The 'Civilising Mission' of Portuguese Colonialism, 1870-1930

Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349675487, 9781137355904
• eBook ISBN: 9781137355911
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book provides an historical, critical analysis of the doctrine of 'civilising mission' in Portuguese colonialism in the crucial period from 1870 to 1930. Exploring international contexts and transnational connections, this 'civilising mission' is analysed and assessed by examining the employment and distribution of African manpower.

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 Act of February 1885.² This article established and internationally 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’; however, as we shall see, it meant much more than this.³

The General Act 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 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 evangelical 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 conjunctural 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 political 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 (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 trafficking, the 9th article of the General Act 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 material 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 complying 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 international 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 outcome 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 stopping 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 legitimising 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 colonial 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 protectionist 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 guarantors 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 nationality 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 middle of the nineteenth century.¹⁰

This ‘benevolent imperialism’ was progressively described as an ‘obligation’, 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, legitimated 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 selection. 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 assertion 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 evidence 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 necessarily 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 humanitarian 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 colonial 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 significant 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 processes 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 agitation 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 counterpart 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 influencing the European political and diplomatic sphere.¹⁴ On the strictly religious 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 instr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I The ‘Civilisation Guild’: Native Labour and Portuguese Colonialism
• Part II Colonialism without Borders
• Notes
• Sources and Bibliography
• Index