It was with great interest that I settled in to read Pamela Gupta's work. Of course, the Portuguese had colonies on the doorstep of South Africa, and Frelimo coming to power was a seminal moment in my teenage years. Mozambique's independence was celebrated on the streets of my hometown, Durban, through pamphlets and rallies in 1974, and we learned the story of Angola through reports of the battles between the Cubans and the apartheid war machine. However, the histories we relied on were mainly anecdotal and restricted to the romantic teleological narrative of the national liberation struggle.
The term ‘decolonization’ often operates as a catch-all that does not sufficiently capture the drama of a process that altered the formal global power structure that took shape over five centuries. African decolonization is sometimes examined from an imperial perspective, focusing on decolonization as the end-phase of a long history of empire, as is often the case for Portugal, whose empire at one stage stretched over three continents, or from a local perspective which interrogates decolonization within particular colonies and usually focuses on the great nationalist leaders and liberation movements, such as Samora Machel and Frelimo in Mozambique. While there are some outstanding studies of Portuguese decolonization, the significance of this book is that it seeks to capture the multiple ways in which it impacted on the everyday experiences of ordinary people in Portugal's colonies. The various approaches to decolonization are, of course, not exclusionary, so the broader structural developments provide a canvas against which the story is told.
Portugal lost Goa in 1961, but its empire in Africa dissolved more than a decade after those of Britain and France, who departed in a manner that allowed them to maintain partnership relationships with their former colonies. In contrast, as Chapter Two shows, the Portuguese were involved in brutal wars in Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Angola from 1961 to 1974. The reasons for Portuguese intransigence included having a dictator at the helm, its economic reliance on empire, and support during the Cold War from the United States, South Africa, and Rhodesia. The wars of liberation weakened the foundations of the Portuguese state, and within months of the April 1974 military coup in the country, which ended decades of authoritarian rule, there was a transfer of power to Lusophone African territories. While Gupta provides a short but excellent overview of the factors that led to decolonization, and outlines why Portugal delayed it, it is not clear why resistance movements in Portuguese Africa did not keep pace with other African colonies.
Gupta's focus throughout is on ‘entanglements’ and ‘imperial connections’, which she explores by honing in on Goa, Angola, Mozambique, and South Africa. She shows that decolonization in one colony, Goa, led to migration, initially, to other Portuguese colonies and eventually to South Africa, Brazil, and Portugal (retornados), which produced significant minority diasporic Goan communities. The Portuguese from Mozambique and Angola constituted new diasporic communities in South Africa and Brazil. Thus, as Gupta underlines, decolonization involved the movement of ‘people, ideas and things, and with an emphasis on migration and diaspora’ (2).
Gupta seeks to approach Portuguese decolonization as an ‘historical event and an ethnographic moment’, and does so by drawing on a wide range of sources that includes exceptional photographs by Ricardo Rangel, whose images from the 1940s onwards are considered iconic depictions of colonial life. Gupta also draws upon journalistic accounts, oral history, participatory research, and life histories in order to ‘access decolonization … at the level of the individual, and to locate politics in the personal’ (18). As the author rightly points out, this expansion of the archives provides ‘different forms of seeing, thinking and writing about history’ (19). This approach has been utilized with great effect in studies of Indian indenture, for example, where the use of photographs and life histories has made for a more complex history that captures migrants’ agency rather than simply seeing them as victims.
Chapter Three on Goans in Mozambique relates the experiences of ordinary people like Delia, Silvia, and Sandra, while not ignoring the broader structural forces in their lives. A chapter on the Goan fishing community in Catembe, Mozambique includes an ethnographic study of a religious festival (Chapter Four); Chapter Five approaches the end of Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique through the experiences (and eyes) of photojournalist Ricardo Rangel, Carlos Garcao who emigrated to South Africa, and Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, who was a reporter in Angola in 1975. Chapter Six considers the emigration of Portuguese from Angola to apartheid-era South Africa and draws on life history interviews with migrants.
By capturing the experiences of ordinary people, Gupta unveils the meaning of possessions and dispossession in people's lives; the anger and resentment people carry with them when they have to leave, forcibly or voluntarily, what has become ‘home’; the damage to infrastructure that some engage in, as a means of retribution; the nostalgic way in which they remember ‘their colonialism’ as banal; the consequences for those who opt to remain; and the ‘longings and belongings’ and citizenry of the new diasporic communities and their changing identities (125-126).
The title Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World is slightly misleading. Africans and the Portuguese state are largely absent from the story, which provides a new perspective on Portuguese decolonization by focusing mainly on the colonizers and settlers (whites from Portugal and Goans). At times, we develop a genuine empathy for white settlers who were, or whose ancestors were, responsible for brutalizing Africans over an extended period. They almost appear as ‘victims’ of decolonization. Gupta writes at one stage of the ‘the spectre of fear and lawlessness’ that Portuguese and Goans ‘experienced every day in the midst of armed struggle between colonial forces and nationalist ones in the wake of the colony's impending decolonization; they were compelled to dramatically change their lives’ (84).
This point is not to detract from an ambitious, well-written, and beautifully illustrated book whose value lies in examining Portuguese decolonization from a largely neglected perspective. Gupta largely achieves what she set out to do: show that decolonization was not a ‘seamless transition from a colony to something post’, but a complex process marked by ‘chaos, confusion and disorder’ whose ‘unresolved affective qualities (of messiness, trauma, loss and resilience) are part of postcoloniality itself’ (146).
