced an endless series of new scientific applications relating to
industrial organisations (e.g. Fordism) and the organisation of labour
(e.g. Taylorism). It was necessary to form groups of specialists who could
push forward the new principles of scientific management and deal
with the technical and technological developments that revolutionised
production. The industrial complex required new technical skills and
demanded an infrastructure of specialised and professionalised services.
In the educational field, John Dewey, one of the most important intel-
lectuals in the United States at that time, called for a more flexible, crea-
tive and democratic approach to the education process, one that was
guided by an education that was based on practical knowledge. Edward
A. Ross, an eminent sociologist, was admired by many educationalists
for having created the concept of ‘social efficiency’, which sought to
establish conditions for a more objective identification of the most
appropriate function or occupation that any individual should fulfil
in the complex, highly specialised and industrialised modern societies.
He came to be admired by colonial educators when he associated the
principles of ‘social efficiency’ with the principles of the paradigm of
cultural and social evolution.29
The second reformist axis focused on social and humanitarian
reforms, incorporating some of progressive technocracy’s principles,
and sharing its characteristic glorification of science and its usual
organisation. This tendency’s favoured laboratory was the immigrant
ghettoes, which had grown enormously during the last decades of the
nineteenth century. The appearance of detailed reports and enlighten-
ing images of the living conditions of those who inhabited New York’s
immigrant neighbourhoods, such as Jacob Riis’s 1890 classic How the
Other Half Lives, awakened public interest in the least favoured classes.
A number of shelters run by volunteers opened up (women played an
important role, which marked a crucial period in the diversification of
women’s social roles and the beginning of a period of active participa-
tion in social matters) with the aim of acclimatising immigrant families
to their new surroundings. Another important aspect of this process
was the appearance of social service as a profession. Universities such as
Chicago began to include specialised ‘social service’ courses that were
designed to complement bureaucratic progressivism, scientific investi-
gation and the mobilisation of specialists in efficient organisations. The
fruit of changes in the social base of pressure groups calling for pro-
found political and social reforms in American society, the progressivist
movements spread their activities across a wide range of social nuclei,
from manufacturing and social service organisations (such as the shel-
ter homes), civil leagues, commercial and professional associations, to
organisations that concentrated on achieving a radical transformation
of social law. The epithet ‘social progressivism’ derives precisely from
that group of progressivist reformists who specialised in reforming the
administration and social legislation, with this being one of the areas of
activity that was most attractive to social scientists who were anxious
to see their scientificc analyses of social problems codified in law, in a
complex and unstable jockeying for position with groups with specific
interests.30
With respect to the educational programme, the second reformist
axis, which had its roots in the legacy of Darwinism, without, however,
naturalising and reifying its conclusions (that is, substituting the idea
that the least favoured classes and groups were so because of either
genetic or moral dispositions associated with the belief in the influence
of social environment on individual development), focused on the
establishment of standards of social behaviour for each ethnic group,
with particular attention paid to the black minorities. These were sorted
according to their social development and progression and, based on a
series of scientificc and sociological tests, a formula determining a suitable
educational programme for each of these communities or groups was
found. Méthodes Américaines d’Éducation Générale et Technique (1908),
the seminal work by Omer Buyse, the prolific author of works focusing
on technical-professional education, included a chapter entitled ‘The
education of a race: instruction for backward races’, which contained an
entirely new educational pedagogy establishing technical instruction as
the most appropriate for ‘backwards races’. This not only confirmed and
exemplified the materialisation of the progressive principles in matters
of education (it was no accident the book was applauded by the French
minister of commerce), but also represented an example of how the
experiences of social reform had been circulated internationally. The
models of education which followed in the United States at that time,
guided by the ‘individualisation of instruction […] and the development
of each person’s faculties and capabilities’, entailed a bet on ‘teaching
in laboratories and teaching crafts’. Learning by doingg dominated reflec-
tions on the democratisation of education and clearly had powerful
repercussions in the education projects designed for the American black
communities. Omer Buyse visited the Hampton Institute and concluded
that ‘the experiments the Americans are carrying out in the education
of the backward races must serve as a model for those states with colo-
nies of subjects or citizens with black blood’. This visit was the source of
the chapter on l’éducation d’une race. This same work appeared as one of
the pedagogical references in the pages that Freire de Andrade, governor
of Mozambique, dedicated to education in the colony of Mozambique
in his voluminous report. It is easy to understand why.31
‘Adaptation is universally approved; far from universally practised’,
was the motto for the superior designs of a racial and social philan-
thropy. The essential problem stemmed from the methods of ‘develop-
ing such types of education’ as were ‘best fitted to meet the needs of
backward peoples’. Gone were the days when the ‘old thesis’ dominated
with its belief that ‘a curriculum well suited to the needs of a group on
a given scale of civilization in one country is necessarily the best for
other groups on a different level of advancement in another country or
section’. This was the mistake ‘made by New England’, by not under-
standing that ‘agricultural and industrial training, under Christian
auspices, proved to be the best type of education for the majority of
the freedmen’. This was the thesis defended by Jesse Jones, following
Booker T. Washington.32 This approach emerged in March 1866, with
the creation of the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where Thomas Jesse
Jones lectured. The Hampton Institute was created to educate freed
slaves, and its programmes combined the rigours of military discipline
with religious ritual, teaching elementary classes in grammar and arith-
metic (to which were later added lessons in philosophy and ‘moral
science’) and offering specialised courses in agriculture, home econom-
ics, carpentry and typography. The first person to head the institute
was Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a strong believer in the discipline of
the Protestant work ethic, whose firm leadership was stamped on the
daily life of the institute. The problem of race relations in American
society was to be solved through ‘a practical Christian sociology’. In
1892, in a letter to Robert Ogden, supporter of the institute, Armstrong

argued that the ‘kingdom of heaven’ would only arrive ‘through sociol-
ogy well studied and applied wisely’. The institute was funded by the
American Missionary Society and a number of private philanthropists,
like George Foster Peabody, a New York financier and mentor of the
Peabody Education Fund (1867). The success this programme achieved
in training specialised labour turned the institute into a model that was
emulated throughout the United States and across the world.33
The first institute created on the Hampton model was established in
Tuskegee, Alabama in 1881. Its first director was Booker T. Washington,
who had entered Hampton in 1872 and graduated with honours.
Washington is thought to be the twentieth century’s most important
black leader after Martin Luther King. An intransigent defender of prac-
tical and applied Christianity, of the work ethic and of education for
work, Washington, who was born a slave in Virginia, recognised that the
upward social mobility of the black race depended upon its collective
effort to improve its condition, which meant attending school, learning
a trade and receiving a solid grounding in agricultural and commercial
activities. He claimed that no race contributing to the world markets
could be ostracised. By unleashing an attack on the black clergy, whom
he accused of too frequently presenting negative images of the agricul-
tural labour he valued, Washington was able to obtain enough money
to fund the Phelps Hall Bible School, which would apply the principles
of a practical Christianity strongly guided by rural activities. Edward A.
Ross was one of the most avid supporters of this emancipatory strategy:
‘It is now recognized that not churches alone will lift the black race;
not schools; not contact with the whites; not even industry […] But all
of these cooperating can do it’. Only close cooperation could function
as the moralising and civilising incentives to inculcate ‘new and higher
wants’ and to provide technical skills to the ‘idle, quarrelling, sensual
Afro-American’. Despite the support of distinguished social scientists
and senior officials within the Protestant Churches, Washington’s pro-
posals (and those of his follower Jesse Jones) were strongly criticised,
particularly by W. E. B. Du Bois, as already mentioned, given the fact
that they were perceived as encouraging Afro-Americans to come to
an accommodation with the established and evolving segregationist
system. Nevertheless, the general thoughts of these two activists had
shaped new approaches on the physiological, moral and intellectual
characteristics of black individuals.34
In Portugal, Sampayo e Mello appropriated their work in order to
counter the evolutionist tradition of Oliveira Martins, and to support
the need to institute programmes for educating the native population

in the Portuguese colonies. Marnoco e Souza did likewise in order to
sustain the possibility of developing the natives’ moral condition by
providing them with an education that was in accordance with their
psychological traits. While they did not directly quote the two American
activists, both Sampayo e Mello and Marnoco e Souza cited their works
in their footnotes. As we saw above, the views of both Washington and
Jones fitted perfectly into the equation that sought the perfect, instru-
mental balance between work and civilisation.35
While the social service professionals represented the combination
of humanitarian concerns with an excessive belief in organisation and
technical knowledge, another type of urban reformer emphasised reli-
gion’s social demands. In Georgia in 1896, a rural community of white
Christians published Social Gospel, a journal that supported their desire
to construct a school modelled on Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.
This title came to name a movement within American Christianity that
was characterised by a ‘fresh application of the insights of the Christian
faith to pressing problems of the social order’, which soon became a cru-
cial theme among religious reformers and in the progressive discourses
in American society at the turn of the century. The interpretation of the
Social Gospel as a socio-religious movement has been the subject of sev-
eral historiographical analyses. The most controversial points relate to
the racial interests of the prophets of American social Christianity and
to the explanatory origins of the emergence of the Social Gospel. What
was at issue in both cases was the consideration of the Social Gospel as
a movement for either religious reform or social reform with a degree of
autonomy and coherence that was capable of distinguishing it from the
multiplicity of reformist movements that had existed within American
society’s progressive movement since the end of the nineteenth century.
On the one hand, the Social Gospel was defined as a response to the
social problems resulting from the urbanisation and industrialisation of
American society; a response embodied in the formation of a discursive
corpus mainly focused on social justice. On the other hand, its origins
are identified within the religious camp. The latter’s extreme fragmen-
tation had resulted in the emergence of many voluntary associations
which were linked to domestic missions. These turned Social Gospel
into little more than a localised proclamation that had little to do with
religious values and beliefs. The same was true in relation to the racial
concerns that characterised it. It was accused of racial myopia, along the
lines of criticism Du Bois had levelled at Washington and Jesse Jones;
and it was also accused of an historical myopia that, in its obsession
with establishing a degree of homogeneity within the movement and

a relative consensus on racial matters, disregarded the testimonies of
such crucial figures within the movement as Josiah Strong and even
Washington.36
While it was not a central element in the global reformist movement,
the Social Gospel provided a powerful moral stamp to the efforts of the
progressivists as they continued their work in America’s major cities,
going beyond the religious field and implanting it within the economic,
political and social forces of American society. An 1898 novel by Charles
Monroe Sheldon, In His Steps, which tells the story of a young priest
who leaves the rural interior to work closely with the poor of Chicago,
was a best seller and became the most important novel of the period.
Those who read it defined it as the application of the overall message
of Christian salvation in society, in economic life and in the social
institutions, at collective and individual levels, establishing Christian
faith as the main support for social reform, recovering and consciously
moving away from the Darwinist legacy. The doctrine reflected evolu-
tionary themes of religious faith, as noted by Walter Rauschenbusch,
a Protestant theologian who was a methodical publicist of the Social
Gospel.37
The theological and ideological determinants were clearly accompa-
nied by an unquestioned public social dimension. The Social Gospel
was not an organised movement; rather, it was a powerful network of
movements operating in different political, social and economic con-
texts. This network, while mainly focusing on reformist activity within
the nation’s borders, did not neglect the need to spread its programme
internationally. The leading advocate of this need for the movement
to internationalise was Josiah Strong, an ardent proponent of a racial
assimilation with strong religious traits which attracted many accusa-
tions of disguised racism. As far as Strong was concerned, the supporters
of the Social Gospel had to understand that the reform of the American
nation was only one stage of international reform and, since the nations
are mere tools of God’s historical drama, it was precisely the American
nation that should lead this global redemption. In an ingenious com-
bination of spiritualism and globalism, Strong believed that the United
States, guided by the Christian ethics defined by the prophets of the
Social Gospel, would bring a ‘universal consciousness’ to a world char-
acterised by a novel ‘political and economic interdependency’. In short,
he was defining the ‘imperialism of righteousness’, which could easily
turn into a defence of the ‘righteousness of imperialism’. It was not long
before Strong’s theology of racial relations, guided by the myth of the
Anglo-Saxon civilising mission and of its inevitable triumph, came in

for some very heavy criticism.38
The Social Gospel had been formed in association with the theories of
moral and social ascension and with programmes for socialising recent
immigrants and more established racial groups. It also represented the
evangelical and liberating appropriation of a discipline yet to be fully
accepted within the inflexible levels of the academically rooted hierar-
chy of knowledge: sociology. In 1902, Carroll D. Wright, a distinguished
statistician, representative of the American Bureau of Labour and a
doctor of sociology, encouraged an audience of clerics to allow their
sermons to ‘ be in the light of actual sociological science’. The message
was understood, moreover, as it had been in leading institutions such
as Hampton and Tuskegee, and Protestant theological schools redefined
their programmes and joined with religious and voluntary associations
working in the field.39
They began applying the techniques of social surveys as an essential
method for obtaining a realistic impression of the religious and social
needs of specific neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the large cities.
In 1889 – under the scientific supervision of the sociologist Graham
Taylor, who was to become one of the most important sociologists to
embrace the Social Gospel and who in 1900 published the Syllabus of
Biblical Sociologyy – the Connecticut Bible Society conducted the first
ever socio-religious survey in the United States. In 1902 the Handbook
of Population and Religion in New York Cityy was published, the result of
the largest religious survey carried out in America, sponsored since 1897
by the Federation of Churches and Christian Workers in New York City.
The Handbook condensed an impressive sociological database of the
housing, nationalities, races, religious preferences, public infrastruc-
ture and such places of entertainment (or, as the Connecticut survey
described them, ‘destructive forces’) as saloons. As a consequence of
initiatives such as this, the religious institutions were recognised as a
powerful source of service and public social assistance. In 1907, an issue
of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science was
entitled ‘The Social Work of the Church’.40
As a result, American sociology was profoundly influenced by the
ideas of the Social Gospel. For example, Robert Ezra Park, one of the
central figures of American sociology at the beginning of the twentieth
century (who, along with Edward A. Ross, introduced the ideas of prag-
matism) and author of Race and Culture (1950), started showing interest
in the question of race in America after the establishment of a work rela-
tionship with Booker T. Washington (for instance, collaborating in his
1912 The Man Farthest Down), after the participation at the International
Conference on the Negro (Tuskegee, 1912), where he offered the key-
note lecture. From their coeval membership in the American Congo
Reform Association, focused on denouncing the violent malpractices
of King Leopold’s imperial project, to the scientific analysis of the racial
issue in the United States and elsewhere, the relationship between Park
and Washington proved to be a fruitful one at many levels.41
The articulation of these secular and religious orientations, domi-
nated by ‘science as induction from observed facts’ and focused on
the promotion of a social reform that was based on the accumulation
of statistical data on social problems, gave American sociology –and
the social sciences in general – an eminently empirical stamp, without
neglecting moral and ethical concerns. Modern-day social sciences have
their origins in the need each national state had to regulate and admin-
ister the social consequences of capitalist industrialisation, whether
through governmental or private institutions. The historical configura-
tion of the interrelations between national political organisations and
social structures is closely associated with the development of new sys-
tems of ideas emerging from the scientific arena or from political and
moral ideologies.42
The development of secular evangelism programmes and ideologies
in the United States was closely associated with the development of a
state university system at the end of the nineteenth century.43 Framing
the concerns centred on the democratisation of culture, in the nation-
alisation (or Americanisation) of the groups of urban immigrants, in
the constant pastoral rhetoric (moral and spiritual elevation) and in
the material development of the rural communities, these programmes
were dominated by a profane Protestantism which based its salvation
projects on the belief that, as with work, university education was a
divine instrument to create a better world. Similarly, the state was seen
as an equally powerful tool for achieving a ‘Christian brotherhood’ and
was conceived of as having a ‘spiritual quality’. At the centre of this
view, sociology was considered the fundamental body of knowledge.
The constitutional obstruction to the aspirations of promoting this
‘Protestant social science’, the cornerstone of a state dominated by
ecclesiastical principles, eventually resulted in the secularisation of all
these principles. Moreover, this conception led the academic Richard T.
Ely, who headed the American Economic Association in 1885 and was
a leading advocate of the Social Gospel, to support the alteration of the
First Amendment to the US Constitution and argue that the Church,
seen as the most important of the country’s social forces, should be
associated with the movement of ‘revolt against the laissez faire theory’.
Along with scientific management, the Church should function as a
brake both on laissez-faire passivity and on collectivist idealism. This
constitutional principle led to the transformation of faith in the Social
Gospel into a secularised form of civil religion.44
The main characteristic of liberal Protestantism, as its critics labelled
it, was based in the minimisation of the supernatural and dogmatic
aspects of Christianity and in the consequent defence of a return to the
Gospels, guided by the enhancement of the value of the simplicity of
the messages, in what was a clear attack on the elaborate sacraments
and the hierarchical system that characterised the ecclesiastical edifice.
Like the modernist movement within the Roman Catholic Church,
liberal Protestantism represented the need to adapt education and reli-
gious practice to the new developments in historical knowledge and
modern science (Freudian and Jungian psychology, the reflections on
nature and meaningg of history of Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee and
Benedetto Croce) and, in a sense, began to be associated with the idea
of progress.45
At the epicentre of this large ideological movement that incorporated
and united university institutions, state government policies (social
integration policies) and sociological scientific formulations, as well
as many religious and socio-professional groups, were such important
figures in early American sociology as Charles Horton Cooley of the
University of Michigan, and the above-mentioned Edward Alsworth
Ross of the University of Wisconsin. In fact, these writers and their
writings represented the union of the models of a Social Gospel with
reforms inspired by Christianity, seeking its institutionalisation and
dissemination through the state’s administrative system; that is, the
combination sought to extend its pragmatic principles via an institu-
tional territorialisation that was based on the rationalisation of a wholly
renewed social order.46
To achieve this there was nothing better than consolidating these
principles in the bureaucratic administration of the state through the
academic institutes that are necessarily associated with the idea of
‘social service’, where the technicians – or rather the preachers –who
would soften up the social fabric were to be trained. The creation of
the League of Nations was, moreover, seen as the maximum expression
of this intention to spread Christianity’s social and political principles,
particularly in the idealistic and ‘socialist’ variant of the Anglican com-
munity, as represented by Charles Gore.47 It is not difficult to surmise
that the central question originated in an appreciation of the idea of
social control, which Edward Ross believed to constitute a crucial new

sociological breakthrough that he had discovered.48
Ross personified this operation, through which was conferred socio-
logical – or scientificc – legitimacy to the popular and collectivist progres-
sive ideology (the supremacy of social values over individual values),
supported in evolutionary precepts which had a solid religious basis.
In his view, the social idea had been perfectly and radiantly formulated
in the Gospels. In this movement of indoctrination that marked a new
division of the work of salvation –which could not be delayed given that
the migratory flows increased the presence of disparate ethnic groups –
the confluence between scientific endeavour and religion prevailed. A
particular religious ethic, in which the social scientist assumed the role
of the preacher, predominated. Here we are presented with a curious
contradiction: while, on the one hand, Ross and the ideological milieu
(social and religious) he represented argued for a popular version of
evangelical and civilising redemption; on the other, he conceived race
and ethnicity as social marks of predestination; that is, unalterable signs
of a particular state of social grace. This last view produced an image of
a ‘Teutonic’ America that was resistant to Chinese, Japanese, Italian,
Greek and Jewish immigration.49
In contrast to this view, other historians in this field, who are more
interested in his strictly sociological contribution, state that Edward
Ross did not demonstrate a religiously rooted aspiration for social equal-
ity that motivated social evangelists like Richard T. Ely or Albion Small,
for instance. He was essentially promoting a specific ‘liberal individual-
ism’. However, the emphasis Ross attributed to the need to appreciate
the rural communities, similar to the attitude expressed by Ferdinand
Tönnies – where the possibilities of exercising effective social control
became greater and the mechanisms for doing so more concentrated –
showed that the focus on individuals and on their individual action
(individual ‘grace’) was the result of a previous and much wider concern
for the (re)formation and consolidation of a social grace that, while not
implying equality, entailed the implementation of a programme that
would limit diversity.50
This wave of ‘Protestantisation’ of the state carried the legacy of
an analytical sociology which focused on Charles Cooley’s ‘primary
groups’ and on family unit, taken as the main moral deposit and the
basic unit of labour (the small social units were also seen to be compel-
ling bases for the establishment of a ‘science of society’), into which it
introduced Calvinist principles in which the restricted notion of social
grace prevailed both from the ethnic and the racial point of view. In
fact, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and eugenics were all present in the

works of Edward Ross, as is shown in his description of some people as
incapable of being ‘assimilated’, a designation he applied to ‘Asians’,
‘East European Jews’ and ‘Italians’ who were not, therefore, included
in the Social Gospel programmes of moral and social redemption and
regeneration. As for eugenics, he actively encouraged birth control
among the ‘lower classes’, who were seen as incapable of regeneration.
One example of his eugenic beliefs lay in his successive warnings about
the high birth rate among the ‘Negroes’ in the southern United States,
which Ross believed would diminish the ‘character’ of white Americans.
The ‘stability of character’ was considered the ‘chief moral trait of a
winning race’, and supremacy could not be maintained in the absence
of ‘pride of blood and an uncompromising attitude towards the lower
races’. The fact that he was the origin of the expression ‘race suicide’ is
significant enough.51
The failure to control immigration was the worst mistake the US gov-
ernment had made, according to Ross. His reasoning was not only based
on a supposed essential ‘inferiority’, but rather in the fact that these
populations had not been familiarised with the ‘language’ and ‘insti-
tutions’. This explained their political and economic ‘exploitation’,
which had to be avoided at all cost. The success that, according to Ross,
characterised the assimilation capacity of the immigrants rested on the
series of exceptional ‘social principles’ that governed American life:
tolerance, individualism, love of progress, liberalism in the concession
of the right to vote and insistence upon educating the young. However,
these principles had to be limited and subject to rational and rationed
application. His proposals for controlling the possibility of conflicts
between nations and within the United States began with the argu-
ment that a discriminatory policy should be enforced ‘at the ports of
arrival’, preventing entry to all those who showed ‘intellectual’, ‘moral’
or ‘cultural’ deficiencies that were sufficiently obvious and which would
preclude a full understanding of their civic rights and duties. He added
that Americans already had a racial problem, and that they did not need
another. It was therefore necessary to tighten immigration policy while
simultaneously strengthening the social integration and social control
policies according to rational and pragmatic models that were adapted
to the needs of the various social strata without forgetting the racial
variable.52
Nevertheless, the implications of Ross’s religious-scientific worldview
on the analysis of the American racial problem were much more tem-
perate. At the University of Wisconsin, Ross, John R. Commons and
Richard H. Edwards sought to challenge the popular racial assumptions

that existed within American society, both of those who advocated the
continuation of the colour-bar and of those who dominated the reform-
ist movement. Edwards organised meetings where social questions were
discussed in the light of Christian faith and social sciences. As result of
these public reflections, and under the direction of Ross and Commons,
Edwards published a series of manuals for civic associations which
addressed such matters as the need to control the sale of alcoholic
beverages, poverty, immigration, the ethics of work and of economic
activity and the ‘Negro question’. The general conclusions said much
about this group in Wisconsin: ‘the most fruitful emphasis does not
seem to be upon political rights and agitation for social equality, on
the one hand, or upon white rule as such and imputations of Negro
inferiority on the other’, wrote Richard H. Edwards. In his ‘The causes
of race superiority’, which was published in the Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science in 1901, Ross simultaneously
questioned the ‘equality fallacy’ and the Darwinian ‘counter fallacy’,
restating arguments in ‘Social Darwinism’, which was published in the
American Journal of Sociology in March 1907. The analysis of these ques-
tions should take place under the lens of the principles of tolerance,
justice, social interdependence and the need for self-control, which
were disseminated and administered by a whole range of religious and
secular groups, through faith and education.53
The relationship between Social Gospel and a liberating sociology,
dominated by a kind of populist approach and which, as we have seen,
was extremely limited as a result of racial proscriptions, was finally
replaced at the time of the Great Depression. In its place, and in tune
with the spirit of the times, emerged a wholly secular ‘technical-scien-
tific salvation’ that was based on the glorification of the statistical and
quantitative potential of the sociological science and separated from
an idealistic social philosophy, while retaining the moral and ethical
elements. Departing from a strident form of populism, Ross came to
advocate a numerical scientism, always carrying a sociological manual
under his arm. The novelty was to abandon the mere critical exhor-
tations made by social scientists and to demand active mentors and
protagonists.54
5
New Methods, Old Conclusions:
The Ross Report
‘Colonisers par excellence’
‘It seems that the League of Nations’ slavery commission will be meet-
ing shortly […] Our African colonies continue to be the main topic of
discussion as a result of unfounded accusations that Portugal is tired of
destroying, demonstrating, by all means available, that its legislation on
native labour and on assistance is one of the most perfect known.’ With
these words, Ernesto de Vasconcelos, admiral and ‘permanent secretary’
of the Lisbon Geographical Society, anticipated one of the most impor-
tant events in Portuguese political life during the 1920s, one that was
to unleash a torrent of questions about the importance of the colonial
project, its past, present and future. This anticipation of the content and
purpose of the Slavery Commission meeting at the League of Nations
was derived from a series of requests for clarifications that the com-
mission had addressed to the Portuguese government concerning such
matters as taxing the natives for public works, and insisting on the prin-
ciple of freedom of contract that was ensured to the natives. In short, it
questioned, in numerous contentious issues, the actual workings of the
native policyy in Portugal’s overseas territories. The diverse modalities of
slavery – explicit or disguised – assumed a central role in these enquir-
ies. Arguing that the native policies applied in the Portuguese colonies
displayed clearly liberal traits, Ernesto de Vasconcelos blamed the even-
tual persistence of slavery models or practices on factors external to the
colonies, claiming that ‘if slavery still exists, it is because there are slave
markets, and, if that is the case, then it is necessary to look for them
outside of our African provinces and close them’.1
On 6 November 1920, the Journal de Genève published a section in
which the ‘role of Portugal in the League of Nations’ was assessed.
134
New Methods, Old Conclusions 135
Afonso Costa, the Portuguese representative at the League of Nations,

was interviewed about the country’s posture regarding the League’s
nature and function. Among other obvious aspects that were empha-
sised about the positive role of the international organisation, Costa
mentioned ‘the improvement of indigenous races’. Moreover, ‘through
the League of Nations’, the country could ‘continue his civilizing
oeuvre’. When asked about the potential role of the country regarding
the ‘colonial problem’, Costa was clear: the Portuguese were ‘colonis-
ers par excellence’, having proved for ‘five centuries’ a ‘capacity for
expansion, for adaptation to hard climates’ and a ‘marvellous aptitude
of being able to conquer the people of the most savage regions’. The
Portuguese supposedly possessed ‘a special knowledge’ about and ‘an
incontestable authority’ over colonial situations, therefore being able to
actively contribute to their improvement. The ‘rapid progress of indig-
enous populations’ was one of the goals that could benefit from these
virtues possessed by the Portuguese. The country was committed to the
new zeitgeist on imperial and colonial issues and was integrated in the
normative international landscape that followed the end of the First
World War. Moreover, according to Afonso Costa, the ‘principles’ that
governed the post-war international agreements regarding the colonial
worlds were already central to Portuguese legislation. The recent reor-
ganisation of the administration of Angola and Mozambique – the Bases
Orgânicas de Administração Civil e Financeira das Colónias of 9 October
1920 – was mentioned as one example, being portrayed as entailing a
‘near autonomy’ for the colonies.2
The most important illustration was the creation of the regime of
high-commissioners in Angola and Mozambique, which was a central
issue in a more general policy of financial and administrative decen-
tralisation.3 In a couple of decisive dispatches sent on 26 and 28 April
1919, Afonso Costa exerted significant pressure over the minister of for-
eign affairs in order to ensure the actual confirmation of the projected
political and legal rearrangement that would promote the existence of
authoritative high-commissioners. As he wrote, it was ‘indispensable to
start the transformation of our colonial administration immediately’,
and this could only be done through the ‘application of a new system’
that might ‘mitigate’ the existing ‘serious difficulties’ and, at the same
time, ‘give a demonstration of our uncompromising purpose to be a
nation capable of conserving and developing our wide colonial domain
to the civilised world’. The membership at the League of Nations was
used as an argument to induce a comprehensive reform: the member-
ship ‘categorically’ entailed ‘the duty to promote the moral and material
progress of the colonies and its population’. Accordingly, Afonso Costa

drafted a decree that should be the basis of the overall reformist pro-
ject. In June 1919, he wrote a ‘highly confidential’ telegram to Rodrigo
Xavier da Silva in which he reinforced his position, stating that the
institution of the new regime was a way to ‘surprise’ the foreign pow-
ers and ‘embarrass any illegitimate aspiration, immediately blocking
the longstanding campaign against us regarding the treatment of the
indigenous population’. The regime ‘constituted a fundamental effort
of salvation of our overseas territories’, because it assured, ‘without limi-
tations or hesitations’, the widespread ‘conscience of our legitimacy and
reputation as a great colonial power’. If it failed, the ‘entire endeavour
of our rehabilitation as a people capable of possessing such a significant
overseas patrimony’ would be ‘completely ruined’, he argued.4
Despite these efforts to prove a different political standpoint, Afonso
Costa and his peers were confronted with numerous severe denuncia-
tions over the treatment of natives in the Portuguese colonies, starting
with an accusation made by the British Government regarding ‘a certain
number of precise cases, of recent occurrence, in which […] unquestion-
able evidence existed that proved that the Portuguese authorities had a
violent attitude towards the natives of the province’, as Judge Bernardo
Botelho da Costa summarised the problem. In late 1918, a memoran-
dum made by the Portuguese delegates at the Paris Conference had
already highlighted the two main controversial aspects: the ‘accusations
made to Portugal for not having developed her colonies’, considered
‘largely unfounded’, and the ‘treatment of native Africans’, considered
to be ‘just and humane’. After all, ‘the natives have been dominated
with extremely small military forces’. The ‘recent and wide rebellions’
were merely consequence of ‘German manoeuvres’. However, in early
1919, in a note about the problem, Freire de Andrade highlighted the
‘question of the ill-treatment given by our troops to the natives of
Mozambique’, but also noted that the persistence of the chibalo should
be immediately forbidden. Both facts were an obstacle to the diplomatic
manoeuvres in Geneva. One thing was to ‘find the more advantageous
means to convince the native to work’, as he elaborated upon in a
memorandum about Le main d’oeuvre indigène dans la colonie africaine,
written in 1919. Another was to employ instruments such as the chibalo.
To defend this in Geneva was impossible.5
Arthur Balfour submitted 45 documents to Afonso Costa, providing
abundant instances – ‘precise cases, with exact indications of places and
names’ – that supported the British accusations. Several memoranda
and general information delivered by the British Legation in Lisbon
reinforced the case. On 29 April 1919, Bernardo Botelho da Costa was

appointed to make an extensive ‘enquiry about the relations between
the authorities of the Province of Mozambique and their native popula-
tions’. This territory was partially controlled by the Nyassa Company,
an important fact to note. The ‘veracity’ of the information provided by
the British government should be evaluated in situ. This was the general
guideline that Botelho da Costa received in Geneva, where he had sev-
eral reunions with Afonso Costa and other members of the Portuguese
representation. At these he received all the documentation, which was
in such ‘disorder that its examination was a hard task’.6
This information included accounts (and complaints) from the Grémio
de Proprietários e Agricultores da Zambezia, from the Companhia do
Boror (the prazo Boror Company) and from the Companhia do Caminho
de Ferro de Benguela (Benguela Railway Company). The Association of
Planters and Owners of the Zambezi aimed to block the circulation of
African labourers to the Transvaal and the Rand mines. According to its
members, recruitment during the war had had a tremendous, negative
impact on the native population: ‘There was a recent war with “German
East Africa” in which our unfortunate province suffered the most cruel
toll of lives that one can conceive. To deliver porters to British forces,
and porters and soldiers to the Portuguese forces, every expedient and
form of violence was used, not only risking and damaging the prestige
of our sovereignty but also causing unspeakable costs to all industries
and to all the vast interests and sacrifices involved in our economic and
civilising action in that province’.7
The Companhia do Boror confirmed the abuses, the overwhelm-
ing pressure for porters by the British, and criticised the effects of the
regional agreements regarding African manpower. Responding to a
request made by Freire de Andrade, who wanted precise information
about the labour situation in Mozambique, the director of the company
sent several dossiers to Geneva that blamed the local authorities for
the difficult circumstances: a ‘rebellion of the natives was possible, as
a consequence of this recruitment’, which was imposed by the provin-
cial governor and the ‘military authorities’. The result was terrible: ‘the
death of circa 80,000 porters, 25,000 of them in the Zambezi’.8
The railway company answered to a request made by Afonso Costa
and submitted a lengthy report entitled Recrutamento dos Trabalhadores
d’Angola para a Katanga. Sua alimentação, habitações, doenças, deserções
antes de terminarem os respectivos contractos. The report aimed to reveal
the conditions of African manpower sent from Angola and Mozambique
to the Katanga mines, exposing at the same time the difficulties that
the colonial authorities had in actually managing regional markets of

labour, commercial trade and movements of population. The limita-
tions of the colonial administration were paramount. Like the previous
accounts, this report identified the problems of recruitment and labour
conditions to which the African workers were submitted. In order to
explain desertions (a major problem at the time), the reporter was clear:
‘the lack of women, the widespread news on transfers from one mine
to another, […] the diseases they faced’ were some of the fundamental
reasons. Their ‘use as porters in the campaign against the Germans’
and the ‘lack of information on the conditions of payment upon
their return’ were the additional reasons mentioned for the desertion
problem. Whatever the main cause, the reporter emphasised the need
to ‘regulate conveniently’ the migratory movements to Katanga, the
Transvaal or the Rand mines, in order to minimise the abuses, which
were certainly enhanced in a context of competition for manpower
during the war.9
For the British, the causes rested elsewhere. The limitations of the
actual colonial sovereignty, the debilities in the administrative appara-
tus, the unsupervised autocracy of the chefes de posto – ‘class quite unfit
for so much independent responsibility’, essentially guided towards
personal economic advantage, possessing ‘little control’ over the cipaios,
‘who overrun the district and terrorize the native, beating, murdering,
raping and robbing’ – and the absence of actual legal mechanisms to
welcome the natives’ complaints and to ‘investigate and punish’ those
responsible were the fundamental claims behind the British memo-
randa, sent to the Portuguese authorities since 1914, but addressing
cases from before. For example, Document No 9, dated 18 November
1918, written after the armistice in Porto Amélia, a port locality in the
province of Cabo Delgado, Captain Parminter noted the absence of a
civil administration, ‘as we understand it in our colonies’, and, more
importantly, declared that in many localities a ‘state of permanent
war between the Portuguese authorities and the unfortunate natives
existed’, a ‘state of open revolt’ was undeniable. This ‘extraordinarily
brutal and autocratic form of government’ should be checked. The
abuses were not entirely explainable in a Great War framework, and
their impact went beyond the particular place in which they occurred.
The ill treatment of Africans (and of Indians, some British subjects) was
endemic and recurrent. Moreover, ‘the state of affairs in Portuguese East
Africa’ appeared ‘to be steadily growing worse’. A memorandum of 7
April 1919, signed by Lancelot D. Carnegie, summarised the problems,
essentially focused on the Nyassa Company territories.
The failure to meet a promise made to the British government in

April 1917 – the realisation of a full enquiry into events which had
occurred up till then – added to the reasons for the British toughening
their official protest: the situation was intolerable at many levels. In this
memorandum, which reached Afonso Costa in Geneva, a veiled threat
was made. If the ‘reports of the atrocities, which are of a revolting char-
acter, […] were published in England, public opinion would demand
that His Majesty’s Government should press for an immediate and most
searching investigation before an international tribunal’. According to
the British representative in Lisbon, ‘apart altogether from humanitar-
ian questions, important though these are, the feeling of the natives
in Portuguese Africa as described in every report which reaches His
Majesty’s Government from whatever source is of a nature to cause the
most serious apprehension’. The point was that, in its potential impact,
‘native unrest’ was ‘not a purely local affair’.10
Afonso Costa understood the message and, in a certain sense, agreed.
The ‘old recurrent habits’ of the bureaucracy, which led to the non-
delivery of the promised report in 1917, had caused ‘much damage
here’ in Geneva. The actual production of an enquiry met two funda-
mental purposes: on one hand, it demonstrated the ‘willingness to do
justice’; on the other, it entailed ‘transforming our colonial administra-
tion in a progressive manner’. The report would ‘prove exuberantly’
many important points, to be used bilaterally and internationally. The
‘abuses’ were not an outcome of a ‘system’, at most they were a result
of the ‘tax-exaction perpetrated by the agents of the Nyassa Company’.
Moreover, the report would show that the reasons behind the com-
plaints had to do with local grievances promoted by the war dynamics;
that is, the fact that the Portuguese failed to provide native labour to
foreigners, namely the British. The report was still to be completed but
it already met a set of predefined purposes.11
The war competition for native labour, namely carregadores (porters),
was a cause of interimperial friction, as well as of local conflicts between
European interests and local communities. The near absence of roads,
navigable rivers or railways lines in the colony necessitated a huge
number of porters, who were forcibly recruited by the armed police,
for instance in the prazos of the Zambezi. Circa 60,000 were used in
Mozambique by the Portuguese army during the war. Some 30,000 were
provided to British forces.12 This obviously had a negative effect locally.
To give just one crucial example, this was one of the main reasons for
the widespread unrest and insurgency in Tete and Barué in 1917, which
involved around 15,000 African combatants, an area which had barely
been pacified at the beginning of the century. The recruitment of men to

military service, to be porters and to work on the construction of roads,
(re)ignited numerous conflicts. These acquired a pan-ethnic nature on
the way, transforming the rebellion into one of the most important
moments of anticolonial emergency. It spread along the Zambezi and
outlasted the end of the First World War. As in Angola, where 1917
saw the well-known and violent conflicts in the coffee plantations of
Amboim/Novo Redondo, the particularities of the war contexts entailed
the questioning of Portuguese colonial sovereignty. This increased the
tension between colonial authorities and local communities, and led to
numerous, violent conflicts and to mass migrations.13
For Botelho da Costa the accusations were unfounded. They were
‘filled with falsities’. In what related to ‘native policy’, the Portuguese
administration was ‘on a par with neighbouring colonies’. In the
Portuguese colonies, he argued, the natives ‘had more liberty, more
rights and privileges’ than in the British ones. ‘Violence’ was essentially
an outcome of a ‘series of absolutely unavoidable circumstances’, those
entailed by circumstantial ‘disruptions’ caused by the war and which
terminated when the latter ended.14
But in a lengthy, confidential, preliminary report (8 October 1919),
Botelho da Costa addressed many other issues that he would not
explore in the official report. He recognised the ‘more than irregular
exaction of the hut-tax’, which was based on ‘frail legislation’ that
needed to be more strict in what related to ‘the census of the popula-
tion, the identification of huts and the exaction of the tax’. He pointed
out the deficient legislation related to the concession of land. He noted
the ‘deficient primary education’ (only three schools, almost empty),
with no functioning regulation, and the absence of ‘professional educa-
tion’, which was a serious problem given the competition of ‘private
schools of Swahili’. These were substantially attended, and their pro-
motion of ‘Mohammedan religion’ had a putative ‘denationalising
action’. He highlighted the absence of ‘medical assistance’ and – as no
vaccination plan existed – of the much needed ‘defence against small-
pox’. He also underlined the migratory movements associated with the
recruitment of labour to S. Thomé and to Rhodesia and the Katanga
Mines, which amounted to 10,000 people per annum. As importantly,
he recognised the ‘arbitrary action’ of the cipaios and the ‘lack of super-
vision of their behaviour’, especially in the interior. The ‘native policy’
was not that perfect, even considering that the visited territories were
part of the Nyassa Company. He terminated by suggesting that it would
be important to visit the Rand mines and Rhodesia in order to evaluate
the ‘conditions in which our own natives work’ (what he eventually

did). The ‘accusations’ directed towards the Portuguese were focused
on ‘the hut-tax’ and on the forms of work, ‘free or paid’. A comparative
assessment could be useful to put Portuguese colonial territories into
perspective.15
His assessment of the Mozambique Company, communicated in July
1920, was more ‘satisfactory’. In a particularly revealing formulation,
he noted that ‘the native is treated humanely, being provided sufficient
care, with a view to guarantee his complete efficiency in the works to
which he is chosen’. The work of the Repartição do Trabalho Indígena
(Department of Native Labour), created in 1911 to be an autonomous
agency central to the politico-economic administration of the com-
pany’s territory, was praised for its ‘organised facilities’, ‘methodically
establishing its recruitment services’, distributing ‘with criteria’ the
labourers recruited, inside the territory of Manica and Sofala but also
beyond its frontiers to ‘several companies and landlords’. In fact, in
the previous five years of its existence (until late 1926, when it was
suppressed under pressure by the League of Nations) an annual average
of more than 100,000 persons was recruited by this department. This
happened despite ‘great difficulties’, as Botelho da Costa argued, given
the demand for manpower coming from the sugar companies and the
numerous plantations in the area, but also given the labour migratory
movements, again criticised by him. As he was able to confirm at the
sugar plantation and factory Companhia Colonial do Buzi, a conces-
sion of the Mozambique Company at the Buzi district, native man-
power was absolutely essential: ‘cheap, in relation to the salary and to
the food provided’. One last remark was similar to those noted at the
Nyassa Company: the ‘lack of education of the native and of medical
assistance’. In a formulation that certainly did not appear in the official
report, Botelho da Costa concluded: ‘if Portugal wants to deserve the
label of a colonising nation, the question of native education must be
seriously tackled’. Among other things, this was important in order to
instil ‘work habits’ in the native population. The risk of not being able
to do so was to ‘renounce once and for all to our mandate as colonisers’,
for sure par excellence.16
Not surprisingly, given the accumulation of so much contrary evi-
dence, some months later, Afonso Costa informed the Portuguese
government that the ‘Black Cross’ (Belgian International Bureau
for the Protection of Natives [Bureau International pour la Défense
des Indigènes, BIDI])17 had presented a petition at the League of
Nations denouncing the persistence of slavery in Africa, including in
Mozambique, and delivered reports produced by the Anti-Slavery and

Aborigines Protection Society (ASAPS).18
Afonso Costa sent ‘highly confidential’ (confidencialíssimo) dispatches
to Lisbon, which included the Anti-Slavery Society’s report ((Labour
Conditions in Portuguese West Africa), submitted as well to the British
government in 21 October 1920, stating that Mr Chapuisat, director
of the Journal de Genève, was the provider of the documentation. The
Portuguese had to ‘be cautious about and prepare themselves’ against
what was coming. Afonso Costa was also informed by Mr Chapuisat
that the ASAPS wanted to ‘restart the campaign’ against Portugal on the
grounds that the ‘slavery regime in Angola and S. Thomé continued and
was recently reinforced’. The resonance of this intention in an article
in The Spectatorr (18 September), precisely entitled ‘The recrudescence of
slavery’, increased the concerns. The article amplified the contents of
the O Tempo (4 August 1920) and also of the Primeiro de Janeiro (6 August
1920) – two important newspapers –,reminding the British public of
longstanding facts and arguments. ‘Slavery’ was going to be ‘reintro-
duced’ into the ‘Portuguese cocoa islands’. The ‘action’ of ‘an inter-
national body’ should be considered. Signed by Charles Roberts, John
H. Harris, Travers Buxton and others, the ASAPS’s report insisted that
labour malpractices were continuing in the Portuguese colonies, namely
on those ‘cocoa producing islands’. The withdrawal of the British consul
from West Africa was considered to reinforce the critical state of affairs.
Its absence was seen to ‘entail an unprecedented recrudescence of the
importation of Africans from the continent’ to S. Thomé and Príncipe.
The transfer of 5,000–6,000 serviçais from Angola to S. Thomé in 1919 –
information given by Cecil Harmsworth, under-secretary of state for for-
eign affairs, at the Commons after being questioned by Lieut.-Colonel
Sir S. Hoare – was signalled by the reporters as an undeniable proof.
Perhaps even more important was the news published by the
Portuguese newspaper O Tempo on 17 and 19 July 1920, under the titles
‘A Escravatura em Angola’ and ‘Porque é que os indígenas se revoltam’.
The widespread venality of official personnel (for instance, a captain
who had amassed considerable funds as a broker in the business of
migration to the islands); the violent methods of recruitment and trans-
portation; and the failures of the repatriation system were denounced.
In the 19 July edition, an open letter was published, addressed to Freire
de Andrade, former governor-general of Mozambique and soon to be
Portuguese representative at the Temporary Slavery Commission of the
League of Nations. In it the ‘criminal methods of recruitment exercised
in Angola’ were stressed, and the system of re-recruitment in S. Thomé
censured. Angola had ‘returned to slavery’. Unless a serious reform was

undertaken, the S. Thomé cocoa would continue to be the product of
‘blood and slavery’, not of ‘free labour’. Given this evidence, the ASAPS
suggested that HM government should press the League of Nations’
members to promote ‘an impartial commission of enquiry’ that could
‘guarantee the immediate release and repatriation of the workers impris-
oned in slavery by violence and through fraud’. Afonso Costa pressed
for information, namely the ‘exact’ number of serviçais that went from
Angola to S. Thomé in 1918–1919 and in the first months of 1920, in
order to be able to react to the potential impact of the pressure group’s
action in Geneva. Until then, he claimed, he would be unable to
‘impede’ the campaign in the press. The ‘seismic effect’ generated by
the slave cocoa process was still evolving, and needed to be neutralised
in an informed way.19
The first answer came from a pamphlet that was produced by the S.
Thomé and Príncipe Emigration Society, and published in Geneva, by
Chapuisat’s Journal de Genève. This association was formed by all plant-
ers of the islands, following the model of the Witwatersrand Native
Labour Association. As expected, they aimed at showing the ‘inexact
information’. In an illustrative phrase, the authors claimed that ‘the
native African finds a larger protection in Portuguese legislation that
the white labourer’.20
Jaime Batalha Reis had already emphatically stated this need for
proper enquiries and information in a report of 17 August 1919. This
had ‘the agricultural labour in tropical countries’ as its subject, espe-
cially under the new institutional architecture formed in the aftermath
of the Peace Treaty: the League of Nations and the International Labour
Office. A distinguished member of the Association scientifique inter-
nationale d’agronomie coloniale (International Scientific Association
of Colonial Agronomy), in which he had already promoted a similar
enquiry presented at the association’s meeting in Brussels in 1910 (at
the Universal Exhibition), Batalha Reis considered that it was ‘neces-
sary to fill, with urgency, a prejudicial gap’: the absence of an ‘exact
exposition of the actual situation of agricultural labour and labourers in
Portuguese colonies’. This should start with the legislation but should
go beyond that to include an evaluation of natural and cultural envi-
ronments. A ‘work of response and defence against accusations, without
ever declaring it to be so’, was mandatory, especially if it included a
‘credible description, as much testimonial as possible, of the ways in
which that legislation has been and is being applied’. Also vital was a
comparative exercise, an effort ‘only possible in Paris and London, near
the great libraries and sources of information’. According to Batalha

Reis, his testimony in 1910 ‘avoided’ the criticism that ‘the enemies
of the S. Thomé cocoa’ had planned to deliver at the Brussels meeting.
A different approach was indispensable, given international circum-
stances, namely those related to the new set of normative frameworks
set out by international institutions and agencies and by the Covenant
of the League of Nations (which he identified and analysed in rela-
tion to potential risks), and given the continuous criticism over labour
conditions in the Portuguese colonial territories.21 His report certainly
pleased Afonso Costa. The ‘problem of native manpower’ was a central
one in Geneva and an informed mémoire, capable of ‘emphasising our
enormous humanitarian drive’, was vital.22
Given Afonso Costa’s requests for factual clarifications, the reports
delivered by the BIDI in Geneva were sent to S. Thomé and Principe.
The BIDI report reached the curator-general of the colony, António
Correia de Aguiar, who had already offered his view in a report of 5
September 1918, which was still to be published, entitled O trabalho
indígena nas ilhas de S. Tomé e Príncipe. According to Correia de Aguiar,
the major proof of the working policy regarding repatriation resided in
the existence of ‘three prosperous and happy colonies of former repatri-
ated angolas’. An additional element was important: R. T. Smallbones
and H. Hall Hall also mentioned this fact in their dispatches to the
Foreign Office in 1914 and 1915, as contained in the White Book, Africa
Number 1 (1915). In his report of 29 July 1920, Aguiar stressed the
‘chaos’ that had prevailed before his arrival at the curadoria. The expedi-
encies associated with the process of repatriation were highlighted, the
loops in the legislation identified. The production of reliable statistical
data regarding non-repatriated serviçais in the period before his arrival
was impossible. Despite aiming to demonstrate a positive evolution of
the state of affairs, Correia de Aguiar nonetheless pointed to the short-
comings of the related legislation, therefore confirming some of the
ASAPS criticisms. Moreover, Afonso Costa’s request was hard to meet.23
The emergence of a petition coming from a ‘group of natives’ of S.
Thomé, in which the League’s ‘protection’ was required in order to end
the abuses perpetrated by local Portuguese authorities, became an obvi-
ous obstacle to proving such a commitment. The telegram had been
sent directly to the president of the Council of the League of Nations,
and Bernardino Machado, head of the Ministers Council, was informed
in March 1921: ‘Gouverneur arme commercants accapareurs ces amis
travailleurs indigenes contre population sthome portugaise apres assas-
sinats polices indigenes il transforme greve en haine races prisons
arbitraires no vies courent peril demandons protection ligue nations =

natifs’.24 Later in the year, Freire de Andrade, then in Geneva as
Portuguese delegate to the Second Assembly of the League of Nations
(5 September–5 October 1921), informed Lisbon that ‘complaints’
received by the League related to the ways in which the natives of Cape-
Vert were transported to São Thomé. Freire de Andrade suggested that an
inspection into this affair should be done by the Ministry of Colonies.
This inspection should be appropriately publicised in the newspapers,
aspect to which he attributed great importance. In the end, the echoes
of these diligences in the newspapers should be sent to Geneva. Some
days later, Freire de Andrade was informed that the ministry com-
manded the governors-general of the colonies in question to provide
information about the case. They were also instructed to carry out a
‘detailed inspection’ of the regulatory instructions that were stipulated,
duly published in the ‘most important newspapers’ five days earlier.25
On 23 September 1922, John H. Harris signed a letter published in
The Spectator,
r entitled ‘Slavery in Africa – Curious Portuguese attitude’,
in which he claimed that the Portuguese representative at the Third
Assembly of the League of Nations (Geneva, 4 September–30 September
1922), Manuel Teixeira Gomes, opposed an enquiry into slavery in
Africa. Moreover, according to Harris, he had done so despite the
favourable stance taken by the likes of Gabriel Hanotaux, Robert Cecil,
Fridtjof Nansen and H. A. L. Fischer. The effect was obvious: the country
and its representative were considered to be obstacles to the solution
of the slavery problem in Africa. Teixeira Gomes wrote to Augustin
Edwards, the Chilean president of the League, in order to denounce
the ‘false accusations’ that abounded in Harris’s text, a fact that did not
surprise him given the ‘previous campaigns against Portuguese colo-
nisation’ organised by Harris. Teixeira Gomes had already been ques-
tioned on the subject by Barbosa de Magalhães, the minister of foreign
affairs, on 31 October. The minister was eager to react, a fact reinforced
by the appearance of news in The Cape Argus and The Starr (4 October)
repeating Harris’s opinions. He instructed the consuls in the Cape and
Johannesburg to categorically ‘deny’ Harris’s views and asked Teixeira
Gomes about the way to proceed. On 1 November, Teixeira Gomes
replied, stressing that Harris’s declarations were ‘false’, ‘as usually’ was
‘everything that that personality without prestige has been publishing
about our colonies’. According to him, the decision to exclude Africa
from enquiries about slavery – the critical point under consideration –
was unanimous, given the shared perspective that there was ‘no single
evidence of recrudescence of slavery’ in the continent. In what related
to the course of action that the Portuguese authorities should follow,

Teixeira Gomes was certain that Harris was ‘unworthy of an official
answer’. Given the absence of a ‘modicum of press service’ available
that could be used to ‘refute […] slanderous allegations propagated
by people of dubious moral standpoint’ – a situation which Teixeira
Gomes lamented – he argued for a direct approach to the League’s
Council. These efforts to downplay the seismic effects of the slave cocoa
affair would for sure continue in the years to come as new accusations
emerged regarding the forced recruitment and use of forced labour, or
‘conditions analogous to slavery’, in the Portuguese colonial empire.26
In another memorandum sent by the BIDI to the League, in August
1923, signed by Claparède and by Henri A. Junod, the famous Swiss
Protestant missionary and anthropologist, the existence of the chibalo
in Mozambique was considered an ‘unquestionable fact of slavery’.
Forced labour was organised by ‘State agents’ for public works and pri-
vate interests. As we have seen, Freire de Andrade was right to request
the abolition of this practice. Mozambique was considered to be an
important example within the catalogue of cases included in this brief
but global overview of the persistence of slavery that aimed to condi-
tion the debates in the Temporary Slavery Commission of the League
of Nations.27
Also related to Mozambique, another moment of tension emerged
with a letter-report on the prevailing native labour system, which
was made by G. A. Morton, former British consul in the region, in
late 1924. Morton’s letter was sent to the League’s Temporary Slavery
Commission in January 1925 by Travers Buxton of the ASAPS, having
Harold A. Grimshaw as its recipient. Grimshaw also forwarded it to
William E. Rappard, director of the Mandates Commission. Apparently,
Morton addressed the ASAPS declaring his willingness to provide
some information about labour conditions in Portuguese East Africa.
‘Two or three persons well acquainted with Portuguese rule in Africa’
considered ‘the charges serious’, the ‘evidence important and trustwor-
thy’. The ASAPS decided to submit the letter to the Temporary Slavery
Commission. Morton had been in Mozambique ‘during the late war’
and he lived on the Zambezi River between 1919 and 1921. According
to him, ‘the officials and the native police’ induced ‘natives for labour
against their wishes’. This was especially noticeable in the territories
of the Mozambique Company and at the Boror and Luabo prazos. In a
particularly relevant example, he described how he could only get por-
ters after addressing the ‘chief or sub-chief of a district’. After that, the
chief would send ‘his police’ out and the natives were ‘simply arrested’.
Upon request, the process was the same regarding native girls, Morton
stated. The role of public authorities in the recruitment and organisa-
tion of a system of forced labour was highlighted, as was the overall
financial benefits that they got from the situation. The chefe de posto
was portrayed as a ‘small king in his own district’. ‘Supervision’ was
non-existent, arbitrariness ruled. And he concluded: ‘as it is, the state
of affairs is simply rotten to the very core’.28
The Portuguese reply, based for instance on ‘observations’ made
by the minister of the colonies Henrique Paço de Arcos, accepted the
facts stated by Morton – the existence of coerced labour in the colony,
verified mostly in the territories of the chartered companies, the Nyassa
Company and the Mozambique Company – but stressed that these were
‘contrary to the laws in force in the Portuguese colonies’. Therefore,
they were ‘punishable by the competent tribunals and authorities when
brought to their notice’. The assurance of an effective colonial author-
ity and the reiteration of the progressive nature of legislation were the
cornerstones of the reply to Morton’s assertions. ‘Portugal has therefore
fulfilled all the duties which, as a colonising nation, she owes to the
natives of her colonies’, the minister emphasised, while highlighting
the ambivalent position in which a colonial power was regarding the
issue of labour: ‘if the country to which the colony belongs takes steps
to induce the native to work or to force him to abandon his indolent
way of life – and the less civilised he is the more he clings to it – it
is easy enough to accuse that country of introducing forced labour
or slavery. If, on the other hand, the native is left entirely alone, the
mother-country is thereupon accused of doing nothing to develop the
colony and is held responsible for its backward condition’. This lengthy
quotation is worthwhile for the way in which it demonstrates one of
the most important rationales that prevailed among the Portuguese
authorities. Forced labour was a condition of civilisation. The compa-
nies were also invited to answer to Morton accusations, but they were
less concerned with civilising principles. This was merely another case
of ‘anti-Portuguese propaganda’, as the president of the administrative
council for the Nyasa Company António Centeno wrote.29
‘Without documentation and just with simple declarations,

we can end in a bad situation’
In October 1922, the secretary-general of the League sent a letter to

all members requesting information about the ‘present circumstances’
that characterised the ‘slavery question’ in their territories. Following
a resolution concerned with the subject, approved by the Fourth

Assembly on 28 September 1923, the same secretary-general was obliged
to request further explanations from the member states. During the first
sessions of the Temporary Slavery Commission, which took place in
Geneva from 9 July 1924, the matter that most concerned its members,
including Freire de Andrade as vice-chairman, was to define and to
clarify the object and content of its activities.30 Following a resolution
adopted by the League of Nations Council on 11 December 1923, sev-
eral requests for clarification were sent to the League member states, as
the commission sought to assess the degree to which slavery practices
persisted. The proposals and resolutions issued by previous assemblies
of the League of Nations focused on the ‘suppression of slavery – par-
ticularly in Abyssinia’31 – and in the need to ‘give the matter the neces-
sary publicity, in order to increase the moral pressure of public opinion
and to ensure the movement of data provided by experience’ among
the member states. However, the agenda governing the sessions of the
Temporary Slavery Commission, a ‘competent body’ and a ‘commission
of specialists’, was now based on the outcomes of a much wider survey,
one that, in the words of Frederick Lugard, focused not ‘only on League
member states, but on all of the states and the various institutes and
personalities, with the aim of preparing a report on the progress made
in the suppression of slavery in all its forms’.32
At the invitation of its chairman Albrecht Gohr (who was also
director-general of the Belgian colonial ministry), Lugard raised the
questions that were to guide the discussions within the recently created
commission. The common element that unified the many sessions was
the need to define and delimit the use of the term ‘slavery’. Given the
‘vague and undefined, not to mention contradictory’ instructions that
emerged from the first initiatives in analysing the matter of the native
people’s working conditions and of the means of their recruitment and
payment, the commission’s principal goal was to identify, define and
classify the diversity of situations that could fall into the category of
‘slavery’. In the requests for clarification sent to the member states, the
fundamental questions were essentially concerned with the evaluation
of the legal framework that ensured the prosecution of efforts to elimi-
nate slavery practices:
What are […] the legal, administrative or other measures that have
been applied to ensure the elimination of slavery? What has been the
result of the application of these measures? Has slavery been com-
pletely eliminated or did it disappear gradually? What have been the
economic and social consequences of the measures taken, both to

the former slave owners and former slaves and to the administration
and mise en valeurr of the territory in question? Are other measures
envisaged?33
The general purpose of these sessions rested in the understanding of the

multiplicity of situations that determined the ebb and flow of the forms
of compulsion to work.
At the fourth meeting, Freire de Andrade demonstrated the complex-
ity of the commission’s subjectt when he called its attention to the need
to include the debates about ‘importation of weapons and alcohol’ and
the ‘organisation of labour’ in the discussion of slavery. In the former
matter, what needed to be addressed, as Lugard pointed out, was the
recruitment of natives at gunpoint and, on the other hand, their persis-
tent propensity to consume an inordinate amount of alcohol. This last
item deserves to be dealt with separately. Firstly, because this descrip-
tion was contained in the classificatory repertoire of native customs and
traditions, which was, as we saw in the first part of this book, frequently
mobilised by colonial experts (as was also the case with vagrancy).
Secondly, because the same reference was also being used by the native
press (see, for example, the recurrence of this question in O Africano and
O Brado Africano) to identify the informal methods of colonisation, that
is, contributing to the alienation of the native and to their correspond-
ing passivity towards the colonising programme. The recruitment of
slaves by force, the slave trade (the sale, gift or inheritance of slaves), the
acquisition of slave female concubines, the adoption of native children
as a means of disguising other motives, slavery as a means of paying off
debts, all formed a series of different circumstances and practices that
were conducive to the persistence of slavery, and which had to be taken
into consideration when analysing this problem.
It was also important to consider another question: the distinction
between servitude and slavery. ‘The relationship that unites the mas-
ter and the serf may often be more intolerable than that which exists
between the owner and the slave’, claimed Freire de Andrade as he
supported the pressing need to understand the ‘labour conditions’ that
existed within each colonial context, and which should be the main
target in the preparation of the report. This matter was the subject of
some discussion within the commission. After the French representa-
tive Maurice Delafosse had confirmed that it was necessary to define
the line separating slavery and servitude, once the French authorities
and the natives of the French colonies clearly distinguished the two
terms (a distinction that was based on the possibility of sale [slavery]

or in the absence of this possibility [servitude]), the commission briefly
discussed the best way to present the question on the state of domestic
slavery (the initial project) or domestic or agrarian slavery or servitude
(the final formulation).34
In specifying this requirement, Freire de Andrade argued that the
survey had to be designed along three fundamental axes. The first of
these related to the localisation and identification of the methods of
recruiting and trading slaves, as well as all the forms of compelling
people to work in violation of their personal liberty. The second was
the need to define the best method of eliminating these situations and
of encouraging free labour, ‘taking local circumstances into account’,
this last aspect being a major precondition in all his interventions. The
third was concerned with the identification of the conditions in which
it was permitted to use the labour provided ‘by the less evolved races’,
a factor that could save certain colonies from many setbacks. This final
point, which referred to ‘those who are forced to work to benefit the
government or the settlers’ was picked up by the Dutch representative,
Van Rees, who also raised another point concerning the resilience of
slavery: the policy of race discrimination. However, unlike Freire de
Andrade – who persisted in casting light on the multiplicity of views
that regulated the matter in question, arriving at the point of saying
that ‘it is above all necessary to determine the exact meaning of the
word “native”’ – Van Rees proposed that such questions were neutral-
ised in the discussion.
During the third session, the planned questionnaire drawn up by
Frederick Lugard continued to occupy the time of the commission’s
members. The first paragraph of the proposal draft to be discussed,
the twelfth, was titled ‘Compulsory labour’. When faced with the first
concern about the general nature of the proposition, Lugard explained
that what it essentially sought was to determine the extent of the use
of ‘compulsory labour for public service’ by the various governments.35
However, the vagueness of the formulation led to the raising of a num-
ber of points that mainly resulted from the fact that in many countries,
whether in their colonies or in their own motherland, compulsory
labour could be a consequence of punitive and fiscal decisions, practices
that should be saved from the restrictive meaning of compulsory labour.
Confronted with proposals that sought to capture the many shapes that
compulsory labour could take, the Portuguese representative recalled
that the preparation of a ‘very detailed questionnaire will not be wel-
comed by governments’, and suggested the following edit: ‘What kinds
of compulsory labour are permitted in law?’ The final edit read thus:
‘Public or private compulsory work regime, paid or not?’
Curiously, despite his earlier intervention, Freire de Andrade stated
that ‘experience effectively shows that laws may not provoke any criti-
cism of or prevent slavery in an absolute manner, and that the actual
practice is frequently very different’. As we have seen, the Portuguese
experience was a clear example of this, although it was obviously not
the only one. While discussing one of the more important points
in the proposed questionnaire, concerning the liberalisation of the
labour market and the transition from serf-based labour to paid work,
the Portuguese representative added ‘the settlers have an urgent need
for manpower, and if we do not provide it, there will be abuses’. The
extreme need for labour in Portugal’s African territories continued to
be the subject of discussion. Thus, the intervention of the state in this
process was vigorously demanded. As we saw above in relation to the
question of importing manpower to S. Thomé, the regulation and state
control of the labour system was seen as a guarantor of regular access to
the supply and retention of workers.36
In September 1923, as mentioned above, further explanations from
the member states were required by the secretary-general. Two essential
points governed the enquiry over the state of slavery in ‘current territo-
ries or in colonial possessions’ in which ‘it was noticeable that slavery
existed in the past’: the first related to the administrative and legislative
procedures that were used to ‘ensure’ its extinction; the second focused
on the ‘result’ of such measures, in order to understand if they had
any impact on the existence of the phenomenon but also to evaluate
the impact from an administrative and economic (mise en valeur) r point
of view and from a social one; that is the impact of such measures on
the groups formerly involved in the slave trade. Like the British, the
Portuguese authorities informed the secretary-general that ‘enquiries’
were being made.37
In September 1924, the Portuguese answered. Attached to the
mémoire, a letter signed by João Chagas, president of the Portuguese
delegation, was sent to Sir James Eric Drummond, the secretary-general
of the League. Chagas highlighted the ‘institutions’ that could provide
‘interesting information’: the Lisbon Geographical Society (LGS) and
the Centro Colonial, an institution that had been involved in a seri-
ous allegation of misuse of data in 1913 at The Spectator. As expected,
the LGS was eager to participate, for instance identifying the works on
‘civilisation and colonisation’ that characterised the Portuguese colonial
endeavour, against ‘historical falsehoods’ that were recurrently being
voiced internationally. Its members were convinced that no ‘slave trade’

existed in Portuguese colonial territories. Even ‘domestic slavery’ was
‘exceptional’, restricted to territories in which ‘the beneficial action’ of
effective occupation was not fully felt.38
The League of Nations’ request for explanations promoted the need
to amass and assess information throughout the colonial bureaucracy,
as we have seen before. From Geneva, in order to be able to cope with
the activisms within and around the League, Freire de Andrade urged
the imperial administrative apparatus to gather and transmit informa-
tion about the state of affairs regarding the existence of ‘slavery or slave
trade’ in the colonies. A questionnaire with eight questions was sent
to all the colonies which aimed to establish past and present measures
towards their suppression, and also to assess their actual effects. Two
special interrogations were formulated about the relevance of arms and
alcohol trades to the issue in question. The important fact was that
a different kind of answer was needed. As an internal memorandum
written by Freire de Andrade stated, the ‘process’ which was adopted
by the Portuguese authorities to answer the previous enquiry made by
the League had to be abandoned. The argument that ‘slavery in the
Portuguese colonies ended in the middle of the nineteenth century’,
and that any contrary statement was ‘defamatory’, was indefensible.
This was ‘not true’ and this type of declaration entailed a ‘clear moral
harm’: the use of ‘less exact statements’ was ‘counterproductive’. Freire
de Andrade declared that compared to the responses of the other impe-
rial powers – which confirmed the existence of slavery in their colonial
territories, presented the respective legal framework, highlighted the
measures being taken and identified their results – the Portuguese infor-
mational reaction ‘did not create a good impression’. It was fundamen-
tal to be prepared for and informed about actual realities.
For example, the publication of John H. Harris’s pamphlet Slavery
and the Obligations of the League of Nations, edited by the ASAPS, again
mentioned cases of labour abuses that related, directly and indirectly,
to Portuguese East Africa. In order to ‘refute’ these accusations before
the League of Nations, the Portuguese authorities acting at an interna-
tional level needed ‘all necessary documentation’, as a dispatch of the
Portuguese Legation in London plainly noted.39 In an internal note,
Freire de Andrade was more specific on the type of information needed.
The information provided before was ‘insufficient’. Other members
provided detailed data. It was crucial to give factual information about
‘what has been done in favour of the natives’: about schools for ‘native
nurses’, ‘wells’, ‘roads’, ‘hospitals’, ‘vaccinations’; on measures and
prosecutions against labour abuses perpetrated by ‘authorities’, ‘if they

exist’; or over the ‘number of African deputies, of African public serv-
ants – black or mulattoes – in the colonies and at the metropole’. He
concluded: ‘without documentation and just with simple declarations,
we can end in a bad situation’.40 Already in June 1923, on the eve of
another Assembly of the League of Nations, Freire de Andrade expected
that ‘enemies’ would use ‘the pretext of an enquiry on the slave trade
in Abyssinia to renovate the calumnies that the English chocolatiers,
our tenacious adversaries, have been inventing’. It was urgent to receive
‘reports as complete and documented as possible’ about the situation
of native labour in the Portuguese colonial territories. Despite past
efforts to put pressure upon the high-commissioners of Angola and
Mozambique and the governors of S. Thomé and Guinea to produce
and transmit information on the subject, no substantial documentation
arrived in Geneva.41
In 1924, another mémoire was presented in Geneva. The Portuguese
reply, the 62-page mémoire, was probably the longest one sent to
Geneva by a member state in the period. It was based on a series of
‘questionnaires’ sent to colonial governors and insisted, like the previ-
ous mémoires, on the country’s long history of efforts to abolish slavery.
Perhaps in a more precise manner, it was declared that the country
had made all ‘efforts to guarantee through legislation the best and more
humanitarian treatment to the natives of its colonies’. The dissemina-
tion of ‘religious missions […] colleges and schools’ was asserted, despite
all the contrary evidence that at the time was being amassed by the likes
of Jesse Jones. Offering a summary of historical marks of the proclaimed
humanitarian tradition of the country – obscuring the role played by
external forces, namely of British origin, in the abolitionist trajectory –
and also providing evidence of accommodation of and integration
in international norms, starting with the General Acts of Berlin and
Brussels, the mémoire was again used as a political and diplomatic instru-
ment to tentatively demonstrate the ‘liberal and humanitarian spirit’
that supposedly presided over the ‘administration of the colonies’. More
importantly, the nature of the requests made by the League, which
focused on legislative dimensions, enabled the Portuguese authorities
to promote the country as being ‘one of the first States to have solved
the complex problem of the utilization of Negro labour’. In a different
tone but with similar purposes, the intercolonial modus vivendi regard-
ing labour migration was also invoked to validate the evidences of
humanitarianism advocated to be the essence of the Portuguese impe-
rial venture: all other colonial powers, including the British, seemed to
recognise the moral and legal acceptable conditions that governed the
Portuguese use and distribution of African manpower. Otherwise, they
would not ratify such migratory agreements.42 What this argument
failed to consider was the unofficial migratory movements precisely as
a consequence of specific native policies.43
A more dense reasoning was put forward in what related to other
forms of forced labour, ‘slavery in all its forms’. The preponderance of
local native labour, which should offer its ‘collaboration’ in the on-
going process of ‘civilisation’, ‘colonisation’ and ‘development’, was
recognised. ‘Persuasion and smooth and benevolent methods’ should
prevail in order to make the natives work, and change their ‘mentality’.
If this general guideline proved to be ‘ineffective’, methods similar to
those used in ‘civilised societies’ should be mobilised: ‘punish vagrancy
and laziness’. ‘Certain philanthropic ideas’ were considered to be,
‘sometimes’, ‘contrary’ to the goals they supposedly aimed at. Given
the nature of colonial economic exploration, based on agriculture and
mining and requiring an ‘abundant workforce’, and the developmental
imperative that was identified as a pillar of colonisation, the ‘rational
and humanitarian organisation of native labour’ was mandatory. In
what related to forced labour, its existence was restricted to the requisi-
tion of native labour to public works and to the enactment of a legal
punishment. The first assured the native’s participation in the ‘develop-
ment’ of the colony, especially regarding infrastructure; the second cor-
rected the inefficient solution of imprisonment, as the native was seen
to consider the latter as an opportunity to have ‘food and accommoda-
tion without any effort; […] a way to rest!’. ‘Abuses’ were acknowledged
but the related responsibility was attributed to the natives: ‘having no
necessities’ they did not deem it ‘necessary to work in order to satisfy
them’. And the rapporteur ended by stating: ‘it is understandable that
while seeing their cultures in danger and facing the absence of volun-
tary labour the farmers employ all means to find the latter, even circum-
venting the law’.44
Another section was devoted to the coeval juridical framework and
mechanisms that governed the ‘organisation of native labour’ in the
Portuguese colonial empire, the law of 14 October 1914 (that entailed
local adjustments negotiated in the government conselhos, which
included natives’ representatives). The idea of local, plural participation
was an important instrument, and was relevant evidence of a general
imperial policy that had political and legal decentralisation as its motto.
The law was depicted as providing and guaranteeing ‘individual free-
dom’ and a ‘just and humanitarian guardianship [tutela]’ to the natives,
fostering their ‘moral and intellectual development’. The six principles

highlighted by the high-commissioner of Angola, in the report that
accompanied Decree no 40 of 3 August 1921, were also used to justify
the benevolent and progressive nature of the law. With the exception
of ‘forced labour’ for public works, considered a ‘necessity of tropi-
cal countries’, it was declared that the most prominent and criticised
aspects – corporal punishments or recruitment for private interests –
would be fought by the law. Perhaps as important, there was a clear
understanding of the need to exercise ‘the most constant, meticulous
and severe surveillance over the recruitment and working conditions of
the natives’. The role of the curador,r the ‘protector of the indigenous’
as it was described, was given as the prime example of that controlling
process, side by side with the Junta Central de Trabalho e Emigração,
a commission focused on overseeing all issues related to native labour.
The metropolitan and the colonial apparatus of trusteeship were pro-
moted as evidence of the official policies’ intent.45
The memorandum also dealt with the most significant cases of diver-
gence between the official standpoint and foreign criticism, namely
that of S. Thomé and Príncipe and the Zambezi prazos. Using the reports
made by the already mentioned British consul in Portuguese West Africa,
Hall Hall, written on 3 July and 3 October 1916, and the one made by
António Correia de Aguiar, the efforts to improve the system shown by
the republican government were emphasised; several ‘foreign person-
alities, of all nationalities’ were mobilised. The latter were considered
to be ‘convinced’ witnesses of ‘the progress reached in social aspects’.
From botanists such as Friedrich Welwitsch to the consul-general of the
United States of America and a bishop of the Methodist Church, the
testimony of illustrious personalities was used as a proof of social trans-
formation. As they supposedly confirmed, the islands of S. Thomé and
Príncipe were ‘the paradise of black people, the pearl of Portuguese colo-
nies, the model of agricultural colonies’. The testimony of Angel Barrera
y Luyando, two times the colonial governor of Fernando Póo, received a
special place in the mémoire. His commendations were of great use: the
roças were a ‘model of organisation’ in what related to ‘accommodation,
factory, hospitals, tools workshop’ and the ‘working conditions’ in the
islands should be studied by the planters of Fernando Póo. Interimperial
and intercolonial comparison was important in order to simultaneously
naturalise – that is, promote as one case among others – and value the
Portuguese case – by comparison a better reality.46
The conclusion also is worth mentioning as it summarised precisely
the type of reasoning the Portuguese authorities were trying to promote
in international fora. The first point related to the role played by leg-
islation. The Portuguese clearly emphasised the legislation focused on
colonial issues, especially in what related to labour issues. The putative
humanitarianism of the legislation, and its proclaimed originality and
premature nature, were constantly used to counteract the abundant
critical appraisals of the actual realities of colonial labour. But its role
was also downplayed, in the sense that its impact on local societies was
considered to be limited, given the ‘complex and delicate sociological
dimensions’ that characterised them. The transformation of ‘native
societies’ could not be attained solely by ‘laws and decrees’. It required
‘slow, gradual’ procedures that acknowledged the ‘meteorological and
ethnic conditions’ of those societies, their ‘notions of morality and
justice’, without ‘preconceived rules and dangerous leaps’. More impor-
tantly, the fundamental obligation was to ‘educate, instruct and mor-
alise’, and ‘teach him how to work’. Without that, there would be no
improvement of the ‘conditions in which he lives’. One final statement
was revealing: ‘the action of the colonising country must be based on
principles of opportunism and tolerance’. It is not hard to understand
which of them prevailed. How these principles of opportunism and
tolerance related to native work was exemplified in the concluding para-
graphs of the document. To understand, and intervene on, the problem
of native labour and all its ‘constraints’ required the ‘use of rational
and progressive means adapted to the political, moral and economic
state of indigenous populations’. Accordingly, it was proclaimed, the
Portuguese government had devised a catalogue of methods to attain
equilibrium between those principles, associating political, administra-
tive, educational, religious and economic instruments. This balance was
colonisation par excellence.47
The Social Gospel at the League of Nations
This was the context in which, in August 1925, a lengthy article was
published in the Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias: ‘Uma campanha
difamatória: A propósito do “Report on Employment of Native Labour
in Portuguese Africa”’.48 Published anonymously, the article was repro-
duced both in English and in French versions in Boletim’s ‘foreign sec-
tion’. While within the Temporary Slavery Commission in 1924, the
Portuguese representative had called for the inclusion of ‘serious and
competent philanthropic institutions’ in the series of commissions of
specialists analysing the question of slavery, by 1925 he was confronted
with a document with philanthropic origins that must have given him
cause to think again. This was another document that caused numer-
ous problems for the propagandists of an immaculate view of Portugal’s
colonial experience, with the added problem that the same document
had been submitted to the Temporary Slavery Commission which,
in the sequence of its work of the previous year, was now debating
the preparation of a report to be submitted to the League of Nations’
General Assembly.49
At the same time, the BIDI submitted a new mémoire, signed
by Claparède, about the ‘violations of the rights of the natives in
Portuguese Africa’, repeating some of the statements inscribed in the
1920 exposition. If the latter was focused on the ‘recrudescence of trade
in Angola to supply the cocoa islands of S. Thomé and Príncipe with
native manpower’, this new memorandum dealt with the circumstances
in Mozambique, namely on ‘forced labour’, which ‘under the name of
“chibalo” it seems to really constitute a form of slavery’. This was not an
exclusive reality of the Portuguese imperial world, and the Portuguese
were capable of offering some ‘improvements’, as was proved by Correia
de Aguiar’s O Trabalho Indígena, that was praised by Claparède as ‘an
admirable work’. However, in Mozambique, ‘the system in place […]
is governed by the fundamental purpose of supplying the government
and private interests with [native] manpower’, violating the ‘funda-
mental rights of the native’. The terms of the 1914 Labour Code was
not actually respected. The ‘obligation to work’ was not a civilising
mechanism; it was simply a mode to ‘supply manpower’. The chibalo
was a ‘way to satisfy those who want labourers’, not an instrument to
‘correct vagrants’, to ‘educate’ or ‘moralise’ the natives, as it was con-
stantly proclaimed. In the overall process, the role of the native chiefs
in the recruitment process was highlighted as being crucial, and criti-
cised as being governed by ‘complete arbitrariness’. Adding to all this,
the question of salaries was mentioned as being difficult to understand.
The relation between legal precepts and actual realities was not a linear
one, to say the least.
In his reply, Afonso Costa questioned the ‘inexact information’
used by Claparède in recalling the case of the labour migration from
Angola to S. Thomé. In what related to social and economic uses of
the chibalo, this was recognised as a problem, especially by those in
Geneva. As a confidential note sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
by the Portuguese delegation stated, the practice of allowing, with the
help of cipaios, the ‘indiscriminate requisition of natives for public or
private works’, which was a legal privilege of the superiors of the cir-
cumscriptions, could bolster ‘unfavourable’ remarks on the country as a
‘colonising nation’. The example given was the impact of the opinion of
a “well-known and praised agent of anti-slavery societies, called Jones”,
that is, Jesse Jones. The American educator ‘did not conceal the negative
impression’ provoked by the ‘aggressions and abuses generated by the
chibalo’ and by the ‘labour regime in the prazos’ in Mozambique. The
BIDI mémoire reinforced these claims, and Afonso Costa exemplified the
recommendations made by Freire de Andrade to Lisbon: reality should
be acknowledged; based on substantial information, abuses existed; the
government was examining evidence and taking measures to repress
them, ‘taking the special circumstances of each colony into account’.
Moreover, efforts were being made to increase the amount and quality
of knowledge about the ‘social state of the natives’ in Mozambique.
Generalisations on the subject of abuses in colonial labour were not
based on a proper assessment.50
But in Geneva further evidence was being provided on the topic.
During the commission’s eighth session, which was held on 16 June
1925, its members – at the suggestion of its chairman – decided ‘to com-
municate Professor Ross’s report to the Portuguese government’.51 In a
letter dated 26 September 1925 from the president of the Portuguese
delegation, Afonso Costa, to the general-secretary of the League of
Nations, it was noted that the report had been sent to the Portuguese
government on 5 June.52 Some 100–300 copies were sent to the
Commission in Geneva.53
The report in question had been written by Edward A. Ross and R.
Cramer, signed by 19 American citizens and submitted to the League
of Nations Slavery Commission on 5 June 1925.54 In the letter accom-
panying the report, the signatories asked the League of Nations’ gen-
eral-secretary to establish an inquiry to confirm the veracity of their
claims. They also recommended, as a demonstration of their absolute
certainty of the report’s accuracy, that suitable measures should be
taken to ‘abolish compulsory labour and other practices that represent
the injustice that is inflicted upon the people of these colonies’, Angola
and Mozambique. Reinforcing Edward Ross’s scientific credibility, the
19 signatories emphasised the authors’ availability to present their
findings to the commission, should it be required. Making quite clear
that their intention was not to question the ‘pioneering heroes’ of
Portuguese colonisation and the Portuguese colonial achievement, the
signatories expressed their trust in the Portuguese government and in
its ‘power to abolish the cursed practices’ that were expressed in the use
of native labour in its colonies. The tentacles of the Social Gospel had
again reached Portugal and its colonies. After the reports by Jesse Jones,
which while focused on the problem of colonial education mentioned

the questionable manner in which native manpower was recruited and
exploited, Ross’s report reopened the problem. Moreover, the tribune in
which it was exposed expanded its political reach exponentially.55
Of the 19 signatories to Ross’s report, at least three – Hamilton Holt,
Georges Foster Peabody and William Jay Schieffelin – were deeply
involved in the Social Gospel movement. Along with the Sagamore
Sociological Conference, which took place in 1907, the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the
Cosmopolitan Society of Greater New York were among the most
important vehicles for the dissemination of the Social Gospel during
the first decade of the twentieth century. This last one, established in
1906 and supported by Hamilton Holt (who was also the editor of the
Independentt newspaper), was dedicated to advocating a solution that
was based on the diffusion of the multicultural principles of toler-
ance and ‘interracial participation’.56 This association was an alliance
between radicals of the black communities’ cause and white reformers,
and challenged the leadership of Booker T. Washington in its analysis
of race relations in American society, to the extent that it proposed a
solution that was oriented towards the acquisition of black civil rights.
Holt was one of the individuals who planned the National Conference
on the Negro at the beginning of 1909. This conference was one of the
most important events in the history of the ‘Negro question’ in that
country. George Foster Peabody had been involved in several ini-
tiatives addressing the American racial question since the end of the
19th century. He was a financier and an active counsellor at the Hampton
Institute, and he had also been involved in the establishment of the
Southern Education Board in 1901, which involved such figures as
Booker T. Washington and had John D. Rockefeller and the Russell Sage
Foundation as its main sponsors.57
While being mainly occupied with the enormous problem of illit-
eracy that characterised the southern states of the United States, the
Southern Education Board also represented another tendency within
Social Gospel, one that shared its theological and reformist outlook,
but was dominated by a greater and more intense paternalism, focusing
on the leadership of ‘educated and intelligent men’, which implied that
‘the solution to this [racial] problem resides in preparing the Negro for
work’, through primary and industrial education. This was a claim that
could have been quoted from the manuals of the Portuguese colonial
administration. William J. Schieffelin was a central figure in the urban
missions, especially of New York, and was involved in the creation of
the Committee for Improving the Industrial Conditions of Negroes in

New York in 1905 and the National League on Urban Conditions among
Negroes in 1910.58 While revealing different reformist programmes and
methods that exemplified the diversity of approaches within the Social
Gospel, Holt, Peabody and Schieffelin shared a common purpose: an
extreme concern with the social and political margins of American soci-
ety, with the ‘Negro question’ and with the civilising purposes more or
less emphasised through education.
The most important driving force of the Report was the International
Missionary Council, namely Warnshuis, who, for instance, participated
in the revision of the manuscript, making much more than superficial
suggestions.59 According to a letter Warnshuis sent to Joseph H. Oldham
in April 1924, it was T. S. Donohugh (Board of Foreign Missions of the
Methodist Episcopal Church) who first made the proposal to ‘send
out an independent investigator to study this labour situation’. Jesse
Jones had also been contacted to provide information on the subject.
At the time, Warnshuis was in ‘direct negotiations with Professor E. A.
Ross’, preparing his endeavour.60 Officially proposed by ‘a number of
American gentlemen interested with the welfare of the African natives’,
the making of the report was suggested to Ross and Cramer by the IMC.
The IMC wanted Ross to confirm numerous reports, coming from mul-
tiple sources, old and new, that pointed to constant abuses in the ways
in which Portuguese authorities and private individuals and companies
treated African populations.61 One of the factors mobilised to justify
Ross’s selection stemmed from the fact he had already made ‘wide tours
of sociological observation’ in China, Japan, South America, Russia
and Mexico, being as well familiarised with the modi operandi of social
research.62 In fact, Ross soon redefined the line separating public and
academic discourse, a characteristic mark of his intellectual trajectory.63
In 1911 he travelled through China and established a close relationship
with some journals, in order to ensure his impressions of the journey
were published.64 In 1917, the American Institute of Social Service, an
organisation with diplomatic aims, invited Ross to lead a team of entre-
preneurs and diplomats with the intention of assessing the unstable
political situation in Russia.65 Its decision to choose Ross, according to
Horace Hoadley, who was a member of the institute, was based on the
fact that he was considered by some as the most important American
sociologist and, above all, because of the ability he demonstrated in his
‘description’ of foreign nations in publicly accessible terms. Coinciding
with the United States’ entry into the First World War, the mission
began in June that year. Ross signed publishing contracts with the
Century Company publications and with Holt’s Independentt newspaper,

both of which were interested in presenting his impressions to the
public.66 His depictions of the ‘living conditions on the haciendas of
Mexico, the brutalities practiced by the Portuguese in Africa, the caste
system in India, and the rise of racial tension in South Africa’ were suf-
ficiently hot topics for the press.67
Many praised Ross’s experience and aptitudes, and were animated by
the potential of his endeavour. Having read some notes of what would
later be Ross’s full report, Harold A. Grimshaw, was Abbé Livingston
Warnshuis fundamental interlocutor at the League, had no doubt about
the necessity to bring the final report to the Slavery Commission. In a
letter of December 1924, he explained to Warnshuis how this could be
accomplished, devising a set of main principles to be observed, identify-
ing the protocol to be followed and the members to whom the report
should be sent. He also suggested that Ross should be available to attend
an official hearing before the commission. Additionally, he advised
Warnshuis that the report should be ‘drafted rather in the form of a
scientific study of the evils which arise, their origins, and suggestions
as to remedies’. Finally, he proposed to mail the Portuguese legislation
regarding colonial labour to Ross, with a view to providing evidence of
the ‘ineffectiveness of even the best legislation when administered by
uncontrolled and inferior types of officials’. A month later, in a meeting
in New York between Warnshuis and Ross, it was determined that the
‘character of his report should be that of a well authenticated statement
of the facts as he discovered them, and a scientific study of the prob-
lem’. It should not be a ‘vividly coloured popular statement’. Grimshaw
sent the Portuguese legislation to Warnshuis - the mémoire and pub-
lished versions of legislation – which should be forwarded to Ross. He
also wrote to Jesse Jones, ‘urging him to put in to the Commission any
evidence he may possess on labour conditions in Portuguese Africa or
elsewhere’. Grimshaw was not pleased with the workings of the com-
mission. The prevalence of ‘official information’ provided by the gov-
ernments, mainly legislation, needed to be counterbalanced by other
types of testimonies and evidence. Grimshaw suggested that Warnshuis
should ‘put into movement your society or other Societies or individu-
als’ that were ‘capable of assisting’ the commission. Therefore, the Ross
report was greatly welcomed in Geneva.68
Considering it as being ‘worthy of consideration’ within the League’s
agencies, Grimshaw was convinced that the report would ‘have a great
effect’, especially because he believed that the entire affair would be
taken up and explored further by the International Labour Office.
Freire de Andrade’s ‘activities’ were proof enough that the Portuguese

government was ‘deeply stirred by it’. More importantly, he thought,
the Portuguese authorities were also ‘taking some action in the colonies
themselves’, given the nature and content of the report. Following a
request made by Freire de Andrade, Grimshaw sent some copies to
the governors of Angola and Mozambique and to several ministers in
Lisbon. Grimshaw also used the opportunity to inform Warnshuis that
he was told that the Portuguese would bring ‘a couple of “natives” to
Geneva to protest that their fellows in the colonies are wondrous’. The
source of this information was John H. Harris. Warnshuis was also hope-
ful regarding the consequences of the report, believing, as he noted to
Ross, that there would be ‘no difficulty in keeping up the pressure on
the Portuguese government during this year’.69
The purpose of Ross and Cramer’s trip to Angola and Mozambique
was to ‘gather the significant facts as to the system of employing native
labour followed in Portuguese Africa’. The introduction – a brief descrip-
tion of the credentials of the authors, Ross and R. Melville Cramer, a
specialist in psychiatry and psychology, and of the report’s subject and
methodologyy – was signed by the collective that endorsed the report,
including Warnshuis as one of the signatories.70 In respect of the report’s
methodology, it should immediately be noted that the gathering of
statements from Portuguese officials was considered ‘fruitless’, since the
laws governing the recruitment of native labour were well understood
by all. Moreover, any question directed at official representatives of
the Portuguese colonial administration would have ‘elicited’ the same
response: they were proceeding ‘in accordance with the law’. What they
wanted to know was ‘not the system as laid down in the decrees or as
officials profess to carry it out, but the actual experiences of large num-
bers of natives taken at random’. That being so, Ross and Cramer opted
to choose, ‘at random’, 32 villages in Angola and two towns and three
‘missionary stations’ in Mozambique, in the company of an interpreter
who was known to the resident populations. The report, which was
based on Ross’s ‘field notes’, was divided into two parts: the first dealing
with Angola; the second with Mozambique.71
The interview guide contained important questions on: the amount
of time the natives spent working as a result of administrative require-
ments; the relation between these demands and the payment of the
hut-tax, or the exemption of mandatory roadwork; and the general
conditions under which labour occurred (food, payment in clothing or
money, effective payment, etc.). Ross dedicated an entire chapter of his
autobiography to his travels through Portuguese Africa, which provided
a summary of the main observations he made and also challenged some

of the criticisms to which they were subjected.72
The Ross report contained several attacks on the Portuguese colonial
administration, although one can read in it that those who conducted
the survey were able to register as many favourable as unfavourable
testimonies. The criticisms sprinkled throughout the report were gener-
ally related to the Angolan case. From complaints about the taxes levied
on natives and accusations of the retention of salaries due to them by
the employers and Portuguese administrative officials to the inability
to apply the law and the exercise administrative authority before the
interests of the traders and white plantation owners, the report enu-
merated an extensive list of imperfections of the Portuguese colonial
administration. The first and third points of its conclusion confirmed
that ‘the labour system, virtually state serfdom’, in the Portuguese colo-
nies had developed in previous years, and that the ‘amount of unpaid
labour exacted of skilled natives’ was ‘not infrequently so excessive that
the young men see nothing to be gained by their acquiring skill in the
missionary schools’. The principles of Booker T. Washington and the
majority of Social Gospel supporters were unable to function in these
circumstances. This meant, according to the conclusion, that faced
with the persistence and frequency of the demands made on the native
population for compulsory work, they had neither the ‘time’ nor the
‘energy’ to devote to agricultural activities that would make them self-
sufficient or to improve themselves in the missionary schools. Above
all, they were working without pay.73
The unreasonable labour demands for public works sustained the
accusation of servitude and were exemplified by the permanent requisi-
tion for the construction of roads and railways, which Ross believed was
more extensive than was necessary.74 Apart from the manner in which
the communication routes were linked with native labour, one of the
more persistent criticisms levelled at the Portuguese colonial adminis-
tration was precisely the lack of social and economic development in
the colonies (which was also defended by some colonialists), making
it difficult to understand the statement of the unnecessary construc-
tion of roads. Ross’s involvement with the progressive movement, both
secular and religious, is the reason that justifies his statement regarding
unnecessary roadwork. He called for the spiritual development of the least
favoured, naturally anchored in missionary education, articulated with an
education directed towards self-development and in conformity with their
level of social evolution: in other words, a technical and industrial educa-
tion that was largely guided by agricultural work. Exactly as Washington
and Peabody, amongst others, defended. At the end of the report, Ross
explained what he called ‘alternative lines of colonial development’.
The leading role in this proposal was handed to the ‘mission schools’,
as the means for managing the new needs of the native populations
(better housing, clothing, hygiene, decency and schooling for children)
and the transmission of methods of paying for them. In order for this
to succeed, the boys were to learn carpentry, ceramics, gardening and
a variety of farming skills. The girls were to learn how to cook, weave
baskets and a whole range of domestic activities. In this way the rest of
the world would be able to obtain ‘the cotton, sugar, coffee, rice and
cocoa, palm nuts and sisal which this part of Africa is fitted to produce’
in exchange for sharing knowledge and educating the natives’ charac-
ter. The connection between Washington, Jesse Jones and Oldham with
Lugard was clear. If this were not carried out, then a regime of ‘veneered
barbarism’ would be the result; the use of machines, the application of
scientific techniques to industry and the surfeit of settlers would merely
be a travesty of civilisation.75
Ross also concluded that the metropolitan and colonial government
provided ‘practically nothing in the way of schools, medical care, emer-
gency relief or justice against the white trader for the people of the vil-
lages as recompense for the heavy burden of unrequited toil it lays upon
them’, in a general framework of joint exploitation by the administra-
tion and the settlers.76 In short, what was attributed to the Portuguese
administration consisted in the existence of compulsory unpaid work,
the absence of a native legal statute that would effectively protect them
from abuses as much from the administration as from the settlers, and
the non-existence of a policy of social assistance and instruction that
would serve the principles that were described as being central to the
normative model of the mandates international system. Regarding the
first point, although they are all interconnected, it had already been
established as a fundamental question within the League of Nations.
Article 23 of the League of Nations Covenant stated that its signatories
were obliged to ‘undertake to secure just treatment of the native inhab-
itants of territories under their control’.
In the Convention revising the General Acts of Berlin and Brussels,
realised in St Germain-en-Laye in 1919 and approved in Portugal on 8
May 1922, the obligation to protect the native people and to improve
their material and moral condition was reinforced. As Freire de Andrade
noted, the main principles of the Covenant (and of the associated
convention applicable to the model of native labour) involved the
safeguarding of three essential aspects, all of which were jeopardised
according to the Ross report. Firstly, no one should demand more work
from the native populations than they could produce. The urgent need
to develop the colonial economy should not, in any case, overload the
natives with work. Thus, wrote the same author in 1925, it was ‘nec-
essary to know the number and aptitudes of the natives and of their
ability to work’, by collating ‘trustworthy statistics’, by studying their
‘social state’ and thereby defining a work regime that better fits their
‘customs and traditions’. In a phrase: Ross’s ‘social efficiency’. Having
completed these processes, the time would be right to establish the
most suitable ‘progressive plan’ for the colonies. Secondly, native labour
should be free, and this did not entail any kind of benevolence with the
idleness of their customs and traditions, meaning it should be remuner-
ated. Thirdly, compulsory labour must only be imposed for public works
that were in the general interest. While keeping the spirit of the times
and following old intentions, Freire de Andrade was clear about what
was the priority: civilising through work – redemptive labour.77
‘I must ask you not to quote from it in any way’
In late 1935, Warnshuis wrote a letter to Ross, who had contacted

him in order to get information about the impact of his report ‘upon
the policy of the Portuguese government’. Warnshuis explained that
Ross’s request offered ‘real difficulties’ to him and his institution, given
the Portuguese government’s ‘grievances, real and fancied, against all
Protestant missionaries’. Informing Ross of the potential negative impli-
cations of ‘any quotation’ or commentary regarding the report coming
from his institutions’ members, Warnshuis considered his letter ‘strictly
confidential’, and felt the need to emphasise that to Ross: ‘I must ask
you not to quote from it in any way’. Ross was preparing his autobi-
ography and some of Warnshuis’s concerns related to the possibility
that some compromising information regarding the role of Protestant
missions on the elaboration of his report could be included. Despite
having been one of the signatories of the submission of the report to
the League, Warnshuis now feared any public relation to the case. When
Ross was asked to visit the Portuguese colonies it was emphasised that
‘the missionaries should not be involved as responsible for your state-
ments’. This had also been emphasised when Warnshuis corresponded
directly with Grimshaw and Oldham in 1925. Ten years later it was
important to keep such principle clear.
The ‘publication of the report raised a tempest in Portuguese colonial
circles’ and one of the ‘immediate’ consequences was the ‘increased
tension’ between the missions and the Portuguese authorities, ‘vestiges

of which still remain’, stated Warnshuis, replicating ipsis verbis the testi-
mony of Emory Ross, Methodist missionary and secretary of the Conseil
Protestant du Congo. A cautious approach was advisable. Moreover, to
answer Ross’s request would entail the ‘necessary’ selection of ‘another
special commissioner to gather first-hand evidence’ to overcome the
influence of official statements and interventions. The testimonies sent
by missionaries on the spot such as H. S. Hollenbeck (who furnished
information to the report and was later interviewed by the Portuguese
Commission responsible to evaluate the allegations) or William C. Bell
(‘one of the men rather intimately connected with Professor Ross when
he was in west Africa’) were not enough, and were divergent.78
For instance, in a letter that he also ‘considered confidential’, H. S.
Hollenbeck declared that there was a ‘marked improvement in general’,
an assessment that was also shared by Emory Ross, especially if the
present situation was compared with the immediate reactions to the
publication’s report: ‘threats were made’, ‘some severe persecution of
the natives’ occurred. At the time, William C. Bell was also interviewed
in order to clarify his involvement with Edward Ross’s visit to Angola:
‘itinerary, where he visited, what he saw, with whom he talked, both
whites and natives […] what facts he gained’. Facing ‘strenuous’ offi-
cial proceedings, Bell re-stated the existence of some abuses portrayed
by the report. More plainly, Bell questioned the modus operandi of the
operation and wanted to contact Ross in order ‘to let him know how
we are being attacked out here’. The situation was considered to be
so difficult that a document entitled ‘Suggestion for missionaries in
Portuguese territory’ circulated within missionary circles, at home and
overseas. The perceived association between US missionaries and the
origins, and conclusions, of the Ross Reportt was so widespread that it
was causing problems for their evangelical work. In an important point,
it was stated that although the missionaries recognised ‘the many diffi-
culties which arise in connection with questions of labour and taxation
in Africa’ these ‘were not confined to Portuguese territory’. Moreover,
they were ‘loyal in the desire to aid the government in finding a proper
solution’ to these issues. As happened before, the need to find a modus
vivendi was a priority.79
The concern over the impact of the report on the already difficult
arrangement between Protestant missionary societies and Portuguese
colonial administration was voiced by some important personalities.
For instance, in a letter to Warnshuis dated 9 September 1924, Ernest
W. Riggs argued that ‘a campaign of publicity’ would ‘hurt most those’
who were combating the ‘evils’ locally, that is, the missionaries. And he
added that ‘such injustices are no more approved by the men at the top
in P.E.A. than are the lynchings in our south by the governors of the
southern states’. At the same time, he recalled for Warnshuis a conversa-
tion he had had with Charles Templeton Loram, author of The Education
of the South African Native (1917) and at the time a member of the South
African Native Affairs Commission, in which he echoed Tucker’s view
on Ross: ‘he felt that the publication of the material which Professor
Ross had secured, largely through missionary sources, would imme-
diately bring serious hostility to those missionaries on the field’. C. T.
Loram also noted that it would be better to approach the Portuguese
government before going in a more public direction. 80
More or less in the same line of reasoning, later on and after the fact,
Pierre Loze, of the Swiss Portuguese East Africa Evangelical Missionary
Association (formed by the Free Methodist, Methodist Episcopal, Swiss,
Wesleyan and Anglican missionary societies), also questioned Ross’s
modus operandi, considering it ‘unwise’. The Portuguese authorities,
at the metropole and overseas, should have been contacted first. The
missionaries were ‘guests’ of the government, having collaborated
with local authorities and been central in inducing important changes,
according to Loze. The ‘drink question’ was one example; the 1908
‘program of the schools for Natives’ and the governmental decision to
stop the use of ‘women in the repairing of roads’ were others. When
the report appeared, a decision had already been made within the Swiss
mission to meet the Mozambican high-commissioner with a reformist
agenda regarding the ‘labour question’. The result was not positive: ‘we
feel that all the Protestant missions are in trouble on account of this
report’. In June 1927, he wrote that it was a ‘very serious situation’,
worsened by the decree that gave a leading place to Roman Catholic
missions within the empire, the João Belo’s Estatuto Orgânico das Missões
Católicas Portuguesas de África e Timor that we addressed before.81 Henri
Anet, director of the Bureau des Missions Protestantes du Congo Belge,
felt the same. A ‘mistake’ had been made in the ‘method of presenting
the Ross Report’.82
Given Loze’s testimony and opinions such as the one professed by
Anet, which illustrate the variety of sensibilities concerning the role of
Protestant missionary societies within the Portuguese colonial venture
and, more specifically, regarding the rationale, and the consequences, of
actions such as the ones that led to Ross and Cramer’s report, Warnshuis
decided to appease criticisms, reinforcing the argument that dissoci-
ated the missionary societies from the production of the report. Like
Warnshuis, Ernest W. Briggs and T. S. Donohugh did the same, all based
on ‘suggested paragraphs’ that eventually determined the similarity in
the dispatches. But in a letter to J. H. Oldham, Warnshuis did not fail to
state that it was ‘noteworthy’ that the ‘only protest’ came from a ‘city’
mission: ‘possibly the group in Lourenço Marques are not in such close
touch with these labour conditions’.83 But, as Ernest W. Riggs noted,
rightly précising the circumstances, ‘we may conceal the fact that the
arrangements for Dr. Ross’ journey were made through you, and that
the report was revised and edited by you. But we cannot withdraw our
signatures from the letter which officially requested that this report
should be passed over to the slavery commission of the League of
Nations’. The time was to see how to ‘defend our native constituency’,
especially given the ‘oppression which they are suffering with the result
of this report’.84
Given these incidents, the impact of the report was to be mitigated.
As William C. Terril, the superintendent of the Board of Foreign
Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church in Southeast Africa, stated,
‘the officials were indeed angry and place the responsibilities for the
coming of Prof. Ross and Dr. Cramer on the American missionaries’.
Aggressive measures were being taken at the mission field, with the
government sponsoring the expansion of ‘Portuguese catholic missions’
via the increase in their annual grant. ‘This is having a disastrous effect
upon our work’, he concluded. Many similar conclusions were coming
from other Protestant missionary organisations, from the Portuguese
Congo to the Province of Mozambique: the Baptist Missionary Society,
the German Evangelical Missions Committee and the Swiss Evangelical
Missionary Association.85
In fact, the connection that the Portuguese made between Ross
and Cramer’s endeavour and Protestant missionaries on the spot was
already a solid belief within the Portuguese diplomatic and imperial
bureaucracies. One of the more important confirmations came directly
from James R. Angell, president of Yale University (1921–37), one of the
signatories of the Ross report. A psychologist, disciple of John Dewey
and a promoter of functional psychology, Angell informed the Portuguese
representative in Washington, Viscount d’Alte, that the real reason
behind the decision to submit a report on the subject of labour condi-
tions in the Portuguese colonial territories to the Slavery Commission
was related to ‘the accumulated effect’ of evidence amassed by mission-
aries on the spot. The ‘unsatisfactory conditions […] in the manage-
ment of the labouring population’ were a persistent reference in their
reports. Contrary to what was alleged in some Portuguese circles, there
was no ‘international collusion’ and no ‘colonial ambitions’ behind

the report, as Viscount d’Alte suggested to Angell in a conversation in
September 1925. As he concluded later, ‘the protestant missionaries in
Africa incited the American philanthropic societies’. The former con-
sidered that the Portuguese ‘colonial environment’ was ‘demoralising’,
especially given the treatment of ‘native women’ by certain Portuguese
authorities. What the Portuguese considered merely ‘venial’ was defined
as a ‘crime against civilisation’ by the ‘New England missionaries’.86
The reactions at a local level were visible in other ways. The blaming
of US missionaries for the contents of the report was promoted in news-
papers. In Angola, for instance, the newspaper Preto no Branco (Black
in White), published in Loanda (18 October 1925), contained a letter
on the front page addressed to Robert Shields of the local Methodist
Mission, ‘asking all sorts of questions relating to race conditions and
treatment of coloured people in the States’, to the treatment of Native
Americans and to events related to the construction of the Panama
Canal. Despite Shields’s declaration that the Portuguese did ‘not treat
the natives badly’, which was published on 15 October in the Comércio
de Angola, the US missionaries continued to be publicly criticised for
their involvement in the production of Ross and Cramer’s report. Some
days later, Preto no Branco published a list of lynchings in the United
States between 1885 and 1922, next to another list: the one of the 19
signatories of the report. In another Angolan newspaper, the Comércio
de Angola published in Benguela (7 November 1925), an article titled
‘Ross, Steed & Co.’ showed how the report could be given instrumen-
tal use to settle local disagreements. More than focusing on Ross, the
attention should be directed towards a local ecclesiastic, J. A. Steed of
the Canadian Foreign Missionary Society. In the piece he was accused of
‘many things not in the category of what is expected of a missionary’,
of ‘prevarication’, ‘of trading’.87
Local grievances against foreign missionaries, namely Protestants,
were enhanced by the conclusions of the report, which were also
used by the authorities to strengthen their traditional obstacles to de-
nationalisingg forces. As the well-known John T. Tucker of the American
Board in Angola, stationed at Dondi Mission (Huambo), stated, the
missionaries became the object of a ‘virulent campaign’: they were
accused of being ‘spies, traitors, abusers of hospitality, liars, agents of
the devil, etc.’. According to Tucker, in a conversation in March 1926, a
‘storm’ had been raised in Angola, ‘correspondence had been censored’,
and ‘everything possible’ was ‘being done to cripple missionary work’.
Contrary to some hopeful expectations that abounded in the Protestant
missionary world, Tucker was not impressed with the news on the rati-
fication of a Slavery Convention. Portugal ‘will sign anything’ and yet
‘things’ would continue ‘as before’. Moreover, the Portuguese would
‘not want to support slavery’: ‘they have found a much better system –
forced labour’.88
In Bailundo, according to a lengthy and informative letter written
by Una J. Minto of the West Central Africa Mission, representing the
Foreign Mission Boards of the Congregational Churches of America and
Canada, the ‘administrator of Bailundo has been gradually increasing
his persecution of the mission work’ and his younger brother, a chefe
de posto, ‘openly declared his opposition to all religion, and tried at
first to shut down Catholic as well as Protestant work’ in the area. After
the publication of the report, he ‘concentrated upon our schools and
churches’. One of the measures was the ‘recent levying of the forced
labour recruits, which has been almost wholly from our outstations’.
This was confirmed by Daniel A. Hastings, a colleague of Minto: ‘if
things continue as they are going, in another year not an adult male
will be left on a single one of our outstations’.88
Ross denied the accusations levelled against him, which were the base
of the hardships. But many of the statements made by the Portuguese
were considered to be ‘very damaging’ and requiring ‘serious consid-
eration’ within the Protestant missionary coalition. As T. S. Donohugh
wrote to Warnshuis, the risk was that ‘criticism of some of his methods’
could ‘outweigh the real facts of importance, namely the conditions
existing in Angola and which have existed for years’. Something had
to be done. To Warnshuis, however, the best policy would be to move
forward, evading debating the report’s problems, and ‘concentrate
attention upon the actual conditions that prevail in these Portuguese
colonies’. The problems that missionaries were facing locally were far
more important.90
Serious efforts to find a modus vivendi after the Ross report occurred
during 1926. The diplomaticc visit of Henri Anet to Portugal at the begin-
ning of 1926 was perhaps the most important.91 His voyage to Portugal
had two essential goals: first, it aimed to understand the general attitude
in the country regarding Protestant missions; second, more impor-
tantly, it aimed to appease the Portuguese vis-à-vis Protestant missions
after the Ross report. Anet aimed to convince the Portuguese that mis-
sions could be an important instrument to counteract ‘hypocritical and
false’ charges on the international stage. He was absolutely convinced of
the need to establish a ‘direct and cordial contact’ between Portuguese
authorities and the Protestant missions, which was in line with his
perspective regarding the ‘method of presenting’ the result of Ross and

Cramer’s account. For instance, he declared, the Protestant organisa-
tions and missionaries were committed to inform the authorities of
possible ‘abuses’ in the colonies, therefore collaborating with the efforts
to improve the lawfulness and morality in colonial contexts.92
In ‘Report on a journey to Portugal’, Anet detailed all his efforts to be
recognised as a privileged interlocutor to the Portuguese, demonstrat-
ing the desire for cooperation that animated the Protestant coalition,
presented as a ‘powerful international organisation, above all party
politics and nationalistic or imperialistic influences’, and reasoning that
this cooperation could be the ‘best protection’ available to Portugal in
order to counteract ‘people simply wishing to take’ her colonies. Anet
appropriately insinuated the fears of foreign imperial covetousness. For
instance, this cooperation could ‘avoid publications that could hurt’
the Portuguese and ‘be taken advantage of by their political enemies’.
This was the fundamental message that Anet wanted to pass to the
Portuguese authorities. In Lisbon, Anet engaged in conversations with
Bernardino Machado (president of the republic), Freire de Andrade,
Vicente Ferreira (high-commissioner of Angola), Vasco Borges and
Gonçalves Teixeira (minister of foreign affairs and general secretary of
the same ministry), Vieira da Rocha and Massano de Amorim (minister
of colonies and general secretary of the same ministry). According to
him, Bernardino Machado directly questioned the Ross report, alluding
to a ‘forerunner whose end was very sad and ought to be a warning for
him: Sir Roger Casement’. Freire de Andrade accepted that it was ‘unde-
niable that abuses exist in our African colonies’. A ‘great deal of the
Ross Report’ was ‘true’, he apparently said to Anet. But, he added, the
Portuguese had no ‘colour-bar’ and ‘friendly relations between white
and black’ were considered ‘a feature of Portuguese civilisation’, despite
the condemnation of the ‘production of half-caste’. After all, ‘they
have succeeded in blending the races together harmoniously in Brazil’,
a track record that was beginning to be constantly mobilised in sup-
port of Portuguese reactions against accusations of ill treatment of its
colonial population. The ‘most interesting’ interview, to Anet, was the
one with Vicente Ferreira. His declared ‘propensity’ towards ‘protestant
methods of free thinking’ and the announcement of full support to the
Protestant missionary endeavour in the Portuguese colonies certainly
helped Anet’s highly positive assessment. Anet considered that all the
interviews were as ‘satisfactory as possible’: they altered the perceptions
and even the relations between the Protestant organisations and the
Portuguese authorities, despite the political turbulence that affected
Portugal at the time.93 Anet’s visit was partially supported, from a finan-
cial point of view, by the American Board Commissioners for Foreign
Missions. Ernest W. Riggs considered him ‘a master diplomat’ who was
able to succeed ‘excellently in the publicity which he secured both in
Portugal and in Belgium’. He had ‘left a lasting and valuable impression
upon the higher officials’ in Portugal.94
Anet maintained a close relationship with the Portuguese minister in
Brussels, Alberto de Oliveira, who was his principal interlocutor in his
efforts to minimise the impact of the Ross report. He also corresponded
with Freire de Andrade. In a letter of July 1926, after the Lisbon meet-
ings, Anet declared that he wanted to do ‘everything in his power to
assist the development of [Portuguese] colonial administration and the
integrity of the colonies’. He also used the opportunity to note that he
was forced to ‘believe’ that ‘the abuses continued in certain regions of
Portuguese Africa’, using an unspecified brochure that, according to
him, was more impressive than Ross’s account, while confirming many
of the report’s ‘facts’. Anet disagreed with the methods used by the
sociologist – as he wrote in his ‘Report’, the whole process had been
‘detrimental not only to the mission-work in the colonies, but to the sit-
uation of Protestantism in Portugal’ – but he had to acknowledge some
of his findings. Moreover, the reprisals being directed towards those
who were accused of being Ross’s collaborators were unacceptable and
should be blocked by a ‘vigorous intervention by the colonial authori-
ties’. Re-enacting old fears, the forthcoming entrance of Germany at
the League of Nations (September 9, 1926) was mentioned by Anet
to emphasise the need for a substantial change in Portuguese colonial
policies. He offered some advice, giving the Belgian Congo as an exam-
ple, as Jesse Jones had already done: a commission of enquiry should
be organised, with sufficient competencies and including a foreigner,
for instance ‘a Belgian magistrate’; a ‘permanent’ commission for the
‘protection of the natives’, composed of authorities and Protestant and
Catholic missionaries, following a model devised in the Belgian Congo.
It was fundamental to show some signs of effective change; it was not
enough to ‘publish laws that we admired given their humanitarian
character’. But the most important point of this reference was the fol-
lowing: ‘until now, the central missionary authorities have resisted the
pressure to publish’ information related to ongoing abuses and repris-
als. This attitude should be seen as a ‘sincere will to let the Portuguese
government deal with the situation’. The ‘mistake’ Anet identified in
the process of publication of Ross and Cramer’s report was not going to
be repeated.95
In his reply, Freire de Andrade informed Anet that the Portuguese

were ‘modifying’ the ‘native legislation’. At the same time efforts were
being made to ‘destroy certain prejudice’ towards ‘American missions’.
To Freire de Andrade, there were ‘clear proofs not of the bad faith but of
the thoughtlessness with which the report has been written’. But that
was the ‘past’. It was important to secure new understandings. Certainly
in line with Anet’s efforts, Freire de Andrade concluded that ‘our own
interest is that the missionaries should show us the evil where it is’.96
In January 1927, Anet believed that some efforts were being made by
the Portuguese to make ‘a better show’. The action of Vicente Ferreira,
whom he praised since his days in Lisbon, regarding native welfare,
namely the constitution of a Comissão de Assistência aos Indígenas
(Commission for Assistance to the Natives), was celebrated. 97
Efforts to find a modus vivendi and to pacify the turbulent relations, at
least at the high level, were also carried out on other occasions. During
the realisation of the International Conference on the Christian Mission
in Africa (Zoute-sur-Mer, Belgium, 14–21, September 1926), Alberto de
Oliveira informed the minister of foreign affairs, António Bettencourt
Rodrigues, of some important facts.98 According to him, some mission-
aries gathered at the conference possessed ‘new reclamations about the
ill-treatment given to natives’ in Portuguese colonies, namely the ‘fero-
cious punishment’ given in Angola by the ‘cipaios’ to those who were
‘suspects of having supplied elements to the famous Ross report’. This
information was passed on to Oliveira by Anet, as he had already done
with Freire de Andrade. He also invited Oliveira to be present at the
conference, convincing him that his attendance would ‘cause an excel-
lent impression and would suffice to avoid any inopportune discussions
about the native situation in Portuguese Africa’. This last purpose was
achieved, a fact praised by Oliveira. In his allocution, Oliveira did noth-
ing more than ‘paraphrase our statements at the League of Nations and
everywhere the problem of native labour has been raised’. To the min-
ister, he highlighted the need to promote the presence of Portuguese
representatives in ‘gatherings of this type’. He clearly understood the
usefulness of these international meetings to advance the cause of
Portuguese ‘colonial efforts’.
At the conference, he attended a session on the ‘theme of race rela-
tions’ in which Louis Franck (former general-governor of the Congo),
Adolphe de Meulemeester (general, military officer in the Congo),
Frederick Lugard and Erasmo Braga (Brazilian ecclesiastic and intel-
lectual) participated. Offering an example of the importance that the
presence at these meetings could have in the international diffusion
of the Portuguese authorities’ point of view, his statement at the

conference seized the opportunity to declare that the ‘great problems
of the relations between races’ had been already ‘worked out’ by the
Portuguese, namely in Brazil. After a ‘difficult period of growth’, Angola
and Mozambique would ‘develop into new Brazils’.99 However, in a let-
ter to Anet, and despite the latter’s efforts to publicise the Portuguese
official perspective in Belgian newspapers, Oliveira lamented that the
final account of the conference had ‘no mention of the good welcome’
that had been given to his declaration concerning the attitude of the
Portuguese government on the ongoing problems. The effective dissem-
ination of this fact was crucial. Opportunities such as this one should
not be missed.100
Against another ‘defamatory campaign’: on methods and

interpretations
The official Portuguese responses to the plans for a convention on

slavery were frequently based on the promotion of a natural view of
work (‘the labour law is a natural law’), and in defence of the equality
of responsibilities, duties and rights between the ‘white, black, yellow
and calôbros’. The defence of ‘redemptive labour’ rested on the civilis-
ing rhetoric, while the defence of the absence of any ‘precepts of race’
and of a similar legal architecture served to legitimate the inclusion
of the matter of compulsory labour with the ‘obligation to contribute
through work to ensure the advancement of civilisation and the march
of progress’.101
At the centre of this argument was, again, the social Darwinist idea
that was projected on the socio-cultural definition of the native people.
The recourse to the justice of Decree no 951 of 14 October 1914, which
approved the Native Labour Regulations, clarified this approach: ‘the
basic principle of the new regulation is the obligation that the native,
like all men must, “through his labour”, provide for himself and improve
his social condition. Similarly, the regime of the enslaved woman had
to disappear. It is known that, in general, the black men live off the
work of the women; their life is one of idleness. Their wealth depends
on the number of women who work for them. So often, under a hot
sun, we have seen them, their children on their backs, carrying out the
agricultural tasks that only the men ought to do […] Bringing an end
to such practices was, therefore, the beginning of the moralisation and
regeneration of the family’. This picture, which was used to legitimise
the appropriateness of the 1914 regulations as much as the alterations
to the regulations on native labour, was mentioned in the Ross report,

albeit with the opposite meaning, which led the Portuguese authorities
to vehemently criticise it, accusing it of sensationalism. The protection
of women was the best ‘way to strengthen the race and increase the
population’. The description of a natural state, ‘ethnically backward’, in
which the native people lived, where polygamy was a strategy for the
maximisation of family labour, therefore served to justify the civilising
potential of compulsory labour.102 Freire de Andrade concluded that
the 1914 law on native labour ought to serve as a model for all colonial
countries: ‘its foundations, which had been magisterially established
by António Enes and Oliveira Martins 20 years before, are entirely in
agreement with the principles the League of Nations consider to be the
most just and equitable’.103
The Portuguese government’s response even compared the legisla-
tion in the metropolitan penal code that dealt with ‘those with no
fixed address, who cannot show any means of sustenance and who are
habitually out of work’ – in a word, ‘vagabonds’ – with the general prin-
ciples of native labour.104 Compulsory labour – restricted to an expres-
sion of public interest, when faced with the ethnic and cultural realityy of
the natives – was transformed into a legitimate tool of civilisation, ‘the
humanitarianism of which greatly exceeds the imbecilic proselytising of
the American Protestant missions’. That being so, it did not recognise
the criticisms included in the Ross report claiming the Portuguese set-
tlers did not like working.105
Notwithstanding this rationale and despite these reactions, some
reformist reasoning emerged, partially as an outcome of international
and transnational dynamics and pressures. The publication of Instruções
provisórias para o recrutamento e emprego de trabalhadores indígenas nas
províncias (Provisional instructions for the recruitment and employment
of native workers in the provinces), which was approved in Angola on
16 January 1925 by the interim governor Tavares de Carvalho, attracted
some criticism in Geneva, in the circle of Portuguese representatives.
The Provincial Ordinance (no 4) was designed to meet the ‘serious
economic situation’ that Angola was facing. It aimed to ensure that the
colonial administration was responsible for coordinating and manag-
ing labour recruitment and distribution to private interests, within the
same legal framework applied to recruitment to ‘services to the state’.
The preamble was particularly illuminating about the efforts to accom-
modate longstanding prejudices (the ‘innate indolence of the race’, for
instance) and the need to modernise the ‘system’ of colonial labour.
The new framework was an ‘engagement that could not be postponed’,
aiming at the system’s ‘moralisation’, ‘in absolute agreement with the

function of tutelage and protection of native populations’, with ‘no
aggressions, irregularities or injustices’, refusing the previous ‘system of
labour recruitment via [non-state] recruiters’.
But this did not convince those in Geneva. Afonso Costa considered
it ‘obligatory and urgent’ not only to ‘suspend but entirely revoke’ the
ordinance. The ordinance was ‘embarrassing the defence’ of Portugal’s
case ‘as a civilised country, capable of administrating its grand colo-
nial empire’, and it was contrary to the positions that the Portuguese
representation was assuming before the commissions of the League. A
clear demonstration of willingness to harmonise Portuguese legislation
with the ‘modern principles of liberty and humanity’ being promoted
by the League, namely in the ‘colonies under mandate’, was crucial.
The ‘imperative precepts of behaviour’ that respected those principles
were on the verge of being established, and internationally institution-
alised. According to Vasco Borges, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, his
request for the suspension of the ordinance was blocked at the Council
of Ministers by the minister of commerce and communications, Nuno
Simões. The Angolan economic circumstances and local conditions
advised otherwise. Moreover, the suppression of the ordinance could be
seen as ‘an implicit confession of the existence of a pernicious labour
regime in Angola’.
But for the likes of Afonso Costa and Freire Andrade, that was not
enough. The ‘compromising preamble’ and the ‘almost forty disposi-
tions, almost all iniquitous and vexatious’ were unacceptable to the
delegation in Geneva. They were also criticised by Norton de Matos,
in London at the time. For him the publication of the ordinance could
create ‘a lot of difficulties and serious inopportune’ problems. It was an
‘extremely hasty and thoughtless’ decision, revealing ‘an absolute lack
of knowledge over the international situation of all African colonies in
what related to native labour’. The ordinance represented the ‘full rees-
tablishment of forced labour for the use and benefit of private interests’,
giving ammunition to those who were using the Ross report as a general
description of labour conditions in Portuguese colonial territories. At
the same time, he noted, the British government was publishing a White
Book entitled Kenya. Compulsory labour for government purposes, which
was seen as establishing a sharp contrast with what was going on in
Angola. This was a model to follow, at least from a legal point of view.106
Exactly at the same time, when informed by Freire de Andrade
that the director of native affairs in Mozambique, António Pereira
Cabral, had produced an ‘extremely unpleasant report’ focused on the
‘treatment’ of the natives, Afonso Costa asked Lisbon to take ‘all meas-
ures and precautions’ to silence him. Apparently, the report argued that
‘Ross’s accusations were still far from the sad reality’. Augusto Cabral’s
‘disgraceful campaign’ would have negative repercussions in Geneva.
For all in Geneva, as Lancelot D. Carnegie argued for the issue of native
unrest, this was not a purely local or national problem.107
The Portuguese response, which, presented by the Portuguese delega-
tion to the Temporary Slavery Commission ‘very proudly and conscious
of their patriotic duty’, was , published for the first time on 30 September
1925. The form of its publication reveals an interesting detail.108 At the
foot of the fourth page of the Diário de Notícias, the newspaper always
carried an excerpt from a pamphlet of dubious taste that could be cut out.
It was in this place that the Portuguese response was published, ‘so that
it can be more easily collected and handled’. Since ‘being aware of’ this
response was ‘simultaneously, to understand the Ross Report’, the anony-
mous writer alerted readers to the need for it to be read carefully, as this
was the only way to understand how it bore witness to the ‘many ambi-
tions there are on our colonial dominion’ and which naturally required
‘more than ever’ that the ‘wise administration and colonisation’ which
the Portuguese colonial territories needed be found. To finish, each reader
now knew that this reaction was circulating in many languages, that it had
been distributed to the delegates and journalists at the League of Nations:
‘Thus, it is going to be known throughout the world’. The conclusions of
the report had been partially transcribed in the newspaper that August.109
The report was sent to the high-commissioners of Angola and
Mozambique, where they were to be evaluated and, in the event any
of its conclusions being verified, they were to support the realisation of
inquiries to identify those responsible for the allegations contained in it.
In an Ordinance of August 1925, the high-commissioner and governor-
general of Angola Francisco da Cunha Rego Chaves (1925–26) appointed
Francisco Oliveira Santos, governor of the district of Cubango, to
provide the ‘particulars for the study of the causes of the decline
of the population, with particulars of births and mortality, feeding,
clothing and other matters which will help towards the betterment
of conditions of life, and develop and perfect the native population’.
For Edward Holmes, head of the Baptist Missionary Society in the
Portuguese Congo, this was ‘undoubtedly’ related to the Ross Report.
Oliveira Santos’s ‘enquiry into the native conditions’ was essentially an
endeavour to ‘get information as to who had given evidence against the
government’. The ordinance was seen as ‘a bit of the usual Portuguese
altruistic bluff’. But it was much more than that.110
Oliveira Santos’s report, which took almost eight months to complete,

represented, with its exalted style and its many almost incomprehensi-
ble sociological references, a most violent, contradictory and accusatory
rejection of the Ross report. Despite this, the document contained some
information that made it possible to locate and contextualise the expe-
dition behind its creation. The appendix to each chapter included a set
of documents designed to prove the factual and informative errors con-
tained in the Ross Report, as well as to cast veiled aspersions on Edward
Ross’s good intentions, suspicions that were largely based on the fact
that he had remained anonymous during his stay. It did this with some
irony, describing Ross’s arrival in extensive detail:
He disembarked, accompanied by the doctor, Cramer, and by his many

interpreters, one for each of the dialects in the regions in which he
worked – so as not to be betrayed, clearly, in his high social mission –
he had his impediments unloaded: field tents, camp beds, canteens and
canvas pails for water; he unloaded his crates of food, his light phar-
macy, his jackboots, his spares, his weather observatory and he also
had unloaded – conveniently hidden in crates upon which was writ-
ten ‘fragile’, to avoid the trouble of declaring them to the Portuguese
authorities – his magnificent rifles and ammunition for hunting small
game, and to defend himself from being hunted by big game. I could
not ascertain, despite my efforts, whether or not Professor Ross brought
a cook, but I did find out that, in obedience to his religious principles
and affinities with some philanthropic and benevolent organisations,
he does not drink alcohol and nor does he smoke.111
It is curious to note that while Oliveira Santos emphasised the fact

that Ross had disguised the real purpose of his visit, his report also
gives the clear impression that Ross’s steps had been controlled, as the
above description confirms. The writer of ‘Algumas observações’ (Some
observations) presented to the Temporary Slavery Commission claimed
that the government had been fully aware of what was happening, but
preferred ‘to leave to the professor every facility and the most complete
freedom of movement’.112
The accusations Oliveira Santos raised were of varying degree, but
always abundant. First, he alleged that Ross had not been in Angola
during the period mentioned in the report submitted to the League of
Nations: ‘Ross has no right to claim that he was in Angola to “register
data” until 3 September 1924; by not being truthful and making a gra-
tuitous claim he has greatly compromised his reputation’. Presenting
the list of passengers from Lisbon to Luanda, Oliveira Santos showed

that Ross arrived in the Angolan city on 17 July 1924 and left on 20
August when he embarked for Cape Town on the steamship Africa. In
the report sent to the League of Nations, he stated that the fieldwork
had been carried out from 19 July to 3 September 1924. According to
Oliveira Santos, this negated the quantity of observations and points of
sociological and ethnographicc inquiry: ‘The same Professor Ross did not
visit 19 embalas (the name given to the village that accommodates the
soba), as he also claims in his report’, but ‘13 native villages that, in
the region, are either called sanzala (in the north of the river Cuanza,
in the district of Malanje), embala, quimbo (small villages that depend
upon the soba) or libatas’. Oliveira Santos followed the path and the
empirical points of Ross’s itinerary and himself gathered the testimonies
of the catechists and the natives, which enabled him not only to take
apart the supposed dispersion of the information poles that contributed
to the report, but also to challenge the size of the survey’s sample. Ross
said he had surveyed 7,000–8,000 people, from missionaries to natives
and foreign settlers, a ‘daily average of 230 respondents on the first
hypothesis and 270 on the second’. Oliveira Santos challenged this,
using his own example of the preparation of the counter-document:
‘During eight months […] I have still not managed to interview more
than 11,000’. His entire report was based on the minute dismantling,
even if repetitive and disorganised, of each methodological proposition
and of each analytical inference in Ross’s study.
As for the methodology, apart from the inaccuracies pointed out, the
essential question concerned the sources of information, not only for
those who produced them but, especially, for those who translated
them. The latter, because of the difficulties in communication, had a
crucial role in the conduct of the survey. On the one hand, this problem
was due to the interpretingg influence of the American missionaries and
the ‘natives of the respective missions’, and to the contribution of non-
Catholic missions on the preparation as well as the final production of
the report. As far as Oliveira Santos was concerned, Ross chose ‘certain
roads, where he was sure that the workers being surveyed were already
known by the missionary’s interpreter’. Oliveira Santos arrived at the
conclusion that, to his knowledge, at the time it was ‘the interpreter
himself who, alone, provided the detailed description of the sanzala’.113
On the other hand, Oliveira Santos was still making considerations
about the psychological characteristics of the African natives. In the first
case, what was in question was the persistent civilising tension between
the Portuguese colonial administration, including the Catholic religious
institutions that either supported or substituted it, and the activity of

foreign missionaries who were seen as a constant threat to the noble
plans to Catholicise and civilise the natives (articulated according to
the principle of the nationalisation of colonial affairs), or as outposts
for the recurring ‘desires’ of other colonial countries. Without doubting
the ‘beneficial influence’ of the missions, the Portuguese response to the
Ross report did not fail to claim that had this model been applied,
the authors ‘would not have travelled colonies with such amenities
as they encountered’. The missions were no more than a ‘powerful
aid, acting on the spirit of the natives’: the great task of civilisation
required an administrative leader. Moreover, ‘the extraordinary idea’ of
leaving the African colonies entirely to the missions brought another
question: what religion was Ross thinking about?114
Another point of criticism was that by not using ‘a semi-civilised
native’ (that is, one who had been exposed to the Catholic civilising
process), as the anonymous author of ‘Uma campanha difamatória’
wished, an approach to the objects of the survey had been established
which favoured getting into ‘the good graces of the inhabitants of the
native villages, by making them see how they might pay less tax’, and
seducing ‘the village leaders, showing them how they might continue
to exploit their subordinates to their own advantage, as they had done
prior to the coming under our beneficial administrative occupation’.115
Taking an excerpt from the report describing Edward Ross’s fieldwork,
the comments sent to the League of Nations focused their criticism on
the methodological operation of the survey in the operation of interpre-
tative dependence on the translators, since it was from them – and only
from them – that the ‘notes’ that formed the basis of the report came.
The declarations and testimonies of the chiefs, of the preachers and of
the native teachers were all recorded and filtered by interpreters who
had been chosen and supplied by the missions, ‘and of which religion?’
Their faithfulness and veracity were therefore immediately question-
able. Moreover, this allowed the introduction of constant references to
the ‘psychology of the African natives’:
It should be understood, and all those who are at least a little aware
of the psychology of native Africans know perfectly well […] that
these natives generally give white people the answers they believe
will please them most in the expectation of a reward. It is easy to get
from the same black, and even easier the less civilised he is, differ-
ent answers to the same question, depending upon how it is asked.
Everyone in Africa knows this.’116
This was the general framework of the psychological evaluation of the

‘native’ that supported the claim that not only were the respondents
easily instrumentalised but so too was the interpreter, who ‘naturally
translated in the manner he believed would most please the person who
was paying’.117
Another variation could be seen in the analysis made of the proce-
dures followed by the cipaios. Against the constant allegations in the
report concerning their ability to act with impunity and their involve-
ment in frequent abuses, it confirmed that ‘the poorly civilised native,
when invested with some authority, tends to abuse that authority. This
is what has happened with the cipaio’. Again, this accusation was placed
within the framework of missionary competition, insofar as ‘certain’
missionary organisations established themselves ‘in some almost unoc-
cupied regions of the colony […] as absolute masters […] where no
activity by the authorities is welcomed. Was it not true that some of the
interpreters chosen by Dr Ross were from these missions? Everything
leads us to believe they were, particularly since we know how little they
like the cipaios’. For Ross, this was not the issue. The people mostly
responsible for the abuses and for the ‘brutality’ the natives were suffer-
ing were the cipaios, who enjoyed the protection of their superiors. In
‘Village 16’, Ross asked the teacher at the school (which was presumably
part of a mission) why no-one protested against violent and arbitrary
recruitment by the cipaios. The teacher replied that he had done so. He
complained to the official representative of the Portuguese administra-
tion and accused the native police force of blackmailing the natives,
among other things. Not only did the superior authorities not supervise
the cipaio, they simply ignored the complaint. This way, ‘often the
cipaio’ was able to get wealthy ‘much faster than a successful merchant’.
What was true of ‘Village 16’ was also true of ‘Village 18’.118
Another particularly important case concerned the testimonies of
‘ambaquistas’’ (people from the Ambaca region) and the ‘black evange-
lists’, the incorporation of whom sought to give force to the animosity
they already expressed in relation to the Portuguese administration.
Ross gathered 50 natives in ‘Village 4’ who stated that they would
‘rather be slaves’ than compulsory labourers or serfs. The compulsory
labour to which they were subjected was worse than the old domestic
slavery that was ‘only cruel when the owner was cruel’. Despite the law
providing the recruitment process complete freedom, Ross noted that
these ambaquistas ‘said they put their fingerprints on paper without
knowing the contents’. These contracts, they said, are only ‘for the
English to see’.119 Oliveira Santos countered that it was in the area of
Ambaca where the establishment of a yet limited network of schools

with the aim of providing an ‘academic’ education rather than one of
‘trades and crafts’ had been sought. The result was perverse since the
‘naturally intelligent took advantage of this education for ill and sought
to use it and impose it on the other blacks, who had always been largely
exploited’. On the other hand, the ‘Negroes of Ambaca’, before the
intensity of the missions and their education, had dedicated themselves
to ‘selling powder and hunting rifles’, which, because of the prohibi-
tion of the trade in arms and the administration’s efforts to disarm the
natives, was the main reason for the ambaquistas’’ animosity towards
them, and the reason they took advantage of the opportunity provided
by Ross’s survey.120
In this context, the Portuguese government’s response to the League
of Nations sought not only to undermine the credibility of these state-
ments, but also to stress the positive effects of its administrative activity
and to project a negative image of the power structures that existed prior
to their occupation. For example, it claimed the route followed by Ross
and Cramer, under the protection of the ‘Portuguese colonial adminis-
tration’, would in earlier times, ‘in the dark days’, either have ended up
in ‘a disgraceful state of slavery, under the control of any native chief’, or
simply have been ‘slaughtered or devoured by cannibals’. The mistakes
and the abuses, where they existed, occurred in those pockets of terri-
tory to which the administrative writ did not yet fully run, ‘spots’ where,
strangely, given the ‘isolation of certain elements who prefer – who
knows why? – to pursue their mission far from the gaze and supervision
of the Portuguese administrative authorities’. When they come under
the effective jurisdiction of the Portuguese administrative authorities
they are severely punished in accordance with the penalties contained
in the official bulletins of the Portuguese colonies. The differentiation
of abuse and punishment was not part of ‘Algumas considerações ...’,
although they were largely described in ‘Campanha difamatória ...’.
Regardless of the recurrence of the irregularities committed, what is cer-
tain is the diversity of the crimes against the natives, moreover practised
by administration officials, which ranged from ‘maltreating natives with
the paddle and whip […] on three successive days’, to the extortion of
cattle and crops, through the payment of salaries owed to natives with
vouchers that could not be exchanged for money. By this reasoning,
challenging the report meant revealing the Portuguese colonial admin-
istration’s failure to exert its authority throughout the territory.121
In conclusion, the majority of the Portuguese response was con-
cerned with the nobility of the Portuguese colonial administration’s
intentions and its efforts. ‘Philanthropists or not, what is certain is

that these “Negrophiles” do not agree with a labour regime that is not
based on the principle of absolute freedom: and for this reason they
continuously protest, and often in a loud and unpleasant manner’.122
As the Portuguese response to the League of Nations noted, ‘if labour
must be free, then idleness must not have the same privilege’, which
was a recurring and perfectly sustainable argument within the civilising
rhetoric that governed national and international colonial texts and
discourses.123
In the pages of O Brado Africano, the newspaper of the African Guild
of Lourenço Marques (Grémio Africano de Lourenço Marques), an insti-
tute designed to defend and promote the rights of Mozambican natives,
the matter of compulsory labour was also the subject of many references
to the Ross report.124 The first of these emerged two days before the
article in the Diário de Notícias, and expressed foreboding. The article,
signed only by ‘X’, was titled ‘Prevendo a tormenta (Anticipating the
storm)’.125 It is interesting to note that this was a rare example of a
notice that was written by someone who was introduced as neither ‘a
native nor born of this colony’, which in a way excused the journal’s
editorial team which, while composed of ‘natives’, had declared them-
selves to be ‘Portuguese and patriotic’ from the outset (in the pages of O
Africano, their first journal, which was published in 1908). In this point
lies, perhaps, the explanation for the fact that the Ross report’s allega-
tions were rejected when subjected to direct analysis, while in other col-
umns in this same newspaper, there were frequent critical reflections on
central questions contained in the report itself, which were not limited
to the matter of forced labour.
For example, an article entitled ‘Trabalhadores indígenas’ (Native
workers), which was published on 10 April 1926, contained a strong
attack on the ‘general tax’ (imposto da chapa). This tax was levied on
natives, with 80 per cent of the funds collected being used to create
a sanitation infrastructure and to provide them with social support.
However, after ‘13 years of assiduously collecting this tax’, the article
claimed, the ‘improvements accounted to nothing more than the pur-
chase of more handcuffs for those’ who did not yet have them. The
existence of a department for native affairs did not preclude facts such
as this, nor did it prevent the exploitation or the ‘beatings’. Although
the ‘black’ did not complain, since he knew ‘complaints only’ result in
‘disappointments and persecutions’, the article’s author said there was
‘a general discontent [raging] among the native workers’.126 Ross had
forcefully attacked this tax, to such an extent that it was one of the
main accusations he levelled regarding Mozambique. The main issue

was that the tax was very high, more than half of the payment received
for chibalo (labour requisitioned by the Portuguese colonial administra-
tion), whether it was for work in the mines of Johannesburg or in the
sugar plantations. This, if they even received payment. In 1922, accord-
ing to the testimony of a missionary that Ross presented as evidence
(‘Case 6’), a native who was recruited to work on a sugar plantation had
to work for six months in order to pay the hut tax. The method of col-
lecting this tax was also mentioned by Ross as being ‘contemptuous of
human dignity’, since payment cannot be made directly to the cipaio.
After the cipaio had made notification of the debt, the native had to fol-
low him for one or two days as he made his notifications, and only then
would they both go to the secretary of Native Affairs.127
Ross interpreted the mass emigration to neighbouring countries,
particularly to the mines in Transvaal, as clear proof of the manner
in which the natives were maltreated in Mozambique. Emigration
was viewed as a strategy of native resistance, as if this process was the
result of free will, as if the cipaios did not exceed their authority and
extend their activities to the frontiers, or as if the working conditions
in Belgian Congo and the Rand were not similar to those identified by
Ross in the two Portuguese colonies – a fact that had, moreover, been
often recognised by the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society.
Nevertheless, emigration to neighbouring territories represented a not
negligible source of income for the Portuguese colonial administration.
As we saw in the first part of this book, the trade in native manpower
was a phenomenon that involved the entire African and Asian colonial
complex. In a confidential letter from José Cabral, the governor of
Mozambique, to the colonial minister, Artur Ivens Ferraz, the economic
value of the circulation of native manpower was noted. The subject of
the correspondence was the consequences of the cessation ‘of the emi-
gration of our natives to Transvaal’, in the framework of the negotia-
tions of the convention with the Union of South Africa.
On the one hand, it reflected on the terms for the reorientation of the
available manpower faced with the cessation of flows to Transvaal, and
whether the colony would be able to absorb them without ‘completing
our inability’ to administrate the respective populations. On the other
hand, and much more importantly, the ‘loss of the direct revenues’
from emigration ‘of more than £200,000’, was lamented, as well as the
indirect revenues ‘the value of which is impossible to know’. In respect
of the latter, José Cabral noted that even if they made immediate use of
the available manpower, ‘in certain public works and other government
or private enterprises’, the imbalance in the revenues would continue

for several years.128 In the article ‘Uma campanha difamatória’, native
emigration was explained by the persistence of ‘foreign recruiters’, by
the fact that the administrations in the neighbouring territories did not
apply emigration taxes for many years and by the devaluation of the
Portuguese currency (escudo).129
In the article by the Portuguese settler that was published in O Brado
Africano, the ineffectiveness of the Native Affairs department was high-
lighted, while it also raised doubts about the compliance with legal
dispositions that supposedly regulated native labour, concluding that
‘it is a pity that the missionaries, Drs Ross and Cramer, had not taken
photographs of what they saw here, then it would not be difficult to
show such clichés as groups of natives being escorted by cipais [sic] […]
or perhaps being beaten, which seems to be a very common occur-
rence, particularly in the northern districts’.130 The African National
Party (Partido Nacional Africano, PNA131) and the African League (Liga
Africana), the leading institutional affiliate of which was precisely the
African Guild, were mentioned in the Portuguese response (‘Algumas
considerações ...’) as sharing the general indignation that greeted pres-
entation of the report at the League of Nations, as well as being widely
publicised in the metropolitan Portuguese newspapers and in those of
each of its colonies.
Indeed, the PNA wrote a letter to the secretary of the League of
Nations refuting the arguments made by Edward Ross. The PNA was
represented at the Second General Assembly of the International League
for the Protection of Natives (Ligue Internationale pour la Defense des
Indigènes), which took place in Geneva on 3 September 1925, and used
the opportunity to express their views on the subject. Noting that all
the members were ‘of black race and were from Portuguese colonies
of Africa’, their letter to the League provided a ‘formal denial’ of the
report’s contents, while assuring the League that the Portuguese colo-
nial authorities had ‘acted energetically, from an administrative and
judicial point of view, against the perpetrators and the accomplices
of the abuses’. Moreover, it was declared that the ‘protection of the
natives’ was being actively promoted, as the realisation of the first
International Congress of Tropical Medicine in Angola (1923) proved.
The ‘scientific protection of the life, the health and the improvement
of the indigenous races’ was a reality. Given this position, and its
positive expected impact in Geneva, Afonso Costa suggested that the
Portuguese government should ‘discreetly’ facilitate the continuity of
their presence in Switzerland. Given the success and utility of their
presence, the PNA leadership requested more support at forthcoming

international events, not only at the League in Geneva, but also in Paris
and Dresden. Given the expected ‘renewed agitation of imperialistic
colonial pretensions of certain foreign plutocratic groups’, the role of
the PNA could be crucial. 132
The common-sensical interpretation of E. A. Ross’s report, shaped by
the Portuguese authorities and ably disseminated and generalised by the
publicists in its service, ran as follows:
This document, which insults Portugal and the Portuguese, makes
such inflammatory, unreasonable and absurd allegations against the
Portuguese colonial administration, stating that, inter alia, while there
is no slavery in the Portuguese colonies in the sense of ownership and
right of life and death over another human being, it is simply because
the labour regime to which the natives are subject – compelled to work,
often without payment or food, subjected to the greatest oppressions
and violence, exercised over men, women and children – makes such
slavery unnecessary.
At the same time, the authors were identified: ‘Behind all of these
defamatory campaigns against the Portuguese colonial administration,
there lurks the hand of certain foreign Protestant missionaries’.133
This persistent and impertinent hand, while not important in respect
of the publication of the conclusions of the reports by Thomas Jesse
Jones and the Phelps-Stoke Fund, represented the visible outcome
of a ‘preconceived plan against us’, designed with the consensus of
competitor colonial powers (Germany and Italy) and the generality of
the member states of the League of Nations, attacking a country that
did not have ‘a large global circulation newspaper with which to chal-
lenge these allegations’ that are ‘published’ against it.134 This quickly
became a national obsession. The publicising and propagandising of
the national civilising activity to a global audience became imperative.
Ross had knowledge of these considerations and concluded that they
only reaffirmed the ‘secret’ agreement between the Portuguese colonial
administration, ‘well organised and powerful economic interests’ and
the press, which served to neutralise the evidences presented by him
and others.135
These criticisms had known predecessors. At the time, as we have
seen, they abounded. In Slavery or ‘Sacred Trust’?, published precisely
in 1926, John H. Harris considered that the legal abolition of slavery
had, perversely, led to the emergence of serfdom that characterised
two specific systems of labour organisation: the South African mines
and the rum, sugar and cocoa plantations of Portuguese Africa. An ‘old
story’, the organisation of labour in the Portuguese colonies now faced

a new range of problems that were rooted in the fact that ‘the patience
of the nations’ had been ‘exhausted’ by the persistence of its unac-
ceptable traits. David Livingstone, William Cadbury, H. W. Nevinson
and Edward Ross – all, according to Harris – told the same story of the
‘fraudulent and corrupt practices, of cruelty, oppression, […] of the
commercial enslavement of an entire population’. From these assess-
ments by these ‘humanitarian’ officials to the ‘private correspondence
of missionaries’, the accumulation of evidence revealed to Harris the
unquestionable and unequivocal nature of the often tortuous circum-
ventions practised by the Portuguese colonial administration. The Ross
report, which Harris cited often, was only one more chronicle of an
established practice: ‘the most serious aspect of the report’ was that ‘it
did not contain anything new’.136
The establishment of the League of Nations Temporary Slavery
Commission was intended to examine the truth of some aspects of these
documents, insofar as on their own they were considered insufficient as
conclusive proof, despite their conclusions being troubling.137 The mat-
ter of the means of recruiting and of administering native labour in the
colonial territories and the colonial problem were, once and for all, at
the centre of diplomacy and of international public opinion. The inter-
national colonial labour law emerged along with the need to develop
measures to repress the slave trade and slavery and was defined by the
establishment of obligations on states to regulate labour relations in
their colonial territories.138 From early on, as we have noted throughout
this book, the fundamental trace of normative order that governed the
codification of the native labour system lay in the need to ‘protect’ the
native populations as a consequence of their ‘special situation’, which
referred to the identification of a ‘particular form of life and civilisa-
tion’. The protective character of the norms was clearly expressed in
Article 23 of the League of Nations Covenant, and was based on the
growing acceptance of the principle of the freedom of labour and in the
precise definition of the rights and obligations of the contracting par-
ties. Although it had not paid much attention to the problem of native
labour since its creation, the International Labour Office came to play
an extremely important role in the international regulation of labour
in the colonial context. Established to meet the growing demands of
worker organisations in the allied countries (especially France and Great
Britain), but also to study the ‘scientific organisation of labour’ founded
on the proceedings and results of the ‘industrial technique, psychol-
ogy and economy’, the office became associated with the Permanent
Mandates Commission and the Temporary Slavery Commission, in

which it had one representative. The first fruit of this unification of
forces was the Convention of 25 September 1926, which was the result
of work developed by the Temporary Slavery Commission outlining
strongly restrictive rules on the use of compulsory labour. This was only
to be permitted for public ends, and must be paid for and authorised
only by the central authorities in each colony.139
It was in this context that the Portuguese government sent an official
response in which it repeated its challenge to the Ross report, without
actually referring to it.. It also restated the ‘absence of racial precepts’,
the existence of civic equality between the natives and the settlers, and
cited Articles 256 and 260 of the metropolitan penal code as proof that
the solution of compulsory native labour was similar to that employed
in Portugal (with idleness and vagrancy serving as essential criteria),
where the redemptive nature of work was always emphasised. Unlike the
laconic Chinese response, the Portuguese reply was prolix in explaining
history, intentions and principles. However, it cunningly left out the
possibility that the actual implementation of the ‘civilising precepts’
could take a long time. The age-old habits, the traditions, the perceived
psychology of the natives – that made them ‘ethnically backward’ and
in need of constant training (Omer Buyse had left his mark) – were
so rooted that the civilising process would necessarily involve a ‘long
period of evolution’ and demand differentiated solutions according to
the specific native types. The response to the prohibition of compulsory
labour for private ends was positive. However, it raised many questions
that obscured the applicability of its use for public ends, which ranged
from the validity of the legal termination to describe those situations in
which it was possible to implement compulsory labour, to questioning
whether non-payment of the hut tax, which was a fair exercise of the
civilising effort, could result in compulsory labour.140
Manoeuvring the ‘sacred trust’
On 8 December 1925, following a suggestion made by Vasco Borges

and Ernesto Vieira da Rocha (minister of colonies), the government
appointed a commission that had as its purpose the ‘reviewing of our
legislation over native labour in the different colonies with a view to
harmonise them with the principles of the protocol [of repression of
slave trade, proposed by Lord Cecil]’. As important was the need to find
ways to improve or reinforce the mechanisms to ‘supervise the rigorous
application of the legislation’ and the ‘severe repression of the abuses
that may have been committed’. Composed by people such as Freire de

Andrade, António Correia de Aguiar and Bernardo Botelho da Costa,
covering all parties interested in the subject (including the Centro
Colonial and the PNA), the commission proposed many changes to the
existing legislation, always aiming to prove its correspondence with the
proposed project of convention submitted to the Sixth Assembly of the
League of Nations. Despite the efforts made by the ASAPS to include
some foreign participants in the commission, the Portuguese authori-
ties refused. Although they recognised an improvement in ASAPS’s atti-
tude towards the Portuguese, as Vasco Borges argued in January 1926,
this was a sensible affair that needed to be addressed cautiously and
internally. The same effort to minimise the possibilities of accusations
regarding the inconsistency of Portuguese colonial labour legislation
with the new international standards of imperial civilisation focused
on the laws of vagrancy. British and French laws were compiled and
analysed. In July 1927, Freire de Andrade asked António Bettencourt
Rodrigues, minister of foreign affairs, to write, with ‘urgency’, to the
International Labour Office saying that Article no 2 of the 1914 Labour
Code should be revoked. The problem was that the condemnation of
vagrancy enabled the transfer of natives to private companies. Portugal
was the only colonial power that enabled this, and such exceptional-
ity should end immediately. Portugal ratified the convention on 26
August 1927 and submitted its ratification to the League of Nations on
4 October that same year.141
On 7 May 1929, the Portuguese government sent a letter to the gen-
eral-secretary of the League of Nations in which it submitted a brochure
published by the minister of the colonies containing all Portuguese
colonial law then in force, from the regulations of the Native Labour
Code of the Portuguese Colonies in Africa (Decree of 6 December
1928) to the Political, Civil and Criminal Status of Natives (Decree
of 6 February 1929). The appendix to this communication, signed by
Calheiros e Menezes, was a ‘demonstration of the motives’ that had led
to the publication of the Native Labour Code of the Portuguese Colonies
in Africa (Decree-law 16199). As expected, the description of the decree
was included in a long history that demonstrated the continuation of
the ‘civilising policy Portuguese governments have introduced since
the 15th century’, characterised by a ‘Christian brotherhood’ with the
native people, promoting their ‘moral development and their progress’.
Using the rhetorical repertoire of the colonialists’ discourse, it stated
that ‘Europe of today, obsessed with the protection of natives in the
colonies, is very far from expressing the exact ideas of the humanitarian
and spiritual tendencies that characterise the supreme power and the
laws of Portugal’: to make the native people participate in a style of
life without which their moral and material development, their nor-
mal family life and civilisation were neither obtainable nor feasible.
It returned to the idea that it was absolutely necessary ‘to tear them
away from the idleness, prevent them from exploiting their women
and their children and make them renounce their vegetative life’. All
this guided the regulations of 1899, 1909 and 1914, as was recalled in
examples of ‘tutelary and protective’ work.142 The reoccurrence of the
word ‘protection’ was surely not innocent. The labour code of 1928 had
been rewritten under the influence of the 1926 convention on slavery.
However, the elements of the successive legislative texts that had been
formulated since the 1800s, which in practice supported the continu-
ation of a private system of native labour guided by the philosophy of
redemptive labour, were expanded and accommodated to the terms of
the convention.143
On 28 June 1930, the International Labour Office published a con-
vention on compulsory labour in which the colonial aspects were duly
analysed.144 One year earlier, during the Portuguese government’s nego-
tiations on the convention, a letter from the minister of the colonies,
Eduardo Augusto Marques, to the minister of foreign affairs, Jaime da
Fonseca Monteiro, dated 13 December, stated that:
it would be good if we could avoid the convention, but this not

being possible, as precedents suggest, then it would be better if the
clauses of this convention were written in such a way as to not leave
us exposed to constant attacks for failing to comply with that to
which the convention obliges us. It seems to me that it would be
useful to probe the governments of the colonial countries about
the provisions with respect to a future discussion on the replies to
the questionnaire, and on the viability of a secret prior agreement
between those nations that have opinions that are similar and who
have analogous interests, so that in Geneva we can as one defend the
same positions.145
The central question in the International Labour Office’s question-

naire was whether it should adopt a draft convention that had as its
goal the prohibition of the use of forced or compulsory labour in any
of its forms. The convention came into force on 1 May 1932 with-
out being ratified by Portugal, France or Belgium. The creation of an
entente coloniale, which was formed around the ICI with the goal of
preserving common interimperial interests (and marginalising the

United Kingdom), was a crucial aspect of this rejection. The ICI was an
important organisation for bringing together imperial interests and for
the circulation of information on the colonies. Its influence extended
to the Permanent Mandates Commission and the Temporary Slavery
Commission of the League of Nations, whether because some of the
resident members of these commissions were important figures within
the institute (Lugard, Gohr and Van Rees) or because it organised study
commissions on colonial matters in parallel with those of the League
of Nations. An ‘entirely scientific and non-official’ association, the
ICI sought to ‘facilitate and expand the comparative study of colonial
administration and legislation’, conduct original research on colonial
data and ‘create international relationships between those who are
concerned in the study of colonial administration and law – politicians,
administrators and intellectuals – to facilitate the exchange of ideas and
special knowledge among competent men’.146
More importantly, common stances could be reached, despite the
interimperial competition. Portuguese colonial thinkers saw in this
institution an important organisation for the dissemination of the
programmatic body of Portuguese colonisation, the past and present
achievements of the nation’s civilising magnum opus and, simultane-
ously, a fundamental support in the common defence of the colonial
projects of several powers. The internationalisation of colonial prob-
lems required the concerted efforts of several networks of interests that
circulated within the imperial and colonial worlds. In a letter from
Penha Garcia to the minister of the colonies, José Bacelar Bebiano, the
former called attention to the introduction of the question of native
labour organisation into the institute’s study programmes. The reason
was simple: ‘the League of Nations’ International Labour Office is inter-
ested in this matter’. Since within the ‘institute there are experienced
colonialists’, its leaders thought they could ‘inspire’ the ‘circles in
Geneva through a serious study that would prevent the Bureau from
suffering from the influences of those who have nothing to do with
the colonies and who could lead it to errors that would jeopardise the
reasonable and practical nature of the question’. The study in question
was Le régime et l’organisation du travail des indigènes dans les colonies
tropicales (1929). The urgency of Portuguese collaboration lay in the fact
that the Portuguese had ‘repeatedly been accused of being anti-human-
itarian towards the natives’. The Native Labour Code of the Portuguese
Colonies in Africa was published on 6 December 1928 and the ICI
was an important vehicle for spreading the Portuguese colonising and
civilising message. Its proximity to the centres of analysis and decision

making in respect of colonial matters and its international reach made
it extremely attractive. As already noted, also important was the fact
that it provided a forum that enabled the negotiation of common posi-
tions which would eventually question the 1930 ILO’s Convention on
forced labour.147
Already during the Paris Peace Conference, Freire de Andrade stressed
the need of a common stance, namely with Belgium: their authorities
were as ‘ready to resist the doctrines of President Wilson over colo-
nial administration as the Portuguese’. The French position should be
evaluated as well. The danger of the ‘theories’ that were arguing that ‘in
the future all colonies would be under a special economic and native
administration regime, supervised by the League of Nations’, was great,
and needed to be counteracted.148
Later on, a clause of colonial application was frequently invoked to
justify special circumstances in the application of the novel norma-
tive framework regarding labour. In his lengthy report of the Twelfth
International Conference on Labour, which he attended as Portuguese
delegate, Vasco Quevedo described the ‘extremely difficult’ position
in which he was throughout the debates over ‘forced labour’: he had
to deal with an ‘organised revolutionary aggressiveness of the workers
group’. Given the political circumstances, which he saw as unfavour-
able to the imperial interests of the Portuguese state, Quevedo strongly
advised that a close coordination of positions between colonial empires
should be pursued. The answers to the forthcoming questionnaire
should be ‘identical’ in ‘concept and substance’ (he included Great
Britain in this strategy). The ‘establishment of that international instru-
ment’ was a matter of great concern. To condition the terms of the
Convention through a common interimperial effort was seen as a more
intelligent strategy than its outright rejection and non-ratification. His
view was commended at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was in tune
with the policy being promoted by the successive cabinets and minis-
ters of foreign affairs. As Luís Sampayo wrote, ‘international multilateral
agreements with an humanitarian label’ entailed ‘the highest danger’.
‘Partial agreements’ on colonial issues were a far better strategy.149
Alberto de Oliveira, in Brussels, and Manuel Quintão Meireles, min-
ister of foreign affairs, sponsored similar ideas. Oliveira reported on
the Twentieth Session of the ICI (24–27 June 1929), one dominated
by debates on regimes and forms of organisation of native labour in
tropical colonies, including the limits of international supervision of
colonial labour. As Oliveira noted, the ‘majority of the members of the
Institute were still under the painful impression caused by the danger-
ous and indiscreet deliberations of the last Conference on Labour in
Geneva’. Given this fact, a common attitude towards the necessity of
establishing clear limits to the international intervention on the subject
was evaluated: ‘only between [and by] colonial states’ could these limits
be defined. This was precisely the main point raised by Manuel Quintão
Meireles: its was fundamental to ‘counterbalance everything that ena-
bles the intrusion of external elements and especially of international
organisations in the supervision, examination or whatever one might
describe it, of the administration of colonial territories’. The ‘principle
of internationalisation’ should be refused. The representatives of the
League that were in Brussels – Vito Catastini, director of the Mandates
Commission, and Jean Goudal, from the BIT – certainly understood the
message.150
These efforts at interimperial entente obviously reached the news-
papers. In late 1930, a Portuguese journalist published a piece in the
Belgian newspaper La Nation Belge (28 October 1930) in which he
proclaimed the need to organise an ‘entente between nations with
interests in the African continent’, in order ‘to face the offensive that
against them was being perpetrated at the International Conference
on Labour’, as Oliveira highlighted to his superior. In his text, Paulo
Osório mentioned the June meeting of the ICI as an example of what
should be done, and perfected. At that meeting, the conclusion could
not have been clearer: ‘in the current state of affairs, there is no place for
international agreements’ on the subject of colonial labour. A ‘solidary
action’ against the ‘hypocrite humanitarianism’, which advocated the
‘internationalisation of the colonies’ and was being promoted by ‘social
conceptions inspired in Moscow’ (an accusation frequently thrown at
the ILO), was mandatory. An anonymous note confirmed the meetings
in Paris between Penha da Garcia and the representatives of the French
and Belgian governments, in which the definition of a common stance
regarding ‘forced labour in the colonies’ was agreed.151
Portugal’s refusal to sign the document was based on two essential
points. The first lay in the fact that the new regime in Lisbon believed
it was unnecessary given the relatively recent implementation of
the 1926 convention. The second reason was based on the fact that
the regulation of compulsory labour for public ends was a matter of
national law, and that by violating that principle the convention was
disrespectful of the state’s sovereignty. Thus, with the blessing of the ICI
and with the backing of international law, the Portuguese government
defended its position that the development of labour law must proceed
in conformity with the extent of the native peoples’ development and

in accordance with the specific needs of each colony. As José de Almada
noted, the profit produced by the labour of natives from Angola and S.
Thomé was poor during the first year while those from Mozambique
increased from the sixth month. The vaunted equality of treatment had
its limits, determined by the need to protectt the native populations. In
fact, little had changed during almost 60 years. What needed to change
was the success of the propaganda promoting the abolitionist and
humanitarian myth of Portuguese colonialism.152
The re-emergence of emphatic condemnations over the labour con-
ditions that were being offered to Africans in the Portuguese colonial
territories circa 1930 reinforced this perspective. Among many other
examples were: the publication of Lady Kathleen Simon’s Slavery; and
the report produced by the British consul in Loanda, R. T. Smallbones,
which argued that the intervention of the authorities in labour recruit-
ment to ‘supply the plantations’ was a result of the disproportion
between ‘wages payable to native labourers’ and the ‘hut-tax’, which
was ‘about equal to the salary for four months’. Another memorandum
from the ASAPS in 1930 (signed by John H. Harris, Henry W. Nevinson,
Joseph Burtt but also by William Cadbury) again provoked discomfort
with the evolving internationalisation of imperial and colonial affairs.
As the Portuguese ambassador in London, Tomaz Garcia Rosado, stated,
the copious number of ‘references to native labour in our colonies’ in
the United Kingdom proved a ‘systematic tendentious campaign’ and
a ‘widespread opinion about the treatment […] given to the native
population’. The decision to reject the 1930 Convention impacted
negatively in ‘international opinion’ about the country.153A reaction
was in order, one that should be anchored in new forms of proving civi-
lisation, that is, new modalities of collecting, organising and presenting
political, cultural, social and economic evidence about the Portuguese
imperial civilisation.154 But the problem of forced labour persisted. So
did criticism about the ‘civilising mission’ of Portuguese colonialism.
The manoeuvring of the ‘sacred trust’, and of the evolving internation-
alisation of imperial and colonial affairs, continued to be an expedient
turned into a policy.
Conclusion
As we stated at the beginning of this book, the true ‘mission’ of

Portugal’s civilising imperial programmes was to create the appropriate
conditions to prepare and induce, forcefully if necessary, the natives to
work in the creation of new Brazils in Africa. The widespread formula-
tion of political, moral, legal, economic and sociocultural doctrines that
proclaimed the irreplaceable civilisational value of labour demonstrates
why this fact constituted the cornerstone of the new imperial formation.
Given the nature and the modus operandi of the novel, colonial,
moral and political economies, in a particularly turbulent international
and interimperial environment, the achievement of civilisation through
labourr was promoted as a sine qua non of the overall imperial project.1 As
happened in other colonial empires, the longstanding problem of scar-
city of manpower forced the Portuguese imperial and colonial adminis-
trations (in Lisbon and in all colonial outposts) to sponsor and enable
the creation of a system of native labour recruitment and distribution,
including circulation from one colonial territory to another. The pro-
grammes of ‘white colonisation’ failed consistently and the need to pro-
tect those territories from foreign aspirations, real and imagined, and
to assure them a modicum of development – accommodating the few
national economic interests there operating, promoting the interests
of the empire-state and responding to the novel ‘standards of imperial
civilisation’ – left no other option. These imperatives justified and rein-
forced the doctrine of civilisation through labour,
r being accompanied by
the production and reproduction of sociocultural representations about
the civilisational evolutionary condition of indigenous populations.2
At the same time, the establishment and persistence of a system of
colonial exploitation – which preserved the old practices and routines
of the slave trade and the longstanding tenets of an ideology of slavery,
195
and which was based on forced labour and on conditions ‘analogous to

slavery’ – was the focus of recurrent criticism; for sure a legacy of the
ideological, moral, economic and political dimensions of the abolition-
ist process.3 The rhetorical operation behind the system proposed a
differentiation between archaic and morally unacceptable modalities of
coerced labour, as servitude and slavery, and modern forms of coaction,
rationally and scientifically organised by the state with a view to instill-
ing the modern principles of work in African subjects.4 Side by side with
repatriation, the modus operandi of the recruitment process was the
central problem addressed by external critics, motivated by economic,
humanitarian and missionary reasons. This modus operandi of the sys-
tem persisted as a central aspect of the labour conditions and relations
in the Portuguese empire until the end, although not without historical
and geographical variations. The Portuguese reply to such criticism was
based on a combination of an old and multifaceted catalogue of his-
torical and rhetorical evidences of the ‘civilising mission’ with numerous
proofs of colonial labour legislation that, it was argued, confirmed the
proclaimed liberal and progressive, imperial and colonial programmes
and policies. The mobilisation of the alleged nobility of the legal pro-
cedures and of the putative civilising imperial endeavour, which the
former supposedly embodied, had a double purpose: on one hand, they
justified and legitimised the established system; on the other, they rein-
forced its continuity and development, via the argument of ‘redemptive
labour’. This book demonstrates this fact.
With the analysis of the issue of native labour, which is understood
alongside more ample considerations regarding the native policies
or the Portuguese colonial administration, two important aspects are
equally demonstrated in this book.
First, as we noted in the Introduction, the need to evade the meth-
odological, analytical and historiographical nationalisms that still pre-
dominate in the study of imperial and colonial histories. Second, the
necessity of being critical about social and historical assessments that
are based on approaches focused on the juridical and constitutional
dimensions of imperial and colonial ventures or focused on the inter-
pretation of colonial policies as mere epiphenomena of ideological and
political regimes, frequently dominated by an exclusive metropolitan
analytical take.
On the one hand, the risk of overestimating the actual consequences
of legal precepts and their intentions is obvious, and the probability of
reifying the normative order is high. The failure to produce a proper
assessment of the social mechanisms and practices of resistance or
Conclusion 197
instrumental appropriation and manipulation of legal dispositions

(by the colonists, the natives, or by both) is the major – but not the
only – significant unwarranted consequence. The legislative outpour-
ing regarding imperial and colonial affairs was just one of the elements
of a more complex and ambiguous tapestry of political, economic and
sociocultural processes which occurred at different levels. An excessive
focus on the legislative architecture that aimed to govern the imperial
and colonial worlds entails a presumption of homogeneity of colonial
projects that overshadows the plural and dynamic interests in its inte-
rior, again at many levels. Juridical aspects were central to the numerous
loci of international debate about imperial and colonial affairs, and the
governmental mémoires were full of doctrinarian and juridical protocols,
instruments and expedients. But these processes were gradually marked
by the increased importance of factual information gathered locally,
practice that became decidedly promoted in the colonies, at the metro-
pole and internationally, even if with different rhythms and degrees of
accomplishment. The intersection of these analytical levels is therefore
more than a methodological preference; it is also a necessity that results
from contact with multiple archives of diverse institutions (colonial,
metropolitan, transnational and international).
On the other hand, analytical emphasis on the colonial programme
as the result of a political regime, or of a particular historical period
defined by a certain administrative or constitutional framework (e.g. a
republican colonialism), obscures the diversity of individuals, groups,
social and historical events and processes that contribute to and com-
pete in the imperial spaces, doing so beyond a single metropolitan (e.g.
one empire-state) or colonial (e.g. one colony) level. As this book shows,
especially in the first two chapters of its second part, the formation of
a colonial empire, the secular or religious civilisational control of its
populations, the delimitation of its political, economic and sociocul-
tural borders, and the information gathering and mise en valeurr of its
material and symbolic resources are not reducible to, nor can they be
understandable in, a single analytical scale.5
Many of these features are only graspable in a wider, common and
comparative analytical framework. Among other important factors, the
mounting internalisation of imperial and colonial affairs was crucial,
as it entailed many moments of international normative integration of
the Portuguese empire-state, which had a considerable impact on the
formulation, and adjustment, of the political and legal mechanisms
of regulation and supervision available to those who administered
the empire throughout the colonial bureaucracy. The analysis of the
events of the 1920s explored in this volume reveals why and how
this occurred. To fail to recognise these methodological and analytical
imperatives is to fail to understand the rich historical texture of broader,
but also more localised, historical processes. Moreover, the risk of erro-
neously promoting exceptional cases is obvious.6 The longstanding doc-
trines of exceptionality of Portuguese imperialism and colonialism, still
pervasive today under many disguises, must be constantly scrutinised.
This volume examines and questions the benevolent exceptionality of
its civilising mission, while refusing its supposed insularity. Perhaps in a
more pronounced manner, all these problems and processes continued
until the imperial endgame.7
Notes
Introduction
1. Rowley also stressed the poor ethical and moral preparation of the priests
and missionaries in Portuguese Africa. Henry Rowley, Africa Unveiled
(London: SPCK, 1876), 75; also cited in James Duffy, A Question of Slavery
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 112–113.
2. This book is a revised and augmented version of Livros Brancos, Almas Negras
(Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2010), which was based on an MA
thesis entitled Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Livros Brancos, Almas Negras.
O Colonialismo Português: Programas e Discursos (1880–1930) (Lisbon: MA
Thesis, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de
Lisboa, 2000).
3. For assessments of other imperial formations see Alice Conklin, A Mission to
Civilize (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); Catherine Hall, Civilising
Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Harald Fischer-Tiné
and Michael Mann (eds), Colonialism as Civilizing Mission (London: Anthem
Press, 2004); Dino Costantini, Mission Civilisatrice (Paris: La Découverte,
2008).
4. For the development of this argument see Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘The
“Civilization Guild”: Race and Labour in the Third Portuguese Empire
c.1870–1930’, in Francisco Bethencourt and Adrian Pearce, eds, Racism and
Ethnic Relations in the Portuguese Speaking World d (Oxford: Oxford University
Press/British Academy, 2012), pp. 173–199.
5. For the notion of politics of difference see Frederick Cooper and Jane
Burbank, Empires in world history (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010), 11–13. For one example of an approach based on the ethical argu-
ment and its relation to the problem of labour see Neta Crawford, Argument
and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
159–200.
6. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, ‘Das “dificuldades de
levar os indígenas a trabalhar”: o “sistema” de trabalho nativo no império
colonial português’, in Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ed., O Império Colonial em
Questão (Lisbon: Edições 70, Colecção História&Sociedade, 2012), 159–196;
idem, ‘Internationalism and the labours of the Portuguese colonial empire
(1945–1974)’, Portuguese Studies, vol. 29, no. 2 (2013), 142–163. For the con-
nection between the problem of labour and decolonisation see the classic
work by Frederick Cooper, Decolonization and African Society (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
7. This study does not offer an in-depth investigation of the local realities and
dynamics of native labour, which is a crucial analytical approach to many
of the themes explored in this book. Unfortunately, it continues to be an
understudied aspect, especially for the period in question. For some recent
works, although essentially for a later period, see Alexander Keese, ‘Searching
199
200 Notes
for the reluctant hands: obsession, ambivalence, and the practice of organiz-
ing involuntary labour in colonial Cuanza-Sul and Malange districts, Angola,
1926–1945’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 41, no. 2
(2013), 238–258; Jeremy Ball, ‘Colossal lie’ (Los Angeles: PhD diss., University
of California, 2003); Philip Havik, ‘Estradas sem fim: o trabalho forçado
e a “política indígena”’, in AAVV, Trabalho Forçado Africano–Experiências
Coloniais Comparadas (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2006), pp. 229–247; Douglas
Wheeler, ‘The Forced Labor “System” in Angola, 1903–1947’, in AAVV,
Trabalho Forçado Africano–Experiências Coloniais Comparadas (Porto: Campo
das Letras, 2006), 367–393; Todd Cleveland, Rock Solid (Minneapolis: PhD
diss., University of Minnesota, 2008); Eric Allina, Slavery by Other Name
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).
8. Frederick Cooper, ‘Conditions Analogous to Slavery: Imperialism and Free
Labor Ideology in Africa’, in Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt and Rebecca
J. Scott, (eds), Beyond Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000), 107–149.
9. For the ‘standards’ of civilisation see Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard
of ‘Civilization’ in International Societyy (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1984);
Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), esp. pp. 98–178; Antony Anghie, Imperialism,
Sovereignty and the Making of International Law w (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 32–114.
10. For a recent overview see Jonathan Derrick, Africa’s ‘Agitators’ (London:
Hurst, 2008).
11. For the overall argument see Jerónimo, ‘The “Civilization Guild”’.
12. Kevin Grant, A Civilized Savagery (New York: Routledge, 2005), especially pp.
109–134.
13. For classic assessments see, for instance, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, L
Congo au temps des grandes compagnies concessionnaires, 1898–1930 (Paris:
Mouton, 1972); Charles Van Onselen, Chibaro (London: Pluto Press, 1980);
Babacar Fall, Le travail forcé en Afrique-Occidentale française 1900–1946 (Paris:
Karthala Editions, 1993).
14. Since the conclusion, in 2000, of the MA thesis that originated this work –
Livros Brancos, Almas Negras. O Colonialismo Português: Programas e Discursos
(1880–1930) – some important books have appeared on this subject. Apart
from Grant’s A Civilized Savagery’s chapter, r see Lowell J. Satre, Chocolate on
Trial (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2005); Catherine Higgs, Chocolate
Islands (Athens OH: Ohio University Press, 2012).
15. Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000), 3, 11–15, 21–28, 85; Crawford Young, The African Colonial State
in Comparative Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 118–122.
For a comparative study see Colin Newbury, Patrons, Clients, and Empire (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo,
‘The States of empire’, in Luís Trindade, ed., The Making of Modern Portugal
(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. 65–101.
16. See the classic by Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998).
17. For an important study of these interrelations and processes see Andrew
Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
Notes 201
2010). See also Ulrike Lindner, ‘The transfer of European social policy
concepts to tropical Africa, 1900–1950: the example of maternal and child
welfare’, Journal of Global History, vol. 9 (2014), 208–231.
18. Frederick Cooper, ‘Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the
Development Concept’, in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds),
International Development and the Social Sciences (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997), pp. 64–92, at p. 64.
19. With few exceptions, the analysis of the country’s national and imperial
history is still marked by this type of approach. The same happens with the
traditional historiography of its international relations. For an analysis of
this question in social theory and sociology see Daniel Chernilo, A Social
Theory of the Nation State (London, Routledge, 2007).
20. This was a major concern in my 2000 MA dissertation. This is also a
major goal of the research project Internationalism and Empire: The Politics
of Difference in the Portuguese Colonial Empire in Comparative Perspective
(1920–1975) (FCT-PTDC/EPH-HIS/5176/2012). For the League and the impe-
rial and colonial phenomena see, for instance, Mark Mazower, Governing the
World (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 116–190 and ‘An international civiliza-
tion? empire, internationalism and the crisis of the mid-twentieth century’,
International Affairs, vol. 82, no. 3 (2006), 553–566; Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to
the league of nations’, The American Historical Review, vol. 112, no. 4 (2007),
1091–1117. See also Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro
(eds), Os passados do presente (Lisbon: Almedina, 2014).
21. See, for instance, Crawford, Argument and Change; Veronique Dimier, ‘On
Good Colonial Government: Lessons from the League of Nations,’ Global
Society, vol. 18, no. 3 (2004), 279–299.
1 Between Benevolence and Inevitability: The ‘Civilising

Mission’ of Portuguese Colonialism
1. Marcelo Caetano, Portugal e a Internacionalização dos Problemas Africanos
(Lisboa: Edições Ática, 1965), 145. For the protocols and the confer-
ence’s closing declaration, see Conférence Internationale de Bruxelles (Paris:
Imprimerie Nationale, 1891).
2. The best collective study of the Berlin Conference and its importance for
European colonial and imperial history is still Stig Förster, Wolfgang J.
Mommsen and Ronald Robinson (eds), Bismarck, Europe, and Africa (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988). The best study of the diplomatic manoeuvres
immediately before, during and after the Berlin meeting is Sybil Eyre Crowe,
The Berlin West African Conference, 1884–1885 (London: Longmans, Green &
Co., 1942). For more on the Portuguese involvement and the Congo ques-
tion, see Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, A Diplomacia do Império (Lisbon: Edições
70, 2012), 238–302 (revised and augmented version of ‘Religion, Empire, and
the Diplomacy of Colonialism: Portugal, Europe, and the Congo Question, c.
1820–1890’ (London: PhD thesis, King’s College London, 2008)); F. Latour da
Veiga Pinto, Le Portugal et le Congo au XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France, 1972), 246–293.
3. Caetano, Portugal e a Internacionalização, 97–98.
202 Notes
4. For example, it was only in 1887 that the Portuguese colonial administra-
tion proceeded to the topographical delimitation of its effective sovereignty
over Angola. For more on this, see Guilherme Brito Capelo, ‘Relatorio
do governador-geral da província de Angola de 1887’, in Relatórios dos
Governadores das Províncias Ultramarinas (Lisboa: Ministério da Marinha e
Ultramar, 1889), pp. 9–10.
5. The abundant correspondence between Hutton and Mackinnon with
Henry Morton Stanley, located at the archive of the Royal Museum for
Central Africa in Tervuren, demonstrates the proximity with Leopold II’s
agenda. For Mackinnon see J. Forbes Munro, Maritime Enterprise and Empire
(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2003), esp. 346–381. See also Barrie M.
Ratcliffe, ‘Commerce and empire: Manchester merchants and West Africa,
1873–1895’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 7, no. 3
(1979), 293–320.
6. For more on the activities of the British missionary societies (in addition to
the BMS and the Livingstone Inland Mission) and their links with British
commercial interests aligned with Leopold II against the agreement between
Portugal and the United Kingdom, see Roger Anstey, Britain and the Congo in
the Nineteenth-Centuryy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), esp. 113–138; Ruth
Slade, L’Attitude des Missions Protestantes vis-à-vis des Puissances Européennes
au Congo avant 1885 (Bruxelles: Institut Royal Colonial Belge, 1954) and
English-Speaking Missions in the Congo Independent State (1878–1908) (Brussels:
Académie Royale des Sciences Coloniales, 1959). For more on Leopold II’s
colonial project see particularly Robert S. Thomson, Fondation de l’État
Independent du Congo (Brussels: Office de Publicité, 1933) and, among
the many works of Auguste Roeykens, Léopold II et l’Afrique (1855–1880)
(Brussels: Académie Royale des Sciences Coloniales, 1958).
7. For more on the disputes over ecclesiastical jurisdictions in the Congo
region, see Horst Gründer, ‘Christian Missionary Activities in Africa in the
Age of Imperialism and the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885’, in Förster
et al., Bismarck, Europe, and Africa, pp. 85–103 and especially Jerónimo, A
Diplomacia do Império.
8. For an example of Travers Twiss’s opinion on the Congo see his International
Protectorate of the Congo Riverr (London: Fewtress & Co., 1883); for his par-
ticipation in the debate see the anonymous statement by ‘a member of the
Royal Geographic Society of Antwerp’, titled Sir Travers Twiss et le Congo
(Bruxelas: A.-N. Lebègue et Cie, 1884). For a later assessment see Jesse S.
Reeves, ‘The origin of the Congo Free State, considered from the standpoint
of international law’, The American Journal of International Law, Vol. 3, no.
1 (1909), 99–118. See also Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘The Justification of King
Leopold II’s Congo Enterprise by Sir Travers Twiss’, in Shaunnagh Dorsett
and Ian Hunter (eds), Law and Politics in British Colonial Thoughtt (New
York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010), 109–126; Casper Sylvest, ‘“Our passion
for legality”: international law and imperialism in late nineteenth-century
Britain’, Review of International Studies, vol. 34, no. 3 (2008), 403–423. For
the relationship of the colonial and imperial question with international
law, see Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and
Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), esp. 98–178, 132–133 (for Twiss); Antony Anghie, Imperialism,
Notes 203
Sovereignty and the Making of International Law w (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2007), esp. 32–114; Andrew Fitzmaurice, ‘Liberalism and
empire in nineteenth-century international law’, The American Historical
Review, vol. 117, no. 1 (2012), 122–140, esp. 127–130 (for Twiss).
9. For the presence of religious and humanitarian factors before and after
the conference see Suzanne Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade
(London: Longman, 1975), 169–189; Lewis H. Gann, ‘The Berlin Conference
and the Humanitarian Conscience’, in Förster et al., Bismarck, Europe, and
Africa, pp. 321–331, and the general study by Charles Pelham Groves,
‘Missionary and Humanitarian Aspects of Imperialism from 1870 to 1914’,
in Lewis H. Gann and Peter Duignan, Colonialism in Africa, 1870–1960: The
History and Politics of Colonialism, 1870–1914, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969), 462–496. For the public impact of the conference
and its ‘humanitarian’ dispositions see William Roger Louis, ‘The Berlin
Congo Conference’, in Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis (eds), France
and Britain in Africa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 167–220,
cit. in 218. For the view of an important actor at the time see H. R. Fox
Bourne, ‘Agreement of European Powers as to Liquor Supply in Africa’,
Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation, vol. 1, no. 2 (1899), 287–292.
For an overview of the problem of alcohol in Africa see Justin Willis,
‘Drinking power: alcohol and history in Africa’, History Compass, vol. 3, no.
1 (2005), 1–13, and the bibliography therein. For the role of the Aborigines’
Protection Society see Kenneth D. Nworah, ‘The Aborigines’ protection
society, 1889–1909: a pressure-group in colonial policy’, Canadian Journal of
African Studies, vol. 5, no. 1 (1971), 79–91 and H. Charles Swaisland, ‘The
Aborigines’ protection society, 1837–1909’, Slavery&Abolition, vol. 21 (2000),
265–280.
10. The heated discussions that took place during the 1876 Brussels Conference
around the role the missions had to fulfil, side by side with scientific and
commercial principles, in the colonial project sponsored by the Belgian King
Leopold II, represent a clear example of the manner in which religious moti-
vations were not always central in the promotion of civilising discourses and
practices associated with the colonial enterprises. See Jerónimo, A Diplomacia
do Império, 155–166. For recent and stimulating approaches to European
Kulturkämpfe, although without any reference to the colonial or imperial
aspect of the question, see Christopher Clark and Wolfram Kaiser (eds),
Culture Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
11. For more on ‘benevolent’, ‘obligatory’ and ‘inevitable’ imperialism, see
Andrew Porter, European Imperialism, 1860–1914 (London: MacMillan Press,
1994), 20–29. For the role fulfilled by the expansion of the Protestant mis-
sions, see Brian Stanley, The Bible and the Flagg (Leicester: Apollos, 1990),
esp. 85–110, and, especially Andrew Porter, Religion vs. Empire? (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2004).
12. For the significance of Livingstone’s challenge, see B. Stanley, ‘Commerce
and Christianity: providence theory, the missionary movement, and the
imperialism of free trade, 1842–1860’, The Historical Journal, vol. 26, no. 1
(1983), 71–94, and A. Porter, ‘Commerce and Christianity: the rise and fall
of a nineteenth-century missionary slogan’, The Historical Journal, vol. 28,
no. 3 (1985), 597–621. See also Förster et al., Bismarck, Europe, and Africa;
204 Notes
Suzanne Miers, ‘Humanitarism at Berlin: Myth or Reality?’ and Gann, ‘The

Berlin Conference’, pp. 333–345, pp. 321–331.
13. For more on the distance between the aims declared at the end of the meet-
ing and its actual results, and over the still persisting mythology about the
meeting as the moment the African continent was divided, particularly
the discussion of the meaning of the term ‘effective occupation’ (which
was restricted to new conquests, costal zones and occupations, not to
protectorates), see the exceptional articles by Jean Stengers, ‘À Propos de
l’Acte de Berlin, ou Comment Naît une Légende’, in Zaire (October 1953),
839–844, and Jean Stengers, ‘Les Cinq Légendes de l’Acte de Berlin’, in J.
Stengers, Congo: Mythes et Réalités (Paris: Éditions Duculot, 1989), 79–90;
Henk L. Wesseling, ‘The Berlin Conference and the Expansion of Europe: A
Conclusion’, in Förster et al., Bismarck, Europe, and Africa, pp. 527–40, esp.
pp. 532–533.
14. For more on Lavigerie’s missionary projects and for the place of the anti-
slavery ‘crusade’ within it, see Jerónimo, A Diplomacia do Império, 171–202;
François Renault, Lavigerie, L’Esclavage Africain et L’Europe 1868–1892, 2 vols
(Paris: Boccard, 1971); idem, Cardinal Lavigerie (London: Athlone Press,
1994); Aylward Shorter, Cross and Flag in Africa (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2006).
For an excellent assessment of Lavigerie’s place in the ‘transnational anti-
slavery’ movement see Daniel Laqua, ‘The Tensions of Internationalism:
Transnational Anti-Slavery in the 1880s and 1890s’, The International History
Review, vol. 33, no. 4 (2011), pp. 705–726.
15. See, for instance, William Clarence-Smith, ‘The British “Official Mind” and
Nineteenth-Century Islamic Debates over the Abolition of Slavery’, in Keith
Hamilton and Patrick Salmon (eds), Slavery, diplomacy and empire (Brighton:
Sussex Academic Press, 2009), pp. 125–142. For an analysis of the question
of slavery and Islam see William Clarence-Smith, Islam and the Abolition of
Slaveryy (London: Hurst&Company, 2006).
16. For the agitation suggested by Pius IX, see Jerónimo, A Diplomacia do Império,
202. For Leo XIII see Claude Prudhomme, Stratégie missionnaire du Saint-Siège
sous Léon XIII (1878–1903) (Paris: Boccard, École française de Rome, 1994),
388–392. For Lavigerie and Leo XIII see François Renault, ‘Aux origines
du Ralliement: Léon XIII et Lavigerie (1880–1890)’, Revue Historique, vol.
281, no. 2 (1989), 381–432. For the transnational Catholic network see
several articles in Emiel Lamberts (ed.), The Black International 1870–1878
(Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002). For Lavigerie’s action see Renault,
Lavigerie, Vol. II, 77–78, 83–94 and 101–106, and Laqua, ‘The Tensions of
Internationalism’, 707. For a comparison between diverse religious and
ecclesiastical adherence to the abolitionist cause (theme that requires fur-
ther research) see Seymour Drescher, ‘Two Variants of Anti-Slavery: Religious
Organization and Social Mobilization in Britain and France, 1780–1870’,
in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds), Anti-Slavery, Religion and
Reform (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), pp. 43–63 and, for a larger compara-
tive framework, see William Clarence-Smith, ‘Religions and the abolition of
slavery – a comparative approach’ in http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/
Research/GEHN/GEHNPDF/Conf10_ClarenceSmith.pdf (last accessed on 24
September 2014).
Notes 205
17. Jean Stengers, ‘Introduction’, in La Conférence de Géographie de 1876 (Brussels:

Académie Royale des Sciences, d’Outre-Mer, 1976), xiii; Miers, Britain and the
Ending of the Slave Trade, 204–206, 219–221 and 229. For the donation see
Laqua, ‘The Tensions of Internationalism’, 709. For Bismarck and the German
context see Jan Georg Deutsch, Emancipation without Abolition in German East
Africa, c. 1884–1914 (Oxford: James Currey Publishers, 2006), 103–104ff.
For the overall European anti-slavery moment see William Mulligan, ‘The
Anti-slave Trade Campaign in Europe, 1888–1890’, in William Mulligan and
Maurice Bric (eds), A Global History of Anti-Slavery Politics in the Nineteenth
Centuryy (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), pp. 149–170.
18. Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave, 230–234; Renault, Lavigerie, 259ff.
19. For the Ultimatum see Nuno Severiano Teixeira, O Ultimatum Inglês (Lisboa:
Beta-Projectos Editoriais, Lda, 1990).
20. For a transcription of the sessions, f the invitation, the work by Augusto
Castilho and the list of official stations, see Conférence Internationale de
Bruxelles, 10, 16–45 and 53–62; see also Augusto de Castilho, Memoria Ácerca
da Extincção da Escravidão e do Trafico de Escravatura no Territorio Portuguez
(Lisbon: Publicação do Ministério da Marinha, 1889).
21. Conférence Internationale de Bruxelles, 67–68.
22. Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave, 236–291.
23. Ibid., 251–256. For the civilising stations and the 1876 conference see
Jerónimo, ‘Religion, Empire, and the Diplomacy of Colonialism’, 114–115;
Caetano, Portugal e a Internacionalização, 146–149; see also Joaquim Moreira
da Silva Cunha, O Sistema Português de Política Indígena (Coimbra: Coimbra
Editora, 1953), 33–35.
24. Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave, 294.
25. For more see Jerónimo, ‘The “Civilization Guild”’.
26. Obviously, it is not our intention to create a marked, superficial distinction
between the two historical moments and processes: quite the contrary. The
understanding of one moment entails the study of the other. For a com-
bined assessment of both moments, see João Pedro Marques, The Sounds
of Silence: Nineteenth-Century Portugal and the Abolition of the Slave Trade
(Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006) and James Duffy, A Question of Slavery:
Labour Policies in Portuguese Africa and the British Protest, 1850–1920 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1967). For an example that is informatively rich and
which reveals the manner in which the legislative output operated as the
main legitimating factor of the abolitionist rhetoric and the civilising one,
see Joaquim Moreira da Silva Cunha, O Trabalho Indígena (Lisbon: Agência
Geral do Ultramar, 1954).
27. Here we follow the version included in Conférence Internationale de Bruxelles,
16–45. See also Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 1881, 23–27 and
391–392; Ao Povo Português (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1881), 4–5, 7 and
11–16; for the decree on the civilising missions, see Portuguese Government,
Diário do Governo, 18 August 1881.
28. For an analysis of the main aspects of the abolitionist mythology see João
Pedro Marques, ‘O mito do abolicionismo português’, in Actas do Colóquio
‘Construção e Ensino da História de África’’ (Lisbon: Ministério da Educação,
1995), 245–257.
206 Notes
29. Conférence Internationale de Bruxelles, 17, 24, 27 and 37. For an understand-
ing of the internal and external political context in which the decree of 10
December 1836 and its preamble emerged (including over the Setembrismo)
see João Pedro Marques, Os Sons do Silêncio, chapter IV, especially 195–214.
The preamble of the decree was partially based on the report by Sá da
Bandeira, which was submitted to the Cortes on 19 February 1836 and pub-
lished in Memorial Ultramarino e Marítimo, 1, March 1836, 13–14.
30. Conférence Internationale de Bruxelles, 28–29; See also O Trabalho Indígena nas
Colonias Portuguesas: Memoria Justificativa (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1906),
4, and Cunha, O Trabalho Indígena, 141–145, cited in 142.
31. Castilho, Memoria Ácerca da Extincção da Escravidão, 44; Duffy, A Question of
Slavery, 126–128.
32. A. T. da Silva Leitão e Castro, A Escravatura na Europa e na Africa a Propósito da
Conferencia de Bruxelas (Lamego: Minerva da Loja Vermelha, 1892), 7. For an
overview of the relation between the Church and the abolition of slavery see
William Clarence-Smith, ‘Église, nation et esclavage: Angola et Mozambique
portugais, 1878–1913’, in Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau (ed.), Abolir l’esclavage
(Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008), pp. 149–167.
33. José de Almada, Apontamentos Históricos sobre a Escravatura e o Trabalho
Indígena nas Colónias Portuguesas (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1932), 43–44.
For a more global appreciation of the historical transformation of slavery,
with particular emphasis on the development of legitimate trade in Africa,
see, among other works, P. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slaveryy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000 [1983]), especially 165–190 and 276–289,
and the collection of texts contained in Robin Law (ed.), From Slave Trade to
‘Legitimate’ Commerce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
34. For more see Jerónimo, A Diplomacia do Império, 41–55.
35. Special report of the Anti-Slavery conference held at the Salle Herz on the twenty-
sixth and twenty-seventh August 1867 7 (London: British and Foreign Anti-
Slavery Society, 1867) especially 134–135 and 144–146. See also Duffy, A
Question of Slavery, 6, 102–108.
36. Duffy, A Question of Slavery, 71 [Monteiro], 75–76 [Cameron and Young],
108–110 [Sullivan and Young], 111–113 [Rowley], 115 [Monteiro]. For the
overall issue see Jerónimo, A Diplomacia do Império; Pinto, Le Portugal et le
Congo. For the British involvement see Anstey, Britain and the Congo.
37. For Cameron, see his Across Africa, 2 vols. (London: Daldy, Isbister&Co,
1877); Jerónimo, ‘Religion, Empire, and the Diplomacy of Colonialism’,
153, 165–166, 183–186; Anstey, Britain and the Congo, 53–56; and Duffy, A
Question of Slavery, 75–76.
38. Andrade Corvo cited in A. Correia de Aguiar, O Trabalho Indígena nas Ilhas
de São Tomé e Principe (S. Thomé: Imprensa Nacional, 1919), 165–166.
In addition to the works by Jerónimo and Anstey cited above, see J. de
Andrade Corvo, Estudos sobre as Províncias Ultramarinas (Lisbon: Imprensa
Nacional, 1883), IV, 155–157; Pinto, Le Portugal et le Congo, 124–134; Eric
Axelson, Portugal and the Scramble for Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand
University Press, 1967), 41–50. For the abolitionist arguments see João
Pedro Marques, ‘Uma cosmética demorada: as cortes perante o problema
da escravidão (1836–1875)’, Análise Social, Vol. 36, no. 158–159 (2001),
209–247.
Notes 207
39. Agatha Ramm, Sir Robert Morier (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 73–112. For
Hopkins’ dispatch and testimony see Duffy, A Question of Slavery, 78–82.
40. Augusto Nascimento, ‘São Tomé e Príncipe’, in Valentim Alexandre and Jill
Dias (eds), O Império Africano 1825–1890 (Lisbon: Estampa, 1988), especially
271–298; ‘A “crise braçal” de 1875 em São Tomé’, Revista Crítica de Ciências
Sociais, vol. 34 (1992), 317–329; and Poderes e Quotidiano nas Roças de São
Tomé e Príncipe (Lousã: Tipografia Lousanense, 2002), 82–90.
41. Duffy, A Question of Slavery, 87–92 and 116–119.
42. Dermot Robert Wyndham Bourke (Earl of Mayo), De Rebus Africanis
(London: W. H. Allen&Co., 1883), especially 24–27, for an assessment of the
Angola-São Thomé connection.
43. José Alberto Corte-Real, Resposta à Sociedade Anti-Esclavista de London
(Lisbon: Sociedade de Geografia de Lisbon, 1884), especially 3–15; Vicente
de Melo e Almada, As Ilhas de São Thomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Academia Real
das Sciencias, 1884).
44. See Duffy, A Question of Slavery, 125–126 and 129–135. For the disputes see
Porter, Religion vs. Empire?, 270–272 and Hugo Gonçalves Dores, Uma Missão
para o Império (Lisbon: PhD Thesis, Universidade de Lisboa, 2014), especially
Chapter I, ‘Sonhos imperiais, Actos Gerais’. For the general context see
Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique (London: Hurst & Company, 1995),
317–355.
2 The ‘Civilisation Guild’ and the ‘Engineers of

Depression’: The Case of S. Thomé Cocoa
1. See Almada, Apontamentos Históricos.
2. O Trabalho Indígena nas Colonias Portuguesas: Memoria Justificativa, vol. 3:
Portugal e o Regime do Trabalho Indigena nas suas Colonias. Memoria Justificativa
(Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1910), 6.
3. Ibid., 4–5, 7.
4. António Enes, Moçambique (Lisbon: Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 1913),
70–71; Marcelo Caetano, ‘António Enes e a sua acção colonial’, Boletim
da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 11–12 (1948), 573. See also Valentim
Alexandre, A Questão Colonial no Parlamento 1821–1910 (Lisbon: Dom
Quixote/Assembleia da República, 2008), 132–138.
5. Gomes dos Santos, As Nossas Colonias (Lisbon: Empresa do ‘Portugal em
África’, 1903), 148–149.
6. A partial transcription of the document appears in Sampayo e Mello, Política
Indígena (Oporto: Magalhães e Moniz, 1910), 265–271. See also Almada,
Apontamentos Históricos, 46.
7. O Trabalho Indígena nas Colonias Portuguesas: Memoria Justificativa, 12–13;
Enes, Moçambique, 75.
8. Conde da Penha Garcia, ‘Bases para a organisação do ensino colonial
prático nas escolas de agricultura, do commercio e nos institutos industri-
aes, com largo desenvolvimento da geographia economica e estudo especial
das nossas riquezas coloniaes e suas relações com a economia nacional’,
in Congresso Colonial Nacional (Lisbon: A Liberal-Officina Typographica,
1902), 44–51.
208 Notes
9. José Francisco da Silva, ‘Ensino aos emigrantes’, in Congresso Colonial

Nacional (1901), 57.
10. Marnoco e Souza, Administração Colonial (Coimbra: Tipografia França
Amado, 1905), 572; Augusto Freire de Andrade, Relatorio feito pelo Director-
Geral das Colónias acêrca do Livro Portuguese Slavery Escrito pelo Sr. John H.
Harris (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1913), 14.
11. For Stober, see Michael Samuels, Education in Angola, 1878–1914 (New
York: Teachers College, 1970), 87–88; for Swan, see Tim Grass, “Brethren
and the Sao Tomé cocoa slavery controversy: The Role of Charles A. Swan
(1861–1934)”, Brethren Historical Review, 4 (2007), 98–113; Grant, A Civilized
Savagery, 118–20; for Grenfell, see Harry Johnston, George Grenfell and the
Congo, 2 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1908) and Jerónimo, ‘Religion, Empire,
and the Diplomacy of Colonialism’, 167–172. See also Duffy, A Question of
Slavery, 168–174.
12. Henry W. Nevinson, A Modern Slaveryy (London: Harper and Brothers, 1906),
37. For Nevinson and Portuguese Africa see Angela John, War, r Journalism and
the Shaping of the Twentieth Centuryy (Londres: I.B. Taurus, 2006), pp. 42–59
and Roberts Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities (New York: Routledge,
2011), pp. 98–121. For an overview of labour conditions on S. Tomé, see
William Clarence-Smith, ‘Labour Conditions in the Plantations of São Tomé
and Príncipe, 1875–1914’, in Michael Twaddle, ed., The Wages of Slavery
(London: Frank Cass, 1993), 149–167; and also Duffy, A Question of Slavery,
186–188.
13. Duffy, A Question of Slavery, 177–179, 182.
14. ‘A Ilha de São Thomé e o Trabalho Indigena’, Revista Portugueza Colonial e
Maritima (Lisbon: Ferin, 1907), iv–vi; Francisco Mantero, Portuguese Planters
and British Humanitarians (Lisbon: Reforma, 1911), 24.
15. Despite the appropriation to which is was subjected, Chevalier considered
the question of labour recruitment a ‘serious problem that is far from being
solved’. Moreover, he denounced the fact that the colonial administration
spent only the ‘minimum fraction of its tax income’ on the improvement of
the colony of S. Tomé. Augusto Chevalier, ‘A Ilha de São Thomé’, reprinted
in A Ilha de São Thomé e o Trabalho Indigena, vi, ix, 43.
16. See, more recently, Dean Pavlakis, ‘The development of British overseas
humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Campaign’, Journal of Colonialism
and Colonial History, vol. 11, nº. 1 (2010).
17. For a general appreciation of slave cocoa, based on British sources, particularly
the Cadbury archive at the University of Birmingham, see Grant, A Civilized
Savagery, 109–134; for the Cadbury Brothers Ltd., see Charles Dellheim, ‘The
Creation of a Company Culture: Cadburys, 1861–1931’, American Historical
Review, vol. 92, nº 1 (1987), 13–44, and also Gillian Wagner, The Chocolate
Conscience (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987).
18. For both questions see Grant, A Civilized Savagery, 39–107. For E. D. Morel
and the Congo Reform Association, see also, among others, William Roger
Louis and Jean Stengers, eds, E. D. Morel’s History of the Congo Reform
Movementt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968) and Jules Marchal, E. D. Morel contre
Léopold II (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996).
19. Confirm opposite interpretations of this in Grant, A Civilized Savagery,
110–113 and Duffy, A Question of Slavery, 183, 193–194.
Notes 209
20. See also Higgs, Chocolate Islands, 15–20.

21. Grant, A Civilized Savagery, 120–126; for an historic analysis of labour migra-
tion in Mozambique, see Patrick Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity (London:
James Currey, 1994).
22. Joseph Burtt, Report on the Conditions of Colored Labour Employed on the Cocoa
Plantations of Sao Tome and Principe and the Methods of Procuring it in Angola
(London: 1907), which also appears as an appendix to William Cadbury’s
book, Os Serviçaes de S. Thomé (Lisbon/Oporto: Bertrand/Chardron, 1910),
83–104. For a detailed reconstruction of Burtt’s stay in São Tomé and Angola
see Higgs, Chocolate Islands, 25ff.
23. Cadbury, Os Serviçaes de S. Thomé, 89–91, 102–104. For more context see
Higgs, Chocolate Islands, 133ff.
24. James Duffy, A Question of Slavery, 194–195, 197, 199; Grant, A Civilized
Savagery, 126–128; See also Higgs, Chocolate Islands, 139ff.
25. The commission of agricultural proprietors of S. Tomé was composed of
Alfredo Mendes da Silva, Henrique José Monteiro de Mendonça, Joaquim
de Ornellas e Mattos, João Paulo Monteiro Cancella, Nicolau Mac.
Nicoll and Francisco Mantero. Mantero chaired the session, assuming
the representation of the interests and views of the Portuguese colonial
agriculturalists.
26. Appreciation of the documents presented at the conference, Francisco
Mantero, Obras Completas, Vol. 1 (Lisbon, 1954), 305–307. This edition,
which was published by his son, Carlos Mantero, who wrote the preface, is
a reproduction of his work, A Mão-de-Obra em S. Thomé e Príncipe (Lisbon:
Edição de Autor, 1910).
27. Mantero, Obras Completas, 308–310.
28. Ibid., 312–313.
29. William Cadbury to the plantation owners of S. Tomé and Príncipe, 10th
December 1907 and 21st January 1908, Mantero, Obras Completas, 315–316;
Grant, A Civilized Savagery, 128.
30. William Cadbury to the plantation owners of S. Tomé and Príncipe, 28th
November 1907, reproduced in Mantero, Obras Completas, 298. See also
James Duffy, Portuguese Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1959), 162; and
Donald Heisel, The Indigenous Populations of the Portuguese African Territories
(Ann Harbor: University of Wisconsin, 1966), 19.
31. William Cadbury to Francisco Mantero, 8th July 1908, and Agricultural
Commission to William Cadbury, 14th July 1908, reproduced in Mantero,
Obras Completas, 199–200; Grant, A Civilized Savagery, 129–132. See also
Satre, Chocolate on Trial, 106–107, 125. For the secrecyy of Swan’s trip see
Higgs, Chocolate Islands, 144.
32. Cadbury, Os Serviçaes de S. Thomé, 72–73, 77.
33. O Cacau de S. Thoméé (Lisbon: Tipografia d’A Editora, 1910), 6–10, 15.
34. Correia de Aguiar, O Trabalho Indígena, 180–182.
35. The expression was originally used by Amável Granger, Facêtas de Angola
(Lisbon: Aillaud & Bertrand, 1926), 44, and was also used in Douglas L.
Wheeler, ‘Mais leis do que mosquitos’: a primeira república portuguesa e o
império ultramarino (1910–1926)’, in Nuno Severiano Teixeira and António
Costa Pinto, eds, A Primeira República Portuguesa (Lisbon: Edições Colibri,
2000), 133–168.
210 Notes
36. H. R. Fox Bourne, Slave Traffic in Portuguese Africa (London: Broadway

Chambers, 1908), 60; Correia de Aguiar, O Trabalho Indígena, 178.
37. Mantero, Obras Completas, vol. 1, 307, 312–313.
38. Twelve days later, Cadbury gave value to the official Portuguese efforts.
William Cadbury to the plantation owners of the S. Tomé and Príncipe, 28th
November 1907, reproduced in Mantero, Obras Completas, vol. 1, 294.
39. Mantero, Portuguese Planters and British Humanitarians, 20.
40. For an explanatory framework, see Duffy, A Question of Slavery, 211.
41. For a collective assessment see Abebe Zegeye and Shubi Ishemo, eds, Forced
Labour and Migration (London: Hans Zell Publishers, 1989). For a brief over-
view of the Portuguese case see Shubi Ishemo, ‘Forced labour and migration
in Portugal’s African colonies’, in Robin Cohen, ed., The Cambridge Survey of
World Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 162–165.
42. Document 9, in Livro Branco: Africa, 2 (1913) (Lisbon: Centro Tipográfico
Colonial, 1913), 28–32; Duffy, A Question of Slavery, 216.
43. Portugal e o Regime do Trabalho Indigena nas suas Colonias: Memoria Justificativa
44. Almada, Apontamentos Históricos, 47–48.
45. The committee was made up of the curator-general of contracted labour, the
head of the health service, the director of public works, three landowners
or administrators chosen by the central commission in Lisbon and a man-
ager of the S. Tomé branch of the Banco Nacional Ultramarino. Almada,
Apontamentos Históricos, 51–53.
46. O Trabalho Indígena nas Colonias Portuguesas: Memoria Justificativa, 6.
47. Portugal e o Regime do Trabalho Indigena nas suas Colonias: Memoria
Justificativa, 18–19; Correia de Aguiar, O Trabalho Indígena, 178.
48. ‘Serviço de Emigração e Recrutamento de Operarios, Serviçaes e Trabalhadores
para a Provincia de S. Thomé e Principe’, Decretos 17 and 29 July 1909,
Portaria Régia 22 November 1909 and Decreto 9 December 1909 (Lisbon:
Imprensa Nacional, 1909), 3.
49. For an overview of the colonial state and the notion of mobile interventionism
see Jerónimo, ‘The States of empire’.
50. ‘Serviço de Emigração e Recrutamento’, 4–19, 24; Mantero, Portuguese
Planters, 16.
51. Portugal e o Regime do Trabalho Indigena nas suas Colonias: Memoria
Justificativa, 14.
52. Almada, Apontamentos Históricos, 60–63.
53. The Tongas were the children of natives and serviçais from other African
colonies, particularly from Angola. A. Miranda Guedes, S. Thomé (Oporto:
Typographia da Empreza Guedes, 1911), 8, 22–23; Ernesto de Vasconcelos,
São Tomé e Príncipe (Lisbon: Tipografia da Cooperativa Militar, 1918), 87–90,
93.
54. Miranda Guedes, S. Thomé, 27–28.
55. For a more detailed examination of this question, see Nascimento, Poderes e
Quotidiano, 127–170.
56. Ernesto de Vasconcelos, São Tomé e Príncipe, 85.
57. Henry W. Nevinson, A Modern Slaveryy (London: Harper and Brothers, 1906),
187; Fox Bourne, Slave Traffic in Portuguese Africa, 44–25.
58. Miranda Guedes, S. Thomé, 22.
Notes 211
59. Correia de Aguiar, O Trabalho Indígena, 164.

60. Ibid., 264–246, 270–271, 273.
61. José Almada, Comparative essay on indentured labour at St. Thomé and Príncipe
62. Cadbury, Labour in Portuguese West Africa, 31; Almada, Comparative essay,
59–60.
63. According to José de Almada, around 1913 the tariff applied to the export
of cocoa was 270 reis per 15 kilos in the case of Portuguese ships and 476
reis per 15 kilos in the case of foreign ships. Almada, Comparative essay,
59–60.
64. The Banco Nacional Ultramarino was created in 1864 with the aim of
monopolising the lending of capital to Portuguese colonial territories. It
became one of the main agents in Portugal’s colonial economy. Jorge M.
Pedreira, ‘Comércio ultramarino e integração económica’, in Francisco
Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, História da Expansão Portuguesa, vol. IV
(Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 1998), 253–254.
65. O Trabalho Indígena nas Colonias Portuguesas: Memoria Justificativa, 6.
66. See Jerónimo, ‘The States of empire’. For the pacification campaigns see Réne
Pélissier, História das Campanhas de Angola (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1986);
História de Moçambique (Lisboa: Estampa, 1987–8); Naissance de la Guiné
(Orgeval: Éditions Pélissier, 1989); Les Campagnes Coloniales du Portugal,
1844–1941 (Paris: Pygmalion, 2004).
67. J. Paulo Monteiro Cancella, ‘Impressões de uma viagem às Ilhas de S. Thomé
e Principe’, in Congresso Colonial Nacional (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional,
1902), 16, 20–21, 27, 29–31.
68. Mantero, A Mão-de-Obra em S. Thomé e Principe.
69. António de Sousa Lara was one of the main investors in the S. Tomé plan-
tations, and was linked with the creation of the Companhia Comercial de
Angola (1900), the gunpowder business, and the concession of mining rights
in Lisbon. He was also one of the largest producers of sugar cane in Benguela.
William Clarence-Smith, O Terceiro Império Português (1825–1975) (Lisbon:
Teorema, 1985), 111.
70. The text accompanying the photograph of J. A. Wyllie between pages 78 and
79. In its appendix, this book reproduced some of the articles that had been
published by this individual in the British press, ‘in defence of Portugal’.
Mantero, Obras Completas, vol. 1, 192–200.
71. Mantero, A Mão-de-Obra em S. Thomé e Principe, 23. The role of photography
was also noted by see Diogo Ramada Curto in his ‘Prefácio’ to Jerónimo,
Livros Brancos, Almas Negras, 9–40, especially at 20–21.
72. J. A. Wyllie, ‘Prefatory Note’, in Francisco Mantero, Portuguese Planters, 1–2,
4–6, 8.
73. Ibid., 12–13.
74. René Claparède, L’Esclavage Portugais et le ‘Journal de Genève (Paris: Bureaux
de la ‘France D’Outre-Mer’, 1913), 9–14, 21–23, 28–30. For John H. Harris
see William R. Louis, ‘Sir John Harris and “colonial trusteeship”’, Bulletin des
Seances de l’Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer,
r vol. 14 (1968), 832–856.
75. Duffy, A Question of Slavery, 212–215.
76. The White Books were published as substitutes for the Blue Books in
1912–1915 and 1927. Almada, Apontamentos Históricos, 99.
212 Notes
77. Alberto Correia, A Exploração do Indigena no Districto de Mossamedes (Loanda:

Livraria, Papelaria e Tipografia Mondego, 1911), 4–5, 8.
78. Cited in Freire de Andrade, Relatório Feito, 21–22.
79. Jerónimo Paiva de Carvalho, Alma Negra (Oporto: Tipografia Progresso,
1912).
80. Ibid., 5–8.
81. The contradictions between the two pamphlets produced by Paiva de
Carvalho are, in fact, huge. The reasons for this are not apparent in the avail-
able sources. Freire de Andrade, Relatório Feito, 38–40, 43.
82. Alfredo da Silva, O Monstro da Escravatura (Oporto: Tipografia Mendonça,
1913).
83. Ibid., 17–19.
84. Ibid., 23–27, 29.
85. Alfredo da Silva was one of William Cadbury’s witnesses in the Birmingham
trial of 1910. For his view on the trial, see the article he published in O
Mundo, 25 January 1910; Alfredo da Silva, O Monstro da Escravatura, 8–9.
86. John Harris, ‘Escravatura portuguesa’, in Livro Branco: Africa, 2 (1913), 4–7, 9;
John Harris to Foreign Office quoted in Duffy, A Question of Slavery, 219–220.
87. Letters dated 31 January and 15 February 1913, in the Livro Branco, and
quoted in Claparède, L’Esclavage Portugais, 12–13.
88. Notice quoted in Freire de Andrade, Relatório Feito, 19–20.
89. Harris, ‘Escravatura portuguesa’, 9.
90. For the entire event see Pélissier, História das Campanhas de Angola, 294–313;
Jelmer Vos, The Kingdom of Kongo and Its Borderlands, 1880–1915 (London:
PhD Thesis, SOAS-UL, 2005), 216–248. See also J. S. Bowskill, San Salvador
(London: Carey Press, 1914) and Earl Mayo’s testimony at the House of Lords
in 27th Kuly 1914: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1914/jul/27/
portuguese-west-africa. For the religious underpinnings of these affairs see
Dores, Uma Missão para o Império.
91. Correia de Aguiar, O Trabalho Indígena, 164, 188–189.
92. Ibid., 195, 206–207.
93. Joseph Burtt, ‘S. Tomé’, Bournville Works Magazine, reproduced in Correia de
Aguiar, O Trabalho Indígena, 253–261, quoted in 253–255.
94. Sociedade de Emigração para São Tomé e Príncipe, La Main D’Oeuvre Indigène
dans L’Ouest Africain (Geneva: Imprimerie du Journal de Genève, 1920),
6–24.
95. Correia de Aguiar, O Trabalho Indígena, 80–82, 84–86.
96. Ofício 852/222, 4 August 1916 by Correia de Aguiar, sent to the government
of the province of S. Tomé. Correia de Aguiar, O Trabalho Indígena, 90–91,
130.
97. Almada, Apontamentos Históricos, 53.
3 ‘Redemptive Labour’ and the Missionaries of

the Alphabet
1. Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena, 221.
2. José Francisco da Silva, ‘Emigração: Assistencia aos Emigrantes’, in Congresso
Colonial Nacional: Actas das Sessões (1901), 22.
Notes 213
3. Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena, 219–220; Francisco Mantero, ‘Regimen

do trabalho em S. Thomé e em Angola’, in Congresso Colonial Nacional
(1901), 61.
4. ‘Pamphlet Scrope’ was a strong opponent of Malthusian population doc-
trines and an advocate for the emigration of British subjects to the colonies,
seen as it was as a panacea for domestic problems. For an intellectual biog-
raphy and the nickname see Redvers Opie, ‘A Neglected English Economist:
George Poulett Scrope’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 44, nº. 1
(1929), 101–137, at 102. For the intellectual context, his position and
the colonial issue, see Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 97–99, 117–118, 190.
5. Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena, 219–220.
6. For an overview see Robert Rowland, ‘Velhos e novos Brasis’, in Bethencourt
and Chaudhuri, eds., História da Expansão Portuguesa, vol. 4, 303–374
and Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Portugal no mundo’, in Pedro Tavares
de Almeida, ed., História Contemporânea de Portugal. Vol. 2: A Construção
Nacional, 1834–1890 (Madrid/Lisboa: Fundación Mapfre&Editora Objectiva,
2013), 77–108. For a later period see Cláudia Castelo, Passagens para África
(Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 2007).
7. Luís Schwalbach Lucci, Emigração e Colonização (Lisbon: Typ. do Annuario
Commercial, 1914), 73–74, 81–89.
8. Henrique Galvão, ‘Um critério do povoamento europeu nas colónias portu-
guesas’, Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias, 8 May 1932, 3–26.
9. Gomes dos Santos, As Nossas Colonias, 5–130.
10. Lucci, Emigração e Colonização, 76.
11. Idem, 89.
12. Henrique Barahona da Costa, ‘O problema das obras publicas nas suas
relações com o progresso e desenvolvimento dos nossos dominios africanos’,
in Congresso Colonial Nacional (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1901), 6.
13. Gerald J. Bender, Angola under Portuguese (London: Heinemann, 1978),
87–98.
14. José Francisco da Silva, ‘Emigração: Assistencia aos emigrantes’, in Congresso
Colonial Nacional (1901), 22.
15. For the 1820s reasoning see Jerónimo, A Diplomacia do Império, 25–26.
16. Intervention by José Francisco da Silva in the debate at the first session of
the National Colonial Congress, in Congresso Colonial Nacional, 142.
17. A more profound study of the emergence of colonial science in Portugal
remains to be made. For the French case, see the excellent work by
Emmanuelle Sibeud, Une Science Impériale pour L’Afrique. (Paris: EHESS, 2002).
For the Belgian case see Marc Poncelet, L’invention des sciences coloniales belges
(Paris: Karthala, 2008).
18. Ernesto de Vasconcellos, ‘Ensino colonial nas escolas superiores. Instituto
Colonial’, in Congresso Colonial Nacional (1901), 42–43; Count of Penha
Garcia, ‘Bases para a organisação de um museu colonial como centro de
informações coloniais’, in Congresso Colonial Nacional (1901), 52, 54–55;
John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1986), 121–146. For the British Imperial Institute see also William
Golant, Image of Empire (Exeter: University of Exeter, 1984) and Michael
Worboys, ‘The Imperial Institute: The State and the Development of
214 Notes
the Natural Resources of the Colonial Empire, 1887–1923’ in John M.

MacKenzie, ed., Imperialism and the Natural World d (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1990), 164–186.
19. Count of Penha Garcia, ‘Bases para a organisação do ensino colonial prático
nas escolas de agricultura, do commercio e nos institutos industriaes, com
largo desenvolvimento da geographia economica e estudo especial das nos-
sas riquezas coloniaes e suas relações com a economia nacional’, in Congresso
20. Count of Penha Garcia, ‘Bases para a organisação de um Museu Colonial
como Centro de Informações Coloniaes’, in Congresso Colonial Nacional:
Actas das Sessões (1901), 55; Count of Penha Garcia, debate at the second
session of the National Colonial Congress, in Congresso Colonial Nacional:
Actas das Sessões (1901), 153–154.
21. Domingos de Oliveira, ‘Influência da instabilidade da legislação na admin-
istração colonial’, Congresso Colonial Nacional (Lisboa: A Liberal-Officina
Typographica, 1902), 83–85; Conde da Penha Garcia, in idem, 153.
22. Carlos Mello Geraldes, Instituições de Fomento Colonial Estrangeiras (Lisboa:
Tipografia Universal, 1912).
23. Idem, 63, 111, 119–120. For Kew Gardens see Richard Drayton, Nature’s
Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); for the Jardin Colonial
see C. Bonneuil and M. Kleiche, Du jardin d’essais colonial à la station expéri-
mentale 1880–1930 (Montpellier: Cirad, 1993); for the Museum at Tervuren
see Dirk Van Den Audenaerde & Sony Van Hoecke, eds., Africa Museum
Tervuren 1898–1998 (Brussels: Musée Royal de l’Afrique centrale, 1998). For
the general problem see also Daniel R. Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress,
especially 209–258; Mark Harrison, ‘Science and the British Empire’ and
Michael A. Osborne, ‘Science and the French Empire’, Isis, Vol. 96, nº 1
(2005), 56–63 and 80–87.
24. João Carneiro de Moura, A administração colonial portuguesa (Lisboa: A.M.
Teixeira, 1910), 11. For a sample of other common perspectives see Ruy
Ennes Ulrich, Ciência e administração colonial (Coimbra: Imprensa da
Universidade, 1908); Lourenço Cayolla, Sciencia de colonização (Lisboa:
Typographia da Cooperativa Militar, 1912).
25. See Jerónimo, ‘The States of empire’.
26. Relatório ácerca do Estudo dos Problemas Coloniaes (Lisbon: Sociedade de
Geografia de Lisboa, 1913), 3, 5–8.
27. For an overview see Ong Jin Hui, ‘Chinese indentured labour: coolies and
colonies’, in Robin Cohen, ed., The Cambridge Survey, 51–56; and, among
others, Rana P. Behal and Marcel van der Linden, eds., Coolies, capital and
colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
28. Years earlier, Gomes dos Santos had appreciated the willingness of ‘Asiatics’
to work in a different manner, stressing their tendency to ‘explore the work
of others’. Gomes dos Santos, As Nossas Colonias, 148, 175; Marnoco e Souza,
Administração Colonial, 566–570.
29. The author of this statement was Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, one of the most
quoted thinkers in the manuals of the Portuguese colonial administration.
Marnoco e Souza, Administração Colonial, 571. For Beaulieu and his impor-
tance on Portuguese imperial thinking see Jerónimo, ‘The “Civilisation
Guild”’, 195ff.
Notes 215
30. Quoted in Lucci, Emigração e Colonização, 92; Valentim Alexandre, Origens

do Colonialismo Português Moderno, 1822–1891 (Lisbon: Sá da Costa Editora,
1979), 216–217.
31. The period of the duration of the contracts was in inverse proportion to
the volume and intensity of external pressure. While in 1875, 1878 and
1899, according to the native labourr legislation, the maximum duration of
each contract was five years, the regulation of 1911 limited it to two years.
Almada, Apontamentos Históricos, 42–47.
32. Leroy Vail and Landeg White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique
(London: Heinemann, 1980), 145.
33. A Miranda Guedes, S. Thomé, 33.
34. Representação dos Agricultores e Comerciantes de S. Tomé á Camara dos Deputados
contra o Decreto de 1 de Outubro de 1913 (S. Tomé: Imprensa da ‘Voz’, 1913),
3, 6.
35. Ruy Ennes Ulrich, Política Colonial (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade,
1909), 128–129.
36. Vail and White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique, 166. See also
Eduardo do Couto Lupi, Relatório do Governador do Districto de Quelimane,
1907–1909 (Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional, 1910), 93; William
Clarence-Smith, The Third Portuguese Empire (1825–1975) (Manchester:
Machester University Press, 1985), 105.
37. See Sérgio Chichava, ‘Unlike the Other Whites? The Swiss in Mozambique
under Colonialism’, in Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen, eds. Imperial
Migrations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 149–167, especially
161–162.
38. As we have seen, some years earlier, according to the testimony of D. R. W.
Bourke (the Earl of Mayo) in his book De Rebus Africanis (1883), the recruit-
ment method was distinctive. Once placed before government officials, the
natives were subjected to a short interrogation based on such questions as
‘Are you hungry?’ A positive response was a declaration of a desire to go
to S. Tomé for the following five years. Quoted in Almada, Apontamentos
Históricos, 9.
39. The revelations continued to accumulate in the titles of newspapers, and
included critical reports about the general conditions in Portuguese prisons.
It is in this context that Vail and White framed the celebrated discussions
about an eventual division of Portugal’s colonial possessions between the
British and the Germans, with Edward Grey being one of the main support-
ers of this idea. Vail and White, Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique,
184–187.
40. Lucien Aspe-Fleurimont was a French colonial expert and an adviser to the
Commerce extérieur de la France (1902). Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena,
221–233, 225; Marnoco e Souza, Administração Colonial, 557.
41. Letter to William Cadbury, dated 30 December 1912, in reply to his report,
Os Serviçaes de S. Thomé and to a letter Cadbury published in Nineteenth
Century. Augusto Freire de Andrade, A Questão dos Serviçaes de S. Thomé
(Lisbon: Typografia do Anuário Comercial, 1913), 3.
42. A. Freire de Andrade, Relatório feito pelo Director-Geral das Colónias, 4–24.
43. The work by Paul Reinsch, Colonial Administration (New York and London:
Macmillan & Co., 1905) is clearly the source of inspiration to Freire de
216 Notes
Andrade. Freire de Andrade, Relatório feito pelo Director-Geral das Colónias,

4–5, 25.
44. Marnoco e Souza, Administração Colonial, 573.
45. Freire de Andrade, Relatórios sobre Moçambique, Vol. II, (Lourenço Marques:
Imprensa Nacional, 1908), 62ff.
46. The excerpt is presented in italics, unlike the rest of the citation by Freire de
Andrade. Again, it is interesting to note that the same quotation had been
included to justify the solution to obligatory labour in the work of Sampayo
e Mello. Freire de Andrade, Relatório feito pelo Director-Geral das Colónias, 6;
Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena, 243; http://hansard.millbanksystems.
com/commons/1898/may/06/class-ii#S4V0057P0_18980506_HOC_219.
Accessed 18 October 2010.
47. Aspe-Fleurimont thesis in La Colonisation française (Paris: V. Giard et E.
Brière, 1902), 23, referred to in Marnoco e Souza, Administração Colonial,
564. For social Darwinism in France and the place Aspe-Fleurimont and
other colonial experts played in it see Jean-Marc Bernardini, Le Darwinisme
social en France (1859–1918) (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1997), esp. 195.
48. Freire de Andrade, Relatório feito pelo Director-Geral das Colónias, 11.
49. Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena, 238 (quotation attributed to Leroy
Beaulieu).
50. For Angola see the classic by Alfredo Margarido, ‘Les Porteurs: forme de
domination et agents de changement en Angola (XVIIe–XIXe siècles)’, Revue
française d’histoire d’outre-mer,
r vol. 65, nº 240 (1978), 377–400.
51. Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena, 239, 241 e 243; Marnoco e Souza,
Administração Colonial, 565–566.
52. Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena, 242–243.
53 There is no comprehensive empirical research on the role played by tax-
extraction policies and practices on the developments of the Portuguese
colonial empire from the late nineteenth century onwards. For an example
regarding the British Empire see Leigh A. Gardner, Taxing Colonial Africa
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
54. The expression appears in Paul Reinsch, Colonial Administration, 360.
55. Mantero, ‘Regimen do trabalho em S. Thomé e em Angola’, in Congresso
56. Freire de Andrade, Relatórios sobre Moçambique, Vol. II, 60ff.
57. Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena, 254; Marnoco e Souza, Administração
Colonial, 560.
59. Ibid., 247.
60. António Almada Negreiros, La Main-d’Oeuvre en Afrique (Paris: [s.n.], 1900).
See also Jerónimo, ‘The “Civilisation guild”’, 179ff.
61. Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena, 248; Count of Penha Garcia, ‘Bases para a
organisação do ensino colonial’, 50; Viscount de Giraud, ‘Missões commerci-
aes no interior de Angola’, in Congresso Colonial Nacional (1901), 71–72.
63. Freire de Andrade, Relatório feito pelo Director-Geral das Colónias, 10.
64. Between 1876 and 1880, this commission was responsible for many docu-
ments that supported the urgency and strategic importance of colonial edu-
cation. One of the most important examples rests in Projectos de uma Escola
Notes 217
de Disciplinas Relativas à Terra, e às Gentes e às Línguas do Ultramar Português

(of 18 March 1878, sent to the government on 10 July), better known as
Questões Coloniais. Ângela Guimarães, Uma Corrente do Colonialismo Português
(Lisbon: Horizonte, 1984); Jerónimo, ‘Religion, Empire and the Diplomacy
of Colonialism’, 156–159. See also João Carlos Paulo, ‘A Honra da Bandeira’
(Lisbon: MA thesis, FCSH-UNL, 1992).
65. J. P. Oliveira Martins, O Brasil e as Colónias Portuguesas (Lisbon: Guimarães,
1978), 175–179, 255; Valentim Alexandre, ‘Questão nacional e questão colo-
nial em Oliveira Martins’ and ‘O império colonial no século XX’, both in
Velho Brasil, Novas Áfricas: Portugal e o Império (1808–1975) (Oporto: Edições
Afrontamento, 2000), 174–179 and 182, respectively.
66. Francisco Dias da Costa, ‘Relatório apresentado à Camara dos Deputados
pelo sr. ministro da Marinha e do Ultramar ácerca das provincias da África
Occidental’, Portugal em África, 57, September (1898), 326.
67. Charles Ageron, ‘Gambetta et la reprise de l’expansion coloniale’, Revue
Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer,r LIX (1972), 196–197. For all these issues
in Portugal see Jerónimo, A Diplomacia do Império, 210–215, and Idem,
‘Missions et Empire. Politique et religion dans le nouveaux Brésiles en
Afrique (1860–1890)’, Histoire, Monde & cultures religieuses (forthcoming,
2014). For the problem of anticlericalism in the French colonial empire
see, among others, Philippe Delisle, L’anticléricalisme dans les colonies fran-
çaises sous la 3ème République (Paris: Indes Savantes, 2009). See also James P.
Daughton, An Empire Divided (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), and
James P. Daughton and Owen White, eds., In God’s Empire (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012).
68. Luciano Cordeiro, ‘Primeiro Relatório Apresentado à Comissão de Missões
do Ultramar’ and ‘Segundo Relatório Apresentado à Comissão de Missões do
Ultramar’, in Luciano Cordeiro, Questões Coloniais (Coimbra: Imprensa da
Universidade, 1934), 109–134, 135–159, at 112–113.
69. Jerónimo, A Diplomacia do Império, 212.
70. António Enes, Moçambique, 175–178, 181–186, 189; Eduardo da Costa,
Estudo sobre a Administração Civil das nossas Possessões Africanas: Memória
Apresentada ao Congresso Colonial (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1903),
168–174.
71. Freire de Andrade, Relatórios sobre Moçambique, Vol. V, 304.
72. See Jeanne Marie Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism (London:
James Currey Ltd., 1995), 12–13.
73. For a classic account of the problem see José Capela, O vinho para o preto
(Porto: Afrontamento, 1973).
74. O Africano, 25 December 1908. Aurélio Rocha mistakes the date of this issue,
listing it as 28 December. Aurélio Rocha, ‘Associativismo e nativismo: os fun-
damentos do discurso ideológico’, in Fátima Ribeiro and António Sopa, eds.,
140 Anos de Imprensa em Moçambique (Maputo: Associação Moçambicana de
Língua Portuguesa, 1996), 31–33.
75. For the British case, see Andrew Porter, ‘Empires in the Mind’, in P.
J. Marshall, ed., The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 186–189, 202. See also
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Os missionários do alfabeto nas colónias por-
tuguesas (1880–1930)’, in Diogo Ramada Curto, ed., Estudos de Sociologia da
218 Notes
Leitura em Portugal no Século XX (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian,

2006), 29–67, especially 32–34.
76. The filhos do país (sons of the country) were an active Euro-African frontier
group and were one of the most important voices calling for political, social
and economic reform within Angola. Voz d’Angola clamando no deserto: offer-
ecida aos amigos da verdade pelos naturaes (Lisbon: 1901). For an analysis of
the context of the work see Helena Wakim Moreno, Voz d’Angola clamando
no deserto (São Paulo: MA Thesis, 2014), especially 132–155. For the general
problem see Douglas Wheeler, ‘Origins of African Nationalism in Angola:
Assimilado Protest Writing, 1859–1929’, in R. Chilcote, ed., Protest and
Resistance in Brazil and Portuguese Africa (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1972), 67–87; Jill Dias, ‘Uma Questão de Identidade: Respostas
Intelectuais às Transformações Econômicas no Seio da Elite Crioula da
Angola Portuguesa entre 1870 e 1930’, Revista Internacional de Estudos
Africanos, nº 1 (1984), 61–94; Mário de Andrade, Origens do nacionalismo
africano (Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 1997); Fernando Pimenta, Brancos de Angola
(Coimbra: Minerva, 2005); and Jacopo Corrado, The Creole Elite and the Rise
of Angolan Protonationalism, 1870–1920 (Amherst, NY.: Cambria Press, 2008).
77. António Cabreira, O Ensino Colonial e o Congresso de Lisboa (Lisbon: Tipografia
Gutemberg, 1902), 3–4.
78. Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena, 22–24, 27, 61, 81, 101–102; Marnoco e
Souza, Administração Colonial, 414–415. For the ‘geographer-missionary’ see
Jerónimo, A Diplomacia do Império, 212.
79. For the most comprehensive analysis see Hugo Gonçalves Dores, Uma
Missão para o Império, especially chapter IV, ‘Entra a República’.
80. Norton de Matos, Memórias e Trabalhos da Minha Vida, Vol. III (Lisbon:
Editora Marítimo-Colonial, 1944), 302–303, 317.
81. The installation of the republican regime was only slightly responsible for
this, in the same way that the repression of the religious orders in 1834
represented the decisive factor for the state of religious abandonment in
the Portuguese colonies during the nineteenth century. The first case point
is addressed by Dores, Uma Missão para o Império, the second is the object
of analysis in Jerónimo, Religion, Empire and the Diplomacy of Colonialism,
153–181.
82. J. V. Solipa Norte, Relatório do Inspector da Instrução Primária da Provincia de
Moçambique (Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional, 1920), 6–13, 17. For
a study of colonial education in Mozambique see Ana Isabel Madeira, Ler,
Escrever e Orar (Lisbon: PhD Thesis, Universidade de Lisboa, 2007), especially
373ff.
83. José Gonçalo Santa Rita, ‘Ensino nas colónias. Indigenato. Colonato’, in
Congresso Colonial Nacional (Lisbon: Tipografia América, 1924), 1–3.
84. Mário Costa, ‘Esboço histórico e estatístico da instrução na colónia de
Moçambique’, Boletim Económico e Estatístico, Vol. 5 (Lourenço Marques:
Imprensa Nacional, 1928).
85. Mário Barradas, ‘Relatório’, Boletim Económico e Estatístico Vol. 5 (Lourenço
Marques: Imprensa Nacional, 1928), 56–57.
86. An interesting figure, Mário Costa was an infantry lieutenant, a subaltern
in the 1st Native Machinegun Battery. A dispatch dated 22 January 1927
appointed him to organise an historical archive (of documents held within
Notes 219
the General Headquarters of the Mozambique Colony), by virtue of his inter-

est in the colony’s history and of the works that he had published in the
meantime. These works included: Estatística da edificação de Lourenço Marques
em épocas sucessivas (elementos e subsídios para um estudo do desenvolvimento
de Lourenço Marques) of 1925, which received an award from the Statistics
Department; Como Fizeram os Portugueses em Moçambique, which received
a prize in the colonial literature competition run by the Agência Geral das
Colónias in 1927; and the organisation of the Anuário de Moçambique, from
1925–29. Mário Costa, ‘Esboço histórico e estatístico da instrução na colónia
de Moçambique’, 67, 71–72.
87. Estatuto Orgânico das Missões Católicas Portuguesas de África e Timor, r Decree
12 485 of 13 October, reproduced in Anuário de Ensino da Colónia de
Moçambique: Ano de 1930 (Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional, 1931),
155–157, 159–161. For the causes and context see Dores, Uma Missão para o
Império. To assess the nature in which these matters were appropriated and
reproduced during the Estado Novo, see Augusto Castro Júnior, O Problema
do Ensino em Terras de Além-Marr (Lisbon: Editorial Império, 1953).
88. Article 21, Estatuto Orgânico das Missões Católicas Portuguesas de África e Timor,
r
167–168.
4 Bibles, Flags and Transnational Loyalties:

Educating Empires
1. One of the most significant cases of this meeting of legal information on
the regulation of labour in the colonies of various colonising countries
is in the documentation of the ICI or, for a wider range of compared
legislation, the Annuaire Coloniale. See Institut Colonial International, La
Main-d’oeuvre aux Colonies: Documents Officiels, 1st series, 3 Vols. (Brussels:
Bibliothèque Coloniale Internationale, 1895). For a recent analysis of its role
see Benoit Daviron, ‘Mobilizing labour in African agriculture: the role of the
International Colonial Institute in the elaboration of a standard of colonial
administration, 1895–1930’, Journal of Global History, n.º 5 (2010), 479–501.
2. For a recent approach to the role of the transnational dimension of Protestant
missionary action, see John Stuart, ‘Beyond Sovereignty? Protestant Missions,
Empire and Transnationalism’, in Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank
Trentmann, eds., Beyond Sovereignty (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007),
103–125.
3. In addition to the references cited in Part I of this book, see Charles Pelham
Groves, ‘Missionary and Humanitarian Aspects of Imperialism from 1870
to 1914’, 462–463, 476–479; C. G. Baëta, ‘Missionary and Humanitarian
Interests, 1914 to 1960’, in L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan, eds., Colonialism
in Africa, 1870–1960, Vol. II: The History and Politics of Colonialism, 1914–
1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 425–426; Norman
Etherington, ‘Mission and Empire’, in Robin Winks, ed., Historiography,
Vol. V, in William Roger Louis, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 303–305.
4. For more on the International Missionary Council, see William Richey Hogg,
Ecumenical Foundations: A History of the International Missionary Council and
220 Notes
its Nineteenth-Century Background d (New York: Harper, 1952). For more on J. H.

Oldham and the 1910 World Missionary Conference of Edinburgh, see Keith
Clemens, Faith on the Frontier (Edinburgh: T.&T. Clark, 1999), especially
73–99.
5. The most reasoned challenge to an absolute and acritical association of
imperial and missionary factors is that by Porter, Religion vs. Empire?..., espe-
cially 1–14 and 316–330. For the appreciations made in Edinburgh in 1910
in respect of relations between the state, the colonial powers and the mis-
sions, see Brian Stanley, ‘Church, State and the Hierarchy of “Civilization”:
the Making of the “Missions and Governments” Report at the World
Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Imperial
Horizons of British Protestant Missions, 1880–1914 (Grand Rapids, MI: William
B. Eerdmans, 2003), 58–84, especially 80–82; for a contemporary apprecia-
tion, see J. H. Oldham, ‘Nationality and Missions’, International Review of
Missions, no. 35 (1920), 381.
6. Despite Warnshuis conciliatory position, based on the proposal that efforts
should be made by Protestant missions to accommodate themselves to
Portuguese legislation and policies, the IMC officially decided that the obsta-
cles raised by the Portuguese government to the use of the Bible in native
languages should be questioned. A. L. Warnshuis, The Relations of Missions
and Governments in Belgian, French and Portuguese Colonies (London: IMC,
1923).
7. For the nineteenth century, see Andrew Porter, ‘Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery,
and Humanitarism’, in William Roger Louis, ed., The Oxford History of the
British Empire, Vol. III, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 198–221; for
the twentieth century, see Ronald Robinson, ‘The Moral Disarmament of
African Empire, 1919–1947’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,
Vol. 8, no. 1 (1979), 86–104; Ralph A. Austen, ‘Varieties of Trusteeship:
African Territories under British and French Mandate, 1919–1939’, in Prosser
Gifford and William Roger Louis, eds., France and Britain in Africa, 515–542;
Kevin Grant, ‘Human Rights and Sovereign Abolitions of Slavery c. 1880–
1956’, in Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann, eds., Beyond
Sovereignty, 80–102; and Ward, A Civilized Savagery, 135–166.
8. For Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee and African affairs see Louis R. Harlan,
‘Booker T. Washington and the White Man’s Burden’, The American Historical
Review, vol. 71, nº 2 (1966), 441–467; Booker T. Gardner, ‘The Educational
Contributions of Booker T. Washington’, The Journal of Negro Education, vol.
44, nº 4 (1975), 502–518, especially 507–510.
9. See Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa.
10. The descendant of a long philanthropic missionary tradition that was
directed towards the education of the black communities, the Phelps-Stokes
Fund was established on 24 May 1911 by Caroline Phelps Stokes. See Ullin
W. Leavell, ‘Trends of Philanthropy in Negro Education: A Survey’, The
Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 2, no. 1 (1933), 38–52 and Patti McGill
Peterson, ‘Colonialism and Education: The Case of the Afro-American’,
Comparative Education Review, Vol. 15, no. 2 (1971), 146–157.
11. Edward H. Berman, ‘Tuskegee in Africa’, The Journal of Negro Education, Vol.
41, no. 2 (1972), 99–112. For J. H. Oldham and the connection with the
Tuskegee Institute and with Africa, see Kenneth J. King, ‘Africa and the
Notes 221
Southern States of the USA: Notes on J. H. Oldham and American Negro

Education for Africans’, The Journal of African History, vol. 10, nº 4 (1969),
659–677, and George Bennett, ‘Paramountcy to Partnership: J. H. Oldham
and Africa’, Africa, nº 30 (1960), 356–361. For Thomas Jesse Jones, see J. W.
C. Dougall, ‘Thomas Jesse Jones: Crusader for Africa’, International Review of
Missions, Vol. 34, no. 155 (1950), 311–317; Herbert M. Kliebard ‘‘That Evil
Genius of the Negro Race’: Thomas Jesse Jones and Educational Reform’,
Journal of Curriculum and Supervision, vol. 10, nº 1 (1994), 5–20; William H.
Watkin, ‘Thomas Jesse Jones, Social Studies, and Race’, International Journal of
Social Education, vol. 10, nº 2 (1996), 124–34. Cf. Thomas Jesse Jones, Negro
Education, 2 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1917). For
the differences of opinions in sectors concerned with educating the black
community, see Donald Johnson, ‘W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Jesse Jones and
the Struggle for Social Education’, The Journal of Negro History, vol. 85, nº
3 (2000), 71–95, especially 77–87. For a classic critical assessment of these
educational views see Albert Victor Murray, The School in the Bush (London:
Longmans, 1929).
12. Edward H. Berman, ‘Tuskegee in Africa’..., 101–102.
13. Thomas Jesse Jones, ed., Education in Africa (New York, NY: Phelps-Stoke
Fund, 1922). For an overview of the process see Edward H. Berman,
‘American Influence on African Education: The Role of the Phelps-Stokes
Fund’s Education Commissions’, Comparative Education Review, vol. 15, nº 2
(1971), 132–145.
14. Jesse Jones, ed., Education in Africa..., xii–xxv, 18–25.
15. Jesse Jones, ed., Education in Africa..., 224–232, 236, 245–247.
16. Jesse Jones, ‘Diary’, 30th January 1921; Jesse Jones to J. H. Oldham, 4th
April 1921; both in International Missionary Council and Conference of
British Missionary Societies Joint Archive (hereafter IMC/CBMS), Box 1202 –
Portuguese West Africa: Memoranda. General; and Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture (SCRBC), Box 46, African Education Commission,
1921–1923. Diary, 1920–1921, in pages 175–176.
17. Norton de Matos to J. H. Oldham, 9th January 1921; A. L. Warnshuis to
Norton de Matos, 24th October 1921; in IMC/CBMS, Box 1002 – Portuguese
West Africa: Norton de Matos, Governor of Angola, 1921/1922. Jesse Jones to
Norton de Matos, 31st January, 21st February, 4th April and 29th July 1921;
all in Box 46, African Education Commission, 1921–1923. Diary, 1920–1921.
18. J. T. Tucker to A. L. Warnshuis, 9th August 1921 and 3rd February 1922, in
IMC/CBMS, Box 1002 – Portuguese West Africa: Dr. J. T. Tucker, 1920–1949. J.
T. Tucker to A. L. Warnshuis, 30th January 1922; J. T. Tucker (on behalf of
The Angola Missions Conference) to Norton de Matos, 24th September 1922;
for a summary of Norton de Matos reaction to the Conference’s proposals see
J. T. Tucker to the members of the Angola Missions Conference, 3rd October
1922; all in IMC/CBMS, Box 1002 – Portuguese West Africa: Norton de Matos,
Governor of Angola, 1921/1922.
19. For Frederick Lugard, see Margery Perham, Lugard (London: Collins, 1960),
642–650; John E. Flint, ‘Frederick Lugard: The Making of an Autocrat (1858–
1943)’, in L. Gann and P. Duignan, ed., African Proconsuls (New York: Free
Press, 1978), 290–312. On the idea of mandates see, among others, William
Roger Louis, ‘African Origins of the Mandates Idea’, International Organization,
222 Notes
vol. 19, nº 1 (1965), 20–36; Idem, ‘The United Kingdom and the Beginning
of the Mandates System, 1919–1922’, International Organization, vol. 23, nº1
(1969), 73–96; and Michael D. Callahan, Mandates and Empire (Brighton:
Sussex Academic Press, 1999); and A Sacred Trust (Brighton: Sussex Academic
Press, 2004).
20 C. G. Baëta, ‘Missionary and Humanitarian Interests..., 429.
21. Advisory Committee on Native Education in the British Tropical African
Dependencies, Education Policy in British Tropical Africa (London: H.M.
H.M. Stationery Office, 1925). See also Clive Whitehead, ‘Education Policy
in British Tropical Africa: the 1925 White Paper in Retrospect’, History of
Education, vol. 10, nº 3 (1981), 195–203.
22. Perham, Lugard, 656–661. On education policy in the British colonies, see
Arthur Mayhew, ‘A Comparative Survey of Educational Aims and Methods
in British India and British Tropical Africa’, Africa, vol. 6, nº 2 (1933), 172–
186; T. Walter Wallbank, ‘The Educational Renaissance in British Tropical
Africa’, The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 31, no. 1 (1934), 105–122; Ann
Beck, ‘Colonial Policy and Education in British East Africa, 1900–1950’, The
Journal of British Studies, Vol. 5, no. 2 (1966), 115–138, especially 124–127;
Clive Whitehead, ‘The Advisory Committee on Education in the [British]
Colonies, 1924–1961’, Paedagogica Historica, vol. XXVII, nº 3 (1991), pp.
385–421; Bob W. White, ‘Talk about School: education and the colonial
project in French and British Africa (1860–1960)’, Comparative Education, vol.
32, nº 1 (1996), 9–25; Aaron Windel, ‘British colonial education in Africa:
policy and practice in the era of trusteeship’, History Compass, vol. 7, nº 1
(2009), 1–21.
23. Jesse Jones, ed., Education in Africa..., xiii–xx.
24. Jesse Jones, ed., Education in Africa..., 296–297, 302–305, 312.
25. Idem, 314.
26. The International Institute of African Languages was funded by the Carnegie
Corporation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and had Frederick Lugard as
its first chairman, Maurice Delafosse and Diedrich Hermann Westermann
as initial co-directors, and Hans Vischer as secretary. The latter – a former
minister of education of Lugard in Northern Nigeria and secretary of the
Advisory Committee on Native Education in the British Tropical African
Dependencies – was one of the most interested in US models.
27. For Westermann and the Institute see Holger Stoecker, ‘“The Gods are
Dying”: Diedrich Westerman (1875–1956) and some aspects of his studies
of African religions’, in Frieder Ludwig and Afe Adogame, eds., European
Traditions in the Study of Religion in Africa (Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2004),
169–174, especially 171–172. See also Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), especially 205ff; C. G. Baëta,
‘Missionary and Humanitarian Interests...’, 434.
28. For the relations between the United States and Africa in this context, see
Peter Duignan and L. H. Gann, The United States and Africa (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), especially 226–283.
29. Frank Freidel and Alan Brinkley, America in the Twentieth Centuryy (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1982), 24–27. For Dewey and Ross, see, for example, Donald
Johnson, ‘W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Jesse Jones and the Struggle for Social
Education’..., 74–75.
Notes 223
30. Donald Johnson, ibid., 29–31; Libby Schweber, ‘Progressive Reformers,

Unemployment, and the Transformation of Social Inquiry in Britain
and the United States, 1880–1920’, in Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda
Skocpol, eds., States, Social Knowledge, and the Origins of Modern Social Policies
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 186–187.
31. Omer Buyse, Méthodes Américaines d’Éducation Générale et Technique
(Charleroi: Presses de L’Établissement Litographique de Charleroi, 1909),
15–585; A. Freire de Andrade, Relatórios sobre Moçambique, Vol. V (Lourenço
Marques: Imprensa Nacional, 1910), 368ff.
32. Jesse Jones, ed., Education in Africa..., xii–xxv.
33. Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel in Black & White (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 125–128.
34. Luker, The Social Gospel..., 132–134 (cited in Edward Ross, 34); Freidel
and Brinkley, America in the Twentieth Century..., 32–34 (cited in Booker
Washington, 33).
35. Sampayo e Mello, Política Indígena..., 61–68; Marnoco e Souza, Administração
Colonial..., 414–415.
36. See Arthur M. Schlesinger (‘A Critical Period in American Religion, 1875–
1900’, in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 64 [1932]) ver-
sus Ralph Luker, The Social Gospel..., 1, 3–5; and Ronald C. White Jr. and C.
Howard Hopkins, eds., The Social Gospel (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University
Press, 1976), xi–xix.
37. Shailer Mathews, author of the entry ‘Social gospel’ in the Dictionary of
Religion and Ethics (1921), cited in White Jr. and Hopkins, eds., The Social
Gospel, xi; Walter Rauschenbusch, author of A Theology for the Social Gospel
(1917), cited in Freidel and Brinkley, America in the Twentieth Century..., 32;
Michele Mitchell, ‘The Black Man’s Burden: African Americans, Imperialism
and The Notions of Racial Manhood, 1890–1910’, International Review of
Social History, 44 (1999), 79–80.
38. Paul Toews, ‘The Imperialism of Righteousness’, in White Jr. and Hopkins,
eds., The Social Gospel..., 114–117. For an extensive analysis of Strong’s
proposals and the criticisms it received, see Luker, The Social Gospel...,
268–275.
39. Carroll D. Wright, author of Some Ethical Phases of the Labor Question (1902),
cited in White Jr. and Hopkins, eds., The Social Gospel..., 129–130.
40. Ibid., 135–138.
41. For Park and Booker T. Washington see Booker T. Washington, with the col-
laboration of Robert E. Park, The Man Farthest Down (New York: Doubleday,
Page & company, 1912); Robert M. Park, ‘Tuskegee international conference
on the Negro’, The Journal of Race Developmentt (1912), pp. 117–120; Idem,
‘Politics and “The Man Farthest Down”’, in E. C. Hughes et al., eds., Race
and Culture (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 166–176; Paul Jefferson, ‘Working
Notes on the Prehistory of Black Sociology: The Tuskegee Negro Conference’,
in Robert Alun Jones and Henrika Kurlick, eds., Knowledge and Society
(Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1981), 119–151; St Clair Drake, ‘The Tuskegee
Connection: Booker T. Washington and Robert E. Park’, Society, vol. 20, nº
4 (1983), pp. 82–92; Zine Magubane, ‘Science, reform, and the “science of
reform”: Booker T Washington, Robert Park, and the making of a “science of
society”’, Current Sociology, vol. 62, nº 4 (2014), 568–583. Sean H. McMahon,
224 Notes
Social Control and Public Intellect (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers,

1999), 142–143.
42. Donald N. Levine, Visions of the Sociological Tradition (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), 251–252; Skocpol and Rueschemeyer, ‘Introduction’,
in Rueschemeyer and Skocpol, eds., States…, 3–4.
43. Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman, American Sociology: Worldly
Rejections of Religion and Their Directions (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1985), 151; Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman, ‘Secular evangelism at
the University of Wisconsin’, Social Research, vol. 49, nº4 (1982), 1047–1072.
44. Vidich and Lyman, American Sociology..., 153–155; for Richard T. Ely see
White Jr. and Hopkins, eds., The Social Gospel..., 129.
45. W. R. Matthews, ‘Religious Thought’, in The New Cambridge Modern History,
Vol. XII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 656–664.
46. For a rigorous analysis of the academic contributions of these two authors,
see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991). See especially the chapter entitled
‘Towards a sociology of social control’, 219–256.
47. Matthews, ‘Religious Thought’..., 661.
48. Ross, The Origins of American..., 230.
49. Edward Ross, Seventy Years of It: An Autobiographyy (New York: Century Co.,
1936); Vidich and Lyman, American Sociology..., 157; Edward Ross, The
Outlines of Sociologyy (New York: The Century Co., 1923), 56ff.
50. In addition to the works cited in Vidich and Lyman see Dorothy Ross, The
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Macmillan and Free Press, t.
13–14, 1968), 560–562.
51. He changed his views, nonetheless, as he clarified in his autobiography.
Ross, The Outlines..., 57; Edward A. Ross, Foundations of Sociologyy (New York:
Macmillan, 1905), 376–377, 379, 384; Idem, Seventy Years of It, t 276. See also
Curto, ‘Prefácio’, 33–36.
52. Edward Ross, Roads to Social Peace (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1924), 48–49, 54–58.
53. Ross’s article is reproduced in his Foundations of Sociology..., 353–385, at 353.
For Richard H. Edwards, author of The Negro Problem (1908), see Luker, The
Social Gospel..., 258.
54. Vidich and Lyman, American Sociology..., 157–159, 165; McMahon, Social
Control..., 144–146.
5 New Methods, Old Conclusions: The Ross Report

1. Ernesto de Vasconcelos, ‘Escravatura?!...’, Boletim da Agência Geral das
Colónias, 1, no. 1 (July 1925), 10–12.
2. Journal de Genève, 6th November 1920 in Arquivo Histórico Diplomático,
Fundo MNE (hereafter AHDMNE), Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso,
armário 28, maço 71, A questão da escravatura, 1919–1924. For the context of
legislative reforms see Jerónimo, ‘The States of empire’.
3. For the general policy see Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘Administração
colonial’, in M. F. Rollo, ed., Dicionário de História da I República e do
Republicanismo (Lisbon: Assembleia da República, 2013), pp. 26–31.
Notes 225
4. Afonso Costa to Rodrigo Xavier da Silva, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 26th

and 28th April (confidencialíssimo), 19th and 20th May, 3rd (telegram,
confidencialíssimo) and 6th June 1919; Afonso Costa to João de Melo
Barreto, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 15th August 1919, both in AHDMNE,
3º piso, armário 12, maço 168, Colónias em geral. Volume IV – Reforma da
Administração Colonial.
5. Bernardo Botelho da Costa was Judge of the Supreme Military Court and
had relevant experience in courts in several colonies (Estado
( da Índia, Cape
Vert, Nova Goa, Angola). Bernardo Botelho da Costa, Relatório ordenado pelo
Decreto número 5706 de 10 de Maio de 1911, do Ministério das Colónias (Diário
do Governo Nº 98 1ª Série) (typewritten), in Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino
(hereafter AHU), MU-DGE-RCM-M2243/5, at 3–4, 158, 183; Memorandum
Colónias Portuguesas by the Portuguese delegation to the Peace Conference,
14th December 1918, in AHDMNE, 3º piso, armário 12, maço 168, Colónias
em geral. Volume I - Miscelânea; Freire de Andrade, ‘Nota sobre os indígenas de
Moçambique’, s.d.; Freire de Andrade, memorandum titled Le main d’oeuvre
indigene dans la colonie africaine, 19th February 1919; in AHDMNE, 3º piso,
armário 12, maço 168, Colónias em geral. Volume III - Mão-de-Obra Indígena.
6. Botelho da Costa, Relatório ordenado pelo Decreto número 5706 de 10 de
Maio de 1911, do Ministério das Colónias (Diário do Governo Nº 98 1ª Série)
(typewritten), in Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (hereafter AHU), MU-DGE-
RCM-M2243/5, at 3–4, 158, 183. For the Nyassa Company see Barry Neil-
Tomlinson, ‘The Nyassa Chartered Company: 1891–1929’, The Journal of
African History, vol. 18, nº1 (1977), 109–128; Malyn Newitt, História de
Moçambique (Mem-Martins: Publicações Europa-América, 1995), 332–334,
359, 365–369, 408. For the report see also António Manuel Hespanha, ‘Um
relatório inédito sobre as violências portuguesas na frente moçambicana da
I Grande Guerra’, Africana Studia (2010), 163–197.
7. Grémio de Proprietários e Agricultores da Zambezia to Alexandre de
Vasconcelos e Sá and José Carlos da Maia, Ministers of Colonies, 12th
September 1918, 20th February and 15th March 1919; Grémio de Proprietários
e Agricultores da Zambezia to Pedro Massano de Amorim, Governor-general
of Mozambique, 6th May 1918; all AHDMNE, 3º piso, armário 12, maço 168,
Colónias em geral. Volume III - Mão-de-Obra Indígena.
8. Direction of the Boror Company to Freire de Andrade, 12th May 1919, in
AHDMNE, 3º piso, armário 12, maço 168, Colónias em geral. Volume III - Mão-
de-Obra Indígena.
9. Memorandum Recrutamento dos Trabalhadores d’Angola para a Katanga.
Sua alimentação, habitações, doenças, deserções antes de terminarem os respec-
tivos contractos, 10th September 1918; Mariano Machado, Companhia do
Caminho de Ferro de Benguela, to Afonso Costa, 15th October 1919; both
in AHDMNE, 3º piso, armário 12, maço 168, Colónias em geral. Volume III -
Mão-de-Obra Indígena.
10. Lancelot D. Carnegie to Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Memoranda,
19th March 1914, 7th April 1919, in AHDMNE, 3º piso, Armário 10, maço 65;
Lancelot D. Carnegie to Portuguese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Memoranda
and dispatches of 19th March 1914; 9th April 1916; 13th January, 16th April,
2nd August 1917; 7th April 1919; all in Botelho da Costa, Relatório, 19–32,
48–51 (Document nº 9), 203–205.
226 Notes
11. Afonso Costa, confidencialíssimo, to Rodolfo Xavier da Silva, Minister of

Foreign Affairs, 20th May 1919; in AHDMNE, 3º piso, Armário 10, maço 65.
12. Newitt, História de Moçambique, 366; Pélissier, História de Moçambique, 426–427.
13. Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, The Tradition of Resistance in
Mozambique (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 156–185;
Terence Ranger, ‘Revolt in Portuguese East Africa: The Makombe Rising of
1917’, in St. Antony’s Papers, Nº 15 (Oxford: Chatto and Windus, 1963), pp.
54–80; Linda Heywood, Contested Power in Angola (Rochester, NY: University
of Rochester Press, 2000), 33–34. For the First War and the Portuguese empire
see Marco Arrifes, A Primeira Grande Guerra na África Portuguesa (Lisbon:
Edições Cosmos, 2004) and Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, ‘The Portuguese
Empire’, in Robert Gerwarth and Erez Manela, eds. Empires at War, 1911–
1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 179–196.
14. Botelho da Costa, Relatório, 362ff.
15. Botelho da Costa, confidential, to Ministry of Colonies (which had ten
several Ministers since June 1919…), 28th September, 8th October and 17th
November 1919, 13th June, 5th and 14th July 1920; all in AHDMNE, 3º piso,
Armário 10, maço 65.
16. Botelho da Costa, confidential, to Ministry of the Colonies, 5th July
1920, in AHDMNE, 3º piso, Armário 10, maço 65. For the workings of the
Repartição do Trabalho Indígena and the overall local context see Eric Allina,
Negotiating Colonialism, 183–192, 271–300, 303-footnote 8; idem, Slavery by
Other Name, 123.
17. BIDI succeeded the 1908 Swiss League for the Protection of the Natives of
Congo (Ligue Suisse pour la Défense des Indigènes du Congo), led by René
Claparède.
18. Afonso Costa, telegrams dated 26th November and 4th December 1920,
AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço
71, A questão da escravatura, 1919–1924. For BIDI see Rene Claparède and
Edouard Mercier-Glardon, Un bureau international pour la défense des indigènes
(Geneva: Société générale d’imprimerie, 1917) and Edouard Junod, ‘Le
Bureau international pour la défense des indigènes’, Revue Internationale de
la Croix-Rouge et Bulletin international des Sociétés de la Croix-Rouge, vol. 4, nº
37 (1922), 27–43. See also Amalia Ribi, ‘“The Breath of a New Life”?: British
Anti-Slavery Activism and the League of Nations’, in Daniel Laqua, ed.,
Internationalism Reconfigured (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 93–113. See also
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, ‘O império do trabalho.
Portugal, as dinâmicas do internacionalismo e os mundos coloniais’, in
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and António Costa Pinto, eds., Portugal e o fim do
Colonialismo (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2014), 15–54, especially 23–25.
19. Portuguese legation in London to Minister of Foreign Affairs, 9th October
1920; Telegram of Afonso Costa, 4th November 1920; Afonso Costa to
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Confidencialíssimo, 18th and 19th November
1920, in AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28,
maço 71, A questão da escravatura, 1919–1924. Archives de la Société des
Nations (hereafter ASDN), R30, dossier nº 8218, Memorandum on the subject of
slavery practices and general labour conditions in Portuguese West Africa. For Sir
S. Hoare’s questions and Cecil Harmsworth answers see Hansard Commons,
Debate of 6 July 1920, vol. 131, cc1199–1200.
Notes 227
20. ASDN, R30, dossier nº 8218, Memorandum on the subject of slavery practices
and general labour conditions in Portuguese West Africa; Sociedade de Emigração
para S. Thomé e Principe, La Main d’oeuvre indigene dans l’Ouest africain
(Geneva: Imprimerie du Journal de Genève, 1920), at 7.
21. Inquérito sobre trabalho agrícola nos países tropicais. As novas instituições criadas
pelos Tratados de Paz e o trabalho Tropical (1919), in AHDMNE, Sociedade das
Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço 71. Jaime Batalha Reis to
Alexandre de Vasconcelos e Sá, Minister of Colonies, 20th September 1918, in
AHDMNE, 3º piso, armário 12, maço 168, Colónias em geral. Volume III - Mão-
de-Obra Indígena. See also J. Batalha Reis and F. Heim, Enquête internationale
sur la main-d’oeuvre agricole dans les colonies et les pays tropicaux (Paris: Bureau
International de l’Association, 1914).
22. Afonso Costa to João de Melo Barreto, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 15th
August 1919, in AHDMNE, 3º piso, armário 12, maço 168, Colónias em geral.
Volume III - Mão-de-Obra Indígena.
23. Manuel Fratel, Director-General of the Western Colonies, to Director–general
of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 4th January 1921; Telegram from Ministry
of Colonies to Director-General of the Western Colonies, 3rd January 1921;
Correia de Aguiar, Curator of the natives, to governor-general of São Thomé
and Principe, 27th October 1919; Correia de Aguiar to governor-general of
São Thomé and Principe, 29th July 1920; all in AHDMNE, Sociedade das
Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço 71, A questão da escravatura,
1919–1924.
24. ASDN, R589, dossier nº11787, Protestations des natifs de Sao Thome demand-
ent protection contre le gouverneur qui fait persecuter la population de Sao Thome.
Letter from SDN to Bernardino Machado, 30th March 1921, in AHDMNE,
Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço 71, Telegrama
dos indígenas de S. Tomé à SDN sobre maus tratos das autoridades – telegrama da
delegação à 2ª Assembleia da SDN (1921)
25. Freire de Andrade to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 13th September 1921;
Fernando Machado, Director of Western Colonies Department, to Freire
de Andrade, 21st September 1921; all in AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações,
Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço 71, Telegrama dos indígenas de S.
Tomé à SDN sobre maus tratos das autoridades – telegrama da delegação à 2ª
Assembleia da SDN (1921).
26. M. Teixeira Gomes to Barbosa de Magalhães, 14th November 1922; M.
Teixeira Gomes to Augustin Edwards, President of the League of Nations,
2nd January 1923; both in AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º
piso, armário 28, maço 71, A Questão da Escravatura na 3ª Assembleia da SDN/
Proposta do Delegado da Nova Zelândia/Campanha da Harris na Imprensa Inglesa
(1922).
27. BIDI, ‘L’esclavage sous toute ses forms. Mémoire’, 2nd August 1923, in
ASDN, Commission Temporaire de Esclavage (1924). Freire de Andrade, ‘Nota
sobre os indígenas de Moçambique’, s.d., in AHDMNE, 3º piso, armário 12,
maço 168, Colónias em geral. Volume III - Mão-de-Obra Indígena. For Junod see,
for instance, Patrick Harries, Butterflies & barbarians (Oxford: Currey, 2007).
28. H. A. Grimshaw to William E. Rappard, 27th January 1925; Travers Buxton to
H. A. Grimshaw, 13th November 1924; G. A. Morton to ASAPS, 17th October
1924; all in ASDN, Commission Temporaire de Esclavage (1924).
228 Notes
29. All these replies were submitted to the League’s Commission. Portuguese
Government to Temporary Slavery Commission, 5th June 1925; António
Centeno to Francisco José Pereira, government Commissioner to the Nyasa
Company, 27th May 1925, both in ASDN, R64, dossier nº23252, Documents
concerning the Treatment of Natives in Portuguese East Africa.
30. The best study of the question of slavery in the League of Nations is that of
Suzanne Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira
Press, 2003), especially 58–173.
31. In the report of the Temporary Slavery Commission, approved during the
second session that began on 13 July and ended on 25 July 1926, in Chapter
1, entitled ‘The state of slavery and the condition of the slave’, it reads:
‘With the exception of Abyssinia, the legality of the condition of the slave
is not actually recognised in any other Christian state, nor in any of their
territories, nor is it recognised in their colonial dependencies nor in the
territories placed under their mandate’. However, the promulgation of vari-
ous dispositions that the respective government made in order to diminish
such situations was referred to. As the report confirmed from the outset, the
abolition of slavery was a desire that was not easy to achieve. The essential
reason highlighted as a cause for its legal persistence rested in the fact that
the ‘legality of such an institution to be found, among Muslims, in the holy
book upon which they base their religion and, among the Abyssinians, by
secular tradition’. The arguments explaining the persistence of slavery had
changed little. ‘A escravatura e a sociedade das nações’, Boletim da Agência
Geral das Colónias (October, 1925), 28–29. For the case of Abyssinia see Jean
Allain, ‘Slavery and the League of Nations: Ethiopia as a Civilised Nation’,
Journal of the History of International Law, vol. 8, nº 2 (2006), 213–244, espe-
cially 219–223, 243–244, and Amalia Ribi, ‘“The Breath of a New Life”?’,
especially 101–103. See also Joel Quirk, The Anti-Slavery Project (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 77.
32. Société des Nations, Comission Temporaire de L’Esclavage, Première Session,
Première Séance (9 July 1924), 5–6.
Première Séance (9 July 1924), 5–6
34. For Maurice Delafosse, who was a very important person at this time, and
who was deeply involved in Charles Lavigerie’s abolitionist crusade and was
also a colonial administrator in French West Africa, see Jean-Loup Amselle
and Emmanuelle Sibeud, eds., Maurice Delafosse (Paris: Maisonneuve &
Larose, 1998).
Troisième Séance (10 July 1924), 14.
Troisième Séance (10 July 1924), 15; Francisco Mantero, ‘A mão d’obra indí-
gena nas colónias africanas’, in Congresso Colonial Nacional (1924), 3–11.
37. Société des Nations. La Question de L’Esclavage. Mémorandum du Secrétaire
Général. A. 25. 1924. VI. Genève, 4 Août 1924, at 1.
38. La Question de L’Esclavage. Lettre du president de la delegation du Portugal
et Memoire du government Portugais relatifs a la question de l’esclavage. C.
532.M.188.1924.VI.C.T.E.17. Genève, 27 Septembre 1924, in AHDMNE,
Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço 71. For the
Lisbon Geographical Society see Freire de Andrade to Domingos Leite
Notes 229
Pereira, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 3rd January 1924; Vicente de Almeida

d’Eça, president of the society, to Ministry of Colonies, 7th February 1924;
Memorandum, 14th August 1925; all in AHU, Caixa 354, 2 G, MU-DGSC, 1923-
1945. For the case of the Centro Colonial see http://archive.spectator.co.uk/
article/1st-february-1913/13/portuguese-methods-in-political-controversy.
39. Dispatch of the Portuguese Legation in London, 10th April 1923; Freire de
Andrade to Domingos Leite Pereira, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 3rd January
1924; both in AHU, Caixa 354, 2 G, MU-DGSC, 1923–1945; M. Teixeira
Gomes to Council of the League of Nations, full date illegible but from
maço 71, A questão da escravatura, 1919–1924. John H. Harris, Slavery and the
Obligations of the League of Nations (London: ASAPS, 1923).
40. Freire de Andrade, sd.; Secretariat of Ministry of Colonies to Directorate-
general of Colonies of the East and of the West, 13th August 1923; both in
AHU, Caixa 354, 2 G, MU-DGSC, 1923–1945.
41. Freire de Andrade to Domingos Leite Pereira, Minister of Foreign Affairs,
18th June 1923, in AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso,
armário 28, maço 71
42. La Question de L’Esclavage. Lettre du president de la delegation du Portugal
et Memoire du government Portugais relatifs a la question de l’esclavage. C.
532.M.188.1924.VI.C.T.E.17. Genève, 27 Septembre 1924; Lettre du president de
la delegation du Portugal et Memoire du government Portugais relatifs a la question
de l’esclavage (1924), pp. 5, 11, 13, both in AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações,
Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço 71.
43. Newitt, A History of Mozambique, 430.
44. Lettre du president de la delegation du Portugal et Mémoire du government
Portugais relatifs a la question de l’esclavage (1924), 23–25, 31–32.
45. Idem, 33–35, 39.
46. Ibid., 41, 46. For the prazos case see 47–54.
47. Ibidem, 54–55.
48. ‘Uma campanha difamatória: A propósito do “Report on Employment of
Native Labour in Portuguese Africa”’, Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias,
vol. 1, nº 2 (1925), 123–142. For a detailed description of the politico-
diplomatic context of the period and of the negotiations with the League of
Nations, see Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth-Century, 102–113.
Première Séance (9 July 1924), 6.
50. Mémoire sur la question de l’esclavage soumis à la Commission par le Bureau
International pour la Défense des Indigènes, 20th May 1925, in ASDN,
Commission Temporaire de Esclavage (1924); Lettre du Chef de la Délégation por-
tugaise à la VIème Assemblée, transmettant les observations de son Gouvernement
sur la mémoire, en date du 20 Mai 1925 du Bureau International pour la Défense
des Indigènes, 21st October 1925, in ASDN, R64, dossier nº23252; Portuguese
Delegation at the League of Nations, confidential, to Vitorino Henriques
Godinho, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 19th September 1924, in AHDMNE,
Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço 71.
51. Société des Nations, Comission Temporaire de L’Esclavage. Procès-Verbaux de la
Deuxième Session, Huitième Séance (16 July 1925).
52. Published in Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias, December 1925, under the
title ‘Algumas observações ao relatório do professor Ross. Apresentadas como
230 Notes
elemento de informação à Comissão Temporária da Escravatura da Sociedade

das Nações’, Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias (December 1925; January
and February 1926), 179. This is a document that was transcribed over sev-
eral issues of the Diário de Notícias and, later, in several issues of the Boletim
da Agência Geral das Colónias, and was translated to English and French.
53. Huntington Gilchrist, US diplomat at the League, who considered the
report’s conclusions ‘clear and well supported by a most enormous array
of direct evidence’, states that only 100 copies were delivered, while Ross
himself states 300. Raymond Fosdick to A. L. Warnshuis, 18th June 1925;
H. Gilchrist to A. L. Warnshuis, 23rd June 1925; Edward Ross to W. L.
Warnshuis, 25th May 1935; both in IMC/CBMS, FBN87, Portuguese Africa.
54. For brief accounts see Duffy, Portuguese Africa, 166–168; Vail and White,
Capitalism and Colonialism in Mozambique, 222–224; Valentim Alexandre,
‘Ideologia, economia e política: a questão colonial na implantação do Estado
Novo’, Análise Social, XXVIII, nº 123–124 (1993), 1120; Penvenne, African
Workers…, 72–77; and Eric Allina, ‘“Fallacious Mirrors”: Colonial Anxiety
and Images of African Labor in Mozambique, ca. 1929’, History in Africa
(1997), 9–52; Negotiating Colonialism, 292ff; Slavery by Other Name, 75–77.
55. Included in Edward Ross, Report on Employment of Native Labour in Portuguese
Africa (New York: The Abbot Press, 1925), 3. See also Georges Foster
Peabody, Raymond B. Fordick, E. E. Alcott and others to Temporary Slavery
Commission, 18th May and 5th June 1925, in ASDN, R66, dossier nº 23252,
Treatment of Natives in Portuguese Africa. Report by Prof. E. A. Ross, concerning
employment of native labour.
56. For Holt see Warren F. Kuehl, Hamilton Holt (Gainesville: University of
Florida Press, 1960).
57. For Peabody see Louise Ware, George Foster Peabody (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2009 [1951]). For the role of philanthropy in ‘black educa-
tion’ see Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Dangerous Donations (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1999). More generally see Robert F. Arnove,
ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1980); Edward H. Berman, The influence of the Carnegie, Ford, and
Rockefeller Foundations on American foreign policy (New York: SUNY Press,
1983).
58. Luker, The Social Gospel..., 144–151, 181–182, 258–260.
59. A. L. Warnshuis to Edward Ross, 17th April 1925; in IMC/CBMS, FBN87,
Portuguese Africa.
60. A. L. Warnshuis to Joseph H. Oldham, 15th April 1924, in IMC/CBMS, Box
298 – Portuguese Africa: Labour – Report by Prof. Ross.
61. Julius Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism
(Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1972), 186.
62. Note by A. L. Warnshuis, ‘Confidential. Presentation of Professor Ross’
Report to the League of Nations’, 16th July 1925, in IMC/CBMS, FBN87,
Portuguese Africa; Ross, Report on Employment..., 5.
63. Julius Weinberg, ‘E. A. Ross: The Progressive as Nativist’, The Wisconsin
Magazine of History, vol. 50, nº 3 (1967), 242–253.
64. See, for instance, Edward A. Ross, ‘Sociological Observations in Inner China’,
American Journal of Sociology, vol. 16, nº 6 (1911), 721–733, and his book The
Changing Chinese (New York: The Century Co., 1911).
Notes 231
65. He published three books and several articles: Edward A. Ross, Russia in
Upheaval (New York: The Century Co., 1918); Idem, The Russian Bolshevik
Revolution (New York: The Century Co., 1921); Ibidem, The Russian Soviet
Republicc (New York: The Century Co., 1923).
66. McMahon, Social Control..., 137–139.
67. Weinberg, Edward Alsworth Ross, 185ff. On Mexico see Edward A. Ross, The
Social Revolution in Mexico (New York: The Century Co., 1923).
68. H. A. Grimshaw to A. L. Warnshuis, 12th December 1924; A. L. Warnshuis
to H. A. Grimshaw, 26th January 1925; H. A. Grimshaw to A. L. Warnshuis,
10th February 1925; all in IMC/CBMS, FBN87, Portuguese Africa.
69. H. A. Grimshaw to A. L. Warnshuis, 23rd June 1925; 8th September 1925;
A. L. Warnshuis to Edward Ross, 15th July 1925; all in IMC/CBMS, FBN87,
Portuguese Africa.
70. Ross, Report on Employment…
71. Ross, Report on Employment..., 5–58.
72. Ross, Seventy Years of It,
t 191. See also Curto, ‘Prefácio’, 30–31.
73. Ross, Report on Employment..., 58–59.
74. Ibid., 10, 13–15, 17.
75. Ibid., 59–60.
76. Ross, Report on Employment..., 59.
77. A. Freire de Andrade, ‘Trabalho indígena e as colónias portuguesas’, Boletim
da Agência Geral das Colónias (September 1925), 8–9; Caetano, Portugal e a
Internacionalização..., 191, 194–195.
78. A. L. Warnshuis to H. A. Grimshaw, 5th June 1925; J. H. Oldham to W. L.
Warnshuis, 28th May 1925; Edward Ross to W. L. Warnshuis, 25th May
1935; W. L. Warnshuis, ‘strictly confidential’, to Edward Ross, 3rd September
1935; Emory Ross to A. L. Warnshuis, 13 June 1935; H. S. Hollenbeck to
Mabel E. Emerson, 17th June 1935; Mabel E. Emerson to A. L. Warnshuis,
3rd July 1935 (for W. C. Bell); all in IMC/CBMS, FBN87, Portuguese Africa.
W. L. Warnshuis to J. H. Oldham, 8th June 1925, in IMC/CBMS, Box 298 –
Portuguese Africa: Labour – Report by Prof. Ross. For early negative appraisals
of these missionaries see Linda Heywood, ‘Slavery and Forced Labor in the
Changing Political Economy of Central Angola, 1850–1949’, in Suzanne
Miers and Richard Roberts, eds., The End of Slavery in Africa (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 415–436, at 426–427.
79. H. S. Hollenbeck to Mabel E. Emerson, 17th June 1935; W. C. Bell, memoran-
dum, 7th January 1926; W. C. Bell, ‘Notes’, 10th November 1925; W. C. Bell
to Ernest W. Riggs, American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions
(ABCFM), 8th January 1926; T. S. Donohugh, ‘Suggestion for missionaries
in Portuguese territory’, 1st June 1926; all in IMC/CBMS, FBN87, Portuguese
Africa.
80. Ernest W. Riggs to A. L. Warnshuis, 22nd July 1926, in IMC/CBMS, FBN87,
Portuguese Africa. C. T. Loram, The Education of the South African Native
(London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1917).
81. Pierre Loze to A. L. Warnshuis, 30th October 1925; in IMC/CBMS, Box 298 –
Portuguese Africa: Labour – Report by Prof. Ross. Portuguese Africa; Pierre Loze
to J. H. Oldham, 13th June 1927, in IMC/CBMS, Box 1204 – Portuguese East
Africa: Beira Scheme: M. Pierre Loze. See also Leon P. Spencer, Toward an African
Church in Mozambique (Luwinga: Mzuni Press, 2013).
232 Notes

Portuguese Africa.
83. Warnshuis also noticed the different impacts of the report in Angola and
Mozambique. E. W. Riggs, ‘The missionaries serving in Portuguese territo-
ries in Africa’, 3rd February 1926; A. L. Warnshuis to H. H. Oldham, 11th
February 1926; A. L. Warnshuis to P. Loze, 11th February 1926; Undated
and unsigned, ‘Suggested paragraphs that may be included in letters to the
missionaries in Portuguese colonies’; all in IMC/CBMS, FBN87, Portuguese
Africa.
Portuguese Africa.
85. William C. Terril to T. S. Donohugh, 11th December 1925 (extracts); in
IMC/CBMS, FBN87, Portuguese Africa.
86. James R. Angell to Viscount d’Alte, Portuguese Legation in the United
States of America (Washington), 15th October 1925; Viscount d’Alte,
confidential, to Vasco Borges, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 16th and 26th
September and 19th October 1925; AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações,
Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço 71, Relatório Ross.
87. W. C. Bell, ‘Notes’, 10 November 1925; Robert Shields to Edwards, 16th
August 1926 (includes interview, translated); both in IMC/CBMS, FBN87,
Portuguese Africa.
88. John T. Tucker was originally appointed as member of the Jesse Jones
Commission and collaborated in its organisation. Given personal circum-
stances (his wife illness), he resigned. He was the author of the important
Angola, the land of the blacksmith prince (London: World Dominion Press,
1933). John T. Tucker to the American Board and the Canadian Board of
Missions, 23rd September 1925; ‘Note of Interview with Rev. J. T. Tucker’,
17th March 1926; both in IMC/CBMS, FBN87, Portuguese Africa. See also
Linda Heywood, Contested Power in Angola, 52 ff.,
89. U. J. Minto to Ernest Riggs, 1st May 1925; D. A. Hastings, 28th April 1926;
both in IMC/CBMS, FBN87, Portuguese Africa.
90. For Ross’s explanations about this text, which was translated into English
within the IMC, see ‘Comment of Professor Ross upon the Observations
of the Portuguese colonial office upon the Report on the Employment of
native Labour in Portuguese Africa’; T. S. Donohugh to A. L. Warnshuis,
17th December 1926; A. L. Warnshuis to T. S. Donohugh, 28th December
1926; all in IMC/CBMS, FBN87, Portuguese Africa.
91. AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço
71, A Conferência internacional das missões cristãs em África realizada em
Zoute-sur-mer (Bélgica) e o castigo, em angola, de vários pretos suspeitos de terem
fornecidos elementos para o relatório Ross (1926).
92. Alberto de Oliveira to António Bettencourt Rodrigues, 22nd September
maço 71, A Conferência internacional das missões cristãs em África realizada em
Zoute-sur-mer (Bélgica) e o castigo, em Angola, de vários pretos suspeitos de terem
fornecidos elementos para o relatório Ross (1926). For Anet’s trip to Portugal
see also Leon P. Spencer, Toward an African Church in Mozambique, 44–45.
Henri Anet was the author of Quelques resultats pratiques de la Conference
Missionaire Internationale du Zoute (Bruxelles: L. Lignier, 1926) and ‘Protestant
Notes 233
missions in Belgian Congo’, International Review of Mission, vol. 28 (1939),

pp. 415–425. See also his short biography in Academie Royale des Sciences
d’Outre-Mer Belge d’Outre-Mer,r T. VII-A, 1973, col. 9-14.
93. Henri Anet, ‘Report on a journey to Portugal’, 3rd June 1926; in IMC/
CBMS, Box 298 – Portuguese Africa: Anet visit to Portugal, 1926–1930.
Portuguese Africa.
95. Henri Anet, ‘Portuguese situation’, undated; Henri Anet to A. L. Warnshuis,
20th July 1926; Henri Anet to Freire de Andrade, 20th July 1926; Document
‘Comments on ‘Report on a journey to Portugal by Henri Anet’; all in
IMC/CBMS, FBN87, Portuguese Africa. Henri Anet, ‘Report on a journey to
Portugal’, 3rd June 1926; in IMC/CBMS, Box 298 – Portuguese Africa: Anet
visit to Portugal, 1926–1930. Jesse Jones to Norton de Matos, 31st January
1921; in IMC/CBMS, Box 1002 – Portuguese West Africa: Norton de Matos,
Governor of Angola, 1921/1922.
96. Freire de Andrade to Henri Anet, 14th September 1926, in IMC/CBMS, Box
298 – Portuguese Africa: Anet visit to Portugal, 1926–1930.
97. Henri Anet to A. L. Warnshuis, 27th January 1927, in IMC/CBMS, FBN87,
Portuguese Africa.
98. On the conference see Who’s Who. International Conference on the Christian
Mission in Africa. Le Zoute, Belgium. September 14–21, 1926; Edwin Smith,
The Christian mission in Africa (The International Missionary Council,
1926). See also a review by Joseph H. Oldham, ‘The Christian Mission in
Africa’, International Review of Mission, vol. 16, nº 1 (1927), 24–35.
99. Alberto de Oliveira to António Bettencourt Rodrigues, 22nd September
maço 71, A Conferência internacional das missões cristãs em África realizada
em Zoute-sur-mer (Bélgica) e o castigo, em angola, de vários pretos suspeitos de
terem fornecidos elementos para o relatório Ross (1926).
100. Alberto de Oliveira to Henri Anet, 4th October 1926, in IMC/CBMS, Box
298 – Portuguese Africa: Anet visit to Portugal, 1926–1930.
101. League of Nations, ‘Response of the Portuguese Government’, 27 August,
Publications de la Société des Nations. Projet de Convention sur L’Esclavage,
Réponses des Gouvernements (31 August 1926), 2–3.
102. A. Galvão, ‘A mão-de-obra indígena em Angola’, Diário de Notícias, 30
March 1925; cf. A. Galvão, ‘O regime da mão-de-obra indígena em Angola’,
Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias (August 1925) and J. A. Lopes Galvão,
‘O regime de mão-de-obra indígena em Moçambique’, Boletim da Agência
Geral das Colónias (September 1925).
103. A. Freire de Andrade, ‘Trabalho indígena e as colónias portuguesas’..., 9.
104. ‘Resposta do governo português ao projecto de convenção sobre a escra-
vatura’, 27 August, included in Publications de la Société des Nation. Projet de
Convention sur L’Esclavage, Réponses des Gouvernements (31 August 1926), 2–3.
105. Leite de Magalhães, ‘A farça da escravatura: O nosso depoimento’, A Gazeta
das Colónias (10 September 1925), 4.
106. Instruções provisórias para o recrutamento e emprego de trabalhadores indíge-
nas nas províncias, aprovadas por portaria provincial nº 4, de 16 Janeiro de
1925 (Luanda: Imprensa Nacional, 1925), 5, 7–8, 11; Norton de Matos to
António do Lago Cerqueira, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 16th and 25th July,
234 Notes
1st August 1925; Afonso Costa to Vasco Borges, 13th and 17th September
1925; Vasco Borges to Afonso Costa, 18th September 1925; both in
AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço
71. For the Kenyan example see Anthony Clayton and Donald C. Savage,
Government and labour in Kenya, 1895–1963 (New York: Frank Cass, 2005),
especially 134ff; and Bruce J. Berman and John M. Lonsdale, ‘Crises of accu-
mulation, coercion and the colonial state: the development of the labor
control system in Kenya, 1919–1929’, Canadian Journal of African Studies,
vol. 14, nº 1 (1980), 55–81.
107. Afonso Costa, telegram to Vasco Borges, 6th September 1925, in in
AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço 71.
108. ‘Algumas observações...’
109. Diário de Notícias (30 September 1925 and 26 August 1925).
110. Boletim Oficial de Angola, Series II, Nº 34, dated 20th, published 22nd August
1925; Edward Holmes (Baptist Missionary Society, Portuguese Congo) to C.
E. Wilson, 30th September 1925, in IMC/CBMS, FBN87, Portuguese Africa.
Francisco Oliveira Santos, Resposta às acusações que o americano Professor
Edward Alsworth Ross fez à Administração dos Portugueses em Angola num
Relatório que enviou à S. D. N. em 1925 (Loanda: Imprensa Nacional de
Angola, 1926–1927).
111. Oliveira Santos, Resposta às Acusações..., 4, 11.
112. ‘Algumas observações...’, 183.
113. Oliveira Santos, Resposta às Acusações..., 19–21.
114. ‘Algumas observações...’, part 3, 154–155.
115. ‘Uma campanha difamatória’, Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias, 1, no.
2 (August 1925), 124–125.
116. Edward Ross, Report on Employment..., 5.
117. ‘Algumas observações...’, 184.
118. ‘Algumas observações...’, part II, 151. Edward Ross, Report on Employmentt ...,
16, 23, 25.
119. Id., 11–12.
120. Recall the defence Freire de Andrade made of the need to introduce the
question of ‘arms imports’ into the general framework of the discussion
on slavery during the first sessions of the Temporary Slavery Commission.
‘Algumas observações...’, part II, 157.
121. ‘Uma campanha difamatória’, 128, 131–134.
122. A. Galvão, ‘A mão-de-obra indígena...’.
123. Resposta do Governo Português, 27 de Agosto. Publications de la Société des
Nations. Projet de Convention sur L’Esclavage, Réponses des Gouvernements (31
August 1926), 3.
124. Penvenne, African Workers…, 72–77.
125. O Brado Africano, 25 July 1925, 2.
126. Id., 10 April 1926.
127. Ross, Report on Employment..., 40–45, 59.
128. José Cabral to Artur Ivens Ferraz, confidential, 27th January 1928.
123. ‘Uma campanha difamatória’, 136.
130. O Brado Africano, 25 July 1925, 2.
131. For a short enumeration of the ‘native’ associations in Angola, see Douglas L.
Wheeler and René Pélissier, Angola (London: Pall Mall Press, 1971), 115–120.
Notes 235
132. Their declaration was included in ‘Algumas observações...’, on the last

page. João de Castro, President of the PNA, and other members, to Secretary
of the League of Nations, 8th September 1925; Afonso Costa to Vasco
Borges, 12th and 13th September 1925; Council of the PNA to Freire de
Andrade, 25th June 1926; all in AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações, Processo
14, 3º piso, armário 28, maço 71.
133. ‘Uma campanha difamatória’..., 123–124.
134. Anonymous, ‘O momento colonial’, A Gazeta das Colónias (15 December
1925), 5.
135. Ross, Seventy years of it..., 199–204.
136. John Harris, Slavery or ‘Sacred Trust’? (London: William and Norgate Ltd.,
1926), 45–48.
137. For a list of the documents that in 1925 were submitted by ‘organisations
and individuals’ and discussed by Temporary Slavery Commission, see ‘A
escravatura e a sociedade das nações’, Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias
(October 1925), 54–55. This issue also includes a copy of the letter sent
by the commission’s chairman to the president of the League of Nations
Council, as well as the commission’s report, 24–55.
138. See, for instance, Daniel Roger Maul, ‘The international labour organiza-
tion and the struggle against forced labour from 1919 to the present’, Labor
History, vol. 48, nº4 (2007), 477–500, and Susan Zimmerman, ‘“Special
Circumstances” in Geneva: The ILO and the World of Non-Metropolitan
Labour in the Interwar Years’, in Jasmien Van Daele et al., eds., ILO
Histories. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 221–250.
139. Silva Cunha, O Trabalho Indígena (Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional,
1928), 3–6, 9–10, 39–42; Publications de la Société des Nations. Bureau
International du Travail. Conférence Économique Internationale. L’Organisation
Scientifique du Travail en Europee (Geneva, 4 May 1927), 5–6; Silva Cunha,
O Sistema Português, 35–41; Final report of the 1926 Convention, in ‘A
escravatura e a sociedade das nações’, Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias
(October 1925), 28–55; Almada, Apontamentos Históricos..., 114–119. For
more on the 1926 convention and for the Bureau International du Travail,
see Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth-Century..., 121–141; Jean Allain, The Slavery
Conventions (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2008), especially 31–172.
140. Response of the Portuguese government, 27 August. Publications de la Société des
Nations. Projet de Convention sur L’Esclavage, Réponses des Gouvernements (31
August 1926), 1–7.
141. Document appointing the commission, 8th December 1925; Document
‘Alterações ao Regulamento de trabalho indígena’ (1926); Vasco Borges to
Norton de Matos, Portuguese Legation in United Kingdom (London), 30th
January 1926; Norton de Matos to Vasco Borges, 15th January and 22nd
March 1926; Travers Buxton to Norton de Matos, 15th January, 19th March
and 28th April 1926; Freire de Andrade to António Bettencourt Rodrigues,
8th July 1927; all in AHDMNE, Sociedade das Nações, Processo 14, 3º piso,
armário 28, maço 71.
142. Publications de la Société des Nations: Convention de L’Esclavage. Rapport
annuel au Conseil, 6–8.
143. Silva Cunha, O Trabalho Indígena..., 201–203.
144. See Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth-Century..., 141–148.
236 Notes
145. Eduardo Marques, Minister of Colonies, confidential, to Jaime da Fonseca

Monteiro, 13th December 1929.
146. To this end, it organised an international committee that would bring
together, classify and conserve the publications, particularly ‘official
documents’, relating to colonial administration and law, establishing
the Annuaire de Documentation Coloniale Comparée and the International
Colonial Library.
147. Report of the ICI, reproduced in Silva Cunha, O Trabalho Indígena..., 44.
Penha Garcia to the Minister of the Colonies, 2nd November 1928. Institut
Colonial International, Le régime et l’organisation du travail des indigènes
dans les colonies tropicales (Brussels: Établissements généraux d’imprimerie,
1929); Institut Colonial International, Statuts et Règlement (Brussels: Siège
Administratif de L’Institut, s.d.).
148. Memorandum by Freire de Andrade, in AHDMNE, 3º piso, armário 12,
maço 168, Colónias em geral. Volume II – Mandatos.
149. Vasco Quevedo to Henrique Trindade Coelho, 3rdAugust 1929; Luís Sampayo,
Secretary-general of Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to Artur Ivens Ferraz, Minister
of Foreign Affairs, 4th September 1929; both in AHDMNE, Repartição dos
Negócios Políticos, maço 164, Trabalho indígena nas colónias, 1929–1937.
150. Alberto de Oliveira to Manuel Quintão Meireles, confidential, 29th June,
4th July 1929; Alberto de Oliveira to Henrique Trindade Coelho, Minister
of Foreign Affairs, 14th August 1929; Manuel Quintão Meireles, confiden-
tial, to Aníbal de Mesquita Guimarães, Minister of Colonies, 3rd July 1929;
Manuel Quintão Meireles, confidential, to Alberto de Oliveira, confidential,
3rd July 1929; all in AHDMNE, Repartição dos Negócios Políticos, maço
164, Trabalho indígena nas colónias, 1929–1937. See also Jerónimo and
Monteiro, ‘O império do trabalho’, 26.
151. Portuguese Legation in Belgium (Brussels) to Fernando Branco, Minister
of Foreign Affairs, 24th October 1930; Anonymous minute, s.d.; Fernando
Branco to Eduardo Marques, Minister of Colonies, 22nd November 1930;
all in AHDMNE, Repartição dos Negócios Políticos, maço 164, Trabalho
indígena nas colónias, 1929–1937.
152. Response of the Portuguese government reproduced in Silva Cunha, O
Trabalho Indígena..., 275–276; Almada, Apontamentos Históricos..., 14.
153. Note ‘Campanha da Anti-Slavery. Trabalho indígena em Angola’, 19th
September 1930; Tomaz Garcia Rosado, Ambassador in London, to
Fernando Branco, Minister of Foreign Affairs, 17th January 1931; both in
AHDMNE, Repartição dos Negócios Políticos, maço 164, Trabalho indígena
nas colónias, 1929–1937. Kathleen Simon, Slaveryy (London: Hodder and
Stoughton, 1929); R. T. Smallbones, Economic Conditions in Angola (London:
H.M. Stationery Office, 1929), at 21.
154. For developments on this see Jerónimo, Livros Brancos, Almas Negras, chapter
VI, ‘Argumentos velhos, métodos novos: a propaganda colonial’, 219–236.
Conclusion
1. For a comparable process see Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 212–245.
2. Apart from this volume and the references already provided see also Patrícia
Ferraz Matos, The Colours of the Empire (New York: Berghahn, 2013).
Notes 237
3. See Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade.

4. For the debates on the 1920s onwards see Cooper, Decolonization and African
Society, especially 21–56.
5. For a development of this argument see Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ‘A Escrita
Plural dos Impérios: Economia, Geopolítica e Religião na obra de Andrew
Porter’, in Andrew Porter, Imperialismo Europeu, 1860–1914 (Lisbon: Edições
70, Coleção História&Sociedade, 2011), especially 30–48.
6. For instance, Alice Conklin states that despite all colonial powers having
mobilised civilising principles and purposes, only in the French case was this
elevated to a major cornerstone of the imperial doctrine. Conklin, A Mission
to Civilize, 1.
7. Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo and José Pedro Monteiro, Internacionalismo e
Império (forthcoming 2015).
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Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.
Zegeye, Abebe and Shubi Ishemo, eds., Forced Labour and Migration: Patterns of
Movement within Africa. London: Hans Zell Publishers, 1989.
Zimmerman, Andrew. Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire,
and the Globalization of the New South. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010.
Zimmerman, Susan, ‘“Special Circumstances” in Geneva: The ILO and the World
of Non-Metropolitan Labour in the Interwar Years’, in Jasmien Van Daele et al.,
eds., ILO Histories. Essays on the International Labour Organization and its Impact
on the World during the Twentieth Century. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 221–250.
Index
A American Baptist Foreign Missionary

abolitionism (abolitionist), 3–4, 23, Society, 111, 112
24–5, 26, 29, 33, 35, 153, 194, American Board Commissioners
196, 204n16, 205n26, 205n28, for Foreign Missions, 115, 172,
206n38, 228n34 231n79
Aborigenes Protection Society, 14, American Bureau of Labour, 128
43, 47, 48, 56, 70, 72, 142, 184, American Economic Association, 129
203n9 American Institute of Social Service,
Abyssinia, 148, 153, 228n31 160
Africa (journal), 121, 179 American Journal of Sociology, 133,
Africa 230n64
Eastern Africa, 19, 27, 32, 37, 112, American Missionary Society, 112,
119, 137, 138, 146, 152, 167, 125
222n22, 226n13, 228n29, 231n81 American Sociology, 128, 129, 130
South Africa, 71, 112, 119, 161, 184 Anderson, Percy, 13
Western Africa, 4, 43, 45, 52, 70, Andrade, Anselmo de, 85
71, 73, 79, 113, 142, 155, 166, Andrade, Augusto Freire de, 208n10,
202n5, 211n62, 212n90, 221n16, 215n41,
221n18, 226n19, 227n20, 233n95 Anet, Henri, 167, 170, 232n92,
African Education Commission, 111, 233n93, 233n95, 233n96, 233n97,
114, 119, 221n16, 221n17 233n100
African Guild (Lourenço Marques), 183 Angell, R., 168, 169, 232n86
African International Association, 22 Angola, 12, 32, 33, 35, 42, 43, 44,
African League, 185 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56,
African Mail, 43 57, 58, 59, 66, 68, 71, 81, 88, 90,
African National Party (Partido 98, 100, 113, 114, 115, 116, 120,
Nacional Africano, PNA), 185 121, 135, 137, 140, 142, 143, 153,
Africano, O, 99, 114, 149, 217n74 155, 157, 158, 162, 166, 169, 170,
agriculture, 43, 64, 75, 80, 81, 83, 90, 171, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178,
105, 113, 124, 154, 219n1 185, 194, 200n7, 202n4, 206n32,
Aguiar, António Correia de, 62, 74, 207n42, 208n11, 209n22, 210n53,
75, 144, 155, 157, 189, 206n38, 216n50, 218n76, 221n18, 225n5,
209n34, 210n36, 210n47, 211n59, 226n13, 231n78, 232n83, 232n88,
212n91, 212n93, 212n95, 212n96 234n131
Alabama, 111, 125, 200n17, 220n9 Angola Evangelical Mission, 42
Albuquerque, Joaquim Mouzinho de, Annuaire de Documentation Coloniale
96, 98 Comparée, 236n146
Almada, José de, 194, 206n33, anti-slavery, 3, 6, 11, 21, 77, 205n17,
211n63 220n7
Almada, Vicente de Melo e, 36, Anti-Slavery Society, 12, 13, 18, 19,
207n43 23, 30, 31, 32, 36, 42, 43, 45, 46,
Ambaca, 181, 182 48, 54, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 142,
Ambriz, 33 206n35
260
Index 261
Anti-Slavery and Aborigenes Bourke, (lord Mayo) D. R. W., 35,

Protection Society (ASAPS), 142, 207n42, 215n38
143, 144, 146, 152, 189, 194, Bourne, H. R. Fox, 43, 47, 50, 71,
227n28, 229n39 203n9, 210n36, 210n57
Armstrong, Samuel Chapman, 124 Bournville, 50
Aspe-Fleurimont, Lucien, 89, 215n40 Bowskill, J. S., 73, 212n90
Association of Planters and Owners of Brado Africano, O, 149, 183, 185,
the Zambezi, 137 234n125, 234n130
Avelanoso, António Pires, 70 Branco, (lieutenant) Vieira, 69
Brazil, 1, 3, 18, 30, 79, 80, 171, 174,
B 195, 218n76
Bailundo, 48, 170 Brooks, E. W., 72
Balfour, Arthur J., 46, 136 Brussels, 4, 11–23, 25, 26, 27, 49, 59,
Banco Nacional Ultramarino (BNU), 143, 144, 153, 164, 193, 202n6,
63, 210n45, 211n64 236n147, 236n151
Bank of S. Thomé, 55 Brussels Conference (1876), 32,
Baptist Missionary Society (BMS), 12, 203n10
202n6 Brussels Conference (1889), 19, 44, 57
Barradas, António, 103, 104, 114 Bunsen, Maurice de, 48
Bebiano, José Bacelar, 191 Bureau International pour la Défense
Belgian Royal Commission on Native des Indigènes (BIDI), 141, 144,
Affairs, 117 146, 157, 158, 226n17, 226n18,
Belgium, 114, 172, 173, 190, 192, 227n27, 229n50
233n98, 236n151 Bureau International du Travail (BIT),
Belo, João, 105, 167 235n139
Benguela, 42, 53, 72, 137, 169, Bureau of Education, 112
211n69, 225n9 Burtt, Joseph, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53,
Bentley, Wiliam Holman, 36 67, 71, 72, 74, 75, 194, 209n22,
Berlin, 11–23, 49, 59, 201n2, 204n12 212n93
Berlin Conference (1884), 11, 12, 14, Buxton, Travers, 42, 43, 47, 50, 142,
16, 17, 36–7, 67, 201n2, 202n7, 146, 227n28, 235n141
203n9, 204n12, 204n13 Buyse, Omer, 123, 124, 188, 223n31
Bible, 6, 109–33
Bibliotheque Coloniale lnternationale, C
219n1 Cabral, A. Augusto, 177
Bié, 48 Cabral, José, 184, 234n128
Birmingham, 208n17, 212n85 Cabreira, António, 100, 218n77
Blue Books, 31, 211n76 Cadbury Brothers, Ltd., 46, 48, 52,
Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias, 208n17
156, 213n8, 224n1, 228n31, Cadbury, George, 46, 67
229n48, 229n52, 230n52, 231n77, Cadbury, William, 46, 47, 52, 55, 63,
233n102, 234n115, 235n137, 65, 69, 70, 71, 187, 194, 209n21,
235n139 209n29, 209n30, 209n31, 210n38,
Boletim Económico e Estatístico, 103, 212n85, 215n41
218n84, 218n85 Caetano, Marcelo, 11, 39, 201n1,
Borges, Vasco, 171, 176, 188, 189, 201n3, 205n23, 207n4, 231n77
232n86, 234n106, 234n107, Camacho, Manuel de Brito, 104
235n132, 235n141 Cameron, V. Lovett, 31, 32, 42,
Bournville Works Magazine, 74, 212n93 206n36, 206n37
262 Index
Cancella, J. Paulo Monteiro, 63–4, College of Overseas Missions, 102

209n25, 211n67 College of the Mission of Secular
Capelo, Guilherme Brito, 11, 202n4 Priests, 102
Cape town, 179 colonial
Carnegie, Lancelot, 73, 138, 177, administration, 5, 6, 7, 14, 16, 22,
222n26, 225n10 28–9, 31, 32, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41,
Carvalho, Jerónimo Paiva de, 69, 70, 42, 43, 44, 51, 64, 66, 67, 81, 82,
212n79, 212n81 84, 87, 92, 99, 115, 116, 117, 118,
Casal Ribeiro, José, 31 120, 135, 138, 139, 172, 175, 191,
Casement, Roger, 43, 171 192, 208n15, 215n43, 216n54,
Castilho, Augusto, 11, 20, 24, 26, 27, 236n146
37, 205n20 Congress, 42, 83, 84, 213n16,
Castro, António Leitão e, 27, 206n37 214n20
Catholic church, 17, 130 empire, 1, 6, 7, 30, 105, 146, 154,
Catumbela, 48 176, 192, 195, 197, 199n6,
Census, 62, 63, 102, 140 201n20, 214n18, 215n63, 217n67
Central Association of Portuguese expansion, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, 25, 97
Agriculture and Industry, 75 labour, 2, 28, 79, 156, 158, 161,
Chamberlain, Joseph, 23 175, 187, 189, 192, 193, 196
Chevalier, Auguste, 38, 45, 65, law, 3, 82, 109, 189
208n15 school, 41, 83, 153, 164
China, 160, 230n64 science, 6, 7, 62, 84, 85, 213n17
chocolate manufacturers, 50, 52, 54, scientists, 81
65, 70, 73, 74 Colonial Centre, 50, 63–4, 65, 75
Christian World, 73 Colonial Missions Institute, 102, 105
Christianity, 1, 15, 16, 26, 50, 125, Colonial Office, 118, 232n90
126, 130, 203n12 colonialism, 9–37, 45, 65, 107–98,
Church Missionary Review, 113 201–7, 215n37
Church Missionary Society, 13, 110 colonisation
Cid, Francisco Paula, 53, 58 ‘effective occupation’, 3, 4, 16, 22,
cipaio, 5, 86, 88, 138, 140, 157, 173, 37, 86, 152, 204n13
181, 184 colony (ies), 5, 22, 23–37, 38, 39, 40,
civilisation, 2, 3, 9–76, 85, 89, 90, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50,
91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 105, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60,
109–21, 147, 151, 154, 164, 169, 61, 63, 64, 65, 67, 71, 73, 74, 77,
174, 175, 180, 187, 189, 190, 194, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86,
195, 200n9, 207, 214n29 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 96,
civilising 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106,
mission, 11–37, 198, 205n27 109, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120,
station, 20, 25, 94, 205n23 121, 124, 126, 134, 135, 136, 138,
Claparede, René, 146, 157, 211n74, 139, 140, 142, 143, 144, 145, 147,
212n87, 226n17, 226n18 149, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158,
cocoa, 43, 44, 46–54, 60, 63, 64, 65, 162, 163, 165, 170, 171, 172, 173,
66, 72, 73, 142, 143, 146, 157, 176, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185,
164, 186, 207–12 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192,
Coelho, Adolfo, 95 193, 194, 197, 208n15, 210n41,
Coelho, Manuel Maria, 67, 68 210n53, 213n4, 214n27, 218n81,
coercion, 2, 74, 92, 234n106 219n1, 219n88, 220n6, 222n22,
coffee, 60, 61, 64, 65, 140, 164 225n5, 226n15, 226n16, 227n25,
Index 263
229n40, 232n83, 236n145, Congregation of the Holy Spirit, 12

236n147, 236n150, 236n151 Connecticut, 128
Comércio de Angola, O, 169 Connecticut Bible Society, 128
Comércio, O (Benguela), 169 Contemporary Review, 71
Comité Français d’Émancipation, 30 Cooley, Charles Horton, 130, 131
commerce, 25, 26, 35, 50, 54, 95, Coolies, 46, 84, 85, 214n27
96, 97, 104, 105, 113, 124, 176, Cordeiro, Luciano, 95, 217n68
202n5, 203n12, 206n33, 215n40 Correia, Alberto, 68, 212n77
‘legitimate commerce’, 206n33 Corte Real, José Alberto, 36, 207n43
Commission Corvée, 89, 93
African Commission, 95 Corvo, João Andrade, 27, 32–3, 80,
African Education Commission, 206n38
111, 114, 119, 221n16, 221n17 Cosmopolitan Society of Greater
Belgian Royal Commission on New York, 159
Native Affairs, 117 Costa, Afonso, 135, 136, 137, 139,
Central Labour and Emigration 141, 142, 143, 144, 157, 158,
Commission, 58 176, 177, 185, 225n4, 225n9,
Commission for the Examination of 226n11, 226n18, 226n19, 227n22,
Colonial Problems, 83 234n106, 234n107, 235n132
Overseas Missions Commission, 97 Costa, Bernardo Botelho da, 136, 137,
Permanent Commission for 189, 225n5
Statistics, 103 Costa, Eduardo da, 96, 98, 217n70
Mandates Commission (League of Costa, Henrique Barahona da, 80,
Nations), 117, 146, 188, 191, 193 213n12
Slavery Commission (League of Costa, Mário, 103, 104, 114, 218n84,
Nations), 134, 142, 146, 148, 157, 218n86, 219n86
158, 168, 187, 191, 235n137 Couceiro, Henrique de Paiva, 85, 96
South African Native Affairs Cramer, R. Melville, 158, 162,
Commission, 167 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 178,
Committee for Improving the 182, 185
Industrial Conditions of Negroes Croce, Benedetto, 130
in New York, 160 Cuanza (river), 179
Committee on Education in Tropical Cunha, J. M. Silva, 205n23, 205n26,
Africa, 118 206n30, 235n139, 235n143,
Commons, John R., 132–3 236n147, 236n152
Companhia do Boror, 137 Curadoria, 144
Companhia do Caminho de Ferro de curator (of serviçais), 62, 69, 76, 88
Benguela, 137, 225n9
Congo, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 20, 24, 25, D
27, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37, 42, 43, 46, Daily Graphic, 50, 52
47, 49, 56, 71, 73, 112, 113, 168, Daily News, 46, 52
172, 173, 177, 184, 202n6, 202n7, Darwin, Charles, see Social Darwinism
202n8, 203n9, 206n36, 206n37, Defeza de Angola, A, 44
226n17, 233n92, 234n110 Delafosse, Maurice, 149, 222n26,
see also Zaire 228n34
Congo Free State, 13, 16, 20, 42, 43, Derby (lord), 32
46, 47, 202n8 Dewey, John, 112, 168, 222n29
Congo Reform Association, 46, 129, Diário de Notícias, 177, 183, 230n52,
208n18 233n102, 234n109
264 Index
Donohugh, T. S., 160, 168, 170, Ferraz, Artur Ivens, 184, 234n128,
231n79, 232n85, 232n90 236n149
Drummond-Hay, 56 Ferreira, Vicente, 171, 173
Drummond, James Eric, 151 Ferry, Jules, 12
DuBois, W. E. B., 111 First World War, 75, 135, 140, 160
Duffy, James, 199n1, 205n26, 206n31, Foreign Office (FO), 12, 13, 18, 33,
206n35, 206n36, 206n37, 207n39, 34, 35, 46, 47, 49, 54, 56, 67, 71,
207n41, 207n44, 208n11, 208n12, 72, 144
208n13, 208n19, 209n24, 209n30, France, 12, 19, 21, 30, 63, 114, 187,
210n40, 210n42, 211n75, 212n86, 190, 201n2, 203n9, 204n16
230n54 Franklin, James Henry, 112
Durão, Higino, 59 Freudemberg, Alfred Löwenstein-
Wertheim, 45
E
economy G
colonial economy, 28, 40, 44, 63, Galvão, Henrique, 79, 213n8,
72, 75, 83, 86, 90, 165 233n102, 234n122
plantation economy, 56, 62, 65, 71, Garrett, João de Almeida, 26
72, 87, 110 Geneva, 136, 137, 139, 143, 144, 145,
economic development, 64, 78, 79, 148, 152, 153, 157, 158, 161, 162,
96, 100, 163 175, 176, 177, 185, 186, 190, 191,
education 193, 212n94, 226n18, 227n20,
colonial education, 7, 95, 96, 101–4, 235n138
159, 216n64, 218n82 Geographical Society
native education, 98–100, 102, 106, Lisbon, 36, 81, 83, 84
114, 119, 120, 141, 222n21 Paris, 32
Edwards, Richard H., 133, 145, Georgia, 126, 230n57
224n53, 227n26, 232n87 Geraldes, Carlos Mello, 82, 83,
Egypt, 24 214n22
Ely, Richard, 122, 129, 131, 224n44 Germany, 12, 14, 19, 52, 63, 172, 186
emigration, 34, 42, 56, 58, 65, 72, 73, Godins, Jaime Brito, 85
77–81, 84, 86–8, 120, 184, 185, Gohr, Albrecht, 148
213n4 Gold Coast, 52, 112, 113, 114
empire, 1–7, 23, 30, 34, 37, 46, 54, Gomes, Manuel Teixeira, 145, 146,
60, 79, 82, 109–33, 167, 176, 192, 227n26
197, 199n5,n15, 226n13 Gore, Charles, 130
England, 124, 139, 169 Gorjão, Rafael, 47
Eugenics Club of Madison, 132 Gosselin, Martin, 44, 48
Europe, 15, 17, 19, 27, 61, 75, 93, Granville (lord), 18, 35
189, 201n2, 202n7, 203n9, Gravier, Charles, 45
204n13, 205n17, 235n139 Great Britain, 33, 187, 192
Evening Standard, 52, 71 Great Depression, 133
Exhibition, 81, 82, 143 Grémio Africano de Lourenço
Marques, 183
F Grémio de Proprietários e Agricultores
Falcão, Luís Poças, 85 da Zambezia, 137, 225n7
Federation of Churches and Grenfell, George, 42, 208n11
Christian Workers in New York Grey, (Sir) Edward, 48, 56, 67, 88,
City, 128 215n39
Index 265
Grimshaw, Harold A., 146, 161, 162, International Institute of African

165, 227n28, 231n68 Languages (IIAL), 121, 222n26
Guedes, A. Miranda, 60–2, 86, International Labour Office, 5, 143,
210n53, 210n58, 215n33 161, 187, 189, 190, 191
Guinea, 52, 85, 153 International Labour Organisation
(ILO), 193, 235n138
H International Law, 13, 193, 200n9,
Hall, Hall, 73, 75, 144, 155 202n8, 228n31
Hampton Institute, 111, 112, 124, International Missionary Council
159 (IMC), 110, 160, 219n4, 221n16,
Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 43 233n98
Harris, John H., 56, 67, 71, 72, 142, Italy, 186
146, 162, 186, 187, 211n74,
212n86 J
High Commissioner J. S. Fry & Sons, 48
(high-commissioner) James, William, 122
Angola, 112, 117, 155, 171, 177 Japan, 160
Mozambique, 167 Johannesburg, 145, 184, 206n38
Hoadley, Horace, 160 Johnston, Harry H., 45, 47, 208n11
Hollenbeck, Henry S., 115, 166, Jones, Thomas Jesse, 7, 111, 112, 113,
231n78 115, 116, 117, 124, 125, 126, 153,
Holt, Hamilton, 159, 160, 200n8, 158, 160, 172, 186, 221n11
230n56 Journal de Genève, 67, 134, 142, 143,
Holy See, 17 211n74, 212n94
Hopkins, David, 33
Horton, W. Claude, 48 K
House of commons, 19, 35, 56, 91 Katanga, 137, 138, 140, 225n9
Kenya, 176, 234n106
I King, Joseph, 72
immigration, 85, 115, 131, 132, 133 King, Martin Luther, 125
Imperial institute, 81, 82, 213n18 Kingsley, Mary, 45
Imperialism, 3, 127
imperialism of benevolence, 15 L
imperialism of inevitability, 15 labour
imperialism of obligation, 85 colonial labour, 2, 28, 79, 156, 158,
Independent,
t 159, 161 161, 175
India, 65, 66, 161, 222n22, 225n5 compulsory labour, 1, 57, 89, 91,
indígena (native) 92, 93, 94, 150, 151, 158, 165,
política indígena, 27, 40, 100, 174, 175, 176, 183, 188, 190
200n7, 205n23 forced labour, 4, 33, 34, 55, 115,
trabalho indígena, 1, 70, 141, 144, 146, 147, 154, 155, 157, 170, 176,
157, 205n26, 206n30, 206n33 183, 192–4, 210n41
International Colonial Institute (ICI), Lara, António de Sousa, 65, 211n69
83, 109, 117, 190, 191, 192, 193, Lavigerie, Charles-Martial-Allemand,
219n1 12, 17–19
International Conference on the League of Nations, 5, 7, 74, 117, 130,
Negro, 111, 129, 223n41 134, 135, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145,
International Congress of Tropical 146, 148, 152, 153, 156, 157, 180,
Medicine, 185 185, 189, 191, 192, 201n20, 228n31
266 Index
legislation (colonial), 23, 26, 36, 120 Mayo (lord), see Bourke, D. R. W.
Leo XIII (Pope), 17 Meireles, Manuel Quintão, 192, 193,
Leopold II (king), 12 236n50
Lewis, Georgina King, 72 Mello, Lopo Sampayoe, 40, 77, 82, 89,
Liberia, 34, 112 90, 94, 95, 100, 101, 125, 126,
Ligue Suisse pour la Défense des 207n6
Indigènes du Congo, 226n17 Menezes, Francisco Calheirose, 189
Lisbon, 33, 36, 47, 48, 55, 63, 68, 72, Mexico, 160, 161, 231n66
83, 84, 139, 142, 172, 179, 193, migration, 64, 87, 142, 153, 157,
199n2 209n21, 210n41
Lisbon Commercial Association, 72, 75 Milange, 87
Liverpool, 12, 50, 51, 113 Ministry
Liverpool Chamber of Commerce, Ministry of Colonies, 145, 226n15,
50, 54 227n23, 229n38
Livingstone East Coast Expedition, 32 Ministry of Commerce, 176
Livingstone, David, 26, 30, 31, 32, 33, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 157,
187, 202n6 192, 225n10, 226n19, 227n23,
Loanda, 100, 169, 194, 212n77, 236n149
234n110 Ministry of Navy and Overseas,
London, 19, 72, 110, 143, 152, 176, 32–3, 47, 51
194, 199n1, 200n13, 203n9, Mission (religious)
204n14, 206n37, 208n12, 209n22 Catholic, 17, 32, 95, 105, 167, 168,
Lopes, Duarte, 233n102 172, 179
Lourenço Marques, 88, 99, 102, 103, Protestant, 17, 30, 32, 34, 98, 99,
168, 183, 214n24, 218n82, 235n139 109, 112, 117, 120, 146, 165, 166,
Lugard, Frederick, 117, 118, 148, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175,
149, 150, 164, 173, 191, 221n19, 186, 203n11
222n22 Missionaries, 5, 12, 17, 30, 34, 42, 43,
Luís of Portugal (king), 30, 31 48, 77–106, 110, 117, 121, 165,
Lugella, 88 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 179,
180, 187, 199n1
M Mochico, 48
Macedo, Henrique, 11, 20 Moniz, Jaime, 95
Machado, Bernardino, 67, 144, 171, Monteiro, Jaime da Fonseca, 190,
227n24 236n145
Mackinnon, William, 12, 202n5 Monteiro, Joachim John, 31
Malanje, 179 Moreira Júnior, 95
Manchester, 12, 43, 202n5, 203n11, Morel, E. D., 46, 47, 50, 208n18
213n18, 214n18, 215n36 Morier, Robert, 33, 207n39
Manchester Guardian, 43 Morning Herald, 30
Mantero, Francisco, 48, 52, 55, 65, 66, Morton, G. A., 146, 147, 202n5
67, 93, 208n13, 209n25 Mossamedes, 68, 69, 212n77
Martins, Joaquim P. de Oliveira, 95, Mozambique, 11, 27, 30–2, 35, 45,
125, 175, 217n65, 225n6 48–51, 57, 65, 75, 85, 87, 88, 94,
Masui, Théo, 45 99, 102–4, 121, 124, 137, 141,
Matos, José Norton de, 70, 102, 112, 146, 158, 162, 176, 209n21
116, 117, 121, 176, 218n80, Mozambique Company, 141, 146, 147
221n17, 233n95 Mundo, O, 69, 212n85, 213n6, 226n18
Maugham, R., 88 Murray, Gilbert, 221n11
Index 267
N Peabody, George Foster, 125, 159,

Namacha, 104 230n57
Natal, 33 Peace Conference (Paris, 1919), 192
National Association for the Pedro of Brazil (king), 30
Advancement of Colored Pedroso, Fernando, 95
People, 159 Peirce, Charles S, 122
National Conference on the Negro, Penha Garcia (conde de), 42, 81–3,
111, 129, 159, 223n41 191, 193, 207n8, 213n18, 214n19,
National League on Urban Conditions 216n61, 236n147
among Negroes, 160 Phelps Hall Bible School, 125
National Navigation Company, 76 Phelps Stokes, Anson, 112, 119
native (indígena), 1, 27, 40, 68, 70, 85, Phelps-Stokes Fund, 111–12, 116–17,
100, 141, 142 186, 220n10, 221n13
native labour, 1–7, 13, 15, 17, 19, Pius IX (Pope), 18, 30, 204n16
21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, plantation, 43, 47, 48, 60, 62, 65, 71,
35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 47–9, 72, 141, 184
52, 53, 55, 56, 59, 62, 64, 68, 71 see also roça
native policy, 5, 27, 28, 40, 54, Plymouth Brethren, 42
134, 140 Portugal, 3, 11, 19, 42, 65, 70, 79, 84,
see also indígena 88, 97, 105, 125, 136, 151, 170,
Negreiros, António Lobo Almada, 94, 189, 200n15, 205n23
216n60 Poullet-Scrope, Georges, 78
Netherlands, 30, 63 Prazos, 87, 139, 146, 155, 158, 229n46
Nevinson, Henry W., 43, 67 propaganda, 38, 80, 82, 91, 94, 147,
New York, 110, 111, 122, 128, 159, 194, 236n154
160, 161, 200n12, 202n8, 212n12 Propaganda Fide, 17
Nigeria, 112, 222n26 Protestant, 17, 30, 34, 98, 109, 112,
Nightingale, Arthur, 44 124, 125, 167, 168, 169, 170,
Norte, J. V. Solipa, 102, 103, 104, 114, 171, 172
218n82
Nyassa, 32, 34, 137, 138, 139, 140, Q
141, 147, 225n6 Quelimane, 88, 215n36
Nyassa Company, 137, 138, 139, 140,
141, 147, 225n6 R
race, 6, 13, 42, 57, 62, 85, 91, 97, 116,
O 125, 128, 132, 144, 150, 169, 175,
Ogden, Robert, 125 185
Oldham, Joseph H., 110, 111, 116, Rand, 137, 138, 140, 184, 201n18
118, 160, 164, 168, 220n4 Realidade, 68
Ornellas, Ayres de, 54, 209n25 Reinsch, Paul, 93, 215n43, 216n54
Reis, Jaime Batalha, 11, 143–4,
P 227n21
Paris, 19, 30–2, 45, 136, 143, 186, religion, 61, 97, 119, 126, 170, 180,
192, 193, 199n3, 200n13, 201n2, 217n67, 228n31
204n13, 217n16, 228n34 repatriation, 51, 53, 55, 58–61, 73–5,
Park, Robert Ezra, 111, 128, 223n41 78, 142–4, 196
Partido Nacional Africano, PNA, see Revista Portuguesa Colonial e Marítima,
African National Party 44, 208n14, 216n76
Peabody Education’s Fund, 125 Rhodesia, 56, 140
268 Index
Ribeiro, Tomás, 27 slave, 2, 4, 11, 14, 17, 19, 24, 27, 29,
Riggs, Ernest W., 166, 168, 172, 46, 66, 85, 134, 146, 149, 152,
231n79, 231n80, 231n83, 233n94 195, 208n17, 228n31
Riis, Jacob, 122 slavery, 2, 11, 17, 21, 23, 35, 71,
Rita, José Santa, 103, 218n83 89, 92, 142, 148, 150, 157, 195,
Roça, 48 228n31, 234n120
see also plantation Small, Albion W., 131
Rocha, Ernesto Vieira da, 171, 188 Smallbones, R. T., 144, 194, 236n153
Rockefeller, John D, 159 social Darwinism, 85, 95, 216n47
Rome, 204n16 social efficiencyy (E. Ross), 122, 165
Ross Report,
t 6, 7, 134–67, 171, 178, Social Gospel, 121–33, 156–65,
230n55, 231n76, 234n127 223n37
Ross, Edward Alsworth, 130, 230n61, social science, 6–7, 129, 133
231n67, 234n110 social scientists, 121–23, 125, 133
Rowley, Henry, 1, 31, 199n1 social service, 123, 126, 130
Rowntree & Co., 48 Sociedad Abolicionista Espanola, 30,
Royal Geographical Society, 32, 202n8 205n27, 207n43, 207n4
Russell Sage Foundation, 159 Société des Missionaires d’Alger, 12
Russia, 160, 231n65 Société des Nations (SDN), see League
of Nations
S Sousa e Faro (Count), 61
Sá da Bandeira, 26, 206n29 South America, 160
Sagamore Sociological Conference, 159 Southern Education Board, 159
Santos, Francisco Oliveira, 177–9, 181, Souza, José Marnoco e, 85, 89, 90,
234n110 94, 101, 126, 208n10, 214n28,
Santos, Gomes dos, 40, 79, 207n5, 215n40, 216n51, 218n78
213n9, 214n28 Spectator,
r The, 67, 70–2, 142, 145, 151
São Januário (Viscount), 57 Spengler, Oswald, 130
São Tomé e Príncipe, 70, 206n38, St. Germain-en-Laye, 164
207n40, 210n53, 212n94 statistics, 66, 74, 82, 102, 114, 165
S. Thomé and Príncipe Emigration Stober, M. Z., 42, 47, 50, 53, 208n11
Society, 73–4, 143 Stollwerck Brothers, 48, 52
Sarmento, Alexandre de Morais, 33 Strachey, Loe, 56, 67, 71
Schieffelin, William Jay, 159–60 Strong, Josiah, 127
Scotland, 113 Sugar, 141, 164, 184, 186, 211n69
Século, O, 75, 218n75 Sullivan, G. L., 31, 206n36
serviçais, 36, 48, 56, 61–4, 68, 71, Swan, Charles A., 42, 52, 55, 208n11
75–7, 86–8, 142–4, 210n53 Syllabus of Biblical Sociology, 128
servitude, 149, 150, 163, 196
settler, 40, 42, 44, 79, 80, 93, 103, T
112, 115, 150, 151, 164, 175, 179, tax, 19, 73, 77, 78, 93, 183–4, 216n53
185, 188 Taylor, Graham, 128
Sheldon, Edward, 127 Times, The, 30, 43
Sierra Leoa, 112–13 Temporary Slavery Commission, see
Silva, A. M., 209n25 Commission230n55, 234n120
Silva, Alfredo da, 70, 212n82, 212n85 Timor, 36, 105, 167, 218n87
Silva, José Francisco da, 80, 208n9, Toynbee, Arnold, 130
212n1, 213n14 trade, 19, 21, 22, 26, 33, 34, 44, 46,
Silva, Rodrigo Xavier da, 136, 225n4 51, 63, 73, 94
Index 269
slave trade, 24, 11, 13, 19, 21, Veblen, Thorstein, 122
29–30, 42, 151–3, 187, 195, Viana, Manuel da Terra, 53, 59
203n9, 205n26, 237n3 Vilaça, Eduardo, 39
Transvaal, 39, 46, 48, 49, 51, 56, 65, Vilhena, Ernesto de, 75
137, 184 Vilhena, Júlio, 25
Treaty Villiers, Francis, 54, 68
Anglo-Portuguese (1884), 12, 32 Virginia, 124–5, 200n7
Versailles (Peace Treaty, 1919), 143 Viúva Bastos & Filhos, 68–9
Tucker, John T., 117, 169, 221n18, Vivian (lord), 20
232n88 Voz de Angola, 68, 100, 215n34,
Tuileries (Jardin de), 30 218n76
Tönnies, Ferdinand, 131
Tuskegee Institute, 111, 126, 220n11 W
Twiss, Travers, 13, 202n8 Ward, Lester Frank, 122, 220n7
Warnshuis, A. Livingston, 110, 117,
U 161, 220n6, 221n17, 230n53,
Uganda, 117 230n62
Ulrich, Ruy Ennes, 87, 214n24, Washington, Booker T., 101, 111, 119,
215n35 124–9, 159, 163–4, 168, 220n8,
Ultimatum (1890), 19, 205n19 223n34, 223n41
United States of America (USA), 155, Wesleyan Mission School, 113,
232n86 167
University White books, 67
Chicago, 123, 199n3, 224n42 Wilson, Woodrow, 192, 234n110
Columbia, 112, 230n57 Witwatersrand Native Labour
Iowa, 113 Association, 72, 143, 206n38
Lisbon, 82 Wright, Carroll D., 128, 223n39
Michigan, 130 Wyllie, J. A., 65–7, 211n70
Wisconsin, 130, 132, 209n30,
224n43, 231n78 Y
Yale, 168, 200n15, 214n23, 224n43 Young, Edward D., 31, 32, 200n15,
206n36
V
vagrancy, 89, 93, 149, 154, 188, 189 Z
Van Eetvelde, Edmond, 20 Zaire, 14, 204n13
Van Rees, Daniel, 150, 191 see also Congo
Vasconcelos, Ernesto de, 61, 62, 134, Zambezia, 137, 225n7
210n53, 224n1 Zanzibar, 31

(Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series) Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo (Auth.) - The Civilising Mission' of Portuguese Colonialism, 1870-1930-Palgrave Macmillan UK (2015)

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What topics are covered in the Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series?

What topics are covered in the Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series?

Which author wrote about the 'civilising mission' of Portuguese colonialism between 1870-1930?

Which author wrote about the 'civilising mission' of Portuguese colonialism between 1870-1930?

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

Typeset by MPS Limited, Chennai, India.

‘Without documentation and just with simple declarations,

Sources and Bibliography 238

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to several individuals and insti-

To the editors of Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series:

In 1876, Henry Rowley wrote: ‘the instructions which these governors

international and transnational framework, exploring the relationship

state-coordinated scheme promoted labour conditions and relations

apparatus: in order to effectively suppress the slave trade and slavery

The chapters ‘The Civilisation Guild and the “Engineers of Depression”:

conditions and relations in the Portuguese colonial empire, starting with

suggests the centrality of comparative analytical exercises. Focusing on

From Brussels to Berlin: the internationalisation

During the anti-slavery conference that took place in Brussels between

of free trade in the Congo and the colonial geographic definition of

(Percy Anderson of the Foreign Office and Edward Malet, ambassador

Aborigines’ Protection Society, and the many temperance societies that

dedicated to bringing the ‘benefits of civilisation’ – regardless of nation-

From Berlin to Brussels: civilising colonial sovereignty

The realisation of a conference in Brussels, four years after the one in

persistent failure of the naval strategy to combat the maritime trade in

invitation to the meeting to decide the central theme of the suppres-

occupation of colonial territories. The end of slavery in the colonial

Laws, clauses and inconsistencies: Portuguese

Portuguese presence in Brussels was marked by the clear demonstration

of Portugal’s African policy following the political disintegration of

in which the legislative dimension sustained the civilising rhetoric of

The beginning of this apologetic memoir of the ‘civilising virtues’ of

Repeatedly dubbed ‘memorable liberating law’, an expression that

which would condition, essentially in terms of its declared intentions, the

despite its efforts to legitimate in law its supposed abolitionist, humani-

also more ample, aimed at questioning the entire Portuguese colonial

Events as the 1876 Brussels Conference, and processes such as the

interests of the two European states and of the colonial administrations

Unlike the labour situation in S. Thomé, that of the Congo was

criticisms of the Portuguese colonial enterprise (in its administrative

humanitarian associations and by the missionary societies. In the case

Justificatory memoranda and ‘humanitarian’

A justificatory memorandum from 1906 about the model of native

Another provision that enabled the emergence of abuses lay in the

Some years before, at the 1st National Colonial Congress in 1901,

Society). Despite the variable degrees of participation, the combination

Martin Gosselin (British delegate to the Brussels Conference of 1889–90

In addition to repeating the justificatory memorandum of 1906,

Reports, conferences and boycotts: the ‘slave

exploiting labour, and were involved in the denunciation of the exist-

(after being governor-general of Mozambique), and the British diplo-

A large part of the report was dedicated to the characterisation of some

of cocoa, which began in September. Fox Bourne and Buxton began to

of natives, or of the violation of their freedoms mentioned in Burtt’s

to make its acquisition more difficult, had manipulated to his heart’s

‘More laws than mosquitos’: preserving the

it remove suspicions concerning the model of contracting indigenous