Violence and Gender in Africa's Iberian Colonies

Feminizing the Portuguese and Spanish Empire, 1950s–1970s

Andreas Stucki

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030172299
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030172305
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia africana

This book examines how and why Portugal and Spain increasingly engaged with women in their African colonies in the crucial period from the 1950s to the 1970s. It explores the rhetoric of benevolent Iberian colonialism, gendered Westernization, and development for African women as well as actual imperial practices – from forced resettlement to sexual exploitation to promoting domestic skills. Focusing on Angola, Mozambique, Western Sahara, and Equatorial Guinea, the author mines newly available and neglected documents, including sources from Portuguese and Spanish women's organizations overseas. They offer insights into how African women perceived and responded to their assigned roles within an elite that was meant to preserve the empires and stabilize Afro-Iberian ties. The book also retraces parallels and differences between imperial strategies regarding women and the notions of African anticolonial movements about what women should contribute to the struggle for independence and the creation of new nation-states.

© The Author(s) 2019

Andreas StuckiViolence and Gender in Africa's Iberian ColoniesCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17230-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Feminizing Empire

Andreas Stucki¹

(1)

Department of History, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland

End Abstract

“All economic, social or intellectual progress must […] be accompanied by an evolution in the status of women,” King Leopold III of Belgium asserted in his opening address to the international conference on Women’s Rôle in the Development of Tropical and Sub-tropical Countries in September 1958. More than one hundred delegates from eighteen countries had followed the International Institute of Differing Civilizations’ (INCIDI ¹ ) call to Brussels to discuss questions related to cultural, political, economic, and legal aspects of women’s roles in the remaining colonies and what was increasingly referred to as the Third World. The congress overlapped with the last few weeks of the Brussels World’s Fair of 1958. In July of that year, Belgium had to close its Congolese village, showcasing its purported colonial achievements in the Belgium Congo at the exhibition, as the hired Congolese artisans left in protest of what they considered a “human zoo.” Times were changing, the decolonization of Africa was underway, and the INCIDI had to adapt its rhetoric to the new circumstances. The meeting was allegedly “bringing together the elite of different civilizations […] in an atmosphere of tolerance, of mutual respect and of desire for the diffusion of knowledge,” the Institute’s President Henri Depage declared in his welcome address. ²

Depage, a Belgium legal expert, was proud to highlight that “two thirds of the surveys” to be discussed had “been prepared by women.” Indeed, the INCIDI had been able to enlist the French women’s rights activist Marie-Hélène Lefaucheux for a general report and more than a dozen special reports on women’s roles in society had been authored by women from all over the world. Furthermore, half a dozen representatives of international organizations participated in the Brussels conference, such as the UN’s human rights rapporteur Germaine Cyfer-Diderich from Belgium. While Lefaucheux deplored in her report the general lack of access to education for women in developing countries and, in particular, that “general instruction” was “too often sacrificed to housekeeping training,” Leopold III still perceived women as an “auxiliary in th[e] civilizating [sic.] task,” as did the first vice-chairman of the INCIDI, the former Portuguese overseas minister (1950–1955) Manuel Sarmento Rodrigues. Although Sarmento Rodrigues conceded that it would eventually be “necessary to grant woman rights equal to those of man,” he made clear that this should be achieved “within the harmony of [women’s] physiological and cultural conditions.” ³

On the one hand, “to neglect the education of one half of the human race [was] an astonishing waste of human resources,” as Pierre Wigny, Belgium’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, pointed out. On the other hand, (male) politicians and “experts” took care not to disrupt established gender paradigms and usually aimed to further women’s purported soft skills in the social realm and the domestic sphere. ⁴ The contradiction of planning to transform women’s lives in cultural, economic, and political terms and at the same time expecting them to continue fulfilling traditionally defined roles as wives and mothers and be largely subject to men escaped the conservative modernizers’ analysis.

The INCIDI conference of 1958 is a telling example of how the European colonial powers’ former platform for the transfer of imperial knowledge tried to transform itself into a body of experts for socioeconomic development, expanding its thematic range to include women’s contributions to society. The symposium brought together representatives of colonial powers like France, the UK, Portugal, and Spain with delegates from Haiti, Pakistan, and the recently independent Sudan, as well as from international organizations. Assessing and transforming the role of women in developing societies was their common goal. Equality between women and men in social, cultural, and economic terms was not necessarily the desired outcome. Improving the status of women was in fact to a large extent a question of benefits for coming generations: “If you systematically leave the women outside [the] intellectual and spiritual climate you will hold back the children and, with them, the whole people,” Wigny concluded. The advantages to be gained by educating women were often conceptualized in an overwhelmingly instrumental sense. ⁵

When these politicians and academics gathered in Brussels in 1958, the historiography of empire and colonialism was still frequently shaped by the accounts of those who were themselves the (chiefly male) practitioners of colonial policies. ⁶ In the intervening decades, perspectives that incorporate gender as a key analytical category have increasingly been introduced into historical research on empire. Especially since the 1990s scholars such as Antoinette Burton, Karen Tranberg Hansen, Ann Laura Stoler, and Philippa Levine and others have published widely read work that has contributed to a better understanding of the “ways in which colonialism restructured gender dynamics of both colonizing and colonized societies.” ⁷ There is now an established historiography on the gendered nature of the colonial encounter, exploring spaces of masculinity and femininity. However, this scholarship, mostly published in English, has seldom focused on the Portuguese and Spanish empires in Africa and especially on the experience of indigenous women there. As always, there are exceptions ⁸ : For example, from a cultural perspective, Susan Martin-Márquez and Hilary Owen together with Anna M. Klobucka have provided a gender-based approach to Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking Africa as well as Brazil that unravels the construction of Spanish and Portuguese identity throughout the centuries. ⁹ Nonetheless, gender and decolonization in the decisive period from the 1950s to the 1970s remains a rather neglected area in historical research. ¹⁰

Thus, there is a need to rethink Portuguese and Spanish decolonization in Africa from a gendered perspective, bringing into the discussion newly available (and to date neglected) primary material from archives in Portugal, Spain, and the USA, including accounts from the African women themselves. Elucidating the to-date overlooked overlaps between women’s advancement and colonial domination in Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking Africa during the process of decolonization promises to shed new light on two of Europe’s oldest empires, which retained colonial holdings while those of most other powers had become independent.

Decolonization and the Iberian Dictatorships

Reassessing Iberian decolonization in Africa through a gendered lens reveals that a “feminine turn” took place within the Portuguese and Spanish empires. In the 1960s and 1970s, a distinctly women-centered—although not feminist—way of engaging with the empire emerged among male and female colonial figures, administrative bodies, and the armed forces. “The late colonial era synchronized with the emancipation of western women, and feminist demands for equality and women’s rights articulated in international forums stimulated concern for the welfare of colonized women,” as historian Barbara Bush explains. ¹¹ Such developments also influenced the Iberian dictatorships of António Salazar in Portugal and Francisco Franco in Spain, although in a limited way. Hence, with regard to the colonies, new ideas about development and so-called social advancement fused with imperial conceptions of rudimentary training for African women. These ideas were part of wider strategies aimed at stabilizing the empire or at least ensuring advantageous conditions for the colonial powers during and after decolonization—with colonial officials in Lisbon and Madrid often aiming to postpone independence for the colonies to a distant future.

Spanish and Portuguese decolonization in Africa took place some ten years later and under different circumstances than in the other colonial powers. The Iberian colonies in Africa did not gain independence until the period between 1956 and 1975. For the most part, the Iberian regimes pursued their violent retreat from empire against the backdrop of profound political and social change both in Europe and Africa. The effects of the global Cold War, domestic socioeconomic transformations, but also transnational feminist activities in the 1960s influenced African, Portuguese, and Spanish societies, particularly in urban areas. In this environment of rapid change during the 1960s and 1970s, the Iberian dictatorships held on to their colonies (see Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Africa’s Portuguese and Spanish colonies (1950s–1970s)

(Map Peter Palm, Berlin)

In the Portuguese case, the enclaves in India had been incorporated into the Republic of India in 1954 and 1961. The takeover of Goa by the Indian armed forces in 1961 gave a boost to the liberation movements in Africa, the first of which had taken up arms in Angola in 1961, followed by Guinea-Bissau in 1963, and Mozambique in 1964. In Portugal, where Salazar had left office in 1968, his replacement, Marcelo Caetano, continued the bloody colonial wars against the African freedom fighters. The Portuguese colonies finally attained independence after thirteen years of guerrilla warfare when the Carnation Revolution brought democracy to Portugal in the wake of the coup in April 1974. Guinea-Bissau became independent that same year and the vast colonies of Angola and Mozambique together with the smaller Cape Verde Islands the following year. Portuguese colonialism in Timor was replaced by Indonesian colonialism. The Portuguese left Timor in a hurry when the territory plunged into civil war. East Timor declared its independence in November 1975 and was subsequently occupied by Indonesian troops; independence was not achieved until 2002. ¹²

In the Spanish case, Spanish Morocco gained independence in 1956; the southern protectorate, Tarfaya, was restituted to Morocco in 1959. In Equatorial Guinea, Spain installed an autonomous regime in 1963–1964; the territory gained formal independence in 1968. Ifni, the Spanish enclave on Morocco’s south Atlantic coast, was returned to the Moroccan Alaouite dynasty in 1969. In Western Sahara, Spanish troops withdrew in 1975 and 1976, leaving the door open for a Moroccan and Mauritanian occupation. With Franco’s death in Spain in November 1975, ending decades of authoritarianism, public interest centered on domestic issues rather than on colonial concerns and the end of the empire. What was more, the Portuguese example had shown how the colonies could eventually shake the regime to its core and even bring revolutionary change in the metropole, a fear that preoccupied Spanish politicians during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. ¹³

The Spanish and Portuguese colonies followed individual paths toward self-determination. While Spain attempted to showcase an exemplary transfer of power in Equatorial Guinea, including a staged constitutional referendum in 1968, much of “Portuguese Africa” endured thirteen years of protracted colonial wars between 1961 and 1974. ¹⁴ The outbreak of these wars in Angola in 1961 resulted in an increasing rift between the Franco regime and Salazar’s Portugal, even though the two dictatorships had collaborated for decades in several political, military, and economic areas. Long-standing reservations about Portuguese political isolation and Spanish domination on the peninsula increased. Facing a growing lack of support, the empire had often been perceived among Portuguese politicians and intellectuals as an opportunity to maintain Portugal’s “sacred” and certainly “well-defined and unmistakable national individuality.” Throughout the centuries, the empire had provided an escape, a last resort, and a means of demonstrating the grandeur of the Portuguese nation. For Salazar and Caetano, the colonies were the main pillars of the regime’s ideology, which in the end came down to the fact that “the empire is the nation.” Hence, Portuguese propaganda, literature, films, expositions, and maps had for decades cultivated the trope that “Portugal is not a small country.” It supposedly extended from the province of Minho in northern Portugal to Timor in Southeast Asia. ¹⁵

By equating the empire with the nation, Salazar and his ideologues could build on a long Portuguese tradit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Feminizing Empire
• 2. Soft Power: Uplifting “Native Women”
• 3. Violence: Authoritarian Transformations
• 4. “African Skin and a Hispanic Heart”? Racism, Ethnic Relations, Class, and Gender
• 5. The “Bargains” of African Women’s Cooperation
• 6. Staging Iberian Domesticity in Africa
• 7. Empire and Nation-States: Competing Projects
• 8. Epilog: The Presence of Imperial Pasts
• Back Matter