Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975 [1 ed.] 9783031277948, 9783031277955

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Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975 Edited by Filipa Lowndes Vicente Afonso Dias Ramos

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies

Series Editors

Richard Drayton Department of History King’s College London London, UK Saul Dubow Magdalene College University of Cambridge Cambridge, UK

The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a well-­ established collection of over 100 volumes focussing on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures that emerged from, and challenged, colonial rule. The collection includes transnational, comparative and connective studies, as well as works addressing the ways in which particular regions or nations interact with global forces. In its formative years, the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, but there is now no imperial system, period of human history or part of the world that lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome the first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies by more senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong thematic focus that help to set new research agendas. As well as history, the series includes work on politics, economics, culture, archaeology, literature, science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most exciting new scholarship on world history and to make this available to a broad scholarly readership in a timely manner.

Filipa Lowndes Vicente Afonso Dias Ramos Editors

Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975

Editors Filipa Lowndes Vicente Institute of Social Sciences University of Lisbon Lisbon, Portugal

Afonso Dias Ramos Art History Institute (NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST) Lisbon, Portugal

ISSN 2635-1633     ISSN 2635-1641 (electronic) Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies ISBN 978-3-031-27794-8    ISBN 978-3-031-27795-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Black and white photographic postcard (with handwritten text over the image) circulated in 1905. Titled “Luanda. Praia do Bispo”, n. 218 of a series of postcards of Angola issued by the Luanda-based editors Osório & Seabra, c. 1904-05. Filipa Lowndes Vicente’s collection. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Caught  on Camera: An Introduction to Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa  1 Afonso Dias Ramos and Filipa Lowndes Vicente Part I Charting the Empire: Knowledge, Control, Power  65 2 Photographing  Tropical Plants in the Late Nineteenth Century: Scientific Practices and Botanical Knowledge Production 67 António Carmo Gouveia 3 Stopping  for the Camera: Photographs of the Portuguese Expedition to Báruè, Mozambique, 1902 87 Rui Assubuji 4 Ethnographic  Album of Angola: Overlaps Between Photography, Knowledge and Empire (1930s–1940s)117 Cláudia Castelo and Catarina Mateus

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CONTENTS

5 An  Africanist Photo-ethno-graphy in the Portuguese New State (1928–1974)143 Inês Ponte 6  To See Is to Know? Anthropological Differentiations on Portuguese Colonial Photography Through the Work of Mendes Correia171 Patrícia Ferraz de Matos Part II Showcasing the Empire: Propaganda, Media, Exhibitions 193 7 Visions  of Wildlife and Hunting in the “Sportsmen’s Paradise”: Exploring Photography from the Mozambique Company’s Archive195 Bárbara Direito 8 Industrial  Landscapes in Colonial Mozambique: Images from an Economic Magazine217 Nuno Domingos 9 To  See, to Sell: The Role of the Photographic Image in Portuguese Colonial Exhibitions (1929–1940)239 Nadia Vargaftig 10 Images  of Angola and Mozambique in the Imperial Metropolis: Photographic Exhibitions Held at the Palácio Foz (1938–1960)257 Inês Vieira Gomes 11 Vision  and Violence. Black Women’s Bodies on Display (1900–1975) 279 Filipa Lowndes Vicente

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Part III Holding the Empire: Political Violence, Labour, Struggle 323 12 Images  That Kill: Counterinsurgency and Photography in Angola Circa 1961325 Afonso Dias Ramos 13 Colonial  War/Liberation Struggle in Guinea Bissau: From Personal Photographs to Public Silences369 Catarina Laranjeiro 14 Curating  the Past: Memory, History, and Private Photographs of the Portuguese Colonial Wars393 Maria José Lobo Antunes 15 Photographic  Colonial Agency: The Work of Agostiniano de Oliveira at the Diamang (1948–1966)415 Nuno Porto 16 ‘Our  Nightly Bread’: Women and the City in Ricardo Rangel’s Photographs of Lourenço Marques, Mozambique (1950s–1960s)441 Patricia Hayes Index

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Notes on Contributors

Maria  José  Lobo  Antunes  is an anthropologist and research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais of the Universidade de Lisboa. Her research intersects visual culture, memory, history, and colonialism. She is working on the visual representation of the Portuguese colonial wars, in both private collections and institutional archives. Rui  Assubuji is a professional photographer and historian from Mozambique, with a career that includes participation in various exhibitions and engagement in varied related activities. Currently affiliated with the University of the Western Cape, he pursues scholarly endeavours, with a particular interest in the visual history of his country. In collaboration with Paolo Israel and Drew Thompson, Assubuji recently served as coeditor of the journal Kronos 39: Southern African Histories on a special Issue dedicated to nationalism and history in Mozambique. Cláudia Castelo  is assistant professor at the Department of History and Philosophy of Sciences (Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa). Her main research interests are the history of Portuguese colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, namely the production and circulation of knowledge, trans-imperial and international scientific cooperation, colonial ideologies and white settler societies. Her most recent published work include the article “Oral Histories of Field Science in the Late Portuguese Colonial Empire,” The Oral History Review, 47:2 (2020) and the book chapter “The Colonial Garden and the Colonial Agricultural Museum: Education, Research and ‘Tropical Illusion’ in the Imperial ix

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Metropolis,” in Ana Simões and Maria Paula Diogo (ed.), Science, Technology and Medicine in the Making of Lisbon (1840–1940) (2022). Bárbara Direito  holds a PhD from the University of Lisbon (2013) with a thesis on the land question in twentieth-century colonial Mozambique. Since September 2019 she has been a research fellow at the Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia (CIUHCT), NOVA School of Science and Technology, NOVA University (Portugal), in the context of a Scientific Employment Stimulus contract awarded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT). Her research lies at the intersection between agrarian history, the history of veterinary medicine and environmental history and centres on Mozambique. In the past years she has authored publications on land and colonialism, the history of human and veterinary health, and the socio-environmental history of livestock in southern Mozambique. Nuno Domingos  is a research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais of the Universidade de Lisboa (ICS-UL). He researches on the history of Portuguese colonialism, especially in Mozambique during the period of the Portuguese New State (Estado Novo). He is the author of Football and Colonialism. Body ad Popular Culture in Urban Mozambique (2017) and he recently edited the volume Cultura Popular e Império, Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2021. Patrícia  Ferraz  de  Matos is an anthropologist, research fellow at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais of the Universidade de Lisboa (ICS-UL), and member of the teaching staff of the PhD in Anthropology of UL since 2013. She is an associate editor of Anthropological Journal of European Cultures (2020–2024), convener of the Europeanist Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) (2020–2024), deputy director of the journal Análise Social (2021–2024) and correspondent member, in Portugal, of the History of Anthropology Network of EASA since 2019. She is the author of The Colours of the Empire (2013) and of Anthropology, Nationalism and Colonialism (2023). Inês Vieira Gomes  holds a PhD in History from the Instituto de Ciências Sociais of the Universidade de Lisboa (ICS-UL, 2022) where she defended a thesis focused on photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa between 1875 and 1940. She has been awarded with a dissertation fellowship at Harry Ransom Center (University of Austin, 2018), a fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution in the National Museum of African Art

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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(Washington DC, 2015), and worked as a research fellow at ICS-UL (Lisbon, 2012–2013). She holds an MFA (FCSH-UNL, 2011) and a BA (FLUL, 2007) in Art History. António  Carmo  Gouveia  holds a PhD in Plant Ecology, works at the Centre for Functional Ecology and the UNESCO Chair in Biodiversity Safeguard for Sustainable Development at the University of Coimbra, where he served as a director of its Botanic Garden (2015–2019). His research covers the history and communication of science, scientific collections, plant diversity and ecology, and citizen science, collaborating with institutions in São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, and Mozambique. Patricia  Hayes  is a professor in the History Department and Chair in Visual History & Theory, of the  National Research Foundation,  South African Research Chairs Initiative of the University of the Western Cape. She has guest-edited special journal issues on visuality and gender in African history, including Kronos (2000) and Gender & History (2006). In recent research she deals with photography and history in southern Africa, especially in late colonial and apartheid periods; this resulted in the publication of Bush of Ghosts (2010) with John Liebenberg, and several articles on South African documentary photography. Catarina  Laranjeiro is a researcher at the Instituto de História Contemporânea of the New University of Lisbon (NOVA-FCSH). She is developing a six-year project on Bissau-Guinean and Cape Verdean vernacular cinema. She holds a PhD in Postcolonialisms and Global Citizenship from the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra. Her main research interests focus on vernacular cinema, political cosmology, and gender studies. Catarina  Mateus has a master’s degree in Preventive Conservation (2008) from Northumbria University, UK, a master’s degree in Photography Studies (2004) from  Escola Superior de Artes e Design (Portugal), and a minor in Conservation and Restoration (1996) from Instituto Politécnico de Tomar (Portugal). Since 2015, she is the conservator and the curator of photography collections of National Museum of Natural History and Science, in Lisbon. Her special interest and work focuses on Portuguese colonial photography. Inês Ponte  is a research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-UL). Alongside material culture, her research

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interests concern contemporary and historical visual cultures in anthropology, namely the role and practice of cinema and photography. She has written in History & Anthropology (2021) and Kronos (2020); created the research-based website Mobilising Archives: history, photography and anthropology (www.hisfotant.org), and directed six short films based on research. She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media (2015, University of Manchester, UK), with prior training in social anthropology and in documentary directing. Nuno Porto  is a material- and visual-culture oriented social anthropologist. For the past twenty years he has combined his extensively published research on colonial cultures, photography, museums, collections and archives, with experimental curatorial practice and teaching. He is Curator for the African and South American collections at the Museum of Anthropology, and an associate professor at the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Afonso Dias Ramos  is a researcher at the Institute of Art History (NOVA FCSH/IN2PAST), associate editor of Revista de História da Arte,  and guest lecturer at NOVA FCSH and Universidade de Coimbra. He was a visiting scholar at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (2020) and an Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, affiliated with Freie Universität Berlin (2019). He holds a PhD in the History of Art from University College London with a thesis focusing on the relationship between political violence and experimental photography in contemporary art. He is the co-editor, with Tom Snow, of  the book Activism: Documents of Contemporary Art (2023). Nadia  Vargaftig is an assistant professor at the Universite de Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France) since 2015. She is the author of Des Empires en carton. Les expositions coloniales au Portugal et en Italie (1918–1940) published by the Casa de Velazquez (Madrid, 2016). Her work focuses on colonial imaginaries in exhibitions, photography and museums, covering the colonial and post-colonial period, in Europe and more particularly in Portugal. She is particularly interested in the trajectories, both geographical and symbolic, of the objects constituting the collections of anthropological and natural history museums.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Filipa  Lowndes  Vicente  a historian, is a researcher at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ICS-UL). She was a visiting professor at Brown University (2016) and at King’s College, University of London (2015). She holds a PhD (2000) from the University of London, Goldsmiths College, and since then has worked on the intellectual, visual, colonial and cultural history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from Europe to India. Among her books are Other Orientalisms. India between Florence and Bombay 1860–1900 (2009), and the edited volume The Empire of Vision. Photography in the Portuguese Colonial Context (1860–1960) (2014).

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

E.  Thiésson, Native woman of Sofala, Mozambique. 1845. Daguerreotype. 8.9 × 6.6 cm. George Eastman Museum, gift of Eastman Kodak Company, ex-collection Gabriel Cromer. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum 16 Fig. 1.2 J. A. Cunha Moraes, Portrait photograph of an Angolan woman, c. 1880. Research Center for Material Culture, Leiden 29 Fig. 1.3 Antoine Freitas, Untitled, Democratic Republic of Congo, Premiere Photographe à la minute Congolais, Bena Mulumba, Kasaï, 1939. Vintage print, 9 × 14 cm. Courtesy of Revue Noire, Paris39 Fig. 1.4 Photo-postcard, Diamond Company of Angola, Andrada, “The women of contract labourers, returning from a distribution of manioc, organized by the Propaganda and Assistance to Indigenous Labour Department, of the Company (SPAMOI),” undated. F. L. Vicente Collection 45 Fig. 2.1 Photograph of páia-séla / pau-esteira (Pandanus thomensis Henriq.) sent to Júlio Henriques from São Tomé and Príncipe by Francisco Quintas, in 1888 (Archive of Botany of the Department of Life Sciences of the University of Coimbra) 73 Fig. 2.2 Herbarium sheet of the type specimen of Pandanus thomensis Henriq. (held at the University of Coimbra Herbarium, REF. COI5915)75 Fig. 2.3 Photographic postcard of ukwêtê-nglandji / bordão-de-macaco (Costus giganteus Welw. ex Ridl.), sent from São Tomé and Príncipe to Júlio Henriques, unknown date (Archive of Botany of the Department of Life Sciences of the University of Coimbra).

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.3

Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 4.1

Fig. 4.2

Fig. 4.3

The same image was cropped and published in the Bulletin of the Broterian Society, Vol. 27, 1917 81 An important place in the early colonial history of Mozambique, the map locates Báruè in the region once called the Zambezi Valley. It highlights Massangano, the settlement of one of the strongest warlords and landholding opponents to Portuguese authority. The map also indicates Manica and Macequece, the location of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fairs and the gold mining area that stirred European greed 90 “Báruè and surrounding Area.” By locating the principal Aringas (settlements) this map helps the further descriptions of the military operations during the Báruè campaign of 1902. Map from Isaacman, The tradition of Resistance, Maps xvii 93 Silver paper print 10 × 15 cm (circa). Military History Archive, Lisbon. Archival reference: PT AHM-FE-110-B7-PQ-6.2. Written on the back of the print: 2° tenente Gusmão; 2° tenente António de Brito, 2° tenente Mendes de Almeida; 1° tenente Pinto Bastos; João Coutinho; 1° tenente Moniz; 2° tenente Fernando de Magalhães; 2° tenente Roby 95 João de Azevedo Coutinho. Silver paper print 10 × 15 cm (circa). Military History Archive, Lisbon. Archival reference: PT AHMFE-110-B7-PQ-6.1298 Regular soldiers. Silver paper print 10 × 15 cm (circa). Military History Archive, Lisbon: PT AHM-FE-110-B7-PQ-6.98 104 Sepoys. Silver paper print 10 × 15 cm (circa). Military History Archive, Lisbon. Archival reference: PT AHM-FE-110-B7-PQ-6.4108 Silver paper print 10  ×  15  cm (circa). Military History Archive, Lisbon. Archival reference: PT AHM-FE-110-B7-PQ-6.8 111 Original title: “Rest time.” Elmano (left) and Father Estermann (right). On the table, one of the Rolleiflex cameras used. Elmano Cunha e Costa, 1935–1937, Moxico, Angola. Overseas Historical Archive, Lisbon, AHU-ECC-ID8533 124 Original title: “Caravan in the desert.” A few images in the collection reveal details about the trip. Two cars and more than ten persons, most of them, African workers, join the entourage. Elmano Cunha e Costa, 1935–1937, Desert, Angola Overseas Historical Archive, Lisbon, PT-AHU-ECC-9830 126 Original title: “Feminine type – Quipungos.” Portrait of a Quipungo woman facing the camera with a confident and empathetic look. Most of portraits in this collection are only identified as feminine or masculine type, but several— as this one— have the ability to recreate the person’s individuality before us. Elmano Cunha e Costa, 1935–1937, Huíla, Angola Overseas Historical Archive, Lisbon, PT-AHU-ECC-13811  127

  LIST OF FIGURES 

Fig. 4.4

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Original title: “Leopard dance.” The images of rituals, in this case, a circumcision ritual, are most of the times, taken near the action, capturing natural body movements, indicating consent of local people for documenting these traditions, most probably due the presence of Father Estermann . Elmano Cunha e Costa, 1935–1937, Província do Bié, Angola Overseas Historical Archive, Lisbon, PT-AHU-ECC-12735  128 Fig. 4.5 Original title: “Healers.” The relation between Father Estermann and local communities was privileged, due to his prolonged contact with the land and interest for local languages and traditions among the various ethnic groups in south-west Angola. Elmano Cunha e Costa, 1935–1937, Cunene River, Angola Overseas Historical Archive, Lisbon, PT-AHU-ECC-8925 130 Fig. 5.1 Composing a career trajectory: From young to old age, from older to newer technologies. Left: print of photograph taken in the 1920s published in a missionary journal in Braga, Portugal [Estermann, “Conferência SGL”, Missões de Angola e Congo XV, no. 2, 3, 4 (1935): 38–40, 72–74, 104–7] and 26 years later in a scientific bibliography [Afonso Costa, ed., Bibliografia do Etnólogo Pe Carlos Estermann (Luanda: Instituto de Angola, 1961)]; right: mirrored photographic print held by the Arquivo da Província Portuguesa da Congregação do Espírito Santo in Lisbon [Archive of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, APPCES/Lisbon], published in black & white in Pereira, “O Padre Carlos Estermann, Missionário e Etnógrafo” Separata da Revista Encontro, Selecções Missionárias, 1976, 17, captioned as taken in 1972 in Munhino Mission, Angola 146 Fig. 5.2 From others’ to his own photographs; from illustrated articles to photographic albums. Top: My collage of an illustrated page from Estermann’s 1936 article, with Cunha e Costa’s un-signed photographs [“Les Forgerons”, see note 9; cf. archival image ECC/NC7900, accessible at https://actd.iict.pt/view/ actd:AHUD16772, IICT/Lisbon] and its jourmal cover, and of Estermann’s 1946 article with his own images [“Quelques Observations”, see note 9], most of them republished also in Estermann’s first volume of his major monograph (1956, see note 8). Based on copies from Swiss (RÉRO DOC: oai:doc.rero. ch:18163) and German (Humboldt University: https://www. digi-hub.de/viewer/image/DE-11-001871423/245/) Digital Libraries, respectively. Bottom: The three photographic album covers authored by Estermann, between 1960 and 1973, with related captions, when available 149

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Fig. 5.3 To be a scientist is to publish knowledge gathered in the field. My collage. Clockwise from bottom left: print of Estermann chosen field portrait, made in 1932, published in 1956 (see note 15); archival photograph made by Delachaux of field camp in Omupanda, 1933 (see note 17); print of Cunha e Costa’s picture of field camp around 1936, published around 1972 [N.a., n.d. “P. Carlos Estermann”, brochure]; print of Estermann at his office in Munhino (see note 33) Fig. 5.4 Map, pictures and text in formative years. My collage made from Estermann’s first article published specifically for the portuguese scientific circle (cf. note 40), combined with a geographical overlap of his missionary trajectory. Based on images available at Memórias d’África Fig. 5.5 1960: Contrasting visual uses. My collage of two covers related to Estermann’s photographs published in 1960. Left: cover of the catalogue of an exhibition that opened in Sá da Bandeira city in August, which holds only the captions of images on display. Right: cover of illustrated biweekly magazine published in Luanda in early September. Estermann’s article on hairdressing in Southern Angola appears spread in four numbers (15, 16, 17, 18), featuring in the cover in the first one. Based on photographs by author Fig. 6.1 “Women of Loré (Lautém), resting and sieving rice”. Print XLIV of Timor Português, 1944. Photograph supplied by Abel Tavares Fig. 6.2 “Bushman woman from Angola (Mucancala) with a child: steatopygia”. Raças do Império, 1943: 27. IAUP’s Collection Fig. 6.3 Anthropological mission to Mozambique (1948 campaign). Norberto (son to Santos Júnior) in Namapa with a group of Mozambicans. Centro de Memória, Torre de Moncorvo Fig. 7.1 “Aspecto do Museu da Sede”, anonymous, c. 1937, PT/TT/ CMZ-­AF-­AGL/2/1/121. Image provided by ANTT Fig. 7.2 “Documento fotográfico sem título”, anonymous, c. 1928, PT/ TT/CMZ-AF-GT/N/1/3/10. Image provided by ANTT Fig. 7.3 “Caçadores europeus e indígenas”, anonymous, c. 1907–1937, PT/TT/CMZ-AF-GT/E/26/1/2. Image provided by ANTT Fig. 7.4 “Viagem ao Búzi de S.A.R., a Duqueza D’Aosta”, I.R. Carvalho, c. Dez 1909–January 1910, PT/TT/CMZ-AFGT/E/29/2/44. Image provided by ANTT Fig. 8.1 Announcement of the National Overseas Bank for the Concession of Agricultural Credits. The ad appears regularly throughout the years of the second series of the magazine

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167 179 186 191 203 204 205 206 221

  List of Figures 

Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Figs. 8.5 and 8.6 Figs. 9.1 and 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4

Fig. 9.5 Fig. 10.1

Fig. 10.2 Fig. 10.3 Fig. 10.4 Fig. 10.5 Fig. 11.1

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Industry of Assembly of Radios, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 1, no. 12, 1968, p. 1 227 Refrigerants Factory Mac Mahon, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 5. No. 4, 1972, p. 1 228 Texlon. Textiles of Lourenço Marques, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 6, no. 4, 1973, p. 1 230 Course of Commercial Action. Marketing in the Company. Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 6, no. 10, 1973, p.  290. Figure 8.3 Colloquium: the leader and staff training, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 3, no. 4, 1970, p. 141 232 Two rooms of the pavilion of the Companhia de Moçambique, ECP, 1934 (Photographic Archive of the Companhia de Moçambique, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo) Portrait of an Angolan “wizard”, ECP, 1934 (Domingos 249 Alvão, Centro Português de Fotografia) 251 Handcraft work of two Mozambican women, colonial area of The Exposição do Mundo Português, 1940 (Photographical Archive of the Companhia de Moçambique, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo) 253 The visit of the president of the Republic to the Exposição do Mundo português, 1940 (Photographical Archives of the Journal O Século, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo) 255 “An exhibition of colonial customs by Dr. Elmano da Cunha e Costa was inaugurated at the National Secretariat of Propaganda”. Newspaper O Primeiro de Janeiro, 5 July 1938, p.  5. National Library of Portugal 265 Opening of the Exhibition of Angolan Ethnography. Unidentified photographer. 28 December 1946. National Archive of Torre do Tombo (ANTT)  268 Opening of the Exhibition of Angolan Ethnography. Unidentified photographer. 28 December 1946. National Archive of Torre do Tombo (ANTT)  269 “Mozambique in Images—a beautiful exhibition inaugurated at the S.N.I. by the Minister of Colonies”. Newspaper O Século, 11 August 1950, p. 1. National Library of Portugal 272 Detail of the exhibition Gorongosa: a wildlife paradise. Palácio Foz, Lisbon, 1960. Unidentified photographer. ANTT, SNI, box 3035 276 Two photographic postcards in black and white. Part of a small format booklet with 14 images titled, in portuguese, “Souvenir of the 1st Portuguese Colonial Exhibition. 1934”. Edited by A.J. D’Almeida and printed in Germany. The collection

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List of Figures

combined images of monuments and views of the city of Porto, like the bridge of D. Maria Pia, with portraits of unnamed women and men, like the two women represented here. (Author’s collection)286 Fig. 11.2 Postcard of drawing, “Portuguese Empire. Rosinha—Balanta Woman Guiné”. Drawing by Eduardo Malta [1934] (Author’s collection)291 Fig. 11.3 Photograph. Black and white. Unnamed  woman with child. Manuscript text on the back signed by Victor, Angola, 1961? (Author’s collection) 295 Fig. 11.4 Front and Back of coloured photographic postcard.  Unnamed woman and child. Circulated. Sent in 1975 by “Zé” to his mother. (Author’s collection) 296 Fig. 11.5 Exhibition “Botânica” by Vasco Araújo, commissioned by Emília Tavares, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea-Museu do Chiado, Lisbon, 2014 [Photograph by João Paulo Ruas, n° 51606 DIG]. (Courtesy of the Museum) 301 Fig. 11.6 Part of the installation “Atlas” by Joana Gonçalo Oliveira at the Exhibition Retornar—Traços de Memória, curated by Elsa Peralta. Galeria Avenida da Índia/Padrão dos Descobrimentos, November 2015 to February 2016, EGEAC—Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (Courtesy of Elsa Peralta) 303 Fig. 12.1 “Portuguese people, open up your eyes!” [Luanda, 14 April 1961], Author’s collection. This propaganda was dispatched to mainland Portugal with the following message: “After seeing and reading this manifesto, taking in its content, save it as a reminder of your duties and omissions.” 331 Fig. 12.2 The book cover of a state-sponsored anthology of the press coverage of the revolt in Angola, under the title Angola Mártir [Martyred Angola], featuring a monumental-sized reproduction of the most iconic of these atrocity photographs 336 Fig. 12.3 Video stills of the television broadcast of the Portuguese representative Vasco Garin speaking at the UN Security Council meeting, 7 June 1961, while four monumental reproductions of the atrocity pictures are held up by the delegation 346 Fig. 12.4 A set of the Portuguese government-sponsored propaganda booklets illustrated with atrocity photographs, which circulated around the world 349 Fig. 12.5 Protective seal for readers inside the booklet Death on the march in Angola (1961), never included for any editions in Portuguese 364 Fig. 13.1 PAIGC’s Fighters / Photograph from Manecas dos Santos’ personal archive 383

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Fig. 13.2 Nursing students in Kiev/ Photograph Francisca Pereira’s personal archive 385 Fig. 13.3 First meeting between Portuguese troops and PAIGC / Photograph from Manecas dos Santos’ personal archive 387 Fig. 14.1 A page’s fragment from Eva magazine: five war godmothers “effusively greet their godsons”, and a soldiers’ portrait is published in the hope that his family will be able to see him safe and sound in northern Angola. (Source: Eva, September 1961) 400 Fig. 14.2 A painted barracks’ wall provided the set for soldiers’ holiday greetings photographs. A diligent military wrote the words “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”, and drew a white heart that read “My darling I’m alright thank God” (Source: Sá, Batalhão B. Caç)405 Fig. 14.3 A foot patrol in Northern Angola (Source: Sá, Batalhão B. Caç)406 Fig. 14.4 Collaborative composition of stamps in a photographic album’s front endpapers (Source: Manuel Santos private collection) 410 Fig. 14.5 Staging the warrior, a favourite of soldiers’ photo albums (Source: Manuel Santos’ private photographic collection) 413 Fig. 15.1 Assembling an 8 feet pan of a washing and separation jig machine at the mine of Calonda 1, in https://www.diamangdigital.net/ index.php?module=diamang&option=item&id=555419 Fig. 15.2 Lunda Norte. Aspect of housing at the Dundo, managed by the Service for the Protection and Support of Indigenous Labor in, https://www.diamangdigital.net/index.php?module=diaofman g&option=item&id=654422 Fig. 15.3 Great Annual Indigenous Festival-Parade of the competitors in the Indigenous Sports Festival, Andrada, August 1957 [Rel. 1957], in https://www.diamangdigital.net/index.php?module= diamang&option=item&id=528430 Fig. 16.1 Enticing reed yard (1961) 451 Fig. 16.2 Sad-eyed model in this street of merry-making (1962) 454 Fig. 16.3 Steps emerging into the illusion-world (1962) 455 Fig. 16.4 Ritz Bar: aesthetics of the beautiful (1970) 456 Fig. 16.5 Mundo bar: hands that talk? (1962) 457 Fig. 16.6 Wait baby! Mundo bar (1970) 457

CHAPTER 1

Caught on Camera: An Introduction to Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa Afonso Dias Ramos and Filipa Lowndes Vicente

“The camera has often been a dire instrument. In Africa, as in most parts of the dispossessed world, the camera arrives as part of the colonial paraphernalia, together with the gun and the bible, diarising events, the exotic and the profound, cataloguing the converted and the hanged.” Yvonne Vera (1999)1

One of the familiar axioms of contemporary discourse is Martin Heidegger’s claim that the fundamental event of the modern age was the 1  Yvonne Vera, Thatha Camera – The Pursuit for Reality, Bulawayo: National Gallery of Zimbabwe, 1999, p. 3.

A. D. Ramos (*) Art History Institute (NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST), Lisbon, Portugal F. L. Vicente Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860-1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_1

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conquest of the world as picture.2 Yet, this conception of modernity as a radical break that could be defined by the privileging of vision over all senses when establishing regimes of order, truth and reason, or by the emergence of a historically distinctive perceptual apparatus prompted by the unprecedented hypertrophy in visual media, has become a harmless truism in the age of technological reproduction.3 With colonial history still within earshot, the imperialist overtones of that line can no longer be overlooked. Indeed, the metaphor of conquest could be read literally into world history as Europe’s takeover of most of the earth, the unspoken event which Heidegger takes both to inaugurate modernity and to be it. But that statement also failed to acknowledge photography which, more than any picture-making technology, fuelled the imperialist urge to acquire visual knowledge in order to facilitate the control of distant peoples, objects and lands. Unlike representations of the world in maps or atlases, photography—“painting never had so imperial a scope,” Susan Sontag remarked4—took pride of place as the first truly global visual medium, a prime device for overcoming or eliminating distance, with a capital role to play in encounters with and control over the other. Already in 1885, in the foreword to the most important photographic album to come out of Portuguese colonial Africa, Cunha Moraes’s lush fourvolume África Occidental (1885–1888) issued during the Berlin Conference to divide Africa, the Portuguese statesman Luciano Cordeiro triumphally stated: “This is what we were missing: the definitive partnership of the photographic camera with the hypsometer, thermometer, and sextant, in the

2  Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture” [1938], The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New  York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977, p.  133. Famously, Heidegger never mentioned photography in this foundational essay, but painting [das Bildung] instead. Yet, his concept of “world picture” has often been connected to photographic history and theory. See Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008, p.  561, and Diarmuid Costello, “The Question Concerning Photography”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 70, Issue 1, February 2012, pp. 101–113. 3  See Martin Jay, The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 4  Susan Sontag, On Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980, p. 7.

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ideal conquest of the African Continent”.5 When Roland Barthes famously  observed that “the same century invented History and Photography,”6 he touched precisely  on the two missing clauses in Heidegger’s dictum, photography and history in the imperial context. These are among the most swiftly expanding domains of critical inquiry today, and they make up the fulcrum of this book. Until recently, academics often disregarded “colonial photography” as a predictable and oppressive genre with a limited range of representations. Today, conversely, the most radical thinking on the contemporary image-world integrates colonialism and visuality. The study of photographic cultures, practices and technologies in the imperial context has become a flourishing one, unravelling the complexity of image culture and imperial power as a central fact of modern history. After thirty of years of studies, events and publications on colonial-era photography,7 the field has developed by methodological leaps and 5  J.  A. da Cunha Moraes, África Occidental: Álbum Photographico e Descriptivo, Lisboa: Edição David Corazzi, 1885–1888. For more, see António Pedro Vicente and Nicolas Monti, Cunha Moraes – Viagens em Angola, Coimbra: Casa Museu Bissaya Barreto, 1991; António Sena, História da Imagem Fotográfica em Portugal  – 1839–1997, Porto: Porto Editora, 1998; Maria de Fátima Pereira, Casa Fotografia Moraes: A Modernidade Fotográfica na Obra dos Cunha Moraes, Porto: Universidade do Porto, 2001; Teresa Castro, “O esplendor dos Atlas: fotografia e cartografia visual do Império no limiar do século XX”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), O Império da Visão: Fotografia no Contexto Colonial (1860–1960), Lisboa: Edições 70, 2014, pp. 291–304; Bruna Triana, “Arquivos e Imagens (Pós)Coloniais: Contribuições Analíticas Sobre Duas Coleções Fotográficas”, Gesto Imagem e Som - Revista de Antropologia 2, 2017, pp. 37–60; Liliana Oliveira da Rocha and Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, “Fotografias de Angola do Século XIX: o ‘Álbum Fotográfico-Literário’ de Cunha Moraes”, Revista Tempos e Espaços em Educação, Vol. 12, No. 31, 2019, pp. 165–186. 6  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill and Wang, 1981, p. 93. 7  Some foundational texts on colonial-era photography include David Green, “Classified Subjects. Photography and Anthropology: The Technology of Power”, Ten. 8, No. 19, 1984, pp.  30–37; Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987; David Bate, “Photography and the Colonial Vision”, Third Text, Spring 1990, pp. 53–60; Elizabeth Edwards, Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992; Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs, London: Reaktion Books, 1992; James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualisation of the British Empire, London: Reaktion Books, 1997; Paul Landau and Deborah Kaspin (eds.), Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Specifically overviewing Africa, see Erin Haney, Exposures: Photography and Africa, London: Reaktion Books, 2010; Richard Vokes, Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives, New York: James Currey, 2012; Kylie Thomas and Louise Green (eds.), Photography in and out of Africa: Iterations with Difference, London: Routledge, 2018; Lorena Rizzo, Photography and History in Colonial Southern Africa: Shades of Empire, Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2019; Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley (eds.), Ambivalent: Photography and Visibility in African History, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019.

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bounds. It no longer stands on the margins of mainstream historical research but at its centre, raising critical questions on epistemology, identity and agency, weaving theoretical ruminations by influential thinkers of modernity with close visual analyses of historical materials.8 If academics, activists or artists once struggled to show that the empire could not be thought without visuality, the last years have made it clear that it is visuality itself that cannot be thought without empire. It is always already colonial, Nicholas Mirzoeff asserts, operating along a continuum of complex visual regimes going back to the slave plantation, following its model of an overseer surveying the landscape and dividing up people into types.9 Sumathi Ramaswamy argues that vision and empire are inextricably intertwined, and have been mutually constitutive in and of modernity.10 Lucie Ryzova, in turn, takes apart the diffusionist models that still rule  the never-ending discussions on the invention of photography, by marking out zones of the world, especially Africa, as forever catching up with former centres of empire, and thus condemned to be “thought of in terms of ‘adoption’, ‘adaptation,’ ‘response’, or at best as ‘shared production’” inevitably coming from the West.11 Ariella Aïsha Azoulay similarly calls us to give up on accounts of photography as a spontaneous development with its own origins and to view it as part of the imperial modern world order which emerged in the fifteenth century, so as to dismantle the foundational myths of technological supremacy and our overreliance on critics that simply avoid colonial history.12 Out of this exciting nexus of colonialism and visuality, this book turns its attention to the study of photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa. It aims, in the first instance, to undo the Anglo-Francophone hegemony, thus broadening the locations available for critical inquiry. In this new century, the research has expanded beyond Western exceptionalism and the once-dominant Euro-American model that has been shown to be wracked with internal asymmetries, as formerly eccentric geographies in 8  Zahid Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth-Century India, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 9  Nicholas Mirzoeff, Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality, Durham: Duke University Press: Duke 2011. 10  Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (eds.), Empires of Vision: A Reader, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. 11  Lucie Ryzova, “The Image sans Orientalism”, Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 8, 2015, p. 159. 12  Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential history: unlearning imperialism, London and New York: Verso, 2019.

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this field like Germany, Italy and the Netherlands delve upon their colonial experiences with diverse visual legacies.13 Crucially, these recent additions to the literature do not merely rewrite visual history into a photographic canon, but explore the plurality of colonialisms and visual economies, thinking transnationally and inter-imperially to rethink the categories, methods and scales that have shaped historical writing for so long.14 Though focused on the Portuguese ex-colonies in Africa, this book has been envisaged as a productive interface for scholars of photography across regional specialities and cultural domains, exploring connections or continuities across the borders set by the colonial project. It aims to foreground geopolitical and aesthetic contexts little-known in photographic circles and among those interested in African visual practices—in Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe—as the longest pockets of European colonial rule. This focus stems not only from the renewed wave of critical consideration of photography in this geopolitical context, but spotlights territories hitherto assigned a marginal relevance, if any at all, in the leading compendia and reference books of photography studies. Consider, for instance, Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy’s Empires of Vision: A Reader (2014), the largest survey of writing on colonial photography to date, an illuminating 700-page tome without a single mention to Portuguese colonial Africa.15 Far from the exception, this is the rule in specialised literature. If this book covers only this continent, the same case can be extended to other expanses of the Portuguese empire—after all, photography had made an early start in

13  See respectively, for instance, Christraud M. Geary, Images from Bamum: German colonial photography at the court of King Njoya, Cameroon, West Africa, 1902–1915, Washington: National Museum of African Art, 1988; Paolo Bertella Farnetti and Cecilia Dau Novelli, Images of colonialism and decolonisation in the Italian media, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017; Paul Bijl, Emerging Memory. Photographs of Colonial Atrocity in Dutch Cultural Remembrance, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015; and Susie Protschky, Images of the Tropics. Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia, Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011. 14  See Jane Lydon, Eye contact: photographing Indigenous Australians, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005; Christopher Pinney, Nicolas Peterson and Nicholas Thomas (eds.), Photography’s Other Histories, Durham: Duke University Press; 2003; or, Christopher Morton and Darren Newbury (eds.), The African Photographic Archive: research and curatorial strategies, London: Bloomsbury, 2015. 15  Martin Jay, op. cit., 2014.

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Goa, India,16 the first daguerreotypes known in China were made in Macau in 1844 by Jules Itier, and there is no shortage of historically relevant colonial visual material from East Timor.17 This book is the first collection of essays on photography in Portuguese colonial Africa available in English and it is designed to offer a long-term perspective rather than an exhaustive overview. Assembling some of the most recent writing on the topic in revised form and newly commissioned essays from varied disciplinary prisms, this tome casts a wide net geographically and temporally, considering samples of colonial-era images that range from the ethnographic to the anthropological, from the journalistic to the missionary, from landscapes to atrocities. But first, the title Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa requires some elaboration. The case has been made that the umbrella term “colonial photography” raises endless problems. Any reduction of the “colonial” to a monolithic category must be complicated. Also, the idea of “African photography” as a stable theoretical entity is no less contentious since it lacks unity, as a highly distributed object with endless ramifications, custodians, archivists and consumers. The idea of “Portuguese Africa,” too, is a questionable one, as it does not hold up to close scrutiny as a conceptual category, given its boundless diversity and the contradictory positions held by photography within it—the largest countries, Angola and Mozambique, are often

16  Among the earliest Goa-based practitioners, shortly after the medium was invented, were Manuel Xavier de Noronha, A. C. Gomes, A. X. Trindade and the Sousa & Paul photographic studio. See Vivek Meneses, “How colonial Goa used photography to create images of a democratic India”, Scroll, 26 February 2015; and Filipa Lowndes Vicente, “Viagens entre a Índia e o arquivo: Goa em fotografias e exposições”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 319–342. 17  Alfredo de Lacerda Maia, “Governador de Timor: assassinado pelos indígenas, campanhas e iconografia”, Ocidente, No. 298, 1887, pp. 75–77; Alexandre Oliveira, “A imagem colonial de Timor: o álbum fotográfico do Governador Álvaro da Fontoura”, Rosa Maria Perez (ed.), Os Portugueses e o Oriente: História, itinerários, representações, Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2006, pp. 319–337; Ricardo Roque, Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870–1930, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; Steven Farram, “Looking at History: A consideration of two photographs; one from Darwin, one from Dili”, Circa: the Journal of Professional Historian, Issue 6, 2018, pp. 35–41; Lúcio Sousa, “A ‘grande revolta’ de Manufahi na revista Ilustração Portuguesa”, Vicente Paulino (ed.), Somos arquivos da memória: reflexões históricas e sócio-­ antropológicas sobre Timor Leste, Díli: Unidade de Produção e Disseminação do Conhecimento, 2018, pp. 133–152.

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cast as polar opposites in this regard, and there is more literature about the latter than about all of the colonies combined.18 Such histories left extensive visual legacies in the institutions of those independent countries, thereby generating disparate approaches. A lot could be said about the problematic application of these catch-all concepts as historically recurrent categories, but they are used in this book as discursive markers. Lastly, this is not to say that photography is in any way a self-contained and coherent category dispensing further scrutiny. Increasingly, the issue has been raised of what it means to write a history of a ubiquitous technology with such an indefinite standing, considering the heterogeneity of uses and hermeneutic approaches to photographs across the world.19 This book embraces an expanded model of photography with a transdisciplinary analysis, straddling the realms of art, science and entertainment, and discarding binary and hierarchical categories (professional versus amateur, original versus reproduction), means of distribution (books, posters, postcards, exhibitions) or ostensible ends (courts of law, scientific samples, hunting trophies).

18  As José Eduardo Agualusa claims, “The art of photography has no traditions in Angola. Unlike Mozambique, to use a culturally and historically similar country as a reference, there is no school of photography in Angola. And yet, the medium started off to a promising start.” Kiluanje Liberdade and Inês Gonçalves, Agora Luanda, Coimbra: Almedina, 2007, p. 46. See also Albano Silva Pereira, Dia di Bai, Coimbra: Centro de Artes Visuais, 2003; and António Pinto Ribeiro, Réplica e rebeldia: artistas de Angola, Brasil, Cabo Verde e Moçambique, Lisboa: Instituto Camões, 2006. In addition to the referenced articles on Mozambique specifically, see also António Sopa, “Um país em imagens: O percurso da fotografia em Moçambique”, no publisher, no date; Eric Allina, “‘Fallacious Mirrors:’ Colonial Anxiety and Images of African Labor in Mozambique, ca. 1929”, History in Africa, Vol. 24, 1997, pp. 9–52; Jeanne Marie Penvenne, “Fotografando Lourenço Marques: A Cidade e os Seus Habitantes de 1960 a 1975”, Cláudia Castelo, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Sebastião Nascimento and Teresa Cruz e Silva (eds.), Os outros da colonização: ensaios sobre colonialismo tardio em Moçambique, Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2012, pp.  173–192; Drew Thompson, “Constructing a History of Independent Mozambique, 1974–1982: A Study in Photography”, Kronos, No. 39, 2013, pp. 158–184; Drew Thompson, “Visualising Frelimo’s Liberated Zones in Mozambique, 1962–1974”, Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, Vol. 39, Issue 1, 2013, pp.  24–50; Drew Thompson, Filtering Histories: The Photographic Bureaucracy in Mozambique, 1960 to Recent Times, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021; or, Leandro Antonio Guirro, Tempo, Papel e Tinta: imprensa e fotografia sobre Moçambique (1897–1937), Belo Horizonte: Dialética, 2021. 19  See Jennifer Bajorek, Unfixed: Photography and Decolonial Imagination in West Africa, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

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Chronically underrepresented in English or French textbooks on photography and Africa, Portugal’s ex-colonial territories are by no means latecomers to photo-historical study. The first systematic efforts can be traced back to British-born anthropologist Jill Dias in the late 1980s, followed by German ethnographer Beatrix Heintze in the early 1990s.20 Working mostly on the early creation and flow of photographs in the imperial context, they located and sorted out sizeable visual funds that lingered neglected and underfunded. But alas, Dias’s project to create a visual history of the Portuguese empire was left unfinished, though she lamented: “The wealth of the photographic record of Portuguese Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth century is only beginning to be appreciated.”21 Indeed, a lot has changed over the last thirty years, but not enough. There is still no comprehensive history of photography on the former Portuguese colonies, nor for any of the independent nations born thereafter. And yet, that early curiosity with photographs as historical sources has since developed into a solid corpus of historical and critical research that is referenced throughout this book, though with some flagrant shortcomings which this introductory essay attempts to flag out and discuss. It has only been in the last decade that scholars have turned photography in Portuguese colonial Africa into a central focus of research, rather than a curious side interest.22 The first scholarly monograph was Nuno Porto’s groundbreaking study in social anthropology, Angola a Preto e Branco: fotografia e ciência no Museu do Dundo, 1940-1970 (1999),23 20  See Jill R. Dias, “Photographic Sources for the History of Portuguese-Speaking Africa, 1870–1914,” History in Africa, Vol. 18, 1991 [1988], pp. 67–82; and by Beatrix Heintze, “In Pursuit of a Chameleon: Early Ethnographic Photography from Angola in Context”, History in Africa, 17, 1990, pp.  137–156; and “Die Konstruktion des angolanischen ‘Eingeborenen’ durch die Fotografie,” Ethnologie und Photographie, Issue 71, 1999, pp. 3–13. 21  Jill Dias, op. cit., p. 67. 22  See Ana Barradas, O Império a Preto e Branco, Lisboa: Dinossauro, 1998; Eric Gable, “Bad Copies: The Colonial Aesthetic and the Manjaco-Portuguese Encounter,” Paul Landau and Donald Kaspin (eds.), Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, pp. 294–319; Clara Carvalho, “Uma antropologia da imagem colonial: poder e figuração entre os manjaco da Guiné Bissau”, Tempo Brasileiro, 2004, pp. 225–250. 23  Nuno Porto (ed.), Angola a preto e branco: fotografia e ciência no Museu do Dundo, 1940–1970, Coimbra: Museu Antropológico, Universidade de Coimbra, 1999; See also Nuno Porto, “Picturing the Museum: Photography and the Work of Mediation in the Third Portuguese Empire”, Mary Bouquet (ed.), Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future, New York: Berghahn Books, 2001, pp. 36–54; Nuno Porto, “Under the gaze of the ancestors: photographs and performance in colonial Angola”, Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (eds.), Photographs, Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Photographs, London; New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 113–131; Nuno Porto, “www.diamangdigital.net: memória, performance, colonialidade”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 487–496.

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discussing the use of photography with source communities in Angola. Along with the recent publication of some biographical essays and merely illustrative photobooks, this has been followed by the release of academic books like Leonor Pires Martins’s sweeping survey of colonial illustrations in the printed press, Um Império de Papel (2012)24 and the earlier iteration of this volume, an essay collection edited by Filipa Lowndes Vicente, O Império da Visão (2014).25 This volume—with articles by thirty authors, some of them also in this book—was the outcome of a 2009 funded project which, for the first time in Portugal, brought together all scholars interested on the subject and mapped out the photographic collections regarding the colonial experience within Portuguese public archives.26 More recently, some innovative PhDs—from Rio de Janeiro and Minnesota to Lisbon and Florence—have kept on enriching this field. Some have already been turned into books, such as Marcus Vinicius de Oliveira’s À Sombra do Colonialismo (2021)27 and Drew Thompson’s Filtering Histories (2021),28 while others, by Inês Vieira Gomes and Alba Martín Luque, for instance, await publication.29 The full-length studies on photography in Portuguese colonial Africa remain relatively rare, but the dozens of

24  Leonor Pires Martins, Um Império de Papel  – Imagens do Colonialismo Português na Imprensa Periódica Ilustrada (1875–1940), Lisboa: Edições 70, 2012. 25  Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014. 26  Portugal’s Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)-funded Research Project coordinated by Filipa Lowndes Vicente, Knowledge and Vision. Photography within the Portuguese Colonial Archive and Museum (1850–1950) (PTDC/HIS-HIS/112198/2009). 27  Marcus Vinicius de Oliveira, À sombra do colonialismo: Fotografia, circulação e projeto colonial português (1930–1951), São Paulo: Letra & Voz, 2021. 28  Drew Thompson, op. cit., 2021. 29  Inês Vieira Gomes, Fotografia e Império. Imagens da África Colonial Portuguesa entre 1875 e 1940. PhD Thesis (ICS-ULisboa, 2022); Alba Martin Luque, Disparando imágenes: una historia visual de la guerra de descolonización del África portuguesa contada desde el caso de estudio del Frente de Liberación de Mozambique (FRELIMO), 1955–1975. PhD Thesis (European University Institute, 2022).

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doctoral theses underway worldwide are a testament to the sea change in this topic. The last decade saw an outpouring of special journal issues,30 film documentaries, conferences, research projects and artistic events, all of them investigating still images of the colonial era. A major change is also noticeable over this time span—from the historians or anthropologists who “found” photography within their mostly written “archives” to the scholars who have foregrounded images in their research. In the last years, a revisionist scholarship built up around particular pockets of concern—pioneer photographers,31missionary32 and scientific enterprises,33 30  See, e.g. Drew Thompson, Paolo Israel and Rui Assubuji (eds.), “The Liberation Script in Mozambican History,” Kronos Vol. 39, Winter 2014; Teresa Mendes Flores and Cecilia Järdemar (eds.), “Vistas Imperiais: Visualidades coloniais e processos de descolonização”, Vista, Journal of Visual Culture, No. 5, 2019. 31  Paulo Azevedo, Joseph e Maurice Lazarus: photographos pioneiros de Moçambique, 1899–1908, Maputo: Arquivo Fotográfico Moçambicano, 2014, and Photographos – Pioneiros de Moçambique, Lisboa: Glaciar, 2020. 32  See, for instance, Mădălina Florescu, “Post-abolition Angola in a post-colonial mission archive: a preliminary contextualization of a photograph from the Spiritans’s mission in Malange, northern Angola, 1904”, Social Dynamics, Vol. 40, Issue I, 2014, pp. 66–84; and João Figueiredo, “Heimlich/unheimlich: Outlining the Influence of Spiritan Worldviews in the Work of Angolan Pioneer Photographers José Moraes and Elmano Costa”, Social Sciences and Missions, Vol. 30, Issue 3–4, 2017, pp. 366–387. 33  Clara Carvalho, “O olhar colonial: fotografia e antropologia no Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa”, A Persistência da História: Passado e Contemporaneidade em África, Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2004, pp.  119–147; Sandra Xavier, “Numa estreita vereda aberta na floresta; botânica, iconografia, território”, Paulo Amaral, Alexandre Ramires, Fátima Sales and Helena Freitas (eds.), Missão Botânica: Angola 1927–1937, Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2005, pp.  77–96; Cristina Nogueira da Silva, “Fotografando o mundo colonial africano. Moçambique, 1929”, Varia História, Belo Horizonte, vol. 25, n. 41, jan/jun 2009, pp. 107–128; Katie McKeown, “‘A once & future Eden’. Gorongosa National Park & the making of Mozambique”, Richard Vokes (ed.), Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives, Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey, 2012, pp.  166–186; Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, “A fotografia na obra de Mendes Correia (1888–1960): modos de representar, diferenciar e classificar da “antropologia colonial”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 45–66; Cristina Nogueira da Silva, “O registo da diferença: fotografia e classificação jurídica das populações coloniais (Moçambique, primeira metade do século XX)”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 67–84; Cláudia Castelo and Catarina Mateus, “Etnografia Angolana” (1935–1939): histórias da coleção fotográfica de Elmano Cunha e Costa”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 85–106; Ana Cristina Roque, “Missão Antropológica de Moçambique (1936–1956)”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 107–115; Ana Cristina Martins, “Fotografias da Missão Antropológica e Etnológica da Guiné (1946–1947): entre a forma e o conteúdo”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 117–139; Bárbara Direito, “Caçados e caça-

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propaganda and official exhibitions,34 labour and human rights issues,35 dores nas fotografias do arquivo da Companhia de Moçambique”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 141–155; Augusto Nascimento, “Olhar as mudanças sociais em São Tomé e Príncipe através das fotografias”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 157–167; Nuno Borges de Araújo, “Fotografia científica em Angola no último quartel do século XIX: o caso do naturalista José de Anchieta”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp.  171–181; António Carmo Gouveia, “Do nome à imagem: percursos de uma planta tropical de São Tomé numa fotografia do final do século XIX”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 183–194; Paulo Jorge Fernandes, “A fotografia e a edificação do Estado Colonial: a missão de Mariano de Carvalho à província de Moçambique em 1890”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 195–210; Teresa Mendes Flores, “A preto e branco: folheando os relatórios médicos da Diamang”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), O Império da Visão, 2014, pp. 223–242; Mário Machaqueiro, “Imagens de muçulmanos em tempos de sedução colonial”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp.  259–273; Amélia Frazão-Moreira, “Ethnobiological research and ethnographic challenges in the ‘ecological era’”, Etnográfica, Vol. 19, No. 3, 2015, pp. 605–624; Teresa Mendes Flores, “As fotografias da expedição portuguesa ao Muatiânvuo – 1884/88”, Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens, No. 47, 2017, pp. 53–77; António Fernando Cascais and Mariana Gomes da Costa, “Corpos colonizados: Recursos com paisagem em fundo. Uma agenda de pesquisa”, Vista, No. 5, 2019, pp. 101–126; Lorena Travassos, “Missões antropológicas de São Tomé (1954) e Angola (1955): Caminhos para a descolonização da fotografia colonial”, Estudos Históricos, Vol. 34, No. 72, 2021, pp. 81–106. 34  See, e.g. Maria do Carmo Séren, A Porta do meio: a Exposição Colonial de 1934: Fotografias da casa Alvão, Porto: Centro Português de Fotografia, 2001; Leonor Pires Martins, “Imaginar o Império através da revista ilustrada O Occidente (1878–1915)”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 277–289; Rita Carvalho, “Fotografia e ilustração na literatura colonial do Estado Novo”, Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 305–317; Nadia Vargaftig, “Para ver, para vender: o papel da imagem fotográfica nas exposições coloniais portuguesas (1929–1940)”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 343–352; Inês Vieira Gomes, “Imagens de Angola e Moçambique na metrópole. Exposições de fotografia no Palácio Foz (1938–1960)”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 353–365; Maria do Carmo Piçarra, “Cinema Império: contributos para uma genealogia da imagem colonial”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 367–384; Filomena Serra, “Visões do Império: a 1ª Exposição Colonial Portuguesa de 1934 e alguns dos seus álbuns”, Revista Brasileira de História da Mídia, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2016, pp.  45–59; Afonso Dias Ramos, “Photography and Propaganda in the Fall of the Portuguese Empire: Volkmar Wentzel’s Assignments for National Geographic Magazine”, José Luis Garcia, Chandrika Kaul, Filipa Subtil and Alexandra Santos (eds.), Media and Portuguese Empire, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 253–274; Teresa Matos Pereira, “Fotografia e propaganda colonial. Notas sobre uma união de interesses na primeira década do Estado Novo”, Comunicação Pública, Vol. 12, No. 23, 2017 [online]; Filomena Serra (ed.), Printed Photography and Propaganda in the Portuguese Estado Novo, Gijón: Editorial Muga, 2021. 35  See Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Livros Brancos Almas Negras. A “Missão Civilizadora” do Colonialismo Português (c.1870–1930), Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2009; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, “As provas da “civilização”: fotografia, colonialismo e direitos humanos”, Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp.  387–398; Nuno Domingos, “O feitiço das imagens: trabalhadores industriais modernos na paisagem colonial em Moçambique”,

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gender and sexual violence36 and conflict photography.37

Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 243–258; and Jeremy Ball, Angola’s Colossal Lie. Forced Labor on a Sugar Plantation, 1913–1977, Brill: Leiden, 2015. 36  See, e.g. Carlos Barradas, “Poder ver, poder saber. A fotografia nos meandros do colonialismo e pós-colonialismo. Arquivos da Memória: Antropologia”, Arte e Imagem, No. 5–6, 2009, pp.  59–79. Clara Carvalho, “‘Raça’, género e imagem colonial: representações de mulheres nos arquivos fotográficos”, José Machado, Clara Carvalho and Neusa Mendes de Gusmão (eds.), O visual e o quotidiano, Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2008, pp. 145–174; Selma Pantoja, “Women’s Work in the Fairs and Markets of Luanda”, Clara Sarmento (ed.), Women in the Portuguese Colonial Empire: The Theatre of Shadows, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp.  81–93; Carlos Barradas, “Descolonizando enunciados: a quem serve objectivamente a fotografia?”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 447–459; Júlia Garraio, “Perdidas na exposição? Desafiar o imaginário colonial português através de fotografias de mulheres Negras”, António Sousa Ribeiro and Margarida Calafate Ribeiro (eds.), Geometrias da memória: configurações pós-­ coloniais, Porto: Afrontamento, 2016, pp.  279–303; Filipa Lowndes Vicente, “Black Women’s Bodies in the Portuguese Colonial Visual Archive (1900–1975)”, Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, 30/31, 2017, pp. 16–67; Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Inês Vieira Gomes, “Inequalities on trial: conflict, violence and dissent in the making of colonial Angola (1907–1920)”, Francisco Bethencourt (ed.), Inequality in the Portuguese-speaking World, Brighton; Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2018, pp.  217–242; Júlia Garraio, “Weiße Männer und schwarze Frauen in Fotos aus dem portugiesischen Kolonialkrieg. Über Skripte und die Unsichtbarkeit sexueller Gewalt als individuelle Erfahrung”, Gaby Zipfel, Regina Mühlhäuser and Kirsten Campbell (eds.), Vor aller Augen. Sexuelle Gewalt in bewaffneten Konflikten, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2021, pp. 535–543. 37   On the decolonization wars, see Paulo de Medeiros, “War Pics: Photographic Representations of the Colonial War”, Luso-Brazilian Review, Vol. 39, No. 2, Winter, 2002, pp. 91–106; Drew Thompson, “AIM, FOCUS, SHOOT: Photographic Narratives of War, Independence, and Imagination in Mozambique, 1950 to 1993”, PhD Thesis, University of Minnesota, 2013, and “Visualizing the Liberated Zones in Frelimo’s Mozambique, 1963–1974,” Social Dynamics: A Journal in African Studies, Vol. 39, No. 1, Spring 2013, pp.  24–50; Afonso Dias Ramos, “Angola 61, O Horror das Imagens” and Catarina Laranjeiro, “Etnografia visual da Guerra Colonial. Luta de libertação na Guiné”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 397–432 and 435–446; Carlos Maurício, “Um longo degelo: a guerra colonial e a descolonização nos ecrãs portugueses (1974–1994). Um inventário”, Ler História 65, 2014, pp. 159–177; Ansgar Schaefer, “Imagens de A Guerra. Interacção entre os discursos visual e verbal na série de Joaquim Furtado”, Práticas da História 1, 2015, pp. 33–60; Maria José Lobo Antunes, “O que se vê e o que não pode ser visto: fotografia, violência e guerra”, Elsa Peralta, Bruno Góis and Joana Gonçalo Oliveira (eds.) Retornar: Traços de Memória do Fim do Império, Lisboa: Edições 70, 2017, pp. 213–224; Clara Pinto Roldão Caldeira, “O corpo nas imagens da guerra colonial portuguesa: subjetividades em análise”, Galáxia, No. 40, January–April 2019, pp. 17–40; Uliano Lucas, Revoluções: Guiné-Bissau, Angola e Portugal  (1969-1974), Lisboa: Edições do Saguão, 2023.

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If the fields of ethnography, anthropology and history once ruled the writing on colonial-era photography, with the emergence of cultural, museum and media studies, this is no longer the case. This visual field has exerted a magnetic pull over a wide range of social sciences and the contemporary art scene, prompting a shift in discourse more aligned with a critical revision of public history, and thus leading to a sharper focus on issues of identity formation, social memory and anti-racist pedagogy.38 In addition, this turn has also meant a more rigorous and informed approach to colonial photography, for the most part no longer clinging to overly deterministic approaches to the medium through simplistic binaries, without methodological sophistication and historiographical depth, and increasingly making the images central, instead of collateral, to the argument, thereby avoiding the tendency to slip into the anecdotal or the biographical. Such an upsurge of interest in colonial visuality is, of course, not immune to problems of its own. It provides no automatic insurance of criticality. But since most of the scholarship has been uneven in quality, scattered in location and only available in Portuguese, this book seeks to render it widely available. The following essays explore the contexts and ambiguities that vitalized colonial-era photography across Portuguese colonial Africa, without a clear thematic pulse and weaving a diverse constellation of conceptual tools, aiming to respond to the critical juncture: how to suspend generalizing and simplistic judgements to reorient our understanding of colonial photography? Building on a core of significant images, this introduction thematises key issues in current research and also delivers an overview of the state of the art.

The First Photographs in Portuguese Colonial Africa “Officially black people were frequently depicted in the same visual language as the flora and fauna – represented as if in their natural habitat – for the collector of natural history or invariably relegated to the lower orders of the species as belonging to the “great family of man.”” Santu Mofokeng (1999)39 38  Liliana Oliveira da Rocha and Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, “Fotografia colonial: materialidades e imaterialidades identitárias no contexto português”, Criar Educação, Vol. 7, No. 2, July/December 2018, np. 39  Santu Mofokeng, “The Black Photo Album”, Revue Noire, Anthology of African & Indian Ocean Photography, Paris: Revue Noire, 1999, p. 70.

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The history of photography in Africa is as old as the medium itself. The technology arrived in the continent in November 1839, two months after Louis Daguerre announced his invention in France, less than two months after D.  W. Seager made the first daguerreotype in America.40 When François Arago announced the birth of the visual medium at the Institut de France in Paris, it was Egypt that he elected as a priority destination for photography, outlining its use as a mode of imperial domination in itself. The chemist John Herschel, who discovered the action of hyposulfite of soda on silver salts in Cape Town in the 1830s, coined the terms “photography,” “negative” and “positive” images for the first time. Almost immediately after its invention, photography would also be taken up by African photographers—the earliest recorded case of an African making daguerreotypes is that of Khedive Mehmet of Alexandria, in 183941—and it gave rise to new professions, aesthetic practices and forms of presentation. The discourse on colonial photography has not been immune to that desire to fix its nature and origins—in the relentless drive for what Paul Gilroy has called “overintegrated conceptions of culture that present immutable and ethnic differences as an absolute break in the histories and experiences of ‘black’ and ‘white’ people”42—but its place within critical theory also serves to dislodge this quest for certainties, showing multiple appropriations, uses and counter-uses. There is no single originary truth, and certainly no unity in visual practices either. Any attempt to define and to locate African photography in terms of the cultural background of photographers, geographical location of encounters or the subsequent archival fate faces numerous challenges. But one image routinely used to

 The first daguerreotypes in Africa were made in Alexandria in November 1839, by Horace Vernet and his nephew Frédéric Goupil-Fesquet, during their Voyage en Orient (Paris: Challamel, 1843). 41  Olu Oguibe, “Photography and the Substance of the Image”, The Culture Game, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004, pp. 73–89. 42  Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 2. 40

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illustrate the origins of photography43 is particularly useful here in order to articulate the main concerns of this book and pull together the loose methodological strands of this field of study today—from debates on the nature and process of representation, the materiality and meaning of photographs, as well as their fraught political implications, complex cultural legacies, and lastly, the strange place of Portuguese colonial Africa in the ever-expanding intersection of visuality and empire (Fig. 1.1). In 1845, merely months after making the most iconic portrait of Daguerre, the French photographer E. Thiésson is said to have sailed to Sofala in Mozambique, on East Africa, where he made another portrait. This one has long been held as the oldest surviving daguerreotype of southern Africa, the earliest known photographic portrait of an African and the first time that a black person was caught on camera. Strikingly, unlike Daguerre, the sitter is not a surly white man dressed to the nines, self-possessed  and self-assured, gazing defiantly into the camera, but an anonymous black woman posing in profile, topless, slightly slumped and with downcast eyes. She sits uneasily on a cane-bottomed chair with a woven wrap tied below her breasts, fists stiffly clenched over her lap. It is one of the most cited and reproduced daguerreotypes as the first document of photography’s early penetration into the continent, and the necessary double to the individuated bourgeois portrait: the illustration of an ethnic type. This depersonalized view is thought to have pioneered the side and profile view in early daguerreotypes, which became the standard visual technique for photographing non-Western subjects. This is the forerunner of the “mug shot” in police photography. Along the lucrative private commercial venture of which no surviving examples are known, Thiésson’s brief career is then  symptomatic of that structural discrepancy in the 43  Notable examples include Janet E. Buerger, French daguerreotypes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 91; Gilbert Beaugé, “De l’apparence des caractères au caractère des apparences. Photographie et anthropologie: 1839–1912”, Le monde alpin et rhodanien. Revue régionale d’ethnologie, 1995, Vol. 23, pp.  81–144; Bates Lowry and Isabel Barrett Lowry, The Silver Canvas: Daguerreotype Masterpieces from the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 1998, p. 110; Robert A. Sobieszek, Ghost in the Shell: Photography and the Human Soul, 1850–2000: Essays on Camera Portraiture, Los Angeles, Cambridge: LACMA, MIT Press, 1999, p. 107; Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002; Mary Warner Marien, Photography: A Cultural History, London: Laurence King, 2002, p. 355; George Ermakoff, O negro na fotografia brasileira do século XIX, Rio de Janeiro: Casa Editorial, 2004, p. 294; Erin Haney, Photography and Africa, London: Reaktion Books, 2010, p. 35; T. Jack Thompson, Light on Darkness? Missionary Photography of Africa, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2013, pp.  23–26; Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (eds.), Humanitarian Photography: A History, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 18.

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Fig. 1.1 E.  Thiésson, Native woman of Sofala, Mozambique. 1845. Daguerreotype. 8.9 × 6.6 cm. George Eastman Museum, gift of Eastman Kodak Company, ex-collection Gabriel Cromer. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum

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development of the medium in the nineteenth century around what Allan Sekula described as the “fundamental tension between the uses of photography that fulfil a bourgeois conception of the self and uses that seek to establish and delimit the terrain of the other.”44 This tension between typological images aimed at capturing the generic and typical and portraits devoted to distinction or individuation is made profound by foreign domination and racial classification in the colonial world. The picture is extensively annotated, but names and personal information are omitted. The physiological traits and anthropometric notations are not. It only states: “Native of Sofala, Monomotapa, thirty years of age; though still young, this woman has hair that is almost entirely white.” This was meant as a study, not a portrait, and one that was implicated in processes of arraying humans on an evolutionary scale, whereby the nudity of a black woman (but not a white woman) before the camera was then deemed acceptable. The portrait encapsulates the leading concerns dominating scholarship in the last thirty years, in its body-focused analyses of photography as a medium to articulate difference, and it crystallises some of the shortcomings this book seeks to redress. The widely held belief that this is the oldest photograph in southern Africa is, however, incorrect.45 Unquestioningly reiterated over half a century, no evidence was ever produced. In fact, the image was not made in Mozambique but in downtown Lisbon, in the French photographer’s studio. About Thiésson himself, little is known, other than that he showed work in the first photography exhibition ever, and was then hailed the premier daguerreotype portraitist.46 In 1844, Thiésson had made a name for himself in Paris, the vaunted birthplace of photography, not so much for the portraits of celebrities such as Daguerre or David Angers, but for two anonymous sitters from Brazil, a man and a woman from a Botocudo tribe, Naknyanúk, in five plates including front and side views, also held as  Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs”, Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring, 1981, p. 21. It has been noted by Deborah Poole, in turn, that this influential quote on the criminal other indicates the failure of photography criticism to reckon with the colonial world and racial ideologies, absent from the original analysis. Vision, Race, and Modernity: Visual Economy of the Andean Image World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 130. 45  This misunderstanding dates back to South African critic Arthur D. Bensusan’s authoritative claim in his foundational history of photography (Silver images: history of photography in Africa, Cape Town: H. Timmins, 1966, p. 20), in a mix-up probably due to the mistranslation of the original caption in French, assuming the “born in” to mean “native of”, a semantic slip-up telling of a colonial world order. 46  In 1844, Thiésson exhibited his work in Paris, together with Bisson, Gros, Derussy and Thierry. See Georges Potonniée, Histoire de la découverte de la photographie, Paris: P. Montel, 1925. 44

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the first photographic portraits of native Americans.47 They had been brought from north-eastern Brazil to Paris by a Frenchman called Marcus Porte, in 1843, under unknown yet likely coercive means, and given the Portuguese name Manuel and Marie. After being constantly subjected to scientific studies in Europe, they left. Thiésson’s daguerreotypes had an enduring impact. As one eminent critic later wrote, “eighteen years have passed and nothing purer, clearer or franker has ever been made in photography.”48 Yet, by all reckonings, what stood out for contemporary viewers was not the aesthetic merit, but the instrumental value, foreseeing photography as a revolutionary tool for anthropology. The plates were displayed at the French Academy of Sciences in 1845 by François Arago and Étienne Serres, and led the latter to propose the creation of a “photographic museum of the human races” in Paris.49 With that in mind, Serres invited Thiésson to deliver portraits of black people—“photographs of African and Ethiopian races.”50 It was this request that is said to have determined Thiésson’s move to Lisbon where, as many itinerant daguerreotypists in the Iberian Peninsula,51 he temporarily set up a studio on 34 Rua Nova dos Mártires until 20 April 1845. Thiésson’s signature portraits with a blank backdrop were in high demand (a local newspaper jested that weeks after his arrival he had

47  See Michel Frizot, Nouvelle histoire de la photographie, Paris: Adam Biro, 1994, pp.  259–271; Emmanuel Garrigues, “Le savoir ethnographique et la photographie”, L’Ethnographie, No. 109, 1991, pp. 11–54; and Marcos Morel, “Cinco imagens e múltiplos olhares: ‘descobertas’ sobre os índios do Brasil e a fotografia do século XIX”, História, Ciências, Saúde – Manguinhos, Vol. 8, 2001, pp. 1039–1058. 48  Ernest Conduché, “La photographie au Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle”, La Lumière – Revue de Photographie, No. 16, 17 April 1858. 49  Idem. Serres lamented the absence of a museum of anthropology, claiming that botany and zoology had made an “extremely rapid” progress due to their collections. He proposed the creation of a “photographic museum of human races”, freeing anthropology from its speculative character since photography occupied “the positive part” of knowledge. The museum would, in fact, be founded with collections of photographs featuring the Brazilian couple, the African population of Lisbon and among other later additions, Eskimos. 50  Abbé Moigno, “Photographie, son histoire, ses procédés, sa théorie”, Revue scientifique et industrielle, September 1847, p. 363. 51  Another relevant example here was the Frenchman Blaise Bonnevide, who worked in Porto in 1860, before becoming a pioneer of colonial photography in Africa, opening the first studio in Senegal. See Patrice Garcia, Blaise Bonnevide, 1824–1906 & Félix Bonnevide, 1857–1935: photographes à la côte occidentale d’Afrique de 1869 à 1889, Meudon-la-Forêt: Patrice Garcia, 2015.

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captured “a third of all Lisboners”).52 The stay yielded the only-known account of Thiésson’s process, by writer António Feliciano Castilho (who, paradoxically, was blind), described as “the most fitting and irreprehensible portraits: a veritable mirror with a memory”53—a famous metaphor for photography often ascribed to Oliver Wendell Holmes, who only used it later.54 Thiésson delivered twenty-two plates of African “ethnic types.” This is the only known one. On 21 August 1845, Arago presented them to the French Academy as “truly remarkable photographic images representing men, women and children from varied black populations.”55 The verdict was clear. The “daguerreotypes of negroes and negresses in Lisbon by Mr. Thiesson in the service of ethnography and anthropology” were “the best that photography has ever done.”56Serres used them to articulate photography and anthropology for the first time, laying out their future terms of inscription in modern racial theories. Such daguerreotypes showed “all the utility of the photographic art for the study of human races […] Thiesson’s example will be followed.”57 So it was. Word travelled wide and far to Italy, Germany, the Netherlands and Britain. In 1850, in London, for instance, Eliza Cook raved about Thiésson’s work in Lisbon, and stated that “the interesting, but hitherto neglected science of the human race, will find in photography a powerful ally.”58 This alliance—in its overriding drive to categorize, divide and classify the human population as a colonial project that arrogated the right to parcel the world and rule its people—moulded history irreversibly, enshrining the marking of difference as the founding violence of the medium, forever defining our notions of race, identity and 52  Cited in José-Augusto França, A Arte em Portugal no Século XIX, Lisboa: Livraria Bertrand, 1966, p. 286. 53  António Feliciano de Castilho, “Luz Pintora”, Revista Universal Lisbonense, IV, n. 27, 23 January 1845, pp. 329–330. 54  Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph”, Atlantic Monthly, June 1859, pp. 738–748. For a critical discussion of the racial implications of this turn of phrase, see Leigh Raiford, “Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory”, History and Theory, Vol. 48, Issue 4, pp. 112–124. 55  Abbé Moigno, op. cit., p. 363. 56  L’Institut. Journal Universel des sciences et des sociétés savants en France et à l’étranger, No. 604, 23 July 1845, p. 267. 57  Étienne Serres, “Anthropologie comparée – Observations sur l’application de la photographie à l’étude des races humaines,” Comptes rendus hebdomadaires des séances de l’Académie des Sciences, Vol. 21, Paris: Académie des Sciences, 1845, pp. 242–246. 58  Eliza Cook’s Journal, Vol. 3, London: John Owen Clarke, 1850, p. 95.

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culture. As Tina Campt remarked, “the reading of surfaces, particularly of flesh and skin, is profoundly implicated in the pernicious role photography has played in the history of racial formation.”59 The Lisbon daguerreotypes were credited as the model for one of the most infamous photographic projects of all time, Louis Agassiz’s attempt to catalogue races in the US in 1850, hiring Joseph T. Zealy to photograph enslaved black men and women across South Carolina, unclothed, bust-length, from the front, side and back, to prove that humanity split into species, and that racial types continued away from places of origin.60 Such daguerreotypes became the most prominent documents of photography in the service of racism, as the test case for the medium’s enduring role in producing and reproducing inequality, after they were found in a box at the Peabody Museum at Harvard in 1976. Artist Carrie Mae Weems famously used them in the protest installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995), enlarging the original pictures, colouring them red and overlaying text so as to foreground their status as markers of black racial inferiority. A copyright battle then ensued, with Harvard threatening to sue Weems, before ending up buying the series for their collection. In 2019, a lawsuit was filed against the university by one descendant of a depicted slave, requesting the original plates and damages paid for profiting off images obtained without consent.61 This case combines the historic use of photography to shape and support now discredited theories of scientific racism, and the legal, ethical, political dilemmas that  it poses today: do pictures simply reify the 59  Tina M.  Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe, Durham: Duke University Press, 2012, p. 33. 60  In 1865, invited by Emperor Pedro II, Agassiz travelled to Brazil to set up a human laboratory in Manaus, cataloguing “mixed-race” people and making daguerreotypes. Agassiz deemed slavery worse in Brazil than in the US because of “the less energetic and powerful race of the Portuguese and Brazilian […] compared to the Anglo-Saxon”, and thought that “the free blacks compared well in intelligence and activity with the Brazilians and Portuguese”, who gave the “singular spectacle of a high race receiving the impress of a lower one, of an educated class adopting the habits and sinking to the level of the savage.” Cited in Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 287. 61  Eileen Kinsella, “‘Morally, Harvard Has No Grounds’: Inside the Explosive Lawsuit That Accuses the University of Profiting from Images of Slavery”, ArtNetNews, 28 March 2019; Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, “The Captive Photograph. Images seized from enslaved people are not private property to be owned, but ancestors to be cared for”, Boston Review, 23 September 2021.

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abhorrent policies they were created to justify in the first place? Can they still inculcate racism despite critical contextualisation? Is there an ethical obligation to look at them to forestall oblivion, or does this instead keep the dehumanising narratives alive? May they be used without reproducing the inherent codes? What does it mean that images of enslaved or colonized peoples were mostly envisioned by Europeans, who also controlled the means of production, rights of access, and terms of circulation? How can we deal with what Jane Anderson has termed “authorship,” a form of anxiety underpinning colonial archives whereby communities with kin represented have no legal stake in documents, whereas the copyright, gatekeeping and custodianship incline towards the inheritors of colonial power?62 These recent developments signal the possibility of turning the colonial archive on its head through creative manipulation and interpretation, subversively reframing relations between image and identity, as antidotes to stereotypical representation and received conditions of representation. However, they also bring out the unyielding relevance of colonial photographs—their afterlives of harm, the crisis or dilemmas of visibility, the debates sparked in this century regarding the visual repatriation of archives and objects, calling into question the proprietary and moral rights to the material, and the discussions with source communities. The Sofala daguerreotype is taken as a stepping stone in the deeply held association between the colonial gaze and minority identity, as the literal dawn of racial profiling through a camera—even described as “a supremacist zoological study” that paved the way “to measure and control through representation,”63 bound up with biological determinism and eugenics— rendering palpable the stigmatising forces that long outlive it. In the interest of classification and subjugation, it became a symbol of the taxonomic impulse organizing the discourse on photography, as a visual document through which colonial powers envisaged their difference from, and superiority over colonized subjects. Yet, an interesting tension runs between the two projects above as understood by Serres and Agassiz, which has been wholly overlooked by photography studies. Both were marshalled in the service of nascent race theories, arraying humans across an e­ volutionary scale from the most advanced to primitive races. However, Agassiz 62  Jane Anderson, “Anxieties of authorship in the colonial archive”, Cynthia Chris and David Gerstner (eds.), Media Authorship, New York: Taylor & Francis, 2013, pp. 229–246. 63  Christopher Webster, “Seeing the odalisque: aspects of the colonial gaze in South Africa, 1845–1975”, de Arte, Vol. 34, Issue 60, 1999, pp. 20–28.

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endeared himself to proponents of slavery and used the daguerreotypes from South Carolina in order to further the cause of segregation. Serres, on the other hand, was a staunch opponent of slavery and polygenism, and believed that the daguerreotypes from Lisbon would usher in a new era in human history, as photography would lay to rest the age-old demeaning of Africans as subhuman beings on the part of both Western philosophers and scientists: Philosophers, seeing in them the passage of ape to man […] unwittingly made way for the atrocious law of the slave trade. Scientists, […] by comparing them to the European race, exaggerated their degradation, and lowered their terms of address to Hottentot or Bushmen races. In both cases, the negro appears to be something more than an ape, but less than a man. Our descriptions remain affected by this unfortunate scheme […] to assign the African race its due rank in the big human family we need to look at the numerous varieties that compose it, greater than in the other races, which photography, due to its speed of execution, reproduces better than any other procedure.64

Serres then held that the invention of photography would undo the exclusion of black subjects from the human family—though, in an unabashedly racist fashion, he placed them at the bottom of the scale—and that the key scientific virtue of this medium was to document ethnic phenotypes that would soon be lost forever as the inevitable result of the cross-breeding in the colonial world order. Ultimately, Agassiz’s mobilisation of the medium on behalf of policies of discrimination, segregation and exclusion would prevail, as photography was used to create and contrast images of racial difference to prohibit intermix, and only DNA tests quashed the pseudoscientific claims of racialized identity. Indeed, it was a colonial world in flux long before the dawn of photography. The daguerreotype of the Sofala woman— as well as those of the Brazilian couple—is also relevant because the perceived other is not in non-Western shores. In fact, Thiésson never left Europe. Abbé Moigno actually went as far as to stress this immobility, and not its movability, as the capital feat of photography. “It is no longer indispensable to undertake long trips looking for human types,” he wrote, 64  Some of the pseudoscientific racist claims made by Serres, such as belly button height variance and flattened labia as marks of black inferiority, were to be pilloried within the scientific community. See Stephen Jay Gould, Ever Since Darwin: reflections in natural history, Handsworth: Penguin, 1980.

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“[they] will come to us due to the incessant progress of civilisation. Our great cities and sea ports present them constantly: it suffices to capture them in transit and to fix their traits and characters.”65 The circulation of people, things and forms, predated the invention and portability of photography. In addition, these dates alone remind us that, in the Portuguese empire, the medium did not come in just as slavery went out—this rule of thumb does not serve all colonial contexts.66 One need only recall that the largest and oldest collection of photographs of enslaved people from Africa in the Americas was captured in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil banned slavery in 1888) by a Portuguese photographer, Christiano Junior, not as a scientific project, but a commercial one, as grotesque souvenirs for visitors—as he advertised on the press, “A varied collection of black customs and types, a most proper thing for those leaving for Europe.”67Portugal only outlawed slavery in 1869, decades after the daguerreotype of the Sofala woman. The last enslaved black woman in Lisbon on record died in the 1930s.68 Yet, as there is no known information on this particular sitter, one must be wary of automatically assuming a subaltern identity just as one should oppose the continued but senseless descriptions of this woman as being the Queen of Xai Xai from Mozambique.69 65  Abbé Moigno, “Photographie, son histoire, ses procédés, sa théorie”, Revue scientifique et industrielle, September 1847, pp. 364. 66  Krista Thompson, “The Evidence of Things Not Photographed: Slavery and Historical Memory in the British West Indies”, Representations, Vol. 113, No. 1, Winter 2011, pp. 39–71. 67  Paulo César de Azevedo and Maurício Lissowsky (eds.), Escravos brasileiros do século XIX na fotografia de Christiano Jr, São Paulo: Ex Libris 1988, p. XXXI. Other photographers as Augusto Stahl, Rodolpho Lindemann, Alberto Henschel or Marc Ferrez also exported portraits of enslaved African types. See Margrit Prussat, “Icons of Slavery: Black Brazil in Nineteenth Century Photography and Image Art”, Ana Lucia Araujo (ed.), Living History: Encountering the Memory of the Heirs of Slavery, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, pp. 203–230. 68  Arlindo Manuel Caldeira, Escravos em Portugal  – Das Origens ao Século XIX, Lisboa: Esfera dos Livros, 2017. 69  This misattribution is also traceable to A. D. Bensusan (p. 9), half a century ago, who claimed: “This may be the famous Native Queen Xai Xai in the province of Zavala [sic], as it was almost certainly an important dignitary who was worthy of a Daguerreotype in those days.” This ascription is nonsensical from an historical and geographical, let alone visual viewpoint, but, by ignoring the history laid out in this introduction, it is still unquestioningly replicated in authoritative books. See, for instance, “the first daguerreotype made in Southern Africa of Queen Xai Xai of Sofala.” Darren Newbury, “Photographic Histories and Practices in Southern Africa”, Gil Pasternak (ed.), The Handbook of Photography Studies, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, p. 428.

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It may be tempting to reclaim the Sofala woman from historical anonymity, to save her from “the enormous condescension of posterity,”70 but one must countenance the possibility that some stories and details will never be retrieved. Some of the recent critical debates have indeed stressed “the indignity of speaking for others,”71 seeking to curb an abusive tendency for narcissistic projection, calling into question one’s own right to reify a living person into a discursive token or validate vicarious speaking.72 These are some of the unresolved ethical issues of visualizing colonialism and witnessing racial violence, which stand at the forefront of contemporary scholarship, asking whether, and how, these photographs should be reproduced, discussed and circulated. The ethical guidelines in this respect remain murky, and the rules of engagement continue to be the subject of impassioned discussion. In facing the overdetermined images of black bodies as spectacle, as opposed to portraits viewed within the privacy of the family, there is a pressing need to develop approaches that “allow for and engage with people’s desires for obscurity,” engaging what John Peffer calls “the right to choose to not be looked at by the prying eyes of strangers”73—that which Édouard Glissant once famously described as the “right to opacity.”74 As expanded reflections unfold on how to attend the dead in the open digital commons—as Saidiya Hartman has mused, “Why subject the dead to new dangers and to a second order of violence?”75—many call into question the reproduction and sharing of material that represents violated subjects who did not necessarily consent to being documented, leaving the enduring impress of asymmetrical contacts between colonizer and colonized.76 In the same  E.P.  Thomson, The Making of the English Working Class, London: Victor Gollancz, 1963, p. 3. 71  Gilles Deleuze, “Intellectuals and power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze”, Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980, pp. 205–217. 72  On recent debates around contemporary engagements with older photographs, see Érika Nimis and Marian Nur Goni, “Images à rebours: Relire les histoires officielles,” Cahiers d’études africaines 230, No. 2 (2018), pp. 283–300. 73  John Peffer, “How Do We Look?”, Kronos, vol. 46, n. 1, November 2020, p. 83. 74  Édouard Glissant, The Poetics of Relation, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997. 75  Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in two acts”, Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism, No. 26, 2008, p. 4. 76  Temi Odumosu, “The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons”, Current Anthropology, Vol. 61, No. S22, October 2020, pp. 289–301. 70

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way that it is also hard to do justice to the messy and uncontained history of visual representation, with the impure time and emotional afterlife of photographs, Denise Ferreira da Silva argues that colonial and racial violence are best understood not through linear thought and time, which flatten and elide their ongoing nature, but through fractal thinking, featuring a repetition of patterns at varying scales.77 Indeed, one must find a way for these archives to enter the wider cultural bloodstream, to be liberated from colonial structures that erased the humanity of certain subjects. This entails bodily and “analytic practices of refusal” which, according to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “involve an active resistance to trading in pain and humiliation, and supply a rationale for blocking the settler colonial gaze that wants those stories.”78 But this also points to, as Gil Hochberg notes, the urgency of reimagining the archive, to approach it not merely through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past, to think of archives as a break from history, not just as its repository.79 Indeed, in the forked history of anthropology and photography, this new medium did not ostensibly serve to recognise the humanity of the other, more aligned with the historical practice of stereotyped spectacles of colonized peoples at exhibitions or human zoos into the mid-twentieth century.80 The history of picture-taking is inseparable from complex histories of subjugation and oppression, from the traffic in human bodies to the looting of African cultural heritage.81 As discussions on colonial 77  Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Fractal Thinking”, aCCeSsions, No. 2, April 27, 2016. On the notion of “impure time”, see Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg’s History of Art, College Park: Penn State University Press, 2016. On the emotional afterlife of colonial photographs, see Wayne Modest, “Museums and the Emotional Afterlife of Colonial Photography”, Elizabeth Edwards and Sigrid Lien (eds.), Uncertain Images: Museums and the Work of Photographs, London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 21–41. 78  Eve Tuck and K.  Wayne Yang, “Unbecoming Claims: Pedagogies of Refusal in Qualitative Research”, Qualitative Inquiry 20, No. 6, 2014, p. 812. 79  Gil Hochberg, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future, Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. 80  See, e.g. Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the Native and the Making of European Identities, London: Leicester University Press, 2000. 81  An estimated 90 to 95 per cent of Africa’s cultural heritage is outside the continent. Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics, Paris: Ministère de la Culture, 2018.

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restitution, reparation, restoration now reach a fever pitch, it is important to read these circulations of people, objects and images together. Take, for instance, the 1885 expedition to Angola by the Dutch dealer L.J.  Goddefroy, with backing from the Lisbon Geographic Society. The 1258 objects and 191 photographs collected were then placed on a private exhibition tour across Europe, alongside sixteen people handpicked from ethnic groups (only one of them spoke Portuguese) under unknown circumstances. The artefacts, images and people were showcased in Amsterdam (1888), at the zoo in The Hague (1888) and at the foot of the new Eiffel Tower at the Parisian Universal Exhibition (1889), celebrating the first centenary of the French Revolution.82 Though this case also remains largely unknown, there is hardly a more abject indictment of the Enlightenment contradictions as to who counted as a subject than in this pairing of modern triumphalism and evolutionary teleology. The sixteen Angolans, men, women and children, were paraded as specimens of exotic races—whom Goddefroy disparaged publicly as “pure wild people,” “dogs” and “slaves,” while boasting that his exhibition was visited by the likes of Gustave Eiffel, Émile Zola or Arthur de Rothschild. Every morning, before the public arrived, their bodies were measured and studied by scientists in the interest of phrenology and anthropometrics. Among the scientists were two known photographers, Prince Roland Bonaparte and Maurice Bucquet, the founder of the Photo Club de Paris, whose haunting series of portraits—as well as those obtained in the actual expedition to Africa that led to the exhibition—are yet to be studied, as reminders of dehumanising patterns and networks of circulation of people, objects and forms of a colonial world order that long predated the invention of photography. Indeed, the emergence of this visual technology was embedded in pre-existing discursive, sociological, cultural narratives—indeed,  the image more often deemed as the obscenest rendition of slavery representsa joyous black woman chaperoned in a chariot from Angola to Jamaica, following the trope of the Black Venus, a term that was also commonly used to describe this Sofala woman depicted in Lisbon.83 82  See Joseph Deniker and Louis Laloy, “Les races exotiques à l’Exposition Universelle de 1889”, L’Anthropologie 1, 1890, pp. 513–546. 83  See Afonso Dias Ramos, “Imageless Angola – Photography and Political Violence in a Trasnational Age”, PhD Thesis, UCL, 2018. For a long view of visuality in the Portuguese empire, see Orte Krass (ed.), Visualizing Portuguese Power: The Political Use of Images in Portugal and its Overseas Empire (16th-18th Century), Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

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If, in the mid-nineteenth century, photography was used extensively to create type or specimen portraits in the developing science of biological or physical anthropology—a practice founded before photography, like comparative anatomy, which comprised measurements and drawings of crania, in theories that fed into the justification for the continuation of slavery and widespread colonial rule, offering documentary proof of a correspondence between physical type and intelligence, and even the propensity towards criminal behaviour. It was, after all, the high era of imperial conquest, and as much as diverse ethnic groups could be caught on camera on the shores of Europe—e.g. the photographs of Chinese and Algerian residents in Paris by Henri Jacquart (1851)—countless expeditions would be launched to photograph populations around the globe—to East Africa by Charles Guillain (1846–1848), the Canary Islands by Louis-Auguste Bisson (c. 1842) or Mauritius by Chambay et Lecorgne (1857).84 International image-makers documented Portuguese colonial Africa from early on—e.g. in 1862, Rafael Castro y Ordóñez, the first Spanish photographer in an expedition, captured Cabo Verde, the same archipelago photographed by the German geologist Alphons Stübel in 1865.85 Since the 1850s, colonial expeditions used photography to document places and people, playing a defining role in explorations and conquests. Portugal was no exception. Two decades later, its most important travels, by Serpa Pinto86 (revealingly, the explorer after whom they later  renamed the Lisbon street in which Thiésson had portrayed the black population), Hermenegildo Capelo and Roberto Ivens, carried camera equipment. Though every resulting plate appears to have been lost, the prints and drawings made after them survive to this day.87 The Sofala portrait is illustrative of the fraught interactions between the colonial order, racial theories and structures of knowledge that must be taken into account in an analysis of the visual culture of this period. But it is also a sobering reminder that, in dealing with colonial-era photography, 84  See Nélia Dias, “Photographier et mesurer: les portraits anthropologiques”, Romantisme 84, 1994, pp. 37–49. See also Photoquai: le monde regarde le monde: biennale des images du monde, Paris: Nicolas Chaudun, Musée du quai Branly, 2007. 85  See Frank Stephan Kohl, “Um “olhar europeu” em 2000 imagens: Alphons Stübel e sua coleção de fotografias da América do Sul”, Studium, No. 21, 2005, pp. 51–74. 86  See Serpa Pinto, How I Crossed Africa: from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, through Unknown Countries, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1881. 87  See Darlene Sadlier, The Portuguese-Speaking Diaspora: Seven Centuries of Literature and the Arts, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.

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we face millions of reproductions in every form and format. Tellingly, the Sofala daguerreotype still widely held as the first one made in southern Africa, is the work of a French photographer in Portugal and now sits in a collection in the US, without any record of having been made, or circulated, in Africa. The relation between Africa and its archives is one of extreme complexity, not only due to the porous cultural boundaries of the continent but its incommensurable diasporic experience. Such unruly trajectories destabilize any assumption on the historical construction of African identity through pictures, as most of photographs in Western collections spent little time in Africa.88 A lot of the continent’s visual history is found (and thus, spread and kept) in the West, and the transfer of photographs from Africa to the Global North is on the rise, posing questions on rights to access, preservation, awareness and scholarship. Also, visual archives in former Portuguese colonial areas, as elsewhere across the continent, are in deeply fragile conditions: damaged by the war, rarely centralised, mostly kept in private hands or beholden to political parties and often inaccessible to communities (Fig. 1.2).89 The portrait of the Sofala woman is an example of picture collections often dismissed as merely exploitative projects of colonial domination, essentialising native populations to legitimize ideologies of racial hierarchies that underpinned the colonial endeavour. It has been, in particular, taken as the paradigmatic case of the epistemic violence and ontological violation done by early photography to the racialised subject, the ur-­ example of the fraught intersubjective encounters of colonialism. But if colonial visuality was primarily exercised over female bodies, one must not lose sight of counter-examples. Take the daguerreotype of another unnamed black woman in 1880, presumably a carte-de-visite made by Cunha Moraes in Luanda.90 Well-coiffed, exquisitely dressed, with a haughty look, this body is not presented as a specimen to be looked at, it is not a stock figure in a colonized landscape, but a looking subject, a bourgeois portrait in style, ambiance and pose, likely one of the individual portraits made to capture 88  On the use of photography as a resource of diasporic subject and community formation, see Tina M.  Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe, Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2012. 89  Erin Haney and Jürg Schneider, “Beyond the “African” Archive Paradigm”, Visual Anthropology, Vol. 27, No. 4, 2014, pp. 307–315. 90  See Sophie Berrebi, “Sailor Shirts and Photographs. A Research Diary.” Research Centre for Material Culture, 2018. Available on: https://www.materialculture.nl/en/open-space/ sailor-shirts-and-photographs-research-diary (accessed July 15, 2019).

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Fig. 1.2  J. A. Cunha Moraes, Portrait photograph of an Angolan woman, c. 1880. Research Center for Material Culture, Leiden

social and racial contrasts among the urban elite. A sight of deference or status, this model owed more to a cult of individuality than the demeaning of racialised subjects as anonymous. Yet, it is but a tiny drop in the ocean of photographic material without authors, captions and dates. This virtually inexhaustible image complex is a reminder that, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, old maritime trade routes included daguerreotypes, photographs on paper, lantern slides, cameras and further products, and they took hold in the major ports from Saint-­Louis in Senegal to Luanda in Angola, bustling sites of cultural encounter spawning the rise of studios patronised by urban African and Indian elites, traders, missionaries and vessel passengers.

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The opening daguerreotype encapsulates the pressing concerns of current scholarship, the endless discussions on the origin of the medium, its erstwhile mobilisations in the service of science, the transnational histories of photographic reproduction and the social history of visual objects. They call forward the conceptual and methodological dilemmas in the idea of African photography. That the claim of being the first photograph in southern Africa has gone unchallenged for so long is a sorry indication of the work ahead, and the mountains of research to do. So many unknown facts and unwritten stories reveal that, despite the apparent surfeit of studies on colonial photography, there is a long way to go in terms of securing a minimal knowledge of image banks, but also that it holds a boundless potential for reconceptualising ideas of cultural encounter, political opposition or the relation between the self and the social. The scholarship on colonial-era photography is, at once, too old and too new. At its least promising, it draws on rigid models of analysis that look a bit tired as primary arguments, built around dichotomous models of class, identity, imagination or oversimplified oppositions between visibility and invisibility, rather than attuned to the new tropes and turns of historical possibility. We have become overfamiliar with the idea of the camera as a pivotal articulator of difference, and the idea of photography as a technological apparatus that both signifies and enforces cultural, political and racial supremacy, compiling inventories of landscapes, bodies and cultures to authenticate the conditions that authorized a civilizing mission—hiding the extraction and exploitation within a progress-oriented focus on infrastructural development, religious evangelisation and cultural enlightenment. That is why we began this introductory essay by stressing the collusions of photography with the colonial project and its constructions of racial prejudices, to stress that from its inception, this medium lent a powerful support to the ideologies of cultural and racial dominance, spotlighting differential treatment of subjects and knowledges, and the uneven distribution of resources and privileges. Yet, the chapters in this book do not present a unified argument that every colonial photograph acts in a precise way to establish specific racial stereotypes and markers of inferiority, as essentializing objects of racial oppression and imperial governance. In tune with the recent scholarship, this book tries to refine and complicate photography’s ambiguous effects or archival mediations, probing its ambivalent meanings and complex encounters between visual culture and

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imperial history. Countering the once ruling Foucault-derived readings, the authors in this book endeavour to decentre purely instrumental and ideological readings of photography, hence resisting the neat formulations of discourse analysis, and their ancillary status as illustrations, treating them as unruly objects that prompt experimental way of writing, being and thinking. In this postcolonial transition from deconstruction to performativity— a sly slide from materialism to materiality, the semiotic to the somatic—the drive to breakdown hegemonic ideological messages and linguistic constructions is supplanted by a renewed attention to sensation, affect and tactility. This is a reconsideration of colonial images not simply for their rhetorical power, but—in the wake of affect theory and sensory turn—for their bodily effects, such as the manual handling and sonic potential of the objects, and the intricate texture and sensuality of image collections, with an implicit shift towards viewership and embodied experience.91 Bearing in mind that the circuits of power and knowledge run on different courses and that one cannot control the meaning of photography, this volume offers a wide array of approaches and disciplinary angles that are attentive to the slippages and resistances, and an openness to multiple interpretations.

The Medium Spanning Portuguese Colonial Africa “Major Serpa Pinto is an experienced explorer, and he has shown his usual judgment in deciding to attach an experienced photographer to his Congo Expedition, which is just about leaving Mozambique. […] One thing, however, the gallant Major and his photographic henchman need not trouble about, and that is a dark-room or cupboard for developing the plates. Dark cupboard, forsooth! why the enterprising photographer will have a whole “Dark Continent” at his disposal.” Photographic News (1884)92

The first known photograph in Portuguese colonial Africa would, in fact, have to await a decade after Thiésson’s portrait of the Sofala woman

91  See, for instance, Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003; Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographs and the Sound of History”, Visual Anthropology Review 21, Nos. 1–2, 2006, pp. 27–46; Tina Campt, Listening to Images, Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. 92  The Photographic News, 10 October 1884, p. 648.

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in Lisbon.93 The earliest experiments with photography in southern Africa were by Charles Piazzi Smith at the Royal Observatory in Cape Town, in 1839. The first known scenic photograph in a Portuguese area in Africa was made two decades later in Mozambique, in 1852, by the Scottish medic John Kirk, a companion to Livingstone on his Zambezi travels, the first major expedition in southern Africa to employ an official photographer. Among the first mechanical images of Africa’s hinterland, it depicted the Portuguese fort at Sena,94 a notorious hotspot for slave raids and local resistance, the first spot worthy of the name “town” that Kirk found in East Africa.95 But there were photographic studios operating across Portuguese Africa from early on. In 1862, when over forty studios were already active in South Africa, the first daguerreotypes in colour could be obtained from the Luanda-based photographer, José Nunes da Silveira, an award-­winning exhibitor in Porto and London.96 Other studios sprang up in tow in the same city, such as José Augusto Teixeira (1863), Nicola de Luizi (1867) and Cunha Moraes’s (1868). Many prominent photographs were active from the mid to late nineteenth century—in Angola, for instance, the Lisbon-born José Nunes da Silveira (c. 1869–1878) and Coimbra-born watchmaker, Abílio da Cunha Moraes (c. 1877–1895), both of them condemned to colonial deportation for counterfeiting currency in Portugal; or José R.  Gambôa (1875–1895) in Mozambique and São Tomé. In Mozambique, the first professional photographer, Louis Hily, a Mauritius-­ born Frenchman who migrated to Durban in South Africa, also set up a studio in Maputo (1889). These are among the earliest and the most celebrated photographers, having compiled an extensive record of engineering feats and infrastructural projects as the building of railways, roads and 93  There was a long-running speculation that the earliest daguerreotype in Africa dated from 1843 and was made by the Portuguese doctor Clemente Joaquim Abranches Bizarro in Huíla, Angola, depicting Princess Babola. This claim, based on a supposed lithograph thereof, was debunked by Nuno Borges de Araújo in “Primeiros fotógrafos em Luanda”, 1 February 2007. Associação Portuguesa de Photographia. Blog available: http://apphotographia.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html (Accessed on 20 November 2017). 94  Alaistair Hazell, The Last Slave Market: Dr John Kirk and the End of Slavery in East Africa, London: Constable, 2011. 95  Shubi Lugemalila Ishemo, The Lower Zambezi Basin in Mozambique: A Study in Economy and Society, 1850–1920, Aldershot: Avebury, 1995. 96  Nuno Borges de Araújo, “Portugal”, John Hannavy (ed.), Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-­ Century Photography, New York: Routledge Reference, 2008, pp. 1151–1154.

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bridges, symbols of the civilizing effects of a colonial project, but also dramatic landscapes and the so-called uses and customs. At a time of renewed investment in the discussion of the origins of photography, it is clear that numerous other pioneers of image-making will come up in the course of research.97 Another movement worth mentioning was that of Goan photographers to East Africa, not only to the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, but along the cosmopolitan coastal cities, strategically placed at the intersection of Indian ocean’s routes. Some of the first photographic studios in the main port cities in East Africa were originally owned by Goans. In some cases, in the 1890s, the photographers went from Goa to Zanzibar to set up their studios: E. C. Dias, J. B. Coutinho, A. [Andrew] Pereira de Lord and A. C. Gomes and Son. As an island, a port and a city, Zanzibar became a site of passage between Asia, Europe, Arabia and Africa, which translated into diverse ethnically and religious communities and rich material cultures, both of which observable in a thriving photographic production.98 With an extensive output in the 1880s, the A. C. Gomes firm is another example of Indian photographic enterprises that had branches in different cities. Founded in 1868 in Mombasa, in the 1930s it also had a branch in Dar-es-Salaam and, probably before that, one in Aden. Other commercial photographers who briefly associated with the Gomes were the Coutinho brothers, J. B. Coutinho and Felix Coutinho, with a studio in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam around 1890. For many decades, Goan studios ruled the region’s visual culture mainly through the reproductive possibilities of turning photographs into postcards. Some of these photographers extended their commercial operations to other places, such as the case of the Pereira de Lord Brothers in Mombasa, or D. V. Figueira and Alfred Lobo (who would open Kampala’s first studio in 1904) in Uganda. While photography was a relatively late arrival in Portuguese colonial Africa, the rich legacy of internationally renowned photographers and scientists is yet to be studied: from the images of Northern Angola which Thomas Lewis displayed across Britain as lantern slides (1888) to the 97  See Tanya Sheehan and Andres Zervigon (eds.), Photography and Its Origins, New York: Routledge, 2015. 98  Pamila Gupta, “Moving Still: Bicycles in Ranchhod Oza’s photographs of 1950s Stone Town (Zanzibar)”, Journal of African Cinemas, Vol. 12, Nos. 2–3, 2020, pp. 191–211; Meg Samuelson, “‘You’ll never forget what your camera remembers’: image-things and changing times in Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar”, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2018, pp. 75–91.

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inclusion of Angola and Mozambique in one of the richest ethnographic records ever, A. M. Duggan-Cronin’s pictures of Bantu-speakers in southern Africa (1928–1936),99 or the extensive photographic survey of Angola by French explorer Rohan-Chabot (1912).100 Later examples also remain untapped, such as the extensive images of Angola by Alfred Schachtzabel (1923),101Théodore Delachaux (1932–1933) or Otto Jensen (1931) and the work of Alexander Barns in Angola and Guinea Bissau (1927)102 or Adolf Bernatzik in the first ethnological survey of Guinea Bissau (1927).103 Yet, in the last decade, many individualities have become an object of study, from the Lazarus brothers to Carlos Estermann, following a concerted focus on the state-sponsored geographic or anthropological expeditions until the mid-twentieth century.104 Indeed, the late colonial archive is suffused with both neo-ethnographic and anthropobiologic imagery, as racial science in the Portuguese empire outlived the discredit and disrepute which it had fallen into elsewhere.105 A comprehensive history of photography in Portuguese colonial Africa would also have to highlight momentous events in modern science, from the 1889 US Eclipse Expedition to Cape Ledo, in Angola, for which scientist David Todd expressly invented a mechanical apparatus that paved the way for

99  Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin, The Bantu Tribes of South Africa: Reproductions of Photographic Studies, 4 vols., Cambridge: Deighton, Bell & Co, 1928–1936. Specifically, see Vol. 4, Sec. 2, “Vachogi of Portuguese East Africa.” 100  This is now being addressed in Priscila Freitas de Carvalho, “Preencher as lacunas da ciência”: a missão francesa Rohan-Chabot em Angola e na Rodésia (1912–1958), ongoing PhD thesis, ICS-ULisboa. 101  Alfred Schachtzabel, Im Hochland von Angola. Studienreise durch den Süden Portugiesisch West-Afrikas, Dresden: Deutsche Buchwerkst lten, 1923; Angola. Forschungen und Erlebnisse in Südwestafrika, Berlin: Die Buchgemeinde, 1926. 102  Alexander T. Barns, “In Portuguese West Africa: Angola and the Isles of the Guinea Gulf,” Geographic Journal, Vol. 72, No. 1, July 1928, pp. 18–35; and “Through Portuguese West Africa”, Journal of the Royal African Society, Vol. 28, No. 111, April 1929, pp. 224–234. 103  Hugo Adolf Bernatzik, Äthiopien des Westerns: Forschungsreisen in Portugiesisch-Guinea, Wien: Seidel & Sohn, 1933. Emmy Bernatzik, his wife, also published the best-seller account Afrikafahrt. Eine Frau bein den Westafrikanischen Negern, Wien: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1936. 104  Paulo Azevedo, op. cit., 2014. Noeme Santana, “Olhares britânicos: Visualizar Lourenço Marques na ótica de J. And M. Lazarus, 1899–1908”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 211–222. 105   Ricardo Roque, “Equivocal Connections: Fonseca Cardoso and the Origins of Portuguese Colonial Anthropology”, Portuguese Studies, Vol. 19, 2003, pp. 80–109.

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automatic photographic devices,106 to Arthur Eddington’s visit to the island of Príncipe in 1919 at the behest of Albert Einstein (a second team of British astronomers was simultaneously sent to Sobral, in Brazil), to take the famous sixteen photographic plates of the eclipse that proved right the theory of general relativity.107 While the introduction of photography in the periodic press and book printing in the context of Portuguese colonial Africa only occurred six decades after the advent of this visual medium, by the turn of nineteenth century, photography had become a standard feature of everyday life. The Colonizer’s Guide to Portuguese Africa (1891), a handbook of practical advice for prospective settlers, made it clear that “knowledge of photography is very convenient, as it can be made use of in a thousand circumstances.”108 This medium permeated administrative practices, commercial ventures and scientific research. It was routinely used by security forces, government officials, civil servants, private corporations. It ranged from the popular to commercial formats of collection and display: cartes-­ de-­ visite, tourist postcards, photo-albums, illustrated books, magazine ads. At first accessible to wealthy elites, advancements to the camera, image development processes and printing and reproduction technologies would break the monopoly of studio operators, bringing photography into the realm of amateurs. The Portuguese imperial drive in Africa would gather a renewed force from the 1870s onwards, attempting to convert lightly occupied territories into effectively held colonies that could offset British and German bids to absorb them. During the Berlin Conference (1884), while European leaders carved up Africa by pencilling borders without regard for traditional, geographic, cultural or ethnic boundaries, Portugal risked losing its status as an imperial player due to lacking financial resources and manpower to meet the rule of effective occupation—that entailed establishing boundaries, ensuring settlement, promoting economic development—which still 106  Todd himself would later claim: “The continuous plate-chain, invented […] for photographing the corona of December 22, 1889, in Angola, West Africa, was really a forerunner of the world-wide moving picture of today.” David Todd, “Automatic photography of the sun’s corona”, Popular Astronomy, Vol. 41, 1933, p. 310. 107  Unfortunately, all of Arthur Eddington’s plates from São Tomé and Príncipe have been lost. See Robin McKie, “100 years on: the picture that changed our view of the universe”, The Guardian, 12 May 2019. 108  João Bentes Castelo-Branco, Guia do colono para a Africa portugueza, Porto: Typ. Da Empreza Litteraria e Typographica, 1891, p. 48.

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consisted largely of isolated coastal settlements, with a limited control over the majority of territories at stake, and no more than a few thousand resident white men. Against the fraught political background, with a highly beleaguered sovereignty and its colonial capacity put on trial, a boosted sense of imperial entitlement meant that the upsurge in early photography in Portuguese colonial Africa occurred over two defining moments of acute political crisis:109 the demarcation of colonial borders under international dispute,110 and the military campaigns of conquest, the so-called pacification campaigns, to subdue local resistance. Photographers were commissioned to conduct extensive inventories, while some were even implicated in demarcating borders—e.g. Manoel Romão Pereira was charged by the government with recording all of Mozambique in África Oriental: Província de Moçambique (1889–1891);111 Captain Sertório de Aguiar’s photo-album accompanied the eight-volume account of Henrique Augusto Dias de Carvalho’s expedition from Luanda to Lunda (1884–1888); Velloso de Castro’s more than 2000 photographs of Angola, well beyond his obligations as the official military photographer of the 1907 Cuamato campaign; Manuel de Sousa Machado, a military in the expeditionary force to Mozambique, who also produced a large portfolio (1890); though the most extensive iconographic inventory of a Portuguese colony is José dos Santos Rufino’s lush seven-tome Álbuns Fotográficos e Descritivos da Colónia de Moçambique (1929). A comparable boom in photographic production followed the resulting war campaigns to stem local resistance—tellingly the first colonial 109  For more on the photographic camera’s potential for diplomacy and political leveraging, see Sean Willcock, Victorian Visions of War & Peace. Aesthetics, Sovereignty & Violence in the British Empire, c. 1851–1900, London: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2021. 110  See Ana Cristina Roque, “Sources for the history of the southern border of Mozambique: Preliminary results of a project on the archives of the Portuguese Commission of Cartography”, Journal of Borderlands Studies, 25:2, 2010, pp.  77–93; and Teresa Mendes Flores, “As Fotografias da Expedição Portuguesa ao Muatiânvuo – 1884/88”, Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens, No. 47, 2017, pp. 53–77. See also Leandro Antonio Guirro, “O “mato” e a cidade: racismo e demarcação de espaços nos Álbuns Fotográficos e Descritivos da Colônia de Moçambique (1929)”, Faces da História, Vol. 4, No. 1, January–June 2017, pp. 206–225. 111  Luísa Villarinho Pereira, Moçambique: Manoel Pereira (1815–1894): fotógrafo comissionado pelo Governo Português, Lisboa: Author’s edition, 2013; Luísa Villarinho Pereira, Moçambique II - Manoel Joaquim Romão Pereira (1846–1894): novas revelações sobre a sua Colecção Fotográfica, Lisboa: Author’s edition, 2017.

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photograph ever printed in the Portuguese press is a portrait of defeated leader Gungunhana, the last dynastic head of the Gaza Empire (now part of Mozambique), off to a forced lifelong exile in the Azores in 1896112— which has become the target of concerted attention regarding early conflict photography.113 The military campaigns to consolidate colonial rule—and here one is inevitably taken back to Heidegger’s quote that opened this introduction—were extensively documented. After all, the triumph of these campaigns on the ground, as one Portuguese military writer would later claim, could be ascribed to three inventions: machine guns, electrical telegraphs and photographic cameras.114 One of the main problems with the insistent connoisseurly discourse on the pioneer photographers and with the sweeping contextualizations of this medium so far is that it tends to be a white-centred story, one that presumes the image-makers to be European, and the public to be metropolitan, dictated by an early coding of the continent as a visual experience of outsiders looking in. This field of studies has long been haunted not just by the use of the photographic camera as a medium for negative codification, as we have seen above, but also by a presumed dearth of images of black people taking self-conscious control over their own representation. This changed notably since the 1990s—as Okwui Enwezor pointedly argued, photography in Africa should not be conflated with African photography115—building on groundbreaking scholarship going back to the 1970s, tracing how photography shaped itself following local cultural

112  Published by the Portuguese magazine O Occidente in 1896. See Leonor Pires Martins, op. cit. See also Maria-Benedita Basto, “Ngungunyane en circulations: images et objets d’un roi africain dans la production des savoirs coloniaux portugais du XIXe siècle”, Reflexos. Revue Pluridisciplinaire du monde lusophone, No. 5, 2020, [Online]. 113  See Cátia Miriam Costa, “O outro na narrativa fotográfica de Velloso de Castro: Angola, 1908”, Culturas Populares, No. 7, July–December 2008, pp. 1–16; Mário Matos e Lemos and Alexandre Ramires, O primeiro fotógrafo de guerra português, José Henriques de Mello. Guiné: Campanhas de 1907–1908, Coimbra: Imprensa de Universidade de Coimbra, 2009; Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Inês Vieira Gomes, op. cit., 2018; Hugo Silveira Pereira, “Representações metropolitanas do(s) Outro(s) colonizado(s) nas fotografias da campanha do Cuamato de 1907 no sul de Angola”, Eikón Imago, No. 15, 2020, pp. 313–339. 114  José Carlos de Oliveira, “Terras do Fim do Mundo – Campanhas do Kuamato (1905, 1906, 1907),” Revista Militar, Vol. 57, No. 12, 2005, pp. 1469–1477. 115  Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya, In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 1996, p. 231.

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practices from Nigeria to Mali, Namibia to Senegal, Kenya to Ghana.116 In making up for past negligence and ignorance, African photography has become a global phenomenon, injecting theoretical vigour into this field of studies by showing that, regardless of asymmetrical power relations, Africans have been on both sides of the camera at all times. A significant focus of research in the last thirty years, and an issue recently pushed to the fore of the global art scene and academia, there remains an ominous lack of information on black photographers working within the Portuguese colonial world until the mid-twentieth century (Fig. 1.3). Consider the following postcard showing the photographer Antoine Freitas (1919–1990), with his handmade box camera in Bena-Mulumba, Kasai Province (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), on 27 January 1939. The portrayed subjects stand upright in front of a painted canvas backdrop that seemingly depicts a classical Western-styled architectural setting. Some gaze attentively at the photographer, others turn their eyes to the camera. This postcard has become iconic because it radically underscores the entrenched idea that photographers were merely cultural agents of imperialism. Indeed, a pointed tendency within this scholarship is to read visual practices as the illustrations of simplistic perceptions of power relations, whereby European photography is merely an expression of cultural dominance and political superiority, while the photographic practices carried out by the local indigenous peoples are seen as mere pronunciations of resistance thereof. Yet, this visual material helps to radically destabilize any assumptions about African identity through photography. After

116  For foundational studies on how photography has shaped and reshaped itself to conform to local cultural practices, see Christraud M.  Geary, op.cit.; Andrew Roberts (ed.), Photographs as Sources for African History, London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1988; Tobias Wendl and Heike Behrend, Snap Me One! Studiofotografen in Afrika, Munich: Prestel, 1998; Pascal Martin Saint Léon et N’Goné Fall, Anthologie de la photographie africaine et de l’océan Indien, Paris: Revue noire, 1998; Thomas Miessgang and Gerald Matt (eds.), Flash Afrique, Photography from West Africa, Göttingen: Steidl, 2002; Andrew Apter, “On Imperial Spectacle: The Dialectics of Seeing in Colonial Nigeria”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2002, pp.  564–596; Anne-Marie Bouttiaux et  al., L’Afrique par elle-même: un siècle de photographie africaine, Tervuren and Paris: Musée royal de l’Afrique centrale and Éditions Revue noire, 2003; Okwui Enwezor, Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography, New  York: International Center of Photography, 2006; John Peffer and Elisabeth L. Cameron, Portrait Photography in Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013; Heike Behrend, Contesting Visibility: Photographic Practices on the East African Coast, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013.

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Fig. 1.3  Antoine Freitas, Untitled, Democratic Republic of Congo, Premier photographe à la minute congolais  àBena Mulumba, Kasaï, 1939. Vintage print, 9 × 14 cm. Courtesy of Revue Noire, Paris

all, the medium had been used by black Africans even during the high era of imperial conquest, from the 1860s onwards. Antoine Freitas was one of the African photographers who achieved early prominence—the self-described “first photographer à la minute in Congo”—a cabinetmaker who learned photography in a British Protestant mission in Mbanza Congo (now São Salvador), in Angola, and fled to the Belgian Congo in 1933 following the rebellions against forced labour. Crossing the border with a box camera and portable materials, he became a roving photographer and opened a highly sought-after studio in Leopóldville (now Kinshasa) in 1947, later taken up by his two children, Georges and Oscar. The story is common to countless other Angola-born photographers that became highly celebrated in the DRC for their studio portraiture—Jean Depara, Emmanuel Santos, Manuel Pedro, Philippe Ndombélé, Emmanuel Ndombasi, or Ambroise Ngaimoko.117 Yet, the artistic outpouring and social history of such a mass exodus continues unstudied, from the migration imposed by colonial wars and  See N’Goné Fall (ed.), Photographes de Kinshasa, Paris: Revue noire, 2001.

117

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forced labour in Angola—in the late 1950s, the 60,000 Angolans among the 400,000 residents of Kinshasa made it the second Angolan city118— their routes in contact with a Portuguese national, Diamantino, the owner of a leading studio in the 1930s and protégé of Polish pioneer of colonial photography Casimir Zagourski, until they set up their own businesses that prospered from the 1950s onwards, at a time when there is no knowledge of virtually any professional black photographers working in Portuguese Africa. The exceptions to this rule emerged as towering figures of contemporary photography—most often starting as darkroom assistants from the 1940s onwards, Ricardo Rangel (1924–2008), the first non-white hired as press photographer in Mozambique in 1952,119Sebastião Langa (b. 1920)120 or Daniel Maquinasse (1946–1986)—attracting a renewed interest in the last decades due to the mounting popularity of studio photography among African art scholars, curators and dealers. There is still little knowledge about the African photographers before the twentieth century that moved beyond cultural and political boundaries to explore increasingly competitive markets, proving that photography never was just a Western technology.121

118  Charles Gondola, Villes Miroirs: Migrations et Identités Urbaines à Kinshasa et Brazzaville, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996. 119  Rangel’s work has featured in the landmark world-travelling exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994 (2001) curated by Okwui Enwezor, and has since been the object of multiple shows and film documentaries, such as Lícinio de Azevedo’s Ricardo Rangel – Hot Iron (2009) or Bruno Z’Graggen and Angelo Sansone’s No Flash: Homage to Ricardo Rangel (2012). This is matched by extensive bibliography, including José Craveirinha and Mia Couto, Ricardo Rangel, Fotógrafo de Moçambique, Maputo, Editions Findakly 1994; Bruno Z’Graggen and Grant Lee Nuenburg (eds.), Iluminando vidas: Ricardo Rangel and the Mozambican Photogrpahy, Berlin: Christoph Merian Verlag 2002; Drew Thompson, “Color lines according to the photographer Ricardo Rangel”, Africana Studia, No. 25, 2015, pp.  119–141; Pamila Gupta, “Autoethnographic interventions and ‘intimate exposures’ in Ricardo Rangel’s Portuguese Mozambique”, Critical Arts, 2015, pp. 166–181, and “Ricardo Rangel: ‘The departure of the colonialists’”, Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, pp. 87–93. 120  António Sopa, Maria das Neves and Maria Deolinda Chamando (eds.), Sebastião Langa: Retratos de uma Vida, Maputo: Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, 2001. 121  See, e.g. Rosalind C. Morris (ed.), Photographies East: The Camera and its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009; Karen Strassler, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010.

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Among the earliest notable practitioners in Africa, two were Afro-­ Brazilian slave descendants, the Sierra Leone-born Francis W.  Joaque (c.1845–c.1893),122 who was professionally active in Freetown, Libreville and Fernando Pó, and the Nigerian George da Costa (1853–1929) who set up a studio in Lagos in 1895 and was hailed the “ablest and best-­ known professional photographer in Nigeria.”123 In recent years, the work of the leading dynasty of African photographers, the Ghana-based Lutterodts, has been extensively studied with the only exception of their activities in Portuguese areas.124 This also extends to prominent individual figures such as the Dahomey-born Alphonse Owondo (1869–1904), the first photographer in Guinea, who worked in São Tomé and Príncipe in 1888, along with other black photographers from Cabo Verde, whose work (and name) is still unknown.125 The same could be said for the hugely important diasporic communities that were neither European nor African, especially along the East African coast, most of which originated from imperial spaces under Portuguese control, namely Goa, as we have mentioned before. Another severely understudied domain includes the relation between African agency and photographic studios in Portuguese colonial Africa, even in cases where these establishments were particularly long-lasting. Take, for instance, the Foto Melo Photography Studio, which lasted from 1890 to 1990, in Mindelo, Cabo Verde, initially founded in the capital city of Praia. It was founded by Djindjon de Melo (João Henriques de Melo) (1871–1944), the son of a woman from the Santiago Island and a Portuguese man. João Henriques de Melo’s brother was also a photographer in the first military campaigns in Guinea, and they partnered up to sell photographs from Guinea and Cabo Verde.126 Foto Melo was continued by Djindjon’s son, Papim (Eduardo Trigo de Melo) and lastly, by another younger member of the family, thereby 122  Jürg Schneider, “Demand and Supply: Francis W. Joaque, an Early African Photographer in an Emerging Market”, Visual Anthropology, Vol. 27, Issue 4, 2014, pp. 316–338. 123  Cited in Olu Oguibe, The Culture Game, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 124  See, for instance, Erin Haney, “Emptying the gallery: The archive’s fuller circle,” Richard Vokes (ed.), Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives, Woodbridge: James Currey, 2012, pp. 127–139. 125  António Carmo Gouveia, “Do nome à imagem: percursos de uma planta tropical de São Tomé numa fotografia do final do século XIX”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, p. 189. 126  Matos e Lemos and Ramires, op. cit., 2009.

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encompassing three generations of Cape Verdeans. Still kept almost intact in its original studio in the city centre, the archive is no longer open to the public—roughly 150,000 photographs, a large part of them individual studio portraits commissioned by the local population over many generations, thus making the studio a significant example of African photographic practices and uses, an example which extends beyond a limited colonial frame.127 Another uncharted territory concerns women photographers working in Portuguese colonies from early on, with standout cases recently noted by Inês Vieira Gomes such as Hélène of Orléans in Mozambique (1909), Dorothea Frances Bleek, Mary Pocock (1925) or Helena Corrêa de Barros in Angola (1950).128

A Fight to the Finish: Photography, Censorship, Propaganda “The kodak has been a sore calamity to us. The most powerful enemy that has confronted us, indeed. In the early years we had no trouble in getting the press to “expose” the tales of the mutilations as slanders, lies, inventions […] Yes, all things went harmoniously and pleasantly in those good days, and I was looked up to as the benefactor of a down-trodden and friendless people. Then all of a sudden came the crash! That is to say, the incorruptible Kodak – and all the harmony went to hell! The only witness I have encoun-

127  In 2011, the Portuguese Cultural Centre of Mindelo, with financial aid from the Portuguese Camões Institute, started a process of conservation, digitization and cataloguing led by Diogo Bento, but it was left unfinished due to the slashing of funds. Some of the work that had been achieved would be damaged by vandalism and theft. We thank João Vasconcelos and Inês Vieira Gomes for this information. Liliana Oliveira da Rocha’s ongoing PhD thesis on this studio [Clichés identitários em Mindelo: estudo antropológico sobre fotografia em Cabo Verde a partir da Foto Melo (1890–1992)] will hopefully help to preserve, classify and open it to the public. See Gisela Coelho, “São Vicente: Resgate de 100 anos de história do espólio da Foto Melo”, A Nação, 27 March 2021. 128  For an important contribution on women photographers, see Inês Vieira Gomes “Women photographers in Angola and Mozambique (1909–1950): A history of an absence”, Darren Newbury, Lorena Rizzo and Kylie Thomas (eds), Women and Photography in Africa. Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges, London: Routledge, 2020, pp. 62–80. See also Filipa Lowndes Vicente, “Photography as autobiography: Helena Corrêa de Barros, a woman photographer”, Helena Corrêa de Barros: fotografia, a minha viagem preferida, Lisboa: Câmara Municipal de Lisboa-DAM, 2018, pp. 187–197.

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tered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe.” Mark Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905)129

While photography functioned as a cultural and political medium intricately tied to the establishment and support of colonialist power, by the late nineteenth century it was already a commonplace idea that it could normalize, neutralize and naturalize violence, as much as it had a unique potential to contest and resist it, defying overriding ideas of a civilizing mission.130 The medium became profoundly implicated in the emergence of the human rights discourse, as campaigns made a highly effective use of photographs against the ill-treatment and abuse of people under colonialism which attracted wide international awareness. The most prominent case, often pinpointed as the birth of humanitarian photography, brought this visual medium as the leading charge—immortalized in Mark Twain’s epigraph above—against the atrocities carried out in the Congo Free State under King Leopold II (1904–1908), involving violent tactics on local communities to coerce them into collecting ivory, rubber and palm oil. As a result, an estimated ten million Congolese people died. But as Paul Landau pointedly observed, if the truth claims of photography could serve to expose the indignities of labour and land in Congo, they  could also occluded them.131 When a major international scandal also broke out against the little-­ known Portuguese colonies in Africa, with allegations of modern slavery, labour abuses and criminal misconduct in the cocoa producing territories of Angola and São Tomé, photography assumed a pivotal role in the political dispute. Accused of abetting these practices for personal profit, William Cadbury—who helped fund the Congo campaign to divert attention from the mistreatment of labourers in his plantations in Angola and São 129  Mark Twain, King Leopold’s Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule, Boston: P. R. Warren, 1905, p. 68. On this topic, see T. Jack Thompson, Light on Darkness?: Missionary Photography of Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2012; and Robert M. Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities: Eyewitness of Colonialism in the Congo, Angola, and the Putumayo, New York: Routledge, 2011. 130  See Mark Sealy, “The Congo Atrocities, A Lecture to Accompany a Series of Sixty Photographic Slides for the Optical Lantern”, in Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2019, pp. 16–64; Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, “As provas da “civilização”: fotografia, colonialismo e direitos humanos”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp. 387–398. 131  Paul Landau, op. cit.

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Tomé132—and Joseph Burtt went on a fact-finding tour in 1908, requesting the long-time missionary in Angola, Charles A. Swan, to take photographs. The pictures, more than the testimony of the labourers or missionaries, would yield the most damning evidence of the current practice of violence. They definitively shaped the cocoa controversy, as the colonial officials and planters inferred a serious threat in their different presentation of the official truth in colonial Portuguese Africa.133Marquis Valle Flôr, for instance, promptly defended Portugal’s humanitarian record by dismissing the photographs of the Cadbury trip as fakes, and then became the first funder of a film in Portuguese colonial Africa, to show the decency of its labour conditions and the modernity of its infrastructures.134 As visual media gained authority over the written word before the public opinion, the economic propaganda put a spin on the most explosive issue against Portuguese colonial rule: its overreliance on forced labour. The visual field was often managed to present the conditions of labour in civilized images of discipline, progress and order, and no efforts were spared to create an idealized picture of European presence in Africa to gather support for the colonial agenda—which often accounted for the most lavish displays in international colonial exhibitions. Take, for instance, the pictures that Portugal presented at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exhibition casting a halcyon light on the empire to repel any criticism of labour policies and get the outside world to look at and to  invest in colonies that were wholly reliant on foreign capital. As Erica Allina showed, certain photographs of African workers and their environment were staged, even doctored.135 The act of photographing labourers had long been used as an exercise of colonial might, as in the plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe—enforcing discipline and submission, order and taming.136 As the stirrings of liberation war took the form of rebellions against multinational conglomerates reliant on cheap 132  Catherine Higgs, Chocolate Islands: Cocoa, Slavery, and Colonial Africa, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. 133  For the role of photography, see Diogo Ramada Curto, “Prefácio - Políticas Coloniais e Novas Formas de Escravatura”, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, Livros Brancos, Almas Negras, A «missão civilizadora» do colonialismo português c. 1870–1930, Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciênciais Sociais, 2010, pp. 9–40. 134  Fernandes Thomas, Uma visita às propriedades da Sociedade Agrícola Valle Flor, Limitada na Ilha de S. Thomé (1929). 135  See Eric Allina, op. cit. 136  Augusto Nascimento, Poderes e quotidiano nas roças da S. Tomé e Príncipe de finais de oitocentos a meados de novecentos, Lousã: Tipografia Lousanense, 2002.

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manpower, large colonial companies such as Cassequel immediately produced counter-images of the forced labourers holding pro-Portuguese posters and flags.137 The resulting corporate archives hold millions of photographs and thereby constitute a major resource to read colonial history along or against the grain.138 Take, for instance, the following postcard (Fig. 1.4) which captures countless barefoot and barely clad black women walking in a single file along a recently paved road, carrying baskets of manioc on their heads, under the vigilant eye of a fully dressed white guard in colonial regalia. Intended as yet another bureaucratic record of a routine operation of the colonial company, it can nevertheless vividly bring to life the fact that women were not exempt from forced labour. In fact, it was mostly women and children, with only rudimentary

Fig. 1.4  Photo-postcard, Diamond Company of Angola, Andrada, “The women of contract labourers, returning from a distribution of manioc, organized by the Propaganda and Assistance to Indigenous Labour Department, of the Company (SPAMOI),” undated. F. L. Vicente Collection

 Jeremy Ball, op. cit.  See, e.g. Diogo Ramada Curto, “Um álbum fotográfico da Diamang”, Mulemba  – Revista Angolana de Ciências Sociais, Vol. 5, No. 10, 2015, pp. 111–160. 137 138

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tools and no pay, who built and maintained much of Angola’s extensive road system, causing them to abandon the fields and impacting negatively on food production. When visiting Angola in 1930 to report on the political situation, the Portuguese minister Duarte Pacheco briefed the Minister of Finance and soon-to-be dictator, Salazar: [Angola] is being crossed by foreigners carrying photographic cameras to obtain documentation on our mineral resources. The last time, they have made an ample collection of elements. The Benguela Governor alarmed me yesterday with the scale of German colonization. […] families arrive in every steamboat and they come to stay. They hoist German flags in plantations and speak only their language. The same is happening with Italians and Poles.139

This missive outlines the driving concerns of colonialism, with the metropole looking at its overseas possessions as a standing reserve, trying to secure a monopoly control to natural resources, but also the particular vulnerabilities of Portuguese rule in Africa, with large areas exposed to land grabs, the downplaying of white settlers from other European nations and economic dependency on foreign capital. Such political anxieties surrounded the photographic camera, with its ability to project a different image to the outside world. This visual panic was not unfounded. When the liberation wars kicked off in Portuguese colonial Africa, in 1961, there were 200,000 Portuguese nationals in Africa, far less than there were in Argentina and Venezuela alone.140 In the early 1970s, there were more people from Portugal living in France than in all of the colonies combined.141 A 1972 survey covering 80per cent of Angolan Africans found that very few had even a basic knowledge of Portuguese language or ­history.142 In spite of the much-touted five centuries of imperial rule—a 139  Letter to Salazar, Luanda, 4 August 1930. Reproduced in Fernando Rosas, Júlia Leitão de Barros and Pedro de Oliveira (eds.), Armindo Monteiro e Oliveira Salazar. Correspondência Política, 1926–1955, Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1996, p. 31. 140  Rui de Azevedo Teixeira, A guerra colonial: realidade e ficção, Lisboa: Editorial Notícias, 2001, p. 32. 141  David Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal, Canterbury: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 177. 142  Franz-Wilhelm Heimer, Educação e sociedade nas áreas rurais de Angola: resultados de um inquérito, Vol. I, Luanda: Missão de Inquéritos Agrícolas de Angola, 1972.

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slogan suiting colonial apologists and its critics alike—effective occupation, sparse population and repressive policy remained a liability. When the poorest nation in Western Europe rules over two million square kilometres of African land, a continental mass fifty times its own size, the centrality of visual management, rhetorical issues and public relations cannot be overstated. Indeed, theorists have argued that the Portuguese empire was defined by an excess, and not an absence, of images, in the form of a hyperinflated sense of representation meant to offset its own political vulnerability, paltry occupation and tenuous hold over the vast African territories.143 This disproportionality found unique propaganda value in photographic images, as even the most trifle of events was often celebrated as a major achievement. In 1924, for instance, the mere fact that one French parasitologist, Emile Brumpt, delivered a slide lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris, with pictures of a conference visit to Angola, was enough to make the Governor Norton de Matos rejoice: “The room was full. Everyone was left with the impression that our work in Angola has been a monumental one!”144 The high premium placed on visual representation to the outside world also accounts for the pronounced iconophobic tendencies of the Portuguese colonial regime in Africa. One of the recurrent accusations against the Portuguese authorities across the twentieth century was that of colonial hosts managing foreign visits, along with complaints about the burdens and perceived risks of trying to take photographs in public, not to mention the diplomatic hurdles, political liabilities and security risks of possessing and circulating them. On the one hand this created conspicuous omissions in the historical record, as political and military authorities dramatically increased their oversight over the creation and spread of visual material. In fact, as late as 1960, state officials would express their concerns about the “numerous occasions” on which there was a “lack of photographic and other materials” on the Portuguese presence in Africa.145 Indeed, as Drew Thompson has shown, “the metropole found ways to profit from the absence of certain photographs.”146 On the other hand, 143  The overblown imperial rhetoric as a compensatory mechanism was most famously theorized by Eduardo Lourenço, Do Colonialismo Como Nosso Impensado, Lisboa: Gradiva, 2014. 144  Norton de Matos, Memórias e trabalhos da minha vida, Lisboa: Editora Marítimo-­ Colonial, 1944, p. 115. 145  Drew Thompson, op. cit., 2021, p. 55. 146  Idem.

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such an effort was also matched by intensive media campaigns, as the weight of officialdom lingered over the most ambitious photographic projects—the albums of official visits and diplomatic enterprises—and a careful stagecraft that resorted to images as an immunizing strategy against foreign criticism. Gilberto Freyre, the Brazilian sociologist whose work was co-opted to lend support for the multiracial rhetoric of the colonial regime, was photographed in a shanty town in Luanda, but regretted “acting as the spineless foreigners that allow themselves to be pictured along ‘working class houses’ in Brazil […] in a near carnivalesque scenography glossing over or hiding reality.”147 Invited to visit Angola in 1961 on a stage-­managed tour for select journalists, US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Mennen Williams, also recalled that “whenever I said hello to black and white Angolans together, a photographer would leap up to snap a picture. The photographs taken would convince anyone I was moving through a completely integrated society, and I later saw a pamphlet to that effect.”148 Such operations betray an awareness of the transformative potential of visual images to influence public opinion and shape a common imaginary. Indeed, António Ferro, the chief propagandist in Portugal during the 1930s and 1940s, was mindful that the struggle to retain Africa rested on the ability to orchestrate a certain visual outlook. The pictures were “the most powerful weapon of penetration of our time,” he said in 1941, in a clear nod to Mussolini’s rhetoric, and only three years after Heidegger’s quote that opens this introduction, arguing that there is “no offensive more dangerous than images, the most insinuating one, the smoothest of all, because we take it to be harmless.”149 The favourable economic juncture after the “pacification wars” consolidated the control of the territory in Africa, leading to an increasing influx of settlers and an exponential rise in photographic exhibitions by official bodies, invariably around ethnographic aspects, infrastructural development and multiracialism. This was a visual attempt to foster a cultural rapprochement between the metropole and the colonies, and win over global audiences with over-the-top pictures in which violence, race and labour had no place. The increased sense that the colonial world order would not  Gilberto Freyre, Aventura e Rotina, Lisboa: Livros do Brasil, 1952, p. 412.  G.  Mennen Williams, Africa for the Africans, Ann Arbor: William B.  Eerdmans, 1969, p. 128. 149  ANTT—Arquivo Salazar, Plano de António Ferro para uma campanha de propaganda em toda a América e no Brasil em particular, PC-12E, cx. 662, s/d, p. 14. National Archives of Torre do Tombo, Lisbon. 147 148

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hold was a boost to political and cultural diplomacy efforts. While photography would play an absolutely vital role in this process, it still remains the least-researched of propaganda weapons. In the mid-­1960s, for instance, when Portuguese president Américo Tomás travelled to every African colony with great fanfare, he boarded a Portuguese Air Force jet especially equipped with an on-flight photographic studio, and a team of reporters forced to deliver snapshots of official events at the rate of five albums a day.150 With the internationalisation of colonial affairs and the prospect of decolonization looming in the horizon, the effort to control, shape and project an image to the outside world reached its acme. A huge investment in representation, through coercion and mystification, sought, some critics argued, to replace the reality of the unique scale and continuity of forced labour, with the image of a conflict-free and multiracial haven. In 1960, James Duffy stated: “the reality is pretty much the same today as it has been for four hundred years: the indiscriminate use of the African for Portuguese profit.”151 “The trouble with Portuguese Africa,” he argued, “is that the outside world has never been able to see it very clearly.”152 The problem was not visual unavailability, but that, more than any other colonial domain, image and reality failed to coincide. Duffy argued that Portugal then faced a struggle between the “dual reality” of its African colonies, between the benighted record of slavery and forced labour and a benign image of multiracial harmony. With the war just months away, he added: “To retain her hold on Angola, the Portuguese government must replace the first image of Portuguese Africa – that of a slave camp – with the second  – that of a multiracial paradise.”153 The imperial endgame could be thought of as an image problem, a long cosmetic makeover, as censorship and propaganda redoubled the efforts at home and abroad to define what counted as real. As Salazar put it, “there exists only what the public knows to exist.”154

150  Junior Rodrigues, Moçambique, Terra de Portugal, Lisboa: Agência-Geral do Ultramar, 1965, p. 198. 151  James Duffy, ‘The Dual Reality of Portuguese Africa’, The Centennial Review of Arts & Science, Vol. 4, No. 4, Fall 1960, pp: 450–464. 152  Idem. 153  Idem. 154  António de Oliveira Salazar, Discursos 1928–1934, Vol. I, Coimbra: Coimbra Editora, 1961, p. 259.

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In the late 1940s, the possibility of sitting for a photographic portrait was within reach of an increasing number of people in the cities across Portugal’s ex-colonies, and, by the mid-1950s, the democratization of photography was a fait accompli. The more popularized the medium became, the more official strictures conditioned and regulated the production and circulation of images, ever alert to the political and communicative affordances of visual media. With the explosion in censorship and propaganda facilitated by the alliance of imperialism and fascism, the colonial regime held a tight grip on what could be represented—despite continued reforms, the coercive labour and tax exactions, racial discrimination, authoritarian politics and economic exploitation were in place until the end—investing inordinate sums to cultivate its own image abroad. Just as in mainland Portugal, celebrity photographers such as Henri-Cartier Bresson (1955) were brought in on government-funded trips to cast the dictator in a positive light,155 and the slightest dissenting view was stymied and censored, by arresting and deporting figures as Nicolás Muller (1939) or banning the work of Chris Marker (1957)156—these efforts peaked in the African colonies, as they involved the longest liberation wars in the continent. The thick security web of prohibitions and censorship, from the streets to the studios, made it difficult to counter the sanitised views of violence and colonialism. The most widely celebrated photographer of the late colonial era, the Mozambican Ricardo Rangel—the subject of Patricia Hayes’s chapter in this book—regularly saw his reports banned from publication, even destroyed by the political police. The conditions under which war was waged sometimes kept liberation movements from capitalizing on the visual to offset propaganda campaigns—South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO’s) leader Andreas Shipanga boasted that, in 1974, he had managed to take Swedish photographers Pér Sanden and Rudi Spee to Caprivi, in Angola, destroyed by the Portuguese army to get footage—“reels and reels of film of skulls, skeletons, and gutted houses”— and tricked them into selling it to the world as a Namibian village “wiped 155  Cartier-Bresson was one of 155 high-profile journalists and photographers hired by the PR firm Peabody and Associates to visit Portugal under Salazar in order to plant positive stories about the dictatorship on US media. See Vasco Ribeiro, “A empresa de relações públicas norte-americana contratada por Salazar (1951–1962)”, Media & Jornalismo, vol. 18, n. 33, 2018, pp. 155–169. 156  See Susana S.  Martins, “Os mistérios de Chris Marker em Portugal”, Público, 6 September 2012.

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out by the Boers.”157 Nevertheless, certain liberation groups such as the FRELIMO in Mozambique, did become the site of intense visual activity, stimulating image production and the training of image makers.158 The colonial state exerted a stranglehold on visual representation to make its totalizing claims upon it, thus generating a politically hypercharged visual economy. In 1972, when Peter Pringle, a London Sunday Times journalist, went to Mozambique to investigate allegations of a massacre in Wiriyamu, the political police seized his camera and negatives under trumped up charges that he had been photographing military installations and railway lines, forcing him into a plane back to Lisbon.159 But when, in 1973, the legendary jazz player Charlie Haden was arrested in Lisbon for expressing solidarity with liberation groups at a gig, the political police insisted on showing him photographs of the development in the colonies during his interrogation, to see “all the good things they were doing for black people there.”160 This embattled visuality during the imperial endgame is far from exhausted, but it has left behind an important body of work. Hoping that researchers pick up on the treasure trove of photographs still to be explored, and to dissipate misconceptions about the scant visual coverage of the period in the international press, a non-­ exhaustive list (not all photographers by trade) includes: from Sweden, Anders Ehnmark, Elisabeth Hedborg, Hillevi Nilsson, Rolf Gustavsson, Göran Palm, Anders Johannsson, Lennart Malmer and Ingela Romare; from Norway, Knut Andreassen; from the Netherlands, Paul Julien, Roel Coutinho, Koen Wessing and Frits Einseloeffel; from Germany, Horst Faas and Karl Breyer; from Japan, Tadahiro Ogawa; from the US, James Burke, Charles Dorkins, Volkmar Wentzel and Robert Van Lierop; from Algeria, Boubakar Adjali, also known as Kapiassa Nicolaus Husseini; from South Africa, Cloete Breytenbach and S.  J. McIntosh; from France, 157  Sue Armstrong, In Search of Freedom, Gibraltar: Ashanti, 1989, pp. 96–97. In addition to the photographs, Per Sandén and Rudi Spee also produced the film documentary Frihetskampen i Namibia (1974). 158  See Ros Gray, Cinemas of the Mozambican Revolution: Anti-Colonialism, Independence and Internationalism in Filmmaking, 1968–1991, London: Boydell & Brewer, 2020, and Thompson, op. cit., 2021. See also the multi-part film work The Mozambique Archive Series by Catarina Simão (Mueda 1979; These are the Weapons; Effects of Wording; Ntimbe Caetano). 159  Mustafah Dhada, The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964–2013, London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 160  John Litweiler, Ornette Coleman: A Harmonological Life, New York: William Morrow, 1992, p. 143.

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Geneviève Chauvel; from Italy, Uliano Lucas and Augusta Conchiglia.161 The transition to independence also remains underresearched, though it was visually recorded by, among many others, Alain Mingam, Fred Bridgland, Françoise de Mulder, Don Carl Steffen, Jean-Claude Deutsch, Michel Clement, Robert Kramer, Ingeborg Lippmann162 or Jean-Claude Francolon.163 The late colonial archive in Portuguese-ruled Africa attests to sharpened dissonances playing out in the visual realm. The same political regime that turned the outbreak of war in Angola into the largest campaign of atrocity photography in the latter half of the twentieth century broke the world record for the film with the most censorship cuts ever, Faria de Almeida’s Catembe (1965), an otherwise balmy neo-realist documentary on daily life in Mozambique.164 There has never been a comprehensive overview of photography in Portuguese colonial Africa. A lot is to be researched and many surprises are still in store165—from the rediscovery of overlooked photobooks such as Álbum Comemorativo da Exposição-Feira Angola (1938),166 to the probing of a single 1907 photograph by Velloso de Castro in Angola as the basis for Billy Woodberry’s 161  See the recent exhibition of her work at the Museu do Aljube. Resistência e Liberdade in Lisbon: Augusta Conchiglia nos Trilhos da Frente Leste, curated by Maria do Carmo Piçarra and José da Costa Ramos (2021). 162  Filipa Lowndes Vicente, “Para onde olharam elas? Portugal visto por mulheres fotógrafas estrangeiras”, Público P2, 10 March 2019, pp. 12–19. 163  For the rich visual archive on these events by Argus Africa News Service, see Wilf Nussey, Watershed Angola and Mozambique: The Portuguese Collapse in Africa 1974–1975, a Photo History, London: Helion and Company 2014. 164  According to the Guinness Book of World Records of 1987. See Maria do Carmo Piçarra, Azuis Ultramarinos. Propaganda Colonial e Censura no Cinema do Estado Novo, Lisboa: Edições 70, 2015. 165  An invaluable resource for this has been the website Africa in The Photobook (africainthephotobook.com) led by the photo-historian Ben Krewinkel, which compiles photo books produced in and about Africa. A sample of these photobooks was presented by Catarina Boieiro and Raquel Schefer in a show at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris (2021–2022) entitled Résistance visuelle généralisée: Livres de photographie et mouvements de libération – Angola, Mozambique, Guinée-Bissau, Cap-Vert. 166  This album—with images attributed to Firmino Marques da Costa—has been recently brought to public attention by art critic Alexandre Pomar and showcased at Pequena Galeria in Lisbon (2014). See also Sérgio B.  Gomes, “Luanda 1938, um olhar desconhecido”, Público, 6 April 2014; Ana Maria Mauad, “Fotografia Pública e cultura visual em perspectiva histórica”, Revista Brasileira de História da Mídia, Vol. 2, No. 2, July–December 2013; and Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, The Photoboook. A History, Vol. III, London: Phaidon, 2005.

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film A Story from Africa (2019), the appropriation of visual footage for projects such as Stan Douglas’s series Disco Angola (2012) or the reworking of colonial-era image banks as a major strand of contemporary art in the last decade,167 film documentaries168 and exhibits—increasingly concerned with inventing possibilities to disrupt the unilateral, top-down flows of visual manipulation. The twenty-first century is witnessing a notable proliferation of academics, activists and artists raiding the visual archives of the former Portuguese empire in their own research, as new institutional enclaves are formed to house and give access to these materials, and increasing amounts are uploaded online every day, reclaiming the photographs and putting them to new kinds of work. There is a long way to go in order to identify and make available the relevant photographic holdings for Portuguese colonial Africa, and a longer way still to activate previously unseen photographic archives and facilitate the repatriation of entire visual storehouses. At a time when institutions in old imperial centres are under pressure to change their ethos, facing calls to build inclusive museums and strategic reports on the politics of caretaking and restitution of African collections, these initiatives are woefully scarce in the Portuguese case, with little discussion around the ethical tensions of custodianship and how to make room for the investments of multiple stakeholders. * * * 167  See Emília Tavares, “Quando o Rio Congo submergiu a Acrópole”, Vasco Araújo, Botânica, Lisboa: Documenta, 2014, pp. 15–41; Susana Martins and António Pinto Ribeiro, “A fotografia artística contemporânea como identidade pós-colonial”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), op. cit., 2014, pp.  461–473; Afonso Dias Ramos, “Imageless in Angola: Appropriating Photography”, Object 17, 2015, pp.  77–99; Ana Balona de Oliveira, “Decolonization in, of and through archival ‘moving images’ of artistic practice”, Comunicação e Sociedade 29, 2016, pp.  131–152; Frank Möller, “Colonial Wars and Aesthetic Reworking: The Artist as Moral Witnesss”, Arts and International Affairs, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2017, pp. 13–44; Afonso Dias Ramos, “The Fugitive Image: Colonial Terror and Contemporary Art”, Obs* Journal, 2020, pp.  73–87. See also, e.g. Daniel Barroca, Uma Linha Raspada, Vila Nova da Barquinha: Câmara Municipal de Vila Nova de Barquinha, 2013; Nuno Faria (ed.), CIAJG notebooks: colonial images: revelations from anthropology and contemporary art, Guimarães: Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães, 2014; Filipa César and Nuno Faria, The Struggle is not over yet: an archive in relation, Guimarães: Archive Books, 2017; Teresa Matos Pereira, Uma Travessia da Colonialidade. Pintura, coleções e Intervisualidades, Lisboa: Caleidoscópio, 2019. 168  See, for instance, Joana Pontes, Visões do Império (2021); Sabrina D.  Marques, Os Fotocines (2021); and Carla Osório, Missão Sudoeste de Angola: Afinal, quem nos define? (2022).

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A long time in the making, this book seeks to make significant inroads into such discussions by providing a fresh re-examination of the critical literature on photography and colonialism, hopefully giving readers tantalizing possibilities to consider new configurations of the received knowledge for future scholarship. The first section of the book, Charting the Empire: Knowledge, Control, Power, examines the early history of photography in the African colonies under Portuguese rule in the second half of the nineteenth century. The five chapters focus on the varied ways in which this visual medium was always implicated in the imperial project of charting, conquering, converting and controlling vast swathes of land and their populations. This implicated military expeditions and included scientific instruments and photographic cameras alongside weapons. At this stage, in fact, the act of photographing was only possible because there were firearms—the potential act of firing and killing, subduing and controlling those who resisted foreign advances. While some chapters critically reassess well-known bodies of photographic images, others disclose, for the first time, unpublished collections of visual material still inaccessible to the public today. In response to the recent scholarship, a concerted effort has been made to articulate these discussions according to a transnational framework—traditionally dominated by British and French case studies—to produce a more capacious comparative and intersectional analysis. António Carmo Gouveia, the author of the second chapter in this book, focuses on one photograph alone. The former director of one of the main botanical gardens in Portugal, a biologist specialising in ecology, and a historian of science, Carmo Gouveia signs the chapter “Photographing Tropical Plants in the Late Nineteenth Century: Scientific Practices and Botanical Knowledge Production.” Here, he uses tropical plants photographs as a starting point to scrutinise botanical knowledge production in the late nineteenth century, including botanical nomenclature, field work procedures, amateur and professional scientific networks and biological material exchange and circulation. Plant photography and its contexts of production—very often only viewed as illustrative elements—shed light on many other aspects. Through the biography of a single photograph, Gouveia analyses the various steps of species scientific “discovery”—from collecting, to naming and interpreting biological material—but also the conflicting views on scientific objectivity, and the fact that choice and

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selection in scientific representations of nature often relies on the judgement of non-specialists. In the case of many colonial case studies, this means those men that are not working in the metropolitan colonial laboratory, but rather travelled to the colonies, undertaking fieldwork on the ground and working with local populations (who often receive no recognition, not even a reference or name in the final reports or published materials). Amongst those who played a central role in the botanical Portuguese expedition and plant photographing, António Carmo Gouveia identifies two black African professional photographers, a fact that was surely much more common that the written archival documents allow us to grasp, as we have already discussed. A photographer and researcher on the visual histories of Mozambique, Rui Assubuji is the author of “Stopping for the Camera: Photographs of the Portuguese Expedition to Báruè, Mozambique, 1902.” He explores twelve unpublished photographs currently held at the main Portuguese military archive in Lisbon. Part of a Mozambican “pacification campaign”—the name given by the Portuguese to their military missions aiming at neutralizing any resistance to colonial rule—they depict aspects of the expeditions to the Barue kingdom in 1902. There is a consistency in the way the photographs were taken, the precise framing, composition and carefully chosen backgrounds. The repetition in the act of organizing and producing images in different locations made it one of the operational procedures of the expedition. These photographs are cross-referenced with the published memoirs of its commander, João de Azevedo Coutinho. Though a few photographs featured in “restricted” publications, it appears that they may have not enjoyed a wide circulation. Frequently, overwhelmed by dictatorial indexical rules, the lack of competence to provide the necessary information about the subjects they depict means that photographs become victims of their own pasts, useless, inaccessible, condemned to oblivion. As Okwui Enwezor has suggested, the photographs are themselves archives, and Assubuji’s paper engages with this potential. In “Ethnographic Album of Angola: Overlaps Between Photography, Knowledge and Empire (1930s–1940s),” Cláudia Castelo and Catarina Mateus further explore the tensions between scholarly and amateur knowledge in imperial contexts, and how the former often demeans the latter. Castelo, an historian on imperialism and colonialism and its entanglements with politics and science, and Mateus, a photography conservator and curator of the National Museum of Natural History and Science in Lisbon, focus their approaches in a photographic collection named “Angolan

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ethnography,” produced between 1935 and 1939. The collection, now in the Portuguese Overseas Historical Archive (AHU) and available online, was authored by the amateur photographer, Elmano Cunha e Costa, at the Portuguese government’s request. Cunha e Costa was a lawyer with a passionate interest on photography and ethnography in Angola, who combined both dimensions in exhibitions and books, while yearning for the recognition of his work amongst metropolitan scholarly elites. Mobilizing the historiographies of anthropology, photography, science and empire, with the collection and associated archive materials as their main sources, Castelo and Mateus present an entangled biography of the photographer-­author as well as the photographic collection, bringing to light the production, circulation and use of images, and the political and scientific disputes and negotiations implicit in their making. These invisible histories of the visual project of an amateur ethnographer that longed for scholarly recognition are inseparable to a specific moment in Portuguese contemporary history. The emerging right-wing dictatorship led by Salazar was investing particularly in the scientific occupation of the colonies, as a means to re-assert the historical entitlement of the Portuguese empire in the inter-imperial competition of the European interwar period. It was also specially committed to use propaganda as a colonial tool. An anthropologist who combines archival research in Portugal with fieldwork in Angola, using photography and film in her own work, Inês Ponte signs the next chapter, “An Africanist Photo-ethno-graphy in the Portuguese New State (1928–1974),” on the missionary and ethnographer Carlos Estermann’s relation to photography (1896–1976). This chapter can be read together with the previous one, since its protagonist meets and works with Elmano Cunha e Costa in Angola. In fact, both men exemplify the many characters that circulated in colonial spaces, collecting, photographing, writing and, on the whole, producing knowledge, who even if not formal scientists or scholars, often had scholarly ambitions. In the 1940s, Carlos Estermann, a German missionary who spent most of his long life in Angola, was invited by Cunha e Costa to join him in an ambitious project—to compile a series of photographic albums of all the ethnic groups in Angola. They began to work together, and still published a book together, but the contrasting nature of what each one considered to be serious ethnographic work did not allow for the project to continue. Cunha e Costa took more interest in the aesthetic qualities of his photographs of unnamed people in Angola (one of his books and

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exhibitions in Lisbon was on women’s head styles in Angola);169 while Estermann, the Spiritan missionary, believed in photography as being a practice entangled with deep textual research. In her chapter, Ponte explores Estermann’s use of the visual in his ethnographic dissemination work and his field practice, in order to apprehend the ways in which a missionary based in an overseas territory built a career in the social sciences— photographing, publishing, organizing exhibitions—during decades of Portuguese colonial government in Angola, his ethnographic laboratory. Inês Ponte’s own ethnographic research analyses the contemporary reception of Estermann’s photographs with local inhabitants in Angola today. This first section closes with a chapter by the anthropologist Patrícia Ferraz de Matos: “To See Is to Know? Anthropological Differentiations on Portuguese Colonial Photography Through the Work of Mendes Correia. Centered on the work by Mendes Correia, anthropologist and archaeologist, with a degree in Medicine by the Porto Medical-Surgical School and the mentor of the Porto School of Anthropology, Ferraz de Matos’s chapter analyses the ways in which photography was always marshalled into his research and in the several working contexts he was involved in: the Portuguese Society of Anthropology and Ethnology’s sessions; the practical courses in Anthropology at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto; the context of criminal anthropology studies; the Centre for Peninsular Ethnology Studies; in anthropological missions and in two of his main publications—Raças do Império (1943) and Timor Português (1944). The photographs were used as a way of capturing “reality” and record it for future reference and study. This procedure, based on the principle that “to see is to know,” exposed the limitations of some anthropological practices, while also uncovering the imprecisions and difficulties that emerged in the context of the Portuguese colonialism. The second section of this book is titled “Showcasing the Empire: Propaganda, Reproduction, Exhibitions,” and it reflects on the consolidation of the empire as such. If, in the first part, the focus lies on the mapping and the military and scientific making of empire, this section tries to understand how photography diversified and multiplied to be used for a variety of ends. Focusing mostly on the first half of the twentieth century, it investigates, in particular, the propaganda efforts to manage the visual representation of the colonial possessions in Africa. These chapters show 169  Elmano Cunha e Costa, Penteados e Adornos Femininos das Indígenas de Angola, Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1951.

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this campaign to be intimately intertwined with nascent mass tourism practices, inter-imperial competition, public relations operations to sway the public opinion and the official efforts to maintain, legitimate and spin the appearance of a colonial empire in the face of ever-mounting international competition, hostility and condemnation. In “Visions of Wildlife and Hunting in the “Sportsmen’s Paradise”— Exploring Photography from the Mozambique Company’s Archive,” Bárbara Direito analyses how images of hunting practices become a trope of empire. (Dead) Elephants for a thriving ivory market, or simply (dead) tigers for the pleasure and sport of European elites with the backup of large quantities of supporting “natives,” but also the new regulations that distinguished which animals could be killed and should be preserved. The territory in central Mozambique governed by the Mozambique Company—a chartered company—became an attractive destination for hunters and tourists of different origins: because of its once rich and varied wildlife, celebrated in accounts of the late nineteenth-century travellers and professional and amateur naturalists, its proximity to South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, but also its more flexible hunting regulations. As more settlers, sportsmen and tourists, armed with increasingly effective weapons and supported by locally hired African guides, hunters and taxidermists, gradually depleted existing populations of elephants, rhinoceros and other wild animals, tensions started emerging between Company officials—both interested in limiting hunting to certain areas and certain types of animals and in expanding tourism—and different groups of populations, African and European. The stricter policies that ensued reflected the priority given to certain economic imperatives but also a change in perceptions regarding the African environment and wild animals. Bárbara Direito, a researcher at the Interuniversity Centre for the History of Science and Technology of the University of Lisbon, proposes an exploration of the changing policies regarding wild animals in central Mozambique in the early twentieth century, as well as of the changing perceptions on nature and wildlife, bearing in mind the raceand class-based divisions that characterized colonial society in Mozambique, through an analysis of hunting photographs in the Mozambique Company archive. In the following chapter on the “Industrial Landscapes in Colonial Mozambique,” Nuno Domingos’s large body of work on colonial Mozambique here focuses on the late period, when modernizing policies of the colonial state were supported by an institutional rhetoric to provide

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a certain imagination of the imperial terrain. Present in official documents, these discourses were disseminated through different mediums, from film documentaries to newspapers’ articles and photography, in order to create a modern colonial pastoral. Concentrating on the photographs published in A Indústria de Moçambique [The Industry of Mozambique], a specialized magazine that translated this modernizing worldview, this chapter discusses how these images suggested the new role African workers would have in a modern colonial society, but also how this imagination contrasted with the actual colonial process. Exhibitions, both national and international, are at the core of Nadia Vargaftig’s chapter “To See, to Sell: The Role of the Photographic Image in Portuguese Colonial Exhibitions (1929–1940).” This is an attempt to characterize the different roles of the photographic image in the context of several Portuguese exhibitions, at home and abroad, of the early Portuguese New State (Estado Novo). As an anthropological medium, an illustration of Portuguese civilizing efforts, political and commercial propaganda, the photographic object multiplied its functions in the context of exhibitions. It thereby strove to transform the exhibition space into a factual reproduction of a Portuguese Empire, idealized for political and economic purposes. This chapter also raises the question of the reception of photography by the exhibition visitors, in their cultural and social diversity, emphasizing their dual character: presented as an objective illustration of the African or Asian reality, they were to reinforce the imperial illusion built by the Salazarist authorities, in continuity with previous practices and with the support of various institutions (e.g. Catholic Church, Army, colonial companies, trade and employer associations, centres of cultural and scientific production). In this chapter, Vargaftig, author of the book Des empires en carton. Les expositions coloniales au Portugal et en Italie, 1918-1940 (2016), confronts the photographic source with the abundant written corpus left by exhibitions such as guides, catalogues, press articles and administrative correspondence. In the next chapter, “Images of Angola and Mozambique in the Imperial Metropolis: Photographic Exhibitions Held at the Palácio Foz (1938–1960),” Inês Vieira Gomes shows how images of wild animals also became a common sight for the metropolitan publics that went to see photography exhibitions where the “colonies” were the main subject. The Secretariat of National Propaganda (SPN), created in 1933, was established as the centre of the cultural policy and propaganda of the Portuguese New State regime (Estado Novo), Salazar’s right-wing dictatorship in

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Portugal (1926–1974). António Ferro, the first SPN director, projected the so-called Policy of Spirit in the name of the regeneration of the country through visual arts, cinema and theatre. One of the main aspects of this cultural policy was the organization of exhibitions in Portugal and in international exhibitions, from Paris to New York. A part of Gomes’s doctoral dissertation on photographic archives and practices in the Portuguese African colonies from 1875 to 1940, this chapter analyses some of the photographic exhibitions that took place at the Foz Palace in Lisbon (the SPN headquarters) between 1938 and 1960: three of them on Angola, the other two on Mozambique. During the affirmation of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa, these photographical displays proved to be a powerful ally of the territorial and administrative policy by recording the places and their populations and show them to the metropolitan publics to whom “Portuguese Africa” was far and unknown. If exhibitions are a rich laboratory of colonial histories and images, so are photographic postcards. In fact, both were, perhaps the most common and widespread way of circulating images of the colonies. This section ends with the chapter “Vision and Violence: Black Women’s Bodies on Display.” Filipa Lowndes Vicente, one of the editors of this volume, analyses the pervasiveness of images of black women and girls’ bodies in the Portuguese and in other European colonial contexts, in photographic postcards, propaganda leaflets, colonial exhibitions’ ephemera, or illustrations in newspapers and magazines, demonstrating that the gendered and racialized body of (unnamed) African women was a powerful trope of colonial hegemony. One major difference in relation to analogous images of white women was their wide circulation and their banalization within the public sphere, made available to all those who could see. Is “participation” in the “event of photography,” to use Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s groundbreaking category, acceptable and possible for these photographed women? This chapter discusses some of the issues and challenges of dealing with these images through specific case studies and an analysis of the places in which they can be looked at today. Where are these images now, and where were they in the past? How were they used and reproduced? Who looked, and looks, at them and in what contexts? Bearing an endless potential for reproduction, circulation and intermediality, how are we to decolonize these imperial visual remains of the past in the present? Are universities, archives, museums or academic publications critical enough to counteract the risks of perpetuating the violence conveyed in and by these images? At the heart of this chapter is the question of the ethics of

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reproducing and exhibiting images of abuse and exploitation, which scholars, curators or archivists have fiercely debated for the past few decades. The third and last section of the book, “Holding the Empire: Political Violence, Resistance, Struggle,” analyses the role of photography in contesting the most vexed aspects upon which the empire was built, including the brutal violence during the colonial endgame. The chapters provide a long view of such inhumanities, whether as historical events such as slavery, forced labour or armed struggle, and as everyday practices like racial discrimination, gender inequity and authoritarian governance. Afonso Dias Ramos, one of the editors of this volume, begins his chapter by scrutinising the photographs which, in 1961, triggered the long decolonization wars that finished only in 1975, with the independence of the Portuguese former colonies in Africa. In “Images that Kill: Counterinsurgency and Photography in Angola circa 1961,” Afonso Dias Ramos examines the world’s largest-scale campaign of atrocity photographs in the latter half of the twentieth century, produced during the outbreak of the liberation war in Angola in 1961. He addresses the theoretical problems regarding the complete excision of this event from histories of photography, the instrumental role of these images—made and distributed on official orders—in provoking and fostering one of the most protracted contemporary wars, and their international implications in the fight for and against colonialism, civil rights, white supremacy and terrorism. The ensuing chapter by the anthropologist Catarina Laranjeiro similarly focuses on the central role which photography played in the decolonization wars in Guinea Bissau. In “Colonial war/Liberation Struggle in Guinea Bissau: From Personal Photographs to Public Silences” Laranjeiro, whose doctoral thesis dealt with the cinema of the liberation struggle in Guinea Bissau, focuses on the memory of the liberation/colonial war based on the analysis of photography as a form of mnemonic support, intended to ensure the preservation of the past. This chapter primarily discusses the dialectic between the representation and construction of vernacular memories and institutional memories, while identifying the main actors and social dynamics present in these processes, whether those who participated in this war either from the colonial army or the liberation movement. Whereas the construction and symbolic representation of this past corresponds to a shared version produced in the present and also projected onto the future, Laranjeiro explores how such images come to dovetail and disturb the official political history.

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Similarly, in her chapter “Curating the Past: Memory, History and Private Photographic Collections of the Portuguese Colonial War,” Maria José Lobo Antunes, an anthropologist who has worked on the memory and visual representation of the Portuguese colonial war, likewise addresses soldiers’ personal war albums. From 1961 to 1974, Portugal sent nearly one million men to Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Conscripts and regulars were drafted to fight wars never officially declared. The Portuguese New State regime sought to control the public visibility of these conflicts, staging a harmonious picture of life in the colonies. Despite official guidelines restricting access to images of war, an undetermined but large number of servicemen used snapshot cameras during their tours of duty. These personal photographic collections are huge in numbers but have remained accessible only to a few, and in private. Excluded from the public visual imagination of the war for decades, veterans’ photos were recently given the opportunity to reverse its customary obscure existence, under the form of published books or public visual media posted online. This chapter addresses the contemporary uses of ex-servicemen’s photos and explores the ways these images have been shared and publicized. It argues that the veterans’ curatorial drive has transformed private objects of affect into public objects of debate, thus opening up new arenas for the articulation of visual and oral history of the so-called Portuguese “colonial wars.” The ethics of visibility and invisibility are also at the core of Nuno Porto’s chapter, “Photographic Colonial Agency: The Work of Agostiniano de Oliveira at the Diamang (1948–1966).” Porto, an Associate in the Department of Art History and Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia, examines the implications of Article 22 of the working contract for the white employees of the Diamonds Company of Angola, which expressly prohibited the possession of photographic cameras within the diamond mining concession area. The company lived under a visual blackout. As much as for any other activity within the Company’s territorial limits, to photograph, to film and to record was a surveilled and disciplined task, assigned to specific subjects, and designed to maximize performance and profit for the stockholders. Porto returns to the archive of the Diamonds Company of Angola, a rich material corpus he began exploring a few decades ago, delving into a couple of moments in which photography would become a way of resistance to the contractual blackout. These were moments when photographs were neither documents nor

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truthful records, and became, in time, grim comments on the colonial imagination. Finally, this book ends with a chapter by Patricia Hayes, Professor of Visual History and Theory Chair at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, an author who has widely contributed to reflections on photography in and from Africa. Hayes’s work is a prime example of the need to cross historiographical frontiers which tend to restrict analysis to the national. South Africa’s border with Mozambique, Namibia’s border with south Angola, all have common photographic histories. In “‘Our Nightly Bread’: Women and the City in Ricardo Rangel’s Photographs of Lourenço Marques, Mozambique (1950s–60s),” Hayes argues that Ricardo Rangel’s photographic study of the Rua Araújo and red-light district near the harbour in late colonial Lourenço Marques (Maputo) poses new questions around debates in African historiography regarding “women in the city”. The area itself (with clubs, bars, cabarets) was broken up soon after independence (1975) and subjected to a postcolonial phase of purification under the new Marxist-Leninist government of Mozambique, and was only recently resurrected. Thus, Rangel’s rich photographic oeuvre presents certain possibilities for interpretation and historicization, with a feminized economy of the night at the heart of the city. Rangel presents viewers with a very porous and bohemian sense of the city. His work suggests a thick, interlocking space of critical commentary, with artists and intellectuals engaged in a kind of moral aesthetics that is replaced by a mode of ascetic morality under the new postcolonial regime.170

170  We would like to thank the anonymous reviewer for the insightful comments and suggestions on the manuscript.

PART I

Charting the Empire: Knowledge, Control, Power

CHAPTER 2

Photographing Tropical Plants in the Late Nineteenth Century: Scientific Practices and Botanical Knowledge Production António Carmo Gouveia

The Archive Scientific practices are inherently producers of information, be it experimental or observational results, objects or live specimens, the instruments of data gathering and recording, but also all the steps in the process of knowledge production, including interpersonal relations among a diverse set of actors in different geographies.1 When the subject under scrutiny is the natural world, in all its diversity and complexity, record keeping and tracking are of the utmost importance and inseparable from the work 1  Robert J. Mayhew, Charles W.J. Withers, “Introduction: Thinking geographically about science in the nineteenth century”, in Geographies of knowledge: science, scale and spatiality in the nineteenth century, ed. Robert J. Mayhew, Charles W.J. Withers, 1–25. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

A. C. Gouveia (*) Centre for Functional Ecology, Department of Life Sciences, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_2

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activity of naturalists, their accumulated collections and associated networks, including other specialists, amateur participants and informants, among others. From the nineteenth century onwards, most of these activities have been associated with academia and university scientific archives abound, often dispersed among specialised departments, with differing degrees of scope, archival treatment and visibility. The turn to the archives, especially the ones encompassing colonial periods and processes, has been accompanied by a renewed interest in this often overlooked documentation, and scientific archives have been revealing finer and more complex interactions within colonial spaces, for instance, clashes with and transfers of systems of knowledge in occupied territories,2 the roles of indigenous actors in scientific processes3 or the circulation of biological material and their ecological, economic botany and social implications, but also valuable and unsuspected aspects outside of purely scientific data, such as political and territorial actions, social and economic dimensions or, as I will detail, data for the history of African photography. I started the research process on the history of Coimbra botanists to put together the scripts for a documentary series on the diversity of plants and ecosystems of Angola, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe, and the role of the University of Coimbra (UC) in studying the vegetation of these three countries. One of my first tasks was to explore the iconographic collection of UC’s Archive of Botany.4 I was hoping to find images that had been produced alongside the pursuit of botanical knowledge and associated scientific processes that could help define an historical setup to frame the image captured in the present day. With the exception of Luís Carrisso, botanist and a self-taught accomplished photographer, who in 1920s produced more than 700 photographs of Angola and meticulously catalogued his visual archive,5 the remaining material was not inventoried, the origins and dates of most 2  Tanja Hammel, Shaping Natural History and Settler Society (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 3  See for instance, Konishi, Shino, Maria Nugent and Tiffany Shellam, eds. Indigenous Intermediaries: New perspectives on Exploration Archives. ANU Press, 2015. 4  The project Tracking the naturalists produced  four documentaries on Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the Philosophical Voyages, freely available at http://naturalistas.pt. 5  Jorge Varanda, “O Biombo de Fotos/The Screen of Photos”, in Missão Botânica: Transnatural  – Angola 1927–1937, ed. Paulo Bernaschina & Alexandre Ramires, 5–35. Coimbra: Artez, 2007.

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photographs remained uncertain and how, and often why, they came to be present in the department was unknown.6 The folder in which the photographs of São Tomé and Príncipe have been stored, under the generic designation of Photographs belonging to Júlio Henriques, contained—in addition to the photograph that I will analyse in further detail in this text—commercial postcards, images of daily life in several roças (plantation system), cocoa trains or the record of a collection of S.  Tomé seaweeds gifted to Prince D.  Luís Filipe de Bragança in 1907, among other assorted depictions.

From the University to the Tropics It was under Júlio Augusto Henriques, professor of Botany and Agriculture and director of the Botanic Garden, in 1873, that the University of Coimbra rekindled the scientific exploration of the then Portuguese African colonies, namely Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau and the small archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe. Probably because when he took office, he came across previously established contacts with several owners of roças in São Tomé, Júlio Henriques showed a special interest for the archipelago, both from the botanical aspect and the perspective of experimenting with and improving agricultural species.7 This duality of purpose was well expressed by the historians Isabel Castro Henriques and Alfredo Margarido, who defined the Atlantic islands as “garden-islands, simultaneously privileged centres for the discovery of new plants, and greenhouses for the acclimatisation of economically interesting plants.”8 Despite their economic potential, investment in the scientific survey of these islands had always been scarce. Ângela Guimarães, when analysing the records of the sessions of the Lisbon Geographical 6  The photographic archive of Luís Wittnich Carrisso (1886–1937) belongs to the Archive of Botany of the Department of Life Sciences of the University of Coimbra and is being progressively made available. A recent collaborative transcription project led by A.C. Gouveia, “Plant Letters” at Zooniverse made available and searchable the manuscript content of over 1000 documents at  https://cartasdanatureza.uc.pt/. 7  On several instances, Antonino Vidal, Henriques’s predecessor as director of the Botanic Garden (BG) of the UC, already describes acclimation experiments in the BG’s greenhouse with the most productive species of the quinine tree (genus Cinchona, for extraction of quinine, at the time the only effective compound for malaria treatment) and records the exchange of living plant material between São Tomé and UC. 8  Isabel Castro Henriques & Alfredo Margarido, Plantas e Conhecimento do Mundo nos Séculos XV e XVI (Lisboa: Biblioteca da Expansão Portuguesa, Edições Alfa, 1989).

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Society, founded in 1875, in order to quantify the attention dedicated to each former Portuguese colony in Africa, wrote: “São Tomé and Príncipe is never spoken of. […] S. Tomé is a farm whose method of exploitation had to be discussed from time to time. Nothing else.”9 In an article on African flora, Júlio Henriques elaborates on the need for the botanical exploration of the archipelago: The fertile island of S.  Tomé, right on the path nearly everyone follows, attractive and with lush vegetation, seems almost forgotten. Only a few botanists have been there, making quick excursions but leaving the form, richness and quality of the vegetation unknown. It was necessary to explore the island diligently and so, more than once, I took steps to ensure that this was done.10

Thus, in 1885, Henriques, with the support of some of the island’s landowners, managed to organise a botanical expedition to this archipelago located on the imaginary equatorial line. Unable or unwilling to go there himself, he sent Adolfo Frederico Möller, his collaborator at the Botanical Garden and an experienced naturalist in collecting Portuguese flora. Of the short four months Adolfo remained on the island (from May to September 1885), Júlio Henriques said that “Mr. Möller covered the area from the city [capital] to the Pico de S. Thomé and from the river Contador to the river Manuel Jorge” ranging from “near pristine forests” to “almost the entire part of the island most inhabited and cultivated.” 11 The report on the material collected by the Botanic Garden of the University of Coimbra head-gardener impresses both by the quantity and diversity of materials as, while Möller was commissioned to assess the island’s flora, he also collected zoological, geological and ethnographic materials. Though small in area, the island of São Tomé is rich in plant species, at the time mostly unknown to western science, not to mention the nearly complete absence of scientific information on the even smaller island of 9  Ângela Guimarães, Uma corrente do colonialismo português. A Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, 1875–1895 (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1984). 10  Júlio Henriques, “Contribuições para o estudo da Flora d’Africa. Flora de S. Thomé,” Boletim da Sociedade Broteriana IV, (1886): 129–158. 11  Ibid.

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Príncipe, in the nineteenth century. A 2011 inventory, reporting only on angiosperms (flower-bearing plants), lists over 1100 species.12 In 1885, less than a quarter of them were catalogued; Möller’s four months of collections had been insufficient and Júlio Henriques, even from a distance, knew that this number would very likely increase with further inquiries. Henriques then proposed Francisco Dias Quintas to continue the work on the botanical exploration, a request accepted by the Governor of the Province of São Tomé and Príncipe.13 Francisco Quintas was a relative of António Dias Quintas,14 the owner of several roças in São Tomé, and had accompanied Möller during his exploration of the island, as an assistant and eventually an apprentice collector and botanist; before returning to Portugal, Möller left him all of the necessary field material for collecting and preparing plants and indications of the areas in which, in his opinion, further prospecting should be pursued. In terms of time and space, such were the key actors of this story: Júlio Henriques, botanist, outlining the exploration and studying the plants from his office at the University of Coimbra; Adolfo Möller, naturalist, passing briefly by the island of São Tomé, the eyes and hands of Henriques in the field; and Francisco Quintas, an island resident and, through Möller, the  official full-time plant collector in the archipelago, responding to direct instructions from Júlio Henriques himself.  Figueiredo, Estrela, Jorge Paiva, T.  Stévart, Faustino Oliveira, Gideon F.  Smith, “Annotated catalogue of the flowering plants of São Tomé and Príncipe,” Bothalia 41, no. 1 (2011): 41–82. 13  Custódio de Borja (1849–1911), through whose official correspondence we can assess the interest of the government and certain influential figures of São Tomé in the preparation of the 1885 expedition of Adolfo Möller, and subsequent botanical prospecting work on the island. Original documents and copies were consulted at the Botany Archive of the Department of Life Sciences of the UC, and in the Historical Archives in the city of São Tomé; several ordinances on the botanical exploration of the island by Möller and Quintas were also published in the Official Bulletin of the Government of the Province of São Tomé e Príncipe. 14  José António Dias Quintas (1839–1898), owner of the roças Nova Moka, Bom Sucesso and Benfica, in São Tomé; for further details see Jorge Forjaz, Genealogias de São Tomé e Príncipe. Subsídios. (Amadora: DisLivro, 2012). Quintas established important quinine tree plantations and it was at his house in Nova Moka that Adolfo Möller stayed while on the island. It was Quintas who recommended Möller to collaborate with Francisco Quintas, on whom, unfortunately, no clear biographical information could be obtained. 12

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From the Tropics to the University This network comprising three men is a micro-scale example of the sort of material and intellectual interactions common in nineteenth-century natural sciences. Since the implementation of Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature for the description of biological organisms in the mid-eighteenth century, the process of inventorying vegetation and describing new plant species often depended on collaborations between naturalists-collectors in the field and taxonomists in a university office. These relationships relied on trust among the participants because, as Lawrence Dritsas points out, “few natural historians in the nineteenth century had the opportunity to directly observe tropical specimens in situ. Unverifiable faith in the credibility of the collector as reporter remained for Victorian naturalists a critical, if continually problematic, characteristic of scientific analyses of the world’s flora and fauna.”15 Daniela Bleichmar highlights the ways in which this collective process influenced the temporality and geography of inquiry since “natural history observation did not occur in a single session or location, but rather over extended periods of time, sequentially, and in various settings”; in academic offices, confronted with shipments of fragmentary biological material from regions left to the imagination, “naturalists attempted to see something that had not been seen before, to correct what someone else had seen, and to describe so that others could see what they had.”16 In the photographic folder mentioned at the beginning—as one would expect in a collection of loose photographs that belonged to a botanist— there were several images of plants, mostly set within a landscape, different natural habitats or agricultural areas, and others of isolated specimens of a given species. Among the latter, I was impressed by an image glued to cardboard of two adult plants of páia-séla (Forro creole) or pau-esteira (Portuguese), bearing the scientific name Pandanus thomensis Henriq. (Fig.  2.1), an endemic plant to São Tomé, which means that its global distribution is restricted to a portion of that territory, not even occurring in the neighbouring island of Príncipe. 15  Lawrence Dritsas, “From Lake Nyassa to Philadelphia: a geography of the Zambesi Expedition, 1858–64,” British Journal for the History of Science 38, no. 1 (2005): 37 (35–52). 16  Daniela Bleichmar, “The geography of observation: distance and visibility in eighteenth-­ century botanical travel,” in Histories of Scientific Observation, ed. Lorraine Daston & Elizabeth Lunbeck, 373–395. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pg375.

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Fig. 2.1  Photograph of páia-séla / pau-esteira (Pandanus thomensis Henriq.) sent to Júlio Henriques from São Tomé and Príncipe by Francisco Quintas, in 1888 (Archive of Botany of the Department of Life Sciences of the University of Coimbra)

The Construction of a Name Pandanus thomensis is not just any plant within the scientific and personal context of the naturalists referred, for it was Adolfo Möller who collected it scientifically for the first time and sent portions of its anatomical parts to Coimbra, later complemented by other observations and shipments made by Francisco Quintas, culminating in 1887 with the publication by Júlio

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Henriques of a new species for science.17 To the genus Pandanus, Henriques added the epithet thomensis, which unequivocally locates it in São Tomé, to where it is native, and found nowhere else in the world. Appended to the species name, the abbreviation Henriq. associates to the plant the name of the author who gave it a scientific denomination. This naming process, which involved the detailed Latin description of all parts of the plant, from flowers to fruit, of a species that until then did not figure in the scientific catalogues of biological diversity on Earth, was done by Júlio Henriques in Coimbra, without ever having observed it in its natural habitat, near the coasts and beaches of the island, anchored in downward-growing stems that act as stilt roots, which support the weight of the leaves and fruits and balance it during storms or a rougher spring tide. Möller probably described the plant in detail and even told him about its uses by local communities; Quintas must have given him information on the species life cycle, and Henriques consulted illustrations of similar plants in floras of other regions.18 It was not his first time doing it—naming without seeing, imagining an entire organism from truncated and dehydrated fragments arriving from various remote tropical regions. The biological material that served as the basis for Júlio Henriques’s description of the Pandanus is represented in Fig. 2.2. Despite the obvious disproportion and partial character of the available material in relation to the total size of the plant, this herbarium sheet contains the necessary morphological characters for the scientific description of P. thomensis, constituting the type specimen or holotype, which to this day attests to the relation between this plant and its scientific name. An herbarium specimen, in addition to accommodating the desiccated plant material affixed to the cardboard sheet, contains a label that records the species name, date and place of collection, and the name of the collectors. As if to reinforce the close link of P. thomensis to the three men and their joint work in the 17  Júlio Henriques, “Contribuições para o estudo da Flora d’Africa. Catálogo da Flora da ilha de S. Thomé,” Boletim da Sociedade Broteriana 5, (1887): 196–220. The photograph of Pandanus thomensis on Fig. 2.1 appears here for the first time in print in 1887. As described, the picture was sent from São Tomé in 1888. This incongruity is due to the fact that the Bulletin of the Broterian Society of 1887 was published in the following year, as shown by references to other plants identified in letters from 1888, or references to events from December 1887. 18  In the species description, Júlio Henriques alludes to the similarity of the inflorescence and male flowers of P. thomensis with those of P. lais, which he had confronted in the description and illustrations contained in Die natürlichen Pflanzenfamilien by Engler & Prantl, 1887.

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Fig. 2.2  Herbarium sheet of the type specimen of Pandanus thomensis Henriq. (held at the University of Coimbra Herbarium, REF. COI5915)

collection and identification of this new species, two names feature as collectors, Möller and Quintas, associated to two collecting sites and dates. This double origin of herbarium material is quite infrequent in a type-­ specimen but clearly works simultaneously as a paternity certificate and a tribute to those who collected the new Pandanus species. Lorraine Daston emphasises the importance of these “ur-specimens” for botanists, for whom “the type specimen is the face—the desiccated, flattened face to be

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sure, but still the face—that is attached to the name of a species, and on the permanence of that relationship depends the transmission of botanical knowledge amassed for centuries,” and which botanists prefer to consult “over even the most faithful of illustrations.”19 One can add, even over any photographic representation, since botany was one of the few scientific disciplines that resisted the primacy of mechanical objectivity brought about by photography, from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards.20 Plants of all organisms can present within a single delimited species an enormous degree of plasticity, with leaves ranging in size in several centimetres, or in shape and border indentation, or diverse number of petals or sexual organs. This variation was (and still is) best captured in illustrations by a universal, composite and averaged representation of a particular species, in a type of objectivity that Daston & Galison classify as “true-to-­ nature.”21 A photograph of a plant as a complement to taxonomical description and for identification purposes is thus an anxiety that botanists still avoid as photography forces the choice on a particular specimen to represent an entire botanical species. 22 However, after some reservations brought about by early technical limitations,23 photographs of botanical sceneries, plant’s general habit and dimensions or later of specific organs (fruits, flowers, etc.) became widespread and sometimes the only mode of visualisation of distant floras, as I will further explore. 19  Lorraine Daston, “Type specimens and scientific memory,” Critical Inquiry 31, (2004): 153–182. 20  Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 21  Ibid. 22  Even the widespread use of botanical illustrations in floras and popular science books was at a point contested as opposed to the presence and careful observation of plants themselves. As Anne Secord details, “the aim [of illustrations] was not to teach beginners how to look at pictures but, rather, how to use pictures to develop the observational skills necessary for looking at plants and other objects of nature”. Anne Secord, Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early Nineteenth-Century Scientific Knowledge,” Isis 93 (2002), pp. 28–57. 23  Jennifer Tucker, in her work Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005) cites the negative remarks of William Hooker, at the time the director of the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew and leading botanical institution, to a proposal of collaboration on a publication by William Henry Fox Talbot saying of a photograph that “Your beautiful Campanula hederacea was very pretty as to general effect – but it did not express the swelling of the flower, nor the calyx, nor the veins of the leaves distinctly.”

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The adoption of photography in the physical and natural sciences was the object of numerous discussions between adopters and retractors. Carmen Almeida studied the dissemination, protagonists and practices of photography in nineteenth century Portugal,24 including the creation of photography clubs and journals, and while there was an early embracing of the technique in various scientific disciplines, in the botanical sciences this discussion must have run among specialist networks as no published opinions for or against its use have been located.

The Construction of an Image Of the tropical plants scientifically named by Júlio Henriques, the only one for which a photograph is known is Pandanus thomensis. Perhaps because of the exceptionality of its existence, it is also one of the few for which it is possible to trace its context and process of production, shipping and reception. On 22 April 1888, Francisco Quintas writes from São Tomé: In the hands of Dr. Jacinto da Cunha who came here to visit and returns to Lisbon in this liner, I send the photograph of the Pandanus taken by a black photographer. Considering the photographer’s resources, one could not expect any better. The photograph covers two Pandanus in good condition and, in order to achieve the best results, I provided for the clearing of the shrubs and vines that covered its trunk and roots.25

For undisclosed reasons, that first copy did not make its way to Coimbra. Two months later, Quintas again informs from the island: I am also disheartened for the Pandanus picture. The photographer of this work was a black man who arrived here from Sierra Leone and who stayed only for about a month. I meant to buy the plate but the man asked for an exorbitant price and so I did not make the purchase but I reserved two copies for precaution, therefore one still remains aside from the one now packed in the box of cryptogams and seeds. There is a curious photographer here, 24  Almeida, Carmen. A divulgação da fotografia no Portugal oitocentista. Protagonistas, práticas e redes de circulação do saber. (PhD Thesis, University of Évora, 2017. 25  Francisco Quintas. Francisco Quintas to Júlio Henriques, 22 April 1888. Letter. Series PT-UC-FCT-BOT/A/09-FJDQ-6, Department of Life Sciences, Botanical Archive of the University of Coimbra.

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also black, from Cape Verde, but since he dwells in other occupations, he is not always willing to do field work, and considering he is the only one, he plays that to his advantage.26

The photograph seems to have been a direct request from Júlio Henriques to Francisco Quintas, who had to decide on the field location and plant specimens to be photographed, prepare the scenery, hire a photographer, buy the copies and organise the transport of the image to Portugal, twice. Given that in other letters, Quintas complains about the perpetual difficulties caused by weather, health, financial and logistical problems, his personal investment in the image seems to have been considerable. The analysis of the image is further complicated because it is the vision of Quintas that is transposed to photography, a man of whom I know very little and who is the most distant link in this network that connected an image to the plant’s name. The representations, and consequently our understanding of tropical nature were (and still are) created in political and aesthetic contexts that contaminate them and, as Nancy Leys Stepan warns, “we easily forget that they are just representations and take them for literal transcriptions of reality,” when in fact they are based on a “partial and selective” visual repertoire.27 The construction of the tropics by collectors and naturalists on the ground “was the result of an immense negotiation between the images they carried in their minds and the way in which the objects of the foreign landscape were experienced, an exchange that went far beyond the mere act of seeing,” in the words of Luciana Martins, regarding the representations of Brazil made by British naturalists in the nineteenth century.28 And what did Quintas decide to include in the picture of the páia-séla? In the centre of the image, two adult plants of Pandanus thomensis in flat terrain and the leaves of a third, which can be seen to the right; to the left, in a small elevation, stands a white man holding a long pole; to his right, at ground level and very close to the stilt roots, sits a black man who looks

26  Francisco Quintas. Francisco Quintas to Júlio Henriques, 29 June 1888. Letter. Series PT-UC-FCT-BOT/A/09-FJDQ-8, Department of Life Sciences, Botanical Archive of the University of Coimbra. 27  Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 28  Luciana de Lima Martins, O Rio de Janeiro dos viajantes (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2001).

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directly at the camera, holding the infructescence of this species in his arms.29 The view of the trees is strangely unobstructed from other vegetation, in a climate where plant growth is unruly. As Francisco Quintas explains in his letter, he tried to relieve the scene from what he considered excess vegetation to highlight the Pandanus but, in the process, artificialised its habitat. As a result of this clearing action, Júlio Henriques continued without access to a complete picture of P. thomensis in nature. In this process of negotiation with all the biological organisms in the landscape and the individual species to portray, Quintas introduced its vision in the final image: the choice of specimens, which contains in itself the risk of selecting plants that can show the common characteristics of the species but may have individual peculiarities that cannot be generalised, the landscaping, the descent of the fruit. The legibility of territories is a concept closely associated with the production of representations of colonial spaces, especially natural settings, landscapes and ecosystems, for instance in cities and their gardens30 or sugar plantation systems.31 The making of the photograph under analysis is a micro example of broader control strategies of the plant world, argued by Sarah Besky and Jonathan Padwe upon the innovative perspectives of James Scott,32 as the introduction of modernist, heavily standardised and disinfested monocrops, and scientific forestry, “which sought to transform ‘real, diverse, and chaotic’ natural forests into more uniform arrangements of commercial trees” more easily apprehended by colonial states and their representations more legible by the general public.33 This process also illustrates some of the reasons why nineteenth-­century botanists mistrusted and downplayed the usefulness of photography in 29  The “fruit” of the species in the genus Pandanus is what in botanical terms is called infructescence, or multiple fruit, of globular form, consisting of several individual fruits containing a seed (a classic example of this type of structure is the pineapple). 30  Michael Simpson & Jen Bagelman, “Decolonizing Urban Political Ecologies: The Production of Nature in Settler Colonial Cities,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 108 (2018), 558–568. 31  Sophia Frances Kitlinski, “To unweave the sugar plantation: memory, landscape, and photography in Terry Boddie’s sugar plantation landscape,” Nierika. Revista de Estudios de Arte, 14 (2018), 8–20. 32  Scott, James, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). 33  Sarah Besky & Jonathan Padwe, “Placing Plants in Territory,” Environment and Society: Advances in Research 7 (2016): 9–28.

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depicting plant species. Lorraine Daston sums up the main objections to the technique as “either because she cannot capture the details or because she contains in herself the subjectivity in the field that is given to the illustration.”34 Photographing plants in detail, in a dense community, almost always requires the moving of some branches away from the main interest, the redirecting of a vine growth or even detaching an element of the species to photograph. In short, to minimise the noise caused by the abundance of green, to create a neutral canvas, a mechanism similar in everything to scientific illustration—to isolate and highlight the fundamental characteristics for the description and identification of a species. In another photograph of São Tomé belonging to the collection of Júlio Henriques, this process is taken to the extreme and we can observe the making of a botanical photograph (Fig. 2.3). The plant in focus is the monkey-staff (Costus giganteus Welw. ex Ridl.35) a species that occurs only in São Tomé and Príncipe, and Equatorial Guinea (Annobón). The framing of the original photograph is wider than that of the figure printed by Júlio Henriques in his monograph on the island of São Tomé, and we get a glimpse into the scenographic mechanism used in the production of the image.36 The plant specimens were uprooted and propped against an improvised white background. Standing on the corner of a house façade, a white man stretches a cloth that extends the light colour of the walls down to the floor, and under the rhizomes. In the centre, we see the plants and a black man who secures them, simultaneously serving as human scale. In this photograph, there is no attempt at naturalness. The plants have been removed from their untamed and hard-­ to-­photograph habitat and transplanted into the artificial and organised environment of the main form of land use and colonial domain in São Tomé and Príncipe, the well-ordered roças. After the reframing, the black man, the verticality of the plants (with leaves, flowers, stems and

 Lorraine Daston & Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).  The first scientific collector of the monkey-staff (bordão-de-macaco; ukwêtê-nglandji: common names in Portuguese and Forro Creole, respectively) was Friedrich Welwitsch (1806–1872), an Austrian physician and botanist, and a mythical figure for subsequent Portuguese naturalists, who at the service of the Portuguese crown made important botanical collections in Angola, from 1853–1861. On his return trip to Portugal, he collected the monkey-staff at Roça Monte Café on the island of São Tomé. 36  Júlio Henriques, “A Ilha de S. Tomé sob o ponto de vista historico-natural e agricola,” Boletim da Sociedade Broteriana 27, (1917): 1–197. 34 35

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Fig. 2.3  Photographic postcard of ukwêtê-nglandji / bordão-de-macaco (Costus giganteus Welw. ex Ridl.), sent from São Tomé and Príncipe to Júlio Henriques, unknown date (Archive of Botany of the Department of Life Sciences of the University of Coimbra). The same image was cropped and published in the Bulletin of the Broterian Society, Vol. 27, 1917

underground organs) and the wall were the sole elements of the composition to be printed. The photograph of Pandanus thomensis, on the contrary, was published in its original framing, plants and men included. The white man, from his raised position, holds a long pole that seems to end in a small sickle, probably a tool for collecting hard-to-reach plant material. His vertical stand clearly acts as an element of scale. Estimating that the pole would be about two meters long, we can infer that the plant on the left would reach eight metres high, difficult to uproot and lean against a white wall, and impossible to contain in a standard herbarium sheet. And who might this man be? Quintas says nothing of it in his letters, but it is unlikely that he would be accompanied by many people on his botanical wanderings around the

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island. Similar to the P. thomensis, Júlio Henriques had never seen Francisco Quintas either. Could he have included himself in the composition to bear witness to the scientific rigour of the photograph and proof of his knowledge and dedication to the study of the vegetation of São Tomé? If this supposition was to be confirmed, Quintas’s image would be inseparably linked to the name of the plant he helped to collect, highlighting the role and importance of the collector, “the eye that observes, compares, and contrasts,” but who “is itself rarely visible.”37 What of the other man? He might have been an assistant in botanical surveys. Sitting down, he is not useful as a scale element, but artificially increases the perception of how tall the plants are, towering way above him. The fruit he holds in his arms cannot be clearly seen, but brings into focus a botanical feature that, at the distance from which the photograph was taken, would be almost impossible to observe hanging from the branches of the plant, hidden behind the leaves or simply non-existent in the chosen specimens. The colour of his skin also unequivocally accentuates the exotic character and distant habitat of the plant, the same role played by the man in the image of the Costus giganteus.

Power in Technique As Sandra Xavier remarks in an article on the photographs of Angola produced by Luís Carrisso, a disciple of Júlio Henriques, “taking a photograph is an act of ordering” and “the colonial space, millimetrically and symmetrically organized, mirrors the visual order of scientific representations,” but also of social representations.38 The position of the two men immediately signals the relations between the coloniser and the colonised: the white male standing, with his archaic-looking tool, albeit legitimised by its usefulness for scientific studies, who just cut the infructescence that the black man holds close to the ground. At the political, administrative and social level, these power relations, always asymmetrical, seem unquestionable. But the letters of Francisco Quintas introduce a surprising fact that seems to interfere in this 37  Starr Douglas & Felix Driver, “Imagining the tropical colony: Henry Smeathman and the termites of Sierra Leone,” in Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, ed. Felix Driver & Luciana Martins, 91–112. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, p. 112. 38  Sandra Xavier, “Numa estreita vereda aberta na floresta: botânica, iconografia, território,” in Missão Botânica: Angola 1927–1937, ed. P.  Amaral, A.  Ramires, F.  Sales & H. Freitas, 77–96. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2005.

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imbalance, even if only on an anecdotal basis. If there is a power relation in the process of production of this image it leans to the side of the one who possesses and masters the technique: the photographer. The black photographers Quintas complains about, disparaging their work, accusing them of unwillingness to work and of overpricing their services beyond his means. The fact that the author of the Pandanus photograph is black is surprising, given the lack of references in the literature to the activity of black photographers in São Tomé. Moreover, he was a foreigner, and by Quintas’s recollection, just passing by a place lacking in photographers, being that the only other photographer he refers to was also black. Controlling the photographic equipment and technique, and the scarcity of such knowledge, seems to have allowed these black men, if momentarily, to even out the disparities in these complex racial relations. Even if it was Quintas who chose the plants, it was the photographer who would have decided on the framing and image production, and charged for the copies. Without the gaze of both men, Júlio Henriques would have continued to access only to a discrete and fragmented knowledge of Pandanus thomensis, a name without an image.

L’homme à la camera Unravelling the production context of the pau-esteira photograph brought together several known actors but uncovered unforeseen paths. Adolfo Möller collected yet another new species for science, Júlio Henriques received the photo of the plant, which he named and inscribed in the biodiversity catalogue of the tropics, and maybe even Francisco Quintas revealed his face, side by side with the Pandanus. To be able to give the photographer a face, the black man, invisible, would be asking a great deal. But does he have a name in this narrative? The Official Bulletin of the Government of the Province of São Tomé and Príncipe, which began its publication in 1857, details, among other information on the daily life of the archipelago, the list of individuals and boats arriving and leaving the islands every month. If, as Quintas reports in his letters, the photographer of the P. thomensis was a foreigner, on a short stop at the island, his name should feature in such lists. On 19 January 1888, the French gunboat Pourvoyeur arrived in São Tomé from Gabon, carrying 76 soldiers, 5 passengers and 3 suitcases. The passenger list accounts for an “Alphonse Owondo, assistant clerk at the

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government office in Libreville.”39 This same name is inscribed in an important collection of postcards depicting an agricultural competition held in 1902 in Conakry, Republic of Guinea: Alphonse Owondo, opérateur. He made 73 catalogued postcards with photos from Guinea, but also from Freetown. For this reason, some authors think that Owondo was native to Sierra Leone.40 However, the scarcity of data on a nineteenth-­ century black photographer working in Africa produces contradictory information. Odile Goerg, mentioning photographers active in Conakry in the early years of the twentieth century, writes, but without citing any references, that Owondo was probablement gabonais.41 Admitting that this is the same Alphonse Owondo who, 14 years before producing Conakry’s postcards, arrived in São Tomé as a government official from Libreville, Gabon, the latter hypothesis seems to gain some support. On 28 August 1893, l’indigène Owondo, Alphonse, écrivain au Secrétariat du Gouvernement, est licencié de son employ.42 Five years after being in São Tomé, Owondo, the scribe, left his official post in Gabon, making it more

39  Official Bulletin of the Government of the Province of S. Thomé and Príncipe, 7 (1888). Notwithstanding the quantity and diversity of data that can be derived from this bulletin, it should not be taken at face value. By cross-referencing the information from the lists of passengers entering and leaving the island, with the lists of vessels arriving or departing the São Tomé port, several inconsistencies can be found. By way of example, as mentioned in the text, the gunboat Pourvoyeur would have arrived in S. Tomé carrying five passengers, but only three names are recorded as entering the island. Similarly, when the same gunboat left for Gabon on 23 January, we are told that it takes on board the 76 soldiers who entered, some suitcases, but no passengers. However, under the heading “List of individuals who were granted passports or guides to leave this island during the month of January 1888”, only four names are listed, including that of Alphonse Owondo. If it is true that Owondo left on 23 January (on a Monday, three days after arriving), he was not the author of the picture of the screw pine. However, it is likely that the authorisation to leave did not imply immediate departure (especially since trips from São Tomé to Gabon were frequent), or that passengers’ entries and exits were not exhaustive. Maria Estela Guedes, while tracking the wanderings of naturalist Francisco Newton who lived in São Tomé for several years, detected several similar situations in the Bulletin: Newton often entered the island without ever officially leaving, or vice-versa, and some ships left before they even arrived (Maria Estela Guedes, ed., Francisco Newton: Cartas da Nova Atlântida, https://www.triplov.com/ newton). 40  Pierre-André Dürr, “Le concours agricole de 1902 à Conakry en texte et en cartes postales,” Bulletin Images & Memoires 25 (2010): 17–21. 41  Odile Goerg, Pouvoir Colonial, Municipalités et Espaces Urbains: Conakry-Freetown des Années 1880 à 1914 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). 42  Bulletin Officiel Administratif du Congo Français, n. 8 (1893), pp. 145–200.

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plausible that he is the Owondo-photographer who later became active in Guinea, both countries being French colonies at the time. The coincidence in finding the name of an indigène man entering São Tomé around the same  period when the photograph of the Pandanus thomensis was shot, moreover associated to photographic activity a few years later, does not seem to be the work of chance. However, the lack of conclusive biographical data on Owondo does not allow me to state his birthplace with assurance. Was he in Gabon because he was a native, as the use of the word indigenous suggests? Or did he come from Guinea, a neighbouring country of Sierra Leone, to where he returned years later? His nationality matters only because the biggest hesitation in attributing the image to Owondo is introduced by Francisco Quintas, who claims that “the photographer of this work was a black man who arrived from Sierra Leone.” He is not alone in suggesting it, as mentioned above, but the French-speaking name Alphonse and the surname Owondo, still common in Gabon today, do not seem to support this hypothesis. Furthermore, a clerk should have an excellent command of the language of the government which he represented, in this case French. Sierra Leone was then a colony of the British crown, whose capital was Freetown, a name with the same meaning as the French capital of Gabon, Libreville. What language did Quintas and Owondo speak to each other in when in the rainforest? Just as the picture of the páia-séla was lost the first time it was sent to Coimbra, what other missteps and miscommunications might have existed between these two men? Assigning a name and an image to Pandanus thomensis was not a straightforward process for any of those involved. I had not anticipated that from my lengthy observation of this photograph, the name of an African photographer would arise as its putative author. This ought to remind us not to overlook the everlasting relationship between plants and humans, whose traces are a constant source of new and unexpected information.

CHAPTER 3

Stopping for the Camera: Photographs of the Portuguese Expedition to Báruè, Mozambique, 1902 Rui Assubuji

Introduction At the Military History Archive (AHM) in Lisbon, searching for historical photographs related to Mozambique, I came across an envelope on whose outside was handwritten “Expedition to Báruè in 1902 commanded by João de Azevedo Coutinho.” In the envelope, only one of the twelve roughly 10 × 15 cm photographic prints had an inscription on the back, eight names of nine military officials depicted in a group standing for the picture. No other annotations about the images in the collection were immediately available. The majority of the other photographs followed a similar compositional arrangement with groups of men standing for the camera, although in different postures and locations. Seldom seen and therefore new to the contemporary public, these old photographs are

R. Assubuji (*) Jackman Humanities Institute, Toronto, ON, Canada © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_3

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“inscriptions” of a relevant colonial founding period that might contain hidden traces of the past waiting to resurface.1 Since the set-up and the capturing of the images occurred during a time period in which the act of photography was central to military operations, this article considers them as war photographs. Yet the appearance within the images gives the impression of a moment of suspension in which everything freezes for the phenomenon to happen, the creation of a sharp image. “Brought to light” more than a hundred years after being taken, what can these photographs tell us about their existence? “Is there a history made by visuals?”2 A possible answer derives from John Berger’s call to search for what was there before the photographs, where “before refers not only to the confrontation, or the standing before a photograph but also the fact that a photograph implies a time prior to its making and a time afterward, thus linking subject, maker, and viewer.”3 In his 1941 memoirs Memórias de um Velho Marinheiro e Soldado de África (Memories of an old sailor and soldier of Africa),4 the commandant of the expedition João de Azevedo Coutinho described this particular military operation in much detail. Surprisingly, in over 500 pages the production of the photographs seems not to be mentioned, at least not in the section dedicated to the Báruè campaign.5 Here, his writings are put into conversation with directly related visuals and cross-referenced with the research of other scholars. This creates a historical backdrop against which selected photographs of the Báruè campaign can be read and hopefully 1  For a notion of inscription, see Elizabeth Edwards, Photographs and the Practice of History (Great Britain: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 23–29. The past refers to the beginning of the colonial process, the rich history of the Zambezi Valley. 2  Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods (London: Reaktion Books, 2009). 3  John Berger cited in Judit Fryer Davidov, ‘Narratives of Place’, in Alex Hughes and Andrea Noble (eds), Phototextualities: intersections of photography and narrative (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 41. 4  My translation of the Portuguese title. 5  Another publication specifically dedicated to this campaign, J. A. Coutinho A Campanha Do Barué Em 1902 (Lisboa: Typ. da Livraria Ferin, 1904), is a less expanded version of the monograph mentioned earlier, only focused on the campaign. It features 21 ‘illustrations’, a folded map of the region between Sena, Tete and Macequece and the itinerary of the military columns involved in the operation. It also contains three statistical graphs with temperature and altitude and 73 documents with information of the entire organization and the service of the military columns. Apart from the one depicting the imprisoned African leaders on the way to the exile, the set of photographs published are different from the ones in the archive, but convey the same spirit.

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analysed more holistically. Recalling Berger’s point about time, the events and the spaces depicted require us to think about pre-colonial, colonial and even post-colonial phases of a country’s history and the links with other regions of the globe and the histories they evoke. It is perhaps ambitious to look for continuities between the social history of the Zambezi Valley and the contemporary situation, but the unrest of the peoples in central Mozambique persists up to this day, affecting the social, political and economic stability of the country in very problematic ways. The past appears less remote than one might think.

The End of the Báruè Kingdom? After the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, the financially resourceless Portuguese colonial authority began to extend their political and military control of Mozambique from coastal areas into the inland and organized several military expeditions to annihilate insubordinate local powers. Known as “Pacification Campaigns,” they were seen as a high priority for the Effective Occupation of the territory and essential if the finances of the colony were to attract foreign investment. The two most successful military operations were the expedition against the Gaza Empire in 1895 which marked the beginning of forceful occupation, and Báruè in 1902, at the time considered the last of such campaigns.6 Its conclusion was cause to celebrate the complete eradication of autonomous local powers and the much yearned-for victory of Portugal’s hegemony over this African territory (Fig. 3.1). The Báruè Kingdom was a satellite estate of the Monomotapa Empire.7 Through rebellion became totally independent during the sixteenth century. It occupied a region between Sofala and Manica, the escarpment country of Lupata Gorge, and controlled the roads from the Zambezi River to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Portuguese fairs of 6  The Gaza campaign was the first in the context of Effective Occupation, and celebrated the greatest Portuguese victory, putting an end to the powerful Gaza Empire and its king, Ngungunyane. For a brief introduction on this campaign see António José Telo, Moçambique 1895. A Campanha de Todos os Heróis (Lisboa: Tribuna Da História, 2004). On Ngungunyane, see Gerhard J. Liesegang, Ngungunyane, a figura de Ngungunyane, Rei de Gaza 1884–18895 e o desaparecimento do seu Estado (Maputo: ARPAC, 1986). 7  Detail cut excerpted from Map III. Le Mozambique portugais (1854–1857). In René Pélissier, Naissance du Mozambique, Résistance et Révoltes Anticoloniales (1854–1918), Vol. 1 (Orgeval: Pélissier, 1984), 24.

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Fig. 3.1  An important place in the early colonial history of Mozambique, the map locates Báruè in the region once called the Zambezi Valley. It highlights Massangano, the settlement of one of the strongest warlords and landholding opponents to Portuguese authority. The map also indicates Manica and Macequece, the location of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fairs and the gold mining area that stirred European greed

Manica and Macequece.8 In a treaty signed with its king (denominated the macombe) in 1794–1795, Portuguese authorities paid an annual tribute called binzo to guarantee the free transit of its merchants. Another treaty was signed with the new macombe in 1830 which was not recognized by

8  Zambezi or Zambesi in English is spelled rio Zambeze in Portuguese, and Zambézia is one of the largest provinces of the country.

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other chiefs in the region, who had to be paid off separately by the Portuguese.9 According to various sources, the Báruè people were in a constant state of rebellion, and their chiefs “vowed never to accept European rule.”10 This was compromising the occupation of the central region of Mozambique, a territory granted to the majestic Companhia de Moçambique, and weakening the position of Portugal in relation to other colonial powers, particularly Great Britain. The Portuguese authority was compelled to intervene with its force to “pacify” the region. A military operation was set in place with two major goals, the closing of the Báruè frontier to prevent any external aid and the simultaneous rapid conquest of Missongue, the capital where the Macombe lived and Mungari, the home of chief Chipitura, later controlled by his son Cavunda.11 Baruean aristocrats were rivals in the succession dispute but allies in the face of a common enemy, in this case the Portuguese force. Lisbon was able to recruit 14 African Elite Platoons which were constituted of men from diverse ethnic groups such as “the Nguni from Inhambane, the Chope from Lourenço Marques, the Macua from Northern Mozambique and a mix of Angolan peoples.” Less than 3% of 20,000 soldiers were of Portuguese descent. “The support of a great number of African soldiers was crucial for the success of the operation.”12 The military expedition came closer to the theatre of operations by navigating the Zambezi River. Government resources were inadequate for 9  António Rita Ferreira, Fixação Portuguesa e História Pré-colonial de Moçambique. Estudos e Documentos, 142 (Lisboa: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical do Ultramar, 1982), 144–239. 10  Allen and Barbara Isaacman. Dams, Displacement, and the Delusion of Development: Cahora Bassa and Its Legacies in Mozambique, 1965–2007. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013, 342. 11  Allen F. Isaacman, The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique. Anti-Colonial Activity in the Zambesi Valley 1850–1921 (London: Heinemann, 1979), 63 and 55. 12  Isaacman, The Tradition of Resistance, 65. Many of the African soldiers later called cipaios were earlier called chicundas, acting as slave warriors, hunters and police for their landlords. On chicundas see the Isaacmans’ Escravos, Esclavagistas, Guerreiros e Caçadores. A Saga dos Chicundas do Vale do Zambeze (Maputo: Promédia, 2006). On ‘Prazos da Coroa’ see, J. Capela Donas Senhoras e Escravos (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1995), 19–41. See also História de Moçambique, Vol. I (Maputo: Imprensa Universitária, 2000), 251–562. Cipaio is a Portuguese term originated from the word ‘shipahi’ (an Indian soldier serving under the British order). Absorbed in the structure of colonial administration, worked as guards, civilian soldiers, police or tax collectors. Also spelled sipai or sipaio, the English term ‘sepoy’ is adopted here.

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the challenges of the river and its sand bars, which required a private service to transport the expedition from Quelimane to Chinde, that began on 19 July 1902.13 From Chinde, the troops moved on to the premises of the Companhia de Moçambique and mounted the rear post at Chiramba, the limit of the colonially occupied territory, just before Tambara, the first enemy-targeted location.14 The Báruè campaign of 1902 lasted two months with a march of approximately 3000 kilometres. The columns entered into fights of major or minor importance in the aringas (settlements) of Mafunda, Chambo, Vunvuti, Inhacate, Bindau, Sangara, Vunduzi, Massamba, Nhapando, Damba-Cuxamba, Chiussado, Candia-M’tangue, Choarira, Nhahangara Bexigue, with the most important combat taking place at Chuargua and Missongue.15 There were wounded but no dead European soldiers. Coutinho, excluding the anonymous warriors who died in combat, claimed that 13 chiefs or important aristocratic relatives perished, 23 notables as well as ordinary people were imprisoned, 71 aringas were destroyed and great quantities of supplies were found in the settlements and field camps captured (Fig. 3.2).16

Reading the Photographs The analysed photographs do not depict the battlefields, the corps lost in combat, the burning of numerous villages and field crops, people displaced or arrested, lightly mentioned in Coutinho’s testimonies. The deeds of resistant combatants, the famine and other resulting collateral damages are only grasped by reading other accounts of the conflict. Rather than reportage of what happened in the field, the pictures seem to portray celebratory moments of consummated victory. They are selective 13  Quelimane is a city port at the mouth of an offshoot of the Zambezi River, and Chinde, one of its most important ports. 14  When the Companhia de Moçambique finally occupied that territory, they built at Tambara the fort considered by Coutinho to be ‘the best building of this genre I know in Africa’. See Coutinho, Memórias de um Velho Marinheiro, 587; 583. 15  Surprisingly, despite the two days’ heavy confrontation, the initial combat at Tambara is not included in the last list. See the discussion on Fig. 3.3. Aringas are large fortified encirclements where the elite lived and to where people from surrounding fields would converge in case of war. See José Capela, ‘Como as aringas de Moçambique se transformaram em Quilombos (How in Mozambique the aringas became maroons)’, Tempo, 10 (20) (2006), 72–97, www.scielo.br/pdf/tem/v10n/20/05.pdf accessed 8/01/2017. 16  Coutinho, Memórias de um Velho Marinheiro, 630.

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Fig. 3.2  “Báruè and surrounding Area.” By locating the principal Aringas (settlements) this map helps the further descriptions of the military operations during the Báruè campaign of 1902. Map from Isaacman, The tradition of Resistance, Maps xvii

memories confirming the Portuguese victorious presence in claimed African territories. A possible motivation for their making was the immediate outcomes of the campaign, crucial for the internal and external affairs of the colonial empire.17 Taken during the expedition, the photographs were consistently produced in terms of their precise framing and composition. Each picture was made against a carefully chosen background, and in a particular setting and place. The posing subjects denote agreement and full participation of both the photographer and the photographed. Every image in which Africans and Europeans appear is a testimony of unequal treatment, evidenced by their placement and poses within the frame.18 17  Marquês de Lavradio, Portugal Em África Depois de 1851 (Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1936), 281. 18  See discussion on Fig. 3.7.

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The whole framework of the visuals suggests that the collection of photographs in the envelope was neither accidental nor spontaneous, even those where subjects appear more informal. They reveal marked intentionality, easily perceived from the “shadows of meaning” emanating from their objects and subjects. Like a ritual occurring during the entire operation, the image-making built a discourse intended to convey clear messages inferred in their aesthetics, with precise meanings favouring imperial goals. They tell about the grandeur of the colonial force, imposed order, domination, acceptance and collaboration, and confirm the victorious presence in an inhospitable environment. This article proposes a reading of five pictures, selected with the conviction that they represent the spirit of the collection.

In Tongaland the Fights Began In Fig. 3.3, a group of nine military officials depicted in relaxed postures might not be an official photograph, but certainly a register of their presence at the location. In fact, it might signal the beginning of the hostilities with the incursion into the enemy’s land. The Portuguese army had its rear post mounted in Chiramba, on the border of their territorial control. Clustered between this and the Báruè countries was the homeland of the Tonga, an African people allied to the Báruè, constituting a frontline of defence against foreign penetration.19 After two days of combat, their aringa of Tambara was the first to be taken. As Coutinho describes, the Portuguese troops left Tambara on 2 August, marched four kilometres to the Muira River, met the sepoys designated to flank the column and continued the march on the sandy soil of the riverbed.20 Soon they suffered the first attack, fired upon by a few local  The Tonga of the lower Zambezi are descended from the Chona-Caranga (Shona-­ Karanga in English orthography), a cultural and linguistically distinguished people, that since the fifteenth century inhabited the extensive lands limited by the rivers Punguè, Zambezi, Luenha, Zangue, Mucua, Mucombeze and Msicadzi. This contradicts H. P. Junod and others’ perception that Tonga (Tsonga) was a derogatory terminology applied to these people by the Nguni invaders. In A.  Rita-Fereira, Fixação Portuguesa e História Pré-Colonial de Moçambique, 78–79. See the ‘introduction to the Thonga Tribe’ in Henri Phillipe Junod, The Life of a South African Tribe, Vol I (New York: University Books INC, 1962), 13 onwards. On page 15 Junod explains the origin of the spelling Thonga and its significance. On the Alliance between the Barue and Tonga see Isaacman, Tradition to Resistance, 58. 20  See map in 3.3. The entire expedition was divided in three columns that depart from different positions in the assault to Báruè. The first column was the principal, commanded by Azevedo Coutinho himself. Pombeirar refers to the grimacing, provoking, teasing, jumping and signalling challenges before fighting, or during the drumming before combat. 19

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Fig. 3.3  Silver paper print 10 × 15 cm (circa). Military History Archive, Lisbon. Archival reference: PT AHM-FE-110-B7-PQ-6.2. Written on the back of the print: 2° tenente Gusmão; 2° tenente António de Brito, 2° tenente Mendes de Almeida; 1° tenente Pinto Bastos; João Coutinho; 1° tenente Moniz; 2° tenente Fernando de Magalhães; 2° tenente Roby

warriors who fled into the dense woods bordering the river, chased by sepoys. Shortly after, about 500 metres from the advance guard, many “blacks pombeirando” fired their weapons at the column; “I ordered the formation of the square and called on the H. 42mm (artillery piece)… which threw two grenades. They disappeared as if by magic.”21 The background of the picture shows the thick and thorny bush characteristic of the vegetation bordering the riverbeds. Although facilitating the progression into enemy territory, the path was not always easy due to the sandy soil that caused men and animals extra effort and did not always provide water. In addition, the thick bush covered the warriors’ retreats after attacks on the column. Possibly, the picture was taken during the  Coutinho, Memórias de um Velho Marinheiro e Soldado de África, 588.

21

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initial march when the Portuguese invaded the enemy Tongaland following the Muira River and suffered the first ambushes. In his memoir, Coutinho addressed words of appreciation to the officers who worked with him for the success of the operation, particularly mentioning “only those that stand out by providing services worthy of note.”22 Are they the ones posing for the photograph? The image shows that the operation is proceeding with confidence and a harmonious ambience among the officers of the command. Eight names are hand-written on the back of the print. The inscription, however, does not indicate who is who, so presumably we should read them from left to right. Tracing their names in various texts helps to characterize the men in the picture: The first person on the left is the Navy Second Lieutenant Pedro de Gusmão. He gave “evidence of his value” assisting Coutinho in the previous campaigns of Inhangone and Maganja da Costa and was awarded the post of field adjutant to the commandant of the first platoon of the navy.23 The second man (from the left) is Second Lieutenant António Júlio de Brito, who brought 5000 men from Angónia and Macanga, the prazos he had occupied just a month before. According to Coutinho, de Brito resided in Angónia and was known in the neighbouring English colony (today’s Zimbabwe) as the “king of Angónia.” The third man is army Second Lieutenant Boaventura Mendes de Almeida, who had considerable strategic knowledge about the region and was an indefatigable worker. He was distinguished in his command of the column section, often marching in the front position. He took great care of the weaponry in his charge and helped to repair the pieces captured by the enemy in Missongue, the Baruean capital where the whole force concentrated for a major combat.24 The fourth man dressed in white clothes is First Lieutenant Pinto Basto. Besides his crucial position as administrator of Sena District, he was a naval officer (which might explain the white uniform), all reasons for the deference given to him, posing on the right hand side of the commandant,

 Coutinho, Memórias de um Velho Marinheiro e Soldado de África, 649.  Ibid. 24  Ibid., 647. Missongue was the great aringa of Chipitura, one of the contenders for the throne of Báruè, friendly to the Portuguese who support him on the succession fights, See Isaacman, The tradition of Resistance, 55. 22 23

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Coutinho (also from the navy), who referred to him as “my comrade” and “an energetic and active officer.”25 The sixth man in the picture is the First Lieutenant, Júlio Botelho Moniz, who in 1898 conducted the small steamer “Batista de Andrade” on a “risky” trip from Lisbon to Lourenço Marques. He commanded disciplined sepoys constituting the auxiliary column of Muira that assaulted the hill in the battle of Missongue. The seventh man is Second Lieutenant Fernando de Magalhães e Menezes, who has already included the Namarrais and Gaza campaigns in his career. He rendered useful services as commandant of the gunboat Obuz, by loading hundreds of porters and sepoys. On land, he commanded his platoon, constituting part of the auxiliary column of Muira.26 The eighth man is Second Lieutenant Joo de Faria Machado Pinto Roby de Miranda Pereira, deputy chief of the General Staff. Described by Coutinho as “a very young officer who started to show courage in Africa.”27 Pereira was one of several aristocratic officers integrating expeditions that landed in Mozambique. His military career included campaigns in Namarrais, Gaza and Zambézia, before ending tragically in Angola en route to Portugal.28

In Barueland. The Becoming of a Hero Figures 3.3 (above) and 3.4 (below) depict distinctly different natural environments, one bushy and thick, the other rocky, hilly and dry. In the account, Coutinho explains it in detail, narrating how the march into enemy territory started, following paths either along or through the bed of the Muira River, to reach the Báruèan hilly landscape with deep ravines that often forced the column to have long stops waiting for the engineering brigade to open the trail. The artillery and other machinery were often dismantled and transported by men, “a march extremely difficult and fatiguing.”29 The photographer intended to bring the nature of the 25  Basto became an administrator of the Companhia de Moçambique and died a navy admiral. In José Capela, Donas, Senhores e Escravos, 131. 26  These refer to the earlier campaigns led by the greatest Portuguese hero, Mouzinho de Albuquerque, between 1894 and 1898. 27  Coutinho, Memórias de um Velho Marinheiro e Soldado de África, 608. The action of the lieutenant is also mentioned on page 591 of the book. 28  José Capela, Donas, Senhores e Escravos, 131. 29  Ibid., 599.

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Fig.  3.4  João de Azevedo Coutinho. Silver paper print 10  ×  15  cm (circa). Military History Archive, Lisbon. Archival reference: PT AHM-FE-110-B7-PQ-6.12

environment to attention, revealing its wild features. The pictures, therefore, indicate the progression of the expedition into the territory, departing from the Tonga lowlands to reach the Báruè highlands. Figure 3.4 is the only shot in the collection that shows a solitary individual, isolated on a rocky summit. The camera’s slightly tilted-up angle keeps everyone looking at him from a subordinate posture, emphasizing the personage’s importance. Viewers are always in a lower position, regardless of their social rank, and are forced to look at the figure from a lower view point.30 The military man stands above all other men, as though on a pedestal. He has a better perspective of captured land and the globe at his feet. The photograph conveys his triumph over the surroundings and verifies the mission’s completion. It has the appearance of a monument 30  This study adopts western semiotic conventions yet acknowledges other perspectives, mindful that the meanings of the enunciations below and above are more complex. For example, in certain parts of Mozambique chiefs tended to sit on the straw mats (esteira) and talked to servants or to visitors who stand before them.

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dedicated to a historical figure. The photograph celebrates a hero and projects the glory of the empire. However, one detail in the image questions the triumphalism of the victorious discourse and speaks about the fragilities of the empire’s foundation. The visible fracture on the rocky terrain trodden by the soldier appears to suggest the ground yielding before the presence of the invading army, the change of a natural order imposed by new values, a broken resistance. It also reflects what happens to the local society already divided by the ambition of its elite, such as the case of Báruè, besides the profound impact of the dominant presence of foreign elements in African society. To think about the potential meanings of this image, it helps to find reasons for the existence of such a photograph, and stage an encounter with history per se. The man in the picture is the commander of the Portuguese military campaign to Báruè in 1902, João de Azevedo Coutinho. A Portuguese aristocrat, he started his military career in the cavalry at an early age. Transferred to the navy on 10 November 1882, his first commission in Africa began in the Indian Ocean Navy Division, campaigning in Mozambique. In addition to military operations, he conducted hydrographic work surveying the Mozambican coast, the sandbars and rivers in the bay of Lourenço Marques (today Maputo), the access to Tungue Bay, and rivers such as the Moginqual and the Muite. The Portuguese Naval Cartography Committee and the British Admiralty published part of his survey. By order of 1 June 1880, he was in charge of the verification of the hydrographic maps of the Zambezi River and garnered this commission by commanding the gunboat Cherim.31 A military man, politician and colonial administrator, Coutinho was a soldier of the 1890s generation who came to Mozambique to safeguard Portuguese territorial claims from local challenges and in a region “ravaged by British Company speculators in the southern Shire land of Rhodesia and by Scottish missionaries in the northern hinterland of Malawi.”32 During the so-called Campanha de Todos os Heróis initiated in 1894, Coutinho was in the military force that followed António Ennes 31  Coutinho, Memórias de Um Velho Marinheiro e Soldado de África (Lisboa: Livraria Bertrand, 1941), 538. 32  For a schematic description of the principal events of the Effective Occupation process in relation to Mozambique, see René Pélissier, Naissance du Mozambique. Résistance Et Révoltes Anticoloniales (1854–1818) (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1984), 102–106.

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on the mission to control the unrest of the native peoples in southern Mozambique and to counter the pressure exerted by Great Britain over the bay of Lourenço Marques.33 Ennes recalled that on 8 December they left Lisbon to Marseille from where, on the night of the 12th, they departed on board the Iraouaddy towards the Indian Ocean.34 On the eve of the British Ultimatum in January 1890, Coutinho was in command of the gunboat Cherim, which served Serpa Pinto in the Shire and Ruo region.35 He was proclaimed “Benefactor of the Fatherland” on 15 January 1891, at the age of 25, for his involvement in the conquest and pacification of the Portuguese African possessions. He was given the title of Councillor of His Most Faithful Majesty on 31 December 1904. After being promoted to captain-lieutenant of the Navy (1905–1906), Coutinho was named Governor-General of Mozambique. Awarded the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Christ on 4 January 1909, he was appointed the 53rd Civil Governor of the District of Lisbon, a city engulfed in insurgency, on 16 April 1909. He was the Minister of Navy and Overseas (1909–1910) during the last government of an “exhausted political system” whose regime, greatly discredited among the urban population, “failed to reverse the course of events.”36 The rebellion of 31 January 1891 in the northern city of Porto was the first attempt to establish a republican regime in Portugal, finally 33  On Baía de Lourenço Marques, earlier known as Baia da Lagoa (Delagoa Bay) see, David William Hedges, ‘Trade and Politics in Southern Mozambique and Zululand in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century’ (PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, 1978); Eduardo de Noronha, O Districto de Lourenço Marques e a África do Sul (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1895), 35. 34  António Ennes, A Guerra de África em 1895 (Lisboa: Prefácio, 2002), 33. The ship belonged to the French company Méssageries Maritimes. In addition to the Portuguese men sent to launch the military campaign in Mozambique, French officials and soldiers involved on the first preparations for the expedition to Madagascar were also on board. 35  The two men were fighting the Makololo people at the Shire River, the core of the major period of tension in the relations between Portugal and Great Britain, whose peak was the issue of the Ultimatum that ended the Portuguese Pink Map dream. This was considered a determining factor for the fall of the Portuguese constitutional monarchy. The Makololo people were deeply connected with Livingstone’s passage in the region. See Nuno Severiano Teixeira, O Ultimatum Inglês. Política externa e política interna no Portugal de 1890 (Lisboa: Alfa Testemunhos Contemporâneos, 1990). The British Ultimatum deprived Portugal of the rich region later known as Rhodesia. See Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique (London: Hurts & Co.1995), 391. 36  1907 no Advento da República. Mostra bibliográfica 15 de Março a 9 de Junho (Lisboa: Biblioteca Nacional, 2007), 7–8.

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instituted in 1910.37 Firmly faithful to monarchical ideals, Coutinho was compulsorily retired by the new government.38 However, notable figures of the monarchy such as Mouzinho de Albuquerque, António Ennes and others were recovered by a fascist regime that arose from an unstable Portuguese Republican Government. Coutinho’s memoir was published in 1941.39 Significantly honoured by the “New State,” he was solemnly re-admitted in the Navy and promoted to honorary vice admiral in 1942.40 Coutinho’s life was extolled as replete with episodes of extreme courage, respect for opponents, interest in African culture, enlightened capacity and, above all, the uncompromising fulfilment of duties with loyalty and honour. The Portuguese Navy sloop NRP João Coutinho was launched at sea on 7 March 1970. In Mozambique, his portrait became the face of 50 escudos note (Portuguese currency).41 Coutinho is a particularly crucial colonial figure in the history of the Zambezi conquest. Besides his hydrographic contribution and military action, he published several testimonials in which he expresses his version of historical events, sometimes as narrator and sometimes as a character. Through his biography, the centrality of the Báruè Kingdom in terms of anti-colonial resistance is ascertained. Capela states that most of the aringas he militarily attacked were the strongholds of former slaves, which is only possible to understand if one considers the morphological and semantic mutations in the language used in the reports and memoirs of that “conqueror of Zambezia.”42 37  The uprising initiated by the military was later joined by supporting civilians. They met the troops loyal to the monarchy who reacted indiscriminately against the crowd. Both civilians and military rioters were tried by war councils aboard warships and more than 200 people were sentenced to 15–18 years in prison. 38  1910, O Ano da Républica (Lisboa: Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, 2010), 11. 39  The initiatives to revive monarchical heroes happened in different parts of the nation including African territories. In Lourenço Marques, a great monument to Mouzinho de Albuquerque and a statue of António Ennes were erected in 1940. 40  The Portuguese New State (Estado Novo), or the Second Republic, was the corporatist authoritarian fascist regime installed in Portugal in 1933 as a result of a long process of modern authoritarianism that gave birth to the Portuguese National Union, an organization formed in the wake of the coup d’état of 28 May 1926, in reaction to the unstable Republic that from “5 October 1910 to 29 May 1922 had forty-five governments and 29 attempted coups d’état.” See Fernando Rosas, “A Crise do Liberalismo e as Origens do «Autoritarismo Moderno» e do Estado Novo em Portugal,” Penélope: revista de história e ciências sociais, No 2, Fevereiro 1989), 133. 41  Wikipedia, accessed 15/09/2016. 42  Capela, Como as aringas de Moçambique se transformaram em Quilombos, 72–97.

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Attempts to dominate Báruè had started long before 1902. Gouveia, the warlord of Gorongosa and a great Portuguese ally, was killed during the Battle of Missongue in 1891. Coutinho withdrew, severely burned by a gunpowder explosion that killed and wounded hundreds of his soldiers.43 It was a significant defeat for the colonial army. Regarding the campaign of 1902, he admitted the excess: “if I had known in advance how things would evolve, I would certainly have given up such great force.”44 Justifying its scale, Coutinho argued that a campaign to punish rebels must guarantee their complete crushing. “To subject ourselves to be beaten by the subjects of our [colonial] wars is, as far as I am concerned, much worse and more depressing for our authority than to be defeated in droves against external enemies.”45 Báruè 1902 was the best and most organized Portuguese military campaign in Mozambique. According to Azambuja, the great number of chosen cadres of European and indigenous platoons that formed the expeditionary troops suggests its superiority in comparison with the other campaigns. In his memoirs, Coutinho outlined the participation of the navy, particularly important for the transportation of men, animals, machinery and provision to advanced posts inland, whilst protecting the rear lines. Portugal seemed to have finally achieved its purpose with the 1902 expedition officially considered the last of the pacification campaigns concluding the effective occupation of Mozambique, and the photographs can be read as its confirmation. The image in Fig.  3.4 is therefore, a monument to the Portuguese conquest. But, the broken ground is a reminder of difficult victory and a warning sign about the still unsettled colonial process. The fragment of the fractured rock formation almost in suspension in the right side of the frame 43  That expedition confronted the warlord Bonga and resulted in an “enormous carnage” in which many Portuguese found “the most horrible, useless and inglorious death.” Coutinho, Memórias, 587; Manuel António de Sousa, also called m’zungo Gouveia in the Zambezi Valley, landlord of Gorongosa was referred to as a good “black supplier.” See, Azevedo Coutinho. O Combate de Macequece. (Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1935), 54; Coutinho, Manuel António de Sousa, Um Capitão-Mor Da Zambézia (Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1936). For a succinct introduction on António Manuel de Sousa, see Joel Serrão and A.  H. de Oliveira Marques, Nova História da Expansão Portuguesa. O Império Africano 1825–1890 (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1998), 627. See also Eric Axelson, Portugal and the Scramble for Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 1967). 44  Coutinho, Memórias, 571. 45  Ibid.

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indicates a continuation, an allusion to so much left out of the frame, out of control. It resonates with Isaacman who “focused on Báruè, both because they were at the centre of anticolonial activity and because their history remains obscure.”46 Could that impenetrable dark fracture on the image be a sign of that particular expressed by Isaacman? Besides the intention, resistance is not completely excluded from the picture.

Regular Soldiers in Portuguese Army In the photograph (Fig. 3.5), a group of European and African men stands in a choreography that uses the local natural features made evident in the picture by the camera’s point of view. Read from top left to bottom right, the image shows the subjects posing in rows on the slopes of rock: a line of African men almost disappearing in the bush behind them and a group of European men almost in the centre of the image. The rock dominates the entire foreground of the frame. All the men in the picture are in uniform. They are regular soldiers of the Portuguese army. At the centre of the image, eight Europeans wear a complete uniform of jacket and trousers, with boots and hats. Some have handgun holsters on their waists. They boast a very relaxed pose; five are standing, leaning against the rocky surface, three are seated. One of the sitters has his legs stretched and crossed, and holds a stick in his hand. There are similarities between him and the man standing alone in Fig. 3.4. He is probably João de Azevedo Coutinho, the commandant of the expedition. Among the Europeans, besides the one standing, none of the others are looking at the camera. Their gazes are directed to somewhere beyond the photographer and their relaxed posture suggests a contemplation of the landscape, a posture of the “L’homme civilisé.”47 The African men wear dark long-sleeved jackets and do not have trousers, but a cloth hanging from their waists. Most are standing with rifles, which, lodged on the floor, are held by the barrel. As if protecting the back of the white men, in the image they appear as intermediaries between the Europeans and the African natural environment. Their pose is not as relaxed as the pose of the white men, and, by contrast, they “submitted

 Isaacman, The Tradition of Resistance, xxiii.  J. Tagg, The Burden of Representation. Essays on Photographs and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 36. 46 47

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Fig. 3.5  Regular soldiers. Silver paper print 10 × 15 cm (circa). Military History Archive, Lisbon: PT AHM-FE-110-B7-PQ-6.98

their regard at the camera.”48 All the men in the picture (Europeans and Africans) are soldiers of the Portuguese military expedition in full operational mode within the territory of an enemy they intend to dominate. Yet, the relaxed pose of the European officials does not reveal much of the tension that is normally part of an act of war. The superior firepower of their modern weaponry and their victories as they progress into enemy territory may provide them with an impression of invincibility and confidence concerning the final accomplishment of the mission. The dimension and the apparatus of the expedition were impressive. It comprised modern and sophisticated weaponry, from rifles to machine guns and mortars, boats, horses, the prestige of the commander, the expertise of the officials and engineers and a number of different forces, with soldiers from Europe, India and Africa, and sepoys from numerous prazos and warlords. Yet the African soldiers do not appear to be so confident. Perhaps their own cultural and spiritual beliefs would not let them  Ibid., 36.

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relax. They knew the prestigious spirit medium of Kabudu Kagoro was playing an active role in the defence of the Báruè nation.49 Special medicines like nyume, provided by the svikiro to African chiefs, were reputed to reverse the power of the enemy during the battles. The magic porridge distributed to the warriors during the war ceremonies were believed to ensure individual protection against bullets that would be transformed into water.50 To address the question of effective occupation and secure colonial territories, the Portuguese army introduced changes into their regime.51 During the nineteenth century, the colonial force of soldiers sent from Lisbon was transformed and soon after the Ultimatum, the majority of the Portuguese army consisted of locally recruited men.52 Besides the problems of adaptation suffered by the European soldiers in African territories, it was less expensive to contract local people.53 The men were recruited far from the region where they served to prevent desertions. The Inhambane district in the south provided five companies for the garrison in the north

49  Kabudo Kagoro was a former Macombe whose medium spirit called Sviruko was believed to have magic powers. Isaacman, The Tradition of Resistance, 62–63; Coutinho, Memórias, 598. 50  Isaacman, The Tradition of Resistance, 63. 51  The introduction of changes in the colonial military regime started in 1784, a remarkable date as suggested in José Justino Teixeira Botelho, História Militar e Política dos Portugueses em Moçambique, da Descoberta a 1833 (Lisboa: Centro Tipográfico Colonial, 1934), 452. 52  Maria Carrilho, Forças Armadas e Mudança Política em Portugal no século XX.  Para uma Explicação Sociológica do Papel dos Militares (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. 1985), 110. At that time Portugal dreamed about a coast-to-coast empire, from Angola to Mozambique, embodied in the 1616 Pink Map. Disagreements between Portugal and Great Britain culminated with the English Ultimatum of January 1890. Confronted with war Portugal immediately withdrew from the zones in conflict and lost rich African regions (such as Rhodesia) whose appropriation was based on its historical rights. Valentim Alexandre and Jill Dias (coord.), A Questão Colonial no Portugal Oitocentista, O Império Africano (1825–1890) (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa, 1998), 115–126.; Ângela Guimarães, Uma Corrente do Colonialismo Português: a Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa – 1875–1895 (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1984), 15–16. The Portuguese capitulation in response to the British Ultimatum is considered to be the main cause of the fall of the monarchical system in Portugal. 53  Fátima da Cruz Rodrigues, ‘Antigos Combatentes Africanos das Forças Armadas Portuguesas A Guerra Colonial como Território de (Re)conciliação’ (PhD Thesis, Coimbra University, 2012), 112. For the Campaigns see also Carrilho, Forças Armadas e Mudança Política em Portugal no século XX, 110.

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of the colony.54 At the end of the Monarchy, the number of soldiers in the colonial army was just over 10,000 distributed throughout the colonial territories, and less than a third were coming from Europe.55 In the colonies, various forms of recruitment were applied, from persuasion to force. The violent proceedings ranged from the imprisonment of women to compel their husbands to appear at recruiting boards, to the capture and imprisonment of men who were then forced to serve in the army.56 For “the string recruitment” the police raided the outskirts of villages to catch vagrants who were held together with a rope and locked up in quarters until they embarked to the other coast. Designated “compelled,” they had to fulfil the military service for a period of five years. European soldiers also classified as “compelled” served in the colonies, forming the battalions of hunters.57 The changes in the logic of local recruitment indicate the failure of the Portuguese attempts to persuade Africans to serve the colonial army voluntarily. René Pélissier argues that the form of recruitment above mentioned was applied mostly during the epoch of military campaigns that ended in 1941.58 Yet, in 1958, Jaime Neves witnessed the recruitment of what he called the “volunteers of the rope” and recalled that after a census conducted in Tete, an official meeting with the heads of the posts was held where each village was obliged to offer “volunteers” to fill the quota of a thousand men needed for the army. Provided with names given by the chiefs, the sepoys went to fetch those listed. In the case of the ones who ran away, the first “blacks” found were grabbed and coerced to adopt the name of the missing ones; the régulos were aware of this.59 The captured men remained  Colonel Eduardo A. de Azambuja Martins, O Soldado Africano de Moçambique (Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1936), 10. 55   In F.  C. Rodrigues, ‘Antigos Combatentes Africanos das Forças Armadas Portuguesas’, 112. 56  Marco Fortunato Arrifes, A Primeira Grande Guerra na África Portuguesa, Angola e Moçambique (1914–1918) (Lisboa: Edições Cosmos, Instituto de Defesa Nacional, 2004), 244. 57  See E. A. Azambuja Martins, O Soldado Africano de Moçambique, 9–10. 58  René Pélissier, Les campagnes coloniales du Portugal, 1844–1941 (Paris: Pygmalion Flammarion, 2004), 310. 59  Régulo is a Portuguese term, from the Latin regulus, a minor king. It was used to denote African customary leaders or chiefs of various kinds—including kings, queens and sultans— who were empowered (and paid) by the colonial administration to control local communities on behalf of the Portuguese. Some of them were representative of a genuine chiefly tradition; others were simply imposed on communities by the authorities. In Colin Darch (compiler), Historical Dictionary of Mozambique, 3rd ed. (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, forthcoming). 54

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prisoners and during their time “in service,” their wives and children were cared for by the régulos, which created various problems.60 Figure 3.5 shows the preponderance of African soldiers in the colonial army: 8 Europeans against more than 30 African soldiers organized for the picture confirms that during the military campaigns to conquer and defend African territories, the majority of the Portuguese soldiers were black men. For their positioning and postures within the frame, the photograph also denounces other inequalities beyond hierarchical military regulations.

Sepoys: India and Moçambique In Fig. 3.6, the photograph depicts a group of armed natives, the sepoys (African police). Their clothing displays a certain uniformity of the group and reinforces the idea of a unit. Tame and disciplined, the sepoys’ submission to the inquisitive look of the camera attest to their consent to the purposes of their recruitment, the crushing of fellow Africans. Showing them well organized in rows is uncontestable evidence of a “civilizing” influence. The photograph’s omissions can be elucidated by examining the sepoys’ motivations for participating in the war and contemplating the various manifestations of its historical significance. For example, the sepoys had the same privileges held by the chikundas, of which Rita-Ferreira listed “the right to hunt and serve, designated land, weapons, ornaments, cloth, livestock, and women. Many, coming from matrilineal communities embraced the new existence of male predominance.”61 But, why and how did they become an integral part of the colonial force?62 In the eighteenth century, the Portuguese faced growing difficulties filling the infantry regiment of Mozambique. The inadequacy of the European soldiers in the colony’s environment was then recognized and 60  José Freire Antunes, A Guerra de África (1961–1974) (Lisbon: Círculo De Leitores, 1995), 120. 61  A. Rita-Ferreira, Fixação Portuguesa e História Pré-Colonial de Moçambique, 256. On a-chikunda see Isaacman & Isaacman, Escravos, Esclavagistas, Guerreiros e Caçadores. A Saga dos Chicundas do Vale do Zambeze (Maputo: Promédia, 2006). On page 365 the authors explain how the Chicundas were transformed into sepoys. 62  The sepoys (African police) played an important part in supporting the thorough implementation of the régulo’s role. In some cases, they were more powerful than régulos and even arrested African chiefs who failed to fulfil their duties of collecting taxes and supplying labour. See, Sayaka Funada-Classen, The origins of war in Mozambique: a history of unity and division (Stellenbosch: African Minds, 2013), 66.

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Fig. 3.6  Sepoys. Silver paper print 10 × 15 cm (circa). Military History Archive, Lisbon. Archival reference: PT AHM-FE-110-B7-PQ-6.4

during the second half of the century the colonial administration tried to find alternatives within the framework of the Indian Ocean. Initially importing sepoys from India, their high mortality forced the incorporation of men from the colony, including “patricios” inhabiting the rivers of the Sena region.63 For the regular army, the Swahili men on the coast were recruited and later men from Mozambique Island. In 1767, the State of India sent one company of sepoys with a captain, a lieutenant, two sergeants and 59 regular soldiers to the colony. After his commission, one of the sergeants, Nicholas Pascoal da Cruz, remained in Mozambique as a prazeiro.64 His descendants became leading figures of the anti-colonial resistance in the Zambezi. The most well-known was 63  Patricios means person of the same country; initially referred to the ones belonging to the aristocracy. 64  The Prazeiros were the holders of the Prazos, a land-holding system granted to private individuals by the Portuguese Crown. The system was set in place in the Zambezi Valley in an attempt to populate the area with European natives to solidify control over the Mozambican hinterland.

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called Bonga, who established his stronghold at Massangano. The Portuguese organized several military expeditions against him during the campaigns of the nineteenth century.65 The recruitment of Indian sepoys followed a long integrating process of colonial exchanges between India and Mozambique. The establishment of Mozambican sepoys’ companies was reflected in military and linguistic terms; progressively, the name extended to any African fighters. The descriptions of the nineteenth-­ century military confrontation identify Mozambican combatants, both regular soldiers in the service of the Portuguese army and the irregular force mobilized by landowners, as sepoys.66 In the prazo, the entire force of sepoys is called condo. In cases of war, they are divided into companies called ensakas. The whole force (condo) is hierarchically organized as follows: captain or condo commander; Kazembe or commander of the ensaka; sachecunda (sergeant) group commander; and mucata, soldier. There is also the Canhongo, an old sepoy generally known for his bravery and good humour, who has a very special role: he is responsible for monitoring all sentinels during the night and transmits the orders. In combat, the canhongo encourages sepoys with his antics and sayings and punishes those who show fear. According to Coutinho, in Báruè, as in all Zambézia, the “indigenous” made the “war of Aringas.” As he described, the attackers in separated ensakas establish the charge towards the square inside the aringa where the defence concentrate. The attack is always at full force with prepared fire intended to make the besieged consume their ammunition. After a long round of shooting, they would advance, hack down the doors or destroy part of the palisade and fight with close weapons (an axe, knife, or spear). “If the attacker is not successful, the defender leaves the aringa and counter-­attacks the enemy.”67 Each ensaka had its own flag. The canhongos and the wizard (sorcerer) used the war tail (a buffalo tail) that was also present in the ceremonies made before the war. The image above could be of an ensaka since the men are not wearing the characteristic uniform of the regular native 65  The first three companies of sepoys from India arrived in 1781 but, due to disasters and particularly diseases, they were quickly reduced to 11 men. See João José de Sousa Cruz, Revista Militar n. 2545/2546- February/March 2014. www.revistamilitar.pt/artigo/907 accessed 27/9/2016. The aringa of Massangano is highlighted in the map in Fig. 3.1. 66  See Isaacman & Isaacman, Escravos, Esclavagistas, Guerreiros e Caçadores. On page 365 it is explained how the Chicundas were transformed into sepoys. 67  Coutinho, Memórias, 559–560.

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soldiers.68 Some of the depicted even have nude torsos with just a blanket across the chest. Within the group depicted, three members have different upper attire, probably the condo commander, the Kazembe and the sachecunda. On the left side of the frame, there is a section of what appears to be a strong palisade, along which some people are seated. Other people who are not focused can also be seen further back. Some are unquestionably Africans, most likely porters and other personnel. Three European soldiers are standing and conversing on the far right side of the frame. The huts in the background and a hilly formation in the distance suggest that the photograph was taken in one of the war-ready aringas.69 The baobab trees are a predominant feature of the landscape.70 Such visual insinuations trigger other impressions and encourage a reading that transcends the frame. They are teasers for a search for the “remnants” discharged by the larger history that the photographs were supposed to capture. We attempt to go beyond the producer’s intention and look at the history told by these pictures from a different perspective, perhaps to pick up on that “something that cannot be silenced.”71 Here, we can think along Mbembe’s terms, “that something” was invented and had a fundamental role in the “West’s apologetic concerns and exclusionary and brutal practices toward others.”72

Celebration In Fig. 3.7, a group of European men standing around a rustic table made of wooden poles raise their tin cups in a gesture of salute, the majority looking at the camera. The man with white vest is immediately recognizable as  To compare with the regular soldiers in Fig. 3.3.  The Báruè settlements called aringas or gutas were surrounded by very thick, strong and tough palisades of wooden logs built for defence purposes with layout adapted to the terrain. 70  The generic name of the Baobab tree honours Michel Adanson, a French naturalist and explorer. There are eight distinct species and the one occurring in dried parts of Africa is called Andansonia Digitata. They have a great historical significance. Besides hosting spiritual cults, their heavy presence offered defensive possibilities, ‘a natural fortress’ for people frequently raided from the east prior to the colonial enterprise. See Patricia Hayes, ‘Northern exposures: The Photography of CHL Hahn’ in J. R.Forte, P. Israel, L. Witz (eds), Out of History. Re-Imagining South African Pasts (Cape Town: HSRC Press, 2016), 149. 71   These ideas are inspired by the reading of Hansen, ‘Kracauer’s Photography Essay’, 96–97. 72  Achille Mbembe, On the Post Colony (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2015), 2. 68 69

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Fig. 3.7  Silver paper print 10 × 15 cm (circa). Military History Archive, Lisbon. Archival reference: PT AHM-FE-110-B7-PQ-6.8

he appears in several other photographs of the collection, identified as Pinto Bastos (the administrator of Sena district), who contributed many men, soldiers and porters to the campaign.73 Coutinho appears to be the eighth man in the right row in the image. Several civilians were enrolled in the campaign, according to his narrative, including prazos administrators, who were the major suppliers of labour force, engineers and their assistants, whose work was to open pathways and water wells and build shelters in bivouacs. Among the civilians, Eusébio Ferro, the brother of Sena’s capito-mor, is praised as a “very valiant young man and experienced in this type of war.”74 Is this the young man in the front row on the left? All the others, around 18 in number, seem to be wearing military uniform. Black soldiers, identifiable by their blazers, surround those at the

 See the section regarding Fig. 3.4 in this chapter.  Capela, Donas Senhores e Escravos, 115.

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table.75 Some wear white clothes wrapped around their waists, and are barefoot. They are not holding cups as they stand looking at the camera, but their presence is not by chance; they are the servants of those who are celebrating. On the centre of the table, two calabashes hold plants as decoration. Some empty plates and other small objects also scatter on the table. In the foreground, there is an improvised bench also made of the same material as the table. No one is occupying it, suggesting that men took position on the sides to face the camera. But the bench is not empty as two hats and one cap rest on top of it. One of the hats has a round hole towards its top, possibly made by a bullet, which speaks to the violence of the various combats and the enemy’s firepower. A wall or screen made of wooden sticks seen behind the men on the left side of the frame hangs other hats. The fence meets a tree after the man in a white dress. Further back, there seems to be a hut, some clothes hanging in a drying washing line and part of another fence or wall, not a very strong palisade, possibly only to demarcate space. As the bullet-hole in the hat on the bench suggests, the celebration takes place after combat. The aringa is not burned, the calabashes are used for decoration and some of the plates on the table indicate the presence of provisions. Aside from the group in the photo, no one else is visible, and the aringa appears deserted. Had the original inhabitants fled, leaving it to the invaders? What about the rest of the expedition? Perhaps the officers are celebrating in the aringa’s enclosed area known as luane, where the chiefs or warlords reside. Probably shot in Mungari, the capital of chief Chipitura (rival and ally to the Macombe) who had relations with Portuguese authorities that backed him in the succession disputes, the photograph marks the end of the campaign. The aringa was abandoned and occupied without any resistance. Coutinho said that the unburned roofs of the huts and the quantity of provision found in the stores were signs of submission left by their African inhabitants to the King of Portugal, to whom the village was delivered.76

 See discussion regarding Fig. 3.6, Regular Soldiers.  In Coutinho, Memórias, 614.

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Conclusion Some of the most serious critics of Portuguese colonialism were the Portuguese themselves, distinguished figures in politics and the administration, academics and journalists. The fragilities of the colonial administration can be surmised from Coutinho’s admission that the ancient history of Báruè “constitutes a period of absolute darkness, impossible for us to penetrate unless it is to recognize that our rule was never exerted in that region.”77 Although divided, that African community remained cohesive before the external enemy. The differences were overcome and the old values of its culture and tradition prevailed even in exchange for many lives, ancestral lands and other possessions. After the defeat of 1902, Báruè remained unrestful and it forced the Portuguese into the further campaign of 1917, a serious confrontation in the midst of World War I. The colonial success required the use of modern weaponry, comprising gunboats, machine guns and the involvement of mercenaries and troops from other countries. During the 1902 campaign, the total number of sepoys and porters either embedded in the columns of the expedition or providing services counted over 15,000 men.78 The consecutive military campaigns and wars depopulated the region. The recruitment of local people was depleting the prazos from the labour force, affecting their economy.79 According to Ranger, the great rebellion that erupted in 1917 resulted from colonial administrative excesses that include the “imposition of the hut tax, construction of the Tete-Macequece road, violence and arbitrariness of the sepoys, qualitative degradation of the military and administrative occupation, compulsory recruitment of porters for the War against the Germans.”80 The rebellion was overcome but may have opened a path for Mozambican nationalism that evolved into an armed struggle led by  Coutinho, Memórias, 538.  Coutinho, Memórias, 641. 79  In a collection of numbered and dated volumes, assembling correspondence from the Administration in Africa of the Company of Zambézia (1892 to 1908), there are letters referring to “the damages derived from the campaign of Azevedo Coutinho for the pacification of Maganja da Costa […] for being the seasons of harvests and collection of the mussoco. Letter No. 23 extra, from M.  Machado in Lisbon 2/7.1898.” António Rita Ferreira, Coletânea de Documentos, Notas Soltas e Ensaios Inéditos para História de Moçambique (Author’s edition, 2012), 164. 80  In, Rita-Ferreira, Fixação Portuguesa E História Pré-Colonial de Moçambique, 241. Newitt instead relates the Zambesi Valley convulsions with the survival of the Afro-­ Portuguese war-lords and their chikunda captains, a “peculiar mix of commerce, banditry and feudal lordship.” See, M. Newitt A History of Mozambique, 368. 77 78

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Frelimo against Portuguese colonialism. Mozambique became an independent country in 1975. Yet, in that region once called the Zambezi Valley, the tension between centralized and local powers still affects the country to this day. Renamo, the major party in opposition to the government of Frelimo, claims the territory.81 In the district of Muxungué nearby Báruè, armed columns to protect traffic, last reinstated by the national army in 2014, was not enough to guarantee safe transit of motorists and civilians in the region. For Maria Jerónimo and her family members taking refuge in the camp of Vanduzi (Malawi) since September 2016, there is no return to their birthplace. They fled from Nhamatema, a locality in the district of Báruè, to resettle themselves in the neighbouring country to escape a conflict that “this time revealed more hatred.”82 This is rebellion for some and resistance for others, but the bottom line is that democracy in Mozambique is practised with guns in hands. The recent armed attacks throughout villages in Cabo Delgado (2018) bear witness to the fact that other forces are surfacing in Mozambique. This chapter engages with a collection of war photographs and challenges the concept of chance. The photographic moments occurred during the war, in a military operation inside the enemy’s territory. The stiff, yet relaxed postures expressed by some men in the pictures confront the idea of action inherent to the occasion. The immobility of the subjects may have resulted from technical photographic procedures, such as the long exposure required for the slowness of the photosensitized surface to register sharp images. However, the contradiction between the action and the lack of movement in the image can imply a visual discourse that speaks 81  Frelimo guerrillas started a war against the Portuguese colonial regime in 1964. The struggle ended in 1974, but a military organization called the Resistência Nacional de Moçambique (RENAMO) conducted what today is known as the war of the sixteen years against the country’s government. Despite maintaining its armed wing, the peace agreement signed in 1992 transformed Renamo into a political party and is the greatest opponent to the Frelimo government in the Democratic Republic of Mozambique. 82  Jornal Savana, 31 March 2017. The article “Deslocados Indecisos,” reported that many refugees were encouraged to stay in the camps to reduce local support of RENAMO guerrillas. Mozambican press confirmed the existence of mass graves in the Province of Manica but nothing is known about the buried. In the refugee camps in Zimbabwe and Malawi, people have denounced atrocities perpetrated by the governmental forces, from whom they ran away.

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about pacification. As a convenience to the predicaments of the civilizing mission, they conceal violence, which relates to aspects of “colonial aphasia.”83 However, “the absence of war events becomes a weapon of the war.”84 Thus, the aesthetics of the images suggests an institutional, discursive frame determining photographic meaning. They are moments extracted from the flow of life that never stops, images of events preserved for the future, unaltered depictions on a photosensitized surface. We look at the performance, not of the actors depicted but of the photographs themselves which exude a sense of achievement. Rendered into the present, they become a “presence” in which the “dichotomy of what is seen and what is known” asks for “an imaginative engagement” to capture “not only the nature of that blockage but also the feature of loss.”85 In other words, the camera can stop people, freeze movement and arrest time. However, the immobility of the subjects photographed contradicts the mobility of the photographs across viewers, significance, time, places, contexts and hosting institutions. The multiplicity of contained stories in the images unfixes their meanings. The interpretation of preserved pasts is a dynamic process capable of changing understandings of whatever is in the pictures. Thus, the camera cannot stop history that is unsettled by looking at the photographs closely and reading them against the grain. For history, it is the photograph’s inability to exclude that makes it textured and fertile: “beneath its skin” an encoded “excess lays waiting to resurface.”86 Despite the mastery of the photographer in narrowing the reading of the image to what it might represent, the performance of the photograph in front of the viewer is less controlled. The ideological interpretation differs from viewer to viewer, and civilization can be read as domination, submission as exploitation and rebellion as resistance. Could that be the case with Báruè, in whose region armed guerrillas and a looting

83  Ann Laura Stoler, ‘Colonia Aphasia: Race and Disable Histories in France.’ In Public Culture 23:1 DOI 10.1215/08992363-2010-08 (Duke University Press, 2011), 125. 84  Allen Feldman, Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2015), 172. 85  See Paul Lowe ‘Traces of Traces: Time, Space, Objects, and the Forensic Turn in Photography’. Humanities 2018, 7,76; doi:10.3390/h7030076), p 4 of 18. 86  Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson, Photography’s other Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 6.

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state arm still disrupt people’s lives and challenge the stability of the country in 2021?87 These and other photographs of the collection are discussed at length in the unpublished PhD thesis “A Visual Struggle for Mozambique. Revisiting Narratives, Reading Photographs (1850–1930)” by Rui Assubuji. Acknowledgments  Research supported by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the South African Research Chairs Initiative of the Department of Science and Innovation and the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Unique Grant No 98911). The author acknowledges the Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and the SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory, with special thanks to Patricia Hayes.

87  Some concepts are borrowed from Robin Kelsey, “Of Fish, Birds, Cats, Mice, Spiders, Flies, Pigs, And, Chimpanzees: How Chance Casts the Historic Action Photograph into Doubt” in J.  Tucker (ed.), Photography and Historical Interpretation (Malden: Wesleyan University Press, 2009), 60.

CHAPTER 4

Ethnographic Album of Angola: Overlaps Between Photography, Knowledge and Empire (1930s–1940s) Cláudia Castelo and Catarina Mateus

The collection of ethnographic photography produced by the lawyer and writer Elmano Cunha e Costa in Angola during the second half of the 1930s is remarkable for its dimension, information and aesthetics.1 The collection intersected with personalities, institutions and events that marked the first decades of the Portuguese right-wing dictatorship, self-­ styled as Estado Novo (New State), and was the subject of controversies and negotiations that are not evident in the photographs. Thus, in this 1  Currently kept in the Overseas Historical Archive (AHU) in Lisbon, the collection can be fully accessed through the digital repository Arquivo Científico Tropical Digital (ACTD) https://actd.iict.pt/collection/actd:AHUECC (accessed August 8, 2023).

C. Castelo (*) Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e Tecnologia, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal C. Mateus National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon, Portugal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_4

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chapter we highlight the invisible plots on the images to provide a more comprehensive and historically sustained reading of the whole. We have chosen to create an interlinked biography of the photographer and the collection, incorporating contributions from the historiographies of photography, anthropology, science and empire to discuss the interactions between ethnographic photography, scientific research and imperial formations. The primary sources used in our research include the photographic collection itself, catalogues from Cunha e Costa’s exhibitions, the author’s books and archival material from several historical archives.

The Life Journey of an Amateur Photographer and Ethnographer Elmano Morais da Cunha e Costa (1892–1955)2 read law at the University of Coimbra (1910–1916). Among his colleagues were the future dictator António Oliveira Salazar and the future Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira. He was a monarchist deputy in the last legislative elections of the First Republic (overthrown in 1926 by a military coup), and although he joined the Estado Novo (the authoritarian and colonialist regime that governed Portugal from 1933 until 1974), he always professed to be a monarchist.3 He practised law in Lisbon, and worked with his father, a lawyer, journalist and writer. In October 1929, Cunha e Costa left for Angola and settled in the city of Moçâmedes (today’s Namibe), where he continued to work as a lawyer. Between 1933 and 1936 he was also the director and owner of the Moçâmedes newspaper O Sul de Angola, giving it a pro-Estado Novo character. His first editorial page praised the new political “Situation” (i.e. the dictatorship), the balance of Angola’s public accounts and Salazar and Armindo Monteiro, the Minister for the Colonies to whom he felt bound by “ties of affectionate camaraderie.”4 Self-taught, Cunha e Costa would work long and hard at ethnographic photography. He later explained: “My family has had a lasting fondness for

2  “Falecimentos: Dr. Elmano da Cunha e Costa”, in Diário de Notícias (Lisbon, May 13, 1955), 5. 3  Elmano Cunha e Costa, “Regaleira … e os seus fantasmas!” (Lisboa: Imp. Lucas, 1943), 18. 4  Elmano Cunha e Costa, “A eloquência dos números”, in O Sul de Angola, Moçâmedes, year 2, no. 63 (April 22, 1933), 1.

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photography, and it really is an absorbing passion for me.”5 His curiosity for and dedication to ethnography, combined with the nationalist-­ imperialist ideology of the Portuguese New State (Estado Novo), whose values he shared, and a concern with the Portuguese backwardness in the so-called scientific occupation of the colonies, led Cunha e Costa to suggest to the Minister for the Colonies, Armindo Monteiro, that he and Father Carlos Estermann (1896–1976), Superior of the Catholic Mission of Huíla (of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit) should be entrusted with compiling an Ethnographic Album of Angola. This was supposed to be incorporated in a future publication entitled Álbum Etnográfico do Império Colonial Português [Ethnographic Album of the Portuguese Colonial Empire] published by the Agência Geral das Colónias (AGC) [General Agency of the Colonies], which would gather “the elements (photographic or descriptive) necessary to organize and publish a Collection of Ethnographic Documents of the Empire.”6 The project translated a “documentary impulse” of great scope and the belief in the capacity of photography to apprehend the ethnographic diversity of the Portuguese empire, in order to popularize and preserve it.7 Cunha e Costa and Carlos Estermann were formally appointed to the job and worked on it from 1935 to 1938, but the Ethnographic Album of Angola was never published (let alone the Album of the Portuguese Colonial Empire). Together, they only published the book Negros [Blacks] (1941).8 In the context of the preparations for the 1940 commemorations of the Double Centenary of Foundation and Restauration of the Independence of Portugal,9 the lawyer was again commissioned to undertake a 5  Elmano Cunha e Costa, “Alguns aspectos dos estudos etnográficos”, Boletim Geral das Colónias, no. 220 (1943), 12. 6  Despacho do Ministro das Colónias, Diário do Governo, II serie, (July 16, 1935), 3557. 7  Mitman and Wilder have edited a book that reflects on “the documentary impulse that emerged in the late nineteenth century that combined the power of science and industry with a particular utopian (and often imperialistic) belief in the capacity of photography and film to visually capture the world, order it, and render it useful for future generations.” Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder, Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record (Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press, 2016), 1. 8  Carlos Estermann and Elmano Cunha e Costa, “Negros” (Lisboa: [sn], 1941). 9  The Portuguese New State (Estado Novo) planned, for 1940, a vast set of events all around the country aiming to celebrate Portugal’s foundation in 1140 and its independence from Spain in 1640. The highest moment of the celebrations was the Portuguese World Exhibition, held in Lisbon, between June and December. See, for instance, David Corkill and José Carlos Almeida, “Commemoration and propaganda in Salazar’s Portugal: the Portuguese World Exhibition of 1940”, Journal of Contemporary History, 44(3) (2009), 381–399.

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“photographic mission” to Angola, where he returned to take photographs between mid-1938 and October 1939. Although he signed a contract with the Executive Committee of the Centenaries “for the supply of photographs taken in various Angolan tribes,” Salazar ordered that “in no case […] would the mission be official” and explained, “ Only by mistake could anyone have gotten the idea of an order by the Government.”10 Cunha e Costa came back to Lisbon towards the end of 1939 and remained in the capital for about two years. During this period, he was a photographic contributor to the colonial section of the Portuguese World Exhibition directed by Henrique Galvão, and participated in the fourth International Salon of Photographic Art (January 1941).11 In October 1941, Cunha e Costa settled in Portuguese Guinea where he practised law and held the position of substitute judge for a few months.12 There, he photographed the trip of the Minister of the Colonies, Francisco José Vieira Machado, who presided over the ceremonies for the transfer of the capital from Bolama to Bissau on 19 December.13 Cunha e Costa then decided to permanently return to Lisbon and in January 1943 he applied for re-registration in the Portuguese Bar Association, which was refused on the grounds that the applicant “manifestly” lacked “moral propriety.”14 No document of the case clarifies this decision. The motive may have to do with the fact that he was on the list of detainees of the Estado Novo political police. On 7 January 1944, he was arrested for an inquiry relating to the charge of “espionage activities in our Colony of

10  “Caso das fotografias a comprar ao Dr. Elmano da Cunha e Costa” (July 27, 1938). Arquivo Nacional Torre do Tombo (ANTT), Oliveira Salazar Archive, PC-8E, cx. 561, pt. 1, 51st subd. The contract was concluded on 12 June 1938, as mentioned in letter no. 3598 from the Secretary of the presidency of the Council to the head of office of the Minister of the Colonies, (September, 16 1941). AHU, Ministério do Ultramar (MU), Gabinete do Ministro (GM), Comemorações centenárias (1939–1941), Processo 4/63, Sala 6, No. 536. 11  Henrique Galvão, “Exposição do Mundo Português: Secção Colonial” (Lisboa: Pub. Neogravura Ltd, 1940). Grémio Português de Fotografia, Quarto salão internacional de arte fotográfica (Lisboa: Bertrand, 1940). Elmano Cunha e Costa, “Exposição etnográfica de Angola”, in Mundo Português, no. 7 (Lisboa: 1947) 45–51. 12  Cunha e Costa, “Regaleira”, 14. 13  Anonymous, “Viagem do sr. Ministro das Colónias à Guiné e a Cabo Verde”, in Boletim Geral das Colónias, vol. 18, no. 200 (Lisboa: 1942), 95–106. 14  Ordem dos Advogados, Fundo da Secretaria do Conselho Geral da Ordem dos Advogados, Processo no. 10/1285.

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Guinea” in the middle of World War II.15 Everything indicates that he passed on information to the Germans about the movement of allied ships and was paid for it. The political police concluded that monetary interest outweighed ideology in the lawyer’s involvement with a German espionage organization. He was released on parole on 1 April of the same year.16 While he was prevented from exercising his profession, Cunha e Costa concentrated on selling his photographic collection and an ethnographic map of Angola that he produced to the Ministry of the Colonies. He also tried to be called to collaborate in ethnographic studies about the Portuguese colonies, as well as to write a new edition of the Obra Colonial Portuguesa [Portuguese Colonial Work], whose first edition in 1942 he considered to be “a well-done book but with much indoctrination.”17 In addition, he wrote for newspapers, gave radio talks and did translations. The General Council of the Bar Association only authorized his re-­ registration on 17 March 1949.

Context and Production Conditions of the Photographic Collection Between 1935 and 1937, Cunha e Costa photographed the bulk of the collection, accompanied and guided by Father Carlos Estermann in his travels through the vast province of Huíla. The missionary was his “sure guide and invaluable collaborator” because of his ethnological knowledge, prolonged contact with the land, mastery of local languages and the prestige he enjoyed among the various ethnic groups in south-west Angola.18 As early as 1935 they undertook two field trips to the Cunene province,

15  ANTT, PIDE/DGS, SC, PC 1438/942 8 (3rd vol.) NT 4778–4779. From the references to the activities of “Armando” in Guiné, code name Cunha e Costa, which appear in Guy Lidell’s diary, director of the M15 (British counter-espionage), Rui Araújo finds the name of Elmano de Morais da Cunha e Costa, and write his brief biography. Rui Araújo, O diário secreto que Salazar nunca leu (Lisboa: Oficina do Livro, 2008), 98–111. 16  ANTT, PIDE/DGS, Registo Geral de Presos, livro no. 78, no. 15413. 17  AHU, AGU, Repartição Serviços de Relações Publicas e Turismo (RSRPT), T374, “Álbum Etnográfico de Angola” doc. Carta de ECC à AGC, (April 23, 1950). 18  “Catálogo da exposição de etnografia angolana de Elmano Cunha e Costa”, Agência Geral das Colónias (AGC), (Lisboa: SNI, 1946).

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one to Cuanhama and the other to the region of Mupa, where Estermann had begun his missionary activity in 1924.19 Cunha e Costa wanted to carry out a rigorous and systematic inventory and an objective classification of the Angolan people, in the context of the scientific occupation of the empire and imperial propaganda. Those photographed were the colonized from various ethnic groups, reduced to representative specimens. The photographs bring to light that he strictly followed the ministerial order by typifying the subjects as determined: the inhabitants; clothing and personal adornments; family customs; social customs; professions and indigenous economic life; the indigenous village; indigenous housing; monuments, buildings of a public nature and ancillary constructions; indigenous art; and finally, the landscape.20 Later reports by Cunha e Costa and Estermann provide some information about the fieldwork. The division of tasks depended on their individual competences, with the priest focusing on the ethnographic part, observing the daily practices, talking with the natives and taking notes in his field notebook, while Cunha e Costa would take photographs that documented the ethnographic observations.21 In addition, the lawyer, on his own initiative, researched the “names given to the indigenous tribes, locating them geographically” in order to prepare an ethnographic map.22 From time to time they received contributions from other Catholic missionaries, such as Father Laagel, “who for decades has evangelized, civilized and studied” the “Bundos,” “a tribe living in the Caconda region of the Huíla plateau.”23 They also had help from the administrative authorities, such as the governor of Bié, an “old friend, a prestigious colonial figure – D. António de Almeida.”

19  Carlos Estermann, Etnografia de Angola (Sudoeste e Centro) (Lisboa: IICT, 1983), vol.1, p. 67. 20  AHU, Cx.T374-Inv371/A, manuscript from the ministry Armindo Monteiro order, (October 25, 1934). 21  Estermann, Ethnography of Angola, vol. 1, 67. For more detailed information about the journey, listen to “Pe. Carlos Estermann biography information interview with Gordon D. Gibson”, June 3, 1971 [sound recording]. Gordon Davis Gibson Papers, Sound Recordings, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. Accessed July 20, 2023. https:// sova.si.edu/search/ark:/65665/nw3c21dfedc503a4770ab0156d5d3017b28. 22  AGC, Catálogo da exposição de etnografia angolana, n.p. 23  Estermann and Costa, Negros, 61. In the book’s passage, Cunha e Costa says that his camera was setting up the practices of witchcraft that “Father Laagel patiently explained and Father Carlos Estermann followed closely”, 83.

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To engage the reading public, and in a strategy to self-promote and glorify his activity in an exotic and adverse environment, he wrote that “many of the photos were obtained in places in the hinterland after painful journeys on foot, in a Boer cart, on horseback, by dugout canoe through treacherous […] rivers, or in the old machila of such beautiful traditions.”24 The construction of a credible and heroic narrative also involved reproducing excerpts from his diary: August 10, 1939 We have breakfast […] in the house of the Administrator Joaquim Henriques […] who loyally tells me: “From now on you travel on your responsibility. I can guarantee neither the road nor the bridges. You must go with the greatest caution.”25

Cunha e Costa covered more than 100,000 kilometres in a Ford pickup with 85 horsepower (a 1934 model with a more powerful engine than the previous version, which made it very fast for the standards of that time).26 We do not know for sure what route he followed, with or without Carlos Estermann, or how long they/he stayed with each ethnic group. But Cunha e Costa stated that he could not stay long enough in Cuando for a thorough study, where he went without the missionary (Fig. 4.1).27 Despite not being a professional photographer, Cunha e Costa did have some technical knowledge about photography. He had chosen a Rolleiflex camera because its small size meant it was easy to carry—an important detail on long journeys—and for the control of the film and developing costs.28 While making the “documentary,” Cunha e Costa had to take care to protect the films from “the heat […] keeping them in boxes covered with calcium carbonate to absorb moisture […] protecting them from mould and damp with constant and meticulous care.”29 Developing the films was another worry: “I never developed films anywhere but in Mossâmedes,  AGC, Catálogo da exposição de etnografia angolana, Exhibition Catalogue. [n.p.]  Estermann and Costa, Negros, 198. 26  Ibidem, 180. 27  Ibidem, 207. 28  Cunha e Costa, “Alguns … etnográficos”, 18, 13. 29  Ibidem, 12–13. 24 25

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Fig. 4.1  Original title: “Rest time.” Elmano (left) and Father Estermann (right). On the table, one of the Rolleiflex cameras used. Elmano Cunha e Costa, 1935–1937, Moxico, Angola. Overseas Historical Archive, Lisbon, AHU-ECC-ID8533

because labs with the conditions to do a perfect job were hard to find […] the water is bad and an impure washing jeopardizes conservation of films.”30 30  Ibidem, 12–13. This collection was the subject of a case study on how to scientifically evaluate the importance of the accurate photo developing and conditioning methods for preserving photographic film collections. See Elia Roldão, “A contribution for the preservation of cellulose esters black and white negatives” (PhD diss., New University of Lisbon, 2018).

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We know that Cunha e Costa used photography within the framework of colonial relationships, with the photographer invested with an authority vis-à-vis those he was photographing, which came from being white and being propped up by the authority and knowledge of the missionaries and the colonial administration. Although we do not have specific information as to how the interaction between the photographer and the photographed was processed, there are images in the collection showing that African assistants participated in the field trips, contributing, directly or indirectly, to the production of the “photographic documentary.” However, in the reports, they were left in the shadows, or relegated to the anecdotal and quaint level of the drivers, porters, informants or cooks31 (Fig. 4.2). Despite not having any anthropological training, Cunha e Costa reflects a certain ethnographic perception (probably due to Carlos Estermann’s insights) in his photographs. Although they are part of a visual “history of the race,”32 his photographs do not forgo natural and social references, nor do they obey the rigid, stereotyped patterns of representation used by Portuguese physical anthropologists at the time. We are referring to the photographs of anthropological objectification, in which the photographer used techniques of detachment and isolation that transformed subjects into anthropological objects,33 being photographed standing up, partially naked, leaning against a measuring grid or recorded front and profile for a quantitative comparison.34 Cunha e Costa wanted to assert his skill in published articles, in which he explained that a photographic documentary such as the one he made in Angola, capable of capturing the features of an “unmistakable personality” of those portrayed, was only possible with “dedicated, methodical, painstaking and patient work, theoretical study, zealous practice and, naturally, an artistic soul.”35 From Cunha e Costa’s “documentary impulse,” three major subjects stand out: the portraits, (1940), everyday life images (1530) and cultural

 Estermann and Costa, Negros, 193–194.  António Mendes Correia, “Notas sobre a fotografia aplicada à Antropologia em Portugal” in Separata das Memórias da Academia das Ciências de Lisboa, (Lisboa: ACL, 1940), 4. 33  Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing tropical nature (London: Reakting Books, 2001), 123. 34  Patricia Fara, Ciência: 4000 anos de História, 234. 35  Cunha e Costa, “Alguns … etnográficos”, 13. 31 32

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Fig. 4.2  Original title: “Caravan in the desert.” A few images in the collection reveal details about the trip. Two cars and more than ten persons, most of them, African workers, join the entourage. Elmano Cunha e Costa, 1935–1937, Desert, Angola Overseas Historical Archive, Lisbon, PT-AHU-ECC-9830

activities and rituals (1130).36 Notwithstanding our inhibition in providing a detailed characterization of a collection of such a scope and dimension (9000 photographs), the photographs seem to confirm Cunha e 36  Liliana Oliveira da Rocha, in her dissertation, makes an exhaustive survey of the subjects captured by Cunha e Costa, allowing a clear quantification of the photographer’s choices. In “Clichés de um Império Imaginado. Na mira de Elmano Cunha e Costa”, (Master diss., University of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, 2016), 101.

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Fig. 4.3  Original title: “Feminine type – Quipungos.” Portrait of a Quipungo woman facing the camera with a confident and empathetic look. Most of portraits in this collection are only identified as feminine or masculine type, but several— as this one— have the ability to recreate the person’s individuality before us. Elmano Cunha e Costa, 1935–1937, Huíla, Angola Overseas Historical Archive, Lisbon, PT-AHU-ECC-13811

Costa’s attempt to produce a documentary able to record convincing ethnographic evidence, be it portraits, some even in informal perspectives, laid-back positions or with empathy facing the camera (Fig. 4.3) or wide-­ shots of daily routines and rituals (Fig. 4.4), allowing the viewer to perceive the wider environments and access a totalizing vision of the Angolan ethnography.

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Fig. 4.4  Original title: “Leopard dance.” The images of rituals, in this case, a circumcision ritual, are most of the times, taken near the action, capturing natural body movements, indicating consent of local people for documenting these traditions, most probably due the presence of Father Estermann. Elmano Cunha e Costa, 1935–1937, Província do Bié, Angola Overseas Historical Archive, Lisbon, PT-AHU-ECC-12735

As Teresa Matos Pereira has noted, the photography of Cunha e Costa (like that of Cunha Morais), “with the emphasis on the representation of human groups, obeys a classification that blends into a piece, nature and culture, thence giving rise to the notion of tribe, as a collective whole, where somatic characteristics and cultural habits establish an unambiguous

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relationship.”37 The collection masks the economic tensions, labour exploitation and racial and social discrimination inherent in the colonial system itself, and instead constitutes a timeless, static and uniform view of the different peoples under Portuguese rule in the Angolan territory. Taking into account the history of the role of photography in the emergence and development of the field of anthropology, we should say that Cunha e Costa’s photography is no longer merely an instrument for reliably recording phenotype variations and material culture (as understood by anthropologists in the nineteenth century).38 Although it still does not fully incorporate the awareness of the photographer’s exposure to the reality he intends to record (after Franz Boas and Malinowski), it fits better in the culture anthropology field rather than anthropometric recording and biologically defined paradigms of anthropology.39 Though he is an amateur, his work comes at a time when the camera has become a metaphor for the process of collecting ethnographic evidence. If the results should be seen as incidental and improvised or an outcome of the intersubjective relationship that has been established between the photographer and the portraited, it is difficult to validate. It is a fact that the production of this collection arose from the privileged relationships enjoyed by Cunha e Costa with the circles of power, thus embodying the ideal not only of the colonizer but also of the scientific traveller who believed in a presumed Portuguese civilizing mission in Africa (Fig. 4.5). While these assertions are correct, they should not prevent the historian from exploring other interpretative possibilities. Beyond the colonialist perspective of the photographer, one should not forget the “indigenous” participation and agency in the construction of the ethnographic photography archive.40 Although it is not proposed to interpret the collection 37  Teresa Matos Pereira, “Uma travessia da colonialidade: Intervisualidade da pintura, Portugal e Angola” (PhD diss., University of Lisbon, 2011), 245. 38  Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion Books, 2011), 18–62. 39  On this realignment in photography scientific interest from the biological to wider environments, see Elizabeth Edwards, “Uncertain Knowledge: Photography and the Turn-ofthe-Century Anthropological Document”, in Gregg Mitman and Kelley Wilder, Documenting the world: Film, Photograph, and the scientific Record (Chicago and London: The Chicago University Press, 2016), 91–97. 40   Christopher Morton, “Double alienation. Evans-Pritchard’s Zande and Nuer Photographs”, in Photography in Africa: ethnographic perspectives, dir. Richard Vokes (Suffolk: James Curry, 2012), 33–35.

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Fig. 4.5  Original title: “Healers.” The relation between Father Estermann and local communities was privileged, due to his prolonged contact with the land and interest for local languages and traditions among the various ethnic groups in south-west Angola. Elmano Cunha e Costa, 1935–1937, Cunene River, Angola Overseas Historical Archive, Lisbon, PT-AHU-ECC-8925

here, it is possible to perceive that the subjects photographed will also have influenced the photographic practice of Cunha e Costa and that there will have been different attitudes facing the camera.41 41  Morton, 33. While studying Evans-Pritchard’s photographs, Morton identifies differentiated indigenous responses to the British anthropologist’s camera.

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Circulation, Uses and Audiences of the Collection Cunha e Costa very soon announced the photographic work that was underway. In April 1937, he held an exhibition in Benguela, and the following year, an exhibition at the gallery of the National Propaganda Secretariat (SNI), in Lisbon. His photographs were exhibited for the huge and heterogeneous public who visited the Portuguese World Exhibition in Lisbon, on display in the Overseas Provinces pavilion and the Imperial Hunting and Tourism pavilion. Also, a selection of them were included in the catalogue.42 Cunha e Costa went on to showcase the Exhibition of Angolan Ethnography (1946) and the Exhibition of Female Hairstyles and Ornaments of the Indigenous People of Angola (1951),43 both in the headquarters of the propaganda bureau (National Secretariat of Information, SNI) in Lisbon. The openings, always presided over by leading figures of the state (the president, the minister of the colonies or the first lady), featured prominently in the general press. Cunha e Costa and Estermann intended to publish an Ethnographic Album of Angola in 10 volumes, each with 100 engravings, illustrations with captions in four languages, and a bilingual text—Portuguese and French—to introduce and explain each volume.44 The project never materialized. The duration and scope of the fieldwork required a large investment that the Ministry of the Colonies refused to fund. Reading the correspondence exchanged between the AGC and Cunha e Costa,45 we concluded that there were different interpretations about the expedition funding from the outset. Cunha e Costa believed that “just for the Huíla province we will have more than 4000 photos, and if all goes well, we will finish it by October 1936.”46 The AGC, “although it recognizes the importance of making this documentary” states that the “Agency cannot take on a burden like this,” and that to “be extended to all the

 Henrique Galvão, Exposição do Mundo Português: Secção Colonial, 271, 282.  About these exhibitions read Inês Vieira Gomes “Imagens de Angola e Moçambique na metrópole. Exposições de fotografia no Palácio Foz (1938–1960)”, in A Fotografia no Contexto Colonial português (1860–1960), ed. Filipa Lowndes Vicente (Lisboa: Edições 70, 2014). 44  Carlos Estermann, Etnografia do Sudoeste de Angola. vol. 1: Os povos não-Bantos e o grupo étnico dos Ambos, 2nd ed. (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1960 [1956]), 10. 45  AHU, AGU, RSRPT, T374. 46  Ibidem, Letter from ECC to AGC (December 19, 1935). 42 43

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colonies, as it should, it has to be much more modest than Mr Cunha e Costa’s vision.”47 These two different ideas about time and resources led to a dispute that lasted more than two years, as the AGC constantly rejected the various requests from Cunha e Costa to pay the expenses for materials and transportation. It culminated with an order from the Minister of the Colonies, Francisco José Vieira Machado in 1936, to “suspend all the work” and deliver the photos “already paid.”48 Although informed by telegram (in June) and by letter (in December), Cunha e Costa did not comply with the order and continued photographing for another year. Despite a new order from the minister in January 1937 to send the photos, Cunha e Costa only came to Lisbon in May 1938. On 17 June, on his behalf, Júlio Worm delivered to the AGC, “against a receipt, 538 photographs, duly catalogued in Albums, each one having its own caption. These photographs, as the Albums indicate, concern the peoples and tribes: Cuissis, Corocas, Bochimanes, Cuanhamas, Bundus.”49 In 1941 the book Negros was published by Estermann and Cunha e Costa.50 It is an unbalanced and disconnected book: the first three chapters are signed by Estermann—“Bushmen,” “Corocas and Cuissis” and “The Cuanhama tribe” (pp. 1–48)—while the rest of the book, from the chapter “Indigenous Races and Tribes of Angola” to “The Camaxis” (pp. 49–207), is by Cunha e Costa. Only nine photographs are included, a mosaic of the collection, incorporating portraits, rituals, body art and traditional  healing practices. Without consulting Estermann, Cunha e Costa incorporated the explanatory texts of the first two volumes of the planned Album in the book Negros, but without the corresponding photographs.51 Cunha e Costa’s photographs were used to illustrate a range of works, scientific and historical publications, travel literature and colonial propaganda, sold in instalments and designed for mass consumption. Some 47  Idem, idem, synopsis “Álbum Etnográfico do Imperio Colonial Português”, AGC (May 5, 1938). 48  Idem, idem, manuscript, Despacho do Ministro Vieira Machado (March 5, 1936). 49  Idem, idem, Letter from ECC to AGC (June 15, 1938). 50  In a letter from Cunha e Costa to (Engineer) Bacelar Bebiano, (May 17, 1941), the lawyer offers him the book and clarifies: “Although this is an author’s edition, a very meticulous one, as you see, which even sold out, it was a financial loss”. IICT file, proc. 150, doc. 8. 51  Estermann, Etnografia do Sudoeste de Angola, 10; Estermann, Etnografia de Angola (Sudoeste e Centro), vol. 1, 68.

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examples are: Raças do Império [Races of the Empire] by Mendes Correia, published from 1943, with 98 photographs by Cunha e Costa, although already in the possession of the AGC;52 A Maravilhosa Viagem dos Exploradores Portugueses [The Wonderful Journey of the Portuguese Explorers], by Castro Soromenho, published between 1946 and 1948, illustrated with dozens of photographs by Cunha e Costa (uncredited);53 and the second edition of Henrique Galvão’s book, Outras terras outras gentes: viagens em África [Other lands other peoples: journeys in Africa], also with many pictures by the photographer.54 Thus, although the publication of the Ethnographic Album of Angola was a frustrated project, the photographs by Cunha e Costa circulated widely through various media and were consumed very soon after their production.55 At the time, they contributed crucially to how the Portuguese perceived Angolan people, their traditions and the landscapes they inhabited. Like Nuno Porto, we consider that photography is involved in the process of the mutual constitution of a national consciousness, that is, like the other side of the coin, a colonial consciousness. The circulation of printed texts and pictures plays a fundamental part in this process by spreading a group of representations on the subject matter through a spatially fragmented population. Also, in essence, the national community is constituted through their circulation and it will come to think of itself as one, from Minho to Timor, as the official slogan had it.56

Disputing Scientific Authority on Angolan Ethnography It seems that the photographic collection of Cunha e Costa has always been under scientific scrutiny. Salazar agreed that the Committee for the Centenary celebrations should sign a contract with Cunha e Costa for the 52  Mendes Correia, Raças do Império (Porto: Portucalense Editora, 1943). The photographs in this publication are credited as E. Cunha e Costa (Age. G. Col.). 53  Castro Soromenho, A Maravilhosa Viagem dos Exploradores Portugueses, 1st ed. (Lisboa: Terra Editora, 1946); The second edition, (Lisboa: Editorial Sul, imp., 1956), includes a new photographic selection of the same author, again without the credits. 54  Henrique Galvão, Outras terras, outras gentes: viagens em África (Porto: Empresa Jornal de Notícias, [195–]), 2 vols. 55  Pereira, “Uma travessia da colonialidade”, 89. 56  Nuno Porto (coord.), Angola a preto e branco: Fotografia e ciência no Museu do Dundo, 1940–1970 (Coimbra: Museu Antropológico, University of Coimbra, 1999), 18.

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supply of photographs from Angola, provided that “the scientific value of the existing […] collection and the likelihood of completing or enriching it has been shown.”57 The amateur photographer and ethnographer repeatedly sought scientific validation and institutional coverage for his work. On 11 December 1940, he presented the Ministry of Colonies, through the AGC, with an ethnographic map of Angola that he had compiled, “documented with photographs representing a man and a woman of the most characteristic types of all the tribes that inhabit Angola,” leaving the price at the discretion of the Ministry.58 To assess the scientific quality of the map, the Undersecretary of State for the Colonies sought the expert opinion of the Professor of Ethnology of the Escola Superior Colonial [Colonial Higher School], António de Almeida, and researcher of the Junta das Missões Geográficas e de Investigações Coloniais [Geographical Missions and Colonial Research Board] (JMGIC). In view of the reservations raised by the professor, and also the opinion given by the JMGIC, which considered that none of its members had “the required knowledge to be able to give a properly reasoned opinion […] on the accuracy and scientific merit of that map […] the Board is of the opinion that the ethnographic map presented […] as it is drawn up, has no scientific interest.”59 The acquisition was not authorized. In light of the decision of the JMGIC, Cunha e Costa twice asked its chair for guidelines to continue working on his ethnographic map of Angola.60 He stated that he did not wish to fuel any “controversy,” but only sought to improve his work under the guidance of the cultural and scientific institutions of the Ministry of the Colonies. We did not find any response to these requests. While Cunha e Costa and the JMGIC argued over the scientific value of his ethnographic map, the lawyer submitted a proposal for an Ethnographic Mission to Angola to the Board. This was to include a study 57  Caso das fotografias a comprar ao Dr. Elmano da Cunha e Costa (July 27, 1938). ANTT, Oliveira Salazar Archive, PC-8E, cx. 561, pt. 1, 51st subd. Emphasis ours. 58  Copy of letter from Cunha e Costa to Júlio Cayolla, (AGC), Lisbon, (May 17, 1941). IICT Archive, Process 150, doc.7, Anexo. 59  Information No. 35 from JMGIC, signed by J. Bacelar Bebiano, (June 16, 1941). IICT Archive, Process 150. 60  Letters from Cunha e Costa to (Engineer) Bacelar Bebiano, president of JMGIC (July 15 and August 28, 1941), IICT Archive, Process no. 150, documents 17 and 23.

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of “indigenous folklore and indigenous natural law, photographs of tattoos, adornment,” etc., and audio recording. The chair of the institution replied that there were no funds available that year, but since the linguistic and ethnographic studies were planned for the “Scientific Research Work Plan,” it could perhaps be achieved in 1943.61 It is interesting to note that Mendes Correia, in response to a request from the JMGIC, had already drafted a “plan for colonial anthropological studies (anthropology, archaeology and ethnography)” (dated 12 March 1941).62 In July 1943, Cunha e Costa sent a letter directly to the office of the Minister of the Colonies, about “the problem of the ethnographic studies in the Colonies and the best way of solving it,” where he stated to be “at the disposal of the Ministry for any more detailed work.”63 There, he criticized the organization of scientific research in the colonies established by the JMGIC (short-term missions that took place in the dry season, dependent on the logistical support granted by the local administrative authorities) and argued that the ethnographic studies missions ought to remain on the ground for three to four years, without any link to the colonial bureaucracy (which represented an obstacle to development of relationships of trust).64 Cunha e Costa called for studies that would include “measurements” (he claims to have already produced an “anthropological fact sheet” for this purpose) and the collection of “other elements and observation data: geographical study, fauna and flora, indigenous agriculture and industry, domestic life, indigenous law, system of ownership, family law, inheritance, medicine, surgery, arts and crafts, funeral ceremonies, transitional rituals, tattoos, mutilations, intellectual life, etc.”65 He also set out a programme of photographic and cinematographic recording of the songs, dances and 61  Proposal by Cunha e Costa, to the president of JMGIC, (May 2, 1941) (doc. 6), Information No. 34 of the JMGIC (doc. 12). Reply from the president of the JMGIC to Cunha e Costa, (July 2, 1941). IICT Archive, proc. 150. (doc. 15). 62  Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, Anthropology, Nationalism and Colonialism: Mendes Correia and the Porto School of Anthropology (Oxford & New York: Berghahn Books, 2023), 215. 63  Letter from Cunha e Costa to Major Álvaro de Fontoura, chief of staff of the Minister of the Colonies (June 25, 1943) enclosing “Algumas considerações sobre o problema dos Estudos Etnográficos nas Colónias”. Álvaro de Fontoura ordered that a copy be sent to the Board of JMGIC (July 20, 1943). AHU, MU, GM, Sala 6, no. 533-2. Proc. 4/159, Junta das Missões (1942–1943). 64  Ibidem, fl. I. 65  Idem, idem, fls. II-III

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chants of the local people. In terms of photography, he explains that “it requires permanent contact with the natives and therefore staying in the colonies.” Nothing that could be done by “scientific… tourists… who are going for the harvest, who go to swim in the Colonies, in the summer, this very hot summer in the Metropolis.” He would be available to work in the colonies because “there are no insurmountable problems, nor does science accommodate monopolies. With brio and tenacity, everything is achieved”; and “it is easy to make up for lost time, which actually justifies some of the accusations made against us [the Portuguese, by foreigners].”66 Of course, Cunha e Costa’s sarcastic criticisms were very badly received at the JMGIC when asked to comment on the document. It should be noted that the Board was created in 1936 but it was only in the mid-1940s that it was constituted on a regular basis, and their failure to direct the plan of scientific activities outlined for the 1942–1947 period was immediately apparent, given the meagre human and material resources at its disposal.67 In defence of the colonial scientific research plan approved by the JMGIC, its chair says that during the rainy season it is impossible to carry out fieldwork in Africa. As for the statements about the relationship of the administrative authorities with the indigenous peoples, he notes that they call into question the civilizing work of the State in the colonies. To appreciate the technical aspect of the work of Cunha e Costa, the Board called on António Augusto Mendes Correia and Joaquim Rodrigues dos Santos Júnior, respectively, the director and a researcher at the Porto Anthropological Institute. The latter’s opinion, one paragraph long, plainly deprecates the considerations of Cunha e Costa: “I have read the statement, which in my view does not merit detailed analysis, since it is clear from the outset that the author has no precise ideas of either the purpose or the methods of the studies referred to.”68 The opinion of Mendes Correia, more extensive, overturns the claims of the lawyer, whom he does not recognize as having any scientific competence in the matter:

 Idem, idem, fls. II-III.  Portugal, Ministério das Colónias. Ocupação científica do Ultramar Português: Plano elaborado pela JMGIC e Parecer do Conselho do Império Colonial. Legislação. Actividade da Junta. Summary in English (Lisboa: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1945). 68  Opinion of Santos Júnior, Porto, (July 30, 1943), addressed to the president of the JMGIC, fl. 1. AHU, MU, GM, sala 6, no. 533-2. Proc. 4/159, Junta das Missões (1942–1943). 66 67

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A record of anthropological observations can only be produced by those who know about anthropology, who are aware of the aspects on which it focuses its applications and who are properly trained in its methods. Materials collected at random by the merely curious, lacking any preparation or worse, by rough-and-ready pseudo-scientists eager to show off services or driven by extra-scientific intentions serve little purpose for a task of the desired breadth. […] This is not to say that a dilettante, an amateur photographer, a merely interested person cannot collect one fact or another of scientific interest, but if he does not have the above-mentioned preparation, he cannot do the work by himself, systematically, much less provide work guidelines for others. […] Finally, I regret that the interest of science and of the nation compels me to speak truths so naked and raw about the ambitious and inconsistent daydreams of Mr Cunha e Costa.69

This long quotation eloquently expresses the intention of delimiting the scientific field—with Cunha e Costa, an outsider, claimant to the field, being denied any legitimacy to become part of it because he had no formal qualifications and was driven by “other interests”; equally, it reflects the struggle waged by the hegemony of the scientific authority (defined as technical capacity and social power)70 over colonial anthropology. Implicitly, he defended himself against the professional anthropologists and scientific authority of the JMGIC, with the ethnographic authority of the missionaries who were on the ground and a distinguished writer who had lived in Angola. In the catalogue of the Angolan Ethnography Exhibition where the ethnographic map was displayed, Cunha e Costa wrote: The missionaries, among them the ethnographer Monsignor Doctor Alves da Cunha, state that my map is correct, and Castro Soromenho in the studies he has done for the work being published – A Maravilhosa Viagem dos Exploradores Portugueses  – says that it was the most complete that he had found.71 69  Opinion of Mendes Correia, Porto, (July 30, 1943), addressed to the president of the JMGIC, fls. 2–3 Emphasis ours. PT, AHU, MU, GM, Sala 6, No. 533-2. Proc. 4/159, Junta das Missões (1942–1943). 70  Pierre Bourdieu, “La spécificité du champ scientifique et les social de la raison de la raison”, in Sociologie et Societés, vol. 7, no. 1, Paris (1975), 91–92. 71  AGC, Catálogo da exposição de etnografia angolana, n.p.

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But to defend himself from potential criticism, he also argued: This work, entrusted to an amateur […] without expertise in the complex issues of ethnography, ethnology and above all anthropology, does not have goals of scientific rigour, and it was not presented or deemed as such. I only tried, in the first place, to make a documentary that had not been done yet, and collect materials to the basis of scientific studies that should be done by the Masters.72

Cunha e Costa also took the opportunity to praise the scientific occupation of the Portuguese colonies, which had seen a “huge increase” in recent times (alluding to the reorganization of the JMGIC in December 1945), “whose fruits cannot naturally be harvested immediately.”73 He described the scientific missions carrying out fieldwork in the colonies at the time, and explained that they were supremely coordinated by the JMGIC, “directed by a world-renowned scientist, Professor Mendes Correia.”74 Cunha e Costa would never be able to obtain public funding for ethnographic studies in the colonies, not even for work in his area of expertise: photography. Professional scientists, invested with the necessary authority, denied the scientific value of his photographic collection and his ethnographic map, consigning them to the realm of colonial propaganda.75 It was in this capacity that they were incorporated into the AGC. However, as we saw earlier, they were widely used in a scientific book by Mendes Correia himself.

The Photography Collection of Elmano Cunha e Costa at the Archive Despite not knowing exactly when Cunha e Costa delivered the whole collection to AGC, almost 50 years later, 8718 cellulose nitrate negatives (6  ×  6  cm) and 12 albums with 535 prints where again “discovered,” when transferred to AHU in 1984, together with documentation from the  Ibidem, n.p.  Idem, idem n.p. 74  Idem, idem n.p. 75  The Ethnographic Map was published in Catálogo da exposição de penteados e adornos femininos das indígenas de Angola (Lisbon, 1951), (according to information on cover), although we have not found it in any of the copies consulted. 72 73

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AGC. In 2007, the negatives had undergone conservation treatment and were made available online in the Arquivo Científico Tropical Digital (ACTD) repository.76 The original organization of negatives was maintained; they are arranged by three major labels: (1) “Indigenous art,” which comprises a photographic survey of the art exhibited at the Exposição-Feira [Exhibition-­ Fair] in Luanda in 1938,77 organized by the administrative divisions of Angola. (2) “Ethnic groups,” organized by the name of each group in alphabetical order. (3) “Several ethnicities,” with a selection of photographs from the first group, supplemented by photos from other ethnic groups. There are also negatives and prints of the visit of the Minister of the Colonies, Vieira Machado, to Guinea Bissau in 1941. The albums contain photographic prints which corresponds to the collection of negatives, but with different framing. The photographs are printed in sepia and have handwritten captions in four languages (Portuguese, German, English and French). They are decorated with drawings of African artefacts and exotic elements, different for each ethnic group. The interesting point is that the albums only relate to the “Boschimanes,” “Bundos,” “Corocas,” “Cuissis” and “Cuanhamas,” exactly the same ethnic groups’ designations that Cunha e Costa delivered to AGC in June 1938. As there is no further information about the albums and given the four languages for the captions, we suspect that they may be a prototype for the Ethnographic Album of Angola and that they were the only ones to be compiled. From the titles of each individual negative, handwritten by Cunha e Costa, it is clear that an effort had been made to systematize, organize and classify the photographs, in the search for more objectivity. The same subjects are photographed for each ethnic group and represented in short titles such as “landscape,” “dwellings,” “male,” “female,” “boy,” “spells,” “hairstyle,” “tattoos,” “male garment,” “female garment,” “domestic life,” etc.

76  The treatment of this collection was part of a project called Tropical Scientific Archive, which intends to promote the public access to the Scientific and Historical Collections from IICT. 77  See Álbum Comemorativo da Exposição-Feira de Angola em Luanda (Porto: Litografia Nacional do Porto, 1938), where some of the artefacts photographed by Cunha e Costa are illustrated.

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The organization and ordering of the collection were handled by the ACTD, and the original titles were entirely recorded in the ACTD repository, without any update of language from the colonial period. High quality digitization was a priority, not only to avoid too much handling of the negatives, but also so that researchers could access a positive image via the ACTD. In fact, after scanning, the technical quality of these images was evident. Simultaneously, digital access drew attention to a collection until now almost unknown78 and a continuous online search for these pictures has been noticed.

Conclusions The reconstruction of the life history of Cunha e Costa, his ideas, motivations and sociability, the struggles he engaged in (publicly with the Bar Association, covertly with professional anthropologists and with the body that coordinated scientific activity in the colonies) has informed us about the context of the production, uses and stories of the photographic collection he made in Angola between 1935 and 1939. The collection, which denotes the “documentary impulse” of an amateur photographer and ethnographer, intended to record the “58 tribes” of Angola, in their natural and social “setting.” It distances itself from the photography of the physical anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their more coercive practices. Perhaps that is why it has been challenged in the scientific field, especially by those who would shortly be the undisputed “owners” of the field of colonial anthropology—Mendes Correia and António de Almeida—and relegated to the domain of colonial propaganda and exhibitions. Moreover, as a documentary of representative types, it served mainly to display the different indigenous populations that inhabited the territory of Angola to the metropolitan public, crystallizing a timeless and uncontroversial view of that human and social diversity and concealing the exploitation, discrimination and tension inherent in the colonial system itself. Acquired by the Commission of the Centenaries and the Ministry of Colonies, incorporated in the AGC, it entered the AHU in the 1980s, where for a long time it remained in the shadows. Thanks to the 78  Until the digital access, we only knew of an article by German historian Beatrix Heintze, “In Pursuit of a Chameleon: Early Ethnographic Photography from Angola in Context”, in History in Africa, vol. 17, (1990).

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digitalization carried out and to the full availability of the collection in the ACTD it has been possible to get a more precise idea of its scope and content. It has also been possible to confirm the quality of the pictures, and the technical skills and artistic sensitivity of the photographer, clearly superior to his intellectual approach, as explained in his written works. In the light of the contextualization exercise we have attempted in this text, we highlight the activity of the photographer and invite further research on this collection as represents documentary and historical value. Without neglecting the colonial context of production of the photographic collection of Cunha e Costa, without denying that the pictures emanating from this photographic encounter were used to classify and objectify the Angolan ethnicities, regarded as inferior to European peoples and civilization and differentiated from one another, it is important that future interpretations of the collection are mindful of the “indigenous” agency in its construction.79 Acknowledgements  The authors thank Inês Ponte and Raúl Curvêlo for the indication of relevant primary sources and Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino for the unlimited access to the photography collection of Elmano Cunha e Costa and permission to publish the images.

79  Richard Vokes, (ed.), Photography in Africa: ethnographic perspectives (Suffolk: James Curry, 2012), 9.

CHAPTER 5

An Africanist Photo-ethno-graphy in the Portuguese New State (1928–1974) Inês Ponte

Introduction This chapter looks at the trajectory of Charles Estermann (1895–1976), a missionary-turned ethnographer-turned photographer, who, based in the then Portuguese colony of Angola, developed his scientific career during the course of the long New State dictatorship (1928–1974). Becoming a photographer was the last of the activities that Estermann began to engage in. However, taking photographs was only one of the ways in which he placed photography at the service of the social sciences. To examine the mutual relationship between the multiple uses of photography along Estermann’s scientific career, and the evolving historical conditions of his knowledge production and dissemination, I propose to draw a photo-­ ethno-­graphy of his trajectory. To explore the relationship between photography and modern anthropology, research on Africanist photography has been looking at archival

I. Ponte (*) Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_5

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collections. Some studies have examined the double role of ethnographers-photographers,1 others have focused on specific relationships between field photography and scientific dissemination from an historical perspective.2 Estermann’s prolific use of photography, both in its diversity and in its recurrence over such a long period of time, makes for a revealing case study, a case study suited to attempting a comprehensive perspective on his career through his published work that either displays or is about photographs. I will explore the relationship between Estermann’s use of the visual in his ethnographic dissemination work and his field practice, in order to apprehend the ways in which a missionary based in an overseas territory built a career in the social sciences during a long period of colonial government. Photography thus becomes a valuable device through which to simultaneously understand different uses in a greater history of photography for scientific purposes, and the ways in which a self-made scientist navigated the evolving facets of a long political regime. This photo-ethno-graphy, based on the available fragmentary photographic collection, reconstructs the career of a twentieth-century social scientist who made prolific use of photography. To compile it, I have looked for connections between published works and unpublished documents and images gathered in archives and libraries in Angola, Portugal and Switzerland, and available in the virtual world of digital archives and libraries based in Germany, the UK and the US as well. Guided by responses to documents, appropriating visual, textual and even aural materials to generate insights, I tentatively recreate Estermann’s career as a missionary-turned ethnographer through a history of his engagement with photography. I thus go beyond a mere use of images as historical evidence. Examining historical events and sources through a preliminary

1  Christopher Morton, “Double Alienation: Evans-Pritchard’s Zande & Nuer Photographs in Comparative Perspective”, in Photography in Africa: Ethnographic Perspectives, ed. Richard Vokes (Suffolk: James Curey, 2012), 33–55; John Comaroff et al., eds., Picturing a Colonial Past: The African Photographs of Isaac Schapera (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 2  Chris Wingfield, “Photographing ‘the Bridge’: Product & Process in the Analysis of a Social Situation in Non-Modern Zululand”, in Photography in Africa, ed. Vokes (2012), 56–80.

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ethnographic approach, I take advantage of subsequent historiographical research. The role of photography in the project of an early modern social science is nowadays an established field of study, since looking at its historical uses helps to illuminate past practices, current legacies and future promises. The scientific project in which Estermann engaged is characterised by an active policy of documentation, in which both visual and written records were acknowledged as valuable resources. While Estermann increasingly explored the technical innovation of photography, seeing its outputs as objective depictions that could illustrate field observations, during his trajectory he was also an active visual culture practitioner. German by origin, having been born in the Alsatian region that became French after the First World War (1914–1918), Estermann’s choice of the Holy Spirit congregation led him to become part of a transnational network that negotiated missionary activity with several colonial powers. For most of his life, Estermann was a missionary in Africa, a European in Angola, a foreigner in a territory under Portuguese colonial rule (Fig. 5.1). Hitherto, research on the Portuguese colonial context has provided comprehensive overviews of the early uses of ethnographic photography.3 My approach, however, will be to appropriate images to trace a possible biographical history that considers a contextual event of photography in relation to its uses, contributing instead to a transnational history of science in colonial settings. I will pay particular attention to Estermann’s formative period as a scientist-­ethnographer, introducing examples of his use of photography with ethnographic intentions, and also for disseminating the history of science. By constructing a historiography of Estermann’s scientific visual practice, I am able to set his intellectual logic within the context of the evolving

 Beatrix Heintze, “In Pursuit of a Chameleon: Early Ethnographic Photography from Angola in Context”, History in Africa 17 (1990): 131–156; Jill Dias, “Portuguese Sources for the History of Portuguese-Speaking Africa, 1870–1914”, History in Africa 18 (1991): 67–82. 3

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Fig. 5.1  Composing a career trajectory: From young to old age, from older to newer technologies. Left: print of photograph taken in the 1920s published in a missionary journal in Braga, Portugal [Estermann, “Conferência SGL”, Missões de Angola e Congo XV, no. 2, 3, 4 (1935): 38–40, 72–74, 104–7] and 26 years later in a scientific bibliography [Afonso Costa, ed., Bibliografia do Etnólogo Pe Carlos Estermann (Luanda: Instituto de Angola, 1961)]; right: mirrored photographic print held by the Arquivo da Província Portuguesa da Congregação do Espírito Santo in Lisbon [Archive of the Congregation of the Holy Spirit, APPCES/Lisbon], published in black & white in Pereira, “O Padre Carlos Estermann, Missionário e Etnógrafo” Separata da Revista Encontro, Selecções Missionárias, 1976, 17, captioned as taken in 1972 in Munhino Mission, Angola

colonial culture, local circumstances and accidental opportunities.4 I will transit between Western and African subjects, and between the uses Estermann makes of both his own photographs and those of others.

4  Dorothy Ross, “Changing Contours of the Social Science Disciplines”, in The Cambridge History of Science: The Modern Social Sciences, Vol 7, 2008, 206.

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A Preliminary Historiography of Well-Known and Obscure Works: Estermann’s Career and Photography At the age of 28, Estermann arrived in Angola when it was a Portuguese colony, and died there about 50 years later, in 1976, when Angola was newly independent.5 Based in Southern Angola, Estermann’s trajectory as a social scientist is accompanied by his recurrent use of photography. The technological evolution of photography over that long period allowed him increasing access to analogical black-and-white photographs both taken and published by others. This led him to start producing his own and to later experiment with colour. Along frequently producing articles for magazines on missionary culture, Estermann started authoring scientific articles and monographs, and later popular colonial culture articles as well as photographic albums and colonial brochures. His career trajectory can thus be characterised both by his ability to make the most of the technologies available for the purpose of publication and by the growing expansion of outlets for disseminating his ethnographic knowledge. Given that Estermann was based quite far away from established centres of scientific production, his dedication to publishing throughout his career is remarkable. Pereira mentions in a posthumous celebratory booklet that he has authored over 100 pieces.6 Yet, quantifying Estermann’s scientific contributions in terms of output can be a challenging endeavour. Estermann’s dual role as missionary and ethnographer, combined with his continuous interest in disseminating his ethnographic knowledge for various audiences, resulted in a published corpus somewhat difficult to disaggregate. Added to that, some of his published work consists of translated versions, several of which were later augmented. 5  Estermann travelled to Europe on several occasions. One of Estermann’s missionary colleagues, in a partially unpublished tribute, mentions that in around 1945 his congregation offered him an ecclesiastical promotion that would mean moving to Brazil. Wanting neither to leave Angola nor to explicitly refuse the honour, Estermann produced a medical report and was relieved when the other proposed candidate accepted the position—see Valente, “P.  Carlos Estermann [Espólio Pessoal de P.  José Francisco Valente]”, 1991, 27, C575, APPCES/Lisbon; and “P.  Carlos Estermann: Grande Missionário e Etnólogo do Sul de Angola”, Revista Espiritana, 1 (2002): 67–74. Estermann’s specific attachment to the region is further evidenced in 1941 when he negotiated with his congregation to remain in Sá da Bandeira, nowadays Lubango city, rather than move to Nova Lisboa, currently Huambo city, in the central plateau. This was a move his ecclesiastical role should have required him to make after a restructuring of the religious districts by the Portuguese state (cf. Pereira, “O Padre Carlos Estermann, Missionário e Etnógrafo’, 1976, 8). 6  Pereira, 17.

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With an immense body of work about one specific region, Estermann’s ethnographic endeavour is currently best known for his monumental three-volume monograph about rural populations, published in Portuguese between 1956 and 1961 under the auspices of the Junta de Investigações do Ultramar [State Overseas Research Board].7 Two decades later, international publishing houses edited English and French translations (Fig. 5.1, right, depicts an elderly Estermann holding the proofs of the English translation of the first volume).8 Less well-known are the other types of publications that also combine ethnography and photography. Most of the international journals in which a young Estermann published articles with images have displayed them on dedicated pages (three articles with hors-texte), with only one having them embedded in the text (see Fig. 5.2).9 The recurrence of photographs in at least 22 articles for audiences beyond the international scholarly circle indicate the importance that he and/or the magazine editors attached to providing a visual dimension to his writing. Official archived correspondence shows that Estermann was invited to author a photographic album in the late 1950s.10 In fact, he ended up producing several such albums of his field photographs and always through

7  Divided by ethnic boundaries, each volume has a substantive number of photographic images that he produced (1: 145 images, including a field portrait ascribed to an anonymous photographer; 2: 144 images; 3: 72 images). The drawings, unaccounted for here, are ascribed to others. The Junta de Investigações do Ultramar (JIU), as it became strategically known after 1950 to avoid the term colony due to the increasingly tense political atmosphere caused by other African countries’ independence, resulted from an institutional update of the Junta de Missões Geográficas e de Investigações Coloniais, created in 1936. See Castelo, Cláudia, Passagens para África: o povoamento de Angola e Moçambique com naturais da metrópole (1920–1974) (Lisboa: Afrontamento, 2007), 107–110, for the political discussion taking place in the Portuguese context. 8  Estermann, The Ethnography of Southwestern Angola. Vol. 1. (1976); Vol. 2 (1979); Vol. 3 (1981), all edited by Gordon Gibson, New York: Africana Publ. Co.; Ethnographie du Sud-­ Ouest de l’Angola, 2 vols. (Paris: Académie des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, 1977). 9   Estermann, “Les Forgerons Kwanyama”, Bulletin de la Societé Neuchâteloise de Geographie, XLIV, no. 2 (1936): 109–116; “Quelques Observations sur les Bochimans !Kung de l’Angola Méridionale”, Anthropos XLI–XLIV, no. 4–6 (1946): 711–722; “Le Betáil Sacré chez quelques Tribus du Sud- Ouest de l’Angola”, Anthropos, XLV, no. 4/6 (1950): 721–732; “Culte des Esprits et Magie chez les Bantous du Sud-Ouest de l’Angola”, Anthropos, XLVIIII, no. 1/2 (1954): 1–26. 10  Florentino Cardoso. “Informação No3L3/427/59, 7.11.1959 [Documento n.86]”. P427. Arquivo do Instituto de Investigações Científicas e Tropicais [Archive of the Institute for Scientific and Tropical Research], Lisbon [IICT/Lisbon].

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Fig. 5.2  From others’ to his own photographs; from illustrated articles to photographic albums. Top: My collage of an illustrated page from Estermann’s 1936 article, with Cunha e Costa’s un-signed photographs [“Les Forgerons”, see note 9; cf. archival image ECC/NC7900, accessible at https://actd.iict.pt/view/ actd:AHUD16772, IICT/Lisbon] and its jourmal cover, and of Estermann’s 1946 article with his own images [“Quelques Observations”, see note 9], most of them republished also in Estermann’s first volume of his major monograph (1956, see note 8). Based on copies from Swiss (RÉRO DOC:oai: doc.rero.ch:18163) and German (Humboldt University: https://www.digi-hub.de/viewer/image/ DE-11-001871423/245/) Digital Libraries, respectively. Bottom: The three photographic album covers authored by Estermann, between 1960 and 1973, with related captions, when available

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state publishers.11 Estermann’s published photo albums show a sweeping editorial choice—from an album depicting regional multi-ethnic hairstyles to one showing a specific ethnicity’s personal adornments, hairstyles and crafts, to yet a third depicting also the multi-ethnic region. They are linked by a preference for portraiture depicting a diversity of skilfully crafted personal adornments coded as social markers, and are captioned in several languages: Portuguese, French, English and German. This latter feature appears to be of great significance to Estermann, who wanted to widen the contexts through which ethnographic written explanations supporting the visual dimension could reach potential readers. The anthology Pereira posthumously edited in 1983 reused some of Estermann’s field photographs on dedicated pages, yet a logical connection between text and image is very often difficult to trace due to the reselection Pereira made.12 Pereira chose from the prints available to him, which unfortunately erased all trace of Estermann’s original curatorial practice. In contrast to Estermann’s prolific use of photography, the visual dimension appears currently absent from later reassessments of his work as an ethnographer or as a missionary. Knowing how editorial choices were made and what the printing conditions would be of great significance with regard to evaluating Estermann’s visual curatorship, yet only a few remarks regarding his better-known work are available. For his major monograph, Estermann originally aimed to display photographs on dedicated pages to illustrate specific parts of the text,13 but since he was not able to illustrate the chapters in the same way, he later opted to display them after the text.14 Although we cannot easily  Estermann, Álbum de Penteados do Sudoeste de Angola (Lisbon: JIU, 1960); Penteados, Adornos e Trabalhos das Muílas (Lisbon: JIU, 1970); Etnografia e Turismo na Região do Cunene Inferior (Lisbon: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1973). 12  From the Portuguese perspective, Spiritans have produced their own historical accounts about the work of their congregation in Angola and of priests who have contributed to spheres other than the priesthood. Pereira, also a Spiritan, edited Estermann’s dispersed writings, gathering many of his previously “obscure pieces” in Portuguese, German and French; see Estermann, Etnografia de Angola, ed. Pereira, 2 vols (Lisbon: IICT, 1983). Estermann’s supervision in 1974, which is mentioned in Pereira, “O Padre Carlos Estermann, Missionário e Etnógrafo”, 1976, 18, resulted in valuable annotations by the author regarding his original intentions at the time of publishing, and his reappreciation in his old age of the work he produced in his youth. In this chapter, I cite either the original publication or Pereira’s published version when relevant. 13  Estermann. “Carta p/ Secretário da Comissão Executiva da Junta de Investigações Coloniais, Luis Silveira [Doc.47], 3.06.1954”. P427. IICT/Lisbon. 14   Estermann. “Carta p/ Centro de Estudos de Etnologia do Ultramar [Doc.54], 23.02.1955”. P427. IICT/Lisbon. 11

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access information on what Estermann’s driving principles were when choosing which images to publish and what the specific publishing conditions were, we can nevertheless attempt to understand his repertoire through his reuse of images over a long period. By doing this, we can find sufficient significant recurrent variations to suggest how to approach Estermann’s scientific production both in terms of published photographs and with regard to the range of translated versions of his articles over time. Along the course of his work, text and visual content appear to have been constantly reshaped for different publications, whether at his own initiative or by invitation. One example is the comprehensive three-volume regional monograph (1956–1961) mentioned earlier. The monograph, coming after a further 20 years of fieldwork, can be seen as an expanded elaboration of the article he published in 1935, which I will come back to later. While both works display a great many photographs, there is a shift from publishing images made by others to publishing his own photographic productions. There are two, contrasting ways to understand how a missionary became an ethnographer and, later, a photographer who always paid meticulous attention to the visual. This can be by following the better-­ known or more accessible versions of Estermann’s work or by following the development of his career—the latter entails tracking original publications whenever possible. In the following section, I begin to examine his long-term trajectory.

Photography and the Making of a Field Africanist: Missionary Life and Science in a Colony To focus on Estermann’s use of photography is to follow a course within a social science that was already seen as modern. It translates into a period where fieldwork had become a key part of the anthropological methodology produced in metropolitan contexts. With fieldwork often requiring expeditions to colonised territories, Estermann was an ethnographer who throughout his career was instead always “close” to his field. A few field photographs invoke key moments that illustrate the triangular relationship between science, colonial politics and missionary work in relation to Estermann’s scientific trajectory. The chosen collage of photographs on display (Fig. 5.3) also allows us to discuss self-representation, his switch to visual production, and to outline his evolving understanding of the relationship between the visual and the written with regard to the social sciences.

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Fig. 5.3  To be a scientist is to publish knowledge gathered in the field. My collage. Clockwise from bottom left: print of Estermann chosen field portrait, made in 1932, published in 1956 (see note 15); archival photograph made by Delachaux of field camp in Omupanda, 1933 (see note 17); print of Cunha e Costa’s picture of field camp around 1936, published around 1972 [N.a., n.d. “P. Carlos Estermann”, brochure]; print of Estermann at his office in Munhino (see note 33)

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There are a couple of published images showing Estermann on “ethnographic fieldwork”, yet there is only one field image which, it seems, was his own choice to publish. That is the image which appears in the first volume of his well-known monograph on the rural populations of Southwest Angola.15 In the caption, Estermann indicates that he was acting as the translator (a strong metaphor for the work of an ethnographer) for the minister of the colonies at the time, during the latter’s visit two decades earlier, in 1932. The picture only effectively evokes the role of missionaries as mediators of colonial politics when we consider all of the companions Estermann mentions, acknowledging Kalinaso, an Ovakwanyama leader he captions as a queen. It is the only image Estermann captioned as being made by someone else that is published along with the 144 photographs he had produced since the 1940s. The time gap between producing his first monograph and of publishing this image reveals his gratitude to the state for its support of his work as a social scientist, quite as much as his introductory acknowledgement did.16 An archival field image from the second Swiss scientific mission to Angola is indicative of how often missionaries collaborated on international scientific expeditions more generally.17 Theodore Delachaux’s (1879–1949) participation in the mission can be seen in the context of his role as the curator of the Musée d’Ethnographie de Neuchâtel, and as a member of the city’s Geography Society. For Estermann, as a missionary with scientific ambitions, this Swiss mission had a particular effect on his career. His subsequent relationship with the ethnographer in charge, Delachaux, was grounded in a combination of shared scientific interests and of potential collaboration in European scholarly circles as an author. A few available letters exchanged between 1935 and 1941 show Delachaux’s requests to Estermann to check further ethnographic data, or to mediate between who might know or be able to gather more material culture to add to previously collected material.18 They also show Delachaux actively  Estermann, Etnografia do Sudoeste de Angola. 1, (JIU, 1956): image 77.  Estermann, 1956: 12. 17  Theodore Delachaux, “A Notre Camp à Omupanda [Mupanda]: Dr. A. Monard, Le Dr Vanancio [Sic] Da Silva, R.P.C.  Estermann, Sup. Princip. Des Missions Catholiques Du Cunène. Juillet 1933, MEN DELT 45.12”, P.1933.1.534, Archive of the Musée d’Ethnographie de Neuchâtel [MEN/Switzerland], accessible online at http://bit.ly/ DelachauxP1933_1_534. 18  Estermann, “Lettre p/ T. Delachaux, 5.10.1935”; “Lettre p/ Delachaux, 23.111937”; Delachaux, “Lettre p/ Estermann, 25.12.1937”; “Lettre p/ Estermann, 4.03.1939”; 15 16

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inviting Estermann to publish his own scientific production and the many delays affecting the European-based scholarly circles as a consequence of the Second World War (1939–1945). Current-day curator Gregoire Mayor highlights the importance of the visual in Delachaux’s scientific-ethnographic project—Delachaux was a professor of drawing of long standing, and the mission was his first experience of taking photographs.19 Delachaux’s enthusiasm for photography can reveal a lot about the value Estermann ended up attributing to this medium over his career. A good example would be Delachaux’s attitude to the 1942 article on girls’ puberty rites that he invited Estermann to submit to him for publication, and which arrived without accompanying photographs. Delachaux makes a point of referring to his own article (from 1936, which displayed his own field images of the same topic) in his final editor’s note on Estermann’s article.20 Delachaux’s belief in the insightful power of the visual appears to have played a role in inculcating in Estermann the value of photography as a powerful supplement to ethnography. Perhaps a significant demonstration of Estermann’s inclination is to note that the later Portuguese translation of the same article would appear with accompanying photos, this time of his own production.21 To better understand why Estermann began to produce photographs in the early 1940s, I highlight the fieldwork he did with Elmano Cunha e Costa (1892–1955), a metropolitan lawyer who spent some time in Southern Angola and was an amateur photographer. Cunha e Costa invited Estermann to join him as the ethnographer on an ambitious project, the original aim of which was to compile a photographic album of all the ethnic groups in Angola.22 Estermann soon shared the idea with Delachaux, and also in a later letter related how his work on the project “Lettre p/ Estermann, 10.121939”; “Lettre p/ Estermann, 3.2.1940”. All typewritten; all at the MEN/Switzerland. 19  Grégoire Mayor, “Usage de la photographie dans la 2e Mission Scientifique Suisse en Angola”, in Retour d’Angola, ed. Marc-Olivier Gonseth et  al. (Neuchâtel: MEN, 2010), 138–161. 20  Estermann, “La Fête de Puberté dans quelques tribus de l’Angola Méridional”. Bulletin de la Societé Neuchâteloise de Geographie XLVIII, (1942) 129–141; Delachaux, “Ethnographie de la Région du Cunène: 2me Mission Scientifique Suisse en Angola 1932–1933”. XLIV, (1936) 5–108. Delachaux had previously published another article by Estermann, accompanied by un-attributed photographs—cf. Note 9 and Fig. 5.2. 21  Estermann, “A Festa de Puberdade em algumas Tribos de Angola Meridional”, Portugal em África I, 6 (1944): 340–351; cf. authorship Estermann, Etnografia de Angola, 1:1:193. 22  Cunha e Costa’s project is approached from the perspective of the history of the photographic collection (see Chap. 4 by Cláudia Castelo and Catarina Mateus, this volume) and

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was progressing.23 Afterwards, though, Estermann appears to be ambiguous regarding the outcomes of this project. On various occasions, Estermann’s remarks reveal somewhat contradictory attitudes to the resulting book—a self-published edition by Cunha e Costa—consisting of 207 pages with 17 images illustrating 22 chapters, the first two of which are attributed to Estermann.24 Evaluating the difference between skilled and amateur ethnographers’ use of the camera in the field in Angola up to the 1930s, German historian Beatrix Heintze suggests there is a significant difference between the associated data of Cunha e Costa and, for instance, Delachaux’s data for his photographs taken in Angola.25 To support her point regarding the amateur nature of Cunha e Costa’s ethnographic use of photography, Heintze mentions her correspondence with Estermann in 1972, suggesting how he appeared to distance himself from the results of the project.26 A year later, recalling his trajectory as a scientist-ethnographer in a sound-­ recorded interview with American anthropologist Gordon Gibson,27 Estermann underlines the importance of this collaborative experience at the time since it afforded him the opportunity to carry out more in-depth fieldwork than he had managed up to that period. Indeed, he appears more proud of the first book he ended up authoring than of the articles, even though it was only as a co-author and did not gave his full authorisation. Heintze’s argument results from her then recent “chance” discovery of Cunha e Costa’s collection stored in its original albums (1990, 152). At the time of Gibson’s interview, the collection was still “lost” in a metropolitan state archive. Fittingly describing it as a “photographic safari”, Heintze (1990, 145–146) provides a full analysis of the colonial and racist tone of Cunha e Costa’s chapters written in a popular discourse. In the 1970s, the book was also difficult to access. Estermann’s contrasting positions about the project can be taken further. There are a few occasions in which Estermann commented on this work, or cited it after its publication.28 In his 1974 article, he commented the use of a few of its photographs in exhibitions in Lisbon (see Chap. 10, by Inês Gomes, this volume). His collection is accessible online at https://actd.iict.pt. 23  Estermann, “Lettre p/ Delachaux, 5.10.1935”; “Lettre p/ Delachaux, 23.11.1937”. 24  Elmano Cunha Costa and C. Estermann, Os Negros (Lisbon, 1941). 25  Heintze, “In Pursuit of a Chameleon”, 145. 26  Heintze, 153 n.75. 27  Gibson and Estermann. 1973. Interview with C.  Estermann. Angola. Smithsonian Institute/USA. 28  Estermann cites this work in ‘Os “Vatwa”’, republished in Etnografia de Angola, vol. 1 (1983[1951]), 71–75; as well in Etnografia do Sudoeste de Angola. 1 (1956).

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on the impoverished result of the final text, since he had conceived it to relate to Cunha e Costa’s field images.29 In the first volume of his major monograph, describing the initial plan and the final result, Estermann mentions how an album is a more superficial endeavour than a study.30 In the early 1970s, Estermann opines to both Heintze and Gibson, his view that Cunha e Costa’s photographs are a beautifully accomplished device for visual documentation, yet his writing is full of ill-informed details about the sociocultural context of rural populations.31 Issues of scientific credibility reunite Estermann’s distance on the one hand and his appreciation on the other—Cunha e Costa’s scientific ignorance combines with Estermann’s first chance to have a significant authorship role in a book. One needs to realise the importance to a scientist of having a published book. This uneasy collaboration appears to have shown Estermann the importance of associating scientific textual content with image, in which the fieldwork experience was key for that. Soon after publishing these reflections, Estermann started authoring photographic albums with his own field images, thus apparently accepting the format with its potentials and limitations. I find it enriching to have pictures mediating the relationships and experiences that had a strong influence on Estermann’s formative period as a social scientist and that simultaneously help to discuss his history with photography. To conclude my introduction of him as a field scientist through photography, I underline writing as a salient dimension which Estermann prized for its scientific endeavour. In the early 1940s, Estermann made a distinction between being an ethnographer and a scientist, arguing that all missionaries are by default ethnographers, as they need to understand the people they aim to “civilise”, but only scientists publish the knowledge gained, based on their “observational” fieldwork.32 Thus, to indicate the importance he attached to writing for sharing scientific ­knowledge acquired in the field, and to emphasise the sense of his longterm trajectory, the full circle is closed by a portrait depicting an elderly

 Estermann, ‘Os meus contactos com os Boschimanes do Sudoeste de Angola’, republished in Etnografia de Angola, vol. 1, 1983[1974], 65–70. 30  Estermann, Etnografia do Sudoeste de Angola. 1:10. 31   Heintze, “In Pursuit of a Chameleon”, 153; Gibson and Estermann. 1973. Interview. SI/USA. 32  Estermann, ‘Contribuição dos Missionários Espiritanos para a Ocupação Científica do Sul de Angola’, Boletim Geral das Colónias VII, 196 (1941): 13. The relation between social science and missionary work is also the topic of personal correspondence between Estermann and Delachaux, with only the former’s reply being available—Estermann, ‘Lettre p/ Delachaux, 5.10.1935’. 29

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Estermann writing.33 I highlight how the image is ambiguous in that it does not make it clear whether he is writing scientific ethnography or doing missionary work. I will now address one of Estermann’s early articles that introduces his use of photographs in his ethnographic work before he became a photographer.

Providing Visual Ethnographic Knowledge as a Young Social Scientist in Colonial Angola In early 1935, “Ethnographic notes about the native populations in the Huíla district” (my translation) was published in a state publication linked to the then Ministry of the Colonies (1911–1951).34 This article is one of Estermann’s first ethnographic contributions to Portuguese scholarly circles, and it included a set of 17 photographs with no defined authorship, which was a current practice at the time. It can guide us through some of the conditions for Estermann’s production of scientific knowledge in his formative years, and establish a few genealogies for his visual and written anthropological culture. Estermann’s article gives a succinct account of the ethnic diversity of Southwest Angola, a region he defined as the most diverse of the territory, and describes a set of similarities and differences for the indigenous populations summarized into races and tribes. Presented in sections that reveal the conventional anthropological approach at the time, it also closely emulated Joseph Deniker’s (1852–1918) Races of Man (1900; London). Yet it was also in line with the ethnographic work of the missionary Henry A. Junod (1863–1934), on the Tsonga of Mozambique (1912; Neuchâtel), which Estermann often cites in his later works. Both works are widely illustrated, and over Estermann’s career the resemblance between his work and these will shift between one and the other. At the level of visual culture, Deniker used images made by others, while Junod’s images are those he produced himself, together with others’ images.

 Exposição Bibliográfica da Obra de P.  Carlos Estermann (Sá da Bandeira: Serviços Culturais da Câmara Municipal, 1974). 34  Estermann, “Notas Etnográficas sobre os Povos Indígenas do Distrito da Huíla”, Boletim Geral das Colónias, XI, 116 (1935): 41–69. The Boletim Geral das Colónias was created in 1925 as the Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias. In 1952, it further changed to Boletim Geral do Utramar. The whole collection is accessible online at http://memoria-­ africa.ua.pt/Library/BGC.aspx. 33

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As a missionary, Estermann was charged with founding and developing further missions, churches, schools and workshops in different parts of the immense region, and, at the same time, he was given greater responsibility in the internal hierarchy of his congregation as well as in the Catholic arrangement negotiated with the colonial state.35 In order to “civilize the natives”, the missionary vow converging with colonial state overseas policies,36 he was first sent to Mupa (1924–1928), then to Omupanda (1928–1932), the Huíla mission (1933–1935), Sá da Bandeira, nowadays Lubango city,37 and the Munhino Mission (1966).38 Over the course of this trajectory, he became closer to the different populations who inhabited the various areas (Fig.  5.4). Estermann’s missionary career appears reflected in his scientific production, publishing progressively dedicated studies about the neighbouring rural populations nearest to the places to which he moved. When he relocated to the Huíla mission, his ecclesiastical office also involved regular trips to all active Catholic missions in the Southwest. This afforded valuable opportunities for gathering field knowledge in the form of notes, which he zealously produced despite having no time to publish them. This was also the period during which he travelled with Cunha e Costa. Estermann also learned the local languages—he became fluent in Oshikwanyama after he arrived in the region, with the help of a dictionary compiled by one of his predecessors at the mission.39 He found it more difficult to learn Olunyaneka later, as he had grown older.40 Estermann’s 35  The 1940 Concordata, a diplomatic agreement between the Vatican and the Portuguese state, established a new administrative arrangement for Catholic missions in overseas territories. At the time, the Huíla province included the present-day Kunene province. 36  Adélio Neiva, História da Província Portuguesa, 1867–2004 (Lisboa: Congregação do Espírito Santo e do Imaculado Coração de Maria, 2005); Hugo Dores, A Missão da República: Política, Religião e o Império Colonial Português, 1910–1926 (Lisboa: Edições 70, 2015). 37  Valente, “P. Carlos Estermann: Grande Missionário e Etnólogo”, (2002): 67–74. Estermann’s move to Lubango is linked to the opening of the train station, and its predicted impact on the city’s demographics—cf. Pereira, “O Padre Carlos Estermann, Missionário e Etnógrafo”, (1976): 7. 38  Pereira, “Carlos Estermann”, typewritten. 1972, C576, APPCES/Lisbon. 39  A manuscript by father Ernest Lecomte (1862–1908), cf. Valente, ‘P. Carlos Estermann: Grande Missionário e Etnólogo’, 74. 40  Gibson and Estermann. 1973. Interview. SI/USA. He nevertheless conducted regular masses and catechism in Olunyaneka when settled in Lubango; see Estermann, “Carta p/ Rev. P. Miranda Santos, 17.02.1960”. Typewritten, C384. APPCES/Lisbon.

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Fig. 5.4  Map, pictures and text in formative years. My collage made from Estermann’s first article published specifically for the portuguese scientific circle (cf. note 40), combined with a geographical overlap of his missionary trajectory. Based on images available at Memórias d’África

work focused not on the populations he was progressively able to evangelise, but on the rural non-Christian populations, some of which came sporadically to the missions, but with whom he had limited contact due to his time-consuming missionary obligations. It would not be out of place, then, to suggest that Estermann’s proximity to the field is a relative proximity given his scientific interest in non-Christians; an interest he would remain faithful to throughout his career. Such relative proximity appears hidden in his use of photographs made by others in his 1935 article, in the mismatch between his field knowledge and its scientific dissemination. The mismatch results from his choosing to display more collective and individual portraits that seem to have been made in rural peoples’ dwellings, and far fewer that appear to have been made near missions or urban centres. The way Estermann curated his first experience of using images profusely, is also helpful with regard to approaching his construction of a visual culture for scientific purposes

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since it shows an interesting notion of the visual as an illustration of knowledge. The images he chose do not bear a linear relationship with whom or what he describes textually. For example, when summarising the features of the Khoisan people, there appears alongside the text a portrait of the Ovandimba people who have a different ethnicity,41 or while textually describing the generic form of the rural dwellings, there is a collective portrait of Ovanyaneka girls, which in no way gives the reader any idea of the constructions referred to.42 Estermann’s visual culture background, which we can access through the sources of the images he used, is also a revealing dimension. Emphasising the frequent borrowing of photographs of unassigned authorship for ethnographic purposes, and the increasing use of generic captions between the late nineteenth century and the 1930s in general, Heintze43 opened the way to identifying Estermann’s regional visual and written knowledge in his formative years. Heintze’s suggestion of a growing abstract use of image with associated captions for earlier scholars reusing previously published images might not always comply with Estermann’s use over his longer trajectory. Yet she usefully located the source of four of the 17 photographs on display. One image44 was published in a missionary originated monograph which had a complicated production history.45 Estermann’s use of this image shows us how, through his missionary network, he had access to such prints before their publication. The other three images46 appear in a published report about South Angola by the military officer, João de Almeida (1873–1953).47 Overall, Estermann’s reuse of Almeida’s images highlights his awareness of a considerable amount of sources related to the region, besides the missionary ones.

 Estermann, “Notas Etnográficas”, 42.  Estermann, 50. 43  Heintze, “In Pursuit of a Chameleon”. 44  Estermann, “Notas Etnográficas”, 59. 45  Alphonse Lang and Constantin Tastevin, La Tribu Va-Nianeka: Mission Rohan-Chabot (Paris: Ministère de l’Instruction Publique, Société de Géographie, 1937); besides the book’s introduction, see also Estermann, ‘Contribuição dos Missionários’, 14, for the related history of notes from deceased missionary Dekindt (1865–1905) passing to Lang after 1890, passing in turn to Tastevin in 1930 (1880–1962), who appears in 2 of the 41 images displayed in 16 plates. 46  Estermann, “Notas Etnográficas”, 52, 63, 66. 47  João de Almeida, Sul de Angola: Relatório de um Governo de Distrito (1908–1910) (Lisboa: Tipografia Anuário Comercial, 1912). 41 42

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During his training period in Lisbon before departing for Angola (1923), Estermann had already accessed the Spiritan’s library,48 which added to the more general learning he had gained previously in Chevilly, the Spiritan’s main Seminar in France.49 Throughout Estermann’s long stay in Angola, his evolving personal network, combined with his knowledge of Portuguese, French, German, Latin and English, gave him access to a great range of original manuscripts and publications. He carefully built on the knowledge gathered about the region, including neighbouring Northern Namibia, where protestant missions had a strong and long presence before the Spiritans came along. From Deniker’s scientific approach to humankind or Junod’s study of the Mozambican Tsonga, from military reports or contributions authored by missionaries of his or other religious faiths, Estermann’s all-encompassing readings served to make comparisons with the equivalent “primitives” nearby him. With the photograph that appears last in the article,50 which depicts a collective puberty celebration of Ovakwanyama girls, we return to the beginning of the scientific collaboration relationship, already mentioned, between Estermann and Delachaux.51 Despite there being no attributed authorship or context of production, the similarity between the published and the archival photograph nevertheless allows us to extrapolate from Delachaux’s data that it was made in the region of Omupanda when Estermann was superior there. While the sources of the other images are still to be uncovered, this one brings some closure to Heintze’s evaluation about the use of Delachaux’s field information. It also completes the triangle in the relationship Estermann had with science, colonialism and missionary work, in this early phase of his career as a scientist-ethnographer.

Photographic Portraits of Scientists as Sources of Estermann’s Scientific Knowledge Addressing another of Estermann’s uses of photography—the practice of disseminating the history of science—is a way of underlining again the relationship between missionaries and scientists. Between 1940 and 1972,  Gibson and Estermann. 1973. Interview. SI/USA.  Valente, “P. Carlos Estermann: Grande Missionário e Etnólogo”, 67. 50  Estermann, “Notas Etnográficas”, 68. 51   Delachaux, “Jeunes Filles Alignées Côte à Côte”, 1933, P.1933.1.535, MNE/ Switzerland, http://bit.ly/DelachauxP1933_1_535. 48 49

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Estermann authored a few tributes to other scientists, where he outlines their contributions to knowledge. These tributes have other dissemination circles in common beyond the narrow Portuguese-speaking scientific community. The “in memoriam” pieces Estermann authored appear in missionary journals, in metropolitan conference proceedings, and in the regular booklet published by the Sá da Bandeira’s local authority, Huíla’s provincial capital where he ended up being closely based for most of his life. The tributes authored by Estermann that have photographic portraits of scientists, provide an opportunity to highlight other influences that determined his development as an ethnographer. There was the article he wrote on Albert Monard (1886–1952),52 the taxidermist at the first Swiss mission, and another about Hermann Baumann (1902–1972),53 an intriguing German diffusionist ethnologist whose synthesis on African populations was decidedly influential in German and French Africanist circles,54 and clearly had an influence on Estermann. Interestingly, with two images illustrating the ethnographic field context of Delachaux’s scientific missions, but with no photographic portrait of the scientist,55 Estermann’s tribute to him would be excluded by this criterion. This kind of publication also provides an opportunity to explore the connections between missionary work and science, and the effect colonial politics had at this early stage of Estermann’s trajectory. In his 1940 article “The Contribution of Spiritan Missionaries to the scientific exploration of Southern Angola” (my translation), Estermann mentions the strong practice of natural sciences among some of his predecessors, also stressing the interest some of them took in social dimensions such as local languages.56 He then goes on to define ethnography and linguistics as the twin social disciplines that helped missionaries in their task. What goes unsaid is how both the social and natural sciences developed by these missionaries converged in the modern empiricism based on fieldwork as observation. It is this empiricist influence that aggregates every “in memoriam” Estermann  Estermann, “O Dr. Alberto Monard”, O Apostolado, n°924 (1953).  Estermann, “Recordando Herman Baumann”, Portugal em África, 29,173 (1972): 306–311 and “In Memorian: Herman Baumann”, Boletim da Câmara Municipal de Sá da Bandeira, 33 (1972): 85–90. 54  Hermann Baumann and D. Westermann, Les Peuples et Les Civilization de l’Afrique Suivi de Les Langues et L’Education (Paris: Payot, 1948). 55  Estermann, “Dr. Theodore Delachaux’” O Apostolado, 716 (1949). 56  Estermann, “Contribuição”. 52 53

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wrote over his career, whether of missionaries or field scientists, rather than the use of a similar visual strategy. Such tributes are a revealing indicator of the inspiring figures for Estermann’s work, yet it was perhaps not by chance that he submitted the article about the Spiritans’ scientific contributions to the then General Bulletin of the Colonies, or that he specifically used “scientific occupation” in the title—a colonial state policy that had been more of a principle than a practice since 1936.57 Estermann’s early years in Angola were characterised by periods of troubled negotiations regarding the role of the Congregation in the Portuguese colonial administration.58 This circumstance allows for a significant reading of how in the article he first aligns photographic portraits of foreign colleagues, ending with an image of Father José Maria Antunes (1856–1928), the Portuguese Spiritan pioneer in Angola. Antunes’ contributions in the field of botany are well known, and he was also responsible for drawing up the expansion project of religious missions before the New State dictatorship (1928).59 Because of the advice Antunes gave young Estermann to dedicate his available time to publishing in scientific channels,60 the personal link between them could be an appealing motive for Estermann’s visual display strategy. However, it is also possible to see this article as an indication of the delicate relationship between the 57  Tiago Brandão, Da Organização da Ciência à Política Científica em Portugal, 1910–1974 (Casal de Cambra: Caleidoscópio, 2017). See also note 38. 58  Importantly, Estermann’s move to Huíla village in 1933 was a consequence of the small number of Portuguese Spiritans in faraway Mupa, leading to his superior’s request to avoid this situation by moving to a mission with a fixed number of Portuguese priests, a legal constraint established since the republican period (1910–1926). When giving a lecture about missionary work at the Lisbon Geography Society in 1935 (see “Conferência SGL”—Fig. 5.1), attended by important political figures, Estermann stated that his delay in accepting the invitation was due to his still-fragile Portuguese—particularly his accent. In Portuguesecontrolled territories, local languages could be used for evangelisation purposes, Portuguese had to be used in teaching and other European languages were forbidden in daily affairs, while being taught in high schools (see Rui Martins Santos, Cultura, Educação e Ensino em Angola, 1998, 345, online at http://bit.ly/2G3Yt8t). Foreign priests received training in Portuguese to be able to teach it. When feasible, foreign Spiritans appear to have strategically adjusted their proper names to Portuguese versions. For example, while in many publications over his career Estermann appears as C. Estermann, his authorship of books published in metropolitan Portugal turned him from Charles, his birth name, into becoming widely known as Carlos. 59  Neiva, História da Província Portuguesa, 1867–2004. 60  Valente, “P. Carlos Estermann: Grande Missionário e Etnólogo”, 69; see also Estermann, “O Padre José Maria Antunes e as Ciências Naturais”, O Apostolado, XX, 1190 (1956): 1, 4.

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colonial state and the missionary work carried out by foreigners in Portuguese territories during Estermann’s early period in Angola. Thus, we can look at this article as both stressing the fragile position of Spiritans in relation to the central colonial administration, and as an attempt to formally strengthen it through the accredited dissemination of the missionaries’ scientific contributions. I will now address the evolving occasional state support that was crucial for Estermann to consolidate his career as a social scientist and to become a photographer, as well as for his curatorship practice as an established ethnographer.

A Settled Africanist’s Scientific Use of Photography in an Overseas Territory Soon after Estermann arrived in Angola, he followed Antunes’ advice and started to publish in international scholarly journals. Up to the 1950s, highlighting the mapped European geography, Estermann had published articles in Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie (f. 1869, Germany), Africa: Journal of the International Africa Institute (f. 1928, England), the Bulletin de la Societé Neuchâteloise de Geographie (f. 1886, Switzerland) and Anthropos (f. 1906, Germany).61 Portuguese state research support was a major turning point for the progression of Estermann’s scientific career, though the chronology and geography are not so easily determined.62 In 1951, the secretary of the Executive Commission of the Portuguese Overseas Research Board suggested to his superior, the minister of the colonies, that Estermann could receive a scholarship to publish his research in Portugal. He backed this suggestion citing a combination of Estermann’s

61  Catholic missionaries played important roles in establishing both Africa and Anthropos. For Africa, see Karin Barber, “Editorial”, Africa 78, 03 (2008): 327–333, for an overview of 80 years of the journal’s activity. 62  Estermann recalls an unfulfilled research opportunity in the late 1920s coming from the Africa’s editor, since it demanded a dedication that his recent missionary activity at the time could not bear. He mentions as interlocutor Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954), a catholic priest founder of Anthropos—“Os meus contactos com os Bochimanes”, (1983)[1974], 1:69. Pereira mentions Diedrich Westermann (1875–1956), a missionary who was the Africa’s editor at the time, misnaming however Anthropos for “Afrika” as the first international journal in which Estermann published—‘O Padre Carlos Estermann, Missionário e Etnógrafo’, 5.

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fieldwork experience and his international scientific output.63 For Estermann, in his mid-50s, the JIU scholarship was a welcome opportunity to dedicate himself to the dissemination of field knowledge already gathered over more than two decades, and would enable Estermann to transition from an affirmative to a consolidation phase as a scientist-­ ethnographer. Meanwhile, the previous decade showed the importance of Estermann’s relationship with the Governo Geral de Angola [General Government of Angola] for the development of his career, both as a field ethnographer and as a photographer. His participation in the technical committee of the population census (1940) was when Estermann began to take photographs64—at the time using some of the photographs in international articles he published in that decade (see Fig. 5.2). In contrast to his earlier, more manageable personal relations with European colleagues, who often combined social sciences and religious roles, his relationship with the Portuguese state is not unsurprisingly characterised by bureaucracy. Having elaborated an ambitious plan in response to the JIU invitation, which later resulted in his major three-volume monograph published between 1956 and 1961, Estermann ran out of funds during critical phases of carrying it out. The delays caused by centralised state bureaucracy, which appear linked to scientific reviews requested to institutionalised anthropologists, made Estermann look to the General Government of Angola as a source of funding.65 The first and second volumes of his major monograph, which came out in 1956 and 1957 respectively, were sold out by 1959; and surprisingly, JIU was quick to propose a second edition, before even Estermann had submitted the manuscript for the third volume. Publishing the three volumes became a somewhat-convoluted process, yet Estermann’s relationship with JIU also allowed him to author more works than just the 63  Silveira, “Carta p/ Ministro das Colónias [Doc. 5], 12.2.1951”. JIU’s proposal was mediated by Manuel Viegas Guerreiro (1912–1997), who had been teaching in Lubango, and on returning to Portugal was willing to become Estermann’s research assistant, see Estermann, “Carta p/ Secretário da Junta de Investigações Coloniais [Doc. 4], 8.1.1951”. Both typewritten. P427. IICT/Lisbon. 64  Gibson, and Estermann. 1973. Interview. SI/USA; see also Estermann, ‘Os meus Contactos’. 65  Carvalho, José Agapito da Silva. “Oficio p/ Ministro do Ultramar [Doc.54], 1954”. P427. IICT/Lisbon. António de Almeida (1900–1984) and Mendes Correia (1888–1960) are the metropolitan institutionalised scientific authorities supervising Estermann’s work plan and his later requests; after 1959 it is Jorge Dias (1907–1973) (P427, IICT/Lisbon).

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expanded version of his original workplan. For instance, while the initial invite for his first photographic album came from the Sá da Bandeira Local Authority, it was JIU that ended up publishing it. JIU also accepted Estermann’s later proposal for the second photographic album as well. Besides the cumulative dimension to the support provided by the central and overseas colonial structures, there were also intricate interconnections between them. To consolidate Estermann’s reputation as an author of books, state funding was crucial for him to establish himself as an ethnographer in the Portuguese context. Added to this was the role local authorities ultimately played in Estermann’s use of photography, at a stage when the increasingly industrialised city was experiencing an economic and demographic boom.66 While continuously publishing illustrated articles for wider Portuguese-­ speaking audiences, another format in which Estermann engaged with photography from the late 1950s onwards was through exhibitions.67 However, the visual dimensions of such events are eventually greatly lost, and not merely because of their transient nature. The 1960 exhibition catalogue “Patterns from Southern Angola” (my translation), for example, is reduced to Estermann’s captions, there being no evidence of the photographs displayed by the Huila Museum in the city of Sá da Bandeira, Angola. Even so, 1960 appears to be the year in which Estermann’s career was at its height and when his photography appeared to be everywhere: besides that major exhibition in Sá da Bandeira, both his first photography album and a reedition of the first and second volume of his three-volume monograph came out in Lisbon; alongside both an academic and a popular article in illustrated publications based in Luanda (Fig.  5.5). However, any sense of achievement Estermann could have enjoyed appears to have been shortlived. Subsequent to the events in the North that triggered the liberation war in 1961, the Spiritans located at a nearby mission in the South were accused of supporting African populations. The news agitated Estermann to such an extent that he was sent to Europe to recuperate from the sudden shock.68 66  See Carlos Medeiros, A Colonização das Terras Altas da Huíla (Angola): Estudo de Geografia Humana (Lisbon: Centro de Estudos Geográficos, 1976). 67  Motivos do Sul de Angola (Sá da Bandeira: Museu da Huíla, 1960). In 1957, Estermann also organised a photography exhibition to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Father José Maria Antunes, n.a. “Comemorações do 1° centenário do nascimento do Padre José Maria Antunes em Sá da Bandeira”, Boletim Geral do Ultramar, 33, 384 (1957): 179–186. 68  “Apenas boatos? … Não”, O Apostolado, 1699 (1961): 4.

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Fig. 5.5  1960: Contrasting visual uses. My collage of two covers related to Estermann’s photographs published in 1960. Left: cover of the catalogue of an exhibition that opened in Sá da Bandeira city in August, which holds only the captions of images on display. Right: cover of illustrated biweekly magazine published in Luanda in early September. Estermann’s article on hairdressing in Southern Angola appears spread in four numbers (15, 16, 17, 18), featuring in the cover in the first one. Based on photographs by author

Conclusion By looking at the use of photography over the long career trajectory of a European missionary who became an established Africanist ethnographer, I was able to explore the fine line between his missionary biography and scientific career in a colonial setting. An attention to photography enabled me to trace the development and consolidation of Estermann’s long-term scientific career and, at the same time, to provide insight into the evolving political context. To qualify Estermann as an Africanist, frames the area of studies that he sought to contribute to more widely, and his history with photography allowed me to combine his scientific endeavour, encompassing his field and dissemination practice, with his missionary role in a colonial setting.

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Through the medium of photography, I was able to configure a selective reconstruction of Estermann’s career development. I could reunify connections between fragments scattered over various archives and libraries to put together a dynamic puzzle whose pieces formed triangular-­ shaped interactions between science, colonial politics and missionary work over a long period of time. Being able to mediate or provide further ethnographic information to European-based social scientists, Estermann was a missionary who was also willing to become a scientist. Based on his use of photography over his long stay in Angola as a colonially dominated space, led me to show how in practice he combined both activities, and to examine the specific context in which a missionary became an established social scientist, as well as how he negotiated those roles throughout his career. I have been able to show that, coinciding with the Portuguese New State long-term dictatorship (1928–1974), Estermann’s scientific career was initially established through a trans-imperial practice, consolidated through a dynamic relationship between colonial metropolitan and overseas government structures, and attempted to adjust to the evolving colonial setting. For Estermann, in his formative period science was the foundation of a scholarly community from which he derived useful understandings and to which he aimed to contribute for its advancement. It was a project he wanted to become a recognised member of. Estermann’s early trajectory as a social scientist shows how he built an international network for scientific collaboration and dissemination—with a proximity to the field, willing to contribute to a specific field of knowledge that was effective for his missionary work. For the Portuguese colonial regime, Estermann’s international scholarly achievement, combined with his proximity to the field, was an exceptional case. Anthropology was slowly gaining ground with the recognised institutions, but overseas scientific expeditions were seldom conducted. Increasing state interest in proving internationally its “scientific exploration” of dominated territories made Estermann’s profile quite appealing. Consolidation came in Estermann’s later years, when he spent his time writing and giving catechism in the Munhino Mission, 15 km away from Sá da Bandeira. Managing the metropolitan and overseas Portuguese state support, Estermann built a scientific legacy of regional ethnographic knowledge—some of which became widely and more internationally accessible. However, even when Estermann was able to become a full-time ethnographer, through intermittent support from the central colonial state and its overseas structures,

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he willingly continued to fulfil some ecclesiastical and missionary activities—such as conducting weekly masses. Combining as it did, prolific visual production and dissemination, Estermann’s long career provided the opportunity to discuss the multiple roles of photography in the social sciences, and shows how he used it to disseminate different scientific matters. If one could tentatively separate photography for the dissemination of the history of science, from photography intended as ethnographic illustrations, or distinguish between photographs he made himself and those of others, it seems relevant to think of a comprehensive history of photography in the social sciences. Through an overview of Estermann’s history with photography, characterised by his ability to adapt to the latest technologies for scientific dissemination, I was able to examine the scientific trajectory of a missionary, and provide evidence of an interwoven relationship between scientific production and dissemination and central and overseas colonial administration over the long period of time covered. Science appears as a way Estermann connected from a faraway place to the multiple worlds he acknowledged— with photography becoming a mutually connective medium between them. Acknowledgements  This chapter is based on research funded by a Marie Curie Fellowship 747508, from the European Commission; SFRH/BPD/115706/2006, by FCT, Portugal, funded part of its writing up. I appreciate all the attention and help provided by P. João Mónico and Branca Mories, the archivists at APPCES/ Lisbon and IICT/ULisboa, respectively. Gregóire Mayor and Julien Glauser have always provided enlightening information about the Musée de Ethnographie de Neuchatel collections. I thank JP, Ricardo Roque, Filipa Vicente, Afonso Dias Ramos and Maria José Lobo Antunes for the support and challenging feedback.

CHAPTER 6

To See Is to Know? Anthropological Differentiations on Portuguese Colonial Photography Through the Work of Mendes Correia Patrícia Ferraz de Matos

Introduction In this chapter, I will explore the role of photography as an element of documentation in anthropological works and, sometimes, as an ancillary instrument in anthropological practices.1 Both anthropology and photography led parallel lives. In a discipline characterized by Margaret Mead as 1  This translation was financed by national funds through the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), I.P within the UID/SOC/50013/2019 Project. I am grateful for the support of the FCT (SFRH/BPD 91349/2012), and the information given by Norberto Santos Júnior in the interviews.

P. F. de Matos (*) Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_6

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a discipline of words,2 images and photography were, and still are, a primal source for anthropology, used as: a technique in fieldwork; an analytic instrument in laboratories; and a means of recording ethnographic elements and publicizing them. Photography has brought continuity to a tradition in medicine and physical anthropology, which used drawings, anthropometric elements and a set of instruments that aimed to obtain “objective” data, and favoured the comparative method. These practices were also useful to transform the subject into the object. The definition of science and objectivity was based on this transmutation.3 These practices arose side by side with analyses that focused on measurements and/or quantifications, such as bodily statistics. According to its practitioners, through the camera, photography would allow an undistorted, unexaggerated image of reality, as opposed to the work developed by researchers, who might be contaminated by subjectivity.4 As a positivist instrument, photography, according to the maxim “to see is to know”, materialized reality and formed a part of the whole.5 Thus, knowledge can be visually depicted and easily transferred to different audiences. From mid-nineteenth century on, the photographic image started to also disclose the colonial context, reporting official acts, illustrating technical aspects or documenting scientific works. One of the oldest manuals for collecting data, including photographs, was that promoted by Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917).6 The use of photography was also proposed by surgeon and anthropologist Paul Broca (1824–1880), founder of the Paris School of Anthropology, according to whom the bust should be photographed from the front and the side, arms stretched out. This modality, adopted by, among others, Portuguese physical anthropologists, shows the rigid posture and lack of expressivity of the faces depicted. 2  Margaret Mead, “Visual Anthropology in a Discipline of Words”, in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), 3–10. 3  Christopher Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography”, in Anthropology & Photography, 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (London: RAI, 1992), 74–95. 4  Nuno Porto, “Modos de Objectificação da Dominação Colonial: O Caso do Museu do Dundo, 1940–1970” (PhD diss., Universidade de Coimbra, 2002), 151. 5  This expression was also associated with an idea conveyed during the great exhibitions. Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, “Power and Identity: The Exhibition of Human Beings in the Portuguese Great Exhibitions”, Identities. Global Studies in Culture and Power 21, no. 2 (2013): 202–218. 6  Anonymous, Notes and Queries on Anthropology, for the Use of Travelers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands (London: Edward Stanford, 1874–1951).

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The practice of mapping racial features was dominant at this time.7 In 1869, and as chairman of the Ethnological Society of London, Darwinian biologist Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) started a project to record the “races in the British Empire”. With the aim of producing a document that allowed comparable data, Huxley suggested that individuals be photographed naked, in predetermined positions, with a front and a side view, and that each pose should be accompanied by a measurement scale on the same plane of the individual, and the camera should be placed at a fixed distance from the photographed subject. However, this method later revealed several technical difficulties, particularly in determining height.8 In the mid-1870s, Francis Galton (1822–1911) developed a photographic method designed with the aim of outlining the human “type” and isolating its characteristics; this formed a path towards physical anthropology and, later on, eugenics. This idea of type, associated with an individual with no agency, can be found, for example, in the colonial context. Nuno Porto distinguished “type” and “portrait” in an article on the uses of photography at the Dundo Museum (Angola). According to Porto, the portraits of Angolans were created as objects of knowledge and, subsequently, became ceremonial exchange items; photographs were taken of native chiefs—representatives of their “races”, but also mediators between the colonial administration and the local population. In the portraits, the formal aesthetics of “type”, with a neutral background, and the front and side views, was replaced by a more informal photograph produced in a space that, nevertheless, was imbedded in the colonial context. In addition, while the “type” was limited to the services of Diamang, to work interests, healthcare services and physical anthropology, the portrait involved its public circulation.9 In this text and through the work of António Mendes Correia (1888–1960), anthropologist and archaeologist, trained in medicine by 7  The use of images portraying men and women to establish comparisons, in a systematized way and initially as drawings, dates back to the physiognomic studies and to the work by Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), who sought to determine relationships between the outer appearance and the internal constitution (Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, 4 vols. [Leipzig & Winterthur: n.n., 1775–1778]). 8  Elizabeth Edwards, “Professor Huxley’s ‘Well-considered Plan’”, in Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 138. 9  Nuno Porto, “‘Under the Gaze of the Ancestors’: Photographs and Performance in Colonial Angola”, in Photographs, Objects, Histories, eds. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), 121.

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the Porto Medical-Surgical School and mentor of the Porto School of Anthropology, I will analyse the way photography was used in scientific articles that dealt with the Portuguese Empire and the way some individuals were portrayed under colonial administration. I will show how photography was requested in the scope of his research and was present in the various work scenarios he was involved in: in the sessions of Portuguese Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (Sociedade Portuguesa de Antropologia e Etnologia [SPAE]);10 in the practical courses of anthropology at the Faculty of Science of the University of Porto (Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade do Porto [FCUP]); in the scope of criminal anthropology surveys; at the Centre for Peninsular Ethnology Studies (Centro de Estudos de Etnologia Peninsular [CEEP]); during anthropological missions and in two of his works—Timor Português11 (Portuguese Timor) and Raças do Império (Races of the Empire).12 As we shall see, the photographs associated with Correia’s work were assumed as relevant, since they would illustrate a “reality” that was frequently considered to be disappearing. This procedure, based on the principle of “seeing is knowing”, would, however, reveal the limitations of some anthropological practices and would expose the imprecisions and difficulties which arose in the colonial context.

Photography in the Work of Mendes Correia Mendes Correia put value on the use of photography. When he presented research proposals, he included a financing request for the purchase of cameras and photographic film. However, the proposals do not include an official hired photographer, that is, the person responsible for the rest of data collection was supposed to produce the photographs.

10  On the first decades of SPAE, see Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, “Anthropology in Portugal: The Case of the Portuguese Society of Anthropology and Ethnology (SPAE), 1918”, in Local Knowledge: Global Stage, volume 10 of Histories of Anthropology Annual, eds. Regna Darnell and Frederic W.  Gleach (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 53–97. 11  António Mendes Correia, Timor Português: Contribuições para o seu Estudo Antropológico (Lisbon: Ministério das Colónias, 1944). 12  António Mendes Correia, Raças do Império (Porto: Portucalense Editora, 1943).

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The photographs, and also the “bright projections”,13 were used in the conferences organized at SPAE (the society that Correia founded in 1918 and over which he presided from 1929).14 Moreover, the use of photographs from a front and a side view was part of the components “live anthropological observation” and “study of the skull”, in addition to elements such as “descriptive characters” and “anthropometry” included in the subjects taught by Correia in the “Practical Anthropological Works” planned for 1915–1916 at FCUP.15 The curricular plan allows us to conclude that the presence of measurable elements had a preferential status. The observations could be made on the living body or on the skeleton; the live body observations allowed one to describe the characters, measure body parts, capture photographs from a front and a side view, complete (anthropometric and dactyloscopic) sheets, and also to determine the physical robustness coefficients and to study eye and hair colour. The skeleton observations were focused mainly on the skull and included its description, measurement and photography. Another area in which photography was valued by Correia was “criminal anthropology”.16 In Portugal, this tradition of studies goes back to nineteenth century. The 1880s and 1890s saw the formation and consolidation of criminal control instruments. According to the law that created the Anthropometric Stations (of 17 August 1899), it would be necessary to “obtain the anthropometric measurements of all prisoners admitted to the Central Jail” (Art. 81, no. 2).17 Still in 1899, it was considered that these stations should be equipped with the Bertillon system at the Royal Public Prosecutor Offices (decree-law dated 16 November 1899) and in 1901 stations were created for the collection of photographs, physical measures and fingerprints in the civilian jails of Lisbon, Porto and Ponta Delgada (decree-law dated 21 September 1901).18 Besides physical particularities recorded in the prisoner’s identification sheet, photographs 13  A practice whereby the images were projected onto a wall, or surface, and a predecessor of the cinematographic projection. 14  Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, Anthropology, Nationalism and Colonialism: Mendes Correia and the Porto School of Anthropology (Oxford & New York: Berghahn Books, 2023).   15  António Mendes Correia, Antropologia: Resumo das Lições feitas pelo Assistente (Porto: Imprensa Portuguesa, 1915). 16  António Mendes Correia, Os Criminosos Portugueses (Porto: Imprensa Portuguesa, 1913). 17  http://digitarq.cpf.dgarq.gov.pt/details?id=39150, accessed December 2011. 18  http://www.redeconhecimentojustica.mj.pt/Categor y.aspx?id=78, accessed December 2011.

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were taken, with a front and a side view, to which a sequential number was allocated.19 This chapter, however, will not include the photographs taken in prisons, in the hospitals or at the Porto Youth Detention Centre (where Mendes Correia issued medical opinions regarding children and adolescents)—places that Michel Foucault would call surveillance spaces, in which the power of resistance is denied.20 The context I will approach is the one produced in a “colonial situation”, characterized by the negotiation between differentiated powers.21 Within the scope of his connection to CEEP, the headquarters of which were at the University of Porto (Universidade do Porto [UP]), first as a member of the managing board, and later as its president, Correia also dedicated an important space to photography. To organize the ethnography department of CEEP, he invited the Porto anthropologist Jorge Dias (1907–1973), who, from 1947 on, began to create a team of collaborators in order to develop research in the area of Portuguese ethnology and ethnography. These collaborators were: Margot Dias (1908–2001) (a German and wife of Jorge Dias), Fernando Galhano (1904–1995), Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira (1910–1990) and Benjamim Pereira (1928–2020). The team’s research plan included an ethnographic cartography. They revealed a concern as to being exhaustive and systematic, using photographs as an element of research.

The Mozambique Expedition Photographs also played a decisive role in the anthropological missions. Following guidelines by Correia that were directed to the members of the Mozambique anthropological mission, for example, the technical material should include all elements necessary to the performance of physical anthropology tasks, such as anthropometric kits, hair, eye and skin colour scales, and photographic material (cameras and many metres of film), all of which supplied by the Institute of Anthropology of the University of 19  http://digitarq.cpf.dgarq.gov.pt/details?id=39150), accessed December 2011; Leonor Maria de Amorim e Sá, Infâmia e Fama: O Mistério dos Primeiros Retratos Judiciários em Portugal (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2018). 20  Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1977). 21  Georges Balandier, “The Colonial Situation: a theoretical approach”, in Africa: Social Problems of Change and Conflict, ed. Pierre L. van der Berghe (San Francisco: Chandler, 1951), 34–61.

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Porto (Instituto de Antropologia da Universidade do Porto (IAUP). In the letters, his collaborator Santos Júnior, who was responsible for this mission, refers to the use of photographs while describing the diversity of the (biological, cultural and archaeological) elements collected: “I took many photographs and drew some hand and foot tattoos.”22 In another letter, he says: “I studied 12 foot anomalies; I took photographs, made drawings and took dermal and papillary prints.”23 The Mozambique anthropological mission, with campaigns in 1936, 1937–1938, 1945, 1946, 1948 and 1955–1956, produced a considerable number of photographs—2733.24 Despite the initial interest of the image collection having probably been focused on the scope of physical anthropology and anthropometric studies, they allow us to perceive the presence of other concerns and elements—materials (clothing, adornments), contexts (venues, festivities, tombs), daily life (business activities, ships, plants), cultural heritage (use of fabrics, masks, facial paintings) and built heritage (churches, bridges). As with photographs published in the Boletim Cultural da Guiné, on several occasions “the subjects portrayed are not named” and “their identification will be based on ethnic types and gender categories (‘Felupe woman’ or ‘Balanta man’)”.25 These photographs of the Mozambique anthropological mission were never published. In addition, though with an ethnographic intent, some images were captured by employees of the colonial administration, or by their collaborators, and with the consent of the local authorities, such as the kinglets, thus denouncing the structures of the colonial power, but also the fact that the anthropological missions would not have been possible without the cooperation of the local stakeholders. Within the scope of what was understood as a colonial anthropology, Correia published, among others, the books Timor Português (1944), on one of the places of the Portuguese colonial empire, and Raças do Império 22  Letter from Santos Júnior to Mendes Correia, 9 October 1945, Museum of Natural History of FCUP. 23  Letter from Santos Júnior to Mendes Correia, 16 October 1946, Museum of Natural History of FCUP. 24  Ana Cristina Roque, “Missão Antropológica de Moçambique: Antropologia, História e Património”, in Viagens e Missões Científicas nos Trópicos. 1883–2010, eds. Ana Cristina Martins and Teresa Albino (Lisbon: IICT, 2010), 84–89. 25  Clara Carvalho, “O Olhar Colonial: Antropologia e Fotografia no Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa”, in A Persistência da História: Passado e Contemporaneidade em África, eds. Clara Carvalho and João de Pina-Cabral (Lisbon: ICS, 2004), 136.

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(1943), on all the places included in this empire, which will be dealt with in the subsequent sections.

Photographs in the Book Timor Português (1944) Timor Português is the first large monography produced in Portugal on this territory. It is a long text (235 pages) that would become a pioneer for later works by António de Almeida and Ruy Cinatti.26 In Mendes Correia’s opinion, one of Timor’s primal features is both its human group (where one can distinguish the individuals with rather Malayan “traits”, from the ones with Melanesian or Papua traits, and also the non-easily identifiable ones) and its linguistic diversity. The 50 photographs in Timor Português are depicted in black and white and are set additionally to the text, on their own pages and printed on a special kind of paper (Fig. 6.1). Most of the time they are complemented with a caption and a brief description, and they may also state who supplied them, as it happens with Abel Tavares (two photographs) and captain Correia de Campos (two photographs). Concerning the description, the author frequently uses the expression “maybe” when pointing to some elements, or classifications, from physical anthropology.27 Nevertheless, as compared to Raças do Império (1943), it is quite clear that it is more greatly predisposed to including physical classifications, and, considering the absence of any certainties at that level, this is probably the reason for that expression being used. Sometimes an illness or its possibility is mentioned, which denotes Correia’s knowledge in the medical domain.28 Furthermore, several photographs do not specifically mention any individuals or their physical features, but rather cultural practices, buildings, housing, daily activities or clothing. Timor Português included the description and measurement of the Timorese who took part in the Porto Colonial Exhibition (1934) and in the Portuguese World Exhibition (Lisbon, 1940) and hundreds of photographs of Timorese from several regions, commissioned by Lieutenant

26  António de Almeida, “Da Onomástica-Tabu no Timor Português  – Antropónimos e Zoónimos”, In Memoriam 3 (1974), 9–26; Ruy Cinatti, “Alguns Aspectos de Mudança Social no Timor Português”, In Memoriam 3 (1974), 95–105. 27   The captions include expressions such as “Proto-Malay”, “Melanesoid” “and “Caucasoid”. 28  In prints XIII and XXXVII, he refers to “mongoloidism”.

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Fig. 6.1  “Women of Loré (Lautém), resting and sieving rice”. Print XLIV of Timor Português, 1944. Photograph supplied by Abel Tavares

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Colonel Álvaro Fontoura, governor of Timor from 1937 to 1940.29 Mendes Correia would only visit the territory in 1953, for a month.30 However, despite the laboratorial nature revealed, Timor Português was well received at a national and an international level. Arthur Keith, for example, congratulated the author in a letter sent on 6 February 1945, in which he praises the use of the photographs belonging to the Fontoura collection; in his own words, “if you cannot diagnose a man’s race from his photograph, you will never succeed by callipers or mathematics”.31 Nevertheless, this work aroused his interest in aspects that he was able to better appreciate when he visited the territory, in 1953, and checked the conditions required to set up a “local Study Centre and to promote adequate works”.32 The research centre would be created that same year and would gather physical anthropology, prehistory and the collection of elements—number of children, ethnic mutilations, languages, diet and other cultural practices. From 1953 to 1954, a team of anthropologists, directed by António de Almeida, developed a new local study, and worked with Mendes Correia and Ruy Cinatti, among others. However, concerning the research performed on Timor (mainly by Mendes Correia and António de Almeida), according to Maria Johanna Schouten, “an appreciation of traditional cultures” was missing; further, the Portuguese colonial administration’s attitude was characterized “by indifference, bloody military campaigns and economic exploitation”.33

29  These photographs (about 549) were initially organized in the “Fontoura Album”, of which three copies are said to exist: Álvaro Fontoura, Colónia Portuguesa de Timor (S.l.: n.n., 1936–1940 [?]). See www.ics.ul.pt/ahsocial/fontoura/apresentacao/Default.htm, accessed May 2014. 30  António Mendes Correia, Um Mês em Timor (Lisbon: n.n., 1955). 31  Processo n.° 306 de Mendes Correia, 1st volume, IICT. Doc. no. 99. 32  Letter by Mendes Correia, president of Geographical Missions and Overseas Research Committee (Junta das Missões Geográficas e de Investigações do Ultramar [JMGIU]), dated 16 July 1953, sent to the president of the executive committee of JMGIU. Processo n.° 306 de Mendes Correia, 2nd volume, IICT. Doc. 225. 33   Maria Johanna Schouten, “Antropologia e Colonialismo em Timor Português”, Lusotopie 8, no.s 1–2 (2001): 167.

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Dissemination of Knowledge on the Empire: The Making of the Book Raças do Império (1943–1945) Raças do Império was published in instalments that could be collected, with a total of 625 pages, between 1943 and 1945. Aimed at a non-­ specialized audience, according to the author, it would however reveal its great usefulness for “colonialists, administrative employees, missionaries, educators, etc.”.34 It is comprised of eight chapters and is the result of an endeavour to inventory and describe the inhabitants of the territories then under Portuguese administration, including the metropolis and the adjacent islands (Azores and Madeira), which totalled “twenty million Portuguese”. It is a lengthy work, with several details, drawings and photographs. Some descriptions are related to geography, climatology, archaeology and prehistory. As Mendes Correia had mentioned in his anthropology classes, he stressed the importance of racial characters—descriptive and metric. Correia considers that environmental influences (diet, health, social status) could influence height, for example, but this was still a distinctive character of “races”. Moreover, he notes that, at the level of physiology and “racial psychology”, “the superiority of Whites as a whole seems clear in most of the studies performed”.35 In theory, he is referring to the prevailing guidelines for the study of cultural expressions, such as the evolutionist school and the cultural-historical school (with representatives such as Frobenius, Ankermann, Grabner and Schmidt). This work is connected to the context in which it was produced, where the diffusion of information on the empire was one of the Portuguese New State’s greatest endeavours.36 It is in this sense that we should understand the quantity and diversity of images included in the book. The  Correia, Raças, 6.  Correia, Raças, 25, 38. 36  During this period structures were created such as Geographical Missions and Colonial Research Committee (Junta das Missões Geográficas e de Investigações Coloniais [JMGIC], 1936), National Propaganda Secretariat (Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional [SPN], 1933–1944), Cinegraphic Mission to the African Colonies (Missão Cinegráfica às Colónias de África [MCCA], 1937), National Information Service (Serviço Nacional de Informação [SNI], 1944–1974), and several periodicals (Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, The Colours of the Empire: Racialized Representations during Portuguese Colonialism [Oxford & New  York: Berghahn Books, 2013]). 34 35

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author of a major part of the drawings is José Luiz. The photographs include a caption and a brief description, and may provide information on who supplied them or whom they belong to, who captured them or the authors of the works they were taken from. Although the work includes drawings and other images, I will only consider the photographs. The photographs can be divided according to the topic they depict. On the one hand, we have the physical features of human elements coming from all parts of the world, based mainly on the work of foreign authors, including the inhabitants of several regions in Portugal and individuals living under the colonial administration—from Portugal or other countries. On the other hand, we see social and cultural expressions, including the material culture obtained from excavations and the representation of national personalities in monuments, painting or sculpture. Other topics were the following: primatology; palaeontology and archaeology;37 Portuguese scientists; portraits of national personalities; an attempt to articulate physical features with sociocultural ones; and personalities of the “empire”, colonizing or native. The divisions I suggest should be understood considering the author’s distinction between nature and culture (which he defines as what the human being adds to nature). Among the cultural expressions, he included aspects of human life: (1) material (food, housing, clothing, adornments, hygiene, industry, transportation, agriculture, hunting, fishing, animal domestication and breeding, production of ceramics, basketwork, hunting or fishing traps, use of excitants and narcotics, geophagy, cannibalism and anthropophagy); (2) social (puberty ceremonies and rites, circumcision, languages and signs); (3) social organization (inter-gender38 and family relationships, education, birth, marriage and death, system of property ownership, political organization, law and justice, secret societies, politeness formulas, attitude towards foreigners, war, currency and commerce); and (4) mental life (religion, superstition, fighting spirits or disease, social hierarchy, dance, music, poetry, visual arts, moral, myths and popular science).39 The book eventually allows no space left for individually 37  Including images by Émile Cartailhac, Henri Breuil, Hugo Obermaier, Marcellin Boule, Arthur Woodward and Hans Weinert. He also cites Portuguese authors: Paula e Oliveira, Barros e Cunha, Santos Júnior and members of the Portugália group (Fonseca Cardoso, Ricardo Severo and Rocha Peixoto). 38  Correia uses the expression “sexes”. 39  Correia, Raças, 43–45.

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analysing each one of those aspects, and some dispersed and non-­ systematized examples are mentioned. The work includes hundreds of photographs. Nevertheless, I will analyse only the photographs obtained in overseas territories or which capture those spaces at the then metropolis, for example, in the exhibitions, or that may be related to the colonial context.

Colonial Photographs in Raças do Império (1943) I divided the photographs related to the colonial context according to the following topics: physical features (live data); social and cultural expressions (including artistic expressions); connections between physical and sociocultural features, or both;40 landscapes; palaeontology (including archaeology); and personalities of the “empire”. I believe that the joint topic “physical/socio-cultural features” is justified when neither of the two clearly prevails: whether because the photograph may suggest an implicit link between both, when the adoption of rather Western clothing by mestiços is highlighted, more obvious in the case of women, for example; or because, even if only in an implied way, certain practices or behaviours are associated with specific human groups with supposedly identifiable features; or even because, despite the body being photographed, most of the time from the waist up, the physical traits are not the only obvious elements (as in photographs taken with naked or dressed individuals, in a laboratory, the intention of which is to highlight the visible traits from a front and a side view), but also certain ornaments, hairstyles or clothing, which can be associated with a group or cultural practice. In the case of mestiças (women) from Cape Verde or São Tomé and Príncipe, their clothing always includes blouses or dresses, necklaces, chains, hats or head scarves, which actually contrasts with Guinean, Angolan or Mozambican women, whose clothing most of the times does not include these ornaments considered “Western” or potentially denoting some acculturation. According to these criteria, the analyses were focused on 239 photographs, which I divided as follows: physical features (33); social and cultural expressions (130); physical/socio-cultural features (65); landscapes (2); palaeontology (8); personalities of the “empire” (1). These numbers reveal 40  Sometimes the decisive factor for choosing one of them (physical or sociocultural) was related to the way the photograph was captured, trying to investigate what aspect the photographer wanted to highlight.

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the following: even if photographs focused on physical features (33) were added to the ones that, in my consideration, were considered as including physical and sociocultural features (65), the total number (98) would not surpass the number of photographs highlighting social and cultural expressions (130); the reader may be surprised if he/she assumes to find more photographs emphasizing physical features or the preferred data by physical anthropology. In fact, although social and cultural expressions may be sometimes connected to the desire to show a certain exoticism, the photographs that make reference to them prevail. However, the physical component is markedly present, as evidenced by the 12 photographs from a side view (among the 33 that deal with physical features). Some of the books from which photographs (included in this book) were taken and that are related to the spaces of the Portuguese Empire were authored by the Austrian anthropologist and photographer Hugo Adolf Bernatzik (1897–1953) and the Irish photographer Alfred Martin Duggan-Cronin (1874–1954), whose work was carried out mainly in South Africa. We also find works by Elmano da Cunha e Costa (77 photographs);41 Lieutenant Colonel Luís António de Carvalho Viegas, governor of Guinea from 1933 to 1941 (19 photographs); Ezequiel de Campos, public works engineer in São Tomé and Príncipe (4 photographs); and collaborators of Mendes Correia at IAUP, such as Santos Júnior (12 photographs), and Leopoldina Paulo, Mendes Correia’s assistant professor in anthropology at FCUP and the first woman to achieve a doctorate at UP (2 photographs). Lastly, and despite being the minority, some photographs do not mention who took them or to which archive or collection they belong. As regards the collections, the photographs that include that information are distributed as follows: General Agency for the Colonies (Agência Geral das Colónias [AGC]) (96), IAUP (21), Geographical Missions and Colonial Research Committee (Junta das Missões Geográficas e de Investigações Coloniais [JMGIC]) (8), Lisbon Geographic Society (Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa [SGL]) (5) and Museum of Anthropology of the University of Porto (Museu Antropológico da Universidade do Porto [MAUP]) (1). This distribution corresponds to institutions that supported colonial studies, not only in universities (in UP, with IAUP and MAUP) but also in entities that were independent, such as SGL (since 1875), AGC (since 1924) and JMGIC (since 1936). Some of the  Besides being a lawyer in Lisbon in the 1930s, he was photographer in Africa.

41

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photographs identified as belonging to IAUP were captured by Mendes Correia’s collaborators when individuals were brought to participate in the Porto Colonial Exhibition (1934). The researchers who worked at FCUP’s Institute of Anthropology and at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto’s Institute of Anatomy were therefore able to “exhaustively study more than 300 natives”.42 Occasionally, relationships between physical and psychological characters were established. 43 Those individuals were considered as representatives of the members of the group from which they originated. The categorization in “types” also aimed at analysing the physical, mental and psychological abilities that were supposedly associated with them. With that knowledge, it would be easier to control the individuals under colonial administration and allocate them the tasks to which they were most suited. Photography has also a teratological side, that is, it was believed that it could contribute to capturing, analysing and spreading knowledge on some diseases, congenital malformations and physical situations considered as aberrant. These aspects were not explored exclusively in the colonies, but in this case the aim was to study the way certain diseases or malformations could evolve in that context. Therefore, some photographs mention a specific malformation, as in Fig.  6.2, which reveals Correia’s interest towards medicine. The fact that the woman was photographed from the side and her son was positioned with his back turned to the camera and leaning on a measurement instrument is also striking. In addition to the leading role given to physical characters (such as hair format or lip thickness), some are associated with what is considered by the author as inferior physical characteristics; this is the case, for instance, in the caption referring to the African man on page 22 and may have widened prejudice towards Africans.44 This aspect is related to the way the author saw the subject of race. In his book, the concept of race is used as a distinguishing and categorization element, but eventually becomes also an element of hierarchization and discrimination, since, although rarely in an explicit form (as in page 22), some individuals are considered as possessing inferior physical characteristics. The author recognized that the 42  AAVV, Trabalhos do I Congresso Nacional de Antropologia Colonial, I (Porto: Imprensa Portuguesa, 1934), 28–29. 43  On the establishment of these relationships, see Bones, Bodies, Behaviour: Essays on Biological Anthropology (HOA 5), ed. George W. Jr. Stocking (London: UWP, 1988). 44  “Chicunda blackman, ‘Alfanête’, from Mozambique: projecting supraciliary arches, elusive forehead and other inferior characters” (Correia, Raças, 22).

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Fig. 6.2  “Bushman woman from Angola (Mucancala) with a child: steatopygia”. Raças do Império, 1943: 27. IAUP’s Collection

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idea of race is associated with heterogeneity, as it is connected to “differences in habits, social organization, psychological trends” and not only to biological aspects, although the latter would be used quite often to formalize and support his categorizations. The use of descriptive and metric characters in the study of race does not, however, allow him to draw precise conclusions. This difficulty could be ascribed, according to him, to migration or miscegenation.45 The photographs themselves have no date or period for contextualization. They eventually become fixed in a specific time or thus become timeless. They were captured sometime between the late nineteenth century and 1943, when the work was published. As mentioned by Elizabeth Edwards, in the first of her many studies, photography became a metaphor of power, by means of its ability to take possession of the time, space and the people living in it.46 The text of the book does not always relate to the image illustrating a certain page. The images reinforce exoticism, exemplify a specific situation and are used to idealize the possible origin of biological or cultural influences in a certain individual or group. In some cases, the images may be interpreted as scientific because they are seemingly objective. However, these examples eventually call upon a subjective reading. Although a physical and cultural mapping of different populations is sought, the depictions lead us to evocations of singularity and strangeness, which is probably related to the fact that they were intended for general consumption and popular diffusion. The photographs were judiciously selected so that they illustrated what was intended to be proved: the diversity present in the colonial empire— considered as a wealth—and, on the other hand, what certain specificities might involve. However, although seeking to maintain objectivity as to racial characters, the author did not seem to have found criteria valid enough to be applied universally. Furthermore, when organizing them, he eventually defined a hierarchy, discriminating some of them at the expense of others. Nevertheless, despite the diversity among “leucoderms”,47 45  On the issues raised by miscegenation in Portugal, see Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, “Racial and Social Prejudice in the Colonial Empire: Issues Raised by Miscegenation in Portugal (Late Nineteenth to Mid-Twentieth Centuries)”, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 28, no. 2 (2019): 23–44. 46  Elizabeth Edwards, “Introduction”, in Anthropology & Photography, 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (London: RAI, 1992), 7. 47  People with fair/white skin.

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“Blacks”, “Moors”, “Indians” and “Indonesians”, among others, one can observe the aim of relating this diversity to a certain unity and solidarity, born from a context in which Portuguese sovereignty was sought to be imposed in several territories. Globally, the book points to a certain anachronism concerning the theoretical currents already in circulation in British social anthropology and in North American cultural anthropology. Unlike Franz Boas, for example, Correia did not find a balance between the physical and the cultural scope studies, and the idea of race eventually had a fundamental presence.48 This might be related not only to the author’s beliefs but also to the fact that a work such as this might play an important role in the colonial policy. Later on, when he visited Guinea from 1945 to 1946 to prepare the anthropological mission, Mendes Correia criticized the idea of race and advocated its ban, at least within the Guinean context, since it was very hard to establish significant differences.49 However, in Raças do Império (1943) he suggests that some groups are more developed than others, introducing judgements and values that could be interpreted as scientific by the majority of the non-expert population, to whom the book was directed. Despite the mentioned aspects, the photographs reveal an interest in getting to know the populations under colonial administration and to report on its physical and sociocultural aspects.

48  He considered that Boas’ results should be interpreted with reserve, since, despite recognizing that certain environmental influences may change individual cephalic indices (growth diseases, anomalies, obstetric conditions), the cases stated by the American author are exceptions; they cannot cause changes as quickly and do not clearly distort statistic results. Mendes Correia, Raízes de Portugal (Lisbon: Revista Ocidente, 1944 [1938]), 91–92. 49  This formulation can also be related to the post–World War II period, during which the use of the “race” criterion became problematic. Mendes Correia, Uma Jornada Científica na Guiné Portuguesa (Lisbon: AGC, 1947), 127. On his travel to Guinea, see Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, “Modos de Fazer da Antropologia Colonial: A Missão Científica de Mendes Correia à Guiné Portuguesa (1945–1946)”, in Modos de Fazer/Ways of Making, ed. Vítor Oliveira Jorge (Porto: CITCEM, 2020), 167–180.

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Conclusion I conclude that, regarding the colonial context and, specifically, Mendes Correia’s work, seeing does not necessarily mean knowing. Several reasons underlie this conclusion—related to the photographs themselves, but also to the context in which they were produced: scientific and colonial. In an initial stage, anthropology sought to use photography in a scientific manner. It was considered an ancillary element and in some cases a means of research. The anthropometric works, for instance, had a connection to the portraits of “types”. Photographs would therefore allow the obtention of allegedly objective data, which made systematic cataloguing easier. However, the camera showed limitations in racial and anthropometric studies. What physical anthropology sought through measurable elements, anthropometry and photography, was not to capture reality, but rather the creation of that reality. Photography was a method of not only capturing the considered Other (different from the White European man) but also of inventing him/her. The value of photography in this phase, as a document, was socially constructed, since the image was not assumed as a depiction, but rather as reality itself. As Joanna Scherer mentions regarding photography incorporated in the anthropological practice, it demands a critical analysis and increased caution in its interpretation. Neither photography as an artefact nor the observer’s interpretation of the photograph’s subject, or an understanding of the photograph’s intention, can give a global significance to images.50 According to Scherer, only by looking at the three parts of the process, ideally by cross-referencing with related image groups, can we extract a relevant sociocultural significance. Moreover, the image’s documental character may possess a double meaning. When distinguishing image and contents, Joan M. Schwartz distinguished informative value (image contents) and confirmatory value (context of creation and usage).51 As to the analysed photographs, the production context may give us a greater density of elements than those we perceive based on its contents—the elements necessary for the performance of an anthropological work in the colonies or in the laboratory at 50  Joanna C.  Scherer, “The Photographic Document: Photograph as Primary Data in Anthropological Enquiry”, in Anthropology & Photography, 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (London: RAI, 1992), 32. 51  Joan M.  Schwartz, “We Make our Tools and Our Tools Make Us: Lessons from Photographs for the Practice, Politics and Poetics of Diplomatics”, Archivaria 40 (1995): 51.

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the metropolis, and which were previously thought out and selected. Therefore, to obtain some knowledge from the photographs, it is important to consider all individuals involved in the process of producing them: (1) those who encouraged their execution (professors and scholars like Mendes Correia); (2) those who financed them (government, public and private institutions, local politicians); (3) those who took them; (4) those they were directed at; (5) those included and depicted in them. The context of production, the objectives and the target audience might be much more relevant than the photographer’s name or its author. Particularly, it is important to bear in mind the academic perspectives, ideologies and personal agendas of the individuals responsible for the photographs and who paid for them. Colonial photographs might be a useful source, not necessarily for the study of the photographed subjects, but mainly those who took them or promoted their execution. A major part of the photographs sought to underline the “primitive” or “non-civilized” character of the individuals depicted in them, stressing the need for the “civilizing” work with colonization. Although this aspect is not exclusive to Correia’s work, or the work of some Portuguese scholars, we eventually see a certain coherence between the captured photographs, the political ideology underlying the colonial propaganda and the intention of the photographers or of those who hired them. Correia used photography, but was often inspired by the suggestions of foreign authors who mainly valued the physical characters. His longer works are richly illustrated, but the photographs are not always directly related to the text. It is the text that suggests the significance of the photographs or places them in a certain context that we would not be able to perceive based on the image alone. Colonial photographs are also used as proof of the existence of individuals living under Portuguese administration. Their capture by the camera’s lens was often used as a way to illustrate the power the settlers possessed over them, which allowed people under colonial administration (the Natives) to be photographed without this practice being questioned (Fig. 6.3). The empty and distant look of the photographed subjects often denounces the passive capture of images. The individuals depicted seem to belong to precolonial societies, that is, that they were not subjected to processes of acculturation or occidentalization. Furthermore, their names are not usually revealed, rather only their gender (man or woman), the group they belong to, the activity they perform, and their social status. Often the photographs do not reveal any interaction between the

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Fig. 6.3  Anthropological mission to Mozambique (1948 campaign). Norberto (son to Santos Júnior) in Namapa with a group of Mozambicans. Centro de Memória, Torre de Moncorvo

photographer and the photographed subject. Based on this circumstance, some human “types” are created or distinguished as such, allowing them to represent a group of individuals. Expressions such as “indigenous type” or “typical native” are examples of that. In the context of Correia’s work, racial ideas took a central role, as they were part of anthropology’s scientific discourse and contributed to justifying the colonial dominance. These ideas were influenced by evolutionism and by the belief in a relationship between human beings’ “natural” side and their cultural, moral and intellectual side, advocating the existence of a biological predetermination. Non-European “races” were considered as representatives of the “childhood of humanity”—a phase which Europeans thought had already been overcome. Therefore, despite its eclectic nature, Correia’s anthropology, and of some of his peers, in Portugal and abroad, adopted methodologies from biological sciences that placed an emphasis on observing, recording and classifying, and whose support lay in a grid

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that would supposedly allow for positive, scientific and empirical knowledge.52 Correia’s direct contact with the individuals who came for the Porto Colonial Exhibition (1934), his trip to Guinea (1945–1946) and his journey to Timor (1953), among other sparse examples, were exceptions. His work originated mainly in the office, and, as it was impossible to communicate directly with the individuals he was writing about, photographs eventually represented an attempt to fill that gap—they sought to make visible the formulations he imagined or with which he had contact through the works of other authors. In fact, photography can build a memory, since viewing it evokes recollections. It may also stimulate memory. This was the case when I interviewed some former settlers and visitors of the 1934 and 1940 exhibitions in Portugal and used photographs with the intention of bringing back memories.53 The way reality is captured with a photographic record, based on the principle “to see is to know”, revealed that so much was unknown about the “empire”, the existing social tensions, the way differences were discriminated and how cultural hierarchies were established (often based on physical and/or behavioural aspects). Photography on several occasions was a means to essentialize the colonized human beings and (by means of their posture, phenotype, adornments, material culture, religious or social practices, such as monogamy or polygamy) to highlight physical and/or intellectual abilities. Some of those differences could even be made notable in the process of manipulating the final development of the photographs. However, and although we must not forget that “to see is (not) to know”, that is, seeing is not always knowing, it will surely be possible to find stories which are different from those I had access to from the photographs I analysed. It should be pertinent to consider all factors presented, since the photographs produced during the colonial period still circulate nowadays—in publications, private collections, or public archives.54

 Edwards, “Introduction”, 6.  Matos, The Colours of the Empire. 54  On the musealization of photography produced in the colonial context, see Liliana Oliveira da Rocha and Patrícia Ferraz de Matos, “Fotografia Colonial: Materialidades e Imaterialidades Identitárias no Contexto Português”, Criar Educação 7, no. 2 (2018): 1–23. 52 53

PART II

Showcasing the Empire: Propaganda, Media, Exhibitions

CHAPTER 7

Visions of Wildlife and Hunting in the “Sportsmen’s Paradise”: Exploring Photography from the Mozambique Company’s Archive Bárbara Direito

In one of the ten albums prepared for the 1931 Exposition Coloniale Internationale of Paris meant to illustrate the achievements of the Portuguese in Mozambique, the region then ruled by the Mozambique The present chapter is a revised and updated version of Bárbara Direito, “Caçados e caçadores nas fotografias do arquivo da Companhia de Moçambique,” in O império da visão: fotografia no contexto colonial português (1860–1960), ed. Filipa Lowndes Vicente (Lisboa: Edições 70, 2014), 141–156. Research for this chapter was supported by FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., through a CEEC contract (CEECIND/01948/2017), as well as by CIUHCT (UIDB/00286/2020 and UIDP/00286/2020). B. Direito (*) Centro Interuniversitário de História das Ciências e da Tecnologia (CIUHCT), NOVA School of Science and Technology, Caparica, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_7

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Company, in the centre of the territory, was described as ideal for big game hunting.1 Since the late nineteenth century, the region was indeed one of the most popular and sought-after destinations of elephant hunters and naturalists in Southern Africa, and big game hunting occupied a central role in the Company’s official discourse. Drawing on different sources but focusing on four hunting photographs chosen among the hundreds that compose the photographic archive of the Mozambique Company, this chapter proposes an exploration of hunting and photography in central Mozambique. Through these photographs, it discusses how the policies regarding which animals could be hunted, by whom they could be hunted and how they could be hunted, are particularly revealing about different aspects of colonial society in Mozambique and about attitudes and sensibilities towards nature and wildlife.2

Hunting in the “Sportsmen’s Paradise”: Ivory and Elephants in Central Mozambique Alongside its promising gold mines and convenient direct access to the sea, Central Mozambique, divided into the districts Manica and Sofala, was celebrated since the late 1890s by the chartered company ruling it as ideal for big game hunting because of its rich and diverse wildlife, namely

1  José dos Santos Rufino, Álbuns fotográficos e descritivos da colónia de Moçambique, vol. 9 Companhia de Moçambique—A Cidade da Beira. Aspectos do Território (Hamburgo: Broschek & Co., 1929). For a discussion of these albums as an official response to the anti-­ Portuguese sentiment caused by the campaign against slavery and forced labour in Africa under Portuguese rule, see Eric Allina, “Fallacious mirrors: colonial anxiety and images of African labor in Mozambique, ca. 1929”, History in Africa, vol. 24 (1997), pp. 9–52. 2  This chapter builds on the important scholarship that has helped advance our understanding of the role photography played in the creation and consolidation of specific representations of Africa. One of the classic texts in this field is David Killingray and Andrew Roberts, “An outline history of photography in Africa to ca. 1940,” History in Africa, 16 (1989): 197–208. In a seminal work, Jill Dias, a historian of Angola, proposed a preliminary analysis of photographic sources relating to former Portuguese colonies: Jill R.  Dias, “Photographic sources for the history of Portuguese-speaking Africa, 1870–1914,” History in Africa, 18 (1991): 67–82. On photography and hunting in Africa, see Paul Landau, “Hunting with gun and camera: a commentary,” in The Colonising Camera: Photographs in the Making of Namibian History, ed. Wolfram Hartman, Jeremy Silvester and Patricia Hayes (Cape Town: UCT Press, 1998), 151–155.

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several herds of much coveted elephants.3 But interest in ivory in the region had deeper historical roots. After the decline of the gold trade between Africa and Asia that the Portuguese had tried to dominate from the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese Crown turned its attention to ivory. The latter came from the hinterland of central Mozambique and by then was being traded by Arab merchants, namely from the port of Sofala.4 Though other objects of animal origin also caught the attention of European and non-European traders—namely, rhinoceros horns and ostrich feathers—ivory would become the region’s greatest export in the seventeenth century, and this expansion was much assisted by the introduction of firearms through trade or political negotiations.5 By the late nineteenth century, ivory continued to be in great demand, something that was not lost on the Mozambique Company’s administrators, who when negotiating its original charter, in 1891, were granted the exclusive right to hunt elephants.6 Central Mozambique became a favoured destination for professional and amateur naturalists since the late eighteenth century. During their travels and expeditions, they collected the specimens, dead or alive, that would be exhibited in the natural history museums, menageries and zoos created in different cities across the world. In the late nineteenth century, the naturalists were followed by the military involved in the so-called pacification campaigns, waged by the Portuguese against local peoples, and by “explorers” of different countries, but also colonial officers and settlers,  The region was ruled by the Mozambique Company, a chartered company, between 1891 and 1942. On the company’s origins and history, see Companhia de Moçambique, A companhia de Moçambique—monografia para a exposição de Sevilha (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1929), 15; and also Barry Neil-Tomlinson, “The Mozambique Chartered Company, 1892–1910” (PhD thesis, University of London, 1987). 4  Malyn D.  Newitt, A history of Mozambique (London: Hurst & Company, 1997), 23 and ff. 5  Carlos Serra, ed., História de Moçambique, vol. I Primeiras sociedades sedentárias e impacto dos mercadores (200/300-1886) (Maputo: Tempo—UEM, 1982), 86. 6  Decreto com força de lei de 11 de Fevereiro de 1891, Diário do Governo, n. 199, 7 September 1891, article 21. A few works have studied some of the actions and policies of the Mozambique Company in more depth: Eric Allina, Slavery by Any Other Name: African Life Under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique (Charlottesville, VA.: University of Virginia Press, 2012). Bárbara Direito, Terra e colonialismo em Moçambique: A região de Manica e Sofala sob a Companhia de Moçambique, 1892–1942 (Lisboa: Imprensa de CIências Sociais, 2020). 3

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who in both official documents and their memoirs described their travels and expressed their fascination with the wildlife they found.7 Drawings of landscapes and animals, and later photographs, accompanied these accounts. And alongside notes on physical types and local customs of African populations—permeated with the racism that a few increasingly popular scientific disciplines would help legitimize—recommendations on the best regions for hunting parties, discussions on rifle brands and calibres, and advice for amateur taxidermists could also often be found. These accounts, and the illustrations and photographs that complemented them, reinforced and disseminated an image of central Mozambique as vast, exotic and filled with a diverse wildlife, while helping to glorify particular landscapes such as Gorongosa’s floodplains, rich in elephant herds.8 They also helped disseminate the experiences of a number of “sportsmen”, often British, who reproduced in Africa aristocratic lifestyles, symbols of distinction at different levels, although hunting was practiced by many others in different circumstances.9 But the frequency of the hunting parties and the too liberal use of firearms, resulting in a perception of declining wildlife populations, began to worry authorities. Indeed, while in an official report from 1902 on the first years of the Company’s rule central Mozambique was proudly presented as a classic area for big game hunting, visited by many important sportsmen, merely two years later, in a letter to the governor of the territory, a high official 7  Frederick C. Selous, Travel and adventure in South-East Africa (London: Rouland Ward, 1893). Reginald C. F. Maugham, Portuguese East Africa: the history, scenery & great game of Manica and Sofala (London: John Murray, 1906). Teodósio Cabral, Abel Pratas, and Henrique Galvão, Da vida e da morte dos bichos, vol. 5. Narrativas da caça grossa em África (Lisboa: Popular de Francisco Franco, n.d.). José A.  Silva, Gorongosa: experiências de um caçador de imagens (Lourenço Marques: [n.p.], 1964). José C. Pardal, Cambaco: caça grossa em Moçambique ([n.p.], 1996). 8  On Gorongosa and how its “resources”, including elephants, were seen in the late nineteenth century by a businessman with economic interests in the region, see Matheus A. R. Sampayo, A Gorongoza: o seu presente e o seu futuro (Lisboa: Typ. Lusitana, 1898). 9  On the emergence and popularity of Portuguese sportsmen and their representations in the press, see Luís Trindade, “A imagem do sportsman e o espectáculo desportivo,” in Uma história do desporto em Portugal, vol. I, Corpos, Espaços e Media, ed. José Neves and Nuno Domingos (Vila do Conde: Quidnovi, 2011), 121–146. On the contexts and meanings of hunting in British colonial Africa, see John M. Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature: hunting, conservation and British imperialism (Manchester and New  York: Manchester University Press, 1998) and William K.  Storey, “Big cats and imperialism: lion and tiger hunting in Kenya and Northern India, 1898–1930,” Journal of World History, 2, no. 2 (1991): 135–173.

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called for new limits to hunting so that the region could once again become a “sportsmen’s paradise”. Even though local and foreign hunters represented a welcome boost to the region’s economy, different officials felt that in order to maintain the revenue from the ivory trade and avoid outright extinction of some species, especially elephants, the Company needed to impose effective limits on big game hunting.10 Between 1892 and 1942—the duration of the Mozambique Company’s charter—a total of six hunting regulations and several changes thereto were adopted, as well as orders limiting hunting of specific animals in certain regions.11 Because of its numerous elephant herds, a game reserve was first established in Gorongosa in 1921, and later expanded in 1935.12 As an important study has argued, this reserve in fact allowed the Company to attempt to regain control over the ivory trade in the region, even though it had few means to control the activities taking place within it.13 Other factors also influenced the Company’s hunting policy since the early twentieth century: international pressure to protect African wildlife, reflected in the adoption of international treaties, on which more will be said below, as well as the definition of a tourism policy for central Mozambique, at the core of which would be the safari (first the hunting safari, later the photographic one). Gorongosa was to play a key role in this context. Just as they were regaining control over the region ruled by the Company for decades, in 1942 Portuguese authorities hoped Gorongosa would become an exciting destination for people travelling between Southern Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) and Beira, and a considerable source of income for the colony.14

10  Eduardo Costa, O território de Manica e Sofala e a administração da Companhia de Moçambique: 1892–1900 (Lisboa: Typ. da Comp. Nacional Editora, 1902). Letter from Luciano Lanne to the governor of Manica and Sofala, 3 March 1904, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT)-Fundo da Companhia de Moçambique (FCM), n. de ordem 2181, n. 895-AZ8. 11  For instance, ordem n. 685, 31 October 1895, Boletim da Companhia de Moçambique (BCM), no. 53, 1 November 1895, limited the hunting of elephants in certain regions of the territory. 12  Ordem de Serviço n. 4178, BCM n. 6, 2 March 1921. Decreto n. 26076, 21 November 1935, BCM, n. 1, 2 January 1936, article 10. 13  Todd J. French, ““Like leaves fallen by wind”: resilience, remembrance, and the restoration of landscapes in central Mozambique” (PhD diss., Boston University, 2009), 165–166. 14  Passagem para a administração do Estado, dos territórios autónomos em Moçambique, 1942, pp. 19–20, ANTT-Arquivo Salazar, UL-9A, cx.801, pt. 1.

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Thus, as elsewhere in colonial Africa, either to respond to a demand in ivory or for other reasons—food, a form of social distinction, the protection of lives, the expansion of agriculture and so on—elephant hunting and hunting more generally were an undisputable reality in central Mozambique in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fulfilling different roles in the lives of African and settler populations, and were progressively brought under the realm of the state.15 The decline in wildlife in many regions across the continent, combined with economic arguments, would boost the competition for access to what increasingly was perceived as a scarce “resource”. And it would eventually lead to an intervention of colonial administrations, through the imposition of limits to hunting. For historians William Beinart and Peter Coates, hunting regulations ultimately helped “kill” the competition for this resource.16 Some of the dynamics that this process involved in central Mozambique during the Mozambique Company’s rule, and the particular way they can be visualised through photography, will be analysed below through four hunting photographs.

Four Hunting Photographs In order to understand more about hunting and photography in central Mozambique, we undertook a systematic perusal of photographs linked to the practice of hunting, or what we may term “hunting photographs”, in the digitized photographic archive of the Mozambique Company, composed of 5800 proofs and 163 negatives. The dozens of black-and-white photographs falling under this category can be organised under two main groups: images of trophies, often displayed in great quantities side by side after a careful mise en scène, and from which humans are absent; and 15  On the role of hunting in the lives of African and European populations more generally, see Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature, ch. 3 and 4. David Hedges and especially Marcos Coelho have looked more in depth at the contexts of hunting in Southern Mozambique from the perspective of African populations: David Hedges, “Trade and Politics in Southern Mozambique and Zululand in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries” (PhD diss., University of London, 1978). Marcos C. Coelho, “Maphisa & Sportsmen: a caça e os caçadores no sul de Moçambique sob o domínio do colonialismo – c1895–c1930” (PhD diss., Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2015). 16  William Beinart and Peter Coates, eds. Environment and History: The Taming of Nature in the USA and South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995), 27.

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photos of groups of mostly European hunters, normally carrying their firearms, frequently standing or sitting next to the animals hunted. This collection of hunting photography is nevertheless diverse in that it includes what appear to be photographs depicting not only a more official view of hunting, perhaps used in propaganda brochures and taken by photographers working on specific commissions, but also more candid images, with close-ups of people grinning at the camera next to dead animals, possibly participants of private hunting parties, and, finally, photographs showing mostly African men carrying traditional hunting weapons, images that have a certain ethnographic quality to them because of the way they are kept in the archive alongside photographs depicting specific peoples of central Mozambique, their physical traits and customs. In selecting the photographs for this chapter, we looked for examples that reflected the subjective experience of populations of European origin, that expressed their views and groups of values, rather than what could be termed “ethnographic photography”, depicting primarily the local African experience.17 This does not mean, however, that Africans will be excluded from our analysis—in fact, quite on the contrary. The photographs chosen, then, dating from the first decades of the twentieth century, reflect a golden age of hunting in the territory, when hunting regulations had not yet become an obstacle to the foreign and local hunters able to pay the costs entailed in this form of leisure, from firearms to ammunition, to hunting licenses and to the services of carriers and other African auxiliaries. In an effort to determine the specific context of production of each of the four photographs chosen, we searched for information on aspects such as the authors and their intention, the technology used, the photographic conventions of the time, the place of photography in the collection and the audiences the photographs were made for, how they were disseminated, the power relations they represent, the absences they reveal.18 In 17  Pierre Bourdieu, ed. Un art moyen, Essai sur les usages sociaux de la photographie (Paris: Ed. de Minuit, 1965), 24–27. 18  Christraud M. Geary, “Photographs as materials for African history: some methodological considerations”, History in Africa, 13 (1986): 89–116. Jennifer Tucker, “Entwined Practices: Engagements with Photography in Historical Inquiry”, History and Theory, 48 (2009), 1–8. Robert Gordon and Jonatan Kurzwelly. “Photographs as Sources in African History”. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. 30 Jul. 2018; Accessed on 11.10.2021. https://oxfordre.com/africanhistory/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734. 001.0001/acrefore-9780190277734-e-250.

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this regard, it is important to note that the Mozambique Company’s photographic archive was organised according to a set of classificatory principles of archivist science.19 Given the original state in which the photographs were found, it was not always possible to identify the author or the date of the photography, nor the photographic material used, an aspect which is not at all irrelevant given the constraints imposed by the specific “field” of hunting to the activity of photography.20 Information on the four photographs chosen is incomplete, making it difficult to reflect namely on the original intention of the photographs, their place in the archive, the type of dissemination they had or the original organization of the photographic archive.21 More specifically, we know that Fig. 7.1, from 1937, was not taken in Mozambique but rather in a room of the museum of the Company’s headquarters, in Lisbon. Like most photographs in this archive, no author is named. Figure 7.2 was taken in 1928. Figure 7.3 was attributed to the Statistics and Propaganda Department, in the hunting photography section, and was taken somewhere between 1907 and 1937. Finally, Fig.  7.4 is included in the album documenting the official visit taken by a member of the Portuguese royal family to Mozambique and is also kept in the collection belonging to the Statistics and Propaganda Department.22 Taken somewhere between December 1909 and January 1910 by I.R. Carvalho, this photograph was also published in Ilustração Portuguesa, a popular magazine of the time, and is likely to have been more disseminated than the other three.

 The criteria used in the archival treatment of this photographic archive can be consulted on https://digitarq.arquivos.pt/details?id=3678261 Accessed on: 11.10.2021 20  On the evolution of animal and wildlife photography in the nineteenth century, see Gael Newton, “Animal and zoological photography”, in Encyclopedia of nineteenth century photography, vol. 1, ed. John Hannavy (New York, NY and Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 40–42. 21  For an important reflection on the photographic archive and its “resourcefulness”, see Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive”, in Photo Archives and the Photographic Memory of Art History, ed. Constanza Caraffa (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011) 22  Helen of Orleans (1871–1951), the sister of D. Amélia, queen of Portugal, became the duchess of Aosta after she wedded the second duke of Aosta. She would travel extensively during her life, including in Africa, sharing her experiences in memoirs such as S.A.R. la Princesse Hélène de France, Duchesse d’Aoste, Voyages en Afrique (Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1913). 19

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Fig. 7.1  “Aspecto do Museu da Sede”, anonymous, c. 1937, PT/TT/CMZ-­ AF-­AGL/2/1/121. Image provided by ANTT

African Wildlife and Big Game: Representations and Legal Categories Wooden objects, ceramic vases, baskets, cloths, maps of Mozambique, photographs of landscapes, portraits of Africans, hunting trophies and, at the centre, the model of an African village—a multitude of objects covers almost completely the walls and the floor of the room captured in Fig. 7.1 in 1937. The visual impact of the collecting effort evidenced in this room of the museum of the headquarters of the Mozambique Company, then located in downtown Lisbon, is different from that of a typical ethnological section of a museum, in spite of the noticeable interest in a certain type of African artistry shown, specifically carved wood objects. It is also different from the visual impact of a zoological section of a museum, since there seems to be no intention of classifying the lion, the snake or the horns

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Fig. 7.2  “Documento fotográfico sem título”, anonymous, c. 1928, PT/TT/ CMZ-AF-GT/N/1/3/10. Image provided by ANTT

placed on the floor—they lack body, life, movement. They are hunting trophies, prizes of a competition won by the hunters, rather than representations of the living wildlife of central Mozambique.23 23  In zoological sections of museums, many animals captured in Africa are displayed in seemingly realistic poses, after a laborious work of mounting and stuffing of the skins performed by taxidermists. On taxidermy, its difficulties and the prized art of making animals look ferocious, see Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 251–252. For a telling example of the role of taxidermy in the construction of representations of live animals, see Leslie Witz, “The making of an animal biography: Huberta’s journey into South African natural history, 1928–1932”, Kronos, 30 (2004): 138–166.

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Fig. 7.3  “Caçadores europeus e indígenas”, anonymous, c. 1907–1937, PT/ TT/CMZ-AF-GT/E/26/1/2. Image provided by ANTT

Though at a smaller scale, the room is organised according to the logic that the Company itself followed in the pavilion it dedicated to “agriculture and industry” in the precinct of the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition of 1934, also captured in photographs.24 There we can find the same type of objects scattered across the room, namely cloths, wooden artefacts and big cat skins. Though aimed at the Mozambique Company’s officials and visitors, rather than at the wider public expected at the Colonial Exhibition, the museum room, a testament to the Company’s civilising action in Africa

24  “Exposição do Pôrto” (PT/TT/CMZ-AF-GT/E/27/1/63). Available at: https:// digitarq.arquivos.pt/details?id=3682981 Accessed on: 11.10.2021.

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Fig. 7.4  “Viagem ao Búzi de S.A.R., a Duqueza D’Aosta”, I.R. Carvalho, c. Dez 1909–January 1910, PT/TT/CMZ-AF-GT/E/29/2/44. Image provided by ANTT

and the riches and “resources” of the region it administered, was very much an instrument of propaganda. In Fig. 7.1, the lion skin, hung upside down on one of the walls of the room, was presumably a result of big game hunting in central Mozambique. Unlike the remaining objects exposed, inert and agreeable expressions of a certain “Africanness”, the lion, with an open muzzle and salient canines, evokes all the ferocity associated with this animal, a symbol of a dangerous continent, which colonialists in different empires at the time were attempting to tame and conquer.25 Seeing it hanging on a wall, unequivocally  On the musealization of animals in Europe, as well as the fascination and fear they elicit, and the common exhibition of stuffed animals next to ethnographic objects, see Benoît de L’Estoile, “La vie sauvage sous vitrine: les animaux d’Afrique au musée”, in L’animal cannibalisé – Festins d’Afrique, ed. Michèle Cros, Julien Bondaz and Maxime Michaud (Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 2012), 89–104. 25

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dead, was probably more than enough to cause a frisson, in adults and children alike. The lion skin placed in this room, the very way it is displayed, however gains an accrued relevance when we consider the attitudes and sensibilities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries regarding African wildlife. Crocodiles, snakes and lions, as well as leopards, baboons and other wild carnivores, because of their ability to mortally wound other animals and humans, provoked much fear. While in the European tradition the lion had typically come to represent the king of the animal kingdom, and in certain colonial contexts hunting lions was an elitist activity, it did not benefit from the same respect or the same perception of nobility associated, for instance, with the elephant.26 Nor did it benefit, as we will see, from the same type of treatment from hunters and colonial authorities. For Reginald C.F.  Maugham, once the British consul in Lourenço Marques and one of the renowned British sportsmen that in the early twentieth century travelled across Manica and Sofala in search of hunting trophies or specimens to exhibit in European museums, nothing compared to hunting an elephant, a majestic and fascinating animal. Crocodiles, on the other hand, were “hideous, loathsome amphibians” to be destroyed at all costs.27 Guillaume Vasse, a French naturalist familiar with central Mozambique, estimated that crocodiles and lions were responsible for 10% of the deaths among African populations, and even published a set of recommendations on how best to “destroy them”. Carnivores like lions, considered “vermin”, were destined to unbridled hunting and poisoning with strychnine.28 The first hunting regulation adopted in the Territory ruled by the Company, in 1893, and in fact the first of its kind in Mozambique, incorporated this distinction between the category of animals to be preserved, subject to controlled hunting, and the category of animals to exterminate.  For a reflection on the growing symbolic importance of the lion in European medieval thought, see Michel Pastoureau, “Quel est le roi des animaux?”, in AAVV, Le monde animal et ses représentations au moyen-âge (XIe–XVe siècles) – Actes des congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public, 15e congrès (Toulouse, 1984), 133–142. Ritvo also discussed the contradictory views on lions in British sources: the lion appears both as King of beasts and a vindictive animal. The Animal Estate, 26–28. On the specific meanings of lion hunting in colonial Kenya and how it was reserved for the most powerful, see Storey, “Big Cats”, 154, 166. 27  Maugham, Portuguese East Africa, 128, 49. 28  Guillaume Vasse, “The Mozambique Company’s Territory – II”, Journal of the Royal African Society, 6, no. 24 (1907): 385. Guillaume Vasse, “Animaes ferozes ou nocivos  – Maneira de os destruir”, Revista de Manica e Sofala, 37 (1907): 4–10. 26

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According to this regulation, in theory hunting could only be practised with an official license, though landowners could continue to hunt freely in their properties. While animals such as elephants could only be hunted in specific circumstances, “vermin”—lions and other big cats, as well as crocodiles and snakes—not only could be hunted without any restrictions, but rewards had been established for each specimen killed in the region.29 This distinction between animals to be preserved and animals to be exterminated was not original, and featured in the regulations adopted decades earlier in different African territories, namely in the Cape Colony.30 More importantly, it would also feature in the international wildlife protection legislation adopted at the turn of the century by different nations. Indeed, frustrated with the lack of efficacy of the heterogeneous corpus of norms meant to protect some African wildlife species, especially those dealing with “useful” animals like elephants, the Germans and the British decided to convene an international meeting—the first of several—devoted to the protection of African fauna.31 While the London Convention for the Protection of Wild Animals, Birds and Fish in Africa (“London Convention”), of 19 May 1900, never became legally binding, it established a distinction between four types of animals. While type I and type II animals, such as giraffes, elephants and hippos, could not be hunted for different reasons, “vermin”, like lions and crocodiles, did not only lack any type of protection, but parties to the London Convention agreed to pursue measures to reduce them. This is one of the reasons why it has been argued that the 1900 Convention, as well as the 1933 Convention, reflected the hunting mentality of the time, in that they were meant to perpetuate hunting rather than preserving wildlife. The texts of both Conventions were, furthermore, strongly conditioned by views on the

 Ordem n. 86, 2 February 1893, BCM n. 7, 15 February 1893, articles 1 and 11.  On the wild animal poisoning clubs created in the Cape Colony and their action, see Lance V. Sittert, ““Keeping the enemy at bay”: the extermination of wild carnivora in the Cape Colony, 1889–1910”, Environmental History, 3, no. 3 (1998): 333–356. For a more general reflection on the perceptions of European populations vis-à-vis “vermin”, see Jane Carruthers, “Changing perspectives on wildlife in Southern Africa, c.1840 to c.1914”, Society & Animals, 13, no. 3 (2005): 190–192. 31  Bernard Gißibl, “German colonialism and the beginnings of international wildlife preservation in Africa”, GHI Bulletin Supplement, 3 (2006): 128 and ff. 29 30

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expansion of agriculture, namely when it came to areas to be reserved for so-called natural parks.32 In Fig. 7.2, which transports the observer to the colonial field in Africa, a hunter is actually sitting on top of a leopard. With a grin of satisfaction, the hunter is holding the muzzle of the big cat in his hands and showing it to the camera. Unlike the lion exhibited in the room of the museum, the leopard, its body probably still warm, is seen with eyes closed and teeth hidden. Physical contact with the prey and a triumphant pose, as seen in Fig. 7.2, were frequent in hunting photographs of this period. Not only the Company’s archive but also a photographic album depicting African “races and customs” and Mozambican wildlife, which probably reached a larger audience, contain numerous examples of this style of photograph that can also help us reflect on specific views and sensibilities towards animals.33 This demonstration of dominance over a prey, a “vermin” no less, seemed, at least in the first decades of the twentieth century, to be a relatively common practice among hunters, a way of exposing their bravery and of reproducing a certain lifestyle, which the photographic medium allowed to immortalize. But the audacity and defiant attitude of this specific hunter would undoubtedly shock enthusiasts of photographic safaris, conservationists and even professional hunters of a later generation. In Cambaco: caça grossa em Moçambique (1996), the discrepancy between a certain aesthetic taste of the beginning of the century and a later age taste is evident. In the memoir where José Pardal recounts his first-hand experience as a hunter in Mozambique in the 1960s and 1970s, the author not only felt the need to justify the act of hunting, but he also tried to distance himself from hunters who disrespected an alleged professional “ethic”, who mistreated animals, such as those that photographed wounded

32  Mark Cioc, The Game of Conservation: International Treaties to Protect the World’s Migratory Animals (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009). 33  See, for instance, “Rinoceronte” (n.a., n.d.), PT/TT/CMZ-AF-GT/E/26/1/85, available at: https://digitarq.arquivos.pt/viewer?id=3682897 Accessed on: 11.10.2021; and “Elefantes novos. Chupanga” (n.a., 1915–1937) PT/TT/CMZ-AF-GT/E/26/1/89, available at https://digitarq.arquivos.pt/details?id=3682901 Accessed on: 11.10.2021. José S. Rufino, Álbuns fotográficos e descritivos da colónia de Moçambique, vol. 10 Raças, usos e costumes indígenas. Fauna moçambicana (Hamburg: Broschek & Co., 1929), 101, 104, 105, 109 and 110.

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animals. Even when it came to dead animals, he argued, he never enjoyed taking pictures “on top of the animals”.34 This change in sensibilities regarding African wildlife may also be seen through the photographs included in hunting literature of the 1950s and 1960s. Thanks to the technological evolution that had occurred since the first decades of the century, especially the telephoto lens, unlike in Figs. 7.1 and 7.2, where animals appeared dead (partly because the heavy and bulky cameras of the early twentieth century could hardly be used during a pursuit of the animal), it was now possible to capture live animals in their habitats. With colour, movement and close detail, hunting photographs now had an accrued realistic quality, and animals became more complex creatures. While continuing to hunt, many hunters saw themselves rather as “hunters of images”, an expression that was in fact celebrated in the title of a hunter’s memoir.35 “Guns have metamorphosed into cameras”, concludes Susan Sontag in her now classic reflection on photography, when discussing the switch from gun to film in the safari.36 The camera stopped competing with the gun, taking on a position of prominence, while the hunter disappeared and left the spotlight to the wildlife, moving closer to “nature” photography. For Steinhart, this passage of the gun to the camera, which beyond technological progress reflected the increasing influence of conservationist ideas, also meant the passage from “feudal brutality” to a “bourgeois sensibility”, more interested in the possession of an image, a symbol of the animal, rather than in its destruction.37 And as cameras became smaller and more affordable, and tourism safaris more common, many could also possess their own souvenirs of Africa’s (live) wildlife.

African and European Hunters in Central Mozambique Through the analysis of two more photographs (Figs.  7.3 and 7.4), we now propose a set of reflections about the practice of hunting in colonial Africa and the role different groups of populations played in it. In the  Pardal, Cambaco, 21–23.  Silva, Gorongosa, 20. 36  Susan Sontag, “On Photography”, in Essays of the 1960s & 1970s (The Library of America, New York, 2013), 538. 37  Edward I. Steinhart, Black poachers, white hunters: a social history of hunting in colonial Kenya (Oxford: James Currey, 2006), 140. 34 35

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foreground in Fig.  7.3 stand three white, presumably European men dressed in the almost identical classical white hunting attire, from the high-top boots to the pith helmet, showing their rifles, a symbol of the technological superiority that had become an essential part of big game hunting, European style, in Africa. The absence of animals pictured, on the one hand, and the pristineness of the shirts and trousers and the composure of the three hunters, on the other, could lead us to believe that they might not have started the hunting party for the day, or that it was not as physically demanding as the reports of risky pursuits across the savannah, common in the literary genre, might have us believe. The same whiteness, pristineness and composure standout in Fig. 7.4, though the result of the hunt was already on display. With a straight back and rifle carefully laying in her lap, the duchess of Aosta, the sister of the then queen of Portugal, D. Amélia, and invitee of the Mozambique Company to visit the region of Búzi, is peacefully sitting in front of a dead hippopotamus.38 Aside from the European hunters, in Fig. 7.3 nine African men (and a teenager) are visible, bare-chested and carrying both rifles and traditional hunting weapons. In Fig. 7.4, several African men are presented in a similar way, almost all of them carrying long spears in their hands. Some are standing, forming a clearing around the duchess and the hippopotamus, while others are further back, sitting in the boats used to chase the animal in the river. It would appear that, from the perspective of the photographers, the main characters of these two scenes are the white hunters, because of the way they are positioned—in the foreground in Fig. 7.3, and in the centre, in Fig. 7.4—of the way they are differentiated from the remaining participants through their skin colour and clothing, because of the way they are outnumbered but still seem in control of the situation. This representation does not however conform to the reality of hunting as it was practiced in Mozambique in this period. Through contemporary accounts we learn that few Europeans risked embarking on a hunting expedition without a group of African men with different functions: guides, trackers, hunters 38  On the duchess’ visit to Mozambique, the circulation of her photographs and writings on her travels, and on royal photography in colonial Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Inês Vieira Gomes, “Women Photographers in Angola and Mozambique (1909–1950) A history of an absence”, in Women and Photography in Africa Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges, ed. Darren Newbury, Lorena Rizzo and Kylie Thomas (London, Routledge, 2020), 66–72.

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(with their traditional weapons and, when allowed, with rifles), skinners and porters. Without the ones that in these pictures appear to be mere secondary characters, few hunts would take place. In their memoirs, European hunters sometimes recognise these African men’s key role, and in the midst of demeaning and racist remarks praise them for their mastery, loyalty and knowledge.39 Through the careful analysis of both the photographs and the captions in the album documenting the duchess’ travel to Búzi and culminating in the death of the hippopotamus, we realise that more than 1000 African hunters and auxiliaries were engaged to participate in the hunting party, even if they were not necessary, and that, in practice, they were in all likelihood the ones that killed the animal, as the sequence of images in the album depicting several African men in boats aiming their spears at the battling hippopotamus seems to show.40 The duchess may have been left the task, if at all, of shooting the already dying animal. In this context, the contrast between the comment that can be read in Fig. 7.4 (“The hippopotamus finally dead, at the feet of H.H. [Her Highness]”) and the caption accompanying this very same picture when it was published in number 210 of Ilustração Portuguesa, a popular Portuguese magazine, of 28 February 1910 (“Hunting of a hippopotamus in Búzi River. A fine specimen chased by the blacks and killed by Her Highness”), is therefore subtle but relevant.41 Perhaps this seemingly white lie was told just for the sake of the amusement of the magazine’s readers, but it subtly and significantly removed the African hunters from the possibility of being in the spotlight. The distinction that these two photographs illustrate between European and African hunters, between their different roles and the division of labour operated, can be seen as another instance of the domination of the great majority of African populations that characterized the “colonial situation” in central Mozambique, of which a violent labour recruitment

39  Maugham, Portuguese East Africa, 135–139. On the specific practices of Africans specializing in hippopotamus hunting in Zululand and Southern Mozambique, see Hedges, “Trade and Politics”, 56–57. On the social role of hunting in the latter region, see also Coelho, “Maphisa”, 57–58. 40   See photographs PT/TT/CMZ-AF-GT/E/29/2/40 to PT/TT/CMZ-AF-GT/ E/29/2/44, available at https://digitarq.arquivos.pt/details?id=3683275 Accessed on: 11.10.2021. 41  N.a., “As caçadas de S.A.R. a duqueza d’Aosta”, Ilustração Portuguesa, no. 210, February 28, 1910, 257–259.

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system is perhaps the most known.42 In the context of hunting, different arguments were put forth to justify this difference in treatment, namely that even though they had a great knowledge of the field, African hunters used pits, a hunting method allegedly much more deadly than the rifle used by Europeans.43 Armed with rifles and money, an expert argued in 1911 before the members of the International Colonial Institute, echoing the views of many contemporary colonial officials, Africans were contributing to the disappearance of Africa’s big game, much more so than European sportsmen, epizootic diseases or the expansion of European settlement.44 Arguments like these about the role of Africans in the decline of wildlife populations reflected not only in the daily practice of hunting but also in hunting regulations. These regulations meant a growing intervention of the state over hunting as it was practised in different contexts by local populations: about the type of weapons that could be used, about whether pits could be used, about if, when, where and which animals could be hunted. While not always effective and many times subverted by African populations, these rules often had a negative impact in their social, cultural and economic lives. The first hunting regulation of the Mozambique Company established that hunters needed an official licence to legally hunt in the region. Licence holders could in theory be African or European, hunt individually or in a group, though there were limits to the numbers of Europeans or Africans that could make up those groups, and the pricing of licences varied depending on the “colour” of the members of the group. African hunting groups, furthermore, would have to be led by a “white”. In practice, few African hunters would have the means to pay for these licences.45 A few years later, a new regulation demanded not only a hunting licence but also a gun carrying and gun use permit, thereby increasingly bureaucratizing this activity and making it even more onerous, especially for Africans.46 In 1907, perhaps a sign that the regulations were effective, a report on local African customs in Sofala recognised that Europeans were increasingly  Allina, Slavery by Any.  On the local hunting methods used by different peoples of Southern Mozambique, see Coelho, “Maphisa”, ch. 1. For a comparison of the typical methods of hippopotamus hunting used by Europeans and Africans in South Africa, see, Witz, “The making”, 160–161. 44  Carlos Rossetti, “De la conservation de la faune dans les pays neufs et des problèmes qui s’y rattachent”, in Institut Colonial International, Le droit de chasse dans les colonies et la conservation de la faune indigène (Brussels: Institut Colonial International, 1911), 19. 45  Ordem n. 86, 2 February 1893, BCM n. 7, 15 February 1893, article 7. 46  Ordem n. 684, 30 October 1895, BCM n. 53, 1 November 1895. 42 43

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practicing big game hunting and that Africans were slowly being removed from the hunt.47 These two photographs are also telling in another way. While the existing legislation did not establish a distinction between male and female hunters, in that women could also obtain hunting licences, in practice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century few women succeeded in overcoming the social conventions that kept them away from activities like hunting.48 The historiography has indeed underlined how big game hunting in Africa reflected an attempt to affirm the virility of (male) European elites, and how the glorification of the achievements of those elites in the memoirs of “explorers”, travellers and settlers can be read as the affirmation of class belonging, therefore not being reduced to the demonstration of the superiority of the European over the African. The woman, seen as too vulnerable and sensitive, was in principle limited to the role of accompanying party and eventually spectator of the adventures of the dominant male figure—the father, the brother and, especially, the husband—the real hunter.49 In the light of early twentieth-century sensibilities, Fig. 7.4, captured in 1909 or 1910, could therefore cause some amazement because it portrayed a female hunter, but especially because of the way the photograph seems to have been staged. The numerical inferiority of the duchess vis-à-­ vis African hunters is much greater in Fig. 7.4 than that of the three white hunters in Fig. 7.3, even though the star of the hunt was a woman. But the duchess of Aosta does not display any sign of vulnerability, not for being surrounded by several armed African men, nor for being the only woman in the frame, nor even because she was sitting next to a notoriously lethal animal, even if it was dead. The photographs seem to be devoid of any “black peril anxieties”, to borrow Angela Thompsell’s expression.50 Other 47  Alguns usos e costumes indígenas da circunscrição de Sofala, 1907, p. 19, ANTT-FCM, n. de ordem 2193, RA23. 48  For a discussion of representations on the role of women in leisure activities in the Portuguese press, some of which were actually sportswomen, see Trindade, “A imagem”, 132–134. 49  On the accessory role of women in big game hunting in Africa, see Mackenzie, The Empire of Nature, 22. On the emergence of women hunters in Africa in the beginning of the twentieth century, including the duchess of Aosta, see Angela Thompsell, Hunting Africa: British Sport, African Knowledge and the Nature of Empire (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Chap. 4. 50  Thomsell, Hunting Africa, p. 102.

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examples of photographs of women hunters can be found in the Company’s archive, but the circumstances in which the duchess is shown are exceptional.51 And this exceptionality must be understood in the context of the politics of propaganda put in place by the Company. Thus, if the duchess did not display the qualities of the true European hunter in Africa because she was a woman, her royal status gave her a certain measure of freedom to overcome the limited social role that the morals of the time imposed on women, and constituted a way of disseminating the action of the Company in central Mozambique among a larger audience. It is her celebrity status that justifies the real “hunting-spectacle” that was offered to her by the Company, where hundreds of seemingly obedient Africans participated, in clear contrast to the “disobedience” and resistance to colonial rule they were evidencing in the battles fought against Portuguese troops in different regions of Mozambique.52

Final Notes This chapter has considered how photographic representations of the practice of big game hunting in Mozambique helped create and reproduce a certain colonial order. And even if that order was staged, it nevertheless offered concrete indications about the policies that were already transforming central Mozambique in the early twentieth century. In the context of the attempt to control the “resources” of the region, these photographs constituted an instrument of power with an important symbolic value: documenting a form of domination. Indeed, both wildlife and African populations appear dominated and domesticated, though in different ways. The control over wildlife, especially “vermin”, revealed the authority of the colonizer over the continent, his technological superiority, but was also a way of affirming personal and class virtues. At the same time, the photographs expressed the marginalization of African populations. Regardless of the functions and roles that wildlife had in their lives 51   “Mulher caçadora junto a elefante e indígenas” (n.a, 1928), PT/TT/ CMZ-AF-GT/N/1/3/2, available at https://digitarq.arquivos.pt/viewer?id=3684210 Accessed on: 21.12.2018. 52  René Pélissier, Naissance du Mozambique, Résistance et révoltes anticoloniales (1854–1918), 2 vols. (Orgeval: Éditions Pélissier, 1984). Newitt, A history. Similarly, Thomsell’s upper-­ class “Edwardian Dianas” did not lose any of their respectability and glamour despite participating in a traditional male activity like big game hunting, and in fact garnered much interest and support. Thomsell, Hunting Africa, 110.

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in central Mozambique, Africans were given a secondary role in these photographed hunting narratives—they appear only to reinforce the leading role played by European hunters. And as the camera slowly replaced the rifle in the photographic safari, even the white hunter disappeared from photographs, leaving wildlife in the spotlight. Wildlife conservation areas, however, would retain and reinforce the divisions present in a racially ordered colonial society.53

53  On the case of Gorongosa, see French, “’Like leaves fallen by wind’”, Chaps. 5 and 6; and Katie McKeown, “Tracking Wildlife Conservation in Southern Africa: Histories of Protected Areas in Gorongosa and Maputaland”, (PhD dissertation, University of Minnesota, 2015), pp. 67–79. For a political economy explanation of the post-war wildlife conservation boom in British East and Central Africa, see Roderick P.  Neumann, ‘The Postwar Conservation Boom in British Colonial Africa’, Environmental History 7, 1 (2002), pp. 22–47.

CHAPTER 8

Industrial Landscapes in Colonial Mozambique: Images from an Economic Magazine Nuno Domingos

In 1963, near the end of the Portuguese colonial presence in Africa and two years after the indigenato regime was abolished,1 the Bulletin of the Industrial Association of Mozambique (Associação Industrial de Moçambique, AIM) began to be published in Lourenço Marques.2 From 1968 until it closed down in 1974, this periodical was renamed Indústria de Moçambique. In the early 1960s, the Portuguese colonial empire faced a war soon fought across three fronts. In a context of military escalation in 1  According to the Portuguese colonial indigenato regime, the vast majority of the populations in the colonies of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea were considered indigenas, which meant that they did not have the same citizenship status of the population considered civilized, composed mostly of Europeans. 2  The Industrial Association of Mozambique was founded in 1961.

N. Domingos (*) Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_8

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Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, the activity of this magazine suggests that economic investment, in this case of an industrial nature, continued to develop at a good pace. Investors from distinct business areas seemed to overlook what would later be interpreted as a scenario of imminent imperial breakdown. In the AIM Bulletin, the empire was represented as an economic problem, subject to plans based on technical and scientific knowledge. From a certain modernizing perspective, the place of nations on an evolutionary scale of development depended on the success of these plans. The domain of this technique was promoted not only by private capital but also by institutions that operated under the economic sovereignty that the state had over a vast imperial territory. This magazine insistently discussed the economic role of the state in the colonial development, as an agent of change, more rational and bureaucratic, more scientific and interventionist. The representation of a territory as an economic problem was broken down into minute details, as the published authors discussed theories and concepts, presented analyses of economic growth, used graphs and charts, and showed numbers and percentages to discuss the future of a colonial space. However, territorial representations in the pages of the Indústria de Moçambique were also formulated through the use of photographs, whose role was to offer a visual dimension for a project of transformation. Without reference to their authors, they showed some of the largest industries in the territory (which included not only big textile and oil companies but also smaller industries whose production was channelled to the increasing local urban consumption), especially those located in the capital, Lourenço Marques, and in the suburban industrial areas of Matola and Machava. In 1966, the industries of Lourenço Marques already accounted for 50% of the production value of the manufacturing industry, employing 32.15% of the Mozambican workers.3 Colonial anthropologist Rita-­ Ferreira estimated that in 1968, of the 130,000 active Africans workers, 19,500 were in the capital (7000 of them women).4 3  António Rita-Ferreira, Os Africanos de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques: Separata das Memórias do Instituto de Investigação Científica de Moçambique, 1967–1968), p. 126. 4  António Rita-Ferreira, “Distribuição Ocupacional da População Africana de Lourenço Marques”, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 2, n. 6, June 1969, pp. 200–203. Among other manufacturing sites, the magazine published photographs of the Matola Ore Wharf, the Mogás, the General Matola Chemistry, the Nacala Cement Factory, the Vidreira de Moçambique Company, the Sonarep oil refinery, the Sonap Marítima’s Ship-tank, the Mozambican Metallurgical Industry, the cashew industry in Mozambique, the radio assembly industry, the cotton ginning industry and the Texlon textile industry.

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Directed to specialized readers, the magazine emphasized the technical and scientific foundations of modernization, presented as ideologically neutral. As indicated in an article focused on the industrial need to increase local agricultural production: “Technology can be more revolutionary than any ideology.”5 The photographic reproduction of infrastructures, whose sculptural beauty was revealed by talented photographers, provided a first representation of the industrial enterprise’s strength. Buildings and machines, material and symbolic markers of the universality of this programme of social transformation, were a recurrent imagery, adjustable everywhere, subjecting natural and social landscapes, historical and cultural specificities. In many of these reproductions, workingmen, and less often workingwomen, were observed during interactions with their colleagues and with the machinery at the place of production. As in other societies where industrial productivism had become a design, giving a projection of a prosperous future, it was a matter of celebrating the modern organization of labour, placing the machine and the worker at the centre of the visual narrative. In opposition to critical analyses of modern production, in which the worker had a contentious relation with their labour function, the hierarchy and the machine, these images show the employees integrated into the factory’s micro-society. The international circulation of images such as those published in the Indústria de Moçambique materialized the project of universalization of a system of labour, fostered by the action of a global class of specialists, who externalized an ethics, habits and similar lifestyles. These corporate photographs should inspire a community of readers and lead them to act in the name of a global project of change, based on a modern scientific labour management, now disseminated through colonial Africa.6 These new working environments,7 the images seemed to suggest, promise a stable future would, without tensions or conflicts.

 Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 3, n. 8, 1970, p. 268.  Elspeth H. Brown uses the expression “functional realism” to define this iconographic ideology: “functional realism, according to which the image serves as an empirical substitute for the object, a type of evidence, to an instrumental realism, in this case, using the realist promise of the photograph as truth to restructure the ways in which work is performed.” Elspeth H.  Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 71 7  Tim Srangleman, “Picturing Work in an Industrial Landscape: Visualising Labour, Place and Space”, Sociological Research Online, 17 (2) 20. 5 6

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Images of Industry in a Rural Landscape The most reproduced photograph in the Indústria de Moçambique displays an agricultural worker, a black African, in a tea plantation. Probably taken in one of the producing regions of the Zambézia district—Gurué, Milange or Socone—the image is part of an advert of the Banco Nacional Ultramarino, the imperial banking institution responsible for the emission of currency throughout the colonies. The advert was promoting the concession of agricultural credits (Fig. 8.1). The image of the tea picker enshrined the historical relationship between agricultural and industrial production in Mozambique, a colonial territory where industry was born to a large extent from the opportunity to transform and export agricultural products.8 Despite its growth since the 1950s, Mozambican industrial activity was historically weak, within a scenario dominated by the exploitation of a set of agricultural raw materials.9 In the large productions field of cotton and sugar, dramatic forms of labour exploitation were introduced; substantial portions of the Mozambican population were compelled to work on plantation systems.10 The manufacturing transformation of agricultural products, which was dependent on the fluctuation of prices in the international markets, sought to increase their commercial value.11 According to the opinion expressed on the Indústria de Moçambique, the industrial transformation of primary products would make export dynamics more solid and stable, correcting a worrying structural duality between economic sectors and geographical spaces, which was typical of developing regions. In the BNU’s announcement, the tea picker, focused on his function, was dressed in modern equipment. According to the photograph, his goodwill was vital for the achievement of economic goals. This representation was rather different from many previous images of colonial labour in  Indústria de Moçambique, Vol. 5, n. 8, 1972, p. 213.  The sector represented 8,9% of the Portuguese GDP in 1963. Colectânea de Estudos do Gabinete de Estudos Técnicos da AIM, vol. 2, 1968, p. 71. 10  Ann Pitcher, Politics in the Portuguese Empire: The State, Industry and Cotton, 1926–1974 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Carlos Fortuna, O Fio da Meada: O Algodão de Moçambique, Portugal e a Economia-mundo, 1860–1960 (Porto: Afrontamento, 1993); Allen Isaacman, Cotton is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938–1961 (Portsmouth, N. H.: Heinemann, 1997). 11  Joana Pereira Leite, “Mozambique 1937–1970. Bilan De L’Évolution de L’Économie D’Exportation: quelques reflexions sur la nature du ‘pacte colonial’”, Estudos de Economia, vol. XIII, n. 4, July–September 1993, pp. 387–410. 8 9

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Fig. 8.1  Announcement of the National Overseas Bank for the Concession of Agricultural Credits. The ad appears regularly throughout the years of the second series of the magazine

which workers were poorly dressed, often barefoot and naked. Commenting on a collection of photographs found in the section of “public works” in the Portuguese Overseas Historical Archive, Jeanne Marie Penvenne noted: “The photographs showed a large number of men digging, carrying, carrying bales along the edge. Hundreds of men (for the most part) have emerged in these documents anonymously, only quantified as so

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many ‘indigenous’ or ‘black’.”12 Instead, this tea picker seems to embody the model of the worker already fitting the prescriptions imposed by international conventions that configured the recognition of labour rights.13 The photographic reproduction of the tea picker effectively hides the violence historically present in the labour landscape of Mozambique’s countryside.14 This same process of concealment occurred in the production of visual representations of industrial work.

Industrial Landscape Despite the opportunities provided by the Colonial Development Plans since 1953, and the increase in exports and trade, the modernization felt in other colonial contexts after World War II, advanced slowly in Mozambique.15 Growth based on the evolution of an internal market fuelled by the increase in the number of settlers and the surge of African consumption in the cities increased the trade balance deficit, a situation aggravated by the need to import technology to foster export dynamics.16 The scenario was not ideal for the colonial economy to compete in a progressively liberalized economic space. Beginning a period of liberalization, the establishment in 1961 of a Portuguese Economic Area for the free movement of goods, capital and persons threatened a productive structure 12  Jeanne Marie Penvenne, “Fotografando Lourenço Marques: a cidade e os seus habitantes de 1960 a 1975”, In Cláudia Castelo, Omar Ribeiro Thomaz, Sebastião Nascimento e Teresa Cruz e Silva (eds.), Os Outros da Colonização. Ensaios sobre o colonialismo tardio em Moçambique (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2012), pp. 173–174. 13   Maria Fernandes Rodrigues, Portugal e a Organização Internacional do trabalho (1933–1974) (PhD Diss., Universidade de Coimbra, 2011), p. 83. Portugal only signed on 26/7/56 a Convention on Forced Labour of 1930, on 23 November 1959, a Convention on the Abolition of Work Spun (1957) on 20 February 1967 on Equal Remuneration (of 1951), on 12 April 1960. The abolition of penal sanctions for indigenous workers (of 1955) on 22 November 1959. Discrimination in matters of employment and occupation (1958), on 7/7/64, Right to organize and collective bargaining (1958) Ibid., p. 162, on 5/16/1960 the concentration on Reparation of work accidents in agriculture (1921). Ibid., P. 306 and 2/12/62, on Labor Inspection (from 1947), Ibid., P. 437. See also, José Pedro Monteiro, Portugal e a Questão do Trabalho Forçado (Lisbon: Ed 70, 2018). 14  On the violence of colonal rural labour in Mozambique, see Isaacman, Cotton is the Mother of Poverty. 15  Victor Pereira, “A economia do Império e os Planos de Fomento”, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo (ed.) O Império Colonial em Questão (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2011), pp. 251–285. 16  Parcídio Costa, “Evolução e perspetivas das exportações de Moçambique”, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 6, n. 3, pp. 69–76.

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based on monopolies and concessions.17 Influenced by international trends, some economists and entrepreneurs argued that the creation of a more productive economy should necessarily be grounded on the added value offered by modern industry.18 Labour productivity was a crucial dimension of this process of modernization. In order to have efficient workers, managers and middle managers should be properly trained. It was mandatory to have a stabilized labour force, in order to offer some industries the necessary productive predictability, in terms of work and production rhythms.19 Policies aimed to improve the quality of “human capital” suggested a strong reconstruction of Africa’s social organization. This included the stabilization of the workforce in organized urban centres, the social promotion of populations through the application of public policies, the workers’ integration in unions, the construction of infrastructures, the generalization of consumption habits and the adoption of a specific work ethic. Urban planning would produce competent workers, guaranteeing conditions of health, transportation, access to services and infrastructures and a basic social support. Following Durkheim’s classic analysis, economic integration would provide social and political integration: modernizers elected it as the driving force for the colonial power to manage the process described in colonial jargon as “detribalization”, that is, the loss of traditional habits and customs. In an interview with Indústria de Moçambique, engineer Silva Teixeira, a technician from the National Institute of Industrial Research (INII), stressed the urgency in better integrating Africans in the economic 17  The law of constitution of a Portuguese economic space was approved by the decree-law no. 44016 of 8/11/61. 18  The round-table conferences on problems of Portuguese Industry, organized by the Industry Corporation, were a moment of updating the state of the art of economic policies. In November 1970, Indústria de Moçambique. emphasized the importance conferred by the president of the AIM, Mário Fernandes Secca, at the 1970 conference of the economic policies advocated by engineer Rogério Martins, one of the most active representatives of modernizing policies: “review of industrial conditioning, business cooperation, industrial export, foreign investment, anti-monopoly action, investment and production financing”, Indústria de Moçambique, 1970, n. 11, p. 365. 19  Frederick Cooper, The Labor Question in French and British Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Idem, “Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences in the Era of Decolonization: the Examples of British and French Africa”, Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines (Les sciences sociales en situation coloniale), vol. 10, 2004, p. 27.

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activities, so that the local businessmen could take advantage “in a more rational and appropriate way” of the indígena working force”.20 However, the success of this endeavour depended on the rural worker’s transition to the industrial sector. The difficulties typical of this transition (“these African workers went from a tribal past, from a life close to nature […] into the four walls of a factory”) should be tempered by the work of specialists in social and industrial psychology. It was up to them to study “the terminology to be used, the form of giving orders, the control over the performance of the activities, the way of establishing communication between colleagues of different origins”.21 The economic integration of African industrial workers demanded new labour policies. An article published by the AIM Technical Studies Office in 1967 criticized the current “European ethnocentrism” that “limits or impedes the reasoning of Africa and the economy itself”.22 African workers, now called “economically weak workers”, had indeed “a great receptivity to innovation and a deep desire for economic progress”.23 The corporate photographs in the Indústria de Moçambique guaranteed that this African acceptability was real. To consider the African employee as a collaborator of the factory system, as an economic agent open to change and innovation, broke with the premises of a labour system where it was accepted that the indígenas workers should be subject to permanent coercion, a foundation of the Portuguese colonial rule. This symbolic promotion aimed primarily to tackle the problem of productivity. Changing the status of the worker would make him more receptive to a new work ethic, inseparable from a modern urban way of life that was sustained by greater consumer aspirations. Productivity, as highlighted in a 1966 article in AIM Bulletin, resulted from a mathematical economic calculation,24 but it was also ­reliant on the emergence of a new philosophy of life, since it was “a state of mind, a concern to improve, a desire to progress, a permanent eagerness”.25 As the productivity of industrial labour depended on the worker’s existential  Indústria de Moçambique, 1969, vol. 2, n. 4, pp. 113–114.  Ibidem. 22  “Questões fundamentais do desenvolvimento de Moçambique”, Colectânea de Estudos do Gabinete de Estudos Técnicos da AIM, Vol. 1—Julho de 1967, p. 38. 23  Ibidem. 24  “Aspectos Humanos de uma Política de produtividade”, Boletim da Associação Industrial de Moçambique, n. 35, 1966, p. 22. 25  Ibidem. 20 21

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condition, and not only on his technical mastery, the economic promotion of the working force could easily be articulated with the defence of humanist policies: “The adherence to a more humane conception of labour […] inevitably provokes a social climate conducive to a greater production with less sacrifice.”26 Therefore, it was essential to consider the workers’ social demands and make an effort to integrated them into the companies’ goals as indispensable partners.27 The low productivity levels of African labour in Mozambique made the application of these new techniques of industrial relations management more urgent. The Indústria de Moçambique denounced this weakness on several occasions.28 In a 1966 survey promoted by the AIM, several businessmen referred to the “low productivity of African workers”.29 Two years later, in his monograph on the lives of Lourenço Marques’ African populations, colonial anthropologist António Rita-Ferreira obtained similar responses from local bosses. They complained about the workers’ lack of discipline and irresponsibility, their absenteeism and absence of motivation.30 Ferreira concluded that the African worker was ill equipped to respond to the “demands and standards of technological civilization”.31 In March 1973, the Indústria de Moçambique editorial reported that within “the manufacturing workforce, which can now be estimated at 110,000 active individuals, only about 25% are skilled workers. Over the last six years, the industrial labour force has been growing at a rate of 8 per cent a year”.32 However, if the demand for unskilled work (locally known as “undifferentiated work”) grew at the annual rate of 6%, the need for qualified was more urgent and grew at 20% rate. Given this scenario, the author asked: “At this rate where you will get qualified labour?”33  Ibidem.  Ibidem. 28  Among the articles that provided diagnosis and economic previsions in the Indústria de Moçambique, the most noteworthy are those of its director Parcídio Costa, “Reflexões sobre o problema da formação, Produtividade e trabalho”, Indústria de Moçambique, n.° 3, 1968, p.  111; Idem, “Para uma estratégia integrada do desenvolvimento em Moçambique», Indústria de Moçambique n.°1 , 1971, p. 26; Idem, “A Indústria de Moçambique no limiar da década de 70”, Indústria de Moçambique n. 7, 1971, p. 201. 29  Inquérito n.° 1, 28/10/66. Indústria de Moçambique, n. 39, October 1966, p. 92. 30  Ibidem, pp. 342–344. 31  António Rita-Ferreira, “Algumas observações sobre a eficiência profissional do africano”, Indústria de Moçambique, Vol. 2, n.° 10,Outubro de 1969, p. 343. 32  Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 6, n.° 3 , 1973 p. 67. 33  Ibidem. 26 27

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In the context of these economic debates, the photographs of African workers harmoniously integrated in the factories represented the simulation of a prospective situation. More than an illustration of the factory work in Mozambique, although the photographs were taken in “real” settings, the images published in the Indústria de Moçambique staged an imagined future, a visual construction built for corporate leaders and managers. Those prototypical workers were the employees that modern managers would like to command, as reliable and predictable as the machines themselves. Their culture, tradition or civilizing status mattered little to the purpose of the factory. The labour landscapes created by these images are sceneries of productivity and hierarchy which sought to exclude the effects of history and politics: they portray black workers like any other employees in an analogous situation. Carefully staged, these photographs invariably reveal a universal and idealized industrial worker. Portrayed in their tasks, but never as individuals whose lives might worth being asked about, blue-collar workers are a just part of the productive machinery. In December 1968, the cover of the Indústria de Moçambique displays the working environment at the Industry of Assembly of Radios.34 In this factory of radios, a set of workers dedicates themselves to tasks that require attentive and precise eyes to guide agile hands and fingers. Almost all mestizos, with modern hairstyles where the carapinha (frizzy air), a strong symbol of African origin, is absent, these workers would be good examples of an African lower middle class in formation with new consumption habits that included the same radios they were producing. The inclusion of women in the Lourenço Marques’ industries was an important feature of the late colonial period. Still a minority among the female population, these women workers achieve an urban status, linked with the improvement of their material condition, but also because of the changing nature of their habits and lifestyles. Four years later, the cover image of the Refrigerants Factory Mac Mahon shows not only the complexity of the machines but also the relation of the workers to the productive dynamics. Attentive, equipped in a hygienic environment where safety and prevention rules prevail, the workers perform their duties with skill (Fig. 8.2). In most of these images, the surrounding mechanical environment encapsulates the workers, who become mere pieces of an industrial puzzle.  Industry of Assembly of Radios, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 1, no. 12, 1968, p. 1.

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Fig. 8.2  Industry of Assembly of Radios, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 1, no. 12, 1968, p. 1

The image shows not only the complexity of the machines but also the relation of the workers to the productive dynamics. Attentive, equipped in a hygienic environment where safety and prevention rules prevail, the workers perform their duties with skill No other photograph seems to represent better this logic of appropriation than one taken in the Texlon. Textiles of Lourenço Marques (Fig. 8.3). The industrial landscape of Texlon places the African worker in a scenario that is at odds with the stereotypical construction of the African scenery. A man placed inside a deterritorialized space that he has, through the experience of work, to decode. The plan assimilates the worker; as the modern factory was for colonial modernizers the most efficient was to assimilate urban Africans into a renewed imperial society.

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Fig. 8.3  Refrigerants Factory Mac Mahon, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 5. No. 4, 1972, p. 1

They are unlike other images of African labour, predominantly manual, in which the labourer uses only his muscular energy often without the intermediation of the machine. In these labour landscapes, work is not reduced to an exteriorization of brute force but to a logic of specialization, which can be observed in the workers’ corporal ethos. These bodily representations suggest the significance of skills such as attention and precision, celebrating the knowledge necessary to deal with machines. The hands adjust to the specific function, and the camera even shows the relevance of the use of the worker’s various fingers. Hands and fingers were thus not merely a stretch of the muscles.

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White Collar Dreams: The New Colonial Manager and His Middle Managers This industrial landscape represents the expansion of a model that advocated the substitution of previous disciplinary labour systems, celebrating a new factory, sanitized, in which exemplary workers prevailed in rational spaces.35 The modern factory, however, did not demand only new w ­ orkers. Some photographs published in the Indústria de Moçambique exhibited the initiatives of the local Industrial Association and some of its departments such as the Productivity Center, which organized courses on the best methods to increase production. The analysis of modern management and administration techniques, the specialization of staff and intermediate staff, the introduction of new technologies such as those of a computational nature, and the need to increase prevention and safety at work were among the topics of training. Managers, economists and university professors came from mainland Portugal to transmit their knowledge.36 The magazine also published articles by specialists from institutions such as the World Bank, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Economic and Social Council, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and a number of agencies concerned with development aid to “Third World countries”. According to a developmentist perspective, contrary to the nationalist and epic rhetoric of the Portuguese colonial regime, the category of “Third World” applied well to the Mozambican case. In order to develop the “Third World”, the skills of a modern manager were required. In contrast to the more common representation of the colonial boss, the modern manager knew how to

35  See Bruno Monteiro, “Still Life with Machines. The politics of representation of the industrial space in the industrial photography of the decades of 50 and 60 in Porto”. Bruno Monteiro, Joana Dias Pereira (eds.). De Pé Sobre a Terra. Estudos sobre a Indústria, o Trabalho e o Movimento Operário em Portugal, pp. 427–444. 36  Among those who travelled from the metropolis were several specialists, managers, economists and university professors—from ISCEF, Instituto Superior Técnico—members of state organs, various ministries, organizations such as the Technical Commission for Planning and Economic Integration of Mozambique or the National Research Institute Industrial, staff of financial and business institutions, such as the CUF Research Center or the Império Insurance Company.

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relate local challenges with the modern logics of international economy and trade.37 The photographic coverage of AIM training seminars proposed a standardized image of management experts, working as a kind of mirror through which white-collar managers and employees could recognize themselves. The images of the Course of Commercial Action. Marketing in the Company that took place in 1973  in Lourenço Marques (Fig.  8.4) offered a model to emulate by those who aspired to be protagonists in the

Fig. 8.4  Texlon. Textiles of Lourenço Marques, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 6, no. 4, 1973, p. 1

37  On the emergence of the modern manager in the Portugueses metropole, see José Nuno Matos, O operário em construção. Do empregado ao precário (Lisbon: Outro Modo: 2015). 

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world of modern corporations and belong to an international community of interests, desires and aspirations. This technician would be acknowledged by his distinctive attitude, posture and demeanour, commonly identified by a white shirt and tie. The objects that surrounded them—the papers with tables, graphs, texts and pictures, the pens and pencils, the glasses that many wore—revealed a certain expertise, based on the accumulation of educational capital. Similar representations were common in other public media, often linked to the advertisement of modern consumptions, as, for instance, all types of office machines and objects, but also objects and habits that defined a white-collar lifestyle: cars, home appliances, expensive alcoholic beverages and food, exotic holidays or tobacco.38 In the images that show these corporate meetings, there are practically no women. This management elite in colonial-era Mozambique consisted of men, white men (Figs. 8.5 and 8.6). Streamlining productive methods required a trained manager rather than an old-fashioned boss. In addition, companies had to have an effective middle management, which included technicians prepared to deal with the working force, so as to make it more productive.39 The impatience of traditional supervisors with subordinate staff, which might include the use of violence and intimidation, proved to be economically counterproductive.40 The adoption of the language of human resources converted the worker into a collaborator who belonged to a productive community. In order to forge a group of competent middle managers in Mozambique, the Industrial Association organized courses for supervisors, seeking to fill the shortage of engineers in the local division of labour. Again, students in these courses were all white men. It was up to them to interact with the workers on the factory floor, almost all black Africans

A New System of Social Classification The photographs in this chapter display a modern and industrial Mozambique by contrast with the most common colonial images of a natural African world, so often constructed to stimulate the curious gaze 38  On the rise of the white-collar ideology and lifestyle, see: Charles Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951). 39  António Rita-Ferreira, Os Africanos de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques: Separata das Memórias do Instituto de Investigação Científica de Moçambique, 1967–1968), p. 344. 40  Ibidem.

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Figs. 8.5 and 8.6  Course of Commercial Action. Marketing in the Company. Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 6, no. 10, 1973, p. 290. Figure 8.3 Colloquium: the leader and staff training, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 3, no. 4, 1970, p. 141

of Europeans and reinforce their sense of superiority. Representations of the exotic, the primitive, the ontologically different, pervaded the activity of colonial institutions but were also present in the visual landscape of popular culture, in books, magazines, newspapers, postcards and

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advertising.41 By exposing difference, images ratify the emergence of a racial hierarchy. Such essentializing consisted of the identification of ethnic groups, their traditional cultures, their leaderships that could be co-opted for colonial power and the adaptability of their members to work. Photographs of great factories and their machinery follow a set of representations that emphasized the colonizer’s role as conqueror and builder. In a very specific stage of occupation, they are a modern update of the meaning produced by other constructions: military facilities, religious monuments, and urban centres, especially the larger ones, with their ordered streets, arranged gardens and numerous buildings, including those of contemporary architectural origin.42 However, in comparison with these colonial inheritances, modern industrial landscapes have lost any kind of cultural or national singularity. Therefore, these industrial photographs differ from a tradition of colonial photography carried out in the Portuguese colonial context that translates colonialist, culturalist perspectives on territories and populations. Some works on photography in the Portuguese colonial empire highlighted the visual objectification of the African person, portrayed as an individual belonging to a backward culture, attached to its customs and traditions, immobile and passive.43 In view of this visual genealogy, images of labour environments in the Indústria de Moçambique introduce significant symbolic ruptures. While disseminating the aforementioned universalization of a model of labour organization, in which the individual is defined by the position in the work structure, the images of integrated African factory workers proposed a 41  Isabel Castro Henriques, A Herança Africana em Portugal. Séculos XV-XX (Lisbon: CTT, 2009). 42  Materialized by the factory buildings, the universality of the industry also materialized by the designs of professionals who advocated the universality of modern architecture and its ability to surpass the heritage of history, imposing a new cadence on cities. José Manuel Fernandes, Geração Africana. Arquitetura e Cidades em Angola e Moçambique, 1925–1975 (Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2002) .On a critique to these perspectives, see Nuno Domingos, “Colonial architectures, urban planning and the representation of Portuguese imperial history”. Portuguese Journal of Social Sience, 14, 3, (2015): 235–255. 43  Clara Carvalho, “O Olhar Colonial. Fotografia e Antropologia no Centro de Estudos da Guiné Portuguesa”, Clara Carvalho and João de Pina Cabral (eds.), A persistência da história: passado e contemporaneidade em África (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2004) pp. 119–147. Nuno Porto, Modos de Objectificação da Dominação Colonial: O Caso do Museu do Dundo, 1940–1970 (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2009). Ver Rui Mateus Pereira, Conhecer para Dominar. A antropologia ao serviço da política colonial portuguesa em Moçambique (Lisbon_ Parsifal, 2021).

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new worldview where the construction of difference did not depend on cultural and racial distinctions. Social inequality, linked to the position in the labour structure, is no longer constituted as an attribute of culture, custom or tradition and is now represented by the factory’s economic categories, where ethnic and cultural origins fade out. Such representation was distinct from the disciplinary procedures that made African populations cultural subjects, symbols of a backward civilization under the rule of European authority. While some of the images published in the Indústria de Moçambique share resemblances with representations of labour used previously by Portuguese propaganda in international exhibitions and fairs—such as the well-known 1929 albums of Santos Rufino—they stand apart due to their particular conditions of production and circulation.44 They aimed to announce a technical worldview and how labour integration was carried out in new moulds, in large modern manufacturing spaces, not in workshops of arts and crafts. Working bodies seem to be represented with greater dignity, even though individuals seemed entirely subjected to the industrial landscape. Thus, in these pictures, African workers absorbed into the labour order lacked feelings; the camera did not show empathy or any interest in their subjectivities.

Visual Utopias Made for the sake of a developmentist worldview that was far from the reality in the colonial terrain, industrial photographs omitted how modernization in Mozambique was feeble.45 Their pedagogic function suggested that in the factories’ sweat shop another reality took place. On the ground, the discretionary exploitation of labour and the practices of 44  On the role of Santos Rufino’s albums in the international defense of the Portuguese colonies, namely with regard to the labour reality, see Eric Allina, “Fallacious Mirrors: Colonial Anxiety and Images of African Labor in Mozambique, ca. 1929”, History in Africa, Vol. 24 (1997), pp. 9–52. 45  The negative effects of African proletarianization would be counteracted by the action of human resources departments, which invoked the importance of corporate culture while using unlikely community metaphors within a framework of racist domination. More broadly, these effects would be tackled by state policies aimed at a controlled deproletarianization. Nuno Domingos, “Desproletarizar: a FNAT como instrumento de mediação ideológica no Estado Novo”. In Domingos, N., Pereira, V. (eds.) O Estado Novo em Questão (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2010), pp. 165–196.

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institutionalized racism were still the elements that prevailed in the working landscape.46 The creation of new “labour categories”, supported by a visual imaginary, did not change significantly the productive organization. Categories as “undifferentiated worker” and “skilled worker” were the result of a highly euphemized transmutation of the juridical but also sociocultural categories that disappeared with the end of the indigenato system. The skilled unionized workers were almost all white, and the undifferentiated workers were those who until recently had been called indígenas. The statutory antagonism between indígenas and civilized was now reproduced by economic categories, such as those established by the Rural Work Act passed in 1962.47 Directed at the “economically weak workers”, the new rural labour regulation did not have any cultural categorization. It included rural workers48 and those who, not having this status, were not specialized: the vast majority of the African labour force consisted of “casual” workers hired on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, without continuity, with “residence near the working place”.49 For the productive objectives of the AIM, this situation was not favourable. The duality imposed by the “qualified” and “undifferentiated” categories was maladjusted to the modern factory process, characterized by constant needs for labour differentiation, polyvalence and adaptability.50

46  Valdemir Zamparoni, Entre Narros e Mulungos: colonialismo e paisagem social em Lourenço Marques, c.1890. c 1940 (PhD Diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 1998). 47  Decrees no. 44309 and 44310, 27 April 1962, Lourenço Marques, Imprensa Nacional de Moçambique, 1962. 48  According to Article 3 of the Code, “manual workers without a defined occupation engaged in activities connected with the agricultural holding of land and collecting the products or intended to make it possible or to ensure such exploitation.” 49  Providing another representation of society, the “disappearance of the indigenous” and the emergence of the “worker”, had been  reinforced by the creation of the Instituto do Trabalho, Previdência e Ação Social  (Institute of work and welfare)  and the extinction of the  Direção dos Serviços dos Negócios Indígenas  (Native Affairs Institute).   Decree n.° 44111 de 21/12/61. Legal  Diploma n.° 1595, 28/4/56, Lourenço Marques, Imprensa Nacional de Moçambique, 1957. This African labour mass was not yet framed by the new regime of Labour Relations, approved in 1956, and could not integrate the unions. Outside corporatist institutions, Africans were included in professional associations targeting indígenas, cases of the Association of Indian Traders, and the Associations of Carpenters, Washers, Barbers, Shoemakers, Painters, Table makers and Tailors. 50  Many editorial express this will, for example, in the March and April 1966 volumes. But it was a letter to the governor general in 1974 that such a claim was best expressed. Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, Governo Geral, Caixa 873 Pasta T/5-c) Instituto do Trabalho. Assunto Trabalho, C) Regulamento de Trabalho, 1974. Carta da Associação Industrial de Moçambique ao Governador Geral em 15/4/74.

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Despite the power of abstraction promoted by the economic position, the economic categories in the colonial context reproduced racial divisions, since the class structure remained strongly racialized. Thus, as several images of the Mozambican working industrial environments show, in the hierarchy of the modern factory, the managers and middle managers were white, usually men, and the manual workers were predominantly black. In some pictures published in the Indústria de Moçambique, it is common to see the white supervisors overseeing the activities of black workers; these images remind us that humans led the productive order that submitted African workers to the machines. In contrast with the prospective reality staged by photographs of idealized workers in Mozambican factories published in the Indústria de Moçambique, critical assessments of the economic modernization offered a far less perfect perspective on the African labour force in cities like Lourenço Marques. Pre-modern, the local labour structure had a significant number of domestic workers and servants. The underdeveloped secondary sector depended on employees whom, in order to survive, still had to rely on support networks based on the countryside, from which they originated, and on the money gathered by a seasonable workforce in transit for the South Africa’s mines.51 This was the result of an economic system based on a disposable labour force, engaged in manual labour, with a strong turnover and with fragile housing conditions. In relation to the labour force used in the city, which grew substantially from the 1950s, Rita-Ferreira’s research drew a worrying diagnosis of the Lourenço Marques’ suburbs in the late 1960s.52 The author referred to the fragile living conditions of most of the inhabitants, subject to evictions and speculative incomes,53 suffering from widespread malnutrition,54 living at risk of fire, flood and overthrow, without drinking water and electricity,55 with 51  Of the 825,000 wage earners identified in the 1960 census in Mozambique, 290,000 worked outside the colony. António Rita-Ferreira, “Distribuição Ocupacional da População Africana de Lourenço Marques”, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 2, n. 6, June 1969, p. 200. 52  António Rita-Ferreira, Os Africanos de Lourenço Marques (Lourenço Marques: Separata das Memórias do Instituto de Investigação Científica de Moçambique, 1967–1968. 53  Which the author will address in the following two articles, “O Problema Habitacional dos Africanos de Lourenço Marques (II)”, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 2, n.° 12, Dezembro de 1969, pp.  419–422 e Idem, “O Problema Habitacional dos Africanos de Lourenço Marques (III)”, Indústria de Moçambique, vol. 3, n.° 3, Março de 1970, pp. 85–87. 54  António Rita-Ferreira, “Padrões de Consumo” , p.  320. According to Rita-Ferreira’s calculations, there would be 310 canteens in the suburbs. Ibidem. 55  Rita-Ferreira, Os Africanos de Lourenço Marques …, p. 197.

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a high prevalence of certain diseases56 and lack of stable employment that would allow them to foresee the near future. As Jeanne Marie Penvenne recently remarked, with the exception of works by photographers such as Sebastião Langa or Ricardo Rangel, urban environments portrayed the place of the white.57 In the late colonial period, the absence of photographs that report on the existential precariousness of the African worker contrast with the proliferation of images of the tourist heaven, the paradisiacal landscape and heritage, untouched by war, with its modern and organized urban structures, high modern buildings captured by imposing aerial views, its beaches and gardens, the gastronomy and the sophisticated nightlife.58 Such visual landscape supported the business of tourism and the official propaganda.59 The modernizing discourse and its visual imagination reinforced the celebratory tone typical of the late colonial period. In the history of colonial Mozambique, there is no abundance of labour representations in urban spaces and on its peripheries that can break the magical effect produced by these images.60 The stability and homogeneity that defined these colonial corporate photos was a utopia that ended up shaping professional behaviours; simultaneously these depictions turned invisible a fairer representation of the industrial labour environments in Mozambique. On the ground, the idealized African worker did not exist. Other sources, from archival data to oral testimonies, revealed, after all, how unstable these photographs were.  Ibidem, pp. 431–432.  Jeanne Marie Penvenne, “Fotografando Lourenço Marques … pp. 173–191. 58  Noticeable, for example, in the summaries sponsored by the General Agency of the Colonies. For example, Rodrigues Júnior, Moçambique. Terra de Portugal (Lisbon: Agência-­ Geral do Ultramar, 1965); Oliveira Boléo, Monografia de Moçambique (Lisbon: Agência-­ Geral do Ultramar, 1971). Jeanne Marie Penvenne, African Workers and colonial racism. Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877–1962 (London: James Currey, 1995). 59  Like the images produced by the narrative of economic development, the representations of a Portuguese-tropical idyll now possess a magical power of decontextualization and reorganization of history itself. History runs the risk of being stuck with certain representations, a lasting heritage left by those who had the power to create images, now taken as sources to tell a narrative not only about the past but also about the present. 60  For a written counter-narrative on the development of Lourenço Marques read Pancho Guedes, “A Cidade Doente”, A Tribuna, 9 July 1973, pp. 6–7. Among the photographs taken by Ricardo Rangel, the one that portraits a young shepherd with his forehead burnt by a cattle iron is a good example of a visual counter-narrative to the hegemonic representation created by the colonial apparatus. Ricardo Rangel, “Ferro em Brasa”, 1973. 56 57

CHAPTER 9

To See, to Sell: The Role of the Photographic Image in Portuguese Colonial Exhibitions (1929–1940) Nadia Vargaftig

In the interwar Portugal, fairs and exhibitions succeeded one another inside and outside the country, as much in the metropolis as in the colonies. They shaped a generation of Portuguese to Salazar’s imperial ideology, along with

N. Vargaftig (*) Universite de Reims Champagne-Ardenne, CERHiC, Reims, France © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_9

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other media and other fields of social life.1 What was the role of the photographs in these events? In this chapter, I will try to understand what the presence of photographs in colonial exhibition reveals about this particular moment in Portugal’s history, notably their role in the elaboration of the mística imperial, then, designed by the Ministry of Colonies and directed by Armindo Monteiro (1896–1955) and by the Presidency of the Council, and led by the dictator António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970). In the context of European colonial empires, exhibition and photography are closely linked, as the two phenomena were contemporaneous with one another. Their relationship extends beyond merely coinciding in time: these two means of representation of the world depicted by a West confident in its global destiny and cultural superiority fed off one another and brought coherence to the discourse of the “civilizing mission” and strengthened all the imperialist doctrines. The power of images, whether they were still or moving, two- or three-dimensional, guided and charmed opinions regarding overseas questions. These phenomena gave rise to numerous studies, whether they be on universal, international, colonial, or industrial exhibitions or on photography, from aesthetic, technical, social, or economic perspective.2 Nevertheless, the interplay between 1  Cinema, literature, comics and publicity were exploited in this sense, as was national education; these fields have been studied since the last decades of the twentieth century, under the prism of propaganda; Luís Reis Torgal, ed., O Cinema sob o olhar de Salazar (Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 2000); Alberto Oliveira Pinto, “O concurso de literatura colonial da Agência Geral das Colónias (1926–1951); colonialismo e propaganda”, Clio (2002), 191–256; Carlos Duarte Paulo, A Honra da Bandeira. A educação colonial no sistema de ensino português (1926–1946), (Lisboa: Universidade Nova, 1992); Luís Cunha, “A imagem do negro na banda desenhada portuguesa: algumas propostas exploratórias”, Cadernos do Noroeste, vol. 8 (1995), 89–112; José Luís Lima Garcia: “A ideia de império na propaganda do Estado Novo”, Revista de História das ideias, vol. 14 (1992), 411- 424. Currently, researchers focus their inquiry on “popular” or “mass culture” and daily practices like urban life, sports, radio or TV shows, etc. See a balance and a conceptual presentation in Nuno Domingos, “Cultura popular urbana e configurações urbanas”, in Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ed., O Império colonial em questão (sécs. XIX-XX) (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2013), 391–421. 2  It would not make sense in this presentation to attempt an exhaustive, European-wide survey of classic or more recent bibliographic productions on each theme. For the British exhibitions, see: John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984) and Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas. The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). In France, Pascal Ory played a pioneering role in the (re)discovery of the Parisian universal exhibitions of the second half of the twentieth century by historians of the cultural field: Pascal Ory, Les Expositions universelles de Paris: panorama raisonné, avec des aperçus nouveaux et des illustrations des meilleurs auteurs (Paris: Ramsay, 1982). More recently, Alexander C.T.  Geppert dedicated a chapter to a global balance of the production of the exposition studies since the fifties: Alexander C.T. Geppert, Fleeting cities. Imperial expositions in fin-de-siècle Europe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 9–12.

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photography and exhibitions has quite rarely been genuinely explored.3 Photography is a precious source for those who attempt to study and reconstruct the exhibitions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reciprocally, exhibitions can be incorporated into the corpus of those who work on the contexts of the production, spreading and reception of the photographic practice in European and North American societies. In the following pages, I will try to confront exhibitions and photography in the cultural and political context of the early years of the Portuguese New State (Estado Novo) regime in Portugal (1926–1974). This chapter will present the typological variety of photographs that were exhibited and produced in colonial exhibitions of the 1930s, from the Portuguese participation in the Ibero-American Exposition of Seville in 1929 to the Portuguese World Exhibition and its colonial section of 1940.4 This diversity manifests itself in the functions performed by photography as well as in the thematic contents of the images. The representations of landscapes, settlements and customs overseas coexisted with testimonies of the exhibitions themselves, of objects exhibited in pavilions, rooms and showcases. This heterogeneous photographic corpus has thus created a complex and disordered network of representations, a mixture of “authentic” testimonies of colonial life and other images produced in the exhibition context, thus attenuating the frontier between representations and “realities” of colonial life, between true and false. 3  Filipa Lowndes Vicente makes the balance of the main works that cross photography and exhibitions in her contribution “ Fotografia e colonialismo: para lá do visível “, in Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, ed., O Império colonial em questão (sécs. XIX-XX) (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2013), 448. In 1999, Anne Maxwell published a pioneer but also controversial monograph on the issue, mainly focused on Pacific, Asian and North American communities: Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions. Representations of the “Native” and the Making of European Identities (London, Leicester University Press, 1999). See also the review of the book by Elizabeth Edwards, Aboriginal History, vol. 26, 2002, 257–259. 4  In the period studied, Portugal organized and participated in several exhibitions and colonial fairs, for example: Ibero-American exhibition of Seville (1929), International colonial exhibitions of Antwerp (1930) and Paris (1931), Industrial fair of Lisbon (1932), Fairs of colonial samples of Luanda and Lourenço Marques (1932), Portuguese Colonial Exhibition of Porto (1934), Exhibition of the Portuguese World (1940). The Historic Exposition of the Occupation of 1937, which took place in Lisbon, can also be considered as partially colonial, from a military perspective; Nadia Vargaftig, Des Empires en carton. Les expositions coloniales au Portugal et en Italie (1918–1940) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2016). Annarita Gori, “Celebrate Nation, Commemorate History, Embody the Estado Novo: The Exhibition of the Portuguese World (1940)”, Cultural and social History, vol. 15, n.5, 2018, 699–722.

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Giving Order and Meaning to the Overseas World: The Epistemological Function The model for the Great Exhibition was born in London in 1851 and was initially intended to display a global representation of the world and human activities.5 As the first international systematic presentation of manufactured products, it devoted an important part of its device introducing an invention as recent as it was revolutionary: photography in its various forms and techniques.6 An increasingly sophisticated classification prolonged the rationalist utopia inherited from the Enlightenment Century: sections, classes, groups and subgroups formed the structure of the universal, international and colonial exhibitions of the long nineteenth century. Complex ramifications helped the visitor to navigate through a profusion of statistical tables, objects, showcases, samples and photographs. The context of colonial expansion of Europe from the 1880s reinforced these taxonomic ambitions. According to Greenhalgh, it was in 1889 at the Universal Exhibition in Paris, the one that inaugurated the Eiffel Tower, that for the first time a “presentation of all aspects of the French Empire” was produced, creating the “prototypes of the imperial sections of all international events that followed, including the British”.7 After this date, the exhibition was viewed by the organizers and the public as a “physical encyclopedia” capable of giving a global, organized and therefore safe view of a wild, unexplored and hostile world.8 In parallel with the development of anthropological sciences, the “villages” supposed to reproduce the local life of the overseas populations, coupled with parades, shows and performances dedicated to the cultural and ethnic diversity of the colonial empires, became one of the main pillars and “clous” of the exhibitions. This had the effect of reinforcing the mixture of registers, between science, popularization of knowledge  and pure leisure.

5  J.  Gardner, A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events. From the Great Exhibition to London 2012 (London: UCL Press, 2022), 42–84. 6  Anthony Hamber, Photography and the 1851 Great Exhibition (New Castle and London, Oak Knoll Press and V & A Publishing, 2018). 7  Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 87. 8  Benoît de l’Estoile, “Des races non pas inférieures, mais différentes: de l’exposition coloniale au musée de l’Homme”, in Claude Blanckaert, ed., Les politiques de l’anthropologie: discours et pratiques en France (1860–1940) (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2001), 393–397.

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This classification system expresses the political intention to control territories, civilizations and human groups whose supposed cultural and technical inferiority justified any form of tutelage. In the general context of colonization, all the actors and institutions of European imperialism produced groups and categories which made it easier to control the colonized: law, administration, medicine, Christian missions and “colonial” sciences, first of all anthropology, consolidated a process which can be called a colonial government.9 Exhibition and human parades were ­doubtless part of the system. During the first half of the twentieth century, they kept contributing to this taxonomic activity: the Antwerp International Colonial Exhibition of 1930 presented 22 groups and 109 classes; a year later, the Paris Colonial Exhibition had more than 160 classes, bringing together all aspects of the economic, political, social and cultural life of French and European overseas territories. Intended to put the world in a box and in images, the universal, international and colonial exhibitions thus became the theater, both serious and playful, of a strict organization of the social and political life of colonial governments. Photography, as a field that was both scientific and entertaining, thus played a double role in the context of the exhibitions, as a tool of representation and as a tool of domination.

Proving the Imperial Destiny of Portugal and Salazar’s Victory (Porto, 1934): The Political Function When Salazar came to power in Portugal, the country already had some practice in international and colonial exhibitions, both abroad and on its own soil, including the colonies. Then the new regime implemented a policy of intense, systematic and quite industrial colonial propaganda in which the great exhibitions played a key role, opening interesting comparisons regarding the visual culture issues with other European

9  Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: rethinking a research agenda”, in Frederick Cooper e Ann Stoler, ed., Tensions of Empire, colonial cultures in a bourgeois world (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 7; Emmanuelle Sibeud, “Les sciences sociales à l’épreuve de la situation coloniale”, Revue d’Histoire des sciences humaines, vol. 1/10 (2004), 3–10.

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dictatorships, as the nazi German regime or the fascist Italian one.10 Therefore, only a few months after the vote of the new Portuguese Constitution of 1933, which provided the institutional fundaments of the Portuguese New State (Estado Novo) regime,11 the new government of Portugal organized the first National Colonial exhibition in Porto, the second city of Portugal.12 Henrique Galvão, a quite turbulent army officer, was then chosen general commissioner to ensure the organization of the whole project.13 There are thousands of images that reproduce scenes and structures of the Portuguese colonial exhibition of 1934. This is not the case with the photographs exhibited inside the exhibition, which are rarer and difficult to access. To overcome this difficulty, it is necessary to seek help from written sources, which offer some indication of the collection procedures and the results expected by the organizers. The photographs exhibited in the expositions came from two sources. Firstly, they were found in collections already existing at the time, such as those of the institutions of knowledge, culture and colonial propaganda. Among these are the Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa (Lisbon Geographical Society, SGL), founded in 1875, the Agência geral das Colónias (General Agency of the Colonies, AGC), founded in 1924, and even private companies, which have provided statistical and advertising services (Companhia de Moçambique, Diamang). Secondly, some photographs were directly ordered by commissioners, sometimes by the minister of the colonies himself.14 In 1934, Minister 10  Nadia Vargaftig, Des Empires en carton. Les expositions coloniales au Portugal et en Italie (1918–1940) (Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2016); Vanessa Rocco, Photofascism. Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy (London, Bloomsbury, 2020). 11  March 19, 1933. 12  The Exhibition, officially called Exposição Colonial Nacional do Porto, took place between June 16 and September 30, 1934. 13  Lieutenant Henrique Galvão (1895–1970) participated, in 1927, in an attempt of coup against the new military regime and was exiled to Angola. He then came back to metropolis and enthusiastically joined the Portuguese New State (Estado Novo) for several years, occupying different functions in the state apparatus. Later, after the Second World War, he became an opponent of the regime and became an international celebrity in 1961 by trying to divert a line boat, the Santa Maria, in order to focus world’s attention to Portugal and its dictatorship. 14  The CM photographic archive was treated and digitized by the services of the Torre do Tombo National Archive, along with the written sources of the same. There are more than 5000 photos available on the site: http://ttonline.dgarq.gov.pt/cmz.htm. The Direction of Statistics and Propaganda was created in 1929; Arquivo da Companhia de Moçambique (ACM), NO 2753, Actas do Conselho de Administração, 65–66.

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Armindo Monteiro requested AGC’s propaganda services to “document the work of the dictatorship in the colonies”.15 Forty-two photographs, partially enlarged, were thus sent to Porto explicitly for this political purpose. On the walls of the rooms and inside the showcases of the pavilions of Porto, the photographs interacted with other graphical representations of the Portuguese Empire (statistical tables, paintings, models, dioramas, maps, etc.), creating a vast colonial imaginary where the photographic image plays a central role in objectifying Portugal’s imperial achievements. A complex network of representations was thus conceived, offering to the less-educated public an accessible and concrete version of the second chapter of the Colonial Act of 1930: “It is of the organic essence of Portugal to play the historical function of owning and colonizing overseas territories and civilizing populations living there.”16 Photographs of landscapes, individuals, ethnic groups and colonial achievements thus illustrated the richness and diversity of the Portuguese overseas territories and the colonizing effort of the metropolis in favor of its protégés. The numerous photographs of individuals and groups from all over the Portuguese Empire contributed to this colonizing discourse as they represented the anthropological diversity and the assimilation capacities of Portuguese colonialism. However, it would be wrong to overstate the probative value of the photographs exhibited in Porto, by not taking into account the persistence of other visual expressions of the Portuguese power in its overseas territories. For example, commissions were made to metropolitan painters and sculptors, which illustrate the coexistence between “traditional” figurative arts and the mechanical technology of photography, presented as “objective”. Yet organizers and commentators were fully confident in the demonstrative capacities of photography. In the official ECP Visitor’s Guide, the proof value of the photograph left no doubt, when it came to valuing the action of colonial companies, or in the space dedicated to Diamang, “[...] where graphics, samples, dioramas and photographs show the prosperity and possibilities of this great colonial enterprise”,17 or to celebrate 15  Arquivo Histórico-Ultramarino (AHU), Casa Forte, NO 994, letter from J. Garcez de Lencastre, General agente of Colonies, to Henrique Galvão, General commissioner of the Colonial Exhibition of Porto, June 1st, 1934. 16  Acto colonial, decreto-lei n° 18570, July 8th, 1930. 17  Mário Antunes Leitão and Vitorino Coimbra, Exposição Colonial Portuguesa, Porto 1934, guia oficial do visitante (Porto: Leitão, 1934), 28.

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Portugal’s school policy in its colonies. Four years before, the somewhat precipitous preparation of Portuguese participation in the Antwerp International Colonial Exhibition of 1930 provided an opportunity to present photographs representing Portuguese indigenous policy, a subject particularly valued abroad: schools, missions and dispensaries were exhibited in this way. An opinion from the Board of Political Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs insisted on the need to emphasize the sanitary action of the metropolis, “showing in numbers and photographs the work carried out in the various colonies.”18 As a result, “numbers and photographs” constituted the two clearest and doubtless illustrations of Portugal’s civilizing action outside the metropolis.

Stimulating Imperial Business and Helping Colonial Companies (Antwerp, 1930, and Porto, 1934): The Economic Function However, one must not forget that the colonial exhibitions also played a commercial role, revealing, or rather trying to reveal, Portugal’s economic capacities compared to rival empires in the international markets. This is all the more important in the critical context of the 1930s, marked by falling world prices. International exhibitions, such as the one that took place in Paris in 1931, showed strong competition between European empires for both customer and investor demand. This highlights the importance of exhibitions in the communication and commercial advertising strategies of a company, such as Companhia de Moçambique (CM). As a legacy of the Portuguese colonial policy at the end of the nineteenth century, this majestic company still exercised its sovereignty on the vast territory district of Manica and Sofala in the center of Portuguese East Africa in the 1930s, despite Salazar’s refusal to renew the concession signed in 1892 and due to expire in 1942. In this “end of reign” context, CM administrators were obliged to defend at all costs the work and economic prospects of the concession. Exhibitions thus constituted a much-needed field of action and strategic propaganda, as they coincided with the beginning of a decade marked by Salazar’s decision not to renew the concession and by a series of international scandals denouncing the methods of exploiting African 18  Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático (AHD), 3°P, A4, NO 45 “Exposições internacionais até 1933”, report of the Board of commercial affairs to the Minister of Colonies, s. d. (1930).

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labor force in the territory.19 In this sense, a Propaganda and Statistics Service was created in 1929, headed by former journalist, Herculano Nunes.20 The photographs of CM’s participation in the International Colonial Exposition of Antwerp in 1930 and even more in the Portuguese Colonial Exposition of Porto in 1934 show the benefits of a systematic propaganda policy, directed simultaneously at the Portuguese public, foreign investors and the new power in Lisbon. The good relations between Nunes and ECP commissioner Galvão became known in the particularly favorable conditions of the Company’s participation in the event. It benefited from an autonomous section, an individual pavilion in the gardens of the exhibition, rooms filled with models, showcases, statistical tables (the propaganda service was also responsible for the statistical production), samples of agriculture and mines. All of this formed a whole that provoked the admiration of the most demanding observers, such as the journalist of the national daily journal O Século,21 who concludes, “The documentary on the Territory of Manica and Sofala is perfect”.16 As seen above with the photographs commissioned by Minister Monteiro, the colonial exhibitions and the photographs they exhibited did not have exclusively imperial ambitions. They were also destined to serve the interests of political power then asserted, in the metropolis as well as in the overseas territories. The regime that gradually established and consolidated its influence on the country found in each exhibition the opportunity to affirm the return of political, financial and imperial stability and the role of savior of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Even before the ECP, which openly celebrated the new political order in Portugal, the fairs of colonial samples of Luanda and Lourenço Marques of 1932, already directed by Henrique Galvão, and the participation of Portugal in international exhibitions (Antwerp 1930 and especially Paris 1931) underlined 19  ACM, minutes of the Board of directors, n°2754, letter of the governor of the territory seeking the presence of the boss of the department of Propaganda to defend the CM, June 23, 1930. Eric Allina, Slavery by any other Name. African Life under Company Rule in Colonial Mozambique (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2012). 20  Herculano Nunes had a long and intense career as a journalist during the Republican years (1910–1926), writing for several newspapers in Porto and Lisbon and having become known as the founder of the outlaw legacy with Hermano Neves in 1915. From 1924, he gave a new direction to his professional life, joining large colonial companies, first the Bembe Copper Mining Company and then the Companhia de Moçambique. 21  O Século was one of the most important daily newspapers of Portugal, funded in 1880 by some young republican journalists. In the middle of the 1930, there was nevertheless no doubt about its adhesion to the new regime.

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the political virtues of the “providential man”, but it was rather in the “internal” dimension of Portuguese New State (Estado Novo) propaganda that photography celebrated the new order in Portugal. In 1934, the Porto Exhibition revealed all the new government’s intentions. Commissioner Galvão’s statements highlighted the organizers’ dual objective: on the one hand, the Portuguese merchants who wished to strengthen commercial ties with the colonies; on the other, a new government that wished to take advantage of the event to impress and appease a traditionally rebellious city. Therefore, the photographs of Domingos Alvão, the owner of one of the most important studios of Porto, showed a popular and populous exhibition, with pavilions and paths filled with enthusiastic visitors to the event.22 Six years later, in a more solemn record, photographs of O Século testified to the grandiose and protocolary character of the inauguration of the Portuguese World Exhibition in 1940, showing the highest political (President of the Republic Óscar Carmona, President of the Council António Salazar) and religious (Cardinal Patriarch Cerejeira) authorities of the country united to celebrate an eternal and legitimate Portugal, in its metropolitan border as well as in its overseas territories. The records of O Século also show visual testimonies of the great parade, the Cortejo do Mundo Português, which took place on June 30 (Figs. 9.1 and 9.2).

Ambiguous Portraits: Unexpected Functions Each exhibition gave rise to thousands of images, then reproduced in catalogs, leaflets, postcards and press articles. They offered the possibility of circulating between the detailed written descriptions and their iconographic testimony, immortalizing an experience that was by definition ephemeral and impossible to reconstitute from the empirical point of view. In the same way that the exhibitions brought the colonies to the metropolis, for those who would never visit the overseas territories, the photograph brought the exhibition to the whole country, enabling those that could not travel to Porto or Lisbon to view parts of the exhibition. Just as it brought the images of the exhibitions beyond national borders, in 22  Domingos Alvão (1872–1946) was already a recognized photographer in Portuguese political and cultural life in 1934, running a very prosperous company in Porto. Close to the Portuguese New State (Estado Novo), he was decorated by the president of the Republic in order to reward his photographic work.

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Figs. 9.1 and 9.2  Two rooms of the pavilion of the Companhia de Moçambique, ECP, 1934 (Photographic Archive of the Companhia de Moçambique, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo)

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brochures and catalogs translated into other languages or in the popular photographic postcards circulating globally since the turn of the century. Herman Lebovics recalls, “unlike a withterary critic who has the possibility of re-reading a book or a film critic who can see a film again, the exhibition’s own environment will never be accessible to us.”23 Nevertheless, the photograph associated with the descriptive literature of the exhibition enables us to visually reconstitute the latter allowing us to identify and to analyze the commissioners’ and their collaborators’ principal choices. The photographic portraits of the overseas natives reflect the difficulties and contradictions of official discourses, which were torn between the imperatives of the civilizing mission carried by colonial powers and the commercial objectives of the exhibitions meant to attract the public and arouse some sense of what was understood as being strange and exotic.24 This ambiguity is visible in the portrait of an Angolan sorcerer in the corpus of the Alvão company (Fig. 9.3).25 The challenging and defiant stare and the mysterious posture of this old man were valued by Domingos Alvão, official photographer of ECP, who seems to try to arouse a sense of strangeness and fear on the part of the public. An article from O Século highlights the sensational and somewhat disturbing presence, promising that the wizard “will do prodigies, things that will astound Whites themselves”.26 It is difficult to understand the reasons for the presence of this sorcerer in the exhibition, who refutes all the rhetoric of the colonizing and civilizing effort, reinforcing on the contrary a dimension of “disturbing strangeness”. A similar case is that of the two snake charmers and that of an allegedly Indian astrologer at the same Porto exhibition. The organizers are openly at risk of reinforcing cultural and ethnic stereotypes, thus counteracting the commitment of 23  Herman Lebovics, “Donner à voir l’Empire colonial. L’Exposition coloniale internationale de Paris en 1931”, Gradhiva (1989–1990), 19. 24  S.  Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth Century Britain (Chicago: UCP, 2011). 25  Alvão obtained the exclusive coverage of the event, publishing an official album and illustrating all the catalogs of the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition of Porto; Maria Serén, A Porta do Meio. A Exposição colonial de 1934, fotografias da casa Alvão (Porto: CPF, 2001), 33. Simon Dell has studied the polysemic nature of the portraits produced for the 1931 Paris International Exhibition in one of the chapters of his book; Simon Dell, The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary. Photography beteween France and Africa 1900–1939 (Leuven, Leuven University Press, 2020), 117–147. 26  “As raças do Império representadas no certame oferecem largo campo de interesse e observação”, O Século, june 20th, 1934.

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Fig. 9.3  Portrait of an Angolan “wizard”, ECP, 1934 (Domingos Alvão, Centro Português de Fotografia)

missionaries and administrators against what they call the “superstitions” of the natives. The imperatives of the colonial “shivers” seemed, here, to surpass the assimilationist ambitions of the Empire. These two images allow grasping of the narrowness of the margins and the extent of the potential misunderstandings between organizers and visitors around these involuntary actors of the colonial show. This ambiguity is multiplied when one pays attention the representations of native women.27 For the most part, women who came from the colonies to exhibitions in Porto or Lisbon took on an exclusively domestic  Filipa Lowndes Vicente, “Black Women’s Bodies in the Portuguese Colonial Visual Archive (1900–1975)”, Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies, 30/31, 2017, 16–67; the topic of the polysemous presence and/or participation of women in fairs and exhibitions has been studied in T.J. Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn ed., Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010) and Myriam Boussahba-Bravard and Rebecca Rogers ed., Women in International and Universal Exhibitions, 1876–1937 (New York and London: Routledge, 2018). 27

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role. They reproduced an artificial daily life, in the no less artificial context of the African village or Macanese street. They remained attached to a social function often reinforced by the colonial system itself.28 Mothers, wives and housewives prepared meals and looked after the children under the curious gaze of the visitors. Some of them, however, had a more productive function: it was the case of the wives of Mozambican craftsmen recruited by the Company of Mozambique in 1934 and again in 1940. They were represented in the photographs either in their family context, with husband and children, or in a female group, an image that enhanced their craft skills. Both situations are intended to display a strong degree of assimilation, be it through work done live in front of the visitors, body language or even dressing in European clothing/apparel. This assimilation was also confirmed by the written sources. Some of the European names of these ladies are known, like Carlota or Henriqueta.29 Only a few scarifications, visible on some female faces, upset this general impression (Fig. 9.4). Other female figures were photographed for reasons that had little to do with Portugal’s civilizing mission and much more with their physical qualities and clear erotic purposes, offering visitors a poor, cheap version of the colonial harem.30 Knowing the Portuguese society of the 1930s and its repugnance to any form of nudity and the considerable influence of the Catholic Church, this fact is surprising. However, under the pretext of the diffusion of ethnographic and anthropological knowledge of innocent, backward and little accustomed to Christian and Western pudeur, the 28  Rebecca Rogers, The Domestication of Women: discrimination in developing societies (London: Tavistock Publications, 1980); Arlette Gautier, “Femmes et colonialisme”, in Marc Ferro, ed., Le Livre noir du colonialisme (Paris: R. Laffont, 2003), 774; more recently, see the results of the international meeting called Femmes et genre en contexte colonial, XIXeXXe siècles, Paris, Institut d’Études politiques de Paris, January 19–21, 2012, whose presentations are accessible at the URL https://genrecol.hypotheses.org/. 29  ACM, NO 2166 AH, report of the Governor of Manica e Sofala Territory, to the delegate administrator of the CM, Beira, May 8, 1940. 30  Malek Alloula, Le Harem colonial: images d’un sous-érotisme, (Paris-Geneva: GaranceSlatkine, 1981); Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles, Boetsch, Christelle Taraud and Dominic Thomas, ed., Sexe, race et colonies. La domination des corps du XVe siècle à nos jours (Paris: La Découverte, 2018); Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann, “Under Imperial Eyes, Black Bodies, Buttlocks, and Breasts. British Colonial Photography and Asante Fetish Girls”, African Arts, summer 2012 vol. 45, n°2, 46–56.

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Fig. 9.4  Handcraft work of two Mozambican women, colonial area of The Exposição do Mundo Português, 1940 (Photographical Archive of the Companhia de Moçambique, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo)

colonial context not only tolerated this type of exhibition but also had the support of the highest civil and religious authorities. The most obvious case is that of the young Balanta maid named Rosinha, who arrived in Porto in 1934 with a group of 63 Guineans.31 As the winner of a contest organized by O Século and elected Queen of the Colonies, a series of photographs was consecrated to her which greatly insisted on her physical characteristics. An article of O Século revealed and reinforced this process of reification of women colonized in the Portuguese imperial project: “Rosinha”—a black beauty, who has already given rise to the crime and condemnation of a negro, raised between us, who embraced her, perhaps longing for the land that he does not know—worthes the charm and beauty of all the vil31  Isabel Morais, “‘Little Black Rose’ at the 1934 Exposição Colonial Portuguesa”, in TJ Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn ed., Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 19–36.

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lages. She smiles at everyone like a spoiled child. [...]” Rosinha” is of Balanta race, like those who live with her. Regulus Mony assures order, always difficult, because the beauties like “Rosinha” are many, although she is the most beautiful of all. Men do the usual life: they smoke, eat, sleep, walk. Women take special care of themselves. Invent capricious hairstyles, curl their short hair with mud balls and palm oil. They are adorned with necklaces, bracelets and rings of colored bead. And they open their red mouths to everyone, where their white teeth gleam like snow Perhaps the damned Negro, at this hour, disdain the black beauty. But other blacks and whites do not think so. “Rosinha” is the symbol of Africa, attractive, happy, who spreads grace around and loves the tranquility that the protection of the white gave her, and with it, other horizons, broad perspectives of progress and social improvement.32

All European stereotypes about Africa can be identified: sensuality, taste for adornment, indolence, laziness and immaturity. The uncontrollable libido of the man condemned for gross indecency reinforces a racist and naturalistic vision of Africans, unable to repress the injunctions of their bodies. Rosinha was not only a woman with generous curves to be gazed upon by Europeans. She embodied the entire African continent: young, feminine and protected by its symbolic union with a powerful and virile Europe. This union was based on the eroticism that, supposedly, emerged from the photographs, through the artificial poses of Rosinha. But the melancholy and bored expression of the model as well as her evasive look, contradicted the reporter’s comments about the young woman’s confident smile. Generally, the attitudes of the models reveal the various and subtle forms of agency of the colonized, even of those who made this uncommon, sometimes exciting, trip to the metropolis: Rosinha’s fleeting gaze, like the frowning air of the son of the Timorese ruler D.  Aleixo, under the awkward caress of President Óscar Carmona, denounces the insurmountable distance between the colonized and the colonizer, as if, after all, the photograph escaped its initial propaganda goals and demonstrated the exact opposite. It is therefore easy to grasp the risks taken by the photographers and the organizers of the exhibitions, as they were themselves not only caught up in the representations of their time but also partially aware of the illegitimate character—and even contested abroad, notably within the Komintern—of the imperial enterprise. Paradoxically, and contrary to 32  “As raças do Império representadas no certame oferecem largo campo de interesse e observação”, O Século, June 20th, 1934.

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what was stated at the beginning of this chapter, photography weakens as much as it strengthens colonial certainties. It becomes the standard of worries, perhaps also of anxieties of a domination that is more defensive than it appears at first glance.33 The mystery remains, however, to understand the longevity in the twentieth century of the Portuguese tutelage on its overseas territories and peoples, as an invitation to continue to question the role of photography as an instrument of both power and resistance (Fig. 9.5).

Fig. 9.5  The visit of the president of the Republic to the Exposição do Mundo português, 1940 (Photographical Archives of the Journal O Século, Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo)

33  Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

CHAPTER 10

Images of Angola and Mozambique in the Imperial Metropolis: Photographic Exhibitions Held at the Palácio Foz (1938–1960) Inês Vieira Gomes

Introduction Based on a “restorative” project set out as early as 1932, António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970) imagined reforming the nation and saving it from a future of political instability and economic and social chaos. Part of this national mission involved a project of cultural nationalism. In the words of Oliveira Salazar, “art, literature and science constitute the great

Based on an article by Inês Vieira Gomes, “Imagens de Angola e Moçambique na Metrópole. Exposições de Fotografia no Palácio Foz (1938–1960)”, in Filipa Lowndes Vicente (org.). O Império da Visão: fotografia no contexto colonial português 1860–1960 (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2014), pp. 353–365. Text translated by Martin Dale. I. V. Gomes (*) Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_10

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façade of nationality, what one sees from the outside”.1 The creation of the National Secretariat of Propaganda (SPN) in October 1933 formalised the “Politics of the Spirit” laid out by António Ferro (1895–1956), its first director. The SPN—later the National Secretariat of Information (SNI)— embodied the regime’s ideals: on the one hand, it made culture an instrumental part of propaganda, glorifying the regime; on the other, it reconciled tradition with artistic manifestations that were aligned with a certain understanding of modernity. The SPN/SNI’s cultural policy used exhibitions as one of its main pillars. The exhibition programme, developed during the early years, aimed to highlight the country’s highest achievements, from detailed fine art exhibitions to documental showcases that attested to the country’s development under Salazar’s firm hand. In addition to exhibitions held at the headquarters of the SPN/SNI, three large expressions of the Portuguese New State (Estado Novo) regime should be mentioned that gave form to imperial propaganda: the First Portuguese Colonial Exhibition, held in Porto in 1934; the Historical Exhibition of Occupation, in Lisbon in 1937; and, lastly, the Portuguese World Exhibition, in Lisbon in 1940, the greatest manifestation of the Portuguese history and its colonial empire. Under the patronage of the General Agency of the Colonies/General Overseas Agency (AGC/AGU), other exhibitions were held on colonial themes that were part of the exhibition programme of the SPN/SNI, as explained below. The exhibitions of photographs of Angola and Mozambique, which are analysed in this chapter, were obviously aligned with this discourse focused on projecting the colonies in the metropolis. Five photography exhibitions, held between 1938 and 1960, will be analysed herein: three focusing on Angola and two on Mozambique. The chronology ends one year before the start of the colonial war, for a specific reason. When, in August 1961, the Palácio Foz in Lisbon hosted the photography exhibition Why we are fighting in Angola, with images of the first uprisings against the Portuguese in Angola, that were widely reported in newspapers, leaflets and monographs, people living in the metropolis were confronted with a new reality. This exhibition, which was also presented in November that year, in Porto, marked a turning point in the imaginary universe associated to the colonies: idyllic landscapes were replaced by the horror of savagery in the heart of the Portuguese white community; submissive natives were replaced by insurgent “terrorists”. But photography 1

 António Ferro. Salazar. (Aveiro: Edições do Templo, 1978), p. 122.

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continued to play its role in the New State’s political project: in terms of legitimising the empire with or against Africans.2 The Colonial Act, enshrined in the 1933 Constitution, stated that it was “in the very essence of the Portuguese Nation to perform the historic duty to possess and colonize overseas dominions and to civilize the indigenous peoples that inhabit them”.3 The nationalist and colonialist regime structured colonial policy through the AGC, which was set up in 1924. With the clear aim of disseminating information about the colonies, throughout the mother country of Portugal, one of the AGC’s main purposes was to organise a series of propaganda exercises—exhibitions, trade fairs, dissemination of colonial objects and products, publication of monographs and film campaigns—that could contribute to the common purpose around an imperial project.4 In 1942, a partnership was formed between AGC and SPN via the appointment, by the Ministry of the Colonies, of a delegado [delegate] who was made responsible for coordinating their colonial propaganda.5 Alongside propaganda—leaflets, books, magazines and films—and the development of tourism programmes in the colonies, the exhibitions were, possibly, one of the clearest results of the institutional relationship and partnership between these two institutions. Developed for several years, this partnership was strengthened in the 1950s and 1960s by providing display cases at the Palácio Foz, coordinated by the AGU, which exhibited objects from the colonies. The exhibitions of photographs of Angola and Mozambique were part of this institutional partnership that aimed to join forces and disseminate the colonies in Portugal through the use of images, raising the general public’s awareness of the historic mission to colonise and civilise the overseas territories. The exhibitions of photographs of the colonies were aligned with a broader exhibition programme dedicated to colonial themes that aimed to enhance a series of cultural manifestations that would raise awareness of the colonies amongst the general public. From the 1940s onwards, the SPN/SNI’s exhibition programme included exhibitions on colonial 2  On this subject, see in this volume Afonso Dias Ramos. “Images that kill: counterinsurgency and photography in Angola circa 1961”. 3  Article 2 of Decree-Law No. 22,465 of 11 April 1933. 4  José Luís Campos de Lima Garcia. Ideologia e propaganda colonial no Estado Novo: da Agência Geral das Colónias à Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1924–1976. PhD thesis defended at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra, 2011, p. 123. 5  Ibid., p. 152.

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topics, from art exhibitions—of drawing, sculpture and painting in particular—to evocative exhibitions and industrial and tourism fairs. The exhibitions were initiated by AGC/AGU, which acted as an intermediary in the circulation of objects from the colonies to Portugal. Examination of the correspondence in the SNI’s archives reveals that a circuit existed, linking the colonies to the metropolis, which was mediated by the AGC/ AGU, via exhibitions held at the SPN/SNI’s headquarters. Frequently, the exhibitions were initially conceived in the colonies and only later shown at the SNI, refuting the idea that activities in the colonies were merely the result of policies devised in Portugal, and bolstering what could be deemed as a certain autonomy and cultural energy in the colonies. A notable example was João Martins da Costa (1921–2005), who travelled to Portuguese Guinea on an artistic expedition sponsored by the Centre for Colonial Studies (CEC) to collect pictorial motifs. His findings were shown at an exhibition in Bissau and, later, in 1949, in Lisbon (containing 20 oil paintings and 30 watercolours).6 Other artists benefitted from art grants. Albano Neves e Sousa (1921–1995), who was born in Matosinhos, Portugal, but who moved to Luanda at an early age, was given a grant by the Luanda Municipal Council to study at the School of Fine Arts in Porto. He was a member of the Grupo dos Independentes do Porto, together with Fernando Lanhas, and joined the Ethnographic Studies Mission of the Museum of Luanda. With sponsorship from the AGC, he held exhibitions at the headquarters of the SPN/SNI in 1944 and 1949 and in Porto in 1947.7

Elmano Cunha e Costa and the Mission to Angola The 1938 exhibition and subsequent exhibitions in Portugal dedicated to Angola in 1946 and 1951 were based on photographs taken by Elmano Cunha e Costa (1892–1955) and stem from the “Photographic Mission to Angola”.8 This mission, which took place between 1935 and 1938, coordinated by Elmano Cunha e Costa and sponsored by AGC, primarily aimed to undertake an ethnographic survey of the indigenous and tribal  National Archive of Torre do Tombo (ANTT), SNI, Box 430.  ANTT, SNI, Box 430 and Box 437. 8  Designation attributed by António Sena. História da Imagem Fotográfica em Portugal 1839–1997. (Porto: Porto Editora, 1998), p. 261. See in this volume Cláudia Castelo and Catarina Mateus. “Ethnographic Album of Angola”. 6 7

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peoples of Angola in the form of a photographic anthropological study for the Ethnographic Album of Angola.9 This survey, which lasted roughly four years, produced around 10,000 photographs. This set of documental photographs is possibly the most extensive collection dedicated to the ethnographic aspects of a former Portuguese colony commissioned from a private individual, with no academic and professional link to ethnology or any other science dedicated to colonial issues. It should also be said that the photographic mission to Angola, which had no academic underpinnings, was contemporaneous to other work undertaken by the Board of Geographical Missions and Colonial Research (JMGIC)—created in 1936 by the Ministry of the Colonies—within a context of producing colonial scientific knowledge. Elmano Cunha e Costa, a lawyer by training and profession, had the chance to explore photography in Angola which, he said, was “an old obsession in my family, and an absorbing passion in my own case”.10 Elmano Cunha e Costa relied on help from Father Carlos Estermann (1895–1976), superior of the Catholic Missions in the Province of Huíla, who played a key role as his interpreter, establishing contact with several tribes.11 This partnership led in 1941 to the publication of the 9  It is possible to find parallels with the photographs of José Augusto Cunha Moraes (1855–1933). In the late 1870s and the early 1880s, Cunha Moraes recorded different aspects of the cities, towns, customs and landscapes of Angola in an anthropological, documentary and ethnographic record. His photographs were included in the four volumes of the album, África Occidental, Album Photographico e Descriptivo, edited by David Corazzi, published in Portugal between 1885 and 1889, and nowadays considered to be one of the most important Portuguese albums of photographs taken in Africa. On the subject, see: Jill Dias. “Photographic Sources for the History of Portuguese Speaking Africa, 1870–1914”: History of Africa, 18 (1991), pp. 67–82; António Pedro Vicente and Nicolas Monti. Cunha Moraes. Viagens em Angola. 1877-1897. (Coimbra: Encontros de Fotografia de Coimbra, 1991); Maria de Fátima de Sá Guerra Marques Pereira. Casa Fotografia Moraes. A Modernidade Fotográfica na Obra dos Cunha Moraes. Master’s thesis presented at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto, 2001. 10  Elmano Cunha e Costa. Alguns aspectos de estudos etnográficos, attached leaflet to nr. 220 of the Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias. (Lisbon: Agência Geral das Colónias, 1943), p. 12. 11  On this subject: Inês Ponte, Unpublished stories: photography, archives and perceptions regarding the missionary Carlos Estermann in Angola in the 1960s (in this volume); Inês Vieira Gomes, “Álbum de Penteados do Sudoeste deAngola”/“Southwest Angola Hairstyles Album” in Filomena Serra (ed.). Fotografia Impressa e Propaganda em Portugal no Estado Novo/Printed Photography and Propaganda in the Portuguese Estado Novo. (Gijón: Muga, 2021), pp. 212–213; pp. 355–356.

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co-­authored book Negros [Negroes], an ethnographic study of several indigenous Angolan tribes, with negative plates by Elmano Cunha e Costa that included an illustration by the artist Júlio de Sousa (1906–1966)12 on the cover. The text published in Negros corresponded to the text that was to be included in the two first volumes of the albums to be published on the photographic mission to Angola,13 which never materialised, as explained below. Travelling across Angola from “end to end, covering a total of over one hundred thousand kilometres”, always accompanied by his Rolleiflex, Elmano Cunha e Costa would always processed his footage in Moçâmedes and “the negative plates always in duplicate should be sent to the metropolis with an indication of the captions to be used”.14 In addition to the photographic process and storage of the plates, Elmano Cunha e Costa wrote about the logistics of producing a photographic mission of this size: I consider it opportune to mention, for the sake of public clarification and to dampen down the most absurd fantasies, that everything we did, including the purchase of a Ford truck, photographic material, wages, fuel, salaries for the whites, gifts for the natives, etc., cost the state no more than two hundred thousand escudos.15

Some photographs from Elmano Cunha e Costa’s mission were first shown in Benguela in April 1937. In other words, the first photographic exhibition was held in Angola. The exhibition of “ethnographic studies”, which consisted of 100 photographs, at a time when the mission was still ongoing—the newspaper O Lobito mentioned that 3900 photographs had already been taken—took place at the Palácio do Comércio de Benguela and its opening, on 3rd April, was attended by the provincial governor. Prior to the inauguration, Elmano Cunha e Costa gave a conference 12  For example, the artist Júlio de Sousa illustrated texts and magazines by Maria Lamas, including the illustration on the cover of the author’s novel Para Além do Amor. (Lisbon: Editorial O Século, 1935). 13  Carlos Estermann. Etnografia do Sudoeste de Angola. Memórias. Série Antropológica e Etnológica, Vol. I. (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1956), p. 10. 14  Costa, Ibid., 1943, pp. 12–13. 15  Catálogo da Exposição de Etnografia Angolana—Agência Geral das Colónias; documentário etnográfico, carta etnográfica e legendas da autoria do Dr. Elmano Cunha e Costa. [Catalogue of the Angolan Ethnography Exhibition—General Agency of the Colonies; ethnographic documentary, ethnographic letters and captions by Dr. Elmano Cunha e Costa]. (Lisbon: SNI, 1946), s/p.

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entitled “My dolls…”, framing the “valuable ethnographic negatives—an interesting emphasis, extensive like a documentary film, thrilling the retina of all those with the emotional sensibility to admire what is beautiful”.16

Exhibitions of Angola, 1937–1951 By being shown, substantially, in the exhibitions in the SPN/SNI’s headquarters and documented in the respective catalogues, this set of documental photographs helped in some way to disseminate Angolan ethnography to a wider audience in the metropolis. This propaganda exercise, included in the plan to disseminate the colonies in Portugal, constitutes an example of the use of photography as a means of informing the general public about the colonies. Furthermore, the exhibitions gave material form to the photographic mission because, although the intention was to publish the photographic albums from this mission, this never happened. The exhibitions were one of the few ways at the time in which the general public could come into contact with the images taken in Angola.17 However, it should be noted that in 1960 the Overseas Research Board (JIU) with support from the Municipal Council of Sá da Bandeira (today Lubango), Angola, published the Álbum de Penteados do Sudoeste de Angola [“Album of Hairstyles of Southwest Angola”] by Father Carlos Estermann. The theme of this album was very similar to that of the exhibition shown at the Palácio Foz in Lisbon, in 1951, as we shall see, and included an essay by Carlos Estermann, as well as his photographs: “It should be borne in mind that when taking the photographs the author was

16  Newspaper O Lobito, ‘Exposições de Estudos Etnográficos’, 10 April 1937, pp.  1; 4. Consultation of newspapers published in Angola was crucial to profiling this exhibition. When I wrote the original article in 2013, I did not have any reference to the exhibition held in Benguela, an exhibition that pioneered those that later took place in Portugal. 17  The album should have been published in ten volumes with photographs from the “Photographic Mission to Angola”. Father Carlos Estermann stated that the album should include a bilingual text—Portuguese and French—and photo captions in four languages: Portuguese, French, English and German. Estermann, Ibid., 1956, p.  10. It should be noted, however, that dozens of photographs taken by Elmano Cunha e Costa were reproduced in the work by Mendes Correia. Raças do Império. (Porto: Portucalense Editora, 1943).

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more concerned with creating an ethnographic document through images than with giving his work an artistic stamp”.18 Based on Elmano Cunha e Costa’s photographs from Angola, three exhibitions were organised on different themes: Exhibition of Photographs from Angola; Exhibition of Angolan Ethnography and Exhibition of Female Hairstyles and Adornments of the Natives of Angola. If, on the one hand, the particularity of these exhibitions was that they gave form to the photographic mission, then, on the other, since the albums were never published, as already mentioned, it also allowed the general public to be placed in the empowering position of European and discover distant and “exotic” lands, the indigenous peoples who lived there and their customs.19 Elmano Cunha e Costa’s photographs show a visual canon of a “savage” Africa and peoples that had not yet come into contact with civilisation, a view that was greatly explored by the European colonial powers and legitimised colonialisation from a civilisational perspective. Opened with pomp and circumstance, with the head of state and other high officials in attendance, the exhibitions became celebrations of the regime surrounded by imperial propaganda. Periodicals echoed these manifestations, reproducing writings and images and legitimising the need to highlight the imperial project and the continuity of exhibitions of this nature (Fig. 10.1). The first exhibition shown in July 1938, the Exhibition of Photographs from Angola, featured 44 photos on aspects of ethnography and landscape in Angola. They revealed an “admirable set, ranging from the colour of the strikingly bright landscapes to the beauty of the sculptural bodies of the amber-coloured women and men”.20 18  Carlos Estermann. Álbum de Penteados do Sudoeste de Angola. (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1960), p.  6. Carlos Estermann was placed in Mission in the Cuanhama and later in Huíla. From 1928, he collaborated with Anthropos magazine and wrote a set of monographs. Key examples include: Etnografia do Sudoeste de Angola, Volumes I–III (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1956–1961); Penteados, adornos e trabalhos das muílas. (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1970); A vida económica dos Bantos do Sudoeste de Angola. (Luanda: Junta Provincial de Povoamento de Angola, 1971). 19  This idea was explored by Emília Tavares: the access to the sights of far places or not so distant places, constitutes possible propaganda for the most favoured people, and dream locations for less fortunate people. In this way an inventory is created that becomes almost a matrix, whatever the place to be photographed, that seeks to fulfil the main objectives—to be seen as places of exception and evasion. Emília Tavares. “A Fotografia dos Lugares”, in Cadernos de Fotografia. (Figueira da Foz: Frederica João, 2010), p. 26. 20  Newspaper O Século, “O Chefe do Estado inaugurou ontem uma notável exposição de fotografias de Angola no Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional” [The Head of State inaugurated yesterday a remarkable exhibition of photographs of Angola in the Secretariat of National Propaganda], 5 July, 1938, p. 1.

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Fig. 10.1  “An exhibition of colonial customs by Dr. Elmano da Cunha e Costa was inaugurated at the National Secretariat of Propaganda”. Newspaper O Primeiro de Janeiro, 5 July 1938, p. 5. National Library of Portugal

The 1938 exhibition shown at the SPN’s studio in Rua de S. Pedro de Alcântara was the first to display only photographs dedicated to a single Portuguese colony. It was deemed a “veritable artistic happening since the works of the illustrious exhibitor are of rare beauty and take one by surprise with their very interesting aspects of life, customs and habits of the indigenous peoples of Angola”.21 The magazine Objectiva (1937–1945), the main Portuguese periodical on artistic photography, wrote that the 21  Newspaper Diário de Notícias, “Exposição de fotografias sobre motivos de Angola” [Exhibition of photographs on motifs from Angola], 3 July 1938, p. 2. The 1938 exhibition was part of a relatively recent movement of photographic exhibitions in Portugal. In 1930 the 1st Exhibition of Independents was held, the first art exhibition held in Portugal to include photography. The Photographic Section of the 1st Exhibition of Independents was attended by the photographer Mário Novais and two writers—Branquinho da Fonseca and Edmundo Bettencourt: Emília Tavares. “Hibridismo e Superação: A Fotografia e o Modernismo Português”, in Arte Portuguesa do Século XX 1910–1960. (Lisbon: Leya/MNAC-MC, 2011), p. 130.

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exhibition had “beautiful photographs of Angola, richly presented, perfect in even the smallest details, demonstrating an indisputably superior technique”, recognising that “official entities did well to use these and other photos not shown by the artist to produce an album of propaganda about Angola that will be superb”.22 The exhibition was designed like an art exhibition of the time—a nineteenth-century exhibition layout, framed photographs hung from curtains decorating the space—which was very different from those that followed. At the end of the exhibition, the photographs were intended for the Exhibition-Fair of Angola in 1938, opened in August by the president of the Republic, General Óscar Carmona (1869–1951).23 On 29 September 1946, the Exhibition of Angolan Ethnography opened at the SNI at Palácio Foz’s headquarters, in the Praça dos Restauradores, with around 500 photos of different Angolan tribes. The exhibition also featured an ethnographic letter written by Elmano Cunha e Costa, which, in his own view, contributed to correct certain details in the information in the letter organised by the Secretary of Indigenous Trade and reproduced in José de Oliveira Ferreira Diniz’s book Populações Indígenas de Angola [Indigenous Populations of Angola].24 The photographs shown at the exhibition follow the criteria for exhibiting the different tribes of Angola that Elmano Cunha e Costa himself contacted as part of the photographic mission. The themes are transversal: 22  Magazine Objectiva, “Exposição de fotografias do dr. Elmano Cunha e Costa” [Exhibition of photographs by Dr. Elmano Cunha e Costa], no 15, August 1938, p. 38. 23  Newspaper Diário da Manhã, “Exposição de fotografias de Angola” [Exhibition of photographs of Angola], 5 July 1938, p. 1. This information could not be confirmed because the catalogue of the Angola Fair-Exhibition lists the materials displayed, by pavilions of the different regions of Angola, but without the titles of the works and respective author’s identification. See the catalogue: Álbum Comemorativo da Exposição-Feira de Angola [Commemorative Album of the Angola Fair-Exhibition]. (Luanda: Imprensa Nacional de Angola, 1938). Also, dated 1938, dispatch by the Lisbon Administration of the first objects constituted by a collection of photographs from the album of the Expedition to Muantianvua, coordinated by Henrique de Carvalho between 1884 and 1888 in Angola, to be shown in the Historic Room of the Dundo Museum under the jurisdiction of DIAMANG (Diamond Company of Angola). Nuno Porto. “Under the Gaze of the Ancestors—Photographs and performance in Colonial Angola”, in Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (eds.). Photographs, Objects, Histories. (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 117. 24  Catálogo da Exposição de Etnografia Angolana. (Lisbon: SNI, 1946), s/p. The author refers to the book by José de Oliveira Ferreira Diniz. Populações Indígenas de Angola. (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade, 1918).

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dwellings; adornments; aspects of domesticity, farming, medicine and surgery; arts; witchcraft rituals; and funeral ceremonies. The design of this exhibition and the respective exhibition rooms differed totally from the earlier exhibition of 1938. It consisted of documentary photography in which the photographs, attached directly to the room partitions with the respective captions by Elmano Cunha e Costa himself, are shown in large number and sequence, giving viewers a monumental visual experience.25 The presence of vases with natural plants in the rooms give the exhibition an exotic and particular detail (Figs. 10.2 and 10.3).26 The Exhibition of Female Hairstyles and Adornments of the Natives of Angola, opened in March 1951, was the last exhibition of photographs by Elmano Cunha e Costa. To mark it, the newspaper Diário da Manhã interviewed Elmano Cunha e Costa. In it, he recalled with nostalgia the years he lived in Angola and defended his work, which was unique in Portugal and unparalleled for any other colony, “with thousands of images, capturing landscapes, dwellings, habits and customs of these respectable collaborators of our colonial mission”.27 With around 200 photos and adornments from the collections of the Lisbon Geographic Society (SGL) and AGC, this exhibition differed from the other two by focusing on a particular theme, in contrast to the general nature of earlier exhibitions. The Exhibition of Female Hairstyles and Adornments of the Natives of Angola was reported in the newspapers as an exhibition for Portuguese women, because just like “their white sisters”,

25  The design of this exhibition is not unprecedented, and this exhibition scheme is recurrent in exhibitions of colonial photography. See, for example, an aspect of the photographs exhibited at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, recalling the planning of a photographic album, in Christraud M.  Geary (ed.). In and Out of Focus. Images from Central Africa, 1885–1960. (National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2002), p. 67. 26  The Exhibition of Angolan Ethnography was presented in 1947 in the festive salons of the Coliseu of Porto and its opening included a speech by Elmano Cunha e Costa. ANTT, SNI, Box 2653, Letter from the General Agency of the Colonies, dated 15 April 1947. 27  Newspaper Diário da Manhã, “Lisboa terá uma verdadeira surpresa dentro de dias ao conhecer os adornos e os artísticos penteados das indígenas de Angola” [Lisbon will have a real surprise within days when it learns about adornments and the artistic hairstyles of the natives of Angola], 19 February 1951, pp. 1 and 6. After this exhibition, Elmano Cunha e Costa collaborated between 1951 and 1954 in the revision of the Photographic Archive of the SNI and in the elaboration of the expedition files of the same organisation. ANTT, SNI, Box 1352, Box 1643 and Box 173.

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Fig. 10.2  Opening of the Exhibition of Angolan Ethnography. Unidentified photographer. 28 December 1946. National Archive of Torre do Tombo (ANTT)

“native Angolan women know how to take care of themselves—though with a certain touch of exoticism that the exhibited photos clearly reveal”.28 The reports about the exhibitions of colonial photographs in the newspapers reveal a figurative language that tended to be racist. Reports about the Exhibition of Female Hairstyles and Adornments of the Natives of Angola reflect a discourse split between racial and gender prejudice: Which does not mean, however, that these Angolan women, in their primitive coquetry, do not possess the same charming and futile concern for their looks as the elegant civilised ladies of Chiado... they both seek to beautify themselves, using nails or coins, and embellish their personal appearance with artistic hairstyles that are the hallmark of the dictates of fashion. Women 28  Newspaper Novidades, “Vai abrir em breve no S.N.I. uma exposição de penteados africanos” [An exhibition of African hairstyles will open soon in the S.N.I.], 19 February 1951; Newspaper A Defesa, “No S.N.I. uma Exposição de Penteados Africanos” [An exhibition of African hairstyles in the S.N.I.], 20 February 1951.

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Fig. 10.3  Opening of the Exhibition of Angolan Ethnography. Unidentified photographer. 28 December 1946. National Archive of Torre do Tombo (ANTT) are essentially the same at every latitude, therefore, despite the differences in culture, colour and preferences.29

This type of pejorative and racial reasoning had already been explored in newspapers at the time of the Portuguese Industrial Exhibition in 1932, which took place in the Parque Eduardo VII in Lisbon and “recreated” a village of indigenous natives from Guinea.30 29  Newspaper O Século, “Vão ver como se penteiam e adornam as beldades da província de Angola na exposição que, por iniciativa da Agência-Geral das Colónias, se inaugura, esta tarde, no Secretariado Nacional de Informação” [They will see how they the beauties of the province of Angola dress and adorn themselves, in the exhibition that, on the initiative of the General Agency of the Colonies, will be inaugurated this afternoon in the National Secretariat of Information], 3 March 1951, p. 1. 30  On this subject, see, for example, the newspaper O Século: “Os pretos da Guiné estão sendo alvo duma curiosidade, que exige a intervenção enérgica da Polícia” [Guinean blacks are being the target of a curiosity that requires the energetic intervention of the Police], 17 September 1932, p. 3; “A Grande Exposição Industrial Portuguesa” [The Great Portuguese Industrial Exhibition], 25 September 1932, p. 3.

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The three exhibitions, based on the photographs taken by Elmano Cunha e Costa, reflect the initiative of AGC/AGU aimed at metaphorically informing Portuguese citizens about the colonialisation project. The photographs were a response to an opportunity to map the world and therefore became documents that gave form to scientific knowledge and crystallised an object, individual or place in time as part of the collective memory of a Nation, enclosing the myriad meanings of a photograph within the photographic object itself. Its importance was seen by Elmano Cunha e Costa: “The photographic image is helpful and documentaries in this genre are absolutely indispensable, for their use in dissemination and propaganda, illustration of books and, lastly, supporting in-depth studies.”31 In addition to the exhibitions of photographs of aspects of Angola, two exhibitions were held dedicated to Mozambique, as part of the promotion of the colonies and dissemination of the imperial project in Portugal. The photographic exhibitions sought to be an accurate documentary of the overseas possessions, gradually replacing the recreation of villages inhabited by natives in Portugal, while maintaining the same style of exhibition. Photography was seen as a means of materialising reality.

Mozambique Through a Different Lens The exhibition Mozambique in Images, which took place in August 1950 in Lisbon, was conceived in Mozambique and first shown in the city of Lourenço Marques (today Maputo). Under the direction of Joaquim Pereira de Macedo—founder of the magazine Capricórnio: revista de cultura, artes e letras, which attested to the cultural and artistic activity of Lourenço Marques, although only two issues were published, in April and September 1958—the Casa da Metrópole de Moçambique, where the exhibition was held, produced an exhibition of photographs from its collection.32 Images were seen as the perfect means to portray reality: “Anyone who does not know Mozambique will leave this exhibition well informed, almost without need for explanation.” And therefore it was a

 Catálogo da Exposição de Etnografia Angolana, Ibid., 1946, s/p.  The author is grateful for the availability of António Sopa and his clarifications on the Casa de Metrópole de Moçambique. 31 32

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chance to show the overseas territories to the inhabitants of the metropolis, helping to create a mental image of the colonies (Fig. 10.4).33 This exhibition in Lisbon, alongside a film festival showing eight films about Portuguese Africa—Angola and Mozambique—reflects the regime’s ideology in disseminating the empire through images, in a widened concept that included both photography and film (moving image). The film festival took place on 11 August 1950, one day after the opening of Mozambique in Images, and it featured films by Filipe de Solms and Ricardo Malheiro: Beira; O Karavial em Angola; Lourenço Marques, O ensino em Angola; Chá (from the series “Riquezas de Moçambique”); Lobito, cidade do progresso; and Sisal e Luanda, cidade feiticeira. The films were supported by the Municipal Councils of Luanda, Lobito, Lourenço Marques and Beira, the Angola and Mozambique Export Boards, the Public Instruction Services of Angola and the Association of Sisal Producers of Mozambique.34 The newspaper O Oriente, published in Mozambique, referred to the exhibition’s photographers as follows: “Some of the exhibited photographs have artistic merit, proof of the fact that art photography is not unknown in Mozambique.”35 The fact that the photos were taken by local photographers, which may help to explain why their names were not revealed and so are not known today, does not substantially alter the themes presented. The dominant discourse remains. In addition to a landscape and ethnographic focus, the depiction of “modernity” revealed around public works—roads, bridges, types of dwellings, ports, transport, factories, mines, schools—as well as agriculture and the Catholic missions, health care and a historical revivalism based on Portuguese monuments that recounted Portugal’s historical presence, is defined by the schematic 33  “Exposição Moçambique pela Imagem. Grande Repercussão na imprensa metropolitana do documentário fotográfico de Moçambique” [Exhibition Mozambique in Images. Great Repercussion on the metropolitan press of the documentary photographs of Mozambique], Newspaper O Oriente, Lourenço Marques, 16 September 1950, pp. 1 e 3, p. 3. 34  Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias, vol. XXVI, no. 302–303, August–September 1950, p. 167. According to Garcia, the General Agency of the Colonies had only one film in 1932, and in a few months it had 40 films, with support from the Ministry of Colonies, the General Government of Mozambique, the Commissariat of the Paris Exhibition and the Army photographic services. Garcia, Ibid., 2011, p. 135. 35  “Exposição Moçambique pela Imagem. Grande Repercussão na imprensa metropolitana do documentário fotográfico de Moçambique”. Newspaper O Oriente, Lourenço Marques, 16 September 1950, p. 3.

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Fig. 10.4  “Mozambique in Images—a beautiful exhibition inaugurated at the S.N.I. by the Minister of Colonies”. Newspaper O Século, 11 August 1950, p. 1. National Library of Portugal

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categorisation of “social” inventory that governs, for example, how the photographic archives of the AGC/AGU and SPN/SNI are organised.36 Notwithstanding the fact that the visual structure is governed by categories defined by the metropolis, the fact that the exhibition was conceived and held in Lourenço Marques reveals a decentralisation of power. In other words, not everything was controlled from Portugal. Furthermore, the exhibition consisted of the first set of documental photographs exclusively dedicated to Mozambique, where photography assumed the role of substantiating the Portuguese presence in the colony and, consequently, the effects of administering and subsequently “civilizing” the colonised peoples.

João Augusto Silva: The Image Hunter Ten years later, in 1960, another photographic exhibition was held in Portugal, dedicated to Mozambique, with particular focus on local life and exotic and wild animals. The exhibition, Gorongosa: a paradise of wild animals, featured documentary photography by João Augusto Silva (1910–1990), a writer and illustrator who had exhibited works in 1929 at the Casa Aguiar, together with Tom (Thomaz de Mello) and in other venues in Lisbon, Porto and Coimbra. An official in the colonial administration from the 1930s to 1974, João Augusto Silva earned literary recognition in 1936 with his first book, Da Vida e Amor na Selva [On Life and Love in the Jungle], which was awarded the first Prize in Colonial Literature by the AGC. He also wrote on hunting, namely a book published for the Paris World Fair of 1937: Grandes chasses: tourisme dans l’Afrique Portugaise.37 36  In this exhibition, the photographs were grouped into the following categories: Landscapes, Flora and Fauna (21 photos); Ethnography (55 photos); Bridges and Roads (32 photos); Types of Residences and Neighbourhoods (27 photos); Ports and Navigation (30 photos); Transport (18 photos); Factories, Mines, Companies, Companies, Societies, etc. (15 photos); Agriculture, Hydraulics and Livestock (27 photos); Churches and Missions (15 photos); Health Services (18 photos); Primary Schools, High Schools and Museums (13 photos); Mocidade Portuguesa and Sports (22 photos); Cities and Towns (31 photos); Social Life (5 photos); Today’s Monuments and Vestiges of the Past (18 photos). 37  João Augusto Silva published other books: Animais Selvagens: contribuição para o estudo da fauna de Moçambique [Wild Animals: contribution to the study of the fauna of Mozambique], published in 1956 with drawings and photographs by the author; Gorongosa: Experiências de um Caçador de Imagens [Gorongosa: Experiences of an Image Hunter], 1964; Selva Maravilhosa: Histórias de Homens e Bichos [Marvellous Jungle: Stories of Men

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João Augusto Silva, a hunter of animals and also of images, an expression he himself used in the catalogue of the exhibition held at the Palácio Foz, swapped his rifle for a camera.38 The analogy between taking a picture and firing a gun was established by Susan Sontag when she identified the use of a camera as a sublimation for a weapon.39 João Augusto Silva’s experience when hunting and on long stays in the bush gave him a prowess in handling a camera to take pictures in risky situations. Like Elmano Cunha e Costa, João Augusto Silva wrote about technical issues and his own photographic process in capturing aspects of life and wild animals. Amongst other references, the author writes: For me, small format cameras (for 35-mm film) are the best for this type of work. Besides excellent technical characteristics, they are portable and easy to handle. As they generally use a 36-frame roll, they let you take a rapid succession of photos of the same subject with different diaphragms. If you’re not very skilled at using the light, mainly in the very variable conditions of the bush, then it’s excellent as it allows you to choose the most interesting of the negatives later or the one with the best exposure.40 and Animals], 1965, a novel based on the Mozambican oral tradition, republished in 1971 and with illustrations by José Antunes; and Contribuição para o estudo bioecológico da Palanca Real (Hippotrgus Niger Variani) [Contribution to the biocological study of Palanca Real (Hippotrgus Niger Variani)]. (Lisbon: Junta de Investigações do Ultramar, 1972). In 1977, already as curator of the Lisbon Zoo, he published the practical guide of this institution. More recently, in 2013, he published the book Atlântida. Romance de D. Salomé e outras histórias. Histórias e contos da Guiné, Angola e Moçambique [Atlântida. Novel of D. Salomé and other stories. Stories and tales from Guinea, Angola and Mozambique]. (Lisbon: Edições Vieira da Silva, 2013), authored by João Augusto Silva and with the reproduction of some photographs and drawings by the author. On 3 May 2013, the Lisbon Geographic Society organised a symposium honouring João Augusto Silva on his different achievements and contributions. 38  Gorongosa: paraíso dos animais selvagens. (Lisbon: SNI, 1960). 39  Sontag emphasises the common lexicon: loading; aiming, and shooting. Susan Sontag. On Photography. (London: Penguin, 1979), p.  14. The proximity between photographic practice and the use of weapons goes back to the nineteenth century. The English photographer Samuel Bourne (1834–1912), who photographed intensively in India, wrote in 1863 about the power of photography and referred to the inventors of photography also as inventors of arms. Vidya Dehejia. “Fixing a Shadow”, in India through the lens. Photography 1840–1911. (Washington D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M.  Sackler Gallery; Smithsonian Institution, 2000), p. 21. 40   João Augusto Silva. Animais Selvagens—contribuição para o estudo da fauna de Moçambique [Wild Animals—contribution to the study of the fauna of Mozambique]. (Lourenço Marques: Imprensa Nacional de Moçambique, 1956), p. 16.

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The exhibition Gorongosa: a paradise of wild animals opened on 24 October 1960, three months after the government declared the Gorongosa Nature Reserve a national park and considerably increased its boundaries.41 The Gorongosa, which had been under the administration of the Companhia de Moçambique since 1921 as a hunting reserve, in the Sofala region, was one of the tourism symbols of the Portuguese New State regime—welcoming the Portuguese President Francisco Craveiro Lopes, on an official visit, in 1956—and clearly rivalled the Kruger National Park in the neighbouring colony of South Africa. The Gorongosa National Park, reported in periodicals, magazines and monographs, with images that crystallised the Gorongosa as an African Eden,42 answered to a mental picture created not just via the spread of images intended to reveal the exoticism of the wildlife, but also through literature. In 1960, Vitorino Nemésio wrote a chronicle in “Cadernos de Bolso” on his visit to Gorongosa entitled “The Elephants of Gorongosa” during his stay in Mozambique as part of the 15-day “1st Cultural Outreach Course” in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique, and Luanda, Angola, together with other famous personalities.43 41  In the subsequent 15 years (1960–1975) Gorongosa National Park was visited by several celebrities who according to the Park’s own website included: John Wayne (actor), Joan Crawford (actress), Gregory Peck (actor), James Lovell (astronaut), Tippi Hedren (actress) and James Michener (writer). 42  Katie Mckeown. “‘A once & future Eden’. Gorongosa National Park & the making of Mozambique”, in Richard Voks (ed.) Photography in Africa. Ethnographic Perspectives. (Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey, 2012), p. 166. 43  The lessons of the “I Course of Cultural Extension” were entrusted to: Vitorino Nemésio (Portuguese Language and Literature); Orlando Ribeiro (Geography of Portuguese Expansion); Delfim Santos (Pedagogy); Almeida Lima (Neurology); Lopes de Andrade (Ophthalmology); Flávio Resende (Natural Sciences); Torre da Assunção (Mineralogy); Almeida Ribeiro (Pharmacy); Jacinto Nunes (Economic and Financial Sciences); Adrião Segurado (Mechanics of the reactors of atoms); Marcelo Caetano (Political Law and Paulo Cunha (Proved Right). Newspaper Diário de Notícias, “Comemorações Henriquinas”, September 14, 1960, p.1. Other authors wrote about Gorongosa. In 1964, a monograph by José Maria d’Eça de Queiroz was published, entitled Santuário Bravio: os animais surpreendentes da Gorongosa e Safaris em Moçambique/Wild Sanctuary: the astonishing animals of Gorongosa and Safaris in Mozambique (Lisbon: Empresa Nacional de Publicidade, 1964). In 1969, the novel Fim de semana na Gorongosa: romance de aventuras [Weekend in Gorongosa: novel of adventures] was published, by the Portuguese writer Fernanda de Castro (1900–1994) and with illustrations by Inês Guerreiro. This author had already published another children’s novel on colonial issues: Mariazinha em África: romance para meninos [Little Maria in Africa: a novel for young children], with illustrations by the painter, Sarah Affonso, published in 1925.

Fig. 10.5  Detail of the exhibition Gorongosa: a wildlife paradise. Palácio Foz, Lisbon, 1960. Unidentified photographer. ANTT, SNI, box 3035

The exhibition Gorongosa: a wildlife paradise, at Palácio Foz, was based around documentary photography that crystallised aspects of the park’s wildlife. The 128 images shown focused on animals native to the Gorongosa, especially buffalos, elephants, hippos, lions and zebras: “Altogether, they give an admirable panorama of the life of the wild animals, revealing the way they behave between themselves and react to man. Via these ‘negatives’, we also get an idea of the economic and tourism value of this famous park in Portuguese East Africa.”44 Documentary photography strategically celebrated one of the tourism emblems of the Portuguese colony through images that defined the colonial mental picture and nourished a certain desire for exotic places. Photography appropriated the wild space and highlighted the photographer as a privileged agent in a process of documentary record exposed to the hazards of the jungle (Fig. 10.5). 44  Newspaper Diário de Notícias, “Exposições de Arte. Fotografias de João Augusto Silva no Palácio Foz” [Art exhibitions. Photographs of João Augusto Silva in the Foz Palace], 25 October 1960, p. 7.

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Conclusion The exhibitions of photographs promoted by the AGC/AGU and shown at the headquarters of the SPN/SNI satisfied an opportunity to disseminate the imperial project through images. The exhibitions dedicated to Angola and Mozambique defined a visual corpus that was also explored by other means, namely the reproduction of images in periodicals and on photographic postcards. The visual structure of these images, which disseminated aspects of the Portuguese colonies, aimed to inform and familiarise a diverse audience with a national identity that categorically included the overseas dominions. Photography acted as a cultural and political medium to support colonial power. The relationship between colonialism and visual representation was structured in order to legitimise the civilising mission in the colonised territories. Photography fits into a process of constructing the memory and collective heritage of a people and a nation. And while photography is always based on a personal construction and interpretation, the colonial administrative machine appropriated photography to project propaganda of the empire. In an ambiguous game of fascination for colonised cultures, even though deemed inferior, photography played its part: to record and disseminate the Portuguese colonial empire.

CHAPTER 11

Vision and Violence. Black Women’s Bodies on Display (1900–1975) Filipa Lowndes Vicente

When we overlap the chronologyof technological and photographic developments with that of the formation of modern European empires, the result is evident: The kaleidoscopic images of colonial subjects, projects and experiences are overwhelming in size and diversity. The colonisation of territories and peoples in Africa, as well as in other continents, became a central theme within the visual mapping of the world. The pervasiveness of images of black women and girls’ bodies in the Portuguese and other European colonial contexts—in photographs, photographic postcards, propaganda leaflets, colonial exhibition documentation, or illustrations in newspapers and magazines—demonstrates that the gendered and racialised body of (unnamed) colonised women was a powerful trope of colonial hegemony.

F. L. Vicente (*) Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_11

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The European colonial visual archive, be it Portuguese, French, Belgian, Italian or German, reveals the banalisation of the practice of white men from the military, administrative, medical, scientific or commercial colonial European enterprise photographing unnamed, black, colonised women and making them available to a much wider public. The development of reproduction techniques drove these images into a thriving global market of visual consumption that Deborah Poole calls the “visual economy”, which transcended colonial and national frontiers.1 Therefore, black African female bodies became a common visual trope within the context of all European nations that were colonial powers, even if an extended transcolonial and transnational comparative study would surely enable researchers to detect nuances and differences. The actual process of construction of colonial states was inseparable from white male affirmation and many of its practices, discourses and experiences were gendered.2 The persistence and widespread nature of the exposed bodies of black women is the result of the ongoing complicity of patriarchy with colonialism, two different structures of inequality often entangled even when the resistance to and denunciation of colonialism did not always acknowledge it, just as the denunciation of gender discrimination did not necessarily convey a condemnation of racial or colonial inequalities. The colonisation of the body—the female, colonised, brown and black body—by the male coloniser had the metaphoric resonance of the colonial experience itself: the “civilised” white European man conquering the “wild” territory as well as the untamed body of the black woman. The racialised female body became a steady trope with enormous quantities of photographic images that circulated from the late nineteenth century, with greater or lesser reference to their places of origin, which were usually places that were European “colonies”.3 1  Deborah Poole, Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997). 2  Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: race, gender and sexuality in the colonial conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Patricia Hayes, “‘Cocky’ Hahn and the ‘Black Venus’: the Making of a Native Commissioner in South West Africa, 1915–46”, in Cultures of Empire: A Reader. Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Taylor and Francis, 2000), pp. 329–355, p. 350. The article was first published in Gender and History 8, 3 (November 1996): pp. 364–92. 3  Ayo Abiétou Coly, “Housing and Homing the Black Female Body in France: Calixthe Beyala and the Legacy of Sarah Baartman and Josephine Baker”, in Barbara Thompson, ed., Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; University of Washington Press, 2008), pp. 259–277, p. 272.

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This article will discuss some of the issues and challenges of dealing with these images through specific case studies, analysing them in the past and in the present. In all of them, I will consider the context of production of the images at the time, but mainly I will focus on the places where they are today and the problems and subjects that they suggest. To better understand the possible ways of addressing these image-objects, I will present an overview of recent scholarship on the subject and its different approaches, while also noting how different national contexts have addressed the subject in contrasting ways. The first case study is that of “Rosita”. This Portuguese nickname was given to a Guinean woman who was called Rosa, who was exhibited and photographed in the Portuguese colonial exhibition of 1934 where she became the most iconic “image” of the event. Her photographs will enable me to explore many of the broadest intersections between colonial and gender hierarchies. The other case studies share the same chronology, as they are centred on photographs and photographic postcards produced between 1961 and 1975, the period of the Portuguese-led war against the national liberation movements in the former colonies in Africa (Goa, Damão e Diu had ceased to be under Portuguese rule in 1961, when they became part of India). Through two of these case studies, I will explore the word/image relationship of these objects—the handwritten words on the back of photographs and postcards. The final two case studies engage with images of African women taken in the late colonial period and shown at two different contemporary exhibitions in Lisbon. These two latter cases will allow me to focus on the pervasive trope of white (male) Portuguese soldiers photographed next to bare-breasted African women: a trope that is too recent and personal to be in historical archives, but which proliferates instead in private homes, the homes of the men or families who participated directly in those historical experiences. Through these specific case studies, I will consider some common features. The endless potential for reproduction, circulation and intermediality points to the diverse, but persistent and prevalent, nature of these images. What are the ethical questions posed in recent years in relation to these or other difficult and problematic visual legacies of the past. Where are these images today? In which contexts do they circulate? How are they viewed, stored, talked about, classified and sold? Where were they in the past? How were they used and reproduced? Who looked, and still looks, at them and in what circumstances? How can we critically address, or decolonise, to use a much-repeated contemporary expression, these visual legacies in our present? The question of ethics, which scholars, curators, artists, writers and archivists have been debating for the past few decades, will also

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be addressed. Much has been said both within and outside academia, about the enduring persistence of racism, injustices and violence beyond the chronologies of slavery, segregation and imperialism. Saidiyia Hartman has appropriately named this the “afterlives of slavery” and we could extend the expression to the “afterlives of colonialism”. From the “Hottentot Venus” paraded around Europe in the early nineteenth century to the experiences and representations of black women’s bodies 200 years later (sexualised or subject to state and official violence), how can we think of these images both within such a long time frame and across such wide geographical spaces, and also today? The “Hottentot Venus”, Saartje Bartmann’s body itself, for example, has been reclaimed from her long and violent history—from the early nineteenth century until a few years ago when she left a Parisian museum finally to be buried in South Africa.4 Other means of reparation have been widely rehearsed within artistic and practices or academic projects. However, reproducing and exhibiting images of abuse and exploitation might replicate that which one purports to criticise. Are the university, the archive, the museum and the academic publication critical enough to counteract the risks of perpetuating the violence? How can we decolonise and critically analyse without reproducing and re-enacting this colonisation of the body?

Where Are These Object-Images Today? I will insist on the need to think about these images and materials in the present, and not only in the past. Today they are framed historically within different kinds of public archives, many of them in institutions that were created in colonial contexts, and which persisted into post-colonial times. However, these visual and material legacies also exist outside the usual spaces of historical research and inquiry. In the first place, they exist in people’s homes as personal belongings from more or less distant pasts. More recent than distant, in many cases. This is especially striking in a country such as Portugal, where most of the population today was born before 1975, when the country was still a colonial power. However, they are also to be found in other spaces that go beyond the public or the private archive, the institutional and the personal, and which 4  Debra S. Singer, “Reclaiming Venus. The presence of Sarah Bartmann in Contemporary Art”, in Black Venus. They Called her “Hottentot”, edited by Deborah Willis (Philadelphia: Temple University, 2010), pp. 87–95.

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could be designated as those places of commercial exchange—street markets, antique fairs, second hand or so-called vintage shops or online platforms—where objects are given a monetary value and bought and sold. Certainly, all three of these spaces interact in multiple ways. Private assets go on the market when someone dies or moves house, or they are donated or sold to institutional archives. Public institutions or private collectors acquire objects from professional sellers. I am especially interested in these collecting practices, which are also multiple in their motivations and ambitions. There is an added, more recent layer to the public spaces where these materials can be found—those galleries, museums, or temporary exhibitions where artists or curators use privately owned or institutional colonial photographs or postcards in their work. In this chapter, I will address some of these cases. Collecting the “colonial” today is a thriving practice in which images of black female bodies occupy an identifiable place as one of many typologies. I will not discuss the meaning of the word collector here. In fact, I will use it more vaguely to include all those who buy these materials, even if not with the persistence, time investment, knowledge and classification methods that tend to be attached to those who merit the word “collector”. Amongst those interested in colonial materials I would argue that most have a “colonial” history and participate in the booming market of “colonial nostalgia” that is still cheap enough to make it democratic and widely disseminated. In the Portuguese context, many of the collectors were born or lived in “Portuguese Africa”, as it was called, and some were soldiers in what the Portuguese called the “colonial wars” (1961–1975). As far as I know, there is no study of these contemporary collecting practices in Portugal, and my assertions derive only from my observations of the commercial spaces and conversations with the (mostly) men and (some) women who run them. There are also collectors, like me, who have no “colonial” family history but who started collecting as a direct effect of academic research and interests. As the daughter of a collector and bibliophile, I was familiar from an early age with the commercial spaces of second-hand objects, from bookshops (which very often also have ephemeral and visual materials) to flea markets. When I started my PhD in London, shortly after finishing my degree in Portugal, I frequented these spaces regularly along with conducting my daily research work in libraries and historical archives. Both worlds—scholars and collectors, historical archives and commercial spaces—tend to remain apart even if, I would argue, their intersections can

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contribute to a better understanding of the objects at hand. I did not make a conscious choice to become a “collector”, in the less sophisticated of its senses. There was, however, a realisation that many of the nineteenth-century materials that I was starting to study were present in both archives and in street markets, and that they were cheap and commonplace. The massive reproductive transformations of the second half of the nineteenth century, along with the growing global culture of transforming the world in images and in knowledge, meant that these materials are—or were until recently—easily available for sale at low prices. Therefore, the fact that I am a collector of nineteenth- and twentieth-­century colonial “ephemera”, as well as being a historian, compels  me to reflect on the striking features of the present “histories” of these imperial visual remains. Relevant to my position as a buyer of these materials is the fact that I am a woman, but also the fact that I am a white woman, albeit one who has no personal “colonial” history beyond the obvious condition of living in a former and recently imperial country. This is something more unusual than usual among my generation. The Portugal in which I was born in 1972 was still under a right-wing, authoritarian regime and remained an “overseas” nation (1974 saw the installation of a democratic state after the Carnation Revolution, and in 1975, those African countries under Portuguese sovereignty achieved their full liberation). However, my family on both sides had no direct link to the colonial territories, and both my mother and father had been politically involved with the “opposition” to the regime and its colonial identity. All of this means that my relationship with these materials is necessarily distinct from that of someone who also collects them as part of an autobiographical experience of memory and affect.

The Photographic Commercial Studio: “Rosita” Exhibited and Reproduced During a research visit to Porto, back in 2001, I went to a photographic studio and shop called Fotografia Alvão in one of the most well-known commercial streets of the city centre. Domingos Alvão (1872–1946) was the official photographer of the 1934 Colonial Exhibition of Porto, and his images were reproduced in catalogues and leaflets, but mainly as photographic postcards. The owners, no longer the original photographer’s family, helpfully brought me everything that was left in the studio archive from the 1930s and 1940s when “Alvão” was a prestigious and familiar name in the city of Porto.

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One of the albums had photographs of the Colonial Exhibition glued to its pages and small manuscript words next to some of the images. I was struck by a sentence written by hand next to one of the photographic prints, where “Rosita” appears with a group of African men in a reconstructed village. I copied it in my notebook: “Who is going to sleep with Rosita tonight?” read the caption in Portuguese.5 In this photograph, Rosita was visually available to the group of black African men (those who were also brought by ship from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal to be exhibited) as much as to white Portuguese men (live at the public exhibition, in the photographic studio, or everywhere this image was seen when it was transformed into a photographic postcard). Seeing thus becomes the first of other potential acts, such as the sexual or the colonial encounter (Fig. 11.1). Rosa, Rosinha or Rosita was the “Portuguese” name given to the most frequently mentioned “sight” of the First Portuguese Colonial Exhibition, in Porto 1934. In the official documentation listing all 63 of the women and men brought from Guinea-Bissau to the exhibition, she already appears as “Rosa”, one of the two “Balanta women” who were brought to Portugal in the ship named “Guiné”.6 The document that lists all the names reveals how some of them were Portuguese while others were in local languages. Unlike the vast majority of African women whose photographs were made to circulate during these decades, Rosa had a name, even if it was a Portuguese name. The use of the diminutive suffix “-inha” or “-ita” was a conscious or unconscious strategy to make her seem closer and more familiar to most of the Portuguese public for whom Guinea was a remote reality, even while it “belonged”—a word widely used at the time—to Portugal. The Portuguese colonial presence in Guinea-Bissau, however, had not been there for long enough to cover her semi-naked body. 5  I first wrote about the case of Rosita for a newspaper article: Filipa Lowndes Vicente, “Rosita ou o Império como um objecto de desejo,” Público, 25 August 2013, later translated into French: “Rosita. La Vénus noire de Porto,” Books.fr: livres & idées du monde entier, n. 52, March 2014, pp. 50–53. See also the exhibition catalogue of Domingos Alvão’s photographs of the 1934 Porto Colonial Exhibition: Maria do Carmo Serén, ed., A Porta do Meio: a Exposição Colonial de 1934: Fotografias da Casa Alvão (Porto: Centro Português de Fotografia, 2001) and Leonor Martins, Império de Papel: Imagens do Colonialismo Português na Imprensa Periódica Ilustrada (1875–1940) (Lisboa: Edições 70, 2012). 6  (1934), Untitled, Fundação Mário Soares / C1.6—Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas, Disponível HTTP: http://www.casacomum.org/cc/visualizador?pasta=10428.255 (2022-9-19).

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Fig. 11.1  Two photographic postcards in black and white. Part of a small format booklet with 14 images titled, in portuguese, “Souvenir of the 1st Portuguese Colonial Exhibition. 1934”. Edited by A.J. D’Almeida and printed in Germany. The collection combined images of monuments and views of the city of Porto, like the bridge of D. Maria Pia, with portraits of unnamed women and men, like the two women represented here. (Author’s collection)

The 1934 initiative comprised an “ethnographic exhibition” with more than 300 women, men and children from Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, India, Macau, and Timor, who became its most popular feature. Focused on encouraging Portuguese emigration to Portugal’s African territories and eager to rival other European empires, the Portuguese state needed to invest in promoting the colonies within the metropolis. The exhibition format had recourse to all visual devices available, and it was seen as an exemplary way of showing people, images and objects, while already having a European genealogy: Marseille in 1922 (Exposition Nationale Coloniale de Marseille), London in 1924 (British Empire Exhibition), Paris in 1931 (Exposition Coloniale).7 The history of 7  On the encouragement of colonial emigration, see the work of Cláudia Castelo, Passagens para África. O Povoamento de Angola e Moçambique com naturais da Metrópole (1920–1974) (Porto: Afrontamento, 2007).

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photography and exhibitions was always closely entangled. The 1934 exhibition was widely photographed, and photography was exhibited as part of the display. “Guiné”, thus, was photographed in Porto, but photographs actually taken in Guinea-Bissau were also on display. A few months before the opening of the Porto event, the photographer Manuel Pires was commissioned to “organise the photographic representation of the colony at the Portuguese Colonial Exhibition”.8 In order to do so, he travelled within Guinea-Bissau with official support. A few months later, the photographer received 9000 escudos for the 195 photographic proofs that he made.9 Guinean women had already been on exhibition two years before, when an Industrial exhibition was held in Lisbon in 1932. However, the investment and propaganda of the first (and last) colonial exhibition to be held in Portugal in 1934 had no parallel. A telegram signed by the director of colonial affairs and related to the “indigenous” people of Guinea-Bissau reinforces how the Governor had requested “10 young Balanta women” with “good presentation” to be sent to Bissau, the capital, after a group of other women had been “rejected”.10 However, according to the final list of those who actually made the sea journey, only Rosa and Baqué appeared as “Balanta women” (while 14 women came from the Bijagoz islands). By embodying the empire as an object of desire, Rosita and the other bare-­ breasted women were intended to encourage exhibition goers to actually depart for Africa.11 On display in Porto, they embodied “Africa”. Not the 8  (1934), Untitled [“Guia de trânsito para que Manuel Pires, fotografo encarregue de organizar a representação fotográfica da Guiné na Exposição Colonial Portuguesa, se desloque à Circunscrição Civil dos Bijagós”], Fundação Mário Soares / C1.6—Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas, Disponível HTTP: http://www.casacomum.org/cc/ visualizador?pasta=10427.189 (2022-9-19). 9  (1934), Untitled [“Duas faturas de Manuel Pires, fotógrafo, por fornecimentos à Direção dos Serviços e Negócios Indígenas (Exposição Colonial)”], Fundação Mário Soares / C1.6—Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas; http://www.casacomum.org/cc/ visualizador?pasta=10427.156 (2022-9-19). 10  (1934), Untitled [“Por ordem do Governador, solicita envio de 10 raparigas balantas com “boa apresentação” destinadas à Exposição Colonial, visto as anteriores terem sido rejeitadas”], Fundação Mário Soares / C1.6—Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas; http:// www.casacomum.org/cc/visualizador?pasta=10427.120.003 (2022-9-19). 11  See the excellent article by Isabel Morais, “‘Little Black Rose’ at the 1934 Exposição Colonial Portuguesa,” in Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs, edited by T.J.  Boisseau and Abigail M.  Markwyn, foreword by Robert W.  Rydell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), pp. 19–36. For a recent overview on colonial exhibitions see Nadia Vargaftig, Des Empires en carton: Les expositions coloniales au Portugal et en Italie (Madrid: Casa de Velazquez, 2016).

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dangerous and threatening Africa of the earlier expeditions or the later, so-called “pacification campaigns,” or Portuguese military expeditions that fought African resistance before and after 1900, but a luscious and desirable Africa, close enough to be attainable by the common men whom the exhibition wanted to turn into potential settlers. The association of the masculine with territorial and sexual conquest that was already implicit in relationships of colonialism and enslavement, was visible both within the exhibition and in the photographs that multiplied its impact and viewership. The photographer Domingos Alvão held a great responsibility for this multiplication of Rosita’s impact as well as that of other bare-breasted African women. In his close-ups, he mimicked the images taken in Africa— outdoors and with vegetation—but with recognisable codes of eroticised posing. In one postcard, an unnamed Guinean woman appears as a “Bijagoz beauty”. Leaning against a tree, she raises her arms in the style of one of Picasso’s Demoiselles de Avignon (1907). In the encounters between the African women and Alvão, the photographer occupied the position of the exhibition viewer, thus reinforcing the visual (and sexual) availability of the black female body; she was not merely available to the photographer but also for all viewers of the photograph. Like the exhibition itself, the photographic postcard was a device intended to prompt imagined travels and voyeurism. Both the erected Guinean village and its official photographs/postcards should look “real”—an African village with African inhabitants, in Africa. The pond that separated Rosita and the other Africans from the public became a metaphorical Atlantic. There were no boats at the exhibition to cross the pond, but there were ships available to take any Portuguese man willing to go to the Portuguese-African colonies. In contrast, in an edified pavilion close to Rosita’s simulacrum “village”, the public could see a diorama with life-size figures showing black African women dressed in Western clothes being taught how to cook and sew by patient white nuns in their habits. Domesticity and religion were rehearsed in a life-like display that emphasised the role of Catholic evangelism in Africa, one of the few official occupations Portuguese women could pursue in the colonising enterprise. In this case, inequality was established between women—the white nun as teacher, the black woman as pupil. Far from antagonistic, we might argue that these unnamed black women symbolised what “Rosita” could become after the affirmation of

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the Portuguese presence in Guinea-Bissau. The male colonisers were stimulated by the overt sexualisation of black women in colonial propaganda, but they also needed someone to cook for them and sew their clothes. The “lavadeira” [washerwoman] was a character widely present in colonial documents from the late nineteenth century up to the liberation wars of the 1960s–1970s, when Portuguese soldiers often had one at their service. The notion of “having one” contains all the ambiguity of the role and its status. The name was given to the young African women, very often girls, who were hired by Portuguese soldiers and administrators to wash their clothes, do the housework and, implicitly, to be sexually available. Even if many resisted and complained of these sexual advances and rapes, there was a wide tolerance of their cohabitation in male quarters.12 Within the precinct of the 1934 exhibition, these two distinct models coexisted and contributed to the same aim: encouraging the departure of men to the colonies and making it seem easier, more familiar and, simultaneously, a space full of material benefits and erotic possibilities. The advantage of social recognition and mobility with the added thrill of lusty adventures. Whether outside in the simulacra of African villages where Rosita in flesh and bone was the protagonist, or inside the pavilion where unnamed black women—sculptured representations—performed domestic duties, the exhibition displayed the different possible roles of African women, all of them potentially attractive to Portuguese men. Further research could be conducted in relation to this case study but I will conclude here with three counter-narratives to the dominant images of Rosita: a visual, a written and an oral one. The first, a visual counter-­ narrative, is the portrait of Rosita by Eduardo Malta. The second case is a written document signed by one of the Guinean communities put on display in 1934, where Rosita was one amongst many. This document disturbs and subverts the apparent passivity of those who seemingly had no voice and were only in Porto to be looked at. The third and final case study leads me to a central concern of this article: a recent, oral episode that reveals how Rosita’s image acquired new meanings when displayed many decades after 1934. The past persisting in the present, and the present giving new meanings to that past. 12  Filipa Lowndes Vicente and Inês Vieira Gomes, “Inequalities on trial: conflict, violence and dissent in the making of colonial Angola (1907–1920)”, in Francisco Bethencourt, ed., Inequality in the Portuguese-speaking World (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2018), pp. 217–242.

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Within the vast visual repertoire in which Rosita is protagonist—photographs, postcards, caricatured illustrations printed in newspapers, stamps and drawings reproduced in different formats, there is a counter-image that should be acknowledged. The prestigious painter Eduardo Malta, a favourite portraitist of the Portuguese elite close to the regime, was commissioned to draw the portraits of some of the colonised subjects brought to Porto.13 Within this series of black-and-white pencil drawings, there is also a black woman, Ignez, a “Bijagoz dancer” with bare breasts and sitting in a sensual pose facing the observer. Rosita’s portrait, by contrast, is modest in all its dimensions—her body and head are covered and her eyes are looking down timidly. Like her, other female and male representatives of the colonies were portrayed by Malta with the dignity and subjectivity of traditional portraiture. Was the portrait drawing done after the photographs by Alvão were taken? Did Malta use photography in his practice as so many artists did? Why was this image of Rosita so dissonant from the more dominant images? We will never know what happened when Malta and Rosita met as artist and model (did they?) and what interaction between them led to this strikingly different image of Rosita. Did Malta request to draw her nude and she refused? The time required for painting/drawing is slower than the time needed for photography. Did this affect Rosita’s decision—if indeed it was her decision—to refuse to remain semi-naked for such a long time before the artist? (Fig. 11.2) The second counter-narrative comes from some written documents that exist today in Guinea-Bissau and became digitally available through a Portuguese online archival project named Casa Comum. The documents are part of the Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas, the official entity that dealt with everything related to the colonised subjects of the Portuguese empire. One of them consists of a letter handwritten in Portuguese and signed by a male representative in the name of the “Bijagós” group that had travelled from the Guinean islands to Porto.14

13  See “Eduardo Malta”, in Teresa Matos Pereira, Uma Travessia da Colonialidade: Pintura, Coleções e Intervisualidades (Lisboa: Caleidoscópio, 2019), pp. 185–190. 14  (1934), Untitled, [“Queixa, por parte da comitiva de bijagós que integrou a representação da Colónia da Guiné na 1.ª Exposição Colonial Portuguesa, de terem sido obrigados a trabalhar sem nada receberem em troca, com a agravante de terem deixado de lavrar as suas terras durante o tempo da exposição, pelo que agora nada possuem para pagamento de impostos”], Fundação Mário Soares / C1.6—Secretaria dos Negócios Indígenas, http://www. casacomum.org/cc/visualizador?pasta=10428.220 (2022-9-19).

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Fig. 11.2  Postcard of drawing, “Portuguese Empire. Rosinha—Balanta Woman Guiné”. Drawing by Eduardo Malta [1934] (Author’s collection)

The documents are striking for the way that they testify to the people’s dissatisfaction and their claiming of what they considered to be their rights, in a way that contradicts and disturbs the idea of a community that is passively removed from its daily life to be used as a colonised visual trope and put silently on display. It turns out they also wanted to be heard. One of the letters, sent in November 1934 on the group’s return to Guinea-­ Bissau after the exhibition, complained of the poor treatment they had received in Porto, not having been paid for their work at the exhibition, and with the aggravating factor of having missed the payment of taxes that were now demanded by the Portuguese government. This remarkable document embodies the questioning of the powers exercised by the colonial machine and reveals the different layers of inequality of the colonial model while also exposing the resistance to, and questioning of, this inequality. The document also puts together different kinds of work—that

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of the land and that of the exhibition—and different kinds of monetary transactions: the promised salary that they never received and the government taxes that they were charged. This letter becomes the voice of those who seemed to be voiceless and had been turned into a visual, passive, observed item; it must be read “against the grain” of the overwhelming prolixity of the visual presence of colonised subjects on display. The third and final counter-narrative relates directly to the afterlives of Rosita’s images. In 2001, the newly inaugurated Centro Português de Fotografia [Portuguese Center for Photography] opened its first temporary exhibition—A Porta do Meio: the Colonial Exhibition of 1934: photographs of the Casa Alvão. The story that I will narrate here was told to me by a friend, a photographer and historian who, in turn, heard it in 2001 from someone who worked at Casa Alvão at the time. Enlarged reproductions of the photographs taken by Domingos Alvão as the official photographer of the colonial event were on display  at the Porto institution. Amongst them, Rosita’s photographs, her breasts shown within the legitimacy of an exhibition space centred on the history and aesthetics of photography enlarged by the reproductive possibilities of the twenty-first century. Apparently, one of the visitors to the 2001 exhibition was Rosita’s granddaughter, who was living in Portugal and did not like to see her grandmother portrayed in such a way. She called the organisers of the display to say that she was very upset and even thinking about taking the CPF to court. The Guinean staging created at the Palácio de Cristal of Porto in the 1930s and her grandmother, she said, was very poorly represented and in no way corresponded to reality. Apparently, Rosita’s granddaughter did not follow through with her intentions to sue the state cultural institution, nor did the institution keep her personal data or contact details, even as a possible interviewee. At that time, there was not yet in Portugal the critical thinking or public discussion of the recent Portuguese colonial past to turn this event into an object of reflection as, I would argue, should happen now. This story somehow illustrates how the “empire counter-attacked” the colonial representations that post-­ colonial Portugal had begun to historicise, but the case ended there.

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On Sale at Street Markets: Reading The Backs of Photographs and Postcards In 2014, I bought a photograph at a second-hand book and postcard market that takes place every Saturday on the Rua Anchieta in Lisbon.15 The name of this small, pedestrianised, central street is an example of how Lisbon’s contemporary toponymic is related to Portuguese imperial history. Anchieta was a Portuguese naturalist who lived in Angola for many decades, dying there in 1897 after collecting numerous specimens for the Lisbon Natural History Museum and also taking photographs.16 Like so many other men involved in the gathering of knowledge of colonial spaces, he only made a one-way journey from Portugal to Angola, and the natural history specimens that he collected in Africa travelled to Lisbon without him. This is a common Lisbon story, one where the materiality of the imperial past is permanently available in the present in multiple and entangled layers. Names of streets, avenues, neighbourhoods, monuments, statues, objects, images, specimens, and collections in today’s Lisbon are legacies embedded in the urban space of daily life. Unlike the photographs located in family albums, kept by their owners and part of strong personal narratives of memory and affect, the photographs that can be found at the Rua Anchieta market have been separated from their owners and thus become mute and lost from earlier contexts. These have been named “found photographs” because they are to be found in commercial spaces or flea markets or simply thrown away. Even when they are on sale together with other photographs, they become even more fragmented because the consumer or collector is allowed to purchase a single photograph from a set of related photographs. I do this frequently, conscious of the irreversibility of my gesture of partition. The main reason is the lack of funds to buy a whole set, thus I have to make choices based on subjective and personal reasons. I did exactly that on that Saturday morning, thus disintegrating still further the potential narratives to be made through those image-objects. Standing by a market table holding a set of postcards and photographs 15  I previously wrote about this image in Filipa Lowndes Vicente, “Introduction”, in Filipa Lowndes Vicente (ed.), O Império da Visão: Fotografia no Contexto Colonial português (1860–1960), (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2014), pp. 11–29 and in a newspaper article. 16  Nuno Borges de Araújo, “Fotografia científica em Angola, no último quartel do século XIX: o caso do naturalista José de Anchieta”, in Vicente, ed., O Império da visão, 2014, pp. 171–181.

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that were grouped together in a wooden box, I was struck by a particular image, even if I did not know at the time how that particular photograph would become so important for my research. It combined mother and child in a pose reminiscent of a religious icon, with the woman sending her gaze back to the camera, and an unusual image of Winston Churchill printed on the capulana fabric that the woman was dressed in. The fabric reproduces what seems to be an image of Churchill in military uniform. Is the “V” of Victory linked to the victory of the Allies at the end of the Second World War or the British Victory in the Second Anglo-Boer War in which Churchill served as a young soldier? How did that print-cloth arrive in Angola? (Fig. 11.3) I bought it. Back at home, I read more attentively what was written on the reverse of the image and from that moment onwards I started paying much more attention to the words written on the backs of photographic postcards or photographs. This object—a photograph in postcard format—had travelled from Angola to Portugal. The date written on it was 1961, the year the war started in Angola. “Victor” was the name in the signature and probably he had taken and dated the photograph. Written in Portuguese, in blue ink, his words describe the woman in the photograph as the wife of a soba in the Dembe region, only to add that “the women of Northern Angola may not appear so, but they are more stupid than the Southern ones.” He also writes that Southern women carry children on their backs, whereas their Northern counterparts—such as the one photographed here—carry them on their bosoms since they consider it more “beautiful”. Although “Victor” begins by identifying the woman’s social position, albeit in relation to her husband’s, he then places her within a much wider category of “women of the North”, and adds an insulting generalisation. Even if nothing in the image affected the woman’s dignity and subjectivity, the words written about her disrupt the image irreversibly. Victor’s words kept repeating in my head whenever I looked at the image again. It was the experience of buying that photograph of mother and child that made me more alert to the relevance of handwritten words, which are often related to the images themselves. They are the private captions of publicly available object-images. Another case study, which took place a few years after the experience described above, also enables a reflection on the relationship between words and images in photographic postcards. In 2017, I found a few postcards written by the same man, named “Zé”, and sent to the same person, his unnamed mother, on the floor of a vendor at Feira da Ladra, the main

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Fig. 11.3  Photograph. Black and white. Unnamed woman with child. Manuscript text on the back signed by Victor, Angola, 1961? (Author’s collection)

flea market in Lisbon that is held on Tuesdays and Saturdays. The year was 1975, shortly after the independence of the former Portuguese-African colonies, and one year after the 25th April Revolution that marked the end of a 48-year, right-wing dictatorship and the beginning of Portuguese democracy. A Portuguese man sends his mother a series of coloured photographic postcards, always starting his messages with “Querida mãezinha” [Dear

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Fig. 11.4  Front and Back of coloured photographic postcard. Unnamed woman with child. Circulated. Sent in 1975 by “Zé” to his mother. (Author’s collection)

mummy]. I bought three of them, but by the colloquial tone of his words, this must have been a minute excerpt of a trivial yet prolific communication between mother and son. Sent from South Africa, the three postcards showed black South African women and men. Had he moved to South Africa in the aftermath of independence in Angola and Mozambique in 1975? Or was he already there? Mobility between different African colonies had always been a relevant and common practice, both for colonisers and the colonised, and photography bore witness to those transcolonial movements and experiences (Fig. 11.4). In his manuscript words, the major distinction was between “us” and “them”, the Europeans and the Africans, the former colonisers and the formerly colonised. It did not matter whether they were “colonies” or “nations”. His words travelled from South Africa to Portugal—a country undergoing major political and ideological transformations—but in their unabashed racism that is openly conveyed within the rectangle of the postcard, nothing seemed to have changed. The empire had ended, but many

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of the ideas and words that had sustained it were still there. One of the three postcards sent by “Zé” to his “Querida mãezinha” starts by calling attention to the image represented: “Today, this charming savage! Pay attention to her gaze and tell me if it is not as I have been telling you. An evil look and an insolent attitude, isn’t it? These people are all mean and hate white people”.17 “Zé” continues in that tone and finishes with a direct reference to the “postcard” itself as a collection item: “Here you have one more postcard for your collection and beware that there are many who have this kind of collection, which is wonderful. Kisses, missing you”.18 A week before, at the end of May 1976, he had sent another postcard to his mother—of a bare-breasted “zulu maiden”—whom he ironically describes as “charming”.19 Before ending the message, he answers a question his mother must have asked him in a previous missive and he does so with the usual irony: “You wanted to know how much these postcards cost, didn’t you? Well, they only cost 10 cents the equivalent of 4 Portuguese escudos. While they are not cheap, it cannot be said they are expensive, if we bear in mind the magnificent images they present us with, isn’t it true?”.20 In a heading written in capital letters surrounded by a handwritten frame, placed in the usual location of the stamp, “Zé”, the writer of the postcard, adds a comment: “THIS IS THE EVENING DRESS OF THESE SAVAGES”. These are just some examples of the “personal colonial stories” written on the back of postcards and photographs that travelled the 17  “Hoje é esta encantadora selvagem! Repare bem no olhar dela e, veja lá, se é ou não o que eu lhe tenho dito. Um olhar mau e um ar insolente, não é? Esta gente é toda ruim e odeiam todos os brancos.” Postcard sent by Zé to his mother. While in the other two postcards the signature is clear, in this one the word he chose as a signature sign is unclear, probably a private joke. Johannesburg, 4/6/76. Printed caption: “Lesotho-Southern Africa. Perfect balance and poise is necessary when strolling with babe and clay pot” [also written in dutch]. Edited by Artco. Art publishers (PTY) LTD. 18  “Aqui tem mais um postal para a sua colecção e olhe que há muita gente, [sic] têm coleções destes postais que são uma maravilha. Beijinhos e saudades”. 19  Postcard send by Zé to his mother. Johannesburg, 30/5/76. Printed caption: “Zulu Maiden. Natal. South Africa. Resplendent in a finery of beads, and with clay on her face, she’s the “belle” of the African Kraal” [also written in dutch]. Edited by Artco. Art publishers (PTY) LTD. Photo: John Hone. 20  “Quiz saber quanto custam estes postais, não é? Pois é só dez cêntimos [underlined in the original] o equivalente a esc. 4.00. Não sendo barato, também não é muito caro, se atendermos às magnificas imagens que nos apresentam, não é verdade?”

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transcontinental itineraries created by colonial relationships. The manuscript words on the back of printed images very often address the images themselves, transforming and disturbing them in the dialogue between word and image, written text and visual representation, that prompts comments much more associated with the oral and the private than with the written and public. The back of colonial photographs or postcards is a democratised authorial space even for those who seldom wrote. It is a privileged historical document for locating the blatant, everyday racism that other kinds of written conventions may limit or contain. In opposition with signed newspaper articles or books, these words are often anonymous. One of the characteristics of the postcard is its informality and that means that the person who signs and sends it tends to write only his or her first name, therefore remaining unidentified as a source and only identifiable to the person to whom it was sent, who was supposed to read it (not us). By contrast, the complete name and address of the receiver is indicated if the postcard is to be sent by mail. However, very often postcards and photographs are also sent inside envelopes with the name and address on, so that there is more space for writing on the postcard itself. In these cases, the envelope was often thrown away and the recipient kept only what was inside it. There was official censorship in Portugal and all public and private words could be legally scrutinised by the state. But racialised or gendered derogatory language was, on the contrary, afforded a freedom of expression that can be read bluntly in many personal and public documents today in Portugal. The ways in which, in these examples, the sender uses the images to initiate a dialogue with the receiver, in the long-distance conversation enabled by postcards or photographs, exemplifies the racially and gendered structural violence and inequality that is seldom expressed with such crudity in published and official documentation. Therefore, if the printed words with which the images are identified are a relevant historical source—the triviality of printed captions such as “Black Venus”, “Black Beauty”, “African Venus” or “Angolan Beauty”—so are the manuscript words written on the other side or over the image itself. In 1991, David Prochaska wrote a pioneering article on the relevance of postcards of colonial Senegal in which he transcribes the manuscript words next to the reproduction, while also noticing how Senegalese women were

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photographed for postcards semi-nude, unlike what happened with French women living in that colony.21 I started to buy these kinds of materials in my early twenties, in the mid-1990s, when I was starting my PhD in London and everything I bought was related to what I was researching, with no collecting strategy whatsoever. However, if for many years my criteria for buying a postcard or photograph had been what it represented visually—universal or colonial exhibitions, Portuguese colonies, amongst other subjects—much later, I started to buy postcards also because of their manuscript words, the personal imprint on an object of mass reproduction. To look at the image printed on a photographic postcard is an act that I began to follow with the gesture of turning the object over and reading what was written on the other side, whether in printed or manuscript letters. This way of connecting words with images in postcards could be placed within the genealogy of our contemporary private use of smartphones, which are simultaneously image-word makers and circulation devices, and social media. We take-make images, we write words, we share images and words together. Yet there is a striking difference. If now this combination of word and image tends to be in the same frame/screen, the same gaze, the same two-dimensional surface, an object such as the postcard demands a haptic, physical approach where touch, motion (turning the object over) and tridimensionality are necessary for full apprehension. This need to think of images next to words, the visual next to the written, is not as obvious as it may seem due to the growing global tendency to digitalise images, thus making them more easily available in archival and academic contexts as well as commercial ones. However, when this happens, images are privileged by a detriment of words—for example, a “vintage” postcard, as they are often named, on sale on a commercial website would only have its image on show because that is what determines the labels that classify them in different categories, not the manuscript words on the back. The digital paradigm therefore moves away from the material and haptic-­ centred approach that, I would argue, is fundamental to the ways in which we must approach and analyse these documents.

21  David Prochaska, “Fantasia of the Photothèque: French Postcard Views of Colonial Senegal” in African Arts, October 1991, vol. 24, n. 4, Special Issue: Historical Photographs of Africa, pp. 40–47.

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Contemporary Art Exhibitions: Private Photographs of Portuguese Soldiers Next to African Women In this section, I will analyse photographs of African women taken in the late colonial period as they were shown in two different exhibitions in Lisbon, one in 2014, the other in 2015–2016. The dates of these exhibitions are relevant because this was the period when the Portuguese colonial past started to be addressed in more public and visible ways, not only within academia but in contemporary art practices, in activist associations created by the African diaspora in Portugal and, in general, in the multiplication of voices and places of critical reflection on the colonial past. The first exhibition that I will address, Botânica, took place in 2014 at the Lisbon Museu do Chiado—the artist was Vasco Araújo and the curator was Emília Tavares.22 After participating in a guided visit led by the artist, I noticed the reproduction of a photograph at the centre of an installation. It depicted an interracial couple formed of a white Portuguese soldier and a black Guinean woman and it was dated 1962.23 The face of the man was concealed because he was looking down into the women’s apparently pregnant (by whom?) abdomen, where one of his hands was placed. The other hand was grabbing her breast. Would he be photographed like that next to a white Portuguese woman in his village? Certainly not. This was the first element to disrupt the image (Fig. 11.5). The other disruptive element was the conversation I overheard between other visitors wandering, like me, around the installation where the image was placed. Two good-looking couples in their sixties commented jokingly: “There you go, what a man!”. “They really knew how to enjoy themselves!”. The critical context of the exhibition, where the artist himself had just given a guided visit, was not enough to prevent those responses of complicity with the soldier’s gesture as seen in the reproduction of the photograph on display in the show. What for me was a disturbing sight— the subversion of the traditional portrait couple where the man places his arm over the woman’s shoulder—was for my fellow exhibition goers an entangled demonstration of masculinity and patriotism. 22  Vasco Araújo. Botânica, with a text by the curator Emília Tavares (Lisboa: Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea—Museu do Chiado; Documenta, 2014) [Exhibition from 12 March, 2014 to 18 May, 2014]. 23  “Portuguese soldier with Guinean woman, Portuguese colonial war. Guiné-Bissau.1962”, unknown author, private collection.

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Fig. 11.5  Exhibition “Botânica” by Vasco Araújo, commissioned by Emília Tavares, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea-Museu do Chiado, Lisbon, 2014 [Photograph by João Paulo Ruas, n° 51606 DIG]. (Courtesy of the Museum)

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One year later, in another exhibition—Retornar. Traços de Memória [Nov. 2015–Fev. 2016], also in Lisbon, and commissioned by Elsa Peralta—there was a huge wall full of small photographs, conceived by Joana Gonçalo Oliveira.24 It was named Atlas, to invoke Aby Warburg’s renowned paradigm for thinking about images. This photographic composition gathered private photographs belonging to people who lived in the Portuguese African colonies until their independence in 1975 when they “returned” to Portugal and were given the somewhat pejorative name of “retornados” [the returned], even though this word was misleading as many of them did not “return”, on the contrary, they were arriving in mainland Portugal for the first time, having been born in the “Colonies”. Fleetingly going through these hundreds of images, my eyes halted before four of them (Fig. 11.6).25 A few years after seeing these four photographs in the exhibition I saw them back in the personal photographic album from which they had been temporarily removed and I came to know more about their origin and ownership. They were compiled by the young soldier who appears in the images, now an old man living in a retirement home in Lisbon and unable to speak about the past. The album combined black-and-white photographs and a few coloured commercial postcards from Guinea-Bissau, the colony where the conscripted soldier was sent to fight on the side of Portugal. The album was left in the home of one of his sisters upon his return from Africa and it was there that a granddaughter—a friend and colleague doing a PhD in anthropology—found it and could view it with a critical distance that went beyond the affective approach to a “family album”. In one of the four photographs, the girl’s body appears as a mannequin—passive, stiff, inanimate—sexualised only by the crude hands of the 24  Retornar. Traços de Memória [Galeria Av. da India, Exhibition from November 2015 to February 2016]. 25  I have already written about these photographs—and reproduced them in a reduced size—in the book chapter: Filipa Lowndes Vicente, “Retornar não é possível. Fotografia nas partidas, nos regressos e na distância,” in Elsa Peralta, Bruno Góis, Joana Gonçalo Oliveira, eds., Retornar: Traços de memória do fim do Império (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2017), pp. 197–212. Maria José Lobo Antunes also wrote on photography and on these specific photographs for the same catalogue “O que se vê e o que não pode ser visto: Fotografia, violência e guerra”, pp. 213–224: Júlia Garraio has also written on these photographs in the article “Perdidas na exposição? Desafiar o imaginário colonial português através de fotografias de mulheres negras”, in Ribeiro and Ribeiro, eds., Geometrias da memória: 279–303.

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Fig. 11.6  Part of the installation “Atlas” by Joana Gonçalo Oliveira at the Exhibition Retornar—Traços de Memória, curated by Elsa Peralta. Galeria Avenida da Índia/Padrão dos Descobrimentos, November 2015 to February 2016, EGEAC—Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (Courtesy of Elsa Peralta)

man-boy who lifts her dress, exhibiting her for the camera while squeezing her breasts from behind. In another photograph, we can see a group portrait. Nothing seems strange at first glance: a group of African women, men, children and babies are posing for a camera. On a closer look, however, one notices the only white man, the same young Portuguese soldier, with a young woman sitting on his lap and almost hiding him from the lens. He has to make an effort and move his body in order to appear in the photographic space. The effect is striking and troubling—we only see his smile (the only smile in the whole group), his boots (the only footwear) and his hand (on the girl’s breast). What choice was available to the black woman in his lap, looking at the camera while the soldier grasps her breast? The ambiguous presence of the baby, in one of the other photographs, contributes to the disturbance set by these four images. The young Portuguese soldier holds the black baby in one arm, while the other hand performs that common gesture of male protection and affect that we see

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in thousands of photographs of couples. But with one striking difference. Instead of resting his arm on her shoulder, the hand descends to grab her breast, as if holding a hose, the same gesture seen in the photograph displayed at the Botânica exhibition and in a few photographs reproduced in the 2018 book Sexe, Race et Colonies.26 Is this a couple with their first child? No. Where is the (African) father? Is she pregnant? The image of the “lusotropical” interracial couple thus becomes a cruel parody. Looking back at the photographic lens, the young man in military garb was conscious of the performative experience he enacts. Far from home, in a space where inequality was not just implicit but at the heart of the colonial contract, the young Portuguese soldier felt empowered. He wanted to be seen, both in the present and in the future and he is the only one who seems to be enjoying himself. This is not simply an “event” that is taking place and is captured by the camera. This is an “event” that happens because the camera is there, with an implicit agreement between photographer and photographed that that is what should be seen when the image was printed. However, not all of those being photographed, not all participants in the event, have the same voice. The discomfort revealed by the young woman has nothing to do with the discomfort of posing for a portrait, staying still for too long and with the fake smile that was invented a few decades after photography itself. Her discomfort is of another kind— mainly in the stiffness of her body and the unresponsiveness to the young soldier’s gestures. This is, somehow, her way of resisting and defying the experience. Where is the thin line of consent in a photographic encounter that is simultaneously a sexual encounter? The promiscuous, century-long relationship between the Portuguese empire and photography, from the 1870s to the 1970s, culminated in the persistent trope of images of white Portuguese men being photographed next to black African women. This is certainly not a specifically “Portuguese” photographic practice as it recurs throughout colonial experiences and encounters and became especially common in the militarised conflicts leading to the liberation of formerly colonised countries in the second half of the twentieth century. However, the longevity and lateness of the final Portuguese colonial conflict (1961 to 1975) allied with the democratisation of photography during this period, meant that the 26  Sexe, race & colonies, La domination des corps du XVe siècle à nos jours, Pascal Blanchard, Nicolas Bancel, Gilles Boëtsch, Dominic Thomas, Christelle Taraud & al. (Paris: La Découverte, 2018).

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number of photographs of white Portuguese soldiers alongside black women whose breasts were very often exposed and nude, is disturbingly trivial and widespread. For the Portuguese colonial context, this was especially the case in Guinea-Bissau in a later period when more and more men carried cameras, namely the Portuguese soldiers of the 1960s–1970s who were fighting against African independences. To leave their upper body uncovered (and often their head covered) was the usual dress for Guinean women performing their daily routines, and it did not have a sexual meaning. For the Portuguese soldiers, however—from a patriarchal and sexually repressive country—this was taken as an erotic sign of sexual availability. As Maria José Lobo Antunes argues, “Portuguese soldiers mistook nudity for lasciviousness” and that could be placed in a much wider tradition of Europeans perceiving a homogenised African sexuality as unbound and restriction-free.27 This outdoor, normative nudity associated with the female and black body of a colonised subject allowed the presence of the camera—and this is what we can see—and, very often, justified what we cannot see: sexual violence, sexual abduction and traffic, coerced prostitution, rape. The written, visual and oral colonial archives give numerous glimpses of this violence, but part of the violence is precisely in the archive’s ability to make it invisible, subtle or absent.28 A thorough study of the subject demands the type of deep research within the photographic legacies of these soldiers that the anthropologist Maria José Lobo Antunes is undertaking, and on which she also writes in this volume.29 These photographs are mostly kept in the homes of former soldiers or their children; in markets and commercial spaces, as part of the “aftermath-of-death commerce” where intimate material fragments of former lives are scattered and removed from their owner’s surviving living and family contexts; and in the informal and unofficial associations, groups or digital media of former soldiers who use the sharing of photography as a bonding practice for memory and experience, and as a way of defying trauma. Where once they were shown as slides at private gatherings or 27  Maria José Lobo Antunes, “A crack in everything: Violence in soldiers’ narratives about the Portuguese colonial war in Angola”, History and Anthropology, 2020, https://doi.org/1 0.1080/02757206.2020.1786381. 28  Saidiyia Hartman, “Venus in two acts”, Small Axe, n° 26 (vol. 12, n. 2), June 2008, pp. 1–14. 29  Maria José Lobo Antunes, “Curating the past: memory, history, and private photographs of the Portuguese colonial wars”.

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printed next to autobiographical narratives of soldiers’ experiences, the digital and social media revolution has turned these small, restricted groups into more public events.30 This is necessarily a delicate subject and one that may turn photography into a particularly contested space of contradictory and conflicting discourses. What, for some, may be a troubling visual document of different kinds of inequality, injustice and violence—gender, racial or political—for others, like its owners, it can be a mere snapshot of daily routine in the context of war, even a visual reminder of the few moments of joy, laughter, affection and lightness that contrasted with the hard and traumatic challenges faced by young men who were being turned into fighters with hardly any option to refuse it. As Lobo Antunes states following her interviews with Portuguese war veterans who had been in Angola, Guinea-­ Bissau or Mozambique, they do not “recognize the intrinsic violence of objectifying colonized bodies and dismissing African lives”, nor are they aware of the contemporary critical discussions that would shatter they pasts and their experiences.31 Desire and abuse, in Antunes’s words, become two sides of the same coin, and two central categories in the relationship between colonising (white) men and colonised (black) women, in which photography plays a major role.32 Paulo de Medeiros has also written on representations of soldiers of the “colonial wars”, and noted the quantity of snapshots of “banal” “daily life”, even if he does not discuss the photographic trope of the Portuguese soldier next to the (semi-nude) African woman.33 More recently, Clara Roldão Pinto Caldeira has written on the representation of bodies in images produced within the same context, by studying three private albums belonging to former soldiers.34 Like Medeiros, she focuses her analysis on the self-representation of soldiers when they were not at 30  Maria José Lobo Antunes, Regressos Quase Perfeitos. Memórias da Guerra em Angola (Lisbon: Tinta da China, 2016). 31  Antunes, 2020, p. 12. 32  Antunes, 2020, p. 15. 33  See Paulo de Medeiros, “War Pics: Photographic Representations of the Colonial War”, in Luso-Brazilian Review, Winter, 2002, vol. 39, n. 2, Special Issue: Portuguese Cultural Studies, pp. 91–106. 34  Clara Roldão Pinto Caldeira, “O corpo nas imagens da guerra colonial portuguesa: subjectividades em análise”, in Galaxia (São Paulo, online), n. 40, jan-abr. 2019, pp. 17–40.

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war—bathing, playing football, sharing meals or relaxing amongst their fellow soldiers, while also identifying the typology of soldier-photographednext-­to-African-woman and noting its symbolic violence.35 It could be argued that sexual or physical violence directed towards women was prevalent in Portugal and Angola, regardless of geography and race. But would photography be used in the same way in both places? The quantity of similar performative poses and gestures between white men and black colonised women that were made for the benefit of the camera—as laid bare in the book Sexe, Race, Colonies—demonstrates how they were considered acceptable enough to become part of a narrative shown to others. These were not images of atrocities hidden away from view; they could be shown and shared. Then and now. The common practice of abuse, coercion and sexual violence towards colonised and racialised women that tends to be invisible in the official archives and documents (and that is also part of its violence) appears banal enough to be staged as a performance for the camera; and that reinforces its violence. As we have seen, sometimes these images are used by artists or curators as contemporary art practices, and exhibitions have offered a means of critically engaging with the visual legacies of colonialism. These artistic practices, as well as many of the exhibitions framing them, go beyond written scholarly work, but often share the same critical idiom. Some artists have specifically addressed the vast colonial visual archive of eroticised black women, mainly through postcards and illustrated newspapers, but the majority of them deal with broader issues of the politics of race and imperialism in past and present settings.36

 Caldeira, “O corpo…”, p. 30.  Ifi Amadiume, “African Women’s Body Images in Postcolonial Discourse and Resistance to Neo-Crusaders” and Barbara Thompson, “Decolonizing Black Bodies: Personal Journeys in the Contemporary Voice”, in Barbara Thompson, ed., Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; University of Washington Press, 2008), pp.  49–69, pp.  279–311; Ayo A.  Coly, “Subversive and Pedagogical hauntologies: the unclothed female body in visual and performance arts”, Postcolonial Hauntologies. African Women’s Discourses of the female body” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019). 35 36

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African Colonised Women as a Visual Subject of Postcards and Photographs Certainly, there is a historical objectification of the female body for male visual consumption, which transcends ethnic or national distinctions. However, the banalisation of the practice of white men who originated in the colonising nations photographing nude or semi-nude black women and girls conveys a major difference in relation to analogous images of white women. They were widely available within a public sphere, where they were made available to all those who could see. The unequal value placed on these bodies meant an unequal access to their viewing—the less valued the women’s bodies were, the more visually available they could be. Those black bodies could be subjected to a close-up look because they came from distant geographies of subalternity that somehow “belonged” to the viewers and because many of them were already semi-naked— uncovered bodies, visually available, often being confused with sexual availability. This partial nakedness along with the prerogatives of colonial possession (or the desire for possession) implied, among other things, the right to look. This combination also contributed to an ambivalence between the black woman and the (white) prostitute, those women whose (naked) bodies could also be photographed and circulated as visual commodities. Leïla Slimani recently wrote about a photographic postcard where a neighbourhood in Casablanca was presented as a (sexual) tourist attraction for foreign men and photographs of prostitutes were placed over an aerial photograph of a city block.37 The right to look, as we shall see, implied the right to touch—the man touching the woman, not the other way round. And the right to take photographs: to photograph the woman and to photograph the (white) man sexually touching the (black) woman. The right to rape tended to remain away from the camera lens, even if it was often latent or implicit, as if the taking of the photograph was a “before” or “after” of the non-photographable. Even though erotic photographic postcards showing naked (white) women became so widespread in France that they became known as “French Postcards,” they were nevertheless meant for a private male gaze. On the contrary, black women were available to a wider audience, 37  Leïla Slimani, “Regard sur une image”, in Pascal Blanchard & Gilles Boetsch, Le Racisme en Images. Déconstruire ensemble (Paris: Éditions de la Martinière, 2021), pp. 102–103.

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potentially to all who could see, including other women and children. The colour of their skin made for an ontological difference—belonging to the space of the colonised, the subjugated and the racially inferior, Darwinian ideas also coincided with the development of photography. The colonial label implied the distance and differentiation that enabled their bodies to be looked at independently of who was looking and where. The ethnographic contained (or justified) the erotic. The main way of de-sexualising nakedness was through maternity. A pervasive trope within representations of black women in postcards is that of a mother carrying a child on her back or holding a baby, their bosoms de-eroticised by the nurturing gesture of breastfeeding.38 Within this visual archive, photographic postcards should be considered specifically due to the quantity of their production and the capacity for mass circulation, and to the fact that they made images banal, a democratic possession. Through postcards, photography entered the public sphere in a way that had never been witnessed before. A small paper rectangle: on one side, a framed space with the reproduction of a photograph (or drawing); on the other side, space for the written word, both the address of the recipient and the words the sender would freely choose to write.39 Postcards were bought to be sent to others by post, given by hand, or kept as souvenirs by the buyer as the memory of a place, moment or experience. Postcards were also organised in albums, as happened with photographs, classified with personal criteria and available for browsing and sharing. Often, they were also put on display above tables or furniture, stuck directly on the wall or even framed (as can sometimes be seen in nineteenth and twentieth century photographs of domestic interiors). 38  Geary, “The Black Female Body…” and Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, “The Body of a Myth: Embodying the Black Mammy Figure in Visual Culture”, in Barbara Thompson, ed., Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; University of Washington Press, 2008), pp. 143–160, p. 149; pp. 163–179; Lilia Moritz Schwarcz has been exploring this subject both in her written work and through the curating of exhibitions: Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, “Black Nannies: Hidden and Open Images in the Paintings of Nicolas-Antoine Taunay”, Women’s History Review, 2017, pp. 1–18; Boris Kossoy and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Um Olhar Sobre o Brasil: a Fotografia na Construção da Imagem da Nação: 1833–2003 (Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva; Fundación Mapfre, 2012). 39  Christraud M. Geary and Virginia-Lee Webb, eds., Delivering Views: Distant Cultures in Early Postcards (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998); Aline Ripert and Claude Frère, La Carte postale: son histoire, sa fonction sociale (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon; Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1983).

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A few words describing the image or identifying the publisher were usually printed, on the back of the postcard or on the image itself. The printer’s name is more common than the photographer’s name, which is often absent from the little written information given. Postcards are difficult to date, because one of their characteristics is that unless they depict a precise historical event, they are always undated to make them commercially valid for a longer period. In addition, an image could be printed as a postcard a long time after its actual production. However, postcards sometimes deliver clues about their chronology or at least the time of their circulation, through stamp or manuscript dates, as well as the printed captions and even the technical characteristics. As with photography, the black-and-white postcard was replaced, in the course of the twentieth century, by full colour images. From the late nineteenth century until the 1970s—and peaking between 1880 and 1950—there was a thriving global industry of “colonial” postcards in which the unclothed bodies of black women circulated openly. This circulation crossed national and colonial frontiers because one of the characteristics of postcards is that they are travelling objects. Colonial relationships certainly determined the main geographical itineraries of most circulated postcards. Most of the Portuguese “colonial” photographic postcards were produced in the colonies themselves (even if printed elsewhere), where they were purchased by white Portuguese men or women and sent to the colonial metropolis or to other spaces within the Portuguese imperial geographies, since administrative, military and migrant mobility between the colonies was frequent. Therefore, today, most African postcards on sale at Portuguese commercial venues come from spaces colonised by Portugal. In Italian markets, by contrast, it is more common to find postcards from former Italian colonies, and the same goes for France, the UK, or Belgium. The material maps of the past subsist in the present-day legacies of that past. Most of the images of black, semi-nude women in postcards were taken outdoors, mainly in Africa, or sometimes in temporary exhibitions and acclimatisation gardens in the centre of Europe, and this is relevant for their meaning. After the 1880s, when cameras became lighter, easier and faster devices, “instantaneous” photography enabled image-makers to take snapshots—just by clicking the button—outside the studio space. Revealing the open sky and natural landscape, the photographer could more easily embody the role of a mere witness of the women who were already unclothed before “his” arrival. European eyes transformed the

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presence of the naked body in a public space into a sexualised body, which it was not intended to be. This ambiguity, leaning on the visual tradition shaped by ethnography, travel inquiry and knowledge gathering, was in fact a main legitimiser for the open circulation of these images. Nature and nakedness were the winning combination of the “ethnographic-informed realism” embedded in most of these postcards.40 Women were already semi-nude—it was not the photographer who undressed them nor the photographic encounter that determined it, as was the case with the pornographic visual culture that also developed with the invention of photography and tended to be studio-based. Elizabeth Edwards underlines how “whatever the asymmetries of power relations, the act of photography was participatory and intersubjective by definition.”41 Likewise, Ariella Azoulay recalls that “every photograph of others bears the traces of the meeting between the photographed persons and the photographer, neither of whom can, on their own, determine how this meeting will be inscribed on the resulting image”.42 This approach shifts the protagonism from the photographer, the photographed, and the photograph onto the act itself, to the “event of photography” and the ways in which we take part in the “event” as spectators. If all photographs are, as Azoulay states, “the result of an encounter of several protagonists, mainly photographer and photographed, camera and spectator,” how can these girls/women be placed within this encounter? Then and now? Is “participation” in the “event of photography”, to use Ariella Aisha Azoulay’s ground-breaking category, possible for these photographed women? Independently of whether he is represented or not, it is predominantly the white man who controls the photographing process. It was the men who owned the cameras, who had the main power to coordinate the performative nature of the act of photographing, and who—then and now— have the photographs in their possession (or their families’, if they are dead). To whom should the photographs belong? In one of her poems, the Brazilian Ana Martins Marques writes, “photographs rightly belong/ to those that do not appear in the photographs”.43 But do they? How can 40  Elizabeth Edwards, “Anthropology and Photography (1910–1940)”, in The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. V, 2014, pp. 47–62, p. 48. 41  Ibid., p. 53. 42  Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (London: Zone Books, 2008), p. 11. 43  Ana Martins Marques, “As casas pertencem aos vizinhos...”, in O Livro das Semelhanças. Poemas (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2015), p. 60.

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we acknowledge the participation of women in the photographic event and their right to their own images? Is it relevant to consider the differences between those images in which the women are alone in the frame and those in which the women are seen next to Portuguese men? How can we know more about these women’s roles in the photographing process? Their interest in photography? Their possession of their own image? How common was the use of personal filming cameras? The role of black women in the photographing process will necessarily be a fragmented history of individual stories and cases, one much more difficult to identify and narrate. That is also why many artistic and curatorial practices today are thinking of new ways to give these materials new meanings. Complete reparation will never be possible.

Approaching the Subject in Contemporary Scholarship: National and Ethical Differences The subject of representations of black female bodies in the visual colonial archive has been framed according to different scholarly approaches, in which some national specificities and some ethical divergences can also be identified. This is, of course, a very heterogeneous and diverse “visual archive” and so is the writing on the subject. There is extensive scholarly literature on visual representations of black subjects and blackness mainly in the United States, but also in the UK and South Africa, which has focused more on artistic portraits, paintings or drawings, than in photographic images;44 then there is a growing bibliography dedicated to the visual or photographic history of black bodies or lives, with some studies

 David Bindman, Suzanne Preston Blier and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art (Cambridge, Mass.; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017). This is the companion volume to the series published between 2010 and 2017 in five volumes; Adrienne L. Childs and Susan H. Libby, Blacks and Blackness in European Art of the Long Nineteenth Century (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014); Okwui Enwezor, “Reframing the black subject: ideology and fantasy in contemporary South African representation”, in Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, ed., Reading the contemporary African art from theory to the marketplace (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Black Person in Art: How should S/He be portrayed”, in Black American Literature Forum, vol. 21, n. 1/2 (Spring-Summer 1987), pp. 3–24. 44

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specifically devoted to the female body45 or even to individual case studies.46 Another relevant critical approach reflects on an African or Black relationship to photography—black photographers or photographic practices in black communities, in Africa or its vast diaspora.47 This line of research has been greatly enriched in the last decade, thanks also to the growing presence and voice of black academics, curators, writers and artists in prominent positions in Europe, the United States and Canada, as well as in many African countries, with perhaps South Africa being the most well-known for its critical work on these subjects. Beyond this wider field, there is already a long genealogy of texts on the representation of the female body in the intersection of the visual with colonial contexts. This tradition has been quite Eurocentric and/or white in terms of authors even if one of the earliest cases was the Algerian poet, writer and editor, Malek Alloula. In 1981, he published a pioneering study entitled Le Harem Colonial: Images d’un Sous-érotisme (translated as The Colonial Harem).48 In his analysis of eroticised colonial photographic postcards of Algerian women, Alloula used Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism, applying it for the first time to postcards or photographs in visual studies. Ten years after Alloula’s book, Mieke Bal was lucid and insightful enough to see the dangers of addressing such subjects in books 45  Geary, “The Image of the Black in Early African Photography”, pp. 141–166; Barbara Thompson, ed., Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; University of Washington Press, 2008). Exhibition Catalogue; Geary, “The Black Female Body…”, pp.  143–160; Deborah Willis and Carla Williams, The Black Female Body: A Photographic History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002); Gen Doy, “More than Meets the Eye...Representations of Black Women in Mid-nineteenth-century French Photography”, in Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 21, n. 3, 1998, pp. 305–319. 46  See the many studies on Sara Bartman or Hottentot Venus, as she was also known, as well as, for example, Ciraj Rassool and Patricia Hayes, “Science and Spectacle: /Khanako’s South Africa, 1936–1937”, in Wendy Woodward, Patricia Hayes and Gary Minkley, eds., Deep hiStories: Gender and Colonialism in Southern Africa (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 117–161. 47  Some examples of many: Patricia Hayes and G. Minkley, eds., Ambivalent. Photography and Visibility in African History (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019); Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017); Tina M. Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press), 2012; Tina M. Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); Leigh Raiford, “Photography and the Practices of Critical Black Memory,” History and Theory, vol. 48, n.4, Theme issue: Photography and Historical Interpretation (December 2009), pp. 112–129; In/Sight: African Photographers from 1940 to the Present, Exhibition Catalogue (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1996). 48  Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986).

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with lavish images of eroticised women.49 How can one maintain a critical approach to a subject while indulging in the same strategy under scrutiny? In her brilliant essay Postcards from the Edge (1991), Bal already discusses many of the problems that, today, 30 years later, are still unresolved, as Temi Odumosu has recently demonstrated when reflecting on the “ethics of care” in relation to one photograph housed in the Royal Danish Library.50 Christraud M. Geary, for example, is an author who has written widely on African colonial postcards while working as an archivist confronted with thousands of these materials at the Smithsonian Institution. She has rehearsed an approach that somehow replicates the actual classification of the images held in their context of production and consumption. She uses the wide classification of “anthropometric” and “ethnographic” photographs of African women, the first grouped according to “types” and “geographical origins” and the latter according to daily activities, which included motherhood.51 This classification could be questioned since it can prevent us from seeing beyond the actual colonial categories and look at them through other angles. However, Geary also adds another category that, in the last few years, has become much more central in the scholarship on the subject: that of “images of pride and confidence” where black women appear in studio-like interior spaces, seated, dressed, and posing centrally to the camera.52 Cunha Moraes, the Portuguese photographer based in Luanda has a striking example of such typology that we reproduce in the introduction to this book. This line of research is related to the wider topic of photographic practices in Africa beyond a colonial historical perspective and is much more attentive to African and Asian photographers and photographic studio 49  Mieke Bal, “A Postcard from the edge”, in Double Exposures. The subject of Cultural Analysis (New York, London: Routledge, 1991). 50  Temi Odumosu, “The Crying Child. On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons”, Current Anthropology, vol. 61, Suppl. 22, October 2020. 51  Christraud M.  Geary, “The Black Female Body, the Postcard, and the Archives”, in Barbara Thompson, ed., Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; University of Washington Press, 2008), pp. 147–152. 52  Christraud M. Geary, “The Image of the Black in Early African Photography”, in David Bindman, Suzanne Preston Blier and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art (Cambridge, MA; London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), pp. 141–166, pp. 159–165; Geary, “The Black Female Body…”, pp. 152–156.

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owners.53 Examples of black women commissioning their own portraits already existed by the late nineteenth century, mainly through the many photographic studios that opened along the African coast, many of which were also owned by African or Asian photographers. These portraits, where the women exercise some form of control over the means and ends of their own self-representation, can be seen as visual counter-narratives to the dominant trope of the typified or eroticised black women. However, the presence of these images was not strong enough to counter the hegemonic banalisation of the exposed African female body that was widely reproduced in a growing print culture. Today, the photographic portraits of black women that depended on their own choice tend to remain hidden in private homes, as part of well-­ kept or forgotten family albums, even if some of these images were also reproduced and “sold” in the thriving commerce of the ethnic or geographical souvenir. On the contrary, the culture of reproducibility and dissemination through a panoply of mass-media materials—postcards, newspapers, colonial propaganda leaflets and books or colonial exhibition printed matter—multiplied the impact of semi-naked or eroticised African female bodies in wide geographical spaces in an unparalleled way. This tension—dominant images of black people represented by others, and images of self-representation—exists. However, after a few decades in which scholarly approaches where very much focused on “colonial photography” or images of black slavery and segregation, there is now a more conscious search for those other visual archives where “black” means selfhood, subjectivity, dignity, humanity—images of self-representation, in short. That is to say, a move from images of “despair, pain or brutal isolation”, to use Teju Cole’s words, to images of “human beings, credible, fully engaged in their world”.54 Deborah Willis has summarised this change of perspective towards images of blackness in the finest way—from “imposed representation to self-representation”. If the archive of colonialism or slavery was mainly one of imposed representation, the archive that is now being valued by academics, artists or 53  Erin Haney, Photography and Africa (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), pp.  49–55, 71–76; Geary, “The Image of the Black in Early African Photography”, pp.  141–166, pp.  143–159; Christraud M.  Geary, “Through the Lenses of African Photographers: Depicting Foreigners and New Ways of Life, 1870–1950”, in David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art: The Twentieth Century: The Impact of Africa, vol. V (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2014), pp. 87–99. 54  Teju Cole, “Letter to a friend”, in As We Rise. Photography from the Black Atlantic. Selections from the Wedge Collection, New York, Aperture, 2021, pp. 6–7.

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collectors is one of self-representation. Not by chance, Willis is an AfricanAmerican scholar and so are many of those who have searched for self-representation as a counter-narrative to the banality of the other side: not only those thousands, millions of images that constitute the visual archives of slavery, segregation of colonialism, but also those scholarly studies who have been published on the subject. The foregoing discussion leads us to ethical questions that are also inseparable from national scholarly cultures. That is to say that some differences in approaching this subject seem to be national differences, even if the reasons for them are more difficult to identify. Even if there are, certainly, opposing views and approaches within national scholarly traditions, in some countries there seems to be a more politicised and ethical consciousness towards these visual materials. More in the United States, the UK or Brazil, where activism and academic subjects are closer, than in countries such as Portugal or France, where university production has remained more “shielded” from other sources of critical thought, from artistic practices to political activism related to racial issues. One example makes Alloula’s book an inoffensive enterprise: the massive French coffee table book, Sexe, Race and Colonies published in 2018. A tantalising back cover—a female arm sensuously crossing a graphic line while the word “sexe” dominates the (blank black) cover, next to the words “race” et “colonies” with neon lights suggesting a (prostitution?) nightclub. One wonders if the editors had any say on the graphic design. The cover is only the prelude to the interior of the book—a lavishly illustrated publication with over 1200 images—prints, paintings, drawings, photographs, postcards, lithographs—of semi-nude or nude black and brown women sometimes in overtly eroticised poses or being sexually grabbed by (white) men. The editors claim in the introduction that they decided not to reproduce the most problematic and sexually violent images of women or any that suggested paedophilia. However, we could argue that many of the images reproduced would fit in the “pornographic category” if the women were white. Although the texts—by well-known scholars of French colonialism and also by prestigious authors from the African continent, such as Achille Mbembe and Leïla Slimani—are critical and the book acknowledges how sexual violence against women was embedded in all colonising experiences, for many centuries and in all spaces, the images are nonetheless there for us to see—again. An article in the French, left-wing newspaper, Libération uses a sentence by the editor Pascal Blanchard, as the title

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of the piece: “[T]hese images are the proof that colonisation was a great sexual safari”. Under this statement, the article reproduces some of the photographs of totally naked women, in print and in its online edition. Would these images be reproduced in a newspaper such as Libération if instead the women were white and French? Why does skin colour, not only in colonising contexts, but today, still entail an ontological difference, in terms of visual (and sexual) availability? This press coverage contributed to an intensification of the controversy and to an uproar that went beyond academia to include activist groups of migrants and people of African descent. This is the sign of a time when the public spheres of racial and gender activism and that of scholarship have more porous frontiers and cannot remain separate, as tended to happen in the past. Mieke Bal’s words of 1991 remain poignant, “[T]he critic cannot help being the expository agent, the pointing subject who shows the image, even if the image is the object of this subject’s negative analysis. You can show and critique, but the gesture itself is constative and bears no modal qualification; it cannot say ‘no’ to its own object.”55 This example illustrates how different scholarly contexts choose to deal with the problem in different ways. It seems that in France, and in Europe in general, the stance tends to be “we have to show what we are denouncing and analysing”. I would argue this is also the dominant Portuguese scholarly position. By contrast, the North American scholarly context has shown a tendency to offer more creative, performative and political gestures of speaking or writing about images without showing them again. Is it the fact that the scholars in the former context are mostly men and in the latter, they are mostly women, some of them black, significant for these different options? Sexe, Race et Colonies, however, had the value of being part of a research project that has attempted a comparative, transnational approach. Even if it does not include scholars of Portuguese colonialism, it includes some images from former Portuguese colonies. Otherwise, the vast bibliography that in recent decades focuses on “colonial visual culture”, as it is often called in British historiography, or “colonial iconography”, as it tends to be named in French historiography, does not include the Portuguese colonial visual archive as a source, a problem or a comparative frame. Is there anything distinguishing the “Portuguese” colonial case from other contemporary European colonial cases in what concerns  Bal, “A postcard from the edge”, p. 197.

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images of African women? More studies need to be made but a straight answer would be “no”. In the Portuguese context, a few texts deal with this specific subject and for the most part, they reproduce the images at stake. I have also done it in previous articles, but I have consciously decided not to do so in this text. Júlia Garraio, for example, wrote an article addressing the meanings and implications of the pervasiveness of black women’s bodies in the late Portuguese colonial empire, a subject in dialogue with her other work on sexual violence against women in the context of war, mainly during the Second World War,56 a subject that Azoulay has also included in her latest book.57 Francesca de Rosa, meanwhile, has published an article on the “construction of the feminine body” in the recreation of an African village in the centre of Lisbon in the context of an Industrial Exhibition in 1932.58 Barebreasted Guinean women were on public display and became the protagonists of a documentary film, which is openly available online today. Carlos Barradas addressed the crossing between Portuguese colonialism and visual representation of women in a book that I edited in 2014, O Império da Visão. Fotografia no contexto colonial português (1860–1900), but, overall, the book did not explore the subject of women and gender enough.59

Final Remarks: Dealing with the Triviality of the Legacies of Empire One of my interests in these images resides in the ways in which they are seen, viewed, placed and commented on today. The ways in which images of black women’s bodies continue to be trivialised, colonised, under the same kind of viewership to which they were subjected within the colonial contexts that both produced and legitimised them. The places and the ownerships of the photographs, today, are determining factors for 56  Garraio, Júlia, “Perdidas na exposição? Desafiar o imaginário colonial português através de fotografias de mulheres negras,” in Ribeiro and Ribeiro, eds., Geometrias da memória, pp. 279–303. 57  Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Potential History. Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019). 58  Francesca de Rosa, “África em Lisboa: os Indígenas da Guiné na Grande Exposição Industrial e Guiné Aldeia Indígena em Lisboa—1932: A construção do corpo feminino”, in Comunicação e Sociedade, vol. 29, 2016, pp. 197–217. 59  Carlos Barradas, “Descolonizando enunciados: a quem serve objetivamente a fotografia?”, Filipa Lowndes Vicente, org., O Império da Visão: Fotografia no Contexto Colonial Português (1860–1960) (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2014), pp. 447–459.

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thinking about them. They are mostly in the possession of those once on the side of power—that power of being a white male and also a coloniser. At the same time, many of these men, especially those young soldiers in the late colonial wars, were also subaltern in many ways—young, poor, many of them illiterate, from a rural and underdeveloped metropolis. Yet those photographs are not in the homes or families of the black women who appear in the images but seldom had the opportunity to see them themselves. This means that their contemporary uses, narratives and discourses—the memories they conjure in the present—tend to belong to those who were already in control at the time the photograph was taken. As I have mentioned, the fact that I am a woman was determinant in the ways these images of women affected me and disturbed me even if I am not a black woman. The fact that I am a historian and also a collector of many different nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial documents from photographic postcards to photography, exhibition catalogues and leaflets means that I cannot dissociate these different identities in my approach to these images and the ways I am interested in thinking about them. Being a historian attentive to the visual allows me to reflect on these images/objects as historical documents from the past, but it is the fact of being a collector that mostly helps me to grasp their place and dissemination in the present. It is my experience away from libraries and historical archives—in flea markets, second-hand shops, postcard or ephemera fairs or online trade—that allows me to pay as much attention to their uses in the present as in the past and to have a more holistic approach to their biographies as object-images. Indeed, it is relevant to think of these different things as objects as well as images because it is the focus on their materiality that allows us to consider the spaces where they are today and how they are consumed, seen and collected, both in public and private spaces, historical and institutional or commercial and personal. The same postcard can be simultaneously in all these different places, changing our understanding of each of them. As a woman in a male-dominated world—as one can easily acknowledge when going to a postcard or ephemera fair anywhere—I am continually confronted with the contemporary banality and persistence of colonial materials and colonial ways of classifying and looking at them. When I hesitated about purchasing a 1950s calendar at Lisbon’s main flea market, the seller, a woman, told me that if I did not take it, she would sell it to a client who only buys “pretas nuas” (“naked black women”, even if this is an inaccurate translation because “pretas” can have different meanings

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and also be used in a derogatory way). When I asked for Portuguese colonial photographs at a photographic fair in a Russell Square hotel in London, the seller showed me some of the most violent images I had ever seen of African women with German military men. I had to look away. At the time I was not even thinking historically about this subject, but when later I did, this memory of the obscene that I could not look at came to my mind again. According to a Lisbon-based postcard seller whose shop I used to visit (he has since closed and concentrates only on online commerce), the combination of black, colonial, woman and naked, is one of his most profitable categories, guaranteed to sell. White women’s exposed bodies are classified in sections labelled “erotic” or “pornographic”. Equivalent black bodies can be filed across multiple categories: “Angola”, “Africa”, “colonial”, “ethnic”, “ethnographic”, “colonial exhibition”, “human zoos”, etc. The male-dominated collecting market in the present often reproduces the uses to which these imageries were subjected in the past. The widespread presence of these postcards, produced in all European colonial contexts for so many decades, testifies to its central place as part of a colonial popular culture that reached many people in many different places. Our place as viewers of these images today—part of the immense quantity of remains and legacies of empires—is a major challenge and one that is being widely discussed in the public sphere, even if many of those who possess these images or who sell them remain unaware and oblivious to these discussions. This, as we have seen, leads to the ethical questions that scholars, artists, curators and archivists have been discussing for the past few decades. To think about, look at or write on these images today means inevitably having to confront the violence embedded in their making and consumption. Images of abuse, pain and exploitation retain their strength and can perpetuate what one seems to criticise. Are institutions—the university, archive, museum, exhibition—enough to counteract the risks of reproducing the violence? Can we keep on showing Rosinha, and all these unnamed “Black Venuses”? Can we reproduce anonymous African women having their breasts grabbed—not only in front of the camera, but for the camera? And can we show the anonymous soldiers, who may now be old men still dealing with the experience of being sent from a remote Portuguese village to the unpredictable settings of the African colonial wars? Even if they were in the place of empowerment at the moment of the making the image? Is it legitimate to re-print and re-produce these images in the context of academia and art? Is a critical and deconstructive

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frame of analysis sufficient to validate their display and circulation yet again? Is it possible to decolonise these images while simultaneously and consciously putting them before new eyes in seminar or conference PowerPoint presentations, in scholarly books, in historical or artistic exhibitions or in academic books such as this one? Is there a difference between “showing” problematic images and “quoting” problematic words? Does the very act of seeing, which can be immediate and undemanding, as distinct from the act of reading, a slower and apparently intellectually more demanding exercise, make it more ethically challenging to reproduce difficult images than to reproduce difficult words? How can we analyse these images as historical sources, while preserving or returning to these women the dignity, individuality and subjectivity that was threatened, or even destroyed, in the past making and the past (and present) uses of these images? There are many questions and no easy answers. As already mentioned, in her 1991 essay, “A Postcard from the Edge”, Mieke Bal problematised scholarly exercises such as the one in this article.60 For her, context and critique were not enough to justify the showing of these images yet again, as they still encouraged a voyeuristic gaze that victimised the women portrayed. Saidiya Hartman, more recently, used radical gestures to counteract the implications of “showing again”. By speaking of images while refusing the PowerPoint culture (as she did for example in a 2017 conference at Brown University),61 she sought to preserve the dignity of the black girls and women who were portrayed in the photographs she was describing and analysing. On the other hand, she uses informed fiction to say more about these women than the historical archive allows.62 If history and the archives themselves reproduce forms of oppression and eradicate the documentary traces of many human beings— like the women slaves subjected to rape by their owners and middlemen, whom she writes about—then she goes beyond the “boundaries of the archive” to tell the stories that documents neglect to fully tell. When Mieke Bal wrote her essay most of the authors writing on this subject were male, and she found it relevant to ask, “Who does the 60  Mieke Bal, “A Postcard from the Edge”, Double Exposures: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 195–224. 61  Saidiya Hartman, “The Beauty of the Ungovernable” within the Seminar Imperial Origins of Racialized Lives: From Enslavement to Black Lives Matter, Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Displacement, Brown University, 7 April 2017. 62  Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in two Acts,” in Small Axe, Number 26 (vol. 12, n. 2), June 2008, pp. 1–14.

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looking?” Would Bal ask the same question in 2023? Questions on positionality have become central to many contemporary discussions on the politics of racial and gender identities, even if they are much more acute in some countries than in others. The main differences between 1991 and 2023 is that this has become a public, civic, subject, and there are now many more Africans or African descendants, part of the vast African Diaspora, occupying prominent positions in academia, in the arts and culture, as curators, and as authors of all kinds of publications, from fiction to critical thought. The legacies of the colonial visual archive of the past, found in public archives, libraries, street-markets, online postcard commercial sites or private homes, are much more visible and accessible than those other images of black women that also existed but did not fit a popular or dominant visual culture of what was consumed and collected. These are the photographs of black “common” and “trivial” lives such as the ones published by Deborah Willis, Paul Gilroy and more recently Kenneth Montague.63 Even if there were multiple differences in the ways female bodies were converted into images, reproduced and circulated, these were indissociable from the colour of their skin, the political and social spaces they inhabited and the weaker or stronger voices they possessed. Some women had more of a voice than others did. Women also looked back. Most, however, did not have the tools to materialise it through the instruments of photography or writing. Not even in the backs of postcards. To find and analyse past and present female counter-narratives can also be a way of contesting the lasting silences of the past, the void of the images of those women who never saw themselves portrayed in the photographs. Acknowledgements  I would like to thank Rhian Atkin for her revision of the English text.

63  See, for example: Deborah Willis, Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009); Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers—1840 to the Present (NY: W.  W. Norton & Company, 2000; Paul Gilroy, Black Britain. A Photographic History, preface by Stuart Hall (London: Saqui in association with gettyimages, 2007); As We Rise. Photography from the Black Atlantic (New York: Aperture, 2021), the book-catalogue of Kenneth Montague’s photographic collection.

PART III

Holding the Empire: Political Violence, Labour, Struggle

CHAPTER 12

Images That Kill: Counterinsurgency and Photography in Angola Circa 1961 Afonso Dias Ramos

On 19 July 1961, as the civil rights struggle reached the tipping point in the United States, Martin Luther King confessed: “I know of no situation in the world that concerns me more than the brutality and barbarity taking place in Angola today.”1 Having to decline an invitation to visit the war-­ torn colony due to the critical situation at home, he could only lament from afar: “The whole world should rise up and protest these unbelievable atrocities perpetrated by the Portuguese government against the people of Angola.”2 In a bizarre twist, five years later, King was killed in Memphis by a man who then immediately fled to Lisbon to join the colonial army in Angola. The coincidence is not all surprising. The world had  turned a  “Letter to Mr. George M.  Houser, American Committee on Africa”, 22 July 1961, Clayborne Carson and Tenisha Armstrong (eds.), The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., Vol. VII, Oakland: University of California Press, 2014, p. 255. 2  Idem. 1

A. D. Ramos (*) Art History Institute (NOVA FCSH / IN2PAST), Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_12

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blind eye to his emergency call to the worst humanitarian crisis of the time, and not much has changed sixty years on. It is still nowhere to be found in lists of mass killing. The deadly occurences that launched a thirteen-­year long, three-front war in Africa to end Portuguese colonial rule have never  been paid their due. This chapter reconsiders these neglected events in relation to their visual representation, since they involved not only the largest campaign of atrocity photography in the world, but also prompted the greatest military effort of a Western country since the  Second World War. These two dimensions, I will argue, were radically intertwined, and ought to be read together. Only months after sixteen countries acquired their independence in Africa, and three weeks after Lumumba was killed in the Congo on 17 January 1961, neighbouring Angola was gripped by an unparalleled cycle of violence. Within six months, the north of this colony had  lost two-­ thirds of its population: an estimated hundred thousand people died, half a million fled away. These were, by far, the bloodiest events in a Portuguese territory in the twentieth century, even if they pull little historiographical weight behind them. Caught in a tangle of colonial and authoritarian politics, the domino effect of events dealt a fatal blow to white minority rule in Africa and dictatorial regimes in Europe. The role of images in this has never been examined. This chapter offers the first analysis of the infamous thousands of black-and-white atrocity photographs from such incidents, all too easy to retrieve but nearly impossible to read about. If they are the most reproduced and consequential images in Portuguese imperial history, still printed in newspapers and shared online, why were the most basic questions on their stories, meanings, or uses never asked? To what extent was their circulation implicated in the mechanisms of violence itself? This chapter address the role that visual rhetoric of atrocity played, and still plays, in forging the official history and public memory of these events. A major blindspot in the critical literature on extreme images that has boomed following 9/11 is the inattention to the effective use of atrocity pictures in the context of counterinsurgency during the imperial endgame. In a notable exception, the Nobel laureate José Saramago responded to the attack in New York with the following image: “Somewhere in Angola. Two Portuguese soldiers lift a black man possibly still not dead by his arms, as another machete-wielding soldier is about to cut his head from the body. This is the first photo. In the second … the head has been

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chopped, impaled on a stick, soldiers laugh.”3 Considering the increased awareness of the role of media in framing events and engendering terror, this description hints at what is to be gained from linking such disparate historical phenomena. Colonial counterinsurgencies were a turning point in the contemporary entanglement of the image world in political violence, integrating media theory, military strategy, and visual culture. “Can images kill?” Marie-José Mondzain asked after 9/11. “Do images make us killers? Can we go so far as to attribute to them the guilt or responsibility of crimes and offenses that, as objects, they couldn’t have committed?”4 Those questions drove the renewed interest in terror that has governed visual studies in the last decades, revealing our still tenuous grasp on the deadly workings of images. Indeed, the decolonization wars were a, if not the prime example of the ways in which pictures of violated bodies suit political needs by instilling moral panic, steering the historical narrative, and grounding the right to use violent force. But just as the colonial regimes drew immense political capital from photographs of dead victims, and as military strategists and media experts raved about their unique power to change the fortune of counterinsurgencies, the foundational theorists on photography largely  busied themselves with declaring the waning impact of images. It may appear self-evident today that photography is as much a cry for peace as a call for revenge, as Susan Sontag argued after 9/11, but this duality is not borne out by this field of study.5 The familiar argument is that atrocity photographs were bound up in the rise of humanitarian and pacifist movements, or that to expose war was inherently a form of protest against it. But their role in legitimating death and violence is just as true. Part of the enduring perception of photography as an anti-war medium, rather than a decisive conflict escalator, can be ascribed to their overlooked role in prosecuting the undeclared wars in settler colonies like Angola, Algeria, and Kenya. Long presumed to be without images, or subsumed under the misleading heading of a post-war era, these protracted struggles were not the proclaimed operations to maintain law and order, but dirty wars to control far-flung territories. Visual mediatization had a vital relevance in presenting the affairs, as well as a direct bearing on the conduct  José Saramago, “O Factor Deus”, Público, 18 September 2001.  Marie-José Mondzain, “Can Images Kill?”, Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, n. 1, Autumn 2009, p. 20. 5  Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003. 3 4

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of war (and how it is remembered), by leading to the suspension of the rule of law and the reassertion of sovereignty through terror. Shocking images, meant to overstate panic and to support militarized responses, played a key role in the rhetoric of massacre and reprisal that underpinned counterinsurgencies,6 altering the cultural codes, military rules, and limits to violence.7 These wars to uphold the colonial order took place under the mantle of tabloid sensationalism, as the authorities showed no compunction in using disturbing imagery to effect political change, subverting the existing social codes to kindle fearful reactions and shut down any consideration of grievances or legitimacy. Such a fixation with the methods of violence blindsided the underlying causes, but also authorized the most extreme consequences, intimately bound with the brutal reactions that followed. This strategic deployment of atrocity photographs in counterinsurgencies drew on world war experiences, though these left behind a solid body of literature discouraging their use, either because the ethical implications outweighed the political use-value, or because, in heating up passions and inciting one’s side to commit atrocities in revenge, they led to worse crimes being perpetrated. European powers evaded such restraints in dealing with the uprisings against colonial authority. When the Mau Mau revolt shook up Kenya, the British government was initially cautious with the explicit material, fearing that it was too shocking for the general public, lest it descended into a race war. They were kept at the House of Commons for discreet consultation. But when, a month later, images of a white boy killed along his bloodied toys were published, settlers rushed to the colonial office in Nairobi to demand the elimination of the rebels. The turning point came soon after with the Lari Massacre (1953), when, the day after the attack, the government held an international press conference from the atrocity site, launching an intensive media campaign which included distributing shocking photographs and newsreels of brutalized

6  Martin Thomas, “Repression, reprisals and rhetorics of massacre in Algeria’s war”, Martin Thomas and Richard Toye (eds.), Rhetorics of Empire: Languages of colonial conflict after 1900, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017, pp. 166–171. 7  Worthy exceptions include, e.g. Emma Kuby, “A War of Words over an Image of War: The Fox Movietone Scandal and the Portrayal of French Violence in Algeria, 1955–1956”, French Politics, Culture & Society, vol. 30, n. 1, Spring 2012, pp.  46–67; and Annie E.  Coombes, “Photography against the grain: rethinking the colonial archive in Kenyan museums”, World Art, vol. 6, 2016, pp. 61–83.

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people and animals to information offices and opinion-makers worldwide.8 An infamous booklet of shocking photographs, The Mau Mau in Kenya (1954), was to have an impact on the largest public possible; the settlers were asked to pass them around servants to scare them into submission;9 the Royal Air Force dropped images into the jungles to discourage rebels; and the security forces used them to intimidate and break suspects.10 The moral panic soon led to calls for extermination, allegations of shoot-to-kill policies, and a brutal repression. But as the media obsessively informed the public on the insurgency, any news of the reprisals in which nearly four times as many people were killed, was shielded from sight. This was similar in Algeria. If French authorities were also jittery in allowing the public to access explicit pictures at first, this changed as the political situation worsened.11 When Jacques Soustelle was sent to New York to defend French colonialism at the United Nations (UN), he complained of finding, in the delegation’s offices, a “cupboard stuffed with unused material and photographs on the FLN atrocities … never used by us, for fear of offending the niceties of diplomacy.”12 The turning point came soon after with the Mélouza killings (1957). Aware of the political windfall, the colonial regime launched a media campaign, allowing journalists and photographers to cover the massacre site. Awful pictures surfaced on the press. Entire collections were sent to government officials, influential opinion-­ makers, and anti-colonial critics. In August, the young army officer Jean-­ Marie Le Pen even headed a caravan tour across beaches in France with logistical support from the army, leading a convoy of lorries to foist atrocity pictures and films on the vacationers. Le Pen later boasted of the successful shock tactics, “hundreds of thousands of posters”, “millions of leaflets … with unbearable photos of assassination victims and children with their throats cut”.13  Robert B. Edgerton, Mau Mau: An African Crucible, New York: Free Press, 1989.  Fabian Klose, Human Rights in the Shadow of Colonial Violence: The Wars of Independence in Kenya and Algeria, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, p. 204. 10  Terence Gavaghan, placed on trial in 2011 for human rights abuses in Kenya, admitted to “the mistake of having horrific published pictures of Mau Mau brutalities pinned inside the lorries carrying them” to detainment camps. Of Lions and Dung Beetles, Devon: Arthur H. Stockwell, 1999, p. 187. 11   James D.  Le Sueur, Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005, p. 197. 12  Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954–1962, New York: New York Review of Books, 2006. 13  Jean-Marie Le Pen, Les Français d’abord, Paris: Carrère-Michel Lafon, 1984, p. 42. 8 9

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The decolonization wars were conflicts of global dimensions, with remarkable budgets to produce and circulate propaganda material that far exceeded any efforts of liberation groups. These massive campaigns intended to marginalize the impact of anti-colonial propaganda, replacing it with the positive images of prospering colonies. The shocking imagery had a profound effect on the public, eroding sympathy and solidarity for the cause of independence, as people refused to be associated with savagery and brutality. It developed into a radically lopsided archive, deflecting any criticisms of the conduct of security forces by fixating on the cruelty of insurgents, facilitated by a near absence of images of their own acts of terror. The lasting impact of this imagery was to present the brutality of insurgencies as far more despicable than such  counterinsurgency activities as napalming villages, round-up of suspects, indiscriminate killing, or torture (Fig. 12.1).

15 March 1961: Representing the Insurgency Few blockbusters have an opening scene as horrific as Maria de Medeiros’ April Captains (2000), a popular film in Portugal telling the story of its 1974 revolution. The initial credits roll out to a gloomy tune, and cut to thirty seconds of sheer gore: a non-stop sequence of black corpses rotting on the floor. The camera zooms in and out of naked bodies, with close-ups of fly-ridden, maggot-infested body parts, including bare genitalia soaked in blood and a half-dismembered head, as birds peck on human flesh. Without a word, the music stops, and these scenes in black and white segue abruptly into a shot of a clock in colour filling up the screen. As the camera pans out, it reveals a train station in Lisbon, and a young white couple making out on the platform. The conscript tells his girlfriend he was called up to the war in Africa, then runs to catch the train back to the army base. She begs him to flee to France with her, as the scene draws to a close. This one-minute clip is the most economic version of Portuguese contemporary history ever made. Thirteen years and 5,000 miles divide the two scenes—the black corpses on the ground mark the outbreak of war in Angola, on March 1961; the white couple on the station marks the day before soldiers toppled the dictatorship in Lisbon, on April 1974. The clock binds them together, standing in for the ticking time bomb that, once set off in the African battlefields, blew up in a coup d’état in Portugal, thus bringing Europe’s oldest dictatorship and colonial empire to an end. This narrative nexus is relevant in what it leaves out, betraying the

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Fig. 12.1  “Portuguese people, open up your eyes!” [Luanda, 14 April 1961], Author’s collection. This propaganda poster was dispatched to mainland Portugal with the following message: “After seeing and reading this manifesto, taking in its content, save it as a reminder of your duties and omissions.”

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deep-­ seated reluctance to address the decolonization wars in Angola, Guinea-­Bissau, and Mozambique. The same soldiers fighting in Africa led to democracy in Portugal, so their actions escaped public scrutiny and legal challenge. While the bloodless military-led coup takes up the entire film, the bloodiest episode in contemporary history lasts thirty seconds. Instead of actualized in colour and restaged as vividly present, the archival footage relegates it to a distant, dead past, in black and white. Aligned with the standard accounts of the colonial past—the only violence on display is that of imperial resistance, rendering the uprising senseless, without cause or consequence—this storyline needs to be carefully unpacked in order to understand the differential treatment ascribed to human life across the racial lines. Instead of seeing such events through the vantage point of the finale (the default historiographical position), this chapter winds back the clock to the founding moments of violence. I return to the initial images since they are not only produced by, but also producing of history, as encoded in the film plot. We have names, narratives, locations, and dates for the white couple, as the plight of conscription is staged by living, speaking subjects. None of this is supplied for black bodies, unworthy of mourning or respect, as inanimate and brutalized objects whose story is not told, left for dead and outside of history, in a state of pure victimhood at the hands of some supernatural catastrophe. The graphic violence on-screen also reproduces the double ethical standard whereby black (but not white, as in the original footage) death or nudity are tolerated as a mass entertainment product. This enshrines a differential between worthy and unworthy victims, denying any empathy with the latter through the lack of context, narrative, or personalization of events. As in the dominant inherited narratives, the insurrectionary violence bursts out of nowhere and seems utterly unintelligible, invariably presented as the first rather than the last resort for the marginalised. This is late colonial visuality in a nutshell, turning the brutality of colonial occupation into a matter of self-defence. The wealth of shock images from the Angolan war is no surprise, considering how many people died. What is striking is that such photographs are confined to three days alone (the outbreak of conflict), and these three days dominate the visual legacy of thirteen years of war. They largely record the most tabooed event of war, the UPA (União dos Povos de Angola = Union of the Peoples of Angola) mass insurgency on 15 March 1961, timed to coincide with a vote against Portuguese colonial rule at the United Nations on 15 March 1961. Hundreds of rebels armed with

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machetes or flintlocks, the only weapons at their disposal, set upon the so-­called coffee belt in northern Angola, massacring over 1,000 people, for the most part black labourers of other ethnic groups, but also hundreds of mixed race and white settlers. The majority of the pictures were taken in the first days. But not randomly, as often assumed. Contrary to the claims that this was the accidental work of journalists that happened to be in the region, it largely resulted from executive orders to embed photographers and cameramen from official services in the rescue teams sent to those afflicted areas. This was already the case with the first military columns to leave Luanda on 17 March and it carried on for months. As late as 2 June, the Governor General of Luanda dispatched an army convoy to plantations nearby Negage and Camabatela, with the goal of escorting three photographers to bring back as many images as possible.14 The first thing to note about this quest for visual records is that it was embedded in the military apparatus and thus, entirely submitted to it. In fact, certain vigilantes and soldiers later known for their atrocities in retaliation, often actually took the pictures through which the events became known, thus prescribing the terms of interpretation. Indeed, if the use of photography in this context may be (and largely was) framed as a coping mechanism to deal with the horror they came upon, it was also envisioned as a retaliatory weapon from the get-go. This partly explains why among thousands of images, few actually show material damages or forensic clues for military intelligence. They also never depict the perpetrators, only the victims, focusing not on the masses of dead bodies but on individual suffering. This was less about fact-­ finding and record-keeping than it was about setting up a call to arms, with catastrophic consequences that render particularly pernicious Susan Sontag’s axiom that to take photographs is “essentially an act of non-­ intervention”.15 The idea that the camera is used mainly to detach oneself from what is happening, not to experience but to record it, flies in the face of counterinsurgency campaigns using it as a weapon of combat and retaliation. So much so that the leading theorist of atrocity propaganda, Ernst Jünger, known for contending instead that photography is a political weapon of assault, would condemn this use of graphic imagery precisely when visiting Angola, in 1966. Coming across the pictures in a hotel 14  The report is transcribed in full in Bernardo Teixeira, A fabric of terror: three days in Angola, New York: Devin-Adair, 1965, pp. 128–138. 15  Susan Sontag, On Photography, London: Penguin Books, 1977.

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lobby in Luanda, there was no trace left of his former enthusiasm with shock tactics, arguing that such a direct exposure violates subjects in perpetuity.16 With an exceptional turnaround time, five days after the insurgency, the visual results of the first expeditions to northern Angola reached Lisbon. On 20 March, 16 shocking photographs were sent to top government officials, as they imposed a media blackout and banned foreign visitors from entering Angola, but still held out on sending military reinforcements or evacuation means for the isolated populations under attack. Only on 13 April, after deflecting an internal coup, did Salazar take over the defense portfolio, tellingly emerging from the habitual state of near invisibility in the public eye to make a rare, dramatic appearance on television announcing the dispatch of troops to Angola. Yet, during this month-long hiatus, no expense was spared to exploit the plight of defenseless victims in Angola for political ends, even as they were still facing attacks  by the rebels. Within days, the explicit photographs of the corpses, at first confined to official channels and the top tier of the regime, were bombarded on the public sphere without the consent of families, access restrictions or content warnings. While other colonial powers showed an initial reluctance in releasing the graphic images, in Portugal there was no moratorium. The policy was of unrestricted exposure from the outset. Within weeks, these images spread like wildfire in newspapers, magazines, books, television, films, exhibits and booklets.17 Conventionally, murder victims and crime scene photographs are withdrawn from the public. In this case, the authorities not only condoned their free circulation in public, but openly sponsored it. In central Lisbon, for instance, the propaganda bureau lined up blown-up sensational photographs on the windows of their headquarters, forcing thousands of passersby to behold the carnage. Only one block away, the Lisbon Geographic Society, a semi-official colonial institution, held a public exhibition of shock images, which would break attendance records as the most visited photography show in Portugal, with 50,000 people in a month.18 Meanwhile, an unparalleled editorial boom took place in Portugal, with books released every month full of explicit  Ernst Jünger, Siebzig verweht I, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980, p. 479.  In 1961, the RTP television channel in Portugal broadcasted 9.30 hours of footage of Angola. Vasco Hogan Teves, História da Televisão em Portugal, 1955/1979, Lisboa: TV Guia Editora, 1998, p. 114. 18  “Exposição das Fotografias de Atrocidades Cometidas no Norte de Angola”, Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, July–September 1961, p. 316. 16 17

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photographs, none of them banned by the famously airtight censorship. Shockingly graphic images also made their debut on the big screen. In some cases, the films added sounds effects of women howling and babies crying, for maximum dramatic effect.19 Though it was hardly conceivable that anyone in Portugal had not come across the images given the reach of the campaign, posters showing the bloody corpses were also put on the streets, photographs were placed on display in town fairs and, in some cases, held up by priests from church pulpits,20 and displayed in mobile atrocity picture shows taken to the countryside by propaganda vans for the local populations to see (Fig. 12.2).21 In Angola, the strategy was different. On the one hand, copies of the pictures of black victims were given to soldiers so that they could show the local populations, scaring them into collaborating with colonial authorities.22 On the other hand, copies of the pictures of white victims were made to show incoming soldiers, with an equally clear objective. As one army lieutenant recalled, upon disembarking in Luanda in May: All the images showed whites killed by terrorists. The corpses were in a very bad shape. We knew that they had been chopped, sawed like wood, maimed. We knew that their houses still had their blood, that we had to avenge them. … So, I told them: ‘You see what happened? We cannot tolerate this, can we?’ And that was when the war started for us.23 The army colonel Carlos Fabião clarified the intentions behind the campaign: When a new battalion arrived [in Luanda], they were surrounded and shown photographs. There was an almost homicidal spirit of vendetta in the air, an extremely powerful drive to get revenge. Almost instantaneously, the troops were ready to go.24

19  For example, Quirino Simões’s Angola na Guerra e no Progresso (2010). For more, see Jorge António and Maria do Carmo Piçarra, Angola–O nascimento de uma nação, Lisboa: Guerra e Paz, 2013, p. 29. 20  Maria José Lobo Antunes, Regressos quase perfeitos: memórias da guerra em Angola, Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2015. 21  John Seiler, Southern Africa since the Portuguese Coup, Boulder: Westview Press, 1980, p. 20. 22  Présence Africaine, Issue 45, 1963, p. 114. 23  “Quando o País mergulhou na Guerra,” Correio da Manhã, 15 March 2011. 24   Testimony in Joaquim Furtado’s documentary, A Guerra, Episode 3, RTP Productions (2010).

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Fig. 12.2  The book cover of a state-sponsored anthology of the press coverage of the revolt in Angola, under the title Angola Mártir [Martyred Angola], featuring a monumental-sized reproduction of the most iconic of these atrocity photographs

The atrocity pictures were shown to young soldiers not simply to justify their presence and boost their morale, but as an example to be followed. René Pelissier, for instance, witnessed how these pictures were immediately mobilized as a carte blanche for reprisals. Sitting together with foreign correspondents on the border of Angola, they were denied entry while presented by the guards  with multiple images of dead babies or raped women: “Behold international communism, they would all repeat in choir”.25 This unrestricted exposure to visceral horror meant a radical rupture of ethical norms and social codes. As such, it demanded a radical solution. Swift action, not structural change. Overnight, the pervasive propaganda clichés of a peaceful multiracial colony turned into hyperrealist visions of horror, preying on sexual terrors and racial fears—stories of cannibalism, 25  René Pélissier, Explorar—Voyages en Angola et autres lieux incertains, Orgeval: Pelissier, 1979, p. 126.

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castration or gang rape loomed large in the imagination. As one settler candidly put it, “we could no longer square the colourful images of a postcard Luanda with the  black-and-white photos that filled up newspapers with mutilated bodies, slain kids and women with sticks up their vaginas.”26 Such a contrast, conveyed even at a chromatic level, indicates the schisms on which late colonial visuality rested, always juxtaposing paradise lost and hell unbound. A prime example of this is Luanda 61, a book published by the civil authorities in Angola, compiling hundreds of colour images of the colonial progress and multiracial harmony in schools, hospitals, factories and churches. This all leads up to the last page, one single atrocity photograph in black and white, in full scale, with dead babies on a basinet, and the following caption below: Everything was calm until then! Life was good and simple. … If you are a father, look closely at this photograph. If you are a mother, hold your little children close to you. Imagine for a moment that these are your children. … See the large tears on the little face of the innocent two-year old, his arms open, imagine how he screams while he is wantonly mutilated by the sexually perverted monsters. Listen to the piercing cry of the baby as he is being stabbed with machetes. … Look closely at this photograph. See them lying there on the ground, in pieces, dead. … Everything was calm until then. Today … OUR HOME IS IN MOURNING!27

The command to recreate the suffering, to identify with victims and relive their plight, was intended to induce second-hand trauma in civilian populations for political ends. There is no shortage of testimonies of the deep emotional stress that those images inflicted, particularly among children. They frequently stuck with them forever, as Diana Andringa recalls: My first memory is of photographs, terrible photographs of gutted, hacked, slashed bodies. … [T]he African night was no longer marked by friendly drums but by screams and cries, and the doubt ‘what if I had been there?’ A question without an easy answer, the photographs had done their work, the violence of images overcame rationality, it impaired the capacity to think. Supporters of colonial independence and readers of Fanon and Césaire took part in vigilante groups invoking legitimate defense.28  Manuel Acácio, A balada do ultramar, Cruz Quebrada: Oficina do Livro, 2009, p. 121.  Almeida Santos (ed.), Luanda 61, Luanda: Neográfica, 1961, n.p. 28  Diana Andringa, “Crescer em tempo de guerra”, Aniceto Afonso and Carlos de Matos Gomes (eds.), Guerra colonial, Lisboa: Notícias Editorial, 2000, p. 334. 26 27

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Fueling antagonism and rousing onlookers to action, this campaign capitalized on the tyrannical effect of atrocity photographs to condition the public perception and embolden the human response of outrage, calling for an immediate action, rather than a step back. The strength of atrocity photography, John Berger argues, is to depoliticise events, reducing the response to a moral one.29 Soon, even opposition leaders came to depict the struggle in Angola as one between civilization and barbarism, ensuring that ideas of reform or negotiation were rejected, and repressive violence intensified. Violence, unleashed on so brutal a scale on both sides, became impossible to restrain. The insurgency proved a crushing setback for liberation movements and Angola would never recover from the bloodletting. On the one hand, the brutal Portuguese response would remain one of the driving motivations for people to join liberation armies—even as late as 1972, military intelligence remarked on the still-­ pervasive resentment with “the repression of 1961”.30 On the other hand, the uprising spawned images that, in many ways, enabled the Portuguese to gain the upper hand. So much so, in fact, that by late 1961, a joke ran among the settler community that a statue ought to be built to Holden Roberto and the “terrorists”, for unwittingly boosting colonial rule.31

The Violence to Come: The Media, the Military and the Image There is a very strange detail in the tragedy of Angola. A lot of people, nearly all, from the Province and the Metropole, saw it coming. This included high personalities from the intellectual and official worlds. Yet, no one did anything, no one took any steps to prevent the tragedy. … All of this was written, read, everyone knew it as fact, but nothing was done to avoid the coming danger. Luiz Iglezias (1961)32 In order to forestall “untruthful reporting”, the Portuguese authorities in Luanda have been quick to seize the cameras, films and despatches of jour29  John Berger, “Photographs of Agony”, About Looking, New  York: Pantheon, 1986, pp. 37–40. 30  Maria José Lobo Antunes, Regressos quase perfeitos: memórias da guerra em Angola, Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2015, p. 240. 31  Leonel Cosme, A revolta: a hora final, Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1983, p. 45. 32  Luiz Iglezias, A verdade sôbre Angola, Rio de Janeiro: Gráfica Nossa Senhora de Fátima, 1961, pp. 87–89.

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nalists on the spot, who wanted to report the weekend’s rioting and shooting; they have cut off telephone calls, censored messages, and presented their own prepared picture of the incidents to the world. The Economist (11 February 1961)33

A lot hung on the outcome of the Angolan war. And yet, the early stirrings of the longest liberation conflict in Africa have been oversimplified and understudied to a shocking degree.34 To address the iconographic offensive, we must consider some historical particulars. Tellingly, for instance, the opening scene of a canonical novel about this war, Manuel Alegre’s Journey to Africa (1991), has gone unnoticed. In this fictional tale, the head of Portuguese political police hears of an impending attack in northern Angola in 1960, and jumps on the first plane to Lisbon to deliver the news to Salazar. Kept waiting for days, he then agonizes over the dictator’s response: “Let it be, that is a necessary sacrifice to count on the support of Portugal and the West.”35 This false flag is, obviously, the product of literary license—possibly based on the fact that when the Minister of Defense, General Botelho Moniz, warned Salazar of this attack, the latter showed no reaction.36 But the advance-knowledge conspiracy recently became less far-fetched, as historiographical research increasingly vindicates this neglected passage.37 It was an article of faith, for decades, that the insurgency emerged out of nowhere, unexpected and unprovoked, and was directed from the outside. Classified documents tell a different story. The political leadership always disavowed the record of abuses that served as ferment for the attack. But this was starkly contradicted by classified military reports on the ground, which ascribed the revolt to the discriminatory laws to citizenship and owning of land, physical beatings, mandatory crops, land grabs and forced labour. It was also further  “Angola: Ripening Whirlwind”, The Economist, 11 February 1961.  For a robust exception, see Diogo Ramada Curto, Bernardo Pinto da Cruz and Teresa Furtado, Políticas coloniais em tempo de revoltas: Angola circa 1961, Porto: Afrontamento, 2016. 35  Manuel Alegre, Jornada de África, Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2007, pp. 11–12. 36  Viana de Lemos, Duas Crises: 1961 e 1974, Lisboa: Edições Nova Gente, 1977, p. 34. In the same book, Viana de Lemos wrote of his contacts with the CIA and BND going back to 4 March 1961, and denounced that the very urgent telegram he sent to the top military figure in Portugal, Beleza Ferraz, then visiting Angola, to warn of the upcoming attack, had been sabotaged by an unknown party. 37  See, for instance, José Freire Antunes, Kennedy e Salazar: O Leão e a Raposa, Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2013, p. 174. 33 34

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contradicted by the hastily implemented reforms to confer full rights to everyone and stop forced labour after the outbreak of war. The changes were the last of their kind to be applied in any colonial empire, and only came into effect as a direct effect of the insurgency.38 The explosive cocktail of inequities was long diagnosed as a source of potential violence—in 1947, colonial inspector Henrique Galvão warned of an “imminent catastrophe” if labour conditions did not improve rapidly (his banned report about forced labour in Angola as being “worse than slavery” only leaked in 1961).39 Moreover, specific warnings of a large-scale attack planned for 15 March were passed to the Portuguese government weeks in advance by its own political police, by foreign intelligence agencies (e.g. CIA and BND) and governments (e.g. the US Department of State).40 The speed and cruelty of attacks took everyone by surprise, but not the attack itself. In fact, during the preceding months, settlers bought up weapons in record numbers.41 The enigma is why so little was done to avoid the uprising or minimize its effects—the security forces were kept at a minimum of 3000 soldiers—and why the backups took so long to be deployed. With continued attacks across hundreds of miles, the north of Angola, the size of metropolitan Portugal, was left to its own fate for a month, a situation “virtually unique in the history of modern colonialism”.42 The inaction perplexed many, even among the upper ranks of the armed forces, facing—according to Marcello Caetano—“a climate of unrest for being denied the indispensable means to act”.43 In an ominous letter, the Minister of Defence, Santos Costa, berated Salazar: “What will the nation think of us tomorrow, when the truth, the whole truth, becomes known?”44 No single group reacted more negatively to this negligence than the settler community in Angola, exposed to large-scale violence and then left to fend off for itself, forced to find the private means to fly out or to take up 38  See José Pedro Monteiro, Portugal e a questão do trabalho forçado: um império sob escrutínio (1944–1962), Lisboa: Edições 70, 2018. 39  Henrique Galvão, Report on Native Problems in the Portuguese Colonies, Lisboa: Ministério das Colónias, 1947. 40   See José Freire Antunes, Kennedy e Salazar: O Leão e a Raposa, Lisboa: Dom Quixote, 2013. 41  Dalila Cabrita Mateus and Álvaro Mateus, Angola 61. Guerra Colonial: causas e consequências, Lisboa: Leya, 2011. 42  René Pelissier, Le Naufrage des Caravelles, 1979, p. 108. 43  Marcello Caetano, Depoimento, Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1974, p. 223. 44  Cited in David Martelo, op. cit., p. 63.

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arms.45 In the metropole, the regime squeezed the propaganda around the plight of cut-off settlers and their military protectors to the last drop. In the colony, the fury at the state failure to protect them led to trigger-­ happy civilian militias and considerable fears of a white separationism. This infamously sluggish response to the emergency crisis in Angola still puzzles scholars to this day—military writer David Martelo, for instance, identified a consistent pattern in the regime’s unwillingness to react swiftly to insurgencies as a deliberate political move he termed “strategic lack of foresight”;46 historian Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses instead called it Salazar’s worst ever blunder.47 Whatever the competing interpretations, the atrocious photographs shattered the mythical veneer of a harmonious multiracial brotherhood under the same flag, safe from the turmoil in the rest of the continent. This remained a major liability. How to ensure that images of widespread killing were not used against the colonial state, as evidence of their failure in defending the populations, having ignored the warnings and refused immediate action? A fanatical attempt ensued to control the meaning of the pictures, steering supporting narratives so that the horror could eclipse structural or retributive violence, and divert attention from the political vulnerability and criminal recklessness of the regime48—on 18 September 1961, the censorship board banned all “references to the Government’s belated provisions concerning the Overseas, namely Angola”.49 The pictures emerged as perfect tools to create a ground zero of violence, a vacuum around them. The prescribed reading in state-sponsored films 45  João Nogueira Garcia, a settler forced to take up arms after being forbidden to leave the area under attack in Angola, later refused an award for bravery from the colonial regime by claiming that it “did nothing to warn us about the imminence of a treacherous attack that did not spare women nor children and now, hypocritically, as owners of the Fatherland’s moral values, decide which of the Portuguese involved in this tragedy were heroes or cowards”. Quitexe 61 —Uma Tragédia Anunciada—O Velho Cazenza e Outras Histórias, Lousã: Tip. Lousanense, 2003, p. 94. 46  David Martelo, A Imprevidência Estratégica de Salazar: Timor (1941), Angola (1961), Lisboa: Sílabo, 2015. 47   Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses, Salazar—A Political Biography, New  York: Enigma Books, 2010. 48  John Cann, The Flechas: Insurgent Hunting in Eastern Angola, 1965–1974, London: Helion and Company, 2014, p. 14. 49  Direcção dos Serviços de Censura, “Boletim da Direcção dos Serviços de Censura n. 6/61”, 18 September 1961, Classified, Folder 07419.002.006, Fund: DJL, Fundação Mário Soares, Lisbon.

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combined the atrocity footage with  images of Salazar dispatching the troops  to Angola, an ideological montage that severely distorted the events. The idea that the imagery could be inserted into a historical flow could not be tolerated. And indeed, it led to one of the most infamous cases of political interference in the history of television documentary.50 When NBC produced the film Angola: Journey to a War (1961), director Robert Young decided to sneak into the colony illegally to report firsthand on the situation without Portuguese supervision. He then contextualized the shocking pictures of the insurgency by placing forced labour at its narrative core, as a leading motivation behind the uprisings, but also made the point of including the brutal reprisals. Informed of the existence of such footage, the Portuguese state lobbied the network to keep the film from being screened until extra footage by a pro-Portuguese reporter on a state-sponsored trip to Angola was added, and all footage of US-made napalm bombs dropped on civilians was left out of the final cut. It not only disproved the propaganda against abuses in the  war conduct, but  it revealed the difficulty in assembling alternative points of view. To understand the vexing relations between photography, war and the media, we need to briefly consider how the coverage of violence changed over the three key events in 1961: a strike against labour abuses in the Baixa do Kassange area in January;51 the attack on jails in Luanda to free political prisoners in February; and a mass uprising in the north in March. In January, the disproportionate use of violence to suppress the revolt was censored out of the news and left no images, proving that it was possible to leave the metropolitan population in the dark about an event of such a magnitude. This changed in February, when the Portuguese luxury liner Santa Maria was hijacked in the Atlantic in a protest against the dictatorships of Salazar and Franco. As news emerged of the ship heading to Luanda, foreign correspondents flocked to the little-known capital city. Some nationalists seized the opportunity to storm the local prisons, since it would be impossible to keep this attack from the media. As negative stories started to be filed out from Luanda to the international press, authorities clamped down on reporters, arresting them for spreading false 50  See Afonso Dias Ramos, ““Rarely penetrated by camera or film”—NBC’s Angola: Journey to War (1961)”, Maria do Carmo Piçarra and Teresa Castro (eds.), (Re)Imagining African Independence: Film, Visual Arts and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire, London: Peter Lang, 2017, pp. 111–130. 51  See Aida Freudenthal, “A Baixa de Cassanje: algodão e revolta”, Revista Internacional de Estudos Africanos, Nos. 18–22, 1995–1999, pp. 245–283.

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rumours, and seizing their cameras and film.52 Some were deported, and forced to hand over all their photographic rolls before leaving the colony. Extra measures were even set in place to ensure that no one bypassed the censorship by preemptively mailing out damaging images. As TIME magazine revealed: Photographers’ exposed negatives flown out of Angola were delayed in Lisbon long enough to destroy the undeveloped pictures—possibly with X rays or fluoroscopes. When the film reached home offices and was developed, it was blank.53

This totalitarian management of the visual field shows how central the control of images had become. Hence, when the insurgency broke out across northern Angola in March, the first official order was for a total media blackout and a closing of borders to journalists. This decision to close off the operational zone to the foreign media was not undisputed. Following Britain in Kenya or France in Algeria, Minister of Defense Botelho Moniz wanted reporters to be allowed in, lest the attack could be dismissed as propaganda stunt. Salazar disagreed, vying to claim a complete monopoly on the information flow. Thus, during the hardest-hitting months of the counterinsurgency, Angola was shut off from foreign eyes. Attempts to cover it without submission to the colonial apparatus were risky—the prize-winning war photographer Horst Faas, for instance, was caught, thrown into a blood-spattered jail cell and accused, at gunpoint, of being a CIA spy.54 But there were exceptions. With the borders sealed to all foreign reporters, escorted tours were given to carefully chosen figures. One of the first non-nationals allowed in was Robert Pesquet, the ex-French deputy and member of the OAS, a terrorist group against decolonisation. After being convicted for plotting a murder in France, Salazar offered him Portuguese nationality and, after the uprising, asked him to visit Angola. The army reinforcements from Lisbon had not even recaptured the north of Angola, Pesquet was already back from his tour with the troops to show the atrocity pictures at a slide lecture in the Lisbon Geographic Society on 4 May 1961, “The World Conspiracy Against Portugal”, publishing them in a booklet called The Last Whites in Africa: 52  “Four Correspondents Expelled /Protest after Luanda Shooting”, The Guardian, 11 February 1961. 53  TIME, 17 February 1961, p. 24. 54  Mort Rosenblum, Coups and Earthquakes, New  York: Harper Colophon Books, 1981, p. 99.

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Defenders of the West in the Last Bastion (1961).55 Ronald Waring, another notorious apologist of Salazar, also went on a state-sponsored trip to Angola in April, and then showcased the atrocity photographs and films at a number of international conferences, mailing them to influential opinion-­ makers worldwide, and issuing them in the booklet War in Angola (1961).56 It was clear from the start that the images were to serve as shield and sword. It is hard to get a sense of the impact of these images on the public imagination. Take the most popular account, Horácio Caio’s book Angola, the days of despair. What would it be like for the common reader to open the bestseller of a respected television reporter and find close-ups of sawed male genitals, the mutilated body of a woman, and a toddler face-down in a puddle of blood? The book was banned in apartheid-era South Africa,57 condemned by Germany’s leading theorist of shock photography, Ernst Jünger,58 and also excoriated in the literature reviews published in France and the United States: [S]ome [reports] sold for unbelievable reasons. The publication of photos of white women being massacred, stripped, and raped permitted at least one of these “grab bags” to sell several tens of thousands of copies. If the world of concentration camps can be made profitable by publishers, “revolutionary war” is not far behind when one knows how to truss it up skilfully. The most striking example of this is by Horacio Caio59

Declared impublishable around the globe, the book was an all-time bestseller in Portugal, reaching twelve reprints in just three months. Shocking publications of this kind became increasingly common. By all reckonings, only one journalist, Pereira da Costa, refused to publish his reports on account of “the countless books without any informative value or formative quality, reaching tens of thousands of copies (mostly due to 55  Robert Pesquet, Les Derniers Blancs d’Afrique: Defenseurs de l’Occident dans le Dernier Bastion, Lisieux: Author’s edition, 1961. 56  Ronald Waring, The War in Angola. Views of a Revolt: The Case for Portugal, Lisboa: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1961. 57  Jonathon Green and Nicholas Karolides (eds.), Encylopedia of Censorship, New  York: Facts on File, p. 526. 58  Ernst Jünger, Siebzig verweht I, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980, p. 479. 59  René Pelissier, “État de la littérature militaire relative à l’Afrique australe portugaise”, Revue Française d’Études Politiques Africaines, No. 74, February 1972, p. 77.

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shocking photos).”60 Da Costa justified this rare stand against official practice out of principle, as “the death of thousands of white and black Portuguese deserves a respect that is not compatible with an exploitation of their sacrifice”.61 Caio gives a sense of the discursive context for the images, “Let no one pity the dead. I demand much more: condemn the killers! It is only human. Or does one get away with it for being black?”62 This slippage into a race-based ultimatum became mainstream speech. Take Amândio César’s account, another bestseller in Portugal—whereas in Switzerland, a reviewer stated that due to “horrible photos of a violence difficult to bear, this book cannot circulate freely, only for seasoned experts”63—summing up the takeaway lesson from those pictures: We left the photo-lab, speechless. One of us simply said: “this is horrible!”. … And a year, even months before, there were still those who said and believed that the Negro, generally speaking, was a good man, the noble savage invented by Rousseau! How far removed from reality are these dimwit intellectuals churned out by universities!64

As the public display of killing became trivialised, racial targeting became plain. The dehumanising rhetoric translated into radicalised action on the ground. As Susie Linfield put it, atrocity images forestall any “analytical capacity, historical understanding and political maturity at the time they are so drastically needed. … [T]hey are the perfect vehicle to foster simplistic solutions and unreflecting vengeances rather than political intelligence.”65 Such drastic changes in the political, military and media settings went on a par with drastic changes in the parameters of the state’s use of deadly force. Those pictures amounted to a license to kill, as the Portuguese Minister of the Army, Mário Silva, made abundantly clear in his speech to the first troops sent from Lisbon to Angola: “You’re not fighting human beings but savages, wild beasts to be  put down like animals.”66 (Fig. 12.3). 60  Pereira da Costa, Um mês de terrorismo: Angola. Março-Abril de 1961, Lisboa: Polis, 1969, n.p. 61  Idem. 62  Caio, op. cit., 1961, p. 49. 63  Genève-Afrique, vol. 5, 1966, p. 97. 64  Amândio César, Angola 1961, Lisboa: Verbo, 1961, p. 61. 65  Susie Linfield, The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010, p. 131. 66  João Paulo Guerra, Memória das guerras coloniais, Porto: Afrontamento, 1994, p. 183.

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Fig. 12.3  Video stills of the television broadcast of the Portuguese representative Vasco Garin speaking at the UN Security Council meeting, 7 June 1961, while four monumental reproductions of the atrocity pictures are held up by the delegation

Internationally, this campaign was no less impressive. As Britain threatened to, or France had done in the 1950s, Portugal walked out of the UN whenever its colonial situation was put under discussion in 1961, claiming that Angola was an internal matter over which that body had no jurisdiction. But the retreats in protest changed abruptly on 7 July. Instead of pulling back, the Portuguese delegation charged into the Security Council with four massive reproductions of atrocity photographs held high before the television cameras, and tried to sell the war with a long speech based solely on them:67 They demonstrate a gruesome terrorism that no decent man can look at without a deep feeling of horror. I have shown only four of these pictures, as I do not dare to show many of the others in public … sickening evidence of the unbelievable savagery of the terrorists who came across the border of northern Angola to slay, rape, and mutilate our women and children … without the slightest provocation, without the slightest racial conflict. … No matter how loudly some representatives here shout about fictitious Portuguese atrocities … we will never forget … the pitiful evidence of many

67  These photographs were sent from Lisbon to New York by the Minister Franco Nogueira to the delegate Vasco Garin, on 27 April 1961, with the express purpose of being displayed at the UN.

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of these cases remaining forever in our memory through these horrifying photographs taken by the rescuers, who arrived much too late.68

In shock value, those pictures packed a unique political punch for absolving the colonial power of any wrongdoing. When the main chronicler of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, Robert Ruark, was shown the images of Angola, his response made it clear: I have seen the pictures of just one day of horror. … [T]hey are worse than the combined atrocities of the Portuguese in 500 years of colonization— worse than the Germans in Tanganyika, worse than the Belgians in the central Congo.69

The photographs were then used to intimidate outspoken critics of Portuguese colonial policy and war conduct. In the United States, for instance, the week that Senator Albert Gore from Tennessee criticized the abusive reprisals of Portugal in Angola, all of the 161 newspapers of his home state received an envelope full of shock photographs, and a letter accusing him of aiding and abetting communists.70 And when, for instance, the newspapers Indonesia Observer and Times of Indonesia attacked the Portuguese reprisal, official envelopes from Lisbon arrived in Jakarta, enclosing “a collection of photos that will allow you to draw your own conclusions”.71 Hence, with Portugal on the ropes of international opinion for refusing to decolonise, democratise, or even sign the human rights convention, the sensationalism of this strategy did afford a considerable leverage. When the conservative pundit Edward Griffin exhibited these photographs on a television show in North America, he used them as proof that, unlike a potential US threat, the USSR had been responsible for “ways to die that make the instant flash of a nuclear bomb seem merciful”.72 He held high an illustrated booklet which declared: Add to your imaginary vision of horror the tortures inflicted in the dungeons of the middle age and the worst of the sickening events which  Vasco Garin speaking at the UN Security Council meeting, 7 June 1961.  Robert Ruark, “Preface” in Teixeira, The Fabric of Terror, p. viii. 70  On 24 March 1962, in Middlebury, Vermont, Albert Gore called for a closer look at the aid paid to Portugal to ensure that it was not used to “kill, punish, or intimidate Africans”. 71  AN/TT SNI, Box 2908. National Archive of Torre do Tombo, Lisbon. 72  G. Edward Griffin, The grand design: a lecture on U.S. foreign policy, Thousand Oaks: Grand Design, 1968. 68 69

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occurred in European Concentration camps … you still will not be able to picture what … Portuguese citizens have had to endure in Angola at the hands of the terrorists for whom the U.N.O. expresses such sympathy!73

This official statement reiterated that no knowledge of violence would suffice, was in one of the booklets that Portugal printed in distinct editions, one in Portuguese and Italian, two in French and English. Ideologically tailored to target audiences, the prints ran into millions of copies. In the United States, these were sent to high-profile journalists, politicians and far-right groups with overtly racist agendas, like the association of white supremacist groups, the White Citizen’s Council, which reprinted the images in their publications. This group even announced the sale of this booklet—this was no isolated instance, for another ultraconservative publication, Through to Victory, also sold it to its members74—as collectible items holding “photographic evidence of black savagery”.75 The Italian edition, for instance, was entrusted to the far-right and paramilitary group, Ordine Nuovo. In the United Kingdom (UK), the Portuguese representatives handed the pictures of its dead citizens to the neo-Nazi group British National Party, whose stated aim was to “free Britain from Jewish domination and the coloured influx”.76 This fascist group took up Portugal’s flag in their journal COMBAT, reproducing images to attack all newspapers that refused do so, as “PICTURES OUR NATIONAL PRESS REFUSED TO PUBLISH”, but were “heartily recommended for Labour MPs and Leftist clerics”.77 (Fig. 12.4). All these international alliances with far-right and racist movements expose the root contradictions in the Portuguese defence of continued colonial rule on the basis of an exceptional multiracial society. What’s more, the colonial regime responded to the insurgency by entering into a top-secret coalition with Rhodesia and South Africa, joining military,

73  On the Morning of March 15, Boston: Portuguese-American Committee on Foreign Affairs, 1961. 74  See Erling Jorstad, The Politics of Doomsday: Fundamentalists of the Far Right, New York: Abingdon, 1970, p. 163. 75  The Citizen: Official Journal of the Citizens’ Councils of America, vol. 6, Jackson: Citizens’ Council, 1961, p. 32. 76  “PICTURES OUR NATIONAL PRESS REFUSED TO PUBLISH”, Combat, No. 6, May–June 1960, p. 5. 77  Idem.

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Fig. 12.4  A set of the Portuguese government-sponsored propaganda booklets illustrated with atrocity photographs, which circulated around the world

economic and political efforts to keep the last white bastion in Africa.78 The Portuguese state channeled taxpayer money to fund items and send them to racist associations which profited off them, dealing on the bodies of citizens under their rule after failing to protect them. The images were thereby reproduced by reference books of white supremacy at the time, tendered as demonstrations that black people were uncivilizable.79  See Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamara, The White Redoubt, the Great Powers and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1960–1980, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 79   See, e.g. William G.  Simpson, Which Way Western Man?, Washington: National Alliance, 1978. 78

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What Comes After the Images? I was a kid in 1961. But I still remember scenes of children being tossed against the trees, men buried up to their necks, heads sticking out, the bulldozer moving in, slicing off their heads with a blade invented to dig up the soil in order to make men rich. But what a pleasure it just gave me to destroy a bulldozer! It looked just like the one that severed my father’s head. Pepetela (1980)80 Today they showed me a 1961 photograph showing heads of many black men chopped and impaled on poles around the water deposit in Ucua. This was Robles’s reaction, the hero. … They also pointed to a curve in the asphalt road built over piles of black corpses killed then. … Who will write the history of human beings used as gravel in a landfill? Mário Brochado Coelho (1989)81

What follows from such a tidal-wave of death pictures? What is a terror-­ struck population capable of? How did the presentation of the events affect the response? In the course of the reprisals, an estimated 1,000 people died in Angola and 200 fled to the Congo daily. Northern Angola became the deadliest corner of the world, far exceeding the toll of crisis spots as the Congo and Algeria. Within months, there were twice more refugees outside Angola than settlers in it. By late May, the world press warned of state-sponsored terrorism and extrajudicial killings on a mass scale, and estimated the number of blacks killed in the retaliations at 20,000 to 30,000. Seven weeks after the uprising, one Portuguese army officer reportedly boasted to Daily Mirror: “I estimate that we’ve killed 30,000 of these animals. There are probably another 100,000 working with the terrorists. We intend killing them when the dry season starts.”82 On 22 June, the Baptist Missionary Society warned of the “coming slaughter for a possible 50,000 Africans in reprisal measures”.83 On 20 July, The Sunday Telegraph reported: “[T]he reign of terror and lynching of Africans has at least been stopped—not by public opinion, but by the fear of the authorities that the white militia was getting out of control.”84  Pepetela, Mayombe, Lisboa: Edições 70, 1980, p. 40.   Mário Brochado Coelho, Lágrimas de Guerra, Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1989, p. 122. 82  Daily Mirror, 3 May 1961. 83  “Angola protest by missionaries”, The Guardian, 19 June 1961. 84  Sunday Telegraph, 20 July 1961. 80 81

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Any details were extremely hard to find and impossible to verify independently due to the curtain excluding Western journalists and UN agents. The retaliations were hushed by the media in Portugal, while the campaign to rile up the public intensified. When the atrocity photographs, for instance, were brought up to drum up support for Portugal at the parliament in Brazil—where they had been almost instantly published—the opposition invoked the recent public  declarations of the Portuguese Count Noronha da Costa in Recife, for countermeasure: “We must keep on killing blacks in Angola until they quiet down and realise that we are not like the British, granting independence at the slightest whim … in Angola, for every white man killed by blacks, we shall kill a thousand of them.”85 Indeed, such a reaction was far from a fringe opinion. The misguided sense of righteous and disproportional revenge it elicited was best found in missionary Sidney Gilchrist’s question in response to the repeated eliminationist calls: “Who ever heard an Angolan Bantu threaten, “We’ll kill a hundred Portuguese for every one of us that they kill!”?”86 The excessive violence of the Portuguese retaliation was a problem to contend with, even under conditions of iron censorship and totalitarian rule. An army conscript in Luanda then jotted down in his diary, “[T]he biggest pleasure of some whites is to kill blacks. When truckloads full of black prisoners arrive in Luanda, white civilians shoot them down like dogs.”87 A Portuguese political police officer also recalled: “[The] excesses began to worry us almost as much as terrorist acts. … You’d hear things like ‘You can’t call yourself a man if you haven’t killed a terrorist.’”88 As it all descended into a vendetta, a race war, the brutality of the backlash, though publically denied, was not lost on the regime’s top figures. The first cabinet member to argue that the only way out of this quagmire was political, not military, was Manuel Homem de Mello: “What’s the point of killing thousands of natives more or less summarily, if the ferment of revolt persists and people only accept Portuguese rule by force?” He added: “We cannot respond to UPA’s genocide with a genocide by authorities or individuals, however barbaric and horrific it may have been (and it was) … for 85  Anais da Câmara dos Deputados, Rio de Janeiro: Departamento de Imprensa Nacional, 1961, p. 635. 86  Sidney Gilchrist, Angola Awake, Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1968, p. 50. 87  Etelvino da Silva Batista, Diário de guerra: Angola 1961–63, Lisboa: Três Sinais, 2000, p. 19. 88  Nogueira e Carvalho, Era tempo de morrer em África, Lisboa: Prefácio, 2004, p. 97.

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every UPA crime, Portugal suffers; for every excess of authorities—military and civil—Portugal sins.”89 This fell on deaf ears, as it never represented majoritarian opinion. As a consequence, the abuses accrued at a pace authorities were at pains to stop. US consul Dean Rusk alarmingly observed: “There is great concern here that Portuguese repression in Angola is even bloodier than has come to light … when details of true situation in Angola inevitably come to public attention this will greatly exacerbate situation.”90 No details of the true situation ever came to light. One of the defining characteristics of this cycle of violence is that the numbers still remain conspicuously vague and hard data is difficult to find: a sign both of an official unwillingness to set the record straight and of a lack of interest in these historical events. Without independent observers, shielded from sight, violence went unchecked, reduced to vague scraps of information leaking past the censorship. Where else has a scholar, like René Pelissier, taken to counting fresh graves in cemeteries  in order to assess the damages, due to the sheer unreliability of official figures being provided?91 The victims of the 15 March uprising usually range from 800 to 1000, often up to 2000—although the most powerful colonial company, Diamang, squarely placed the figure at 20092—three quarters of which were neither white nor mixed-race plantation owners, but black contract labourers of other ethnic groups and brought forcibly from distant parts of Angola. Official sources never offered a figure for the reprisals, but the world press stated that, by August, between 20,000 and 80,000 Africans had died, with some placing the toll at 100,000. The exact numbers will never be established, but the sense of proportion is key here. Even by conservative accounts, a death ratio of 1:10 means that the idea of a “eye for for an eye, tooth for tooth” policy was, at best, misleading. The figures alone explain why, in July, Martin Luther King elected Angola as the worst crisis in the world. At exactly the same time in London, 38,000 signatures were taken to the House of Commons to protest against the unbridled reprisals. All this happened a month after the UN Resolution 89  Manuel José Homem de Mello, Cartas de Salazar a Craveiro Lopes, 1951–1958, Lisboa: Edições 70, 1990, p. 237. 90  Telegram from the Department of State to the Embassy in Portugal, Washington, April 23, 1961, 3:55 p.m. 91  Douglas Wheeler, “Independent scholar conquers a military history battlefield-but who will follow?” A review essay in honour of Dr. Rene Pelissier”, Portuguese Studies Review, vol. 12, n. 2, Winter-Spring 2004–2005, pp. 245–261. 92  Basil Davidson, Angola, 1961: The Factual Record, London: UDC, 1961.

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S/4835 of 9 June condemned “the large-scale killings and the severely repressive measures in Angola”, and called upon Portugal to “desist forthwith from repressive measures”,93 while scholars and church leaders in North America released a joint letter to the Portuguese government opposing “the violent reaction in Angola”.94Portugal’s response to the international campaigns amounted to a flat denial, insisting that it was but a peacekeeping mission to re-establish law and order. In June, its delegation at the UN Security Council stated that “the military operation has been purely defensive”, dismissing all allegations as “fictitious” and “the most bare-faced lie that has ever been heard in this Organisation”.95 Yet, Portugal never allowed a UN sub-committee to investigate charges of extrajudicial killing and disproportionate use of violence. The official line was epitomized by Salazar’s own response to The New York Times, in May 1961: “It is possible that we may have erred on the side of excessive caution and tolerance.”96 It took over a decade and a revolution for a Portuguese army report to admit, for the first and only time, in July 1974, “there took place, committed by all—authorities and individuals alike— the greatest of crimes, as revenge against those acts of [UPA] terrorism”, estimating that “some 500,000 Africans disappeared, some shot and others who fled to the woods or to those territories which border on this State”.97 This belated admission was never met with any investigation. Portugal has never admitted to any wrongdoing, let alone acknowledged an unnecessary use of violence or overreaction following the insurgency. The magnitude of the backlash—“one of the most ferocious repressions in all colonial history”, claims Basil Davidson,98—was never known. If the story of the brutal insurgency enjoyed wall-to-wall coverage, the over one hundred books presenting the settler case fall silent on the aftermath. The state’s counterterror was only hinted at, usually couched in the idea of  UN Resolution S/4835, 9 June 1961.  National Council of Churches Press Release, “Open Letter to The President and People of Portugal”, 5 June 1961. 95  Portugal Replies in the United Nations, Lisboa: Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros, 1970, p. 222. 96  Interview with Salazar, The New York Times, 31 May 1961. 97  Cited in Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses and Robert McNamara, The White Redoubt, the Great Powers and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1960–1980, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, p. 30. 98  Basil Davidson, Angola, 1961: The Factual Record, London: UDC Publication, 1961, p. 1. 93 94

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righteous vengeance. Calls for a war tribunal to investigate atrocities never came to fruition.99 Though the exposés ascribe most atrocities not to the army, but to vigilante squads and political police, there is no white book on reprisals in Angola,100 unlike French Algeria or British Kenya.101 This is a far cry from the sea change over the last decade when it comes to exposing the use of disproportionate violence and the radical means to hide it during the imperial endgame—in 2013, Britain formally apologized for their brutality in suppressing the uprising in Kenya, and agreed to pay compensation to surviving victims of abuse; in 2018, France admitted for the first time to using systematic torture in Algeria. What horrified the foreign correspondents in Angola was not only the scale and the means, but also the impunity of the reprisals, or  how the unrelenting show of force could simply be hushed up. Swedish war reporter Sven Öste, for instance, managed to sneak into Angola and found a dire situation “where a Sharpeville takes place every day, a Lidice every week.”102 But unlike those events rendered iconic by visual evidence, the images of the reprisals in Angola never came to light. Could this unavailability of visual proofs be taken as one of the missing preconditions for building an emergency case around this counterinsurgency? In part, an answer could be found in the testimony of the journalist Horácio Caio, the leading broadcaster of the atrocities in Portugal, when, four decades after the events, he admitted before television cameras: “There was also a very violent reprisal, of which there is no notice, no images, no memory. It was the other side.”103 99  Portuguese Major José Ervedosa, for instance, a witness at the UN Decolonisation Committee in 1961, called for the establishment of a tribunal on the lines of the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal that investigated the US atrocities in Vietnam. 100  Protesting the data overload on the insurgency, José Pires wrote in 1975: “What I do not know of is a work reporting on the atrocities by the Portuguese army and white settlers. … I became aware that the Angolan war was a long story of massacres, very similar to a genocide.” Angola! Angola!: testemunho sobre o problema colonial, Lisboa: O Emigrante-­ Voz de Portugal, 1975, p. 82. 101  On Kenya, see Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2005; and David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, New  York: W.W.  Norton & Company, 2005. On Algeria, see Denise Barrat and Robert Barrat, Algérie, 1956: livre blanc sur la répression: documents, Paris: Éditions de l’aube, 2001; and Michel de Jaeghere, Le livre blanc de l’armée française en Algérie, Paris: Contretemps, 2001. 102  Sven Öste, “Skoningslös offensiv i Angola”, Dagens Nyheter, 16 June 1961. Cited in Tor Sellström, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa, Vol. I, Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1999, p. 387. 103  Testimony in Joaquim Furtado’s documentary A Guerra, Ep. 3 (2010).

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The spectacular media strategy of the Portuguese authorities relied on an unprecedented  push to produce and reproduce atrocity images, but likewise to ensure that no other images could ever compete with them. This dismal visual imparity in telling the war story was explicitly contested by Holden Roberto in a radio interview in New York, on November 1961: I agree that there were atrocities on both sides. But I want to clarify that some of those atrocities that the Portuguese claimed that we did, were made by them. They killed people in Angola and then photographed them to convince the world we had done it. Unlike the Portuguese, we have no means of showing photographs of the atrocities that they made.104

Unable to add to or control the photographic production, some also protested that certain pictures were staged and doctored.105 There were reports of Portuguese television crews which, upon arriving on the scene, attributed certain killings to the settlers.106 Ultimately, in time, it became clear  to liberation movements that the terror of images could only be fought back with images. The inability to create or export visual evidence of the counterinsurgency was taken as a serious political liability. That was why, on November 1961, a war of images would take place at the UN in New York, after Guinea asked to put on display photographs of Portuguese atrocities. These were the rare trophy pictures described by José Saramago, showing Portuguese soldiers grinning as they sever a black man’s head off and stick it on a pole. Initially circulating privately in Portugal to show off the retaliation, they found their way into underground left-wing newspapers, from Algeria to Egypt, disrupting the notion of Portuguese soldiers as peacekeepers, and shattering the idea of a struggle between civilization and savagery. Importantly, the most damning proof against the Portuguese was not created by liberation groups with limited visual resources at their disposal. In fact, it was appropriated from the colonial side, a signal of the mismatch between the forces at war. In the whole of the imperial 104  Radio interview with Dick Elman, WBAI-FM, New York, 18 November 1961. This has been retranslated into English from the Portuguese translation provided to Salazar, in AN/ TT, Arquivo de Salazar, AOS/CO/UL. National Archives of Torre do Tombo, Lisbon. 105  René Pelissier suggests, without evidence, that in some cases, the sticks were purposefully inserted on vaginas to make the pictures of corpses look even more shocking. René Pélissier, op. cit., p. 535, n. 22. 106  This happened, for instance, in Carmona, as described in Pires et  al., Braseiro da Morte, p. 85.

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endgame, no episode illustrates the obsession with controlling the visual as much as the arrest and imprisonment of Agostinho Neto, the future first president of Angola, in September 1961, under the accusation that he owned one copy of the said images. This peculiar incarceration (he was arrested in Cape Verde and jailed in Lisbon) turned him into a figurehead for Amnesty International’s first campaign, a group launched in response to the abuses of Portuguese repression.107 With millions of photographs of the insurgency in circulation, the extreme measures around a single image testify to the exceptional efforts employed to eliminate any traces of reprisal. The annihilation of the enemy’s images was a symbol of imperial force and a central piece in the war spectacle. Not unsurprisingly, this image features prominently at the Museum of the Armed Forces in Luanda today. The life cycle of these images is extremely telling. As the war dragged on, images would be increasingly censored from the media—to the extent that the only ones that were tolerated, of soldiers embarking or disembarking ships, simply disappeared from the press in 1969—as the regime insistently replayed the photographs of the inaugural terror. As the initial drive for revenge dried up, and the motivations for war became murkier, the regime hid away the unfolding struggle by pointing to the UPA massacre. Those images still dominate the few late books, shows and films on the armed conflict. As late as 1973, the premier of Portugal, Marcello Caetano, urged the political police in Angola to ship over the shock photographs from 1961, in the hopes they could still galvanize the audiences with a public exhibit.108 Only months after this official request, the colonial regime received a taste of its own medicine when the atrocity propaganda backfired disastrously, finding itself the target of horrific imagery—from films as Tobias Engel’s Nô Pintcha (1970); to boycott posters against Angolan coffee or Gulf Oil in the United States; and newspapers such as Der Spiegel (June 1970) or Jeune Afrique (September 1972). All this culminated in a public relations disaster from which the colonial regime never recovered. In July 1973, in London, The Times printed Father Hastings’s exposé of the Wiriyamu massacre in Mozambique, alongside photographs that led to an uproar against Portugal. The irony is too big to miss: most of those images had not been captured in Mozambique in 1973, but actually in Angola in 1961. But while the pictures of the UPA  Peter Benenson, Persecution 1961, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961.  IAN/TT, Arquivos da PIDE, Processo 16. 10. A, Terrorismo. Del. Angola, NT. 1210. National Archives of Torre do Tombo, Lisbon. 107 108

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insurgency had been reproduced to exhaustion and were instantly recognizable, the photographs of the reprisal were so rare that few journalists ever noted the duplication. In a boomerang effect, the war of images that took place at the UN a decade earlier, occurred again in the same venue, with the same images. This time, the regime lost at its own game. As to the UPA, it rebranded itself as FNLA (Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola = National Front for the Liberation of Angola), but it was never able to shed its reputation of bloodthirsty killers—on the eve of independence, the MPLA published a photobook emulating those of colonial propaganda to attack them by playing on cannibalist myths, using atrocity images of blood-soaked corpses that, as was later found out, had actually been staged at the morgue of the university hospital in Luanda.109 The main dilemma these photographs elicit is whether the greater violence lies in the terror they represent or the unrepresented terror they instigated. If such images fueled an explosion of violence, the larger death toll that they left in their wake robbed none of their impact—neither did the racist and incendiary appropriations that make up their history. The images found many afterlives ever since the war ended, reissued immediately after in conservative newspapers by settlers to condemn decolonization, perpetuating the reading of horror not to attack the dictatorship for failing to protect them, but rather the democratic decision to grant independence to those territories.110 It is then important to contest the interpretive orthodoxy of these events in order to re-politicize the inherited archive. To reproduce the images as they come is to honour the telling of the story as prescribed by the colonial regime. Though they still circulate freely in the public sphere, often used by mainstream media outlets, an early version of this paper released in Portugal would nevertheless face a backlash. A double-spread article in a far-right newspaper, O Diabo, scolded a reviewer111 of the book in which it came out for saying that I had “raised issues of ethics and authenticity” regarding the images. This “shocked” the columnist because, he argued, to “discuss ‘ethics’ is to look at pictures with today’s criteria”, to “question the ‘authenticity’ of the 109  A FNLA em Angola, Luanda: Ministério de Informação da República Popular de Angola, 1975. 110  Anonymous, “África adeus... A Província que se segue ANGOLA”, Bandarra, 28 September 1974, p. 7. See also Reis Ventura, Capim no sangue atraiçoado, Lisboa: Fernando Pereira, 1977. 111  The review in question is Lucinda Canelas, “As fotografias são objectos difíceis e as dos impérios coloniais ainda mais”, Público, 13 December 2014.

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photographic proof of the dark days is to mistrust the suffering of many”.112 Along a disclaimer that the crimes of empire are a form of anachronism, the columnist vowed to set the truth straight against what I wrote (which he never read), making no mention of repression or reprisals, by concluding that “the photographic evidence of atrocities may upset certain ‘politically correct’ minds who condemn a massacre in the name of an idea but not of another”.113 This response confirms the urgent need to track the social life of images, as long as they continue to short-circuit any attempts at a political reading of the uprising and to invalidate every criticism of the settler actions and military conduct. The enduring expectation is still that they remain immune to critical scrutiny and shut off any discussions—to do otherwise is implicitly to deny, slight or disregard the events they depict—which was precisely what has led me into this research in the first place.

Beyond Images: Counterinsurgency and Retaliation Portuguese vigilante squads armed themselves and roamed the bush seeking vengeance. Scores of African villages were burned and thousands of African civilians were killed in random retaliation. In many villages the settlers decapitated African bodies and placed the heads on rows of pikes as a demonstration of Portuguese authority. Lloyd Garrison (1964)114 One evening, I was forced to form the entire platoon. The topic was serious and heinous to me. The captain gravely read an “operational norm” from the headquarters, forcing our troops to repay terror with terror, and chop off the heads of fallen rebels in the encounters ahead, sticking them in poles by the roadside. To set the example. Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho (1977)115 Do you think your eyes will be cleansed of all the images haunting you? You think you can escape the sight of heads on poles along the road? … The two heads were of a child and a white-haired old man. They told me that they had been beheaded at the Catur strategic hamlet [Mozambique] … A family of undercover terrorists, they said. And you couldn’t believe what you saw. You choked and everyone laughed. You mumbled that it wasn’t an act of

 Hugo Navarro, “Os massacres de 1961 no Norte de Angola”, O Diabo, 16 July 2015.  Idem. 114   Lloyd Garrison, “Now Angola: Study of a Rebel”, The New  York Times, 16 February 1964. 115  Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, Alvorada em Abril, Lisboa: Bertrand, 1977, p. 34. 112 113

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war but the deed of psychopaths. They replied that UPA did the same in northern Angola in 1961. Carlos Coutinho (1985)116 We lived the first experience of horror already on the trip up north. In the Úcua area, we passed by a village where the white settlers had avenged the massacres by blacks with even greater violence. They had cut the terrorists’ heads and stuck them on poles, in full view of passersby. A state of numbness came down on us, making us live reality as if we weren’t there, as if it was a film. It was like falling asleep and that is how we spent the war. Albano Moreira da Silva (2014)117

In 2012, public opinion in Portugal was rocked by furor over its colonial past. A newspaper released a recently uncovered army report about a collective beheading in Angola, in the chilling bureaucratic detail of a routine operation. The events occurred at the Mihinjo plantation, close to Luanda. On 27 April 1961, the local population was brought before the army.118 A handful of men were executed by gunshot. Then the headhunters moved in, cutting their heads off to impale them on sticks. Two were left unused, as a warning. It was an unusual find by a historian in a Lisbon archive, and the paper included an order to burn all copies thereof. It survived strictly due to a clerical mistake. Testimonies on beheadings abound, but they are usually discarded under the claim that no unnecessary violence was inflicted. Without evidence, they are invariably dismissed as hearsay or the doing of bad apples, and never taken as an official policy.119 Conscious of the sensitive issue, the Portuguese newspaper contextualized the story cautiously, bringing together a range of experts (archivists, historians, journalists, veterans) across the political spectrum, framing this act as a one-off retaliation to the brutal massacre of settlers. Yet, some readers doubted its authenticity and questioned the motivations behind the release, arguing that it was meant to divert attention from past crimes  Carlos Coutinho, O Que agora Me Inquieta, Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 1985, p. 80.  Albano Moreira da Silva, “Cortaram cabeças e espetaram-nas em paus”, Correio da Manhã, 25 June 2014. 118  Lucinda Canelas and Isabel Salema, “Relatório militar revela que tropas portuguesas participaram em decapitações”, Público, 16 December 2012. 119  An excerpt of the document was first published in Marcelo Bittencourt, “Modernidade e atraso na luta de libertação angolana”, Daniel Aarão Reis and Denis Rolland (eds.), Modernidades Alternativas, Rio de Janeiro: Editôra FGV, 2008, pp.  277–294, and later reproduced in full in António Araújo, “Sanzala Mihinjo, Abril de 1961”, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo (ed.), O Império Colonial em Questão, Lisboa: Edições 70, 2012, pp. 37–53. 116 117

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of liberation groups or political corruption in Angola today. Others casted aspersions on the army, appalled by the use of practices associated with contemporary terrorism like ISIS-style beheadings. It was hard to keep track of the comment section, as the polarizing discussion made that clear that the events are not so much denied as they are unknown to the public. Yet, despite recent breakthroughs regarding incidents of large-scale violence in this colonial context, they all pale in comparison to this one.120 The shock and surprise with which the beheading was received are telling. The published report reads exactly like the one then transcribed in Negage by army doctor Mário Moutinho da Pádua in the fullest exposé of the reprisals, but it has never been published in Portugal.121 And if the practice of mass executions followed by beheadings had been totally censored in the Portuguese press, it was nonetheless widely reported by the few foreign correspondents in Angola. Anders Ehnmark exposed it in Sweden,122 Joseph Barry in the United States,123 and Richard Beeston in the UK. As the latter reminisced: My minder during my travels in Angola was a pleasant young Portuguese Navy Commander. However, our relationship became increasingly strained as I managed to sneak out some uncensored stories about how bad things really were. He became particularly agitated when he heard from Lisbon that they had read my reports of the Portuguese Army practice of leaving piles of severed heads of rebels stuck on poles, stacked up by the roadside. … The Army made no bones about its reason for this. Witch doctors had told the rebels they would return to life if killed in an attack on the whites, and the Army believed that the grisly sight of their comrades’ severed heads would destroy this myth. … [S]hortly afterwards I was politely informed that my visa was not being renewed.124

120   See, e.g. Mustafah Dhadha, The Portuguese Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964–2013, New  York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016; Inês Nascimento Rodrigues, Espectros de Batepá. Memórias e narrativas do “Massacre de 1953” em São Tomé e Príncipe, Lisboa: Edições Afrontamento, 2018. 121  Mário Moutinho de Pádua, op. cit. 122  The reports written for the newspaper Expressen were later collected in Anders Enhmark and Per Wästberg, Angola and Mozambique: The Case Against Portugal, London: Pall Mall Press, 1963. 123  New York Post, August 27, 1961 124  Richard Beeston, Looking for Trouble: The Life and Times of a Foreign Correspondent, London: Tauris Parke, 2006, pp. 71–72.

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The sight of roads lined up with heads stuck in poles in Angola recurs in the literature of the time, an uncanny replication of the horror found half a century before in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1898), when Marlow faces the stockade around Kurtz’s compound and realises that it is full of decapitated heads of Congolese men: Now I had suddenly a nearer view, and its first result was to make me throw my head back as if before a blow. … I returned deliberately to the first I had seen—and there it was, black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids—a head that seemed to sleep at the top of the pole … he said: these heads were the heads of rebels. I shocked him excessively by laughing. Rebels! What would be the next definition I was to hear? There had been enemies, criminals, workers—and these were—rebels. Those rebellious heads looked very subdued to me on their sticks.125

This illustration of how far Kurtz had gone in his break from recognised moral codes in a descent towards madness to quell African resistance is the ultimate example of a politics of pure colonial terror. There is no shortage of late colonial cases when the picture of a beheading served as the ultimate proof of the savagery of the civilised. In the Malayan Emergency of 1952, the picture of a British Royal Marine commando holding the heads of two insurgents caused a public outcry. A spokesman first claimed it was fake, but it was soon confirmed to parliament that it was genuine. The Colonial Office then reckoned: “[T]here is no doubt that under international law a similar case in wartime would be a war crime.”126 But in 1960s Portugal, beheadings by security forces were actually sanctioned by the scions of colonial science as a cultural necessity in the war effort.127 Such a practice was widely witnessed and denounced by soldiers, army doctors, political activists and religious leaders, though pictures are hard to come by.128

 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, New York: Penguin Books, 2017, p. 67.  Cited in Mark Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945, London: Zed Press, 1995, p. 62. 127  Eduardo dos Santos, Maza: elementos da etno-história para a interpretação do terrorismo no noroeste de Angola, Lisboa: E. Santos, 1965. 128  As Bebiana de Almeida remarked, “Across the whole region of Dembos, the only thing I could see were chopped heads stuck on poles.” Letter to Amílcar Cabral, November 1961. “Memorando sobre repressão colonial em Angola. Folder: 04611.062.013, Fund: DAC, Fundação Mário Soares, Lisbon. 125 126

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In 1996, a widely read weekly Portuguese magazine headlined a promising story titled “Colonial War Atrocities: The Censored Photographs”,129 often considered to be a landmark in the public memory of this war.130 The front cover showed the grisly photograph of a white soldier posing for a portrait with a sharpened pole in his hands, in front of a dozen black heads stuck on poles: the man’s face is shielded to preserve his identity, but not the beheaded victims. Given the intense circulation of images from the uprising, one assumes the title to refer to the reprisal then made inaccessible. But instead, the only atrocities revealed were UPA’s, along with the astonishing claim that these images had never been released because censorship judged them too violent (no evidence is given), as if the regime shielded the public from the upsetting images, when it went farther than all others to ensure the opposite. Not only some of those images had been widely reproduced at the time, as those that were not focused on a massacre alone at Fazenda Tabi. Taken by Manuel Graça, the first press photographer embedded with the troops, the images show rifle-toting white settlers and soldiers standing next to innumerable black heads impaled on poles and headless bodies on the floor. What prompted this release? In a late interview, Graça asserted that “the biggest massacre of blacks I saw was at Fazenda Tabi. We found 110 dead blacks and 2 Europeans. The whites were mutilated and the blacks beheaded. UPA did it.”131 How can the greatest display of violence witnessed by the most prolific wartime photographer go unnoticed by historians and reporters? Fifty years after the fact, this statement is revealing. It is not only inconsistent with other accounts that reported only two white victims when soldiers arrived,132 but strikingly, it even contradicts Graça’s own account from 1961: The terrorists struck Tabi three times over a three-hour period. There were two deaths and several injuries among the defenders. The terrorists suffered 129  “Atrocidades da Guerra Colonial. As fotografias censuradas”, Notícias Magazine, No. 199, 17 March 1996, pp. 1–26. 130  Ângela Campos, An Oral History of the Portuguese Colonial War, Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017, p. 58. 131  João Vaz, “Experiências traumatizantes vividas em África”, Correio da Manhã, 11 June 2007. 132  See Américo Barreiros, A Verdade Sobre os Acontecimentos de Angola, Carmona: Tip. Angolana, 1961, p. 25; António Telo, Angola, Terra Nossa: diário do terrorismo, Lisboa: Tip. Lisbonense, 1962; or Felícia Cabrita, Massacres em África, Lisboa: Esfera dos Livros, 2008, p. 132.

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considerable casualties despite taking refuge in the jungle. The troops occupied Fazenda Tabi and took over its defence. They raided surrounding areas, hunting down assailants. […] Then it all smelled of blood and burned gunpowder.133

The photographs neither add up with the provided descriptions nor sit well with most images from the insurgency. Could it be that they never surfaced because they point to an unwanted story, one closer to the original account? Why else would they not be included in a book that printed a shocking one of a white man hacked to death at Tabi? If we pay close attention to the pictures—the uncensored prints are on public access in the Military Archives in Lisbon134—they bring home the mismatch between the atrocity as a UPA attack or as a colonial reprisal. Considering the pose of soldiers and settlers, armed to the teeth and grinning at the camera next to cut-off heads and headless bodies, they suggest trophy pictures. Unlike most images of UPA atrocities, the heaps of corpses on the floor show no sign of blood or violent confrontation, only a clean cut to the neck. Also, the heads on poles don the white bandanas used by UPA fighters. If the regime condoned images of disembowelled corpses and slashed genitals in public, were these not kept for depicting (or gesturing at) the counterinsurgency? These paradoxes remind us that shocking photographs cannot be taken at face value. Colonial regimes placed a premium on them because their shock content discouraged any political contextualization or a close reading. In the photo-collection of the former propaganda bureau, for instance, one can find hundreds of pictures of massacred black bodies, without any data besides the title Angola-terrorist atrocities or Atrocities (negroes). Who were they, where and how did they die? Who killed them? Who took the images? (Fig. 12.5) In addressing the late colonial archive, one must disrupt the connection forced by colonial apologists between the imbalance in the visual outpouring and the exercise of violence. The hegemony of technology on one side, and the monopoly of violence on the other, was the intended strategy. Artur Maciel, for instance, a veteran journalist and Director of Internal

133  Manuel Graça, Angola 60–65: A Surpresa, A Guerra, A Recuperação, Luanda: Edições SPAL, 1966, n.p. 134  I have commented on this series of photographs in Joana Pontes’s film Visões do Império (2020).

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Fig. 12.5  Protective seal for readers inside the booklet Death on the march in Angola (1961), which was never included for any editions in Portuguese

Affairs of the Propaganda Bureau (SPN) in Portugal, defended the colonial conduct on the basis of such a visual disparity: The cannibalism of the terrorist hordes is largely documented, with no shortage of the most chilling photographic images. … It is crucial to take such images into account, for the army is accused of violent acts and inhumane crimes it never perpetrated. Such as, for instance,  that of “tossing massive piles of black bodies into hastily dug pits after mass executions, some dead, others in agony, rolling over them with bulldozers.” Even in writing this, one is left in disbelief.135

135  Artur Maciel, Angola heróica: 120 dias com os nossos soldados, Lisboa: Bertrand, 1963, p. 219.

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It would take nearly forty years for photographs of such an operation to leak from private archives. In 1997, a soldier that took part in the events released snapshots to the Portuguese newspaper Expresso on condition of anonymity. According to the source, the photographs depict the reprisals in Caxito, showing rifle-toting white men and heaps of tortured corpses of black men, after having been electrocuted and had air injected into their veins. In some cases, they were buried up to their necks, burned with torches, and hung. In that series of pictures, the bodies were piled up in a truck and dumped in graves dug by other prisoners who were then shot down, though the official reports alleged that they were killed for fleeing the scene. The source estimated that, in this case alone, 800 men were killed. This is roughly the number of the insurgency victims. Yet this was met with indifference by public opinion in Portugal. Also, there are allegations of similar actions across northern Angola—the army doctor Carmona da Mota, for instance, witnessed a similar killing of thousands of black men,136 along many cases of indiscriminate killing. What is unique about this case is that there are images, refuting the rule of secrecy, denial and impunity based on the argument of visual unavailability. The unexpected eruption from private sources half a century later indicates that pictures do exist, but more importantly, that these should redefine how we view the photographs of the uprising. It reveals how much they have conditioned historical readings through their sheer disproportion and hegemony, imposing a sort of photographic prerogative upon which stories are told, and how they have been told. Indeed, these images are constituted by, as well as constitutive of the historical event. While there is no shortage of sensational stories, let us lastly consider the most reproduced horror story and image of the uprising: respectively, the killing of whites in Luvo and the photograph of a dead baby in a crib. The story of forty whites sawed in half in a lumbermill in Luvo is the most repeated one to this day—one unsuspecting morning, they were attacked by machete-wielding dope-crazed black men, dragged bleeding to the 136  Carmona da Mota wrote, for instance: “White reaction […] Thousands of blacks, suspect or not, were executed. They filled up a pit with corpses; then ditches on banana plantations. Civilians were invited to watch; the machine guns sang, as blacks walked in a single file and fell down. Today, it is recommended that tractors do not dig too deeply. When they ran out of space, they moved over to the airfield. Bulldozers dug out the pits, and machine guns executed blacks walking alongside. Then the bulldozers covered them up. Later, to save ammunitions, they were pistol-whipped and buried, unconscious but still alive.” Cartas de um médico na guerra de Angola, Lisboa: Ed. Autor, 2013, n.p.

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sawmill, tied to boards and fed alive into the spinning blades of a saw. The problem, however, is that no shred of evidence supports this. The lumbermill was not even manned at the time. The scholar René Pelissier tried to get to the bottom of this, scouring all literature to cross-check sources— “pure invention”, he concluded.137 The only source was an interview with one nameless UPA fighter in Leopoldville to Le Monde. The propaganda capitalised on the scoop, reprinting a facsimile version in a booklet in French, Nous les Avons Sciés (We Sawed Them Up). Tellingly, there are no known photographs of this nightmare. Though instantly exposed as a hoax, the episode kept being retold in novels, newspapers and books. While it is significant that the best-known incident of violence never took place, even less attention is accorded to images. The most iconic one cannot be made out in detail, but it purportedly depicts a dead white baby in a crib. It was one of the images Portugal took to the UN, and it could be found everywhere, even as the massive cover of an official publication,138 but it has never been analysed. The selective framing whenever it is ­reproduced is revealing: often cropped to show just a white baby; sometimes, it includes a dead black woman (called “the maid”) in the back; rarely, it includes rifletoting settlers all around. The authorship is not known. But the soldier most often accused of atrocities in Angola, Fernando Robles, claims to have made it.139 What does it mean that the author of the most widely seen image is also frequently described as a war criminal? As to the event itself, it is impossible to verify visually. But reading the captions alone, this photograph was attached to stories said to occur in at least six different plantations hundreds of miles apart in Angola: Camabatela,140 Madimba,141 Mavoio,142 Nova Caipemba,143 Quibaxe,144 Quicabo,145 Quitexe146 or Vale

137  René Pelissier, “État de la littérature militaire relative à l’Afrique australe portugaise”, Revue Française d’Études Politiques Africaines, February 1972, pp. 58–89. 138  Almeida Santos (ed.), Angola Mártir, Lisboa: Agência Geral do Ultramar, 1961. 139  Testimony of lieutenant Fernando Robles in João Garção Borges’s documentary Ultramar, Angola 1961–1963, Acetato and RTP Productions (1999). 140  As captioned in the original RTP television film footage. 141  See Vasco Garin’s speech at the UN Security Council, 7 July 1961. 142  Bernardo Teixeira, op. cit. 143  Américo Barreiros, op. cit. 144  Amândio César, op. cit. 145  Reis Ventura, Sangue no capim: cenas da guerra em Angola, Lisboa: Ed. do Autor, 1962, p. 41. 146  Horácio Caio, op. cit.

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do Loge.147 In addition, this image also appeared in films and books as visual evidence of a massacre that did not occur in Angola but in Katanga, Congo.148 All of this precarious contextual information was called into question by the delegate from India at the UN, J.N. Sahni, interpellating Portuguese representatives on 2 November to ask for details on their image collections, to identify when and where they had been made, by whom, and if possible to name the victims.149 This information on the conditions of visual production and circulation was never answered, and for half a century it was not asked again, thus leaving undisturbed the link between visual content and narrative meaning as defined by the colonial regime, a troubling indication of how superficially the way that history was packaged for mass consumption has been challenged. In itself the image is nothing, it is only in our interaction with, and interpretation of the image that it gains meaning. We become consumed by the image when we lose sight of this. The violence of the image is to be found and understood in the process whereby the distance between viewer and image (the distance that allows us to think) is annihilated. As Marie-­ José Mondzain points out, “the violence [of the image] resides in the systematic violation of the distance”.150 This violence consists in obstructing the subject’s ability to think critically. Indeed, the icons with which war is represented not only document and report on violence, they perform and enact violence, through their narrowed and coercive means. Sensationalist images, and the spectacular strategies that mobilise them, urge a consensual public to consume, actively “discourage critique” and freedom of “judgment”, in strategies that are through and through “totalitarian”.151 Can images kill? asked Mondzain, answering that fatal effects are probably rare but not impossible. As the new century forces this question with greater alacrity, the role of atrocity photographs in colonial counterinsurgencies then requires an emphatic answer. Following the mass challenges 147  Luiz Iglezias, A verdade sôbre Angola, Rio de Janeiro: Gráfica Nossa Senhora de Fátima, 1961. 148  This is one of four pictures of March 15 presented as a Baluba massacre in Katanga, between 1960 and 1961, in Philippa Schuyler, Who killed the Congo?, New  York: Devin-­ Adair Co., 1962. 149  See Man Singh Deora, Role of India in Angola’s Freedom Struggle, New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House, 1995, p. 313. 150  Marie-José Mondzain, op. cit., p. 24. 151  Marie-José Mondzain, Le commerce des regards, Paris: Seuil, 2003, p. 146.

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to imperial authority in the mid-twentieth century, terror was invariably used to compel compliance, and shock photographs proved to be choice propaganda weapons. They were regarded as agents, not tools, in the waging of war and the wielding of colonial power. To claim that photography is not an objective framer of events is hence not to deny what it depicts as false, it is to countenance that other equally important facts must also be weighed. As an extreme intersection of insurgency and visuality, the outbreak of decolonization war in Angola reminds us that, when it comes to late colonial archives, the priority is to dispel the misconception that they were randomly collected, but rather the product of a high-powered and state-led campaign to sell the war to national publics and win over the international community. If left to their own accord, the brutal images thus preclude any chance of dispassionate analysis, allowing a fascination with the irrational aspects of the insurgency to be all-consuming. One must keep in mind that these pictures did serve a dominant purpose, to paralyse any understanding of the circumstances leading to the attack and to render even the most sadistic reprisal understandable. They short-­ circuit a political reading of the insurrection—diverting our attention from the explosive mix of political disenfranchisement, land grabs, compulsory crops, forced labour and physical beatings—and invalidate any criticism of the retributions and disproportionate use of violence. Though entangled, these dimensions are yet to become the object of sustained inquiry.

CHAPTER 13

Colonial War/Liberation Struggle in Guinea Bissau: From Personal Photographs to Public Silences Catarina Laranjeiro

Introduction After the Second World War, Portugal appeared to be immune to the winds of change that were blowing over the whole African continent. These winds allowed several European African colonies to achieve independence on their own. Unlike other European countries, Portugal decided to maintain its overseas provinces in the face of uprisings and launched a colonial war (1961–1974). The war had just ended when, in April 1974, a group of Portuguese military officers who had previously served in the colonial army staged a coup d’état in Lisbon, putting an end to the Portuguese dictatorship and its imperial ideology. A few months later, the power transfer negotiations were launched and after a revolutionary period, a democratic regime was implemented in Portugal.

C. Laranjeiro (*) Instituto de História Contemporânea, NOVA-FCSH, Lisboa, Portugal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_13

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The colonial war was barely remembered by political powers once the transition to democracy took place. This fact has led several authors to describe this lack of public acknowledgement as “shameful” or even “ghostly.”1 Although the memory of the colonial war was rarely celebrated in public space, it was widely remembered in private and familiar contexts as 10% of the population in mainland Portugal had been directly involved in this war. More than a million men were sent, from metropolitan Portugal to the three war fronts—Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-­ Bissau—during the thirteen years of war.2 In the last decade, a successful attempt to change the memory of the Portuguese colonial war has been carried out by several scholars, artists, and media. An outbreak of academic and artistic production has devoted an increased attention to the topic and several significant media products emerged, aiming to reach broader audiences.3 However, some traumatic records, political silences, and historical fissures remain, inviting a deeper reflection on the significances of this war. This chapter intends to demonstrate how research conducted in the former colonies can reveal what is still hidden in Portuguese public discourse. This research, specifically, focuses on Guinea-Bissau. In the Guinean-Bissau national history, the Portuguese colonial war is designated as the Liberation Struggle. This struggle is considered the nation’s foundational historical event, as illustrated by the political motto: “Guinea-­ Bissau: the African Nation Forged by the Struggle.”4 For this reason, it is 1  Eduardo Lourenço, Do Colonialismo Como Nosso Impensado, ed. Margarida Calafate Ribeiro and Roberto Vecchi (Lisboa: Gradiva, 2014); Bruno Sena Martins, “ViolêNcia Colonial E Testemunho: Para Uma MemóRia PóS-Abissal,” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 106, no. Memórias de violências: Que futuro para o passado? (2015); Paulo Medeiros, “Hauntings: Memory, Fiction and the Portuguese Colonial Wars “ in The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, ed. TG Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper (London & New York: Routledge, 2013); Ângela Campos, “We Are Still Ashamed of Our Own History.” Interviewing Ex-Combatants of the Portuguese Colonial War (1961–1974),” Lusotopie. Recherches politiques internationales sur les espaces issus de l’histoire et de la colonisation portugaises 2, no. XV (2008). 2  Margarida Ribeiro and António Sousa Ribeiro, “Os Netos Que Salazar Não Teve: Guerra Colonial E Memória De Segunda Geração,” Abril: Revista do Estudos de Literatura Portuguesa e Africana-NEPA UFF 5, no. 11 (2013); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “Prefácio,” in As Guerras De Libertação E Os Sonhos Coloniais: Alianças Secretas, Mapas Imaginados, ed. Maria Paula Meneses e Bruno Sena Martins (Coimbra: Almedina, 2013). 3  A relevant example is the television program A Guerra [The War], directed by Joaquim Furtado, between 2008 and 2014, for the main Portuguese public channel (RTP). 4  Amílcar Cabral, Guiné-Bissau: Nação Africana Forjada Na Luta (Lisboa: Novo Aurora, 1974).

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widely acknowledged in public space, urban toponymy, and national ­festivities. This history and its heroes are well recognized by the Guinean State. While this war was not remembered in Portugal, it was widely celebrated in Guinea-Bissau. This distinction evidences that the same historical event can assume different official meanings, depending on the political and cultural place from which people remember, and with whom they share their memories. This research focuses on photographs from the colonial war/liberation struggle, collected by former PAIGC’s combatants and former African soldiers in the Portuguese Armed Forces. Interviews were conducted with these former combatants from both sides of the war from whom photographs were collected. The primary goal of this research was to juxtapose photographs from Guineans on different combat fronts. This became more complex as the images and the interviews brought about new layers of analysis, asking for a deeper reflection. More than to just evoke history, photographs have the ability to uncover it. Photographs are tactile and sensory objects that float in space and time, and consequently, as part of social and political experience, play a crucial role in managing and constructing historical processes. Also, photographs can give oral relevant information about those who lead and control these historical processes.5 According to Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographs operate not only simply as visual history but are performed … as a form of oral history, linked to sound, gesture and thus to the relationships in which and through which these practices are embedded.”6 For methodological purposes, photographs can be used as data sources connecting oral history to memory. Photo-elicitation is a methodology developed to obtain answers enriched by the intensity caused by viewing images and by the sharpness of the memories they documented. Everyone can become a good storyteller looking at photographs. Photographs enable the exploration of processes of remembering and forgetting through the analysis of how memories were saved, transformed, erased, or validated in the past, but also in the present.7 In this particular research, photographs may allow the researcher  Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2017), 111. 6  Elizabeth Edwards, “Photographs and the Sound of History,” Visual Anthropology Review 21, no. 1–2 (2005): 29. 7  Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Macmillan, 1981); Georges Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Jon Prosser, “The Status of Image-Based Research,” in Image-Based Research: A Sourcebook for Qualitative Researchers, ed. Jon Prosser (London & New York: Routledge, 1998). 5

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to explore the subjective memories of the former combatants who experienced this war, instead of solely describing the war in socio-­political terms.

The Colonial Army and the Liberation Movement: Approaches, Strategies, and Alliances In order to develop this reflection, it is crucial to describe some historical issues of this war in detail. One of the most hidden issues in Portuguese public discourse is that of the African soldiers incorporated into the Portuguese Armed Forces. In Portugal and in the so-called overseas provinces, military service was mandatory, and not fulfilling it meant being a deserter. To desert implied to join the liberation movement or emigrate to the neighbouring countries, Senegal and Republic of Guinea, which would have as a consequence being unable to return to the homeland. Hence, the recruitment of local military forces cannot be read simply as ideological loyalty for the colonial regime. The Portuguese used the inclusion of African soldiers in the colonial army as a way to spread the message internationally that the African themselves were defending and fighting for the maintenance of the Portuguese presence in Guinea. To achieve this purpose, a kind of “national African army” was created “probably in view of a future federation of Portuguese-speaking States.”8 The participation of African troops entailed other advantages to the Portuguese side: the African soldiers earned lower wages, they were more efficient data collectors, and they were more resistant to tropical diseases. The African soldiers were also assigned the most risky and violent military missions. Finally, their death or injury had little impact on the metropolitan public opinion, since Portuguese society had started giving some signals of war fatigue.9 The recruitment of local forces for the Colonial Army in Guinea-Bissau has some special characteristics when compared to recruitment efforts in Angola and Mozambique. In Guinea-Bissau, an African military elite was created, the Commandos, who assumed the leadership of the conflict as 8  João Paulo Borges Coelho, “Da Violência Colonial Ordenada À Ordem Pós-Colonial Violenta. Sobre Um Legado Das Guerras Coloniais Nas Ex-Colónias Portuguesas,” Lusotopie 10, no. 10 (2003): 184. 9  Carlos de Matos Gomes, “A AfricanizaçãO Na Guerra Colonial E as Suas Sequelas. Tropas Locais–Os VilõEs Nos Ventos Da HistóRia,” in As Guerras De LibertaçãO E Os Sonhos Coloniais: Alianças Secretas, Mapas Imaginados, ed. Maria Paula Meneses and Bruno Sena Martins (Coimbra: Almedina 2013), 163; Fátima da Cruz Rodrigues, “Antigos Combatentes Africanos Das Forças Armadas Portuguesas: A Guerra Colonial Como Território De (Re) Conciliação” (FEUC, 2013), 113.

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representatives of the Portuguese rulers. There were three military units of African commandos fully composed and led by black troops. This approach can be interpreted as the first attempt to implement a neo-colonial nationalist project in Guinea-Bissau.10 These African-led military units were an extension of what had already happened at the political level since traditional leadership roles were appointed by the Portuguese colonial authorities to rule the territory. For instance, local chiefs controlled tax collection and supervised the forced labour. Guinea-Bissau can be described as a classic case of indirect rule.11 Guinea-Bissau was never a settler colony. Little social and economic investment was made and only the products that natives harvested were economically exploited. Portugal was a poor country with little political capacity to control its own colonies.12 This fact was used by the African nationalist leader, Amílcar Cabral, to gain international support for the Guinean Liberation Struggle. In his own words: “Portugal exercises the only ‘civilizing influence’ that it is able to, which corresponds to the kind of colonialism it has adopted and its position as a colonial power whose economy, culture and civilization are backward.”13 This lack of investment in Guinea-Bissau is confirmed by ample historical evidence. For example, in 1959, in Guinea-Bissau, with a child population of 71,000, fewer than 14,000 attended primary school, only 1051 attended professional schools, and 249 attended high school. There was little investment in health care and the nation’s first road, completed in 1968, comprised only 35 km.14 To overcome this situation, a psycho-social programme, Por uma Guiné Melhor [For a Better Guinea] was implemented by the Portuguese General 10  Aniceto Afonso and Carlos de Matos Gomes, Guerra Colonial (Cruz Quebrada: Editorial Notícias, 2000), 97; João Paulo Borges Coelho, “African Troops in the Portuguese Colonial Army, 1961–1974: Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique,” Portuguese Studies Review 10, no. 1 (2002): 138–39. 11  Rosemary Galli and Jocelyn Jones, Guinea-Bissau: Politics, Economics, and Society, Marxist Regimes Series (London: F. Pinter, 1987), 26. 12  Joshua Forrest, Lineages of State Fragility (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 137; Carlos Lopes, From Liberation Struggle to Independence Statehood (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 12. 13  Amílcar Cabral, Príncipios Do Partido (Bissau: PAIGC/ Secretariado Geral s/d), 48; my translation. 14  Peter Karibe Mendy, “Portugal’s Civilizing Mission in Colonial Guinea-Bissau: Rhetoric and Reality,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 36, no. 1 (2003): 52; Julião Soares de Sousa, Amílcar Cabral. Vida E Morte De Um Revolucionário Africano (Lisboa: Nova Vega, 2011), 372.

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António de Spínola. He was appointed as governor and commander-in-­ chief in Guinea in May 1968, when the military situation for the Portuguese side was clearly failing. General Spínola quickly realized that winning the war could no longer rely exclusively on military force. After 1970, a strong social policy investment was pursued by his political programmes: 8,313 houses were built, 520 km of roads were constructed, 51 health posts and 298 schools were created, among which 127 were administered by the Portuguese Armed Forces. Development agriculture projects were also implemented, so that rural Guineans could achieve a quick improvement of their quality of life.15 All these strategies intended to counteract the solid arguments that the liberation movement was effectively using to achieve popular support to liberate Guinea-Bissau from Portuguese colonial rule. This liberation movement was PAIGC—Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde [African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape-Verde]. PAIGC’s political programme aimed to simultaneously liberate the territories of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde from the Portuguese colonial rule. PAIGC was defined, by its historical leader Amílcar Cabral, not merely as a movement or a front, but mainly as a party, with a well-defined programme to which its members should give everything, including their own life if necessary.16 PAIGC emerged with such a convincing political programme that it absorbed, through more or less coercive ways, other nationalist movements which existed in Guinea-­ Bissau at that time.17 “Unity and Struggle” was the political principle adopted by PAIGC.18 This principle defined the resistance against colonialism based on the concept of “class-nation.” Specifically, this concept meant that all social classes and groups should come together in order to fight the Colonial State. 15  Leopoldo Amado, Guerra Colonial E Guerra De Libertação Nacional. O Caso Da Guiné-­ Bissau. (Lisboa: IPAD, 2009), 258; Mustafah Dhada, “The Liberation War in Guinea-Bissau Reconsidered,” The Journal of Military History 62, no. 3 (1998): 585; Sousa, Amílcar Cabral. Vida E Morte De Um Revolucionário Africano, 372. 16  Luís Cabral, Crónica Da Libertação (Lisboa: O Jornal, 1984), 46; Aristides Pereira, O Meu Testemunho: Uma Luta, Um Partido, Dois Países (Lisboa: Editorial Notícias, 2003), 86. 17  Mustafah Dhada, Warriors at Work: How Guinea Was Really Set Free (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1993), 131; Amado, Guerra Colonial E Guerra De Libertação Nacional. O Caso Da Guiné-Bissau., 153; Sousa, Amílcar Cabral. Vida E Morte De Um Revolucionário Africano, 184. 18  Amílcar Cabral, Unidade E Luta (Lisboa: Seara Nova, 1976).

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This union would transcend any class contradictions within Guinean society and between Guineans and Cape Verdeans, as the latter were privileged by the Portuguese government during colonial times. The struggle would promote a strong connection between different social classes and groups moved by the same cause.19 However, during the war, privileges were attributed to Cape Verdeans, who were designated to PAIGC’s leadership positions, while the Guineans were mainly detached as ordinary soldiers to combat on the battle fronts. These distinctions generated huge power tensions and internal conflicts during the war.20 PAIGC’s performance on the military field was not affected by these conflicts. PAIGC obtained successive military victories, and consequently, a growing recognition of their validity in the international diplomatic field. In 1968, when a large part of the territory was under PAIGC’s control, the party leadership decided to implement a proto-government in the liberated areas: schools, health posts, popular courts and people’s warehouses were created, and each village was administrated by a committee, elected by the population.21 Some years earlier, in 1964, the FARP— Forças Armadas Revolucionárias do Povo [People’s Revolutionary Armed Forces]—was created, composed of the best fighters, whose military activities were combined with each village’s popular militias.22 All these political and military programmes contributed to an increase in the number of PAIGC’s supporters. This popular support allowed PAIGC to claim itself as the only representative of the Guinean people’s 19  Lopes, From Liberation Struggle to Independence Statehood, 13–14; Julião Soares de Sousa, “O Fenómeno Tribal, O Tribalismo E a Construção Da Identidade Nacional No Discurso De Amílcar Cabral,” in Comunidades Imaginadas: Nação E Nacionalismos Em África, ed. Luís Reis Torgal, Fernando Tavares Pimenta, and Julião Soares Sousa (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2008), 163. 20  Ângela Benoliel Coutinho, Os Dirigentes Do Paigc: Da Fundação À Rutura: 1956–1980 (Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2017), 23; Sousa, “O Fenómeno Tribal, O Tribalismo E a Construção Da Identidade Nacional No Discurso De Amílcar Cabral,” 148; Marina Padrão Temudo, “From ‘People’s Struggle’to ‘This War of Today’: Entanglements of Peace and Conflict in Guinea-Bissau,” Africa 78, no. 2 (2008). 21  Patrick Chabal, Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 28–29; Dhada, Warriors at Work: How Guinea Was Really Set Free, 55; Oleg Konstantinovich Ignatiev, Três Tiros Da Pide: Quem, Porque E Como, Mataram Amílcar Cabral (Lisboa: Prelo, 1975), 52; Lars Rudebeck, Guinea-Bissau a Study of Political Mobilization (Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 1974), 201–07. 22  Amado, Guerra Colonial E Guerra De Libertação Nacional. O Caso Da Guiné-Bissau., 210; Dhada, Warriors at Work: How Guinea Was Really Set Free, 112.

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aspirations, capable of conducting the people through the path of development and progress that had been interrupted by colonial domination. PAIGC then asserted itself as the government in the liberated areas, promising to develop the territory, claiming that a State absolutely different from the colonial one was emerging in Guinea-Bissau.23 This assertion could also be interpreted as a way to validate PAIGC’s political programme to the outside world so that PAIGC was not seen as terrorist movement, as was widely spread by the Portuguese propaganda.24 In order to conquer international support, several journalists, academics, photographers and filmmakers were invited by PAIGC to visit the liberated areas. These visitors should spread the message among socialist and communist countries in support of PAIGC that a new nation was emerging in the liberated areas.25 This message was reinforced after the visit of the Decolonization Committee of the United Nations in April 1972, which concluded that the Portuguese government no longer controlled a large part of the Guinean territory and condemned the devastation caused by Portuguese military actions. The Decolonization Committee’s report stressed that PAIGC controlled the vast majority of the Guinean territory, and that the population in the liberated areas unreservedly supported their policies and activities.26 This statement prompted a shift in the diplomatic arena: PAIGC’s popularity and legitimacy increased, while the Portuguese government lost a considerable number of supporters. This tendency was not affected by the murder of Amílcar Cabral in January 1973. He was assassinated in Conakry, the capital of the Republic of Guinea. The president of the Republic of Guinea, Sekou Touré, gave unconditional support to the independence struggle of Guinea-Bissau. The headquarters of PAIGC were located in Conakry, where Cabral was based. Until today, there has not been concrete evidence about who assassinated the PAIGC leader. There is a strong possibility that it was the Portuguese political police, with the collaboration of some 23  Warriors at Work: How Guinea Was Really Set Free, 73; Sousa, Amílcar Cabral. Vida E Morte De Um Revolucionário Africano, 211. 24  António Duarte Silva, A Independência Da Guiné-Bissau E a Descolonização Portuguesa: Estudo De História, Direito E Política (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1997), 97–98. 25  António Tomás, O Fazedor De Utopias: Uma Biografia De Amílcar Cabral (Lisboa: Tinta de China, 2008), 26–27. 26   Horácio Sevilla Borja, Kamel Belkhiria, and Folke Löfgren, “Conclusões E Recomendações,” in Pelas Regiões Libertadas Da Guiné (Bissau). A Missão Especial Da O.N.U. Nas Regiões Libertadas, ed. António Alves (Lisboa: Livraria Ler, s/d), 86.

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Guineans unhappy about the segregation between Cape Verdeans and Guineans.27 But in spite of this, PAIGC gathered all conditions to unilaterally proclaim the independence of the territory during the war. The Proclamation of Independence took place on 24 September 1973  in Lugajol, Boé region, where several international diplomats were present. As previously mentioned, the war would end with the coup d’état in Lisbon on 25 April 1974 and the Portuguese government would formally recognize Guinea-Bissau as an independent state in June of the same year, following the Algiers Agreement.

Forgotten Memories and Struggling Narratives This research was intended to rescue the discursive and performative dimensions of the memory of the colonial war/liberation struggle, which could reveal the coexistence of conflicting historical versions. Photographs were collected from, and interviews were conducted with eighteen former PAIGC combatants, including six women and fifteen former combatants from the colonial army. The photographs under analysis were not taken by the combatants themselves, though they were found in their private albums and archives. On the colonial side, the official photographic practice was very common in military rituals, offered to or purchased by the soldiers who appeared in them. On the guerrilla side, the photographs were taken by foreign photographers and reporters invited by PAIGC to visit the liberated areas. These journalists intended to depict the heroic fighter for the liberation of the Third World, appealing to the ethical and moral values propagated by PAIGC. The combatants were represented as righteous warriors and not the barbaric terrorists described by colonial propaganda. In order to propagate this iconographic message, the combatants were not usually portrayed performing any military or paramilitary activities, though they were actively fighting a war. In these photographs, all of the combatants appear serene and confident. To better illustrate these messages, some notable photographs can be described. An Italian journalist photographed Francisca Pereira, one of the most well-known Guinean women fighters, in uniform, sitting on the 27  José Pedro Castanheira, Quem Mandou Matar Amílcar Cabral? (Lisboa: Relógio D’Água., 1995), 277–78; Sousa, Amílcar Cabral. Vida E Morte De Um Revolucionário Africano, 517.

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ground and framed by vegetation, smiling to the camera. In another picture, Pereira is in front of a barrack, a small stake and palm leaf construction, where she lived as the political commissar on the southern war front. She wore a simple dress and sandals, holding a plastic mug and looking as if she had just woken up a few minutes earlier.28 From her experience in the liberated zones, Maria Augusta Furtado keeps two photographs: in the first, she is smiling, wearing a headscarf and holding a shotgun. In another, she is dressed in military uniform and wears a sumbia,29 flanked by three military men.30 In Manecas dos Santos’ personal archive, there was a curious photograph, in which he observed a checkers game between two other combatants, one of whom was the renowned commandant Constantino Teixeira. In another image, there are several warriors: three are talking to each other, one is reading a book, and another is shaving.31 Showing common daily routines, these images intended to document a new life coming into being in the liberated zones, the announcement of a new nation to come. According to Xico Bá, the political commissioner at the Northern Front: We did everything we could do. We even played football. People thought that we were in hiding, but we were not. We lived in a huge military base with barracks, hospitals and basic health centres. Everything, with shelters and trenches. When there was an enemy attack, we would occupy the military positions according to the structure and organization of each base.32

Placing the emphasis on leisure activities, schools and health centres, all of which were built by the liberation movement, the above testimony may corroborate Amílcar Cabral’s argument that Guinea-Bissau was an independent State, partially occupied by a foreign armed force, the Portuguese Colonial Army.33 Whereas Portuguese military iconography focuses on technological weaponry and only male soldiers, the PAIGC demonstrated that this struggle concerned the entire Guinean society, as women and  Author’s interview with Francisca Pereira, 14 March 2013, Bissau.  Common cap in West Africa. It became quite popular in the iconography of the liberation struggle since Amílcar Cabral, as well as other PAIGC leaders, used it frequently. 30  Author’s interview with Maria Augusta Furtado, 10 March 2013, Bissau. 31  Author’s Interview with Manecas dos Santos, 24 March 2013, Bissau. 32  Author’s Interview with Xico Bá, 12 March 2013, Bissau. 33  Chabal, Amílcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War, 90; Silva, A Independência Da Guiné-Bissau E a Descolonização Portuguesa: Estudo De História, Direito E Política, 85. 28 29

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children were also depicted. In Manecas dos Santos’ personal archive, there is a photograph which depicts him holding a baby, the son of commander Duke Djassi.34 Ana Maria Soares, the political commissioner of the northern front, keeps several photographs in which she is dressed in fatigues, holding her first daughter on her lap.35 The image of warrior-­ mothers illustrated the importance that PAIGC gave to women’s participation in the war. Women’s emancipation was one of the main political principles encouraged by PAIGC’s leadership, taking the war as an opportunity to revolutionize gender roles. Notwithstanding, this political demand was an object of several ideological controversies among the male leadership of the party.36 It is crucial to highlight that all these photographs were collected among PAIGC leadership cadres. They are a Guinean elite, who after independence was assigned to political offices. The ordinary fighters possess no visual records. It would be relevant to contrast the photographs and the testimonies collected among PAIGC cadres with the testimonies of the former warriors who never reached spheres of power and privilege. There is a strong possibility that the rural soldiers’ memories would push us towards a critical distance from PAIGC’s official liberation records. Based on some earlier studies focusing on the liberation struggle as it was experienced among the rural population, it seems that these images neglected other histories, which could probably uncover parallel and contradictory accounts.37 It is possible that these accounts might reveal a gap between the rural Guineans, those who were mobilized as the main war  Author’s Interview with Manecas dos Santos, 24 March 2013, Bissau.  Author’s Interview with Ana Maria Soares, 10 March 2013, Bissau. 36  Stephanie Urdang, Fighting Two Colonialisms: Women in Guinea-Bissau (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979); Aliou Ly, “Revisiting the Guinea-Bissau Liberation War: Paigc, Udemu and the Question of Women’s Emancipation, 1963–74,” Portuguese Journal of Social Science 14, no. 3 (2015); Patrícia Godinho Gomes, “O Estado Da Arte Dos Estudos De Gênero Na Guiné-Bissau: Uma Abordagem Preliminar,” Outros Tempos–Pesquisa em Foco-História 12, no. 19 (2015). 37   Rosemary Galli, “Amílcar Cabral and Rural Transformation in Guinea-Bissau: A Preliminary Critique,” Rural Africana 25 (1986); Marina Padrão Temudo, “Western Beliefs and Local Myths: A Case Study on the Interface Bewteen Farmers, Ngos and the State in Guinea-Bissau Rural Development Interventions,” in Bewteen a Rock and a Hard Place: African Ngos, Donors and the State, ed. Jim Igoe & Tim Kelsall (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005); “From ‘People’s Struggle’to ‘This War of Today’: Entanglements of Peace and Conflict in Guinea-Bissau”; Philip Havik, “Virtual Nations and Failed States: Making Sense of the Labyrinth,” in Sure Road? Nationalism in Angola, Guiniea-Bissau and Mozambique, ed. Eric Morier-Genoud (Leiden, London: Brill, 2012). 34 35

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physical force and the liberation movement’s elite, the leading figures of this struggle. Additionally, the aforementioned tensions between Guineans and Cape-Verdeans were always present during the struggle. All these internal conflicts may disclose that among these serene, friendly, and confident men and women in all these photo albums, there were also political betrayals and power conflicts. These conflicts are commonly hidden from the official reports, suggesting that PAIGC’s official history silenced plural and controversial experiences in order to build a consensual and linear history. Naturally, the official history is predominantly narrated by the leadership cadres. Being the protagonists of this struggle, the leadership cadres were not only involved in military trainings and other warlike activities in the liberated areas, but they also travelled outside of the country as ambassadors of the liberation struggle. The vast majority of the photographs collected were by diplomatic missions. These images uncover that the most crucial political moments of this war happened in countries where PAIGC established alliances with similar political repertoires. In these albums, found in the home of former combatants, it might be possible to identify some international stages where PAIGC’s leadership worked on networks of material and political support. Most of these images were taken in countries that during the Cold War intended to oppose colonial and imperial forces. For instance, in Fidélis Cabral de Almada’s personal archive, there were several images taken in North Korea. In one of them, we see PAIGC cadres observing a shotgun, while a Korean soldier talks about it. In another, a group of PAIGC leaders posed in front of the statue of Kim II Sung. In the same family archive, there was an image of a group of anti-colonial leaders, some of whom were from Angola and Mozambique, crossing Alexanderplatz in East Berlin. Finally, an image shows Fidélis Cabral de Almada, visibly moved, embracing Fidel Castro.38 Francisca Pereira keeps an image in which she is greeting Raúl Castro, and several photographs of the meeting of the three anti-colonial leaders—Amílcar Cabral (Guinea-­ Bissau), Marcelino dos Santos (Mozambique), and Agostinho Neto (Angola)—with Pope Paul VI, which she helped to organize.39 There were  Author’s Interview with Mary and Arlette Fidelis de Almada, 26 March 2013, Bissau.  This private audience with Pope Paul VI, which lasted less than ten minutes on 1st July 1970, caused a serious political crisis between Portugal and the Vatican. This political event allowed the liberation movement to acquire public acknowledgement and, consequently, it contributed to the isolation of Portugal, internationally. 38 39

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also photographs in Moscow and China, where she had acted as the representative of Guinean and Cape Verdean women.40 In Teodora Gomes’ albums, there were photographs of her visits to the Soviet Union, as well as Christmas cards sent to her from there. She highlighted, particularly proud, a photograph in East Berlin, precisely at the Brandenburg Gate. In these visits, which they took part in meetings with sympathetic militants and other political actors, PAIGC cadres would show photographs from the liberated areas to gain political support for their cause.41 In addition, their pictures performing diplomatic missions would serve as a testimony of their importance as actors in the revolutionary changes of that political era. Despite this massive iconographic investment of PAIGC’s diplomatic strategy, the interviews conducted with former PAIGC cadres were not particularly rich in details. The interview with Armando Ramos, a cadre who worked in Conakry, where the PAIGC headquarters were located, can be described as an emblematic example of the difficulties faced during most of the interviews conducted. His albums showed that he had actively participated in numerous diplomatic missions, but his discourse revealed a resistance to sharing memories from those times. These resistances were particularly evident in the description of a diplomatic mission throughout Asia in 1972, the last trip of Cabral. While pointing to different pictures, he talked so quickly that it was difficult to ask him for further details or clarifications, as all questions were continuously deflected.42 Similar difficulties were faced during the vast majority of the interviews conducted with former PAIGC leaders, as they frequently gave sparse, descriptive and reluctant responses. This gave very little access to subjective data, frustrating the primary goal of this research. Such a mishap does not necessarily make analysis impossible, if instead of considering the content one realizes that important information can also be gleaned from the silences. The reluctance to mention certain political goals or personal details of these diplomatic missions was probably not due to the deterioration of the narrator’s memory but to the adaptation of the narrator’s memory to the present political context.43 Assuming this point of view,  Author’s Interview with Francisca Pereira, 14 March 2013, Bissau.  Author’s Interview with Francisca Pereira, 21 March 2013, Bissau. 42  Author’s Interview with Armando Ramos, 17 March 2013, Bissau. 43  Alessandro Portelli, Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories, The: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Suny Press, 2010). 40 41

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these reticent responses also reveal how images from the past can be embarrassing and uncomfortable. If one insists that former combatants speak from a time and place frozen in an image, one neglects that the political locus from which they remember has changed. Also, one may overlook the fact that parallel and concurrent identity narratives can be enclosed in the same remembrance act. Therefore, these interviews were reproducing the colonial fallacy, which precisely denounces how identities should not be taken as fixed and stationary.44 A hypothesis may be offered that this reproduction is linked with some dimensions of this conflict that are still hidden from the public discourse (Fig. 13.1). This photograph is a double exposure, consequence of a technical accident, where two warriors remain ethereal and faceless. The image is “ghostly,” juxtaposing, simultaneously, two past moments in the same present. With the fighters dissolving into the landscape, this photograph might be taken as a metaphor for the memory of this struggle, which, at those times, was acknowledged as a revolutionary example by international actors with whom PAIGC shared a political, economic, and social agenda. In the meantime, the image of the heroic fighter for the liberation of the Third World had experienced a process of historical obliteration by these same actors, with the fall of the socialist political field a crucial factor in this obliteration process.45 Taking this into account, these photographs reveal one of the overlooked historical dimensions of this war: During the Cold War, the colonial wars/liberation struggles were also “proxy wars.” The Guinean liberation struggle can be considered one of these “hot” African conflicts triggered by Cold War threats, usually ignored or described as local or circumscribed episodes.46 In the second half of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union intervened in 44  Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Routledge, 2012); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993); Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (Routledge, 2013); Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997). 45  Enzo Traverso, O Passado, Modos De Usar, ed. Edições Unipop, trans. Tiago Avó (Lisboa: Edições Unipop, 2012); Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 46  Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Maria Paula Meneses and Bruno Sena Martins, “Introdução: O Exercício Alcora No Jogo Das Alianças Secretas,” As guerras de libertação e os sonhos coloniais: alianças secretas, mapas imaginados (2013).

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Fig. 13.1  PAIGC’s Fighters / Photograph from Manecas dos Santos’ personal archive

almost every process of change in Africa in order to prove the universal applicability of their ideologies.47 While these world powers took advantage of divisions within African societies to disseminate their own ideological interests, African leaders also used these external alliances to achieve their own goals.48 Alluring countries who could support the liberation struggle under the Cold War political context was crucial. According to Cabral, for whom Marxism was a useful tool for analysing colonial problems, conquering this support was the main objective of foreign policy: The main objective of external political resistance is to conquer allies, to gain political support and to isolate the enemy politically. So, in 1960, we started, while preparing our people for the armed struggle, attending conferences, 47  Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 4. 48  Elizabeth Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror, vol. 7 (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 5.

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international meetings, explaining our problem, struggling to be heard, multiplying our actions, looking for necessary support and seeking to isolate the enemy in the world.49

This support included financial and military support to the combat fronts, as well as material for the health centres and schools being created in the liberated zones. The liberation movement also needed professional cadres to fulfil the social goals it proposed to achieve: teachers to strike illiteracy, doctors to watch over wounded combatants, filmmakers to document the military successes achieved. Training these professionals was only possible through these international solidarity networks. Several Guinean and Cape Verdeans were invited to study abroad, the majority of whom went to Cuba, former Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union. As will be exemplified by the photo below, among other training courses, a nursing course for three groups of women, which took place in Kiev, Ukraine, was particularly relevant as the most well-known women of this struggle—Carmen Pereira, Francisca Pereira, Teodora Gomes, Ana Maria Soares, and Titina Sila—participated in these courses. Upon returning to Guinea-Bissau, some of them were given leadership positions as political commissars on the different war fronts, while others went to the health posts in the liberated zones. This photograph concerns one of these groups in Kiev (Fig. 13.2). These women were part of the African solidarity project, which fitted into the history of oppressed peoples struggling for national sovereignty and emancipation under the direction of the Soviet Union. Most of the young women in the image above came from rural areas, escaping situations of forced marriage set by local traditions.50 Rural people were perceived as the lowest social group under the colonial rule, and consequently, as naturally predisposed for a revolutionary change. This change would liberate them from a colonial and patriarchal oppressed condition and include them in a new educated elite. PAIGC’s political programme viewed polygamy and forced marriage, among other local social patterns, as manifestations of women’s social inferiority. All these practices were 49  Amílcar Cabral, Análise De Alguns Tipos De Resistência, ed. Colecção de leste a oeste (Lisboa: Seara Nova, 1975), 21–22. 50  Inês Galvão and Catarina Laranjeiro, “Gender Struggle in Guinea-Bissau: Women’s Participation on and Off the Liberation Record,” in Resistance and Colonialism—Insurgent Peoples in World History, ed. Nuno Domingos, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, and Ricardo Roque (Cambridge: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

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Fig. 13.2  Nursing students in Kiev/ Photograph Francisca Pereira’s personal archive

viewed by PAIGC leadership as culturally backward social patterns that had to be overcome in order to achieve a true revolutionary development.51 In addition to literacy and nursing, these women were also instructed to acquire appropriate dress codes and hygiene habits in order to perform social behaviours of a higher social class.52 Overpassing the condition of rural women would fulfil PAIGC’s demands for the emancipation of women, and simultaneously, match the Soviet goals for international solidarity, both premised on the idea of backwardness as a result of capitalist exploitation.53 Instead of “modernization” or “development” 51  Amílcar Cabral, “Libertação Nacional E Cultura,” in Malhas Que Os Impérios Tecem, ed. Manuela Ribeiro Sanches (Lisboa: Edições 70, 2011), 373; Urdang, Fighting Two Colonialisms: Women in Guinea-Bissau, 150. 52  Inês Galvão and Catarina Laranjeiro, “Gender Struggle in Guinea-Bissau: Women’s Participation on and Off the Liberation Record,” in Resistance and Colonialism: Insurgent Peoples in World History, ed. Nuno Domingos, Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, and Ricardo Roque (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan., unpublished); Galvão and Laranjeiro, “Gender Struggle in Guinea-Bissau: Women’s Participation on and Off the Liberation Record.” 53  Schmidt, Foreign Intervention in Africa: From the Cold War to the War on Terror, 7, 25.

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the Soviets widely used the concept of kul’turnost, which meant to turn rural people into good urban citizens.54 Very little is known about the content of these nursing programmes, their structures and intended outcomes. But in the photograph above, it is possible to identify some gendered emancipatory devices, which were activated by these international solidarity exchange programmes. Carefully lined up, facing the camera and impeccably dressed, the posture of these women materialized the codes they had to acquire in order to achieve an upper social condition. Again, we are faced with the gap between rural people and the party elite, a gap which could be decreased through specialized training. The young nurses became a persuasive case of this upward movement into a higher position in the PAIGC hierarchies. These exchange programmes also reveal that wars can be prolific grounds for identity negotiations, akin to what Mary Louise Pratt designated as “contact zones,” social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other.55 However, these “contact zones” occurred not only between those peoples who shared common political contexts but also between those with antagonistic political goals (Fig. 13.3). Manecas dos Santos is the tall light-skinned man at the centre of this photograph, in a PAIGC military uniform. In this image, he is flanked by two Portuguese soldiers. During the struggle, he was a military commander on the northern front. According to him, this photograph was taken in May 1974, near Farim, documenting the first meeting between the PAIGC troops and the colonial troops. He explicitly said after the war ended, “there was still some mistrust between us … we were still holding on to our weapons. But, as the photograph shows, we were in peace, and we were smiling.”56 While their smiles may show reconciliation, their weapons signal that the war was not over yet. To display weapons is fairly common in military iconography; however, in this specific case, the weapons may also reveal a tension, a turbulent border zone between war and peace. The image above points to an overtaken border, which until the

54  Artemy M Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 2018), 30. 55  Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 2007), 4. 56  Author’s Interview with Manecas dos Santos, 24 March 2013, Bissau.

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Fig. 13.3  First meeting between Portuguese troops and PAIGC / Photograph from Manecas dos Santos’ personal archive

end of the war divided the colonial army and the liberation movement.57 Therefore, this image can also be perceived as an “in-between,” a place where transcultural dynamics resulting from the colonial encounter occur.58 During the war, these enemy armies were not locked into enclosed spheres. Unexpected ways of communication, approach, and relationship emerged between both, allowing enemies to overcome the borders that initially split them. This reflection is particularly relevant as the colonial war ended with a coup d’état in Portugal, triggered by elements within the Portuguese Armed Forces involved in the war in Guinea-Bissau. There is 57  Susan Stanford Friedman, “O «Falar Da Fronteira», O Hibridismo Ea Performatividade: Teoria Da Cultura E Identidade Nos Espaços Intersticiais Da Diferença,” Revista crítica de ciências sociais, no. 61 (2001); Boaventura de Sousa Santos, A Crítica Da Razão Indolente: Contra O Desperdício Da Experiência (São Paulo: Cortez Editora, 2004); Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation; António Sousa Ribeiro, “A Retórica Dos Limites. Notas Sobre O Conceito De Fronteira,” in Globalização: Fatalidade Ou Utopia?, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Porto: Afrontamento, 2001). 58  Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 20.

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a possibility that these soldiers were influenced by the liberation movement’s ideological positions that had reached them through PAIGC’s Rádio de Libertação [Liberation Radio], among other media.59 These media might have contributed to a greater political awareness on the part of the Portuguese military. Exposing soldiers from the colonial army together with soldiers from the liberation movement may illustrate that the places occupied by the colonized people during the colonial era were neither permanent nor insurmountable, making people believe that the colonial powers had come to an end. But while some unequal political relations seemed to vanish, others emerged with new political inequalities. After the war, while some photographs were taken to prove the end of colonial relations, others were hidden as new political borders were emerging.

Hidden Photographs and Public Silences These hidden photographs are from the African troops who were recruited by the Portuguese Armed Forces. While PAIGC celebrated independence in Guinea-Bissau, and in Portugal there were huge demonstrations acclaiming the end of the dictatorship, the African troops from the colonial army were forgotten by both countries. These combatants represented an uncomfortable heritage, and they were abandoned in a limbo between a Portuguese State which was leaving, and a victorious liberation movement preparing to assume the nation’s power. In Guinea-Bissau these combatants were no longer welcomed. They were politically persecuted, detained, tortured, and many of them were executed without a trial. Initially concealed, these political assassinations were only denounced by Nino Vieira in 1980, after he took over the power, as a result of a coup d’état.60 According to several accounts, destroying or hiding the war ­photographs that proved they had belonged to the colonial army was one of the ways to escape this fate. Abdulai Djaló was particularly resentful when narrating these episodes:  About the Rádio de Libertação to see the film Mouth Cannon (2017) by Ângelo Lopes.  Rodrigues, “Antigos Combatentes Africanos Das Forças Armadas Portuguesas: A Guerra Colonial Como Território De (Re) Conciliação,” 174.; Queba Sambu, Ordem para Matar. Dos Fuzilamentos ao Caso das Bombas na da Embaixada da Guiné (Lisboa, Edições Referendo: 1989); Manuel Amaro Bernardo, Guerra, Paz e Fuzilamentos dos Guerreiros; Guiné 1970–1980 (Lisboa, Prefácio: 2013). 59 60

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At that time [after independence], many people died because of war photographs. I hid mine. I wrapped my photographs in plastic. I dug a hole in the kitchen floor and I buried them, covering them with cement. Only my wife knew that my photographs were there. Back in those days, it was a very dangerous time. There were so many persecutions. … Some commandos were pursued and killed. I was very afraid. … So all my war photographs remained hidden until I went to Portugal.61

The photographs that Abdulai Djaló buried under his kitchen floor reveal that he had served as an official in the Portuguese Armed Forces. These photographs were only uncovered when he was able to take refuge in Portugal which he never visited before, despite having fought on behalf of Portugal. With no social or economic support from the Portuguese State, he lived in an abandoned house in the suburbs of Lisbon, with other Guineans. He then turned to the Associação de Comandos [Commands Association], a non-governmental organization that was created to support the African combatants who managed to come to Portugal. Later, Abdulai Djaló got a job as security guard in the gardens of Lisbon City Hall and seventeen years after leaving Bissau, he took his family to Portugal. All these processes were very slow and difficult. Feeling betrayed by the Portuguese State, as many former combatants, Djaló accuses the Portuguese Government of having abandoned them.62 Portugal made these combatants believe that they were fully Portuguese, with the same civil rights and duties as the Portuguese born in Portugal. Additionally, if they fought on the behalf of the Portuguese nation, they would be political and military offices as soon as the war was over. These combatants were lured by the possibility of social ascension from which they could benefit.63 But the Portuguese democratic regime did not acknowledge these combatants as a legacy of the colonial regime. The African combatants are legally supported by the Portuguese State just as the Portuguese are. However, the former have to prove that they belonged to the Portuguese Armed Forces, because their names do not  Author’s Interview with Abdulai Djaló, 12 January 2013, Lisbon.  Author’s Interview with Abdulai Djaló, 12 January 2013, Lisbon. 63  Borges Coelho, “African Troops in the Portuguese Colonial Army, 1961–1974: Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique,” 140; John P Cann, Contra-Subversão Em África: Como Os Portugueses Fizeram a Guerra Em África 1961–1974 (Lisboa: Prefácio, 2005), 127; Gomes, “A AfricanizaçãO Na Guerra Colonial E as Suas Sequelas. Tropas Locais–Os VilõEs Nos Ventos Da HistóRia,” 131. 61 62

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appear in the official records that remain in the Portuguese archives.64 More than forty years after this war was over, several former African combatants are still trying to migrate to Portugal, with the hope of receiving a military retirement. Their war photographs could be used as documentary evidence of their belonging and participation in the Portuguese Armed Forces. However, the vast majority of these former combatants destroyed their own photographs, as the following accounts reveal: Pictures were usually taken by the military commandants. I had several wearing a military uniform, holding a transmission radio, a bazooka and American weapons. But I do not have these pictures anymore. My comrades-­ in-­arms do not have any pictures either. We burned all of them, because at that time [after independence] if someone saw us with these pictures, we could be arrested.65

Another ex-combatant recalled: At that time [after independence], we were persecuted. If they saw us with any document, a picture or even the military passbook, they would bring us in front of the firing squad. Many of us burned or hid their documents. I managed to hide these pictures. But I had many more. We suffered so many sacrifices in the army. We were so young, we were nineteen or twenty years old, carrying out military service. Recently, we decided to create an association for claiming our rights, which are written in the Algiers Agreements. But we did not get any official response. … But we will not stop, we will continue struggling for our rights. Even if we all die, our children will struggle on behalf of our memory.66

These photographs and documents were hidden, burned, or destroyed. And with them, some episodes of this war. Alberto Gomes had photographs holding American weapons. These weapons—as the use of napalm bombs to destroy crops—were amply used by the colonial army, evidence which was never recognized by the highest cadres of the colonial army.67 After the war, the Portuguese Government never apologized publicly to 64   Author’s Interview with the Portuguese military attaché in Guinea-Bissau, 22 October 2015. 65  Author’s Interview with José Medina 16 March 2013, Bissau. 66  Author’s Interview with Alberto Gomes 18 March 2013, Bissau. 67  António de Araújo and António Duarte Silva. “O uso de NAPALM na Guerra Colonial-­ quatro documentos.” Relações Internacionais, 22 (2009), 121–139.

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the populations bombed with napalm. Abdulai Djaló still has pictures of a military operation in Conakry, designated Mar Verde [Green Sea]. This military action intended to support a military coup that the Front de Liberation Nationale [National Liberation Front] intended to stage against Sekou Touré’s Government, to liberate the twenty-six Portuguese political prisoners, destroy the PAIGC’s headquarters, and arrest Amílcar Cabral.68 Only the second goal was achieved. When the military returned to Bissau, they signed a declaration certifying that they would never talk about what happened. African troops were the major force of this military action. The whites who participated in that painted their faces in black. At that time, they were supposed to seem similar. But most of the African troops were murdered after independence, while the Portuguese returned to Portugal, where the images and the memories of this war were not welcomed in the public discourse.

To Conclude Images are far from being impartial records manifesting truths on historical facts but are rather open to subjective analysis. An image that is preserved brings certain memories of the past to the present. An image that is buried, burned, or destroyed contains no less information than those in a preserved state. An image about which nobody wants to talk might also reveal valuable information. About the Portuguese colonial war, the images collected among Guineans on both sides of the conflict have prompted a reflection about what is included or excluded from public discourse. Rather than reconcile past violence, these images catalyse contentious hidden narratives that persist in both countries. In Portugal, the African troops who served on behalf of the Portuguese nation were politically forgotten and with them some war episodes which might give some clues on the reasons why it is so problematic to Portugal to excavate its colonial past, and mainly the colonial war. In Guinea-Bissau, the liberation struggle is widely celebrated by public discourses without also recognizing that several African troops involved in the colonial army were assassinated on behalf of a “national unity,” which aimed to transform the memory of the liberation struggle into a national memory. Likewise, this national 68  Carlos de Matos Gomes, “Operação Mar Verde (1970)” in As Voltas do Passado: A Guerra Colonial e as Lutas de Libertação, ed. Miguel Cardina & Bruno Sena Martins (Lisboa, Tinta-da-China, 2018), 205–210.

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memory does not acknowledge distinctions and conflicts among Guineans and Cape Verdeans, which reverberated in current cultural gaps among the rural population and the liberation movement’s elite. These divisions and conflicts were also influenced by contingencies determined by the Cold War, war that was far from being “cold” in the African continent. Therefore, this exercise of juxtaposing photographs and memories suggests that until today a complex plot on the memory of this war persists, being challenging to clarify what each of those actors involved in this war precisely intended with their actions. Acknowledgements  I want to express my gratitude to all former combatants who shared their personal photographs and memories with me in Bissau and in Lisbon. I am also thankful to some scholars with whom I have discussed several ideas combined on this paper: António Sousa Ribeiro, Daniel Barroca, Inês Galvão, Luís Bernardo, and Sofia da Palma Rodrigues. This research benefited from my participation in the project Amilcar Cabral, from political history to the politics of memory (PTDC/EPH-HIS/6964/5214).

CHAPTER 14

Curating the Past: Memory, History, and Private Photographs of the Portuguese Colonial Wars Maria José Lobo Antunes

From 1961 to 1974, Portugal fought wars in its African colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. The authoritarian and conservative regime of the Portuguese New State (Estado Novo) resisted international pressure to decolonize. An efficient ideological apparatus worked untiringly to ensure a favourable public version of the conflict. In 1974, the Carnation Revolution opened the way for decolonization and a transition to democracy. These major transformations were not, however, followed by a critical debate about the empire and its demise. Instead, silence muffled the country’s past. Occasional incursions sought to break the pervading silence; literature and civil society were the main driving forces that

M. J. L. Antunes (*) Instituto de Ciências Sociais, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_14

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first publicly evoked the Portuguese colonial past.1 Four decades later, Portuguese colonialism and the wars that defended it are still a territory of contested meanings. Drawing from ongoing research on the visual representation of the wars, this chapter examines the contemporary uses of soldiers’ photographs and their articulation with memory and history. However mundane they may appear, they represent the visual evidence of participation in extraordinary events in which individual lives intersected with history. I will argue that images shot, printed, collected, circulated, curated, and displayed by soldiers are key to understanding the construction, reproduction, and durability of a benign narrative about the colonial wars. Photography has long been a powerful tool for knowledge production due to its perceived accuracy and endless reproducibility. The camera’s memorializing gaze is taken to capture what once existed before its lens, making photographs the “popular historicism of our era: they confer nothing less than reality itself”.2 This chapter begins by examining the ways in which this historicism-by-photography was moulded by the New State’s censorship and propaganda apparatus, effectively drawing limits for the imagination of the Portuguese colonies and the thirteen-year-long wars. Military surveillance did not, however, prevent soldiers from using snapshot cameras during their tours of duty. The second part of the chapter addresses the public uses of ex-servicemen’s photographs, from published books to more recent social media activity. Alienated from their owners, soldiers’ images have been at the centre of important historical revelations on past conflicts, testifying to war crimes and to the apparent normalcy that often surrounds atrocities.3 In the case of the Portuguese colonial wars, private photographs are still attached to their owners and to their curatorial drive. I will show that veterans’ actions tend to abide by 1  See Luis Quintais, As guerras coloniais portuguesas e a invenção da história (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2000), Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, Uma história de regressos. Império, guerra colonial e pós-colonialismo (Porto: Afrontamento, 2004). 2   Alan Trachtenberg, “Albums of Wars: On Reading Civil War Photographs,” Representations, 9, 1 (1985): 1. 3  When soldiers’ photographs break their customary private circulation, they become potentially disruptive documents of violence. There are numerous examples of soldiers’ pictures leaked to the press, but the most notorious is probably the case of images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004. See Janina Struk, Private Pictures. Soldiers’ Inside View of War (London: IB Taurus, 2011), Susan Sontag, Regarding the pain of other (New York: Picador, 2003).

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the New State’s ideological boundaries, hence avoiding potentially disruptive debates over private objects of affect from the past. The chapter’s third and final part examines the “performative cord” that links photographs to their holders, and which grants meaning and experiential density to the framed instants.4 Focusing on one veteran’s private uses of his snapshot collection, I examine the mnemonic performances that are elicited by his photo albums. Articulating private and public uses of veterans’ photographs, this essay delves into the present-day negotiation between personal memories and historical narratives about the past.

Imagination Limited: Ideological Surveillance of War Photographs By the mid-twentieth century, the international winds of change collided with the Portuguese New State regime’s determination to hold on to its colonies. Official narratives underwent a rhetorical makeover that put an end to the empire on paper, constitutionally converting it into a “composite nation” made up of a European “metropolis” and African and Asian “overseas provinces”.5 The regime adopted and popularized a simplified version of Gilberto Freyre’s lusotropicalist theory, which claimed that the Portuguese had a special ability to foster cultural diversity. “Luso-­ exceptionality” was presented as a colour-blind and inclusive national characteristic that guaranteed equality in a multiracial society.6 From the 1950s onwards, the New State propaganda moved away from the imperialistic tone that had marked public discourse about the colonies and adopted a paternalistic rhetoric that sought to emphasize the multiracial character of a pluricontinental nation. 4  Martha Langford, “Speaking the Album. An Application of the Oral-Photographic Framework,” in Locating Memory. Photographic Acts, eds. Annette Kuhn & Kirsten Emiko McAllister (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008): 223–246. 5  “Euro-African and Euro-Asian composite nation” were the terms used by the regime’s leader, Salazar, in a speech delivered in the Portuguese parliament in November 1960. António de Oliveira Salazar, “Portugal e a campanha anti-colonial”, Boletim Geral do Ultramar, XXXVI, 426 (1960): 13. 6  António Costa Pinto and Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo, “Ideologies of Exceptionality and the Legacies of Empire in Portugal,” in Memories of Post-Imperial Nations. The Aftermath of Decolonization 1945–2013, ed. Dietmar Rothermund (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 97–119. For an in-depth analysis of lusotropicalism, see Cláudia Castelo, «O modo português de estar no mundo». O luso-tropicalismo e a ideologia colonial portuguesa (1933–1961) (Porto: Edições Afrontamento, 1999).

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The censorship apparatus enforced discursive guidelines that aimed at highlighting the nation’s organic unity, and at consistently effacing racial references.7 Imagining a national community that extended beyond European borders was the safest way to circumvent the aspirations to independence of African territories. The year 1960 inaugurated a period when the colonies were increasingly incorporated in the national narrative aired by the media. Photographs of the colonies were compiled and made available to newspapers and magazines, exhibiting the multiracial harmony heralded by the regime. Television newscasts started including stories from African and Asian territories. Criteria of relevance were secondary to the political imperative of conveying a comprehensive discourse of nationality: Events as unremarkable as a circus show in Mozambique, a philatelic exhibition in Goa, or a trip to an Angolan town, were all integrated in Portuguese television news broadcasts.8 Life in the overseas territories became increasingly imaginable from afar, as discursive and visual materials about the colonies were offered to domestic and international audiences. When war broke out in Angola, control over the visual representation of the African colonies assumed a central role in the New State policy. Portuguese authorities worked tirelessly to guarantee a positive public opinion of the conflict. Luanda’s February 1961 attacks claimed by the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola), and the March 1961 massacres perpetrated by the UPA (Union of the Peoples of Angola) were widely used in a far-reaching nationalist operation that simultaneously criticized the barbaric acts of “terrorists” and praised the heroic deeds of those who resisted it. Censorship’s usual restraint was suspended, and images of extreme violence were presented in the media. Newspapers, television, books, leaflets, and exhibitions, all obsessively displayed gruesome photographs of dozens of corpses, mutilated women and men, and dead infants. This unprecedented media campaign was unleashed to

7  These guidelines were drafted by the Bureau of Political Affairs (Gabinete de Negócios Políticos), a body of the Ministry of Overseas that played a central role in the naturalization of the national discourse of exceptionality. See Cláudia Castelo, “The Luso-Tropicalist Message of the Late Portuguese Empire,” in Media and the Portuguese empire, eds. José Luis Garcia, Chandrika Kaul, Filipa Subtil & Alexandra Santos (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 217–234. 8  Francisco Rui Cádima, Salazar, Caetano e a Televisão Portuguesa (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1996).

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ensure that the war was perceived as an uncontentious and inevitable reaction to horror.9 Foreign journalists, whose work contradicted the regime’s version of events, were deported from Angola after the Luanda attacks. Those who managed to stay in the territory reported being subjected to strict surveillance: cameras were seized and film was confiscated; a piece by The Guardian described how a journalist had to phone his story to South Africa in order to escape Luanda’s censorship.10 The New State was unable, however, to fully domesticate international media and stop them from releasing material that disrupted the official narrative. Unfavourable news never stopped going public and kept the regime under constant scrutiny in international fora.11 As for Portuguese media, the regime prevented the public from having access to anything other than the fable produced by the media: an informational fiction of peace, prosperity, multiracial bliss, and proud Portugueseness, regardless of skin colour. In April 1961, António de Oliveira Salazar, the decades-long leader of the authoritarian regime, addressed the country and uttered the words that initiated a massive military deployment: “To Angola, swiftly and in strength”.12 Two months later, the media received the official security norms for the dissemination of news about the armed forces’ activities in Africa.13 Issued by the Public Information Service of the Armed Forces 9  For an in-depth analysis of March 1961 massacres’ photographs and its political uses, see Afonso Dias Ramos, “Images that Kill. Photography and War in Angola in 1961”, in this volume. See also Afonso Ramos, “Angola 1961, o horror das imagens,” in O Império da Visão. Fotografia no contexto colonial português, ed. Filipa Lowndes Vicente (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2014), 399–434. 10  Tânia Alves, “Reporting 4 February 1961 in Angola: the Beginning of the End of the Portuguese Empire,” in Media and the Portuguese Empire, eds. José Luís Garcia, Chandrika Kaul, Filipa Subtil & Alexandra Santos (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 235–251. 11  See, for instance, an analysis of NBC’s 1961 documentary about war in Angola, and the struggle over images it generated in Afonso Ramos, “‘Rarely penetrated by camera or film’— Revisiting the first documentary on the Portuguese Colonial War, NBC’s Angola: Journey to War (1961),” in (Re)Imagining African Independence. Film, Visual Arts and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire, eds. Maria do Carmo Piçarra & Teresa Castro (Bern: Peter Lang, 2017), 111–130. 12  In the aftermath of this speech, Portuguese forces in the territory increased fivefold, from 6500 to 33,477 personnel by the end of the year. See Estado Maior do Exército, Resenha Histórico-Militar das Campanhas de África (1961–1974). Enquadramento Geral (Lisbon: Estado-Maior do Exército, 1988). 13  Letter from the SIPFA, 28 June 1961, ADN F05/Sr 1, Box 1, Number 5, Serviço Informação Pública das Forças Armadas fonds, Arquivo da Defesa Nacional, Paço de Arcos, Portugal.

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(SIPFA—Serviço de Informação Pública das Forças Armadas)—a recently created body of the Ministry of National Defence that aimed to shape public opinion on military activity—this document intended to curtail the latitude of Portuguese news, thus “guaranteeing the Armed Forces’ security”. The 1961 security norms included measures that restricted potentially sensitive information (all data on specific military units or troop movements had to be avoided), and laid down the rules for ensuring solid morale (tales of patriotism and bravery were to be publicized; stories of desertion were to be suppressed). It did not take long for the Portuguese authorities to realize that these norms were not enough to completely stifle dissonant versions of events. In December 1961, the Public Information Service of the Armed Forces wrote an official letter to the military command in Angola, warning about the perils associated with soldiers’ mail. The document acknowledged that numerous photographs had been sent from operational zones, and that soldiers were writing home with “exaggerated” and “creative” accounts of the Portuguese “repressive action”, describing “barbarian”, “false”, and “macabre” practices. One injured soldier, the SIPFA wrote, was even known to have described how his unit had slaughtered numerous women and children in an Angolan village.14 These “imaginative” first-hand reports and photographs were deemed to be dangerous breeding grounds for enemy counterpropaganda. Classified as “very secret”, this official document recommended the Command-Chief in Angola to do everything possible to contain such risks, suggesting that strict surveillance should be applied to soldiers’ photographs and letters. As a result, the use of photographic cameras was temporarily banned in Angola’s northern region, where combat was taking place.15 In spite of official efforts, security breaches surfaced in unexpected places. Soldiers kept taking snapshots in sensitive war areas. Worse still, soldiers mailed images not only to their families, but also to the Portuguese press. Eva, a conservative and decades-old women’s magazine, was one of the preferred recipients of soldiers’ mail. Targeting a female audience, Eva 14  Cartas e fotografias relativas à acção das F. Armadas e à acção geral anti-terrorista escritas e tiradas em Angola por militares, 13 December 1961, ADN/F05/Sr 61 Box 307 Number 1, Serviço de Informação Pública das Forças Armadas fonds, Arquivo da Defesa Nacional, Paço de Arcos, Portugal. 15  Restrictions on the use of cameras in Angola were softened in September 1962, with the ban being lifted in urban areas, as was announced in the press: “Determinações menos rígidas sobre o uso de máquinas fotográficas em Angola,” Diário de Notícias, September 26, 1962.

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launched a “patriotic crusade” for female correspondents, known as war godmothers (madrinhas de guerra): young and single women willing to support, with “gentle and maternal words”, those who fulfilled the “sacred duty” of “defending the homeland”.16 In order to boost the war godmothers’ campaign, Eva inaugurated a section in which soldiers’ and godmothers’ letters and photographs were published (see Fig. 14.1). However harmless, soldiers’ photographs provided Eva’s public with unsupervised glimpses of the front. As soon as this came to SIPFA’s attention, a confidential intervention took place. Women’s magazines were asked to carefully apply the official guidelines when printing soldiers’ letters and images. The military command in Angola was instructed to pay attention to soldiers’ personal photographs, because great damage could be done to the Portuguese cause by apparently innocuous images. On the one hand, soldiers’ photographs provided visible evidence of military activity, thus contradicting the official portrait of peace. On the other hand, these images could be used to ridicule the armed forces, as a SIPFA official letter demonstrated by describing a picture that was promptly prevented from being published in Eva: “two soldiers with machine guns, in combat positions, whilst a helmetless soldier looks as if he is cleaning his nails”.17 Soldiers were apparently unable to foresee the many dangers posed by careless images of militarized landscapes, actions, and characters, and their photos were printed in the nationalist fizz that swept the country. It was the job of the armed forces command to ensure centralized control of individual intentions. A second version of the security norms was issued in January 1962, and inaugurated an overt official concern for the visual representation of the conflict.18 Photographs and films were acknowledged as potentially disruptive: it was recognized that they could be used to feed the opponent’s propaganda, and contribute to tarnishing the image of the Portuguese forces. The 1962 security norms explicitly stipulated that no  “Madrinhas de guerra para os nossos soldados em serviço em Angola,” Eva, May 1961.  Letter from SIPFA to the Command-Chief in Angola, 17 January 1962, ADN/F05/ SR15, Box 64, Number 3, Serviço de Informação Pública das Forças Armadas fonds, Arquivo da Defesa Nacional, Paço de Arcos, Portugal. In spite of my best efforts, it was impossible to locate the photographs mentioned in this letter. 18  Normas de segurança militar a observar na publicação, radiodifusão ou televisão, de notícias, crónicas, reportagens, fotografias e filmes relativos à acção das forças armadas (exército, armada e força aérea) no ultramar, 10 January 1962, ADN/F05/SR.1, Box 1, Number 5, Serviço de Informação Pública das Forças Armadas fonds, Arquivo da Defesa Nacional, Paço de Arcos, Portugal. 16 17

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Fig. 14.1  A page’s fragment from Eva magazine: five war godmothers “effusively greet their godsons”, and a soldiers’ portrait is published in the hope that his family will be able to see him safe and sound in northern Angola. (Source: Eva, September 1961)

image, moving or still, could be released without previous approval from the military authorities. Aside from photographs of extreme horror made in 1961 and subsequently shown by all means possible, the Portuguese authorities opted for visual moderation when reporting the wars in Africa. Visuality was very restricted, and relied predominantly in the display of orderly demonstrations of strength, such as parades. There was no

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equivalent to the war photographers of other conflicts, documenting military operations and contributing to a victorious imaginary of the actions of the nation’s troops (enemy dead included).19 Instead, Portuguese war propaganda aimed at the exact opposite. Combat was visually effaced, and emphasis was given to multiracial portraits of life in the colonies, and psychosocial initiatives targeting local populations (soldiers teaching, building, or providing medical care, etc.).20 Strict visual control was not the only measure adopted in 1962; discursive control was also meticulously enforced. The security norms determined that “all activity should be designated as police action, in order to prevent enemy propaganda from speculating or exaggerating the scale of on-going operations”. Troop movements, data on casualties, stories of desertion or military indiscipline, images of ill-groomed soldiers, were all off-limits. Any reference to the use of heavy weaponry (“artillery, flamethrowers, landmines, etc.”) or aviation (“ground attacks or bombardments”) was also banned from the news.21 War could not exist in the Portuguese media. Official security norms were updated time and again as war unfolded and expanded to Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. Subsequent versions reflected the necessary adaptations to restrain the eagerness of soldiers to share details about their war experiences. Later versions of the norms established that no serviceman, active or retired, could release visual or written materials without prior authorization, and that there should be greater caution with radio programmes that broadcast musical requests from soldiers (operational details could easily be revealed by incautious servicemen).22 Periodic revamping of the security norms ensured that a collective belief about peace in the colonies could be achieved through surveillance of individual inattention, as well as through a consistent understatement of events and an elision of violence, destruction, and 19  See, for instance, Robin Gerster, “War by Photography: Shooting Japanese in Australia’s Pacific War,” History of Photography 40, 4 (2016): 432–452. 20  For an overview of Portuguese psychosocial action in the wars, see John P.  Cann Counterinsurgency in Africa. The Portuguese Way of War 1961–1974 (Westport CT: Greenwood, 1997). 21  Normas de Segurança, 1962. 22  Normas de segurança militar a observar na publicação, radiodifusão ou televisão, de notícias, crónicas, reportagens, fotografias e filmes relativos à acção das forças armadas (exército, armada e força aérea) no ultramar, 11 June 1964 and 1 June 1966, ADN/F05/SR.1 Box 1 Number 5, Serviço de Informação Pública das Forças Armadas fonds, Arquivo da Defesa Nacional, Paço de Arcos, Portugal.

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casualties. Life in the colonies was to be imagined as harmonious and prosperous, and the military presence overseas was to be pictured as an orderly combination of policing and assisting local populations on their path towards social and economic development. Everything that fell outside of these narrative and visual boundaries was blocked from the Portuguese public, and imagination was entrapped by the pervasive fiction of national unity.

Soldiers’ Amateur Photography Made Public In spite of official guidelines that restricted public access to private images of war, an undetermined but significant number of servicemen used snapshot cameras during their tours of duty. Photographs were gathered as mementos to be either exchanged with correspondents or to be selected and displayed in personal albums. Following discharge, personal collections have remained accessible only in small circles; soldiers and the people they chose were the private audiences to whom images were shown and stories were told. Excluded from the public visual imagination of the war for years, veterans’ photographs were slowly given the opportunity to reverse their hitherto obscure existence. From the late 1980s onwards, private images occasionally surfaced in books about the wars. Selected from soldiers’ collections, published photographs joined the colonial wars’ visual archive, which had, until then, been made up exclusively of officially authorized pictures. Two of the first books to feature veterans’ photographs were hardcover volumes dedicated to the wars: a collection of texts by Portuguese and African authors, and a self-titled “photobiography” of the conflict.23 The former relied in a circular usage of text and unrelated images (photographs illustrated the written words, and captions were shortened quotations from the published texts), whilst the latter focused on assembling a visual story about the Portuguese colonial wars. No data about the photographs was provided in either of the oeuvres, apart from the generic information that they had been gathered from soldiers’ 23  Os Anos da Guerra. 1961–1975. Os Portugueses em África. Crónica, Ficção e História, ed. João de Melo (Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 1988) and Guerra Colonial. Fotobiografia, eds. Renato Monteiro & Luís Farinha (Lisboa: Publicações D. Quixote, 1990). For an analysis of these two books, see Paulo de Medeiros, “War pics: Photographic Representations of the Colonial War,” Luso-Brazilian Review 39, 2 (2002): 91–106.

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personal collections. Both books presented the violence of the colonial wars as it had not been seen before: photographs of dead and wounded Portuguese military, or of decapitated Africans’ heads. Captions were minimal, and did not include location, time, authorship, or description of what was visually represented. Unprecedented images by anonymous amateur photographers bore witness to previously unknown excesses of the Portuguese forces. These books had a clear political purpose of condemning the wars, attesting to their concealed ferocity and to the regime’s effectiveness in maintaining a long-lasting fiction about the African colonies. After the turn of the century, the wars emerged strongly in the public sphere, namely in a publishing niche dedicated to Portuguese late colonialism. Veterans’ diaries, war letters, and memoirs were released, both by established publishing houses and as self-publishing initiatives. These books frequently use photographs taken by the authors in order to illustrate the edited text, hence offering fleeting visions of the front lines that serve as visual appetizers to the stories being told.24 In most of the books by soldiers, images are subsidiary to the memorialistic intentions of the written narratives about the past, which are predominantly nostalgic in tone and lulled by self-indulgence, and hence do not oppose the official imagery depicting the Portuguese armed forces’ actions as unblemished. In some rarer cases, photography plays a leading role. Such is the case of a volume authored by Luis Correa de Sá, launched in 2003 under the aseptic title of Batalhão B.Caç. 595 1963–1966—a laconic combination of the unit’s identification and the temporal range of its deployment in Angola. Nothing in the title points to its exceptional documentary value. The book’s text and images cover a time period of almost 4 years, from initial military training in Portugal to the return trip to Lisbon by boat. Unlike the majority of veterans’ publications, Sá’s book combines lengthy textual excerpts from his diary, and a selection of 288 of his photographs. Sitting somewhere between a diary and a photography album, this is an unparalleled volume in the recent editorial niche around the colonial wars. Luis Corrêa de Sá dedicates the book to his brothers in arms from the Light Infantry Company 535, Battalion 595, in which he served as a 24  See, for instance, Etelvino da Silva Batista, Angola 1961–63. Diário de Guerra (Lisboa: Três Sinais Editores, 2000), Manuel Catarino (ed), A minha guerra. Testemunhos de combatentes (Lisboa: PressLivre/Correio da Manhã, 2011), Luis de Matos, Diário da guerra colonial. Guiné 1966–1968: de Boa Nova à Guiné (Alpiarça: Luis de Matos, 2009).

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conscript second lieutenant. The author’s curatorial drive is clearly stated in the preface, when the book is presented as the result of “nostalgic remembrance of intense and sometimes difficult moments lived forty years ago” and a recollection of the “most enjoyable moments of conviviality and camaraderie”.25 From this sentence onwards, the reader is made aware of the narrow limits that circumscribe this soldier’s tale. The sombre side of war was fenced out of the book, despite the potentially numerous dark spots in Batallion 595’s deployment, which was marked by intense military activity and numerous casualties.26 As one flicks through Sá’s book, his photographs unveil an admirable gaze on what surrounded him, from memorable moments of soldiers’ lives, to outstanding pictures of Angolan places and people (Figs. 14.2 and 14.3). Sá’s discretion when composing a visual representation of his war contrasts with the apparently unproblematic display of intimate writing, in which he expresses a yearning to get back home to the pleasures of his former upscale life (going to the opera, listening to music in his record player), or candidly exposes his struggle in trying to enforce discipline upon the men in the platoon. More recently, the Internet has offered a new visibility to the soldiers’ stories and photographs, irrespective of commercial considerations about their potential interest. Blogs were the first media platforms that allowed soldiers to evoke and discuss their war experiences. Veterans used blogs to write down their units’ histories, to share personal memories, and to divulge personal documents and photographs.27 Lately, social media has

 Luís Corrêa de Sá, Batalhão B. Caç. 595 1963–1966 (Lisbon: Medialivros, 2003), 5.  The casualties of Light Infantry Batallion 595 are listed in the unit’s report, which was made public on a website: “Batalhão de Caçadores 595—Sempre Alerta,” Dos Veteranos da Guerra do Ultramar, accessed January 1, 2019, http://ultramar.terraweb.biz/Batalhao_de_ Cacadores_595_Angola.htm. In April 2019, I met Sá and he introduced me to his personal photo albums. I came across images of violence that were not published in the book: a picture of a dead guerrilla fighter, and a snapshot of his corpse being interred into the earth. Limited to the privacy of his personal albums, these images were knowingly prevented from going public by Sá’s curatorial action. 27  Luís Graça & Camaradas da Guiné, which inaugurated in April 2004, is probably the blog that has been active for the longest time. https://blogueforanadaevaotres.blogspot. com/, accessed 1 January 2019. On the Portuguese veterans’ use of the Internet, see Verónica Ferreira, “Rebuilding the jigsaw of memory”: the discourse of Portuguese colonial war veterans’ blogs,” in Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age, Eds. Eve Zucker & David Simon, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020): 197–224. 25 26

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Fig. 14.2  A painted barracks’ wall provided the set for soldiers’ holiday greetings photographs. A diligent military wrote the words “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year”, and drew a white heart that read “My darling I’m alright thank God” (Source: Sá, Batalhão B. Caç)

become the most important online locus of ex-servicemen’s memorialistic interaction. Facebook figures prominently, feeding numerous groups and pages that gather hundreds of veterans and their families. Interaction relies heavily in visual posting, following the transformation social media brought to human communication.28   Daniel Miller and Jolynna Sinan, Visualizing Facebook. A comparative perspective (London: UCL Press, 2017). 28

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Fig. 14.3  A foot patrol in Northern Angola (Source: Sá, Batalhão B. Caç)

Users share images (photographs and pictures of memorabilia from private collections) to which they add captions, and a vernacular process of memory elicitation follows. For the most part, visual posts are trivial portraits of soldiers, or pictures of indistinguishable military buildings and vehicles—images that are apparently dull but nevertheless spur reactions among those who share the same “environment of remembrance”.29 Photographs often display examples of what the New State ideological apparatus sought to avoid, such as visual evidence of moments of unruliness and indiscipline (images of drunken, or jesting and dishevelled servicemen) or exhibits of the trail of destruction caused by war (wreckage of military vehicles, burnt African huts, ruined buildings). Observable interaction takes place in the comments section, where veterans respond with their own stories, often only marginally related to the original posting. 29  Eviatar Zerubavel, “Social Memories: Steps to a Sociology of the Past,” Qualitative Sociology 19, 3 (1996): 283–299.

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Sometimes images of Portuguese casualties are posted online and stir up a discussion that raises notions of sacrifice and ungratefulness, popular tropes amongst certain sectors of veterans.30 Shared photographs of Africans tend to display images that conform to the paternalistic New State rhetoric, either visually emphasizing exoticism and dependency, or highlighting the presumed racial harmony that existed in the colonies— images of soldiers holding African children are a favourite in social media comments sections. Retrospective selection of photographs grants soldiers the possibility of rearranging their intrinsically fragmentary collections. Contemporary uses of wartime images necessarily involve reworking personal collections, which feature incongruous juxtapositions of diverse pictures: portraits of “tourists in uniform” (in military, colonial, and otherwise exotic settings), snapshots of apparently happy occasions with fellow soldiers, and images of violence and destruction.31 When veterans curate images to be released, they engage in a risky process, whereby private objects of affect are transformed into public objects of potential debate. Decades after decolonization, when Portuguese colonial wars veterans select photographs for public display, they favour innocuous images of life at war. The very few exceptions that have exposed war’s violence have failed to rebut the deep-­ rooted idea of Portugal’s benign presence in the conflict. No photograph has yet been able to crack the public narrative of a sleepy, and almost harmless, war.

Private Photographic Albums and the Performance of the Past Manuel Santos returned to Portugal in September 1973, after a two-year deployment in Angola.32 Four decades later, his wartime photographs are the only relics that have outlived time. Their physical permanence have fed a continuous process of mnemonic reworking of the past, which included the manipulation and viewing of images in their material form, and the 30  Veterans’ lives in the aftermath of war and decolonization are entangled in retrospective questioning, from which feelings of solitude and senselessness frequently emerge. See Ângela Campos, An Oral History if the Portuguese Colonial War. Conscripted Generation (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 31  The radical ambiguity of the juxtaposition of “tourists in uniform” and pictures of horror is thoroughly examined in Struk, Private Pictures. 32  All names are pseudonyms.

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more recent possibilities that were enabled by their intangible digitizations. I met Manuel Santos in a social media group where he regularly posts photographs from the collection he gathered during his tour of duty. Digitized photographs took me to a town in northern Portugal, where this 70-year-old retired industry worker lives with his wife. He told me about his early years, how he started working after finishing primary school, how he migrated all alone to Lisbon when he was twelve, and how he started working as a baker. Santos was drawn to photography after seeing his employer taking pictures. He bought his first camera shortly thereafter, and began photographing family, friends, landscapes, and events. As soon as Santos embarked on the journey to Angola, he became the unofficial lensman in his unit. Drafted as a corporal with the specialist rank of baker, he was exempted from combat actions. Confined to the unit’s barracks, he was given an enviable amount of spare time, which was used to practice photography. Santos had to mail the film to laboratories to be developed and printed (black and white film was mailed to a Luanda laboratory, whereas coloured film had to be sent to Lisbon to be processed). Once printed pictures were received, fellow soldiers ordered copies and Santos sold the product of his mechanical gaze. Decades after being discharged, colonial war photography still plays a prominent role in Manuel Santos’ life, for it is at the centre of a dense web of both public and private practices and interactions. On the one hand, he is a very active member of veterans’ social media groups, sharing images, commenting on posts, and chatting with other users. On the other hand, he privately uses his photographic albums to articulate his war tales. Being an “instrument of collective show and tell”, the album engenders a text “that is not a text but a conversation”, which Martha Langford has called an “oral-photographic performance”: a dynamic interaction between the album’s compiler and an audience, through which its stories are shown and told.33 During the first interview, Santos introduced me to a book he referred to as “the war album”, which he made after digitizing his collection. Images were selected and printed in the album’s pages according to chronological and thematic orders, from military training in Portugal to deployment in the Angolan hinterland. It is a self-explanatory volume, with little uncertainty to it. Every page is captioned (dates and locations 33  Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations. The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2001).

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are attributed; brief descriptions identify the pictured people, situations, and events). Every now and then, a coloured photography is printed in two pages, usually a grand Angolan landscape, as if Santos meant to exhibit the beauty of an easily recognizable Africa (broad horizons, reddish soils, exotic vegetation). Manuel Santos sat by my side and performed a script he knew by heart: the story of his safe and joyful military service in Angola (soft military training, the luck he had being selected for the specialist rank of baker, and his many youthful adventures in an exotic land). His oral-­ photographic performance was as flawless as the printed pages of the album, with not a speck or wrinkle to account for. The second time we met I asked Santos if he had other albums, and I was shown the original hardcover volume that travelled with him from Luanda to Portugal in 1973. Unlike the album I was first introduced to, this one retains its original disposition, and its pages are filled with traces of past actions, interactions, and processes. The album’s front endpapers are decorated with an impressive composition made from 193 pasted postage stamps. Some are ordered, others are superimposed or reversed; a wide majority is from Portugal, a few of them are from Spain and Jordan. Santos does not recall how he obtained Spanish or Jordanian stamps, for this was a collaborative endeavour in which his correspondents were involved. Aside from family and friends, whom he occasionally wrote to, Santos kept regular correspondence with a girlfriend and with eighteen other young women, who were his war godmothers; all these people were asked to unstick and send back to Angola stamps from their received mail. Santos’ postal composition in the front endpapers spared a small portion of the album’s black cardboard page, where an original engraving reads: “If to remember is to live again, use this album to save images of the happy hours in our lives. Later on, you will live by remembering past hours that were burned by time.” (Fig.  14.4) The decision to keep the engraving signals the memorializing purpose that guided the album’s original composition, following the belief that photographs show at least a “residue of something that once existed before a lens”.34 Santos’ photographs display a number of templates that reappear in most servicemen’s private collections: soldiers posing in carefully chosen settings (next to military vehicles, buildings, monuments, exotic scenery), pictures of banal moments (young men eating, playing volleyball, 34  Alan Trachtenberg “Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory,” Social Research 75, 1 (2008), 126.

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Fig. 14.4  Collaborative composition of stamps in a photographic album’s front endpapers (Source: Manuel Santos private collection)

relaxing, drinking beer, etc.), and portraits of African people and landscapes.35 Soldiers’ photographs are examples of what Geoffrey Batchen calls boring pictures: Technically imperfect and conservative in style, they present endless minuscule variations on a set of models and rules.36 But their formal uncreativeness should not blind us to the valuable insights these photographs can offer. Following Annabella Pollen’s invitation to look beyond the image content and to excavate the “conventionalised sameness” of popular photography, attention should be directed to exploring visual patterns: What do they reveal about what matters to people who

35  Personal photographs from the Portuguese colonial war follow the main themes identified by Janina Struk in her in-depth analysis of soldiers’ albums: touristy pictures, snapshots of colleagues and social occasions, fascination with indigenous people. Images of military brutality and dead, which is Struk’s fourth main theme, is not significantly represented in Portuguese soldiers’ collections. See Struk, Private Pictures. 36   Geoffrey Batchen, “SNAPSHOTS.  Art History and the Ethnographic Turn,” Photographies 1, 2 (2008): 121–142.

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produce, circulate, and use photographs?37 What purpose did these images serve? Soldiers’ photographs were produced as instruments of communication, offering visual inscriptions of private lives in extraordinary times. Photographs were frequently enclosed in letters. Military and civilian worlds met in postal exchanges, as snapshots of uniformed combatants and smiling non-combatants swapped places and served as attestations of life at a distance. Postal mail occupied a central place in soldiers’ lives, as it alleviated the solitude of wars’ forced exile. Lack of writing proficiency was not a deterrent to sending and receiving mail (illiterate correspondents asked to have their letters written and read out loud). What mattered was to keep the mail torrent moving.38 Substantial mail flows connected the military to their families, sweethearts, friends, and war godmothers. Ackowledging the importance of postal mail during war, the Portuguese authorities created in 1961, a military airsheet exempt from postal charges, called an aerograma, which circulated between Portugal and African colonies from 1961 onwards. Since aerogramas were not allowed to include documents, civilian postal services were required to send pictures or other objects. Official numbers of wartime postal flows were not systematically recorded, but available scattered data indicate its scale: between 1961 and 1974, a daily average of 10 tons of mail circulated between Portugal and the colonies; in 1973, more than 10 million civil and 9 million military postal objects circulated in Mozambique alone; Luanda’s postal military station had 180 military personnel exclusively assigned to its services in 1970.39 Manuel Santos’ unofficial work as a photographer owed quite a lot to servicemen’s need to gather images they could send home. Fellow soldiers asked to be pictured in specific settings that testified to the exceptionality of their military experiences and the exoticism of their time in Africa. Numerous photographs depict soldiers standing next to barracks or military vehicles, strolling along tropical beaches, or posing in front of 37  Annebella Pollen, “When is a cliché not a cliché? Reconsidering Mass-Produced Sunsets,” in Reconsidering Amateur Photography. Either/And, edited Annebella Pollen and Juliet Baillie (2012) http://revuecaptures.org/r%C3%A9f%C3%A9rence-bibliographique/ when-clich%C3%A9-not-clich%C3%A9-reconsidering-mass-produced-sunsets 38  For an analysis of correspondence during the Portuguese colonial war, see Joana Pontes, Sinais de vida. Cartas da guerra 1961–1974 (Lisbon: Tinta-da-china, 2019). 39  Eduardo Barreiros and Luís Barreiros, História do Serviço Postal Militar | History of Portuguese Military Postal Service. Aerogramas Militares Catálogo (Lisbon: E. Barreiros, 2004).

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modern colonial buildings. Staged pictures in warrior poses were another favourite of conscripts, whose civilian lives had been halted for a compulsory immersion in military discipline. Santos’ album contains photographs of young men aiming guns towards non-existent enemies, pretending to use artillery weapons, and posing in Hollywood-like combat scenes. Allure for warfare imagery was a powerful trigger for collaborative engagement between photographers and photographed, which creatively re-enacted long-imagined poses and scenes, hence performing a pervasive virility ritual.40 Not even the military baker, exempt from operational activity, escaped the war play: The album contains several pictures in which he can be seen standing or bellicosely lying on the ground pointing a machine gun (Fig. 14.5). Oddly enough, there is not a single picture of Santos baking bread; the documentary intent seems to have been secondary to the staging of a war fantasy. Unlike the digitized “war album”, the hardcover volume is a messy visual inscription of Santos’ twenty-six months of deployment. There is no thematic or clear chronological order to the photographs laid out, and there are no captions. The album bears traces of the dense web of correspondents that Manuel Santos maintained during his tour of duty, for its pages were used to keep pictures received by mail. Snapshots of Santos and fellow soldiers in Angola are displayed side by side with pictures of family, friends, and war godmothers. Compositions of uniformed young men and of exotic settings (palm trees, red soil landscape, African huts) stand next to frames of life back home (Sunday outfits, smiling poses, weddings). The album also contains postcards with views of Angolan towns and landscapes, attesting to their modernity and natural grandeur. Santos’ oral-­ photographic performance was, however, impaired by lack of practice. From its inception, the digitized album’s selection of photographs became the visual cues that Santos uses when telling his war tale, whereas the original album’s pictures were given a period away from mnemonic practices. As we leafed through its pages, an occasional hesitation preceded Santos’ descriptions of received images, as if names, situations, and connections had been thinned by the passage of four decades. Unlike the “war album”, which clearly focuses on Santos’ African experience, the hardcover album features several 40  Staging the warrior is also a common visual theme in Algerian war veterans’ photo collections. See Claire Mauss-Copeau, À travers le viseur. Algérie 1955–1962 (Lyon: Aedelsa, 2003). See also Struk, Private Pictures.

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Fig. 14.5  Staging the warrior, a favourite of soldiers’ photo albums (Source: Manuel Santos’ private photographic collection)

characters (the baker soldier, of course, but also his parents and other relatives, his friends, his war godmothers), some of whom have vanished from the war story he currently recounts. Telling this album’s tales provokes a significant detour from the comfortable narrative of a good and enjoyable military service. Instead, it triggers Santos’ memories about the unglamorous parts of his military past. Memories about assembling stamps, epistolary frenzy, and exchanging photos with correspondents, all signal the weight of a twenty-six-month long African exile. In speaking of his original album, Santos tells a very different tale, one in which boredom, senselessness, and the need to fight monotony emerge. Manuel Santos’ two photo albums offer him distinct mnemonic devices. The one composed in Angola is akin to a live account registered while still in progress—a diary of sorts, resulting from a collaborative action with his wartime correspondents. Four decades later, this album’s contemporary performance has to strive through oblivion, muddling through versions of the past that have been rendered anachronistic by the passage of time. In contrast, the “war album” is similar to memory, for it is the product of a

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retrospective construction of past events. Like memory, Manuel Santos’ digitized album is not the past as it existed, but a less than perfect approximation, created by the convergence of the will to remember, and the ability to simultaneously cope with selectivity and forgetfulness.

Closing Remarks Wartime images offer “windows onto pervasive ideologies” that emanate from the intimate act of photography.41 Private pictures fixate the visible realm, signalling the boundaries that, at each moment, determine what can and cannot be seen. Unlike other conflicts, in which images of victorious military engagements were central for wartime propaganda, the Portuguese colonial wars unfolded under close visual discretion. Four decades after decolonization, soldiers’ photographs are still constrained by the performative cord that connects them to their holders. When soldiers decide to grant public access to their wartime snapshots, they risk suppressing their personal storytelling. A thorough selection of images is the key to containing the risks associated with this endeavour. Colonial war veterans have tended to conform to an unproblematic account of the past, favouring the display of images of militarized yet innocent characters and settings (posing soldiers, buildings, vehicles, and other props of warfare), or snapshots of African exoticism (grand landscapes, traditional huts, poor Africans). Images of violence are notoriously absent from the public uses of private photographic collections, hence reproducing the former regimes’ visual avoidance of ferocity and destruction. Working as repositories of memory and as triggers for mnemonic performances of the past, private pictures are inseparable from the selective readings enacted by their owners. The curatorial cord ensures that photographs only show what can be seen. Acknowledgements  This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. through a postdoctoral grant (SFRH/BPD/116134/2016) and strategic funding UID/SOC/50013/2019.

41  Catherine Zuromskis, “On snapshot photography: rethinking photographic power in public and private spheres,” in Photography. Theoretical Snapshots, eds. J. J. Long, Andrea Noble & Edward Welch (London: Routledge, 2009): 60.

CHAPTER 15

Photographic Colonial Agency: The Work of Agostiniano de Oliveira at the Diamang (1948–1966) Nuno Porto

This chapter is ambitiously distributed in two purposes. First, I want to explore photography as a professional occupation in the Diamang—the Diamonds Company of Angola, roughly between World War II and the 1960s. My main objective is to develop a decentered approach that privileges the exercise of reasoning within the strictures of a profession, considering photography as a technical practice rather than an art practice. Secondly, the argument is built around the notion that technical requirements—the requirements for the job—inasmuch as they were socially designed, have contributed then and there to the creation of a peculiar colonial agent, one that was required by the nature of the work to aim at a global, documented vision of the whole of the Diamang’s operations, in sharp contrast with nearly all other forms of work in the Diamang. Finally,

N. Porto (*) Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory and Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_15

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I hope this approach may contribute to a broader debate on concurrent historiographies of photography in Africa, regarding the role of colonial imagery in the formation of contemporary African visual cultures, including artistic ones. I will not, however, elaborate on this second hypothesis here.

Punctum In November 1997, the Dundo National Museum,1 formerly a colonial museum funded, owned and operated by the Diamang, located in its headquarters, the village of the Dundo, in the North Lunda District in the northeast of Angola, preserved one of the first personal Kodak film cameras that made photography popular. While about two-thirds of the roof of the museum had collapsed, and only a corner room of the building was opened to the local public, mainly schools, during the Angolan civil war (1975–2002), a case had been set for this exhibit. According to the museum label, this camera (model 1A Autographic S) had been “used by Commander Ernesto de Vilhena2 when he visited the mining areas in 1922”, that is, five years after the foundation of the Diamang. Despite this initial association between the director of the Diamang and photography, however, and with the exception of official publications for advertising purposes, photography had a parsimonious usage outside the internal administrative circuits of the Diamang up to the 1950s, an absence that is sensible even in the Cultural Publications series that the museum began publishing in 1946. In fact, the 1940s marked a period of relative autonomy from stakeholders under a ‘nationalization’ policy of employees within a policy of colonial implementation stemming from a particular interpretation of the 3rd Portuguese Empire project associated with the idea of ‘scientific colonialism’. The postwar context, the growth of African independence movements and the consequent international isolation of Portugal due to its dictatorship and its colonial policies are illuminating factors for understanding the development of the institutional uses of photography by the Diamang from then on. 1  Due to civil war in Angola, the museum closed later that same year, only to be reopened in 2012, by then renamed Dundo Regional Museum. 2  Ernesto Jardim de Vilhena acted as Administrator of the Diamonds Company of Angola, from 1918 to his death in 1966. For a comprehensive biographical approach, including his role as a collector, see Vilhena de Carvalho, 2014.

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Added to the aforementioned factors lies the popularization of the medium launched since the end of the previous century, on the one hand, with the increase in private accessibility introduced by the industrial manufacture of personal cameras such as the CEO’s Kodak, and, on the other hand, with the development of mass photographic printing using halftone techniques that would eventually become common and develop, albeit unequally, both in Europe, in the Americas, in Asia and in Africa. Portugal in fact, was not one of the countries where personal cameras and photographic mass printing methods developed faster: One should keep in mind that Sezinando Marques’ images of the Henrique de Carvalho’s Expedition (1884–1888)3 to the Lunda had been printed by lithographic processes for illustration of the respective text. The first photographs published in mass media picturing the Lunda are the photographic images produced by Dr. Meinhard in the context of Prof. Herman Baumann’s expedition,4 already in the 1930s, originally published in Germany, then the center of photography-based mass media. In the 1950s, the use of photography in the Diamang expands beyond the boundaries of administrative work to enter all fields of activity—not primarily for technical reasons but rather as a persuasive means to counter ‘facts’. Printed photographs were facts that could be put to use against all sorts of arguments—such as the subsequent postwar actions that led to the political negotiation of the cessation of English, French and Belgian colonial administrations in Africa. In the territories under Portuguese administration that had been legally reconfigured as ‘Overseas Provinces’ under the Constitution of 1952,5 independence efforts led to the recourse to 3  Henrique Augusto Dias de Carvalho was appointed by the Portuguese Government to establish alliances with Angolan authorities in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference. He published key texts on the Cokwe and Aruund peoples as well a volume on their language. See Dias de Carvalho 1890a, 1890b. Photography on his mission to the Lunda (1884–1887) was undertaken by the pharmacist of the group, Sezinando Marques, who became one of the first Europeans to use photography in the Lundas. 4  The first of these across the Lunda was in the mid-1930s (see Geisenhainer, 2018). Two others will follow, one of which, in 1954, will result in the Baumann Collection (see Heintz 2002). 5  The designation of Overseas Provinces, applied to the territories formerly classified as Portuguese colonies (Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau and East Timor, Goa, Daman and Diu) was a strategy to subtract these territories from the United Nations purview. The Constitutional Reform of 1952 leveled these territories and these were given the same legal status of mainland territory: these were not colonies but provinces, integral to the ‘Organic essence of the Portuguese Nation’.

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armed struggle by the nationalist movements of Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau, a process designated by the regime in force in the metropolis as Colonial War. The consolidation of the armed struggle in Angola in 1961 led, within the ‘spirit of association’ between the Diamang and the Portuguese State, to the installation of the Portuguese army in the company’s concession area, named Explorations Zone, in coordination with armed forces organized by the Diamang itself that had enlisted Júlio Pedro amongst its ranks. He would come to occupy, from 1964 to 1975, the position of photographer. As he recalled when we met in Lisbon in 1998, he learned the trade at the Dundo, under the instructions of Agostiniano de Oliveira, the photographer in charge between 1948 and 1964, himself recruited to succeed Renato Amorim, who was the first employee to occupy this position. This period, from 1948 to 1964, was one of change in the Diamang, marked by a number of factors: an increasing rate of mechanization of mining operations that led to an exponential growth of production and profits; a concomitant increase in population of the progressively ‘nationalized’ white community; an increase in the number of urban settlements; correspondent infrastructural development; increase of the road network; institution of regular air transport to and from the Dundo and Andrada; the specialization and diversification of social facilities, the Dundo Museum included. It is a period of transformation in the colonial policy itself that, from an initial military inspired regime of temporary recruitment of male agents, had transformed into a settler colonization process that began with the turn of the early 1940s.

Expanding the Field The intensification of uses of photography under the scope of administrative work is part of the dynamism of the colonial transformation of the Lunda, of the relations between the colonies and the political metropolis, and of Portugal’s position in the international arena, providing the cultural contexts and social adjustments in which the expansion of the uses of photography takes place. The career of the Diamang’s photographer Agostiniano de Oliveira constitutes a translation of the historical transformation to its local, lived, experience. In this period of adversity to the very existence of the Portuguese Third Empire, the Diamond Company of Angola will bet on photography, among other processes, as a means of publicizing as legitimate and necessary, its colonial work.

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Photographs such as these (Fig. 15.1) are part of the larger purpose, originating from series of postcards published annually, at least between 1955 and 1966, selected from the Annual Reports of the Board of Directors. These postcards, made by Agostiniano de Oliveira, were edited by the Diamang in standard format 12 × 18 cm, captioned on the back in a variable number between 20 and 30 units per year. Like the diamonds produced by the Diamang, these images were processed by various levels of selection in order to convey a very specific image of the work developed by Diamang as a civilizational process, constituting, in this sense, images capable of revealing the way the Diamang presented itself to others. The photographer’s perspective, under the terms of this section, provides a pretext for an ethnography of the role of photography in producing the institutional image of the Diamang in this period.

Fig. 15.1  Assembling an 8 feet pan of a washing and separation jig machine at the mine of Calonda 1, in https://www.diamangdigital.net/index.php?module= diamang&option=item&id=555

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From ‘Wage Earner’ to ‘Hired Employee’ Agostiniano de Oliveira (A.O.) was born in the Portuguese city of Almada in the 1930s. At the age of sixteen, he worked as an apprentice at a photographic studio in Lisbon, where he learned to execute laboratory work: black and white printing and film developing. In 1946, a friend, meanwhile established in the same branch in Luanda, the capital of Angola, sent him a ‘letter of call’ inviting him to join his studio. At this time, the ‘letter of call’ was a necessary document to immigrate to the colonies. Once in Luanda, while completing the work that had been assigned to him, he happened to have produced a report that very much pleased his client, a priest who maintained good relations with staff of the Diamang offices in Luanda. He would eventually sponsor the photographer at the Diamang, and would invite him to move to the Dundo and fulfill the position of Photographer in the Diamonds Explorations Area. A.O’s first work contract, negotiated in Luanda, admits him at the Diamang’s service as a ‘wage earner’, as was common practice with any European employees hired in the colony. When recruited in the metropolis, the employees were admitted under a contract, a classification that generates significant differences: a so-called hired employee received a higher salary, with a greater range of social benefits—namely, a six-month period of paid holidays in the metropolis after two years—and was covered by a principle of continuity in the undertaking, that is, it was assumed that by the end of the first thirty months of the first contract, when interest from both parties in continuing was demonstrated, the contract would be extended or rewritten to the advantage of the employee. The ‘wage earner’, by contrast, was employed for a fixed term to perform the same duties as those under a contract, but receiving a lower salary and enjoying fewer social benefits such as the paid vacation period in the metropolis. In spite of these differences, housing, food, transportation, medicines and medical care were guaranteed by the Diamang, constituting—salary and benefits—a proposal that was quite attractive for him at the time. From the perspective of the photographer, the only obstacle to this first contract lay in the clause concerning the wife of the married employee. A ‘wage earner’ could not bring his wife, while in a standard contract drawn up for ‘hired employees’, the clauses of conjugality were less strict:

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“Article 12 The employee may not, without express authorization from the Company, be accompanied by members of his family or from him dependents, or make them subsequently travel to the territory comprising the districts of Lunda, Moxico and Malange, or any other areas where the Company exercises its activity. Paragraph 1—Failure to comply with the provisions of this article results in the termination of this agreement, (…). (…) Paragraph 7—During the stay of the employee in Angola at the service of the Company, the Company is obliged to provide the wife of said employee, from the time of their arrival to the explorations until their departure, the lodging and medical assistance and medication, to the full extent that local circumstances allow. (…) § 8—The wife of the employee must reside in the place that is superiorly designated to him; if, however, she moves somewhere else, the charges set forth in the foregoing paragraph shall cease to the Company. Paragraph 10—The authorization of the Company referred to in the beginning of this article is precarious, and may therefore be revoked at any time.” (Diamang Standard Work Contract for white employees)

Newly married in Luanda, the installation at the Lunda accompanied by his wife, under article 12, is an imperative that ends up being satisfied by the Company. Meanwhile, in his professional environment in Angola’s capital Luanda, he begins to circulate information about his departure to the Lunda. His colleagues compare this relocation to ‘going to prison’. The restrictions imposed by the Diamang on visitors to the Exploration Zone contributes to this imaginary, apparently current in Angola at the time, at least in the circle of sociability of the photographer, who, while in doubt, manages to get an invitation to join the delegation of the Governor General of Angola, the Captain of Artillery José Agapito da Silva Carvalho, who is inspecting the whole of the Colony, and is bound to spend ‘two and a half days, from the 14 to the 16 of that month [of April]’ in the ‘Zone of Explorations’.6 This trip allows him to get an overview of the Lunda, accessing both the mines and the dining room of K-18, the company’s luxurious Director’s House, where the distinguished guests (and their parties) were received. As for the rest of the colony, the Diamang 6   Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1948, p. 11.

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area contrasts—in his view somewhat positively—with the rest of Angola, due to its clear organization and development. It is under these impressions that he and his wife, arrive at the Dundo as a ‘wage earner’ in June of that same year (Fig. 15.2). At this time, the village of Dundo was not only the social headquarters of the Diamang in the Lunda district, but practically the only urban center worthy of such name above Vila Henrique de Carvalho (seat of the District), further to the south. Other urban centers within the concession area, such as Luaco and Vila Paiva de Andrada remained dedicated to supporting mining work and the other housing estates of the Diamang were located near the mines and were, like those, of a temporary nature. In 1948, the Exploration Zone accommodated, according to the Diamang’s data, 260 ‘white’ employees, accompanied by 150 wives and 157 children.

Fig. 15.2  Lunda Norte. Aspect of housing at the Dundo, managed by the Service for the Protection and Support of Indigenous Labor in, https://www. diamangdigital.net/index.php?module=diaofmang & option=item & id=654

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A total of 567 whites, in a universe that also had 172 ‘assimilated’ or ‘specialized Indigenous’ workers. This category was defined by professional and salary rank and less so by the legal status that gave access to full citizenship to those considered as 'assimilated' by virtue of ‘civilizational qualifications’: the fluency in spoken and written Portuguese language and correlative cultural habits. Finally, the Diamang employed 15,478 ‘natives’ in that year, in a total universe close to 60,000 individuals.7 By contrast, when the photographer left the Diamang in 1964, 1,808 ‘Europeans’ lived in the area of explorations, not counting the Portuguese army and local white militias stationed there since 1961.8 The local population in the area would be over 100,000 individuals and, along with Dundo, Andrada, Maludi, Cassanguidi, Luxilo and Luaco itself, a complete network of urban centers with electric and sanitary mains, hospitals, schools and other infrastructure, had been built in addition to infrastructure related to mining work. Due to the particularities of the position of photographer, A.O. witnessed and documented this global growth of the Diamang. His residence was at the Dundo but, unlike nearly all the other employees residing there, his duties were not exercised in that locality, or any other in particular. Unlike others, the photographer, the remote vision of the administration on the ground, travelled through the whole area of the concession and crossed any boundaries of what others would experience as confined social spaces. Due to these peculiarities, the office of the photographer has a series of characteristics that are common to the higher hierarchical roles of the Direction—namely the non-restriction of movement in the Exploration Zone and, of course, the authorization to possess and use cameras. The employment contract form, used in the 1940s, is definitive in this regard: Article 22 It is forbidden for the employee to introduce or to use, within the area of ​​ the ‘protection zone’, in the district of Lunda or other actual or future areas of similar nature, photographic or film equipment, and it is also forbidden to reproduce, by painting or drawing, any aspects, scenes or facts related to the mining service. Sole Paragraph—Whenever the Company entrusts the employee to obtain or prepare photographs, filming, paintings or drawings of any kind, these works remain the exclusive property of the Company and may not be 7 8

 Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1949.  Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts, 1965.

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used by the employee nor in the original format nor by means of reproductions, decals or other analogous processes.

If what appears to be in question in this clause is the invisibility to the exterior of “aspects, scenes or facts related to the mining service”, it follows from the prevention of such possibility, the proscription of private uses of photography. Thus, apart from the exceptions granted to high management personnel, photography, either as a practice or as a product, was denied, as a rule, to anyone and their existence was subordinated to the interests of the Diamang. The lack of facilities and the obsolescence of work equipment that A.O. finds when he arrives at the Dundo, partially reflect this proscriptive valuation and will be the first source of conflict with the local Administration of the Diamang, given the impossibility of fulfilling his duties in such precarious working conditions. At the end of his first contract as ‘wage earner’, he confronted the Administration with the need to satisfy two conditions for his reinstatement: improving working conditions—which involved, on the one hand, new installations for the Photography Laboratory and, second, the posting, at his service, of auxiliary personnel—and, simultaneously, his transition to the status of a ‘hired employee’. The Diamang meets both conditions, so from 1951 onward, the photographer had an excellent laboratory equipped with studio, darkroom and assembly room, and would later be assisted by an ‘Indigenous’ auxiliary, named Baptista. Factors of different nature contributed to this outcome: First of all, the excellence of the services rendered that exceeded the bureaucratic routine, manifested, as early as the year of his arrival, with the production of the large-format prints for the Diamang’s stand at the Exhibition of the tri-­ Centenary of Angola under the informal coordination of the then inspector Henrique Galvão.9 Second, its easy integration into the social environment and, in one way or another, the fact that one of the engineers of the General Directorship in the Lunda was himself an enthusiast of photography sponsoring the photographer’s work and following up on all of his job requisites: enlargers, cameras, chemicals, papers, etc., were directly requested to him and, through the Diamang’s services, acquired 9  As part of his military career, Henrique Galvão was a supporter of the Portuguese Imperial project but would eventually oppose the dictator from the 1950s onward. He was exiled in Brazil where he died in 1970.

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anywhere in the world, which the photographer recognizes as decisive in his technical improvement. Finally, it is likely that the volume of work would justify another ‘employee’ and that, in this case, the dividends to the Diamang’s representation through photography—although diffuse— were already sensitive. The contextualization of photographic objects in the ecology of entrepreneurial work, therefore, implies this identification of the Diamang Photographer as an agent of a labor structure, rather than an ‘author’, and his work as a technical response, and not so much an oeuvre, susceptible of analysis as a process of subjective creation of photographic images, apprehensible today in its plastic evaluation, and, therefore, exclusively subject to an aesthetic or historical classification, for example, colonial photography. The photographer, this one at least, didn’t see himself as an author but was proud of being an excellent technician, whose job was to mobilize and transport—in order to submit it to the Administration’s eye in Lisbon—the unfolding of everyday life in the Lunda using, for this purpose, the photographic mediation.

The Photographer’s Work The work of the photographer followed precise routines distributed into four tasks: the photographic record of the activities of all the services of the Diamang; the development of films and the printing on paper of entrepreneurial photographs, whether produced by the Photographic Laboratory or by other services; the selection and classification of images according to their technical quality, and their distribution by the corresponding services to their respective monthly and annual reports; the construction of an archive according to the respective sections, to where, in some cases, the negatives would be sent later, while others would remain in the Archive of the Photo Laboratory or be sent to the Headquarters in Lisbon. This distribution of tasks, established by the General Directorship at the Lunda to whom the photographer directly reported, was transposed into monthly ‘work orders’ for regular activities—such as the monthly report on the evolution of each mine—and random ‘service orders’ introducing tasks not initially foreseen. In the Diamang’s organizational chart, the Prospecting Services, the Services for the Propaganda and Support of Indigenous Labor, the Concession (Urbanization) Services and Representation Services, informally, took priority over any established plan if it was found necessary. The work relating to other services, those of the Museum included, were therefore secondary.

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This priority stems from the use of photographs in the Diamang’s monthly and annual reports. Inserted in the report, or forming an autonomous section, the photographs constituted decision-making elements at the various levels of each report’s trajectory: first in the General Directorship at the Lunda, which, drawing from the reports of the different departments, set weekly or monthly priorities. From here to Luanda, where elements related to the Diamang’s representation in the capital of the Government of the Colony (later Province) were added. Finally, in Lisbon, where, after analysis and comments by the administration, they triggered the communication of ‘service orders’ and ‘memorandums’ through the different instances, until eventually returning to the laboratory, indicating that images of the same subject were obtained from different perspectives or, in other cases, to be redone due to an informal organization of the photographic conventions accepted by the Diamang. The initial period of the photographer in the Diamang was also a period of technical learning, both in the sense that he developed his abilities in working with black and white, color and even film, and in the more precise sense in which the notion of a ‘good image’ included—not being subordinated by them—formal aspects, which the photographer learned, developed and applied. This is particularly true for the museum-related images, where the fine-tuning of visual conventions, valuing the photographic image as a source of information—to the detriment of its eventual poetic function—favors a good definition of the represented objects, implying the tendency for the uniformity of the illumination and the sharpness of the image as a whole. In this vein but in a completely different domain, photographic images produced by A.O. tend to eradicate elements that are refractory to the Diamang’s public self-representation. Thus, images containing ragged or body-worn workers resulting from accidents or beatings (bruises or wounds) are, by denial, part of the conventions of these images. Photographs containing such elements would normally end in the S.I.D. (Information and Investigations Office)10 in order to support internal investigations concerning this type of occurrence. The elaboration of a visual order of the Lunda—processed at different administrative levels—is therefore only partially operated by the photographic services and supposes the prescriptive creation of a field of concealment.

10  Serviço de Informações e Diligências, commonly referred to by former employees as the Diamang’s secret police.

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This field is established in a positive way in the type of verbally oriented and, consequently, nonexistent files. Photographs capable of accompanying judicial investigations, not only related to situations of extemporaneous violence associated with work, but also due to sociability in Lunda and, in particular, associated with the central problem for S.I.D.—illicit trafficking in diamonds—were not accompanied by any order of service: after their execution and delivery, with their respective negatives, they were no longer mentioned. A second type of photographs was also refractory to work orders of the Diamang, because, in fact, they had no direct articulation with business functions. The prohibition on the possession or use of cameras endowed the photographer with an important social capital in intra-community relations, inasmuch as, informally, the photographer was asked to perform the role of reporter for Dundo’s extra-labor daily life: birthdays, baptisms, confirmations, weddings, etc. requested his presence and, of course, his cameras, allowing him a rapid integration in the milieu that contrasted in many aspects with his experience of the capital Luanda, in particular by the permanent and relentless regulation of individual time, space and circulation. One of the factors of locally specific experience is usually glossed as ‘racism’: not the individual discrimination manifested in the interpersonal relations between ‘Europeans’ and ‘natives’—which would occur in the Lunda district as much as everywhere else, enacted by specific subjects— especially in the subsequent period of their arrival from the metropolis— but a discrimination between ‘European’ and ‘native’ areas and activities, verifiable even in situations marked by the simultaneous presence of elements of both groups, and which the photographer attributes to the regulation of time and space omnipresent in the Concession area, especially in the urban centers. This regulation is sensible in the Dundo: the dawn and the end of the day to the sound of the industrial siren, separating the period of work from the leisure to the late afternoon, separating spaces and sociabilities with them; Sundays with mass and sports; occasional or cyclical celebrations—which he did not enjoy as a whole, because he was usually at work—expressed situations of exclusive conviviality of ‘Europeans’ or ‘natives’. It was, in these terms, a ‘racism’ arising from the ‘way of being’ of the Diamang, which the photographer sees transforming during his stay in the Lunda district.11  Many of these are common to mining operations anywhere in the world.

11

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Everyday life in urban centers is organized around their respective Staff House. In 1949, the Dundo Staff House is described as a vast and well-designed building, with dance and entertainment rooms, reading and games facilities, library, covered terrace, dining room and private kitchen, changing rooms and more dependencies, and lacking only certain elements of interior decoration and some furniture and equipment already ordered, among which are a complete audience of metal fauteuils and a fixed film projection machine.12

It was the task of the respective animators to organize the various community activities, among them the edition of the Information Newsletter (Folha de Informações), initiated in 1941, the organization of the annual festive cycle—Carnival, Easter, the cycle of the Popular Saints, Christmas and New Year—and the recreational and cultural entertainment. It was also under their purview to manage the library service, the radio broadcast (first experimented in 1944 and then continued under the name Diamang Radio), the programming of cinema sessions and of theater performances by the local drama group, and the organization of social events. In 1950, these included the 9th Exhibition of Arts and Crafts, the 4th of Floriculture, the 3rd of Floriculture, Horticulture and Livestock, the 2nd Philatelic, the 2nd Floral Games and the second edition of the literary contest of The Festival of the Amaryllis. These activities also included sports, initially mainly tennis, with the internal competition for the Board of Directors Cup and the tournament between teams of Diamang and the neighboring Forminière, the Sir Ernest Oppenheimer Cup. Centered at the Dundo, these activities would either diversify or expand to other locations. Thus, when in 1954 the 1st Children’s Art Exhibition, and the 1st Sport Fishing Contest are launched at the Dundo, the 1st Carnival Parade takes place in Andrada. The following year, in 1955, the delegations of the Staff House of Cassanguidi and Maludi are equipped with their own film projectors. These sessions “were always very crowded, exhibiting during the year [1955] 52 feature films, some of which had successfully passed in the screens in the metropolis, such as “Limelight”,” Quo Vadis”, “Lucrezia Borgia” and “The Naked Jungle”.13 12   Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1950, p. 56. 13   Relatórios e Contas da Administração = Administration Reports and Accounts, 1950, p. 115.

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But beyond the cinema, ‘at the Dundo and Andrada, the Dundo Scenic Group represented a comedy in three acts that was much appreciated. Last November, we gave our employees the happy opportunity to hear, at the Dundo, the world-renowned violinist Philip Newman,14 who was in Angola, performing live concerts’.15 If this group of celebrations and activities was exclusive to the ‘white’ community, others were dedicated to the ‘indigenous’ community. To a large extent, the existence of the Museum is justified for its ‘assistancial’ role regarding the cultures of mine workers, but these purposes reach a peak with the creation, in 1950, of the Large Annual Indigenous Festival (Fig. 15.3). Grand Feast ‘In the former report I have expressed our desire to distribute rewards to the Company’s former workers and to establish for this purpose a “Grand Feast”, preceded by two other meetings, the “Festival of the Best Village” and the “Sports Festival”, all encompassed under the name of “Great Annual Indigenous Festival”. Today we can tell you with justifiable pride that, having concluded the Feast for the year 1950, it has exceeded all expectations in success and, moreover, its meaning has been understood by the local population. The cycle of these three meetings was also a salutary source of distraction for the natives and the opportunity, always appreciated, to perform their ceremonies in the meetings between sobas and respective entourages, and to exhibit their best clothes and costumes. It was, to a certain extent, an event with worldly forums, which cut short the monotony of acts of regional life’.16 Due to his obligation to travel throughout the Lunda district, the photographer had a total freedom of movement that enabled him to have an all-encompassing knowledge not only of the different activities of the Diamang, but also to acquire an experience of the Concession area. Soon, 14  Philip Newman, originally from Manchester, UK, had taken refuge in Portugal in 1942 as the country remained officially neutral during World War II. He became professor in the Lisbon Conservatory of Music and resumed his career from there, until his passing in 1966. 15   Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1950, p. 116. 16   Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1951, p. 36.

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Fig. 15.3  Great Annual Indigenous Festival-Parade of the competitors in the Indigenous Sports Festival, Andrada, August 1957 [Rel. 1957], in https://www. diamangdigital.net/index.php?module=diamang&option=item&id=528

for the various employees besieged in the Dundo—that is, those whose residence and work station are located there—the photographer becomes the ‘tourist advisor’ for the Sunday stroll, personalized mail or just the occasional courier due to, once more, the sociological framework resulting from its professional function. In his specific case, the idea of ‘imprisonment’—like many others applied to the Diamang by outsiders—was an incorrect metaphor. Likewise, the idea that the Diamang only ‘exploited the natives’, which accompanied the ‘prison’ metaphor, turned out to be yet another mistake by those who see the Diamang from the capital city of Luanda, having indirect knowledge of it and, on the whole, quite misguided. In three fields, according to the photographer, the living conditions of the native populations were objectively better than outside the concession of Diamang: food, health and education. These three fields are interconnected through the service created in 1936 to deal with these issues, the

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Service for the Protection and Support of Indigenous Labor (SPAMOI17) that was dedicated to encouraging the settlement of populations, and accompanying the maintenance of villages built for that purpose through an assistance and educational complex. Under this purpose, in 1942, these Services proceeded to modify the Indigenous School which covers the study of the mother tongue [that is Portuguese], arithmetic and where physical education is also taught; the School comprises professional guidance sections, by which the various indigenous students are prepared for various jobs, such as mechanic, locksmith, electrician, carpenter, nursing assistant and agricultural foreman.18

Five years later, in 1947, the training would be reorganized into three sections: the Vocational Guidance Section, the Rural Guidance Section and the Sanitary Guidance Section. The first provided preparation for the exercise of different work positions in the company (this year, of the 41 students successfully approved by the School, 5 worked as drivers, 9 as apprentices in this role, 18 as joiners, 7 of whom are apprentices, 6 as locksmiths and others as musicians, clerks or clerk apprentices). The Rural Guidance Section, based in Andrada, provided training in the industrial cultivation of agricultural products, aiming to increase agricultural production in the area. Finally, the Sanitary Guidance Section, operating in both the Dundo and Andrada, aimed at forming auxiliary staff in medical work that, from 1947 onward, extended the circle to the Chitato circumscription, covering populations residing outside the Exploration Zone. In 1949, [i]n order to facilitate the admission of future students to the School for Indigenous, giving them a taste for study, small catechetical schools were created in the vicinity of the Dundo, near the main villages, where the respective catechists teach rudiments of Portuguese to those who voluntarily come forward to receive them.19

 In Portuguese: Serviço de Apoio e Propaganda à Mão-de-obra Indígena.   Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1943, p. 16. 19   Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1950, p. 51. 17 18

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Training in one of the areas, enabled the subject to be hired by the Diamang as ‘specialized indigenous’, earning a salary close to that of an ‘assimilated’. It was, of course, one of the cost containment processes of the means of production, given that the Diamang’s added value in the exploitation of labor, both ‘assimilated’ and ‘specialized indigenous’ were higher than the exploitation of a white man’s work. For the same task, a ‘specialized indigenous’ person received less than an ‘assimilate’ and both, in turn, would receive less than a ‘white’. As a result, the more ‘specialized indigenous’ there were, the cheaper the work costs became. Consequently, in the work structure of the Diamang, the most fragile category is that of ‘assimilated’: essentially unable to replace a ‘white’ employee and, by law, more expensive than a ‘specialized’ indigenous worker. Following the logic of the capital, the next step consists in paying, to the traditional chiefs or Sobas, or to parents of the minors, a pecuniary prize for each child who attended the school. It is in this network of reproduction of subaltern knowledge that not only part of the production but the entire assistance program rests, in particular in the field of Health, whose Services, due to their growing complexity, still report in this year of 1955 to the General Directorate that maintains the coordination of the sections of Internal Medicine, General and Specialties; the Surgical Clinic Section; the Maternity Section and the Indigenous and the Chemical-­ Pharmaceutical Section.20 Four years later, these services account for 17 doctors, 2 chemists, 3 pharmacy technical assistants, 27 white nurses, 13 nursing assistants, 3 clerks, 2 assimilated pharmacy practitioners, 725 auxiliary nurses, practitioners, servants, microscope operators and students of the Nursing School, that were running 5 dispensary hospitals for whites and indigenous people, 4 dispensaries for whites, 1 maternity hospital for whites, 4 maternity hospitals for indigenous, 6 dispensary-wards, 4 isolation pavilions for indigenous, 6 health posts and 65 first-aid posts that make up the health network of the Chitato District.21

20  Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1950, p. 88–89. 21  Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1960.

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The photographer’s job was to document the progress of this growth, either by reporting the diversity of ongoing activities, or by reporting the progression of its physical materialization in buildings, roads, cultivated areas, cattle heads for food, etc., being the publicity of the colonial occupation in progress by the Diamang, a marginal result of this remote surveillance and control practice. Admitting this marginality, the assumption of the communicative efficacy of photographic mediation is, notwithstanding, underlying it. It is also this assumption that is registered in the dynamism of cinema, as a means of colonial pedagogy, developed throughout the 1950s, used, therefore, under a divergent perspective of the recreational function to which it is destined among the ‘white’ population. ‘Today we can report about a new and interesting achievement, which we have just carried out and which we foresee a beneficial influence among the peoples of the region. We want to refer to the “Cinema for indigenous people” that we recently introduced in the Explorations. Under the scope of the social work that the Company has been carrying out in the Lunda, in order to improve the material and moral conditions of the native population in the area where it exercises its influence, we have long had in mind to introduce cinema in the most convenient and best way adapt to their age and degree of development. … The films are both for educational and recreational purposes. The ones are related to subjects such as agriculture, arts and crafts, natural history, geography, industries, health and physical education. The others refer to sports, forest animals, hunting expeditions, and other African scenes. We never forget to carefully record the reactions of the indigenous during the shows, as a basis for possible changes to be made in the programing’.22 As the administration recognizes, and the photographer recalls, he does not have, in this period, any free time on his hands. It should be added that the technical learning he does at the Diamang is carried out by direct negotiation at the offices of the General Directorate in Lunda, and assumes an exceptional character—in his point of view—for the time, since it went beyond the strict field of his craft. It should be noted that technical learning at Dundo posed an immediate drawback as it implied long-distance mediation: that is, reading the available manuals and practicing with different technical materials, in particular chemicals and papers. At the time, 22  Relatórios e Contas da Administração[Administration Reports and Accounts], 1952, pp. 56–58.

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most of the manuals were in English, a language that the photographer did not master. As a solution, he was offered a course in weekly printed lessons and vinyl records whose instructions he followed scrupulously, clearing doubts among his neighbors and ending up understanding the language sufficiently. With the sponsorship of the Diamang, he attended printing courses in London. Henceforth, while learning from the manuals now made accessible, and while experimenting without any restrictions the type of materials he ordered via the General Directorship, he began training his assistants, experimenting with color processing and with editing sound for the films that he also began making as official documentaries about the Concession. In the usual balance of costs and profits, the Diamang ends up betting, internally, on photography, using the hiring of external services for the cinema, already in the mid-sixties, with evident propagandistic purposes. It should be noted that there was a symmetry of circulation described in this economy of images, photographic or in motion. They are being made central either for colonization in Africa—’nationalizing’ and ‘civilizing’ the ‘indigenous’ viewers—or for information, dissemination and propaganda in Europe and the rest of the world. This configuration enunciates the multidirectional character of the colonial process, qualifying colonial culture as a global culture, insofar as it is based on extra-local and transregional processes “((…), in the sense that private metropolitans powers tried to project discourses and forms of control in a series of remote regions at the same time (…)”.23 It also allows to qualify this historical configuration of Portuguese colonialism, to paraphrase Anderson,24 as a ‘print colonialism’, or, more precisely, a ‘media colonialism’, in the sense that this circulation of images contributes to the manufacture of consensus on the colonial question—in this case, in the version practiced in the Diamang—by a public whose connections to the company are based in mass communication materials. It should also be noted, despite this qualification, that this dimension is hardly perceived in the daily life of the photographer at the Dundo, and it is only viable because of the plurality of material systems that photography enters, once processed, printed, 23  Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government, Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 66. 24  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, [1983] 1991).

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distributed and archived, that is, it is only possible due to the cultural process in which it is inscribed, and as a result of which it qualifies agents and relations with each other, mobilizes disparate interests in common results, or institutes specific valuations of situations, people or things. It is to the extent that it serves different purposes and assumes different values that photography is a ‘boundary object’ binding different fields of interest that it puts in contact.25 It is also, as any other border objects probably are, an ‘entangled object’ in more than one sense. This expression by Nicholas Thomas26 aims to highlight the semantic fluctuation of the artifacts not only in intercultural transactions—in his cases occurring in the Pacific and varying throughout history—but also in their ethical use by each of the parties involved, in this way shown as complex and plural. The possibility that this classification of photography opens up is that of referring to this status of technical objects, the corollary of this possibility being that the Diamang photographer understands his work in a much more immediate and pragmatic way that excludes the possibilities— unequal and historically circumscribed—for later use by Diamang. The institution of photography as a routine and bureaucratic practice, in short, is only possible precisely because it is based on a lack of understanding, interests and expectations deposited in it by the different agents and interests at work: photography is not just a means of registration, or distance communication, or advertising, or to guarantee the photographer’s livelihood, or exchange good with his peers, but potentially all of that. Correlatively, the position of the photographer in the Diamang is an eccentric position in relation to most corporate positions and, especially of subordinate positions, since it implies, for its current performance, behaviors that are refractory to most of the behaviors reported to peers: the possession and use of a camera adds to the mobility around the territory and the knowledge of subjects and practices, whether partial or totally hidden from the group of the population. As such, the photographer is, in part, the (remote) view of the administration in the Lunda district, with the technical task of mediating part of the information considered in decision-­making in Lisbon. For him, photography is, above all, a technical issue. Everything else comes in addition. 25  Cfr. Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer, 1989, ‘Institutional Ecology, “Translations” and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals’, Social Studies of Science, vol. 19 (1989), pp. 487–420. 26  Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects—Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge Massachusets, London: Harvard University Press, 1991).

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Photography as a Technical Trade As a technical object, the validity of the photograph depends on different valuations produced within a social network. In this sense, mediation shares, with other technical activities, a series of common characteristics. In Latour’s analysis of technical objects, four meanings of ‘technical’ adjectives are distinguishable. In the first, ‘technical’ means a subprogram, or a series of articulated subprograms, that is, implies deviation from a central objective (e.g., the Monthly Report of the General Directorate in Lunda) to proceed to one of the parts (order the photographs) necessary for that objective. Second, ‘technique’ designates a set of subjects, objects or capacities subordinate in a hierarchy, but, at the same time, indispensable and invisible for the realization of the final result (which could describe, for example, both actors present in the image’s frame, the agents involved in preparing the Reports, etc.). Third, ‘technical’ applies to failures in the program or subprogram that can jeopardize its entirety (classically, the failure of a machine, whose action is invisible in terms of the final results, but is, nonetheless, essential for its production). Finally, it designates subjects that occupy subordinate but indispensable positions in the execution of the programs, becoming mandatory crossing points according to which, a set of privileges is assigned (in this case, the photographer).27 From the photographer’s perspective, the first meaning of the ‘technical’ adjective—as part of a program or subprogram—tends to determine the remaining significations. For him, the production of photographs obeyed to the written need to resolve pragmatic issues arising from the program requested. The principle of a photograph—be it of friends, work or scientific—is constant: to respond to a request from someone else, whether informal or resulting from a service order. The type of camera used, for example, varying according to the program to which a particular photograph would be ascribed, is a first of these variables. The camera units used, as well as the employee of the Laboratory to be ordered to make a photograph, are mobilized differently depending on the purpose of the photograph, the location of its production and the reason to be photographed. Activity photographs—work or leisure—as well as outdoor photographs, provided that they are intended for internal consumption were normally obtained from a 6 x 6 format camera or, later, 27  Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope- Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 191.

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35 mm (in the AO period as a photographer, these were a Rollei and a Contax, respectively). Interior photographs of objects in the studio or portraits could be taken with a 9 x 12 camera (a Linhoff Technica). This was a heavy camera, therefore of demanding handling, but which allowed correcting perspectives and obtaining larger, more detailed negatives and, consequently, preferable for large enlargements or for publication. Under the indication of a ‘publishing program’ for a photograph—that is, a service order relating to obtaining images for the specific purpose of subsequent publication—the Linhoff would be the photographer’s first choice. But that choice would be ‘negotiated’ depending on the photographic subject and its location. In the usual program of the photographer’s work related to the production of photographs for internal circulation in the Reports of the different sections, the usual format would be 6 x 6 or 35 mm. A second technical component refers to the issue of printing. The purpose of using photography—its ‘program’ in Latour’s terminology—may involve, also or exclusively (as with postcards where the starting point is already a negative), the issue of printing. Printing poses problems with the size of the photographic image, its support—that is, the type of paper used—and its finish, namely, if only positivizing the negative, or retouching parts of the image or, even, changing the final representation, for example, with sepia turns that give the image an aged aspect, displacing it to the past. In the Service Reports the printing of the photographs is usually done with finishes faithful to the negative, in 9 x 12 format for 35mm, and 9 x 12 or 9 x 9 for 6 x 6 negatives. These are images without any requirement for perfection, intended for internal consumption. They are also ephemeral, since they report a moment in the ongoing temporal process, losing relevance with the photographs in the following report. As a whole—that is, as a visual sequence of a fraction of time—these images establish a narrative sequence that associates events with a temporal structure, allowing advances and retreats within the structure that, as a whole, they build. They have a dual function in the sense that, in the displacement of business events from Angola to Lisbon, it associates with proof of compliance or noncompliance with the service orders that were at the origin of the events photographed. A relevant element for this technical validation of photography stems from the fact that its recipients were subjects familiar with the photographed elements, for which, as a consequence, the photograph contained information complementary to a previous personal

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experience, but did not constitute that experience. In this sense, they knew the spaces outside the frame, being able, due to their previous knowledge, to attribute an iconic and an indexical value to photography. In Peirce’s semiology, the icon designates a relationship of similarity between the sign and what it represents; the index designates an association between the sign and its meaning. As a mechanical representation (by printing the reflection of an object’s light on a photosensitive film), the photographic representation is always indexical, since the existence of the object photographed in copresence with the camera is a necessary condition of its production. It is also iconic in the sense that the camera does not lie and therefore, except for intentional distortions, it prints the truth of the object in the negative. It may also, finally, be symbolic, in the case where the relationship with the referent is established in a conventional way, referring to languages and discourses outside the image but necessary for the endowment of a meaning.28 Diamang’s postcards are of the latter type, composing, through the material system in which they are produced, a highly selective imagistic universe of the colonial process and, as such, deliberately idealized. As in the case of other conceptual universes defined from postcards, they produce two types of operations: on the one hand, they are assumed as a total vision close to the taxonomist’s view; on the other hand, they reify an idealization that they decompose in a series of discursive tropes.29 The Lunda of the Diamang is, through these processes, shown as an articulated set of material achievements—work, leisure, housing, health, education, etc.—they are anchored in concrete objects and, endowed with this photographic materiality, eliminate alternative possibilities of representation. In this case, therefore, they are documents—with a probative character—a ‘company culture’ that is objectified in them. The use of photography in scientific work follows a different type of technical concern, despite the fact that its validity is established according to the same attribution of effectiveness to the photographic object: that of constructing, visually, conceptual categories, in this case resulting from knowledge production processes. 28  Terence Wright, ‘Photography: Theories of Realism and Convention’ in Elizabeth Edwards, ed., Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, (New York and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 26. 29  Naomi Schor, “Collecting Paris”, in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds. The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books, 1994) pp. 266–268.

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From the photographer’s point of view, the questions that scientific photography raise are not substantially different from the questions raised by the remaining ‘photographic expedient’, simply responding to technical requests in the best possible way. But, because this field of work was exercised by direct dialogue with stakeholders, it introduced two new elements: First, it allowed to accelerate the sedimentation of the experience of this type of registration, since the interested party followed the process, from the point of view to the printing process as well; second, it allowed greater plastic creativity, once the final image was fine-tuned with the interlocutor. The work with ethnographers, biologists or archaeologists included the joint consultation of other publications (catalogs of museums, exhibitions, scientific publications, etc.) allowing the practical development of recognition the type of conventions to be applied depending on the disciplinary field. In this association with scientific work, photographic practices are inscribed in the set of ideographic techniques used in the development of instruments for the exercise of colonial powers and knowledge, whose space of confluence is established at the Dundo Museum: maps, diagrams, schemes or photographs occupy a space for representation and common operationalization, distributed around a revelatory project, through the execution of which, the unknown land—exposed beyond its appearance— is becoming known, classified and ordered. Symmetrically, concealment by distance is overcome by the published materials, and the diffused image of the Diamang abroad—whether as a ‘prison’ or as a ‘slavery’ system—is being replaced by concrete images sanctioned by photographic realism. It is due to the ease of technical execution and the informative accuracy—established, in visual terms, in the tension between realism and convention—that photography is adapted to different disciplinary fields, recalling, in its plasticity, the complexities of colonial cultures. In 1966, Agostiniano de Oliveira retired from the Diamang. In the outskirts of Lisbon, where we met a number of times to remember his career as a photographer, he cherished as his most difficult achievement the photographs—field and museum photographs—for the (now classic) book by Marie-Louise Bastin, published by the Diamang in 1961, Arts Décoratifs Tshokwe. The book is now a collector’s item, in part due to the excellence of his images. I would argue that his unpublished work adds as much to contemporary Angolan visual culture whose complexities are being, nowadays, both explored by historians, sociologists and

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anthropologists, as well as by a new generation of photographers and media-­oriented artists in an incipient archeology of Angolan visual culture. The argument of this chapter is that such universe was not created exclusively from aesthetic projects but was partly constituted through the weaving of social life, populated by its colonial inscriptions, and the mundane objective of getting the work done.

CHAPTER 16

‘Our Nightly Bread’: Women and the City in Ricardo Rangel’s Photographs of Lourenço Marques, Mozambique (1950s–1960s) Patricia Hayes

A ‘historical image’ is one that synthesises. It might start with surface observation but allows for deep reading. According to Georg Simmel, such an image offers a convergence.1 Simmel’s imagined producer of the ‘historical image’ is assumed to be a sociologist, philosopher or other scholar. But here I am interested in what a photographer, a maker of images, does with surface observation in an African colonial city that was 1  See Nancy Rose Hunt, “History as form, with Simmel in tow”, History and Theory Issue 56 (December 2018), 126–144.

P. Hayes (*) DSI/NRF SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory, Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5_16

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rapidly emerging as modern in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lourenço Marques. The oft-cited point is that the colonial city was built for the white man.2 Narratives of twentieth-century African history are frequently about the increasing urbanisation of Africans but on very difficult terms, especially for women. In the southern African historiography in particular, the envisaged role of African women was to subsist in rural areas engaged in social reproduction, while men migrated to work. Much feminist ink has been spilled on how African women defied this and increasingly claimed agency and space in townships and locations, exercising a degree of economic power through beer-brewing, domestic and factory labour, sexual services, property ownership and marriage. Ranged against them in varying degrees were measures such as passes, health inspections for venereal disease, raids for illegal activities and corporal punishment from local headmen under colonial systems for those dubbed ‘runaways’. These are the general social history parameters for many parts of central and southern Africa under British rule.3 If we turn to the Portuguese colonies however, we must take account of specific measures such as compulsory labour (shibalo) under the indigenato, which relegated many men and women to months of labour on agricultural plantations, making the city and migrancy further afield attractive options.4 For women in southern Mozambique, a region denuded by male migrant labour flowing to the Rand mines, the capital Lourenço Marques operated as something of a magnet. An important body of photographic work by the late Ricardo Rangel provides a different set of vantage points on these long-standing formulations around women in the city. His book Pão nosso de cada noite (Our Nightly Bread) is devoted to the Rua Araújo and surrounding red-light district near the harbour in late colonial Lourenco Marques (now Maputo), an area for which municipal records are difficult to access.5 The area with its clubs, bars and cabarets was broken up after Independence (1975) in the wake of a postcolonial phase of purification under the Marxist-Leninist 2  Ibrahim Abdullah, “Culture, space, and agency in contemporary Freetown: the making and remaking of a post-colonial city” in Under Siege: Four African Cities. Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2003). 3  For an overview, see Women in African colonial histories, ed. Jean Allman, Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Muisi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). 4  See Jeanne Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican strategies and struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877–1962 (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1995). 5  Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism, 192.

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government of Frelimo, and has only been resurrected in recent years. Rangel’s rich photographic oeuvre therefore presents certain possibilities for interpretation and historicisation, which not only instate a feminised economy of the night at the heart of the colonial city but also raise other issues around vision, visuality and aesthetics in the approach to Maputo’s urban history. It is important to go beyond narrow notions of visuality in relation to this body of photographs here. In the late colonial and indeed early postcolonial period in Lourenço Marques, it is remarkable how closely artists, poets, writers, journalists, photographers, theatre people, musicians, even architects and academics consorted with each other, and often produced a thick sense of cross-reference, inter-textuality and inter-mediality—if not co-creativity—in their works. It is fecund ground where a kind of aesthetic fullness is valorised and where the idea of a separation of the senses is difficult to conceive. To those from outside, especially Anglophone observers, unexpected qualities emerge from things that are otherwise familiar.6 Certainly, this description of creative conviviality contrasts starkly with the degree of more rarified specialisation of medium and discipline that is apparent in the larger economy of neighbouring South Africa. In Mozambique, “the thickness of the world” comes out more strongly.7 Thus, a social and cultural critic like the photographer Ricardo Rangel in Lourenço Marques is found to be embedded in many cultural fields. His colleague Luis Bernardo Honwana highlights, for example, that jazz was important in his “aesthetic formation”.8 Rangel’s close friend was the poet José Craveirinha. All of this tends to come together in the pages of the newspapers and magazines in which all the above-named worked at different times, especially the progressive A Tribuna (early 1960s) and Tempo (1970s). Because the opportunities for literary publication or public exhibition in the colony (and later in the postcolony) were low, journalism stood out as the vehicle for multiple forms of expression.9 This small intelligentsia also had to earn a living, resulting in what another writer Calane 6  Isabel Hofmeyr, “Seeing the Familiar: Notes on Mia Couto” in Beautiful Ugly. African and Diaspora Aesthetics, ed. Sarah Nuttall (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 386. 7  Mark Paterson, The Senses of Touch. Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 21. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paterson proposes an expanded definition of aesthetics where perception and sensation operate together. 8  Luis Bernardo Honwana, “Ricardo Rangel e o aparecimento do foto-jornalismo em Moçambique,” Savana, 19.6.2009, Suplemento, 3. 9  Interview with Albie Sachs, Johannesburg, 24.11.2005.

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da Silva simply calls a ‘multi-tasking’ born of necessity that resulted in many of these politically minded figures working for extended periods on newspapers.10 Their journalism took them into more peripheral zones of the city where music, dance and performance were also rich, tacking across inner and outer city, desegregating the cultural fields of a city that was zoned along racial and class lines. I raise these issues because of the potential distinctiveness here in what Rancière terms the ‘distribution’, or the sharing out, of ‘the sensible’. According to one formulation, this distribution is “a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the status of politics as a form of experience”.11 I am especially interested when there is an “interface of mediums” that overturns a “well-ordered distribution of sensory experience”.12 If politics as a form of experience is affected by all these things, then the perceptible breaking down of the “distance between the sayable and the visible” in Mozambican artistic-intellectual circles—this intertextuality, inter-mediality, proximity and synthesising—is important.13 What I am asking is whether there might be something distinctive in the lusophone world of late colonial Lourenço Marques in terms of the connectivities of cultural and political fields. My questions are therefore: What is the distribution of the sayable and visible in late colonial and early postcolonial Mozambique, how do they relate to each other and how was this distribution contested? Further, what are the limits of the sayable and visible with regard to African women in the city?

The City By Day I wish to approach these through a preliminary study of the photographic work of Ricardo Rangel in the early 1960s. What has struck me is not only the quality of intimacy but also the irony in his photographs. He favoured juxtapositions, social confrontations and his own version of ‘synthesis’, which was an important concept in local intellectual circles. Very quickly  Interview with Calane da Silva, Maputo, 11.12.2005.  Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, transl. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 13. 12  Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 17. On this note, Mia Couto writes suggestively that “I not only see. I hear photography”. He adds, “Victory of the world of orality still dominant in Africa.” Mia Couto, Pensatempos. Textos de Opinião (Lisbon: Ndjira, 2005), 75. 13  Rancière, Politics of Aesthetics, 15. 10 11

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one apprehends that the city of Lourenço Marques furnished many opportunities to exploit such complicated, if not contradictory, scenarios in the 1950s and the 1960s, when Rangel was at his most active photographically. It was the fascist colonial period when the country was named the Province of Mozambique, part of a greater Portugal, but it also boasted a wave of postwar colonial development where certain colonial peripheries acted as micro-laboratories of modernisation. Ricardo Rangel was born in Lourenço Marques in 1924. Born, as he said, “downtown. I used to joke with my friends, I wasn’t born in the bush, but in the city”.14 His grandfather was Chinese, from Macau, his grandmother African and Ronga-speaking. His father was Greek, but left the family behind in the 1940s to “seek his fortune” in the Congo.15 Rangel said that after whites, it was the Goans, and then people like him who occupied the layers of society in Mozambique. The final layer was the Africans. In 1941, he started work as a printer in the commercial studio of Otilio de Vasconcelas, an elephant hunter-turned safari photographer. Rangel then worked in a number of studios, at Foto Sousa, Foto Portuguesa and Focus. He spent years in the darkroom learning the meaning of a good print. He joined the mainstream newspaper Notícias in 1952, its first black photographer, working with Carlos Alberto Vieira. He collaborated with the newspaper Voz de Mozambique of the Native Association of Mozambique in 1972 and 1974, which was viewed as using photography rather differently.16 But the newspaper that launched Rangel, and which according to the citation for his honorary doctorate “illustrated his own preoccupations”, was A Tribuna in the early 1960s.17 It was established by a leftist editorial and staff. Its focus on the changing capital city, its valorisation of photographic image, meant for a brief period that Rangel operated as one of the ‘absolute lords of the city’. Rangel was one of a number of figures whose family histories cut right across the racial cartography and fluidity of Lourenço Marques. Though they might have grown up in particular neighbourhoods, the figure of the grandmother implicates such figures in the cidade de caniço (reed city),  Interview with Ricardo Rangel, Cape Town, 4.3.2005.  Notícias, 29.10.2008. 16  Antonio Sopa, “Photojournalism in Mozambique” in Illuminando Vidas. Ricardo Rangel and Mozambican Photography, ed. Bruno Z’Graggen and Grant Lee Neuenburg (Zurich: Christoph Merian Verlag, 2002). 17  Notícias, 29.10.2008. 14 15

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which is distinguished from the cidade de cimento (cement city). These are the spatial urban categories of Lourenço Marques during the twentieth century, and even today. In the Boys of Malanga (1982), Calane da Silva wrote: “we, the boys of mixed race, alongside the black boys …. Marginalized in a society that knew we were theirs, and that we wanted to shift”. He puts the question directly: “how to break the dichotomy, the separation between reed city and cement city?”.18 One literary critic characterised these intellectuals as “drinking from the chalice of bad faith”, exercising a sarcasm that was the product of frustrated revolt. It was said of José Craveirinha that he had “the virility and even the virulence of revolt”.19 Craveirinha himself wrote of the banality that it was only those who were capable of grinding their teeth furiously that could feel tenderness and solidarity towards “the disinherited, the marginalized, the betrayed heroes, all those whose sweat assures the wellbeing of others”.20 He described his friend Rangel as ‘indocile’ and obdurate. I raise this not simply for purposes of context but because Rangel did not work alone. As a photographer at the newspaper Notícias, and later at A Tribuna and then Tempo, he always worked together with a writer, even if it was just a sports writer. It was Craveirinha who furnished many of the poetic captions for his friend in the newspaper and when he mounted an exhibition. Calane da Silva and others later wrote essays in Rangel’s publications. But more than that, each week in the journalists’ milieux, these artists practised a constant playfulness between images and words, on matters big and small. Censorship was applied more consistently to texts, and this had its effects on the sayable. According to Luis Bernardo Honwana, an important thing started to happen in photojournalism as a certain photographer “started to go beyond mere illustration”. It is with R[icardo] R[angel] that the image becomes autonomous in relation to the text and proposes, in itself, a critical vision about reality … Many times a curious super-imposition of fundamentally divergent discourses materialized: that of RR, of the image, revindicating, denouncing, open to

18  Cited in Albino Magaia, “Dos Meninos da Malanga. Trajectória Política de um Escritor,” Tempo, no. 664, 3.12.1983. 19  Magaia, “Dos Meninos da Malanga,” 53. 20  Zé Craveirinha, “Carta para o Ricardo sobre as suas fotografias,” Centre Culturel Franco-Mozambicain, Fotógrafo de Moçambique. Ricardo Rangel. Photographe du Mozambique (Paris: Editions Findakly, 1994), 6–8.

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a future perspective; that of the text—afraid to be critical, for the most part conformist, even to the point of giving the official line.21

With its propensities to defamiliarise the familiar, and its ‘loosening effects’ generally, photography has the capacity to create readings where “there is meaning in what seems not to have any meaning, something enigmatic in what seems self-evident, a spark of thought in what appears to be an anodyne detail”. According to Rancière, there is “a particular relation between thought and non-thought, a particular way that thought is present within sensible materiality, meaning within the insignificant, and an involuntary element within conscious thought”.22 This adds another dimension to Honwana’s suggestive formulation of the “curious super-­ imposition”, and Simmel’s notion of the historical image made up of convergences, leading to synthesis. Rangel worked for A Tribuna in 1963, when the radical editor João Reis was in place. Before long not he, but Reis was replaced by a more conservative editor, and Rangel quit. But he produced and published, in his own view, the best photographs of his career in this period. This was at a time when Lourenço Marques entered a phase of relatively dense postwar modernisation and urban expansion, including architectural experiments that were more possible in the overseas ‘provinces’ than in Portugal itself under the dictatorship. “From day to day concrete tears open the sky. It is the camera lens of our reporter that confirms this.”23 This period of the early 1960s is replete with photographic and historical self-consciousness. During roadworks for a new highway, Rangel photographs a man mixing cement, who “pauses and eyes the lens”.24 In another photograph, a bus fills the photograph, just as it does the road.25 The fast-changing built environment with its traffic and roads present the forms of modernisation and their relationship to the frame. There is a filling of vision with things moving at speed. But there were severe problems with these developments and where they were going. This is where Rangel’s photographic strategy of juxtaposition (or super-imposition) became notorious. Signs of progress often had strange travelling companions, as when a donkey cart  Honwana, “Ricardo Rangel,” 3.  Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, transl. Debra Keates and James Swenson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 3. 23  A Tribuna, 12.6.1963, 2. 24  A Tribuna 16.2.1963, 2. 25  A Tribuna 22.8.1963, 2. 21 22

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is next to a motorised bus, or unskilled black labour is constantly featured in the construction of skyscrapers or black kids look at a cinema poster for a movie they cannot see. In the face of colonial expectations and exclusions, Rangel insisted on the presence of all races in the city in his frame. This is part of what Craveirinha called his obduracy. African children do their homework in the street by the light of a display window; a man and a woman of different race pass each other on a zebra crossing; and so forth. One caption to a street scene goes: “Crossroads of the cosmopolitan city in Africa”.26 Elsewhere, a caption celebrates the street with this comment: “A good photographic reporter and a good camera are the absolute lords of the city.”27 As is evident, the accompanying texts in captions often extend the sense of interruption, ambivalence and even inversion of any unidirectional modernisation in the image. Certain photographs and captions hover at the level of the poetic. The photograph in A Tribuna of the empty bridge at the emerging industrial centre in Matola, with its landscape of clouds, comes with an intriguing caption, whose enigmatic undertones are not quite the same when translated into English: “Bridge over the Matola River. The bridge is synonymous with progress. Mozambique happens to need many bridges. Progress is always on the other side of the river. At what time is the crossing?”28 The very condition of backwardness, of imputed lack, where progress is always on the other side, is implicitly interrogated here. New infrastructure, monuments and the emerging skyline with high-­rise apartment blocks and skyscrapers to replace the disappearing ‘colonial city’ are also photographed as they take shape.29 Captions dwell on the transformations brought about especially by concrete, but also iron and glass. The formal impact of multiple railway lines photographed as a towering vertical panorama is referred to as the “symphony of lines”.30 Another metaphor for the new in the African city is glass. Earlier in the twentieth century, construction with glass had excited various kinds of commentaries. As one of the “new synthetic materials”, it offered “a revolutionary surface for a new  A Tribuna 14.8.1963, 2.  A Tribuna 27.4.1963, 2. 28  A Tribuna 19.1.63, 2. Thanks to Fernando Rosa Ribeiro for this translation. 29  Explicit reference is made to the disappearance of the old colonial city with its modest architecture in the face of new construction. See A Tribuna 7.12.1962. 30  A Tribuna 3.9.1963, 1. 26 27

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subjectivity”.31 For a photographer like Rangel, who depicted a male worker standing on a symmetrical ladder cleaning a vast new transparent surface, it is the “spatial interpenetration” that Moholy-­ Nagy identified, and the “unprecedented spatial liquidity” that made a remarkable photograph possible. It is as if the cleaner is working in air, labouring on something invisible, his act of working cut out from any context and monumentalised in its own gesture.32 It is again about the new but serviced by black labour suspended so strikingly here in the image. The daily grist of a newspaper photographer centred on what was happening in late colonial Lourenço Marques. Street scenes which might be unpromising in terms of drama and reportage take on their own dimension, their own quiet possibilities.33 Some have spoken of Cartier Bresson and Italian neo-realism as possible influences. But in local terms, an important element in the ‘battle of the image’ in Rangel’s time at A Tribuna was over who counts as human and is therefore included in the city. In this the street was crucial, as was the notion of synthesis. It was all about the “synthesis of the street”, the enfolding of “city and outskirts” at the heart of Craveirinha’s famous poem entitled Synthesis.34 In the unfolding battle over what was sayable and visible in the “distribution of the senses” at this time, Portuguese fascist censorship became an excellent marker. According to Luis Bernardo Honwana, Ricardo Rangel’s photographs brought the attention of the censor to the potential of the image in itself, as opposed to text, for the first time. 31  Detlef Mertins, “The enticing and threatening face of prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the utopia of glass,” Assemblage No 29 (April 1996), 17, citing Benjamin’s 1933 essay on experience and poverty, “Erfahrung und Armut” in Gesammelte Schriften 2, no. 1, (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1972), 213–19. 32  A Tribuna, 28.6.63, 2. The quote from Moholy Nagy is cited in Mertins, “The enticing and threatening face,” 16. 33  Albie Sachs emphasises the street as an important point of realist exploration. “And it was to capture the variety of types of face, of language, of religion, of modes of being, that in a composite sense went to make up the Mozambican personality. It was the Other of the imposition of the Portuguese personality.” Interview with Albie Sachs, Johannesburg, 24.11.2005. 34  José Craveirinha, Karingana ua Karingana (Maputo: Associação dos Escritores Moçambicanos, n.d.), 22. The poem Synthesis was written between 1945 and 1950. For Mozambican photographers, working discursively with the notion of synthesis, it might imply an encapsulation of rural and urban together in the frame (José Cabral); things that should not be together (Sergio Santimano); or re-citations of a known image referent (Rui Assubuji). Honwana’s term ‘super-imposition’ also conveys the heterogeneous layerings possible under such rubrics.

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Finally, no discussion of A Tribuna would be complete without mentioning its most remarkable initiative. The newspaper launched a public campaign, soliciting its readers to provide commentaries and photographs on the question of the city of Lourenço Marques and its development. This produced an effusion of documentation incorporating personal sentiments and public analysis about the divided city. Regular articles appeared with informed opinion and to some degree research on urban development, accompanied by photographs. The most compelling section of the newspaper during this long-running theme was the section devoted to letters from readers. Contributions came in from all sections of the city, but especially from the residents of reed city. Photographs of letter-writers accompanied the publication of their submissions. There is a graphic letter and I. D. photograph from Armando Guebuza, now a former president of the Republic of Mozambique, at that time a disgruntled young resident of reed city. Life in reed city was blighted by rain, malaria and transport problems. But the worst, apparently, was the immorality caused by conditions in which there were too many people and nothing was private. It was impossible to hide anything. The immorality of women spread, we are told.35 There is a certain historical irony that after Mozambican independence in 1975, Guebuza was put in charge of Operation Production in 1983, which rounded up and airlifted women believed to be prostitutes in Maputo to rehabilitation camps in Niassa province in the north.

The City By Night This matter of ‘immorality’ brings us to the photographs at the centre of Rangel’s career, and at the heart of this chapter. They were finally assembled into the series Pão nosso de cada noite published in 2004. According to Rangel, he started taking photographs in the Rua Araújo, the zone of bars and cabarets near the harbour of Lourenço Marques, in the 1950s. The newspaper Notícias was in the same district, and journalists used to go to the clubs after finishing their copy and putting the articles to press late at night. Rangel said he used to bring along his camera, but never his flash. This meant he learned to push his relatively slow black-and-white film to new limits.36 Club owners allowed them free entry, as journalists 35   Armando Guebuza, “Falam os habitantes da ‘Cidade de Caniço’,” A Tribuna, 14.1.1963, 2. 36  Interview with Ricardo Rangel, Maputo, 31.7.2005.

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sometimes wrote reviews and this helped business. Rangel took many photographs often without being seen, but also with the permission of those women whom he came to know quite well. He also became a familiar figure, like his writer friends. It was something of a bohemian zone, but with “panache”.37 To a large extent, Rangel’s photographs in Pão nosso de cada noite suggest the meeting of the two parts of the city, reed and cement, a rapprochement made possible by the economy of the night. The book in fact opens with a photograph captioned “Enticing reed yard” (1961). Rangel explained that it was a long-standing practice of Portuguese men to go and look for a menina (girl) in reed city, evoking a very troubling sense of the kinds of access white men had over black female bodies. The man peering and calling through a reed fence is trapped and pinioned by both the car headlights and camera, and was an exposure that gave Rangel considerable satisfaction (Fig. 16.1):

Fig. 16.1  Enticing reed yard (1961)

 Interview with Luis Bernardo Honwana, Maputo, 6.9.2005.

37

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Yes, you don’t see me. Because the white people looking there... going there to look [for] the prostitutes in the suburbs. So for these kinds of people, every people who lives in suburbs is a prostitute. … They—they know it’s moralless in this place, they open the straw and say hey... Yes, I was with my colleague. I was making a reportage about prostitutes in the suburbs. And they start to call the names of the girls, bah, bah, bah, and when in fact they found the house of the prostitute, the prostitute said hey! Bah, bah, bah, or said tem gente!38

The life of ‘nightly bread’ in the city began here in reed city for a number of women. A photograph of the candlelit interior of a room captioned “Reed city—Chamanculo (1961)” is linked to the one taken on the other side of the reed fence. According to Rangel, “This is a beautiful girl, is a young prostitute living in Caniço with no electricity.” Through friends who know someone, she might get advice to put on a good dress and shoes, and a wig, and go to Rua Araújo. That is where sailors, tourists and many people went for the nightlife. This included South African men who were prohibited by the Immorality Act in their own country from having more intimate relations across the racial lines.39 As one caption in Pão nosso de cada noite has it, “Rua Araújo: all embraces shine more under neon light (1970)”. Plainly, Rangel was documenting something socially and historically important in the red-light area, whose famous nightlife acted as a magnet within the port city and beyond. His own reasons for being there however started off as rather mundane: Yes it’s very simple to me. So these pictures I’m beginning to make these pictures in the 50s. I was working in the big newspapers and the newspapers used to finish the deadlines and finish the office they close at very, very late at night…1 o’clock…4 o’clock. At the time the newspapers start printing at 1, 2 o’clock so you went out at 1 o’clock, 2 o’clock. So we’re going to the cabarets. Because the newspapers most of them were situated in downtown. So [it] is very near and of course after a period of working, we’re going to the bars, or cabarets, or nightclubs. Sit there and I suppose drink a beer or alcohol or something. And that place is full of girls. Girls were working in these places. 38  Interview with Ricardo Rangel, Maputo, 31.7.2005. All further quotations by Rangel are taken from this Maputo interview transcript. 39  Luis Carlos Patraquim, “Ricardo Rangel. Recordações da Rua Araújo,” Público magazine, 30.6.1991, 34.

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As mentioned earlier, journalists were allowed free access. And, during that period I was always getting my camera. … I remember the first night I saw this is good place, I would like to start taking pictures there, but, the light is very poor oh no another place the light is good. The most important cabarets and nightclubs the light is very, very poor. So I managed to push films to become more sensibilised [sensitized]. I tried to make pictures.

Rangel’s presence and the ‘making of pictures’ in these sites became very regular. Yes, and I start to make pictures every night, and the girls … start asking me, You pretend to make pictures. Why you make pictures every night? Why? Why? Joke with us, joking with words. I say No no… I make this picture because you are beautiful girl, it’s not for put[ting] in the newspaper, it’s for my own collection. Really I was very interesting in this life of these, these girls. And of course with me there are other people who are not journalists, like Rui Nogar, for example, and José Craveirinha the poet. Is very sensitive, sensitive about the way of life of these girls.

There is much to say about Rangel’s own sensitivity to the life of these women, and he found it difficult to use the term ‘prostitutes’. On the one hand, from interviews and other accounts, it is clear he was protective of the dignity of his own black grandmother, and felt the situation of his mother after being left by his white father. On the other hand, he seems very alert to the multiple contexts from which women entered this zone. “Yes yes. … you see that happiness, that smiling, but in fact inside they have very big dramas inside because they have sons and mothers to feed. But in these places they must come happy to collect customers” (Fig. 16.2). Rangel stated that a very important picture for him was the one showing how a woman walks forward into the street out of the dark. It is night, lit up by neon. In a sense it is about mobility, about the way women used the dark to move into visibility and to make an impact. This movement is played out in such a way that the street becomes charged. It is another synthesis of the street. It remains a ‘visibility’ on the women’s terms however, so Rangel must not use a flash. As he put it, the flash would destroy everything. “Silhouettes were enough” (Fig. 16.3). There is a delicacy to this. Light positioned elsewhere produces the silhouette form. It only illuminates “a broader outline and context of what

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Fig. 16.2  Sad-eyed model in this street of merry-making (1962)

is seen and not seen”.40 If Rangel sometimes referenced women as silhouettes, thereby restraining detail, he did not hesitate to use the harsh glare of car headlights to catch those Portuguese men calling women through reed fences and drench them with harsh, direct light. The nuances of light in Rangel’s nocturnal work evoke the same affective spectrum as Craveirinha’s jarring allusion to feelings that go from the grinding of teeth to tenderness. Rangel was finely attuned to the many points of light and dark. This was honed through years working in the darkroom developing other people’s photographs, and also from the jazz photography which he loved. With darkness obscuring detail, the main features need only be hinted at. A figure moving into a pool of light; indoor scenes with shadows and reflections; male figures looking on from the side—these are eloquent enough. Rangel explains further about the economy of looking in the bars, and how he placed himself:

40  Krista Thompson, “A sidelong glance: the practice of African diaspora art history in the United States”, Art Journal 70, no. 3 (Fall 2011), 26.

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Fig. 16.3  Steps emerging into the illusion-world (1962)

[T]he boss watching the girls. They must collect customers to sit in the table, to buy drinks, because you know the system… Push, push the customer to pay the drinks. Because the boss watching and they manage to-to show, Hey look at this! Time to time one of them come to me, say You must take my picture! I say No, no, no, I explain—I explain to the girls, I want to take the pictures, but I don’t like to take portrait pictures like in studios… you are enjoy dancing, and laughing, and bah bah bah, and I going to start taking pictures. Ok, they said ok.

It is not just about how men look at women, but how women look at men, how they look at each other and sometimes how some look back at

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the photographer. These are not only interactive spaces, but a field of interlocking glances and looks that generate a range of emotional intensities, many of which are intersubjective (and which include the viewer). The visual incision of photography that extracts a particular space and time of history,41 from highly specific angles, dilates these moments to produce a cascade of encounters, interactions, expressions, gestures and grimaces. These are tiny acts, micro-histories, caught out, and transported elsewhere. But what is striking is the photography of looking, itself. Across the series, in these scenes of crossing glances, the feelings conveyed might be provocativeness, attraction, speculation, happiness, insecurity, vulnerability, awkwardness, sadness, intoxication, defiance, greed, cynicism, innocence, resignation and much more. It is not simply the boundaries of the sayable and visible that are stretched by Rangel, but many more indefinable areas of affect (Figs. 16.4, 16.5 and 16.6). Occasionally one of Rangel’s Rua Araújo photographs was published in the newspaper. But as he explains, “because the Portuguese don’t want to

Fig. 16.4  Ritz Bar: aesthetics of the beautiful (1970)  Edwards, Raw Histories (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

41

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Fig. 16.5  Mundo bar: hands that talk? (1962)

Fig. 16.6  Wait baby! Mundo bar (1970)

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show the prostitution there”, they tended to publish pictures of cabaret shows for review instead of the actual women with their clients. In the big nights the people enter in the cabarets, the girls say, This is customers, this is money. So come, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah. … sometimes they come. This is the soldiers, the commandoes… Yes. During the war. And uh… OK, so I watch I was sitting in the table, I was watching these girls. I watching this scenario just like that, and suddenly these two customers entered … I take their pictures.

Many commentators highlight the way Rangel ‘denounces’, in the sense that he exposes things that were not supposed to exist. This is true, both with regard to paid sex work (whose existence was officially denied) and the white Portuguese men (including soldiers) frequenting these venues.42 In the attempt to control what was visible and sayable at the time, the local governor general was reluctant to let officials in Lisbon view such scenes of Moçambique through the newspapers. Rangel’s later images of white poverty would meet with even stricter censorship. But the Rua Araújo series touched deeply on the hypocrisies of the Catholic Church and the colonial racial order, with its discourse of assimilation covering over an extreme system of forced labour (chibalo under the indigenat), large-scale migration to South Africa, and a sense of a landscape depleted of men. For women who chose the city, their employment options were limited to domestic and a little factory work, though the latter grew as the cashew processing industry took off in the 1950s.43 But the economy of the night was significant and indeed contiguous with the daytime ‘struggle for the city’. And it is those hypocrisies that inspired José Craveirinha’s ironic title for the series: Our nightly bread. “Craveirinha is a poet. Do you know how he changed our daily bread to nightly bread? I saw it’s fantastic, it’s poetry.” When asked if he ever worried that he was romanticising these women’s lives, Rangel replied: “No. I, I—this is reality but of course, we found some romance, we found some… it’s not for nothing that the poets make … the poems about these girls”. He spoke about the process of making the book Pão nosso de cada noite and the intense fermentation between his pictures and his friends Craveirinha, Calane da Silva, Rui Nogar and 42  Interview with Sergio Santimano, Uppsala, 8.10.2009; Bruno Z’Graggen and Angelo Sansone, Sem Flash. Homenagem a Ricardo Rangel (1924–2009) (Zurich: Sansonfilm, 2012). 43  Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism, 142-5.

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others, who supplied poems, texts and captions. “When people start to select my pieces he [Craveinrinha] discover, he see, these poems looks like [they were] written for these pictures. Or this picture is to illustrate this poem.” Prominent in the book is Craveirinha’s poem entitled Felismina, a name which combines the words feliz (happy) and menina (girl): Felismina Here in town To each tiny inch of your shamelessness/shamefacedness You dance, light spots aiming at your belly You dance each time more naked You dance to the music and all You change from a badly dressed black woman Into a starkly undressed striptease artist To the tune of music from Europe And the play of lights on your nakedness You change for the better without a single book You change within this circus You change, Felismina!44

Rangel concludes: “So, they write and I take pictures. My way to express my feelings is about pictures, is not about text.”45 This is very apt, because here Rangel suggests that while there is a great cross-fertilisation, his sensibilities still remain rooted in the image. There is integration and cross-fertilisation across mediums, but also integrity. And it is here that photography in Mozambique assumes its special place: as a mediator, in its realist and expressive capacities, between other cultural forms, inserted into a range of sociopolitical fields. Not a middle-brow art, as many readings of Pierre Bourdieu would have it, but an essential inter-medial one feeding powerfully into other domains.46

44  José Craveirinha, “Felismina” in Rangel, Pão nosso da cada noite, 11. Translated by Fernando Rosa Ribeiro. 45  Interview with Ricardo Rangel, Maputo, 31.7.2005. 46  Pierre Bourdieu, Photography. A Middle-Brow Art (Cambridge: Polity, 1996). The argument against Bourdieu potentially reducing photography to a mediocre practice is derived from Claudio Marra, La idée della fotografia: la riflissione teorica dagli anni sessanta a oggi (Milano: Mondadori, 2001). With thanks to Federica Angelucci for this reference.

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The City and the Postcolony The neon lights in the dark are another signifier of the modernising African city. A woman could refashion herself to make an appearance as something more than just a “badly-dressed black woman”, as the poem Felismina puts it. Rangel is more visually lyrical in this assemblage than ironic, which is left to the captions. The Rua Araújo photographs transcend his habitual photographic pungency.47 But elsewhere in his urban work, with the photographs of skyscrapers shooting up across the marsh, or the hut silhouettes at Matola with Lourenço Marques in the distance,48 there is a refusal to accept things as they were, namely the exclusions of urban colonialism. Rangel’s pictures force viewers to consider the marginalised and paradoxical in the same frame as modernisation. By stretching the picture to include what is uncomfortable, he was stretching the sentiments and sentience of those who looked. Given colonial censorship, Rangel was able to hold one small exhibition of the Rua Araújo series before Independence in the mid-1970s, followed by an almost twenty-year gap in his public showing of these photographs until the 1990s and later. There is pathos in the fact that at the end of colonialism a new order emerged in which prostitution and vagrancy came under fire. As early as the 1975 Independence celebrations in Maputo, a float appeared in the grand procession featuring a mini-skirted woman in platform shoes and a mini-bar, covered in banners denouncing prostitution and alcohol. The latter were castigated as weapons of the coloniser and the opposite of productivity.49 Between this stern morality, the nationalisation of the economy and the growing war against Renamo and apartheid South Africa, the Rua Araújo precinct became completely moribund. The revolutionary puritanical drive under Frelimo reached an apex in 1983, with Operation Production. This quasi-military operation under Guebuza rounded up alleged sex workers, vagrants and unemployed and shipped them out of the city to distant camps in Niassa, where it was President Samora Machel’s dream to build a great new city, based on new values. That is why Rangel’s photograph of the woman accompanying Frelimo soldiers in Lourenço Marques in 1975, and the last image 47  Ricardo Rangel, Foto-Jornalismo ou Foto-Confusionismo (Maputo: University of Eduardo Mondlane Press, 2002). 48  Ricardo Rangel, “LM 1970,” Tempo, no. 3, 1970. 49  Tempo, no. 248, 6.7.1975, 27.

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featured in Pão nosso de cada noite, runs with the mordant caption: “The ‘final’ bread?”.50 It seems that many women lost the struggle for the city. What the Portuguese failed to clean up, the postcolonial state managed to do. Licinio Azevedo’s 1999 film A Última Prostituta (The Last Prostitute) features some of Rangel’s photographs of women from Rua Araújo. The film tracks down some of the women in far-off Niassa and elsewhere. Those they find tell their stories about being removed from Maputo. Rangel’s photographs act as an aide-mémoire in the film, as women talk about others they recognise from the images, and what happened to them.51 The film was unfortunately not broadcast at the time, as was intended, on public television in Mozambique. As a site of exploitation and hypocrisy, fantasy and sex, friendship and creativity, the issues did not die with Rua Araújo. What is striking is how Frelimo believed it could channel the sex drive. The liberation movement turned ruling party considered it was possible to organise and discipline this and other drives, and move in the direction of a revolutionary purity that was more ascetic. The result of this postcolonial prudery was an atheistic morality, rather than the moral aesthetics of poets, writers, artists and photographers. It is a discourse of purification, rather than synthesis. Photographers who remained in Mozambique under Frelimo, both young and old progressives who genuinely wanted to participate in the revolution, faced a number of dilemmas. After a time, we are told, they went to sleep.52 Partly this was due to the exigencies of the civil war and the unavailability of expensive film for independent work. But as Virilio puts it, what happens when the public space is replaced by the public image?53 Essentially this is what Frelimo did, with the float castigating drinkers and sex workers, and billboards appearing in the city. In the first decade after Independence, there was a new image of woman, looking up, skywards, towards the socialist goal. Not back at men or each other, and not with interlocking glances.54 To return to the question of the limits of the visible and the sayable, photography may have gone through many vagaries in postcolonial  Rangel, Pão nosso de cada noite, 100 and 124.  Licinio Azevedo, A Última Prostituta (Maputo: Ébano Multimedia, 1999). 52  Rui Assubuji, “Mozambican photography” (presentation at the Encounters with African Photography Panel, Cape Town Month of Photography), March 2005. 53  Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 64. 54  See Kok Nam, “A Luta Continua,” Tempo, no. 802, 1986. 50 51

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Mozambique, but this does not stop existing photographs acting on the spaces of history later. This can be over and over again, locally and beyond, and essentially this is what Rangel has done with his publication of Pão nosso de cada noite long after the pictures were taken. Such anachronies can be intensely productive. As Hunt argues for fiction, they are out-of-­ order sightings that “unsettle the flattening effects of linear, homogeneous, empty time”.55 For Rangel, this is a different kind of juxtaposition, instating another time and another cluster of viewpoints in the present, an “insistent anteriority”.56 And here it becomes necessary to acknowledge the specificity of photographs, their transversal capacities, and their “power of desire and movement”. Georges Didi-Huberman refers to the “paradoxical power and fragility of images”, which is especially the case with photographs. “On the one hand”, he argues, “they are always singular: local, incomplete, in short, insubstantial—micrological, in so many words …. On the other hand, they are universally open: never entirely sealed off, never completed”.57 In retrospect, Rangel’s late colonial period was a particularly fecund one. It marked a relatively dense modernism in colonial time where various agents claimed inclusion. Later it comes to stand for a memory of modernisation in postcolonial time, and the template (to some extent) for a development desire. But that postcolonial memory is predicated on a specific conjuncture of architecture, space, segregation, porousness and a sense of cultural, economic and social possibility, within which women also inhabited and moved through the city. Post-revolutionary Maputo of recent years has very different ingredients. So much so, that when Ricardo Rangel passed away on 11 June 2009, the historian Yussuf Adam noted that ultimately the photographer was granted his wish: He had a critical vision of the establishment, the actor in everyday life, state policies and more. He hated those who behaved like sheep and took no responsibility for changing their lives, obeying every order they were given no matter how unjust. Looking at the disarray around him, he often used to say, “I would not like to be here when the people revolt”.58

 Hunt, “Between Fiction and History,” 304.  Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 8. 57  Georges Didi-Huberman, “Critical Image/Imaging Critique”, Oxford Art Journal 40, no. 2 (2017), 260. 58  Yussuf Adam, “Ricardo Rangel takes the train with Coltrane,” Camera Austria, 2009. 55 56

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Acknowledgements  Thanks are due to the late Ricardo Rangel, co-researchers Farzanah Badsha and Rui Assubuji, and all those interviewed who are cited here. Research for this chapter was supported by the National Research Foundation (South Africa), Unique Grant 98911.

References Abdullah, Ibrahim. “Culture, space, and agency in contemporary Freetown: the making and remaking of a post-colonial city” in Under Siege: Four African Cities. Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos. Ed. Okwui Enwezor. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2003. Adam, Yussuf. “Ricardo Rangel takes the train with Coltrane”, Camera Austria, 2009. Allman, Jean, Susan Geiger and Nakanyike Muisi (eds.). Women in African colonial histories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002). Azevedo, Licinio. A Última Prostituta. Maputo: Ébano Multimedia, 1999. Bourdieu, Pierre. Photography. A Middle-Brow Art. Cambridge: Polity, 1996. Couto, Mia. Pensatempos. Textos de Opinião. Lisbon: Ndjira, 2005. Craveirinha, José. Karingana ua Karingana. Maputo: Associação dos Escritores Moçambicanos, n.d.. Craveirinha, Zé (José). “Carta para o Ricardo sobre as suas fotografias.” Centre Culturel Franco-Mozambicain, Fotógrafo de Moçambique. Ricardo Rangel. Photographe du Mozambique. Paris: Editions Findakly, 1994, 5–9. Da Silva, Calane. Dos Meninos da Malanga. Maputo: Cadernos Tempo, 1982. Didi-Huberman, Georges. “Critical Image/Imaging Critique.” Oxford Art Journal 40, no. 2 (2017): 249–261. Edwards, Elizabeth. Raw Histories. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Guebuza, Armando. “Falam os habitantes da ‘Cidade de Caniço’.” A Tribuna, 14.1.1963. Hayes, Patricia. “Pão nosso da cada noite: as mulheres e a cidade na fotografias de Ricardo Rangel de Lourenço Marques, Moçambique (1950–1960)”. In Ricardo Rangel. Insubmisso e Generoso. Ed. Nelson Saúte. Maputo: Marimbique, 2014, 63–84. Hofmeyr, Isabel. “Seeing the Familiar: Notes on Mia Couto” in Beautiful Ugly. African and Diaspora Aesthetics. Ed. Sarah Nuttall. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Honwana, Luis Bernardo. “Ricardo Rangel e o aparecimento do foto-jornalismo em Moçambique,” Savana, 19.6.2009, Suplemento. Hunt, Nancy Rose. “Between Fiction and History. Modes of writing abortion in Africa.” Cahiers d’Études africaines XLVII, no. 2 (2007): 277–312. Hunt, Nancy Rose. “History as form, with Simmel in tow.” History and Theory Issue 56 (December 2018): 126–144.

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Magaia, Albino. “Dos Meninos da Malanga. Trajectória Política de um Escritor.” Tempo, no. 664 (3.12.1983): 52–6. Mertins, Detlef. “The enticing and threatening face of prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the utopia of glass.” Assemblage, no. 29 (April 1996): 6–23. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes. The denigration of vision in twentieth-century French thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Marra, Claudio. La idée della fotografia: la riflissione teorica dagli anni sessanta a oggi. Milano: Mondadori, 2001. Notícias, 29.10.2008. “Reportagem—Fany Mpfumo e Ricardo Rangel: Dois factores de afirmação da nação através da cultura” (honorary doctorate citation Universidade Eduardo Mondlane). Paterson, Mark. The Senses of Touch. Haptics, Affects and Technologies. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Patraquim, Luis Carlos. “Ricardo Rangel. Recordações da Rua Araújo.” Público magazine, 30.6.1991. Penvenne, Jeanne. African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican strategies and struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877–1962. Portsmouth NH: Heinemann, 1995. Penvenne, Jeanne. “Here everyone walked with fear” in Struggle for the City: Migrant Labour, Capital, and the State in Urban Africa. Ed. Frederick Cooper. London: Sage, 1983. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum, 2004. Rancière, Jacques. The Aesthetic Unconscious. Translated by Debra Keates and James Swenson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Rangel, Ricardo. “LM 1970.” Tempo, no. 3, 1970. Rangel, Ricardo. Foto-Jornalismo ou Foto-Confusionismo. Maputo: University of Eduardo Mondlane Press, 2002. Rangel, Ricardo. Pão nosso de cada noite. Santo Tirso: Marimbique, 2004. Sopa, Antonio. “Photojournalism in Mozambique” in Illuminando Vidas. Ricardo Rangel and Mozambican Photography. Eds, Bruno Z’Graggen and Grant Lee Neuenburg. Zurich: Christoph Merian Verlag, 2002. Thompson, Krista. “A sidelong glance: the practice of African diaspora art history in the United States.” Art Journal 70, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 6–31. Virilio, Paul. The Vision Machine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Z’Graggen, Bruno and Angelo Sansone. Sem Flash. Homenagem a Ricardo Rangel (1924–2009). Zurich: Sansonfilm, 2012.

Index1

A Adam, Yussuf, 462 Adanson, Michel, 110n70 Aden, 33 Adjali, Boubakar, 51 Affonso, Sarah, 275n43 Agassiz, Louis, 20–22, 20n60 Agualusa, José Eduardo, 7n18 Aguiar, Sertório de, 36 Albuquerque, Mouzinho de, 97n26, 101, 101n39 Alexandria, 14, 14n40 Algeria, 51, 327, 329, 343, 350, 354, 355 Allina, Erica, 44 Alloula, Malek, 252n30, 313, 316 Almada, 420 Almada, Arlette Fidelis de, 380n38

Almada, Fidélis Cabral de, 380 Almada, Mary Fidelis de, 380n38 Almeida, António de, 122, 134, 140, 165n65, 178, 180 Almeida, Boaventura Mendes de, 96 Almeida, João de, 160 Alvão, Domingos, 248, 248n22, 250, 250n25, 251, 284, 285n5, 288, 290, 292 Amélia, queen of Portugal, 202n22, 211 Amorim, Renato, 418 Amsterdam, 26 Andrada, 45, 418, 423, 428–431 Andrade, Lopes de, 275n43 Andreassen, Knut, 51 Angelucci, Federica, 459n46 Angers, David, 17

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 F. L. Vicente, A. D. Ramos (eds.), Photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa, 1860–1975, Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27795-5

465

466 

INDEX

Angola, 5, 6, 7n18, 9, 26, 29, 32, 32n93, 34, 35n106, 36, 39, 40, 42–44, 46–50, 52, 55–57, 60–63, 68, 68n4, 69, 80n35, 82, 97, 105n52, 117–141, 143–145, 147, 147n5, 150n12, 153–155, 157–161, 163, 164, 166, 168, 173, 186, 196n2, 217n1, 218, 244n13, 257–277, 286, 289n12, 293, 294, 296, 306, 307, 320, 325–368, 370, 372, 380, 393, 396–400, 397n11, 398n14, 398n15, 403, 407–409, 412, 413, 415, 416, 416n1, 417n5, 418, 420–422, 424, 429, 437 Angónia, 96 Ankermann, Bernhard, 181 Anthropologist, 8, 10, 56, 57, 61, 62, 125, 129, 130n41, 137, 140, 155, 165, 172, 173, 176, 180, 184, 218, 225, 305, 440 Anthropology, 8, 13, 18, 18n49, 19, 25, 56, 57, 118, 129, 135, 137, 138, 140, 143, 168, 171–174, 177, 181, 184, 188, 189, 191, 243, 302 anthropological mission, 57, 174, 176, 177, 188, 191 physical, 27, 172, 173, 176–178, 180, 184, 189 Antunes, José Maria, 163, 164, 166n67 Antunes, Maria José Lobo, 62, 169, 302n25, 305 Arabia, 33 Arago, François, 14, 18, 19 Araújo, Vasco, 300, 300n22, 301 Archive, 9, 10, 12, 21, 25, 28, 34, 42, 45, 52, 52n163, 53, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 67–69, 88n5, 118, 129, 138–140, 144, 155, 168, 184, 192, 195–216, 244n14, 260, 273,

280–284, 305, 307, 309, 312, 315–317, 319–322, 330, 357, 359, 363, 365, 368, 377–380, 383, 385, 387, 390, 402, 425 Military Historical Archive = Arquivo Histórico Militar (AHM), 87, 95, 98, 104, 108, 111 Portuguese Overseas Historical Archive = Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (AHU), 56, 117n1, 120n10, 138, 140, 221, 244n14 scientific, 68 See also Colony, colonial archive; Photography, photographic archives; Visual, archive Argentina, 46 Asia, 33, 197, 381, 417 Assubuji, Rui, 55, 116, 449n34 Assunção, Torre da, 275n43 Azevedo, Licinio, 461 Azores, 37, 181 Azoulay, Ariella Aïsha, 4, 60, 311, 318 B Bá, Xico, 378 Badsha, Farzanah, 463 Bal, Mieke, 313, 314, 317, 321, 322 Baqué, 287 Barns, Alexander, 34 Barradas, Carlos, 318 Barroca, Daniel, 53n167 Barros, Helena Corrêa de, 42 Barthes, Roland, 3 Bartmann, Saartje, 282 Báruè (Mozambique), 55, 87–116 Bastin, Marie-Louise, 439 Basto, Pinto, 95, 96, 97n25, 111 Batchen, Geoffrey, 410 Baumann, Hermann, 162, 417 Beinart, William, 200 Beira, 196n1, 199, 252n29, 271

 INDEX 

Bena-Mulumba, 38 Benguela, 46, 131, 262, 263n16 Bensusan, Arthur D., 17n45, 23n69 Bento, Diogo, 42n127 Berge, John, 88, 88n3, 89, 338 Berlin, 380, 381 East Berlin, 380, 381 Berlin Conference, 2, 35, 89, 417n3 Bernardo, Luís, 443, 446, 449 Bernatzik, Adolf, 34, 184 Besky, Sarah, 79 Bettencourt, Edmundo, 265n21 Bijagoz islands, 287 Bindau, 92 Bissau (city), 120, 260, 287, 380n38, 389, 391 Bisson, Louis-Auguste, 27 Bizarro, Clemente Joaquim Abranches, 32n93 Blanchard, Pascal, 252n30, 304n26, 316 Bleek, Dorothea Frances, 42 Bleichmar, Daniela, 72 Boas, Franz, 129, 188, 188n48 Boieiro, Catarina, 52n165 Bolama, 120 Bonaparte, Roland (Prince), 26 Bonga, 102n43, 109 Bonnevide, Blaise, 18n51 Borja, Custódio de, 71n13 Boule, Marcellin, 182n37 Bourdieu, Pierre, 459, 459n46 Bourne, Samuel, 274n39 Braga, 146 Brazil, 17, 18, 20n60, 23, 35, 48, 78, 147n5, 316, 351, 424n9 Bresson, Henri-Cartier, 50 Breuil, Henri, 182n37 Breyer, Karl, 51 Breytenbach, Cloete, 51 Bridgland, Fred, 52

467

Brito, António Júlio de, 96 Broca, Paul, 172 Brumpt, Emile, 47 Bucque, Maurice, 26 Burtt, Joseph, 44 Búzi, 206, 211, 212 Búzi River, 212 C Cabo Delgado, 114 Cabo Verde, 5, 27, 41, 286 Cabral, Amílcar, 373, 374, 376, 378, 378n29, 380, 381, 383, 391 Cabral, José, 449n34 Caconda, 122 Cadbury, William, 43, 44 Caetano, Marcelo, 275n43, 340, 356 Caldeira, Clara Roldão Pinto, 306, 306n34 Camabatela, 333, 366 Campos, Correia de, 178 Campt, Tina, 20 Canada, 313 Canary Islands, 27 Caniço, 452 Cape Ledo, 34 Cape Town, 14, 32, 110n70, 196n2 Capelo, Hermenegildo, 27 Caprivi, 50 Cardoso, Fonseca, 182n37 Carmona, Óscar, 248, 254, 266 Carolina, 20, 22 South Carolina, 20, 22 Carrisso, Luís Wittnich, 68, 69n6, 82 Cartailhac, Émile, 182n37 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 50n155, 449 Carvalho, Henrique Augusto Dias de, 36, 417n3 Carvalho, I. R., 202, 206 Carvalho, José Agapito da Silva, 165n65

468 

INDEX

Casablanca, 308 Cassanguidi, 423, 428 Castelo, Cláudia, 55, 56, 154n22 Castilho, António Feliciano, 19 Castro, Fernanda de, 275n43 Castro, Fidel, 380 Castro, Raúl, 380 Castro, Velloso de, 36, 52 Castro y Ordóñez, Rafael, 27 Cavunda (chief of Báruè people), 91 Censorship, 42–63, 298, 335, 341, 343, 351, 352, 362, 394, 396, 397, 446, 449, 458, 460 Cerejeira, Manuel (Cardinal Patriarch), 118, 248 Chamanculo, 452 Chambay, Modeste, 27 Chambo, 92 Chauvel, Geneviève, 52 Chevilly, 161 China, 6, 381 Chinde, 92, 92n13 Chipitura (chief of Báruè people), 91, 96n24, 112 Chiramba, 92, 94 Chitato, 431 Christiano Junior (José Cristiano de Freitas Henriques Júnior), 23 Chuargua, 92 Churchill, Winston, 294 Cinatti, Ruy, 178, 180 Clement, Michel, 52 Coates, Peter, 200 Coelho, Marcos, 200n15 Coimbra, 68, 73, 74, 77, 85, 273 Cole, Teju, 315 Collection, 6, 9, 18n49, 20, 23, 28, 31, 35, 46, 53–56, 62, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 80, 80n35, 87, 94, 98, 111, 113n79, 114, 116–118, 117n1, 121–135, 138–141, 144, 154n22, 155, 157n34, 174, 175, 177, 180, 184, 192, 201, 202,

221, 244, 261, 266n23, 267, 270, 286, 291, 293, 295–297, 300n23, 329, 331, 347, 367, 373, 395, 402, 403, 406–410, 410n35, 412n40, 413, 414, 453 of postcards, 7, 33, 35, 38, 45, 69, 84, 232, 248, 279–322, 337, 412, 419, 437, 438 iconographic, 68 Collector, 13, 71, 72, 74, 75, 78, 80n35, 82, 91n12, 283, 284, 293, 316, 319, 372, 416n2, 439 Colonialism, 3–5, 24, 28, 43, 46, 50, 54, 55, 61, 161, 277, 280, 282, 288, 307, 315, 316, 340, 373, 374, 403, 460 French, 316, 329 Portuguese, 57, 113, 114, 245, 317, 318, 394, 434 Colony, 7, 8, 33, 35, 36, 42–44, 46, 48–51, 54–56, 59–62, 69, 70, 85, 89, 96, 106–108, 119, 121, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 140, 143, 146, 148n7, 151–157, 165, 185, 189, 196n2, 199, 217n1, 220, 234n44, 236n51, 239, 243–246, 248, 252, 258–261, 263, 265, 267, 270, 271, 273, 275–277, 280, 281, 286–290, 295, 296, 299, 302, 310, 316, 317, 325–327, 330, 336, 341–343, 369, 370, 373, 393–396, 401–403, 407, 411, 417n5, 418, 420–422, 443 colonial archive, 21, 34, 52, 305, 312, 363, 368 colonial domination, 28, 376 colonial power, 21, 91, 145, 177, 223, 233, 250, 264, 277, 280, 334, 347, 368, 373, 388, 439 colonial process, 59, 88n1, 102, 434, 438 colonial restitution, 25–26 colonial visuality, 13, 28, 332, 337

 INDEX 

colonial world, 17, 17n44, 17n45, 22, 26, 38, 48 colonized peoples, 21, 25, 388 See also Empire, colonial empire; History, colonial; Photography, colonial; Propaganda, colonial; Violence, colonial Company, 45, 58, 59, 62, 105, 108, 109, 109n65, 196, 197n3, 198, 199, 202, 205, 207, 209, 215, 218, 225, 231, 232, 244–248, 250, 352, 418, 421, 423, 429, 431, 433, 434 Bembe Copper Mining Company, 247n20 Diamang-Diamond Company of Angola, 45, 266n23, 418 Mozambique Company = Companhia de Moçambique (CM), 58, 195–216, 244n14, 246, 247n19, 252 Conakry (city), 84, 376, 381, 391 Conakry, Republic of Guinea, 84, 376 Conchiglia, Augusta, 52 Congo, 39, 43, 326, 350, 367, 445 Belgian Congo, 39, 347 Congo Free State, 43 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), 38, 39 Contador River, 70 Cook, Eliza, 19 Corazzi, David, 261n9 Cordeiro, Luciano, 2 Correia, António Mendes, 57, 133, 135, 136, 138, 140, 171–192, 263n17 Costa, Elmano Cunha e, 56, 117–141, 121n15, 122n23, 132n50, 154–156, 154n22, 158, 184, 260–267, 263n17, 267n26, 267n27, 270, 274 Costa, Firmino Marques da, 52n166 Costa, George da, 41

469

Costa, João Martins da, 260 Coutinho, Felix, 33 Coutinho, J. B., 33 Coutinho, João de Azevedo, 55, 87, 88, 92, 92n14, 94–103, 94n20, 109, 111–113, 113n79 Coutinho, Roel, 51 Craveirinha, José, 443, 446, 448, 449, 453, 454, 458, 459 Crawford, Joan, 275n41 Cruz, Nicholas Pascoal da, 108 Cuando, 123 Cuanhama, 122, 132, 139, 264n18 Cuba, 384 Cunene (province), 121 Cunha, Jacinto da, 77 Cunha, Manuel Alves da, 137 Cunha, Paulo, 275n43 D Daguerre, Louis, 14, 15, 17 Daguerreotype, 6, 14–23, 14n40, 20n60, 23n69, 28–30, 32, 32n93 Dahomey, 41 Daman, 417n5 Dar es Salaam, 33 Daston, Lorraine, 75, 76, 80 Delachaux, Théodore, 34, 153–155, 154n20, 156n32, 161, 162 Delagoa Bay (Baia da Lagoa), 100n33 Dell, Simon, 250n25 Deniker, Joseph, 157, 161 Depara, Jean, 39 Derussy, Philippe, 17n46 Deutsch, Jean-Claude, 52 Dias, Jill, 8, 196n2 Dias, Jorge, 165n65, 176 Dias, Margot, 176 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 462 Diniz, José de Oliveira Ferreira, 266, 266n24

470 

INDEX

Direito, Bárbara, 58 Diu, 281, 417n5 Djaló, Abdulai, 388, 389, 391 Djassi, Duke, 379 Domingos, Nuno, 58 Douglas, Stan, 53 Dritsas, Lawrence, 72 Duffy, James, 49 Duggan-Cronin, A. M., 34, 184 Dundo, 416, 418, 420, 422–424, 427–431, 433, 434 Dundo National Museum, 416 Durban, 32 Durkheim, Émile, 223 E Eddington, Arthur, 35, 35n107 Edwards, Elizabeth, 187, 311, 371 Egypt, 14, 355 Ehnmark, Anders, 51, 360 Eiffel, Gustave, 26 Einseloeffel, Frits, 51 Einstein, Albert, 35 Elite, 29, 35, 56, 58, 91, 92n15, 99, 214, 231, 290, 372, 379, 380, 384, 386, 392 Empire, 4, 15, 44, 56–58, 61, 99, 105n52, 117–141, 178, 181–183, 187, 192, 206, 218, 246, 251, 259, 277, 279, 286, 287, 296, 318–322, 358, 393, 395 colonial empire, 58, 60, 93, 177, 187, 217, 233, 240, 242, 258, 277, 318, 330, 340 French Empire, 242 Gaza Empire, 37, 89, 89n6 imperial endgame, 49, 51, 326, 354–356 imperial ideology, 239, 369 imperial project, 54, 253, 259, 264, 270, 277, 424n9

Monomotapa Empire, 89 Portuguese Empire, 5, 8, 23, 34, 47, 53, 56, 59, 119, 174, 184, 245, 290, 291, 304, 416 See also History, imperial; Propaganda, imperial England, 164 Ennes, António, 99–101, 101n39 Enwezor, Okwui, 37, 40n119, 55, 442n2 Estermann, Carlos, 34, 56, 57, 119, 121–125, 122n21, 122n23, 130–132, 143–151, 153–169, 154n20, 156n32, 157n34, 158n37, 163n58, 164n62, 165n65, 166n67, 261, 263, 263n17, 264n18 Ethnic group, 26, 27, 56, 91, 121–123, 130, 139, 154, 233, 245, 333, 352 Ethnic types, 15, 19, 177 Ethnographer, 8, 56, 118–121, 134, 137, 140, 143, 144, 147, 150, 151, 153–156, 162, 164–168, 439 Ethnography, 13, 19, 56, 119, 127, 133–138, 148, 154, 157, 164, 176, 263, 264, 273n36, 311, 419 ethnographic knowledge, 147, 157–161, 168 See also Exhibitions, ethnographic; Photography, ethnographic Europe, 2, 18, 22, 23, 26, 27, 33, 104, 106, 147n5, 166, 206n25, 242, 254, 282, 310, 313, 317, 326, 330, 417, 434 Exhibitions, 7, 11, 17, 25, 26, 40n110, 48, 56, 57, 59, 60, 118, 131, 131n43, 140, 155n22, 166, 166n67, 167, 172n5, 183, 192, 206n25, 234, 239–244, 240n2, 241n3, 241n4, 246–248, 250–254, 251n27, 257–277, 281, 283, 285–289, 291, 292,

 INDEX 

300–304, 307, 309n38, 310, 319–321, 334, 396, 439, 443, 460 Botânica (Lisbon, 2014), 300, 300n22, 301, 304 British Empire Exhibition (London, 1924), 286 colonial, 44, 60, 205, 279, 284, 285, 287, 299, 315, 320 ethnographic, 13, 19, 56, 119, 127, 133–138, 148, 154, 157, 162, 176, 263, 264, 286, 311, 419 Exhibition of Angolan Ethnography (1947), 267n26 Exhibition of Female Hairstyles and Adornments of the Natives of Angola (1951), 267, 268 Exhibition of Photographs from Angola, 264 exhibition visitors, 59 Exhibition-Fair of Angola (1938), 266 Exposition Coloniale, see Exhibitions, International Colonial Exhibition) Exposition Nationale Coloniale (Marseille, 1922), 286 Historic Exposition of the Occupation (Lisbon, 1937), 241n4 Ibero-American Exposition (Seville, 1929), 241 Industrial fair of Lisbon (1932), 241n4 International Colonial Exhibition (Antwerp, 1930), 241n4, 243, 246 International Colonial Exhibition (Paris, 1931), 44 Porto Colonial Exhibition (1934), 178, 185, 192, 285n5 Portuguese Colonial Exhibition (Porto, 1934), 205, 239–255, 281, 285, 287

471

Portuguese World Exhibition (Lisbon, 1940), 119n9, 120, 131, 178, 241, 248 Retornar. Traços de Memória (Lisbon, 2015–2016), 302 Universal Exhibition (Paris, 1889), 26, 240n2, 242 F Faas, Horst, 51, 343 Farim, 386 Fascism, 50 Fernando Pó, 41 Ferrez, Marc, 23n67 Ferro, António, 48, 60, 258 Ferro, Eusébio, 111 Florence, 9 Fonseca, Branquinho da, 265n21 Fontoura, Álvaro, 180 Forças Armadas Revolucionárias do Povo = People’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARP), 375 Foucault, Michel, 176 France, 14, 46, 51, 161, 240n2, 308, 310, 316, 317, 329, 330, 343, 344, 346, 354 Francisco, Newton, 84n39 Francolon, Jean-Claude, 52 Freetown, 41, 84, 85, 442n2 Freitas, Antoine, 38, 39 Frente de Libertação de Moçambique = Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO), 51, 114, 114n81, 443, 460, 461 Frente Nacional de Libertação de Angola = National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), 357 Freyre, Gilberto, 48, 395 Frobenius, Leo, 181 Furtado, Maria Augusta, 378

472 

INDEX

G Gabon, 83–85, 84n39 Galhano, Fernando, 176 Galison, Peter, 76 Galton, Francis, 173 Galvão, Henrique, 120, 133, 244, 244n13, 245n15, 247, 248, 340, 424, 424n9 Galvão, Inês, 392 Gambôa, José R., 32 Garraio, Júlia, 302n25, 318 Gavaghan, Terence, 329n10 Geary, Christraud M., 314 Geppert, Alexander C.T., 240n2 Germany, 5, 19, 51, 144, 164, 344, 417 Ghana, 38 Gibson, Gordon, 155, 156 Gilroy, Paul, 14, 322 Glauser, Julien, 169 Glissant, Édouard, 24 Goa, 6, 33, 41, 281, 396, 417n5 Goddefroy, L.-J., 26 Goerg, Odile, 84 Gomes, Alberto, 390 Gomes, Inês Vieira, 9, 42, 42n127, 59 Gomes, Teodora, 381, 384 Gorongosa, 102, 198, 198n8, 199, 275, 275n43, 276 Gouveia, António Carmo, 54, 55, 69n6, 102 Grabner, Fritz, 181 Great Britain, 91, 100, 100n35, 105n52 Greenhalgh, Paul, 242 Gros, Jean-Baptiste-Louis, 17n46 Guebuza, Armando, 450, 460 Guedes, Maria Estela, 84n39 Guerreiro, Inês, 275n43 Guillain, Charles, 27 Guimarães, Ângela, 69

Guinea, 41, 84, 85, 184, 188, 192, 269, 274n37, 285, 355, 372, 374 Equatorial Guinea, 80 Portuguese Guinea, 120, 260 Republic of Guinea, 84, 376 Guinea-Bissau, 5, 34, 61, 62, 69, 139, 218, 285–287, 289–291, 302, 305, 306, 332, 369–393, 401, 417n5 Gungunhana, 37 Gurué, 220 Gusmão, Pedro de, 96 Gustavsson, Rolf, 51 H Haden, Charlie, 51 Hague, 26 Hartman, Saidiya, 24, 282, 321 Hayes, Patricia, 50, 63 Hedges, David, 200n15 Hedren, Tippi, 275n41 Heidegger, Martin, 1–3, 37, 48 Heintze, Beatrix, 8, 140n78, 155, 156, 160, 161 Helen of Orléans, 42 Henriques Júnior, José Cristiano de Freitas, see Christiano Junior (José Cristiano de Freitas Henriques Júnior) Henriques, Isabel Castro, 69, 69n7 Henriques, Júlio Augusto, 69–71, 73, 74, 77–83 Henschel, Alberto, 23n67 Herschel, John, 14 Hily, Louis, 32 History, 2, 3, 7, 13, 14, 19, 20, 22, 23n69, 25, 30, 46, 56, 61–63, 68, 88, 89, 99, 101, 103, 110, 113, 115, 125, 129, 140, 144, 145, 154n22, 156, 160, 160n45,

 INDEX 

161, 167, 169, 226, 233n42, 237, 237n59, 240, 258, 282–284, 292, 312, 321, 326, 330, 332, 340, 342, 350, 357, 367, 370, 371, 379, 380, 384, 393–414, 435, 442, 443, 445, 456, 462 colonial, 2, 4, 45, 60, 283, 284, 353 imperial, 31, 293, 326 natural, 13, 72, 197, 293, 433 of photography, 8, 14, 17n45, 34, 54, 61, 144, 169, 286–287 social, 30, 39, 89, 442 visual, 5, 8, 28, 55, 371 Hochberg, Gil, 25 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 19 Honwana, Luis Bernardo, 443, 446, 447, 449, 449n34 Hooker, William, 76n23 Huíla, 32n93, 119, 121, 122, 127, 131, 157, 158, 158n35, 162, 163n58, 261, 264n18 Human types, 22 See also Ethnic types Human zoos, 25, 320 Hunting, 7, 58, 182, 195–216, 273–275, 363, 433 big game, 196, 198, 199, 206, 211, 214, 214n49, 215, 215n52 See also Photography, hunting photographs Hunt, Nancy Rose, 462 Husseini, Kapiassa Nicolaus, see Adjali, Boubakar Huxley, Thomas Henry, 173 I Iberian Peninsula, 18 Identity, 4, 13, 19, 21–23, 28, 30, 38, 277, 284, 319, 322, 362, 382, 386

473

Imperialism, 38, 50, 55, 243, 282, 307 India, 6, 104, 107–110, 274n39, 281, 286, 367 State of India, 108 Indian Ocean, 33, 100, 108 Inhacate, 92 Inhambane, 91, 105 Inhangone, 96 Institutions, 7, 53, 59, 76n23, 115, 117, 134, 135, 168, 184, 190, 218, 220, 229, 229n36, 232, 235n49, 243, 244, 259, 274n37, 282, 283, 292, 320, 334, 418, 435 Centre for Colonial Studies (CEC), 260 Decolonization Committee of the United Nations, 376 General Agency of the Colonies = Agência Geral das Colónias (AGC), 119, 131–134, 138–140, 184, 244, 245, 258–260, 262n15, 267, 269n29, 270, 273, 277 General Overseas Agency (AGU), 258–260, 270, 273, 277 Geographical Missions and Colonial Research Committee = Junta das Missões Geográficas e de Investigações Coloniais (JMGIC), 134–138, 181n36, 184, 261 International Labour Organization, 229 International Monetary Fund, 229 Lisbon Geographic Society = Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa (SGL), 26, 184, 244, 267, 274n37, 334, 343 National Secretariat of Information = Secretariado Nacional de Informação (SNI), 131, 258–260, 263, 266, 267n27, 269n29, 273, 277

474 

INDEX

Institutions (cont.) National Secretariat of Propaganda = Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (SPN), 59, 60, 181n36, 258–260, 263, 265, 273, 277, 364 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 229 Smithsonian Institution, 314 United Nations (UN), 229, 329, 332, 346, 346n67, 351–355, 357, 366–367, 376, 417n5 World Bank, 229 Iraq, 394n3 Isaacman, Allen, 93, 103 Isaacman, Barbara, 91n10 Italy, 5, 19, 52 Itier, Jules, 6 Ivens, Roberto, 27 J Jacquart, Henri, 27 Jamaica, 26 Japan, 51 Jay, Martin, 5 Jensen, Otto, 34 Jerónimo, Maria, 114 Joaque, Francis W., 41 Johannsson, Anders, 51 Jordan, 409 Julien, Paul, 51 Jünger, Ernst, 333, 344 Junod, Henry A., 157, 161 K Kalinaso, 153 Kampala, 33 Keith, Arthur, 180 Kenya, 38, 198n9, 207n26, 327, 328, 329n10, 343, 347, 354

Kiev, 384, 385 Kim II Sung, 380 King, Martin Luther, 325, 352 Kinshasa, 39, 40 Kirk, John, 32 Knowledge, 2, 18n49, 25, 27, 30, 31, 35, 40, 46, 54–56, 68, 76, 82, 83, 96, 117–141, 147, 152, 156–162, 165, 168, 172, 173, 178, 181–188, 190, 192, 212, 213, 228, 229, 244, 252, 283, 284, 293, 311, 348, 429, 430, 432, 435, 438, 439 production, 67, 143, 394, 438 scientific, 156, 157, 161–164, 218, 261, 270 See also Ethnography, ethnographic knowledge; Visual, knowledge Korea, 380 North Korea, 380 Kramer, Robert, 52 Krewinkel, Ben, 52n165 Kunene, 158n35 L Laagel, Camille, 122 Labour, 11, 43–45, 48, 50, 107n62, 129, 212, 219, 220, 222–226, 222n14, 228, 229, 231, 233–237, 234n44, 340, 342, 442, 448, 449 African, 225, 228, 235, 235n49, 236 force/forced, 39, 40, 44, 45, 49, 61, 111, 113, 196n1, 223, 225, 236, 339, 340, 342, 368, 373, 458 Lagos, 41 Lamas, Maria, 262n12 Landau, Paul, 43 Langa, Sebastião, 40, 237 Langford, Martha, 408

 INDEX 

Lanhas, Fernando, 260 Laranjeiro, Catarina, 61 Lavater, Johann Caspar, 173n7 Lazarus brothers, 34 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 329 Lebovics, Herman, 250 Lecorgne, Alexandre Guillaume Louis, 27 Leopold II (king), 43 Leopóldville, 39 See also Kinshasa Lewis, Thomas, 33 Liberation movement, 50, 61, 281, 338, 372–378, 380, 380n39, 384, 387, 388, 392, 461 Libreville, 41, 84, 85 Lima, Almeida, 275n43 Lindemann, Rodolpho, 23n67 Lippmann, Ingeborg, 52 Lisbon, 9, 17–20, 18n49, 22, 23, 26, 27, 32, 51, 55, 57, 60, 77, 87, 91, 95, 97, 100, 104, 105, 108, 111, 113n79, 117n1, 118, 119n9, 120, 124, 126–128, 130–132, 161, 163n58, 166, 175, 178, 202, 203, 241n4, 247, 247n20, 248, 251, 258, 260, 263, 264n18, 266n23, 267, 267n27, 269–271, 273, 274n37, 281, 287, 293, 295, 300, 302, 318, 319, 325, 330, 334, 339, 343, 345, 346n67, 347, 356, 359, 360, 363, 369, 377, 389, 403, 408, 418, 420, 425, 426, 435, 437, 439, 458 Livingstone, David, 32, 100n35 Lobo, Alfredo, 33 Lopes, Francisco Craveiro, 275 Lourenço Marques, 63, 91, 97, 99, 100, 101n39, 207, 217, 218, 225–227, 230, 236, 237n60, 241n4, 247, 270, 271, 271n33, 271n35, 273, 275, 441–462

475

See also Maputo Lovell, James, 275n41 Luaco, 422, 423 Luanda, 28, 29, 36, 48, 139, 166, 167, 241n4, 247, 260, 275, 314, 331, 333–335, 337, 338, 342, 351, 356, 357, 359, 396, 397, 408, 409, 411, 420, 426, 427, 430 Lubango, 147n5, 158, 158n37, 165n63, 263 Luenha River, 94n19 Lugajol, 377 Luís Filipe de Bragança (prince), 69 Luizi, Nicola de, 32 Lumumba, 326 Lunda, 36, 417, 417n3, 417n4, 418, 421–427, 429, 433, 435, 436, 438 Lupata Gorge, 89 Luque, Alba Martín, 9 Lutterodts (family), 41 Luxilo, 423 M Macanga, 96 Macau, 6, 286, 445 Macedo, Joaquim Pereira de, 270 Macequece, 88n5, 90 Machado, Francisco José Vieira, 120, 132, 139 Machado, Manuel de Sousa, 36 Machava, 218 Machel, Samora, 460 Madeira, 181 Mafunda, 92 Maganja da Costa, 96, 113n79 Makololo, 100n35 Malange, 421 Malawi, 99, 114, 114n82 Malheiro, Ricardo, 271 Mali, 38

476 

INDEX

Malinowski, Bronisław, 129 Malmer, Lennart, 51 Malta, Eduardo, 289–291 Maludi, 423, 428 Manaus, 20n60 Manica, 89, 90, 114n82, 196, 199n10, 207, 246, 247 Manuel Jorge River, 70 Maputo, 32, 63, 99, 270, 442, 443, 450, 460–462 Maquinasse, Daniel, 40 Margarido, Alfredo, 69 Marker, Chris, 50 Marques, Ana Martins, 311 Marques, Sezinando, 417, 417n3 Marseille, 100, 286 Martins, Eduardo A. de Azambuja, 102 Martins, Leonor Pires, 9 Martins, Luciana, 78 Martins, Rogério, 223n18 Massamba, 92 Massangano, 90, 109, 109n65 Mateus, Catarina, 55, 56 Matola, 218, 448, 460 Matola River, 448 Matosinhos, 260 Matos, Norton de, 47 Matos, Patrícia Ferraz de, 57 Maugham, Reginald C.F., 207 Mauritius, 27, 32 Maxwell, Anne, 241n3 Mayor, Gregóire, 154 Mbanza Congo (São Salvador), 39 Mbembe, Achille, 110, 316 McIntosh, S.J., 51 Mead, Margaret, 171 Medeiros, Maria de, 330 Medeiros, Paulo de, 306 Mehmet, Khedive, 14 Meinhard, Heinrich, 417 Mello, Thomaz de, 273 Melo, Djindjon de, see Melo, João Henriques de Melo

Melo, Eduardo Trigo de, 41 Melo, João Henriques de Melo, 41 Memphis, 325 Menezes, Fernando de Magalhães e, 97 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 443n7 Michener, James, 275n41 Milange, 220 Mingam, Alain, 52 Minho, 133 Minnesota, 9 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 4 Missionary, 6, 10, 29, 44, 56, 57, 99, 121–123, 125, 137, 144, 145, 147, 147n5, 150, 151, 153, 156–164, 163n58, 164n62, 167–169, 181, 251, 351 Missions, 39, 55, 57, 98, 100, 104, 120, 135, 138, 153, 154, 158–163, 158n40, 163n58, 166, 174, 176, 177, 188, 191, 243, 246, 257, 259–264, 267, 353, 372, 417n3 civilizing, 30, 43, 115, 129, 240, 250, 252 diplomatic, 380, 381 See also Anthropology, anthropological mission Missongue, 91, 92, 96, 97, 102 Mitman, Gregg, 119n7 Moçâmedes, 118 See also Namibe Mofokeng, Santu, 13 Moginqual River, 99 Moholy-Nagy, László, 449 Moigno, Abbé, 22 Möller, Adolfo Frederico, 70, 71, 71n13, 71n14, 73–75, 83 Mombasa, 33 Monard, Albert, 162 Mondzain, Marie-José, 327, 367 Mónico, João, 169 Moniz, Júlio Botelho, 97, 339, 343

 INDEX 

Monomotapa, 17, 89 Montague, Kenneth, 322 Monteiro, Armindo, 118, 119, 240, 245, 247 Moraes, Abílio da Cunha, 32 Moraes, José Augusto Cunha, 261n9 Mories, Branca, 169 Moscow, 381 Moxico, 124, 421 Mozambique, 5, 6, 7n18, 15, 17, 23, 31–34, 36, 37, 40, 42, 51, 52, 55, 58, 60, 62, 63, 68, 69, 87–116, 157, 176–178, 191, 195–237, 257–277, 286, 296, 306, 332, 356, 358, 370, 372, 380, 393, 396, 401, 411, 417n5, 441–462 Democratic Republic of Mozambique, 114n81 Muantianvua, 266n23 Mucombeze River, 94n19 Mucua River, 94n19 Muite River, 99 Mulder, Françoise de, 52 Muller, Nicolás, 50 Mungari, 91, 112 Mupa, 122, 158, 163n58 Museum, 13, 18, 18n49, 53, 60, 197, 202, 203, 204n23, 205, 207, 209, 282, 283, 320, 416, 416n1, 425, 426, 429, 439 Dundo Museum, 173, 266n23, 418 (see also Dundo National Museum) Huila Museum (Sá da Bandeira), 166 museum of anthropology, 18n49 Museum of Anthropology of the University of Porto = Museu Antropológico da Universidade do Porto (MAUP), 184 Museum of the Armed Forces (Luanda), 356

477

National Museum of Natural History and Science (Lisbon), 55 Natural History Museum (Lisbon), 197, 293 Peabody Museum (Harvard), 20 Mussolini, 48 Muxungué, 114 N Nairobi, 328 Namarrais, 97 Namibe, 118 Namibia, 38, 63 Naturalist, 58, 68, 70–73, 78, 80n35, 84n39, 110n70, 196, 197, 207, 254, 293 Ndombasi, Emmanuel, 39 Ndombélé, Philippe, 39 Negage, 333, 360 Nemésio, Vitorino, 275, 275n43 Netherlands, 5, 19, 51 Neto, Agostinho, 356, 380 Neuchâtel, 153, 157 Neves, Jaime, 106 New York, 60, 326, 329, 346n67, 355 Newman, Philip, 429 Ngaimoko, Ambroise, 39 Ngungunyane (King of Gaza Empire), 89n6 Nhamatema, 114 Nhapando, 92 Niassa, 450, 460, 461 Nigeria, 38, 41 Nilsson, Hillevi, 51 Nogar, Rui, 453, 458 Norway, 51 Nova Moka, 71n14 Novais, Mário, 265n21 Nunes, Herculano, 247, 247n20 Nunes, Jacinto, 275n43

478 

INDEX

O Obermaier, Hugo, 182n37 Odumosu, Temi, 314 Ogawa, Tadahiro, 51 Oliveira, Agostiniano de, 62, 415–440 Oliveira, Ernesto Veiga de, 176 Oliveira, Joana Gonçalo, 302, 303 Oliveira, Marcus Vinicius de, 9 Omupanda, 158, 161 Orléans, Hélène of (Duchess of Aosta), 42, 202n22, 211, 214, 214n49 Ory, Pascal, 240n2 Owondo, Alphonse, 41, 83–85, 84n39 P Pacheco, Duarte, 46 Padwe, Jonathan, 79 Palm, Göran, 51 Papim, see Melo, Eduardo Trigo de Pardal, José, 209 Paris, 14, 17, 17n46, 18, 27, 39, 47, 60, 195, 241n4, 242, 246, 247, 286 Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde = African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo-Verde (PAIGC), 374–388, 378n29, 391 Paterson, Mark, 443n7 Paul VI (Pope), 380, 380n39 Peck, Gregory, 275n41 Pedro II (Emperor), 20n60 Pedro, Júlio, 418 Pedro, Manuel, 39 Peffer, John, 24 Peixoto, Rocha, 182n37 Pélissier, René, 106, 336, 352, 355n105, 366 Penvenne, Jeanne Marie, 221, 237 Peralta, Elsa, 302, 303 Pereira, Benjamim, 176

Pereira, Carmen, 384 Pereira, Francisca, 377, 378, 380, 384 Pereira, João de Faria Machado Pinto Roby de Miranda, 97 Pereira, Manoel Romão, 36 Pereira, Teresa Matos, 128 Photographer, 14, 15, 17, 23, 23n67, 26–28, 31–33, 36, 38–42, 42n128, 48, 50, 50n155, 51, 55, 56, 68, 77, 78, 83–85, 93, 97, 103, 115, 118–121, 123, 125, 126n36, 129, 133, 134, 137, 140, 141, 143, 148n7, 151, 154, 157, 164, 165, 174, 183n40, 184, 184n41, 190, 191, 201, 211, 219, 237, 248n22, 250, 254, 265n21, 268, 269, 271, 274n39, 276, 284, 287, 288, 292, 304, 310, 311, 314, 315, 329, 333, 343, 362, 376, 377, 401, 403, 411, 412, 418–421, 423–437, 439–441, 443, 445, 446, 449, 449n34, 456, 461, 462 African, 14, 39–41, 85 black, 38, 40, 41, 77, 83, 84, 313, 445 pioneer, 10, 37 Photographic studios, 6n16, 32, 33, 41, 49, 284, 285, 314, 315, 420 A. [Andrew] Pereira de Lord, 33 A. C. Gomes and Son, 33 Coutinho brothers, 33 E. C. Dias, 33 Focus, 445 Fotografia Alvão, 284 Foto Melo Photography Studio, 41 Foto Portuguesa, 445 Foto Sousa, 445 J. B. Coutinho, 33 Photography cartes-de-visite, 28, 35 colonial, 3, 5, 6, 13, 14, 18n51, 30, 40, 233, 267n25, 315, 425

 INDEX 

conflict, 12 ethnographic, 13, 19, 56, 117–119, 127, 133–138, 145, 148, 154, 157, 162, 176, 201, 263, 264, 311, 419 hunting photographs, 7, 58, 182, 195–216, 273–275, 363, 433 negatives, 14 photo-album, 35, 36, 150, 380, 395, 404n26, 413 photographic archives, 53, 60, 69n6, 129, 196, 200, 202, 202n19, 202n21, 244n14, 273 photographic camera, 2, 36n109, 37, 46, 54, 62, 398 photographic canon, 5 photographic collection, 9, 55, 56, 62, 118, 121–130, 133, 138–141, 144, 154n22, 414 Photographic Colonial Agency, 62, 415–440 photographic exhibition, 48, 60, 257–277 photographic images, 3, 19, 47, 54, 59, 68, 87, 118, 144, 148n7, 172, 198, 217–237, 239–255, 257–277, 279, 280, 312, 325–368, 371, 394, 417, 425, 426, 437, 441, 445 photographic portraits, 15, 18, 50, 161–164, 250, 315 photographic postcards, 7, 33, 35, 38, 45, 60, 69, 81, 84, 232, 248, 250, 277, 279–322, 337, 412, 419, 437, 438 photography studies, 5, 21 police, 15 portraits, 15, 17–19, 23n67, 24, 26–28, 31, 37, 42, 101, 125, 127, 132, 148n7, 156, 159, 160, 173, 182, 189, 203, 237n60, 248–255, 289, 290, 300, 303, 304, 312, 315, 362,

479

399–401, 406, 407, 410, 437, 455 war photographs, 88, 114, 388–390, 395–402 See also History of photography Picasso, Pablo, 288 Pinto, Serpa, 27, 31, 100 Pires, Manuel, 287 Pocock, Mary, 42 Pollen, Annabella, 410 Pomar, Alexandre, 52n166 Ponta Delgada, 175 Ponte, Inês, 56, 57 Poole, Deborah, 17n44, 280 Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), 357, 396 Porte, Marcus, 18 Porto, 18n51, 32, 100, 175, 176, 243–248, 250, 251, 253, 258, 260, 273, 284, 285, 287, 289–291 Porto, Nuno, 8, 62, 133, 173 Portraits, see Photography, photographic portraits Portugal, 8, 9, 23, 27, 28, 32, 35, 44, 46, 48–50, 50n155, 54, 56, 60, 62, 71, 77, 78, 80n35, 89, 91, 97, 100, 100n35, 101n40, 102, 105n52, 112, 118, 119, 119n9, 144, 163n58, 164, 165n63, 175, 178, 182, 187n45, 191, 192, 202n22, 211, 222n13, 229, 239–241, 241n4, 243–248, 247n21, 252, 259, 260, 261n9, 263, 263n16, 265, 265n21, 267, 270–273, 282–287, 292–294, 296, 298, 300, 302, 307, 310, 316, 330–332, 334, 334n17, 335, 339, 339n36, 340, 344–348, 347n70, 351–357, 359–361, 364–366, 369–373, 380n39, 387–391, 393, 403, 407–409, 411, 416–418, 429n14, 445, 447

480 

INDEX

Portuguese New State (Estado Novo), 56, 59, 62, 101n40, 117–120, 119n9, 143–169, 181, 241, 244, 244n13, 248, 248n22, 258, 275, 393, 395 Postcards, see Collection, of postcards; Photography, photographic postcards Praia (city), 41 Pratt, Mary Louise, 386 Príncipe (island), 5, 35, 41, 44, 68–73, 68n4, 80, 81, 83, 84n39, 183, 184 Pringle, Peter, 51 Prochaska, David, 298 Propaganda, 11, 42–63, 131, 201, 206, 215, 237, 240n1, 245–248, 247n19, 254, 258, 259, 263, 264n19, 266, 270, 277, 287, 330, 331, 333–336, 341–343, 349, 356, 363, 366, 368, 394, 395, 399, 401, 414, 434 colonial, 132, 138, 140, 190, 243, 244, 259, 289, 315, 357, 377 imperial, 122, 258, 264 Portuguese, 234, 376 leaflets, 60, 259, 279, 315 See also Institutions, National Secretariat of Propaganda = Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (SPN) Punguè river, 94n19 Q Queiroz, José Maria d’Eça de, 275n43 Quelimane, 92, 92n13 Quintas, Francisco Dias, 71, 71n13, 71n14, 73–75, 77–79, 81–83, 85 Quintas, José António Dias, 71, 71n14

R Racism, 20, 21, 198, 235, 282, 296, 298, 427 scientific, 20 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 4, 5 Ramos, Afonso Dias, 61, 397n11 Ramos, Armando, 381 Rancière, Jacques, 444, 447 Rangel, Ricardo, 40, 40n119, 50, 63, 237, 237n60, 441–462 Reis, João, 447 Resende, Flávio, 275n43 Resistance, 25, 31, 32, 36, 38, 55, 61, 62, 99, 101, 103, 108, 112, 114, 115, 176, 215, 255, 280, 288, 291, 332, 361, 374, 381, 383 Resistência Nacional de Moçambique (Renamo), 114, 114n81, 114n82, 460 Rhodesia, 99, 100n35, 105n52, 348 Southern Rhodesia, 58, 199 (see also Zimbabwe) Ribeiro, Almeida, 275n43 Ribeiro, António Sousa, 12n36, 370n2, 387n57 Ribeiro, Orlando, 275n43 Rita-Ferreira, António, 107, 218, 225, 236, 236n54 Rituals, 94, 126–128, 132, 135, 267, 377, 412 Roças, 69, 71, 71n14, 80 Rodrigues, Sofia da Palma, 392 Rohan-Chabot, Jacques de, 34 Romare, Ingela, 51 Roque, Ricardo, 169 Rosa, 253, 254, 281, 284–292, 320 Rosa, Francesca de, 318 Rosinha, see Rosa Rosita, see Rosa Rothschild, Arthur de, 26 Rufino, José dos Santos, 36, 234, 234n44 Ryzova, Lucie, 4

 INDEX 

S Sá da Bandeira, 147n5, 158, 162, 166, 166n67, 167, 263 See also Lubango Sá, Luis Correa de, 403 Sachs, Albie, 449n33 Said, Edward, 313 Saint-Louis (Senegal), 29 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 50n155, 56, 59, 118, 120, 133, 239, 240, 243–247, 257, 258, 334, 339–344, 353, 395n5, 397 Sanden, Pér, 50, 51n157 Sangara, 92 Santiago Island, 41 Santimano, Sergio, 449n34 Santos, Delfim, 275n43 Santos, Emmanuel, 39 Santos Júnior, Joaquim Rodrigues, 136 Santos Júnior, Norberto, 171n1, 191 Santos, Manecas dos, 378, 379, 386 Santos, Manuel (pseud.), 39, 407–409, 411–414 Santos, Marcelino dos, 380 São Tomé and Príncipe, 5, 35n107, 41, 44, 68–71, 68n4, 71n13, 73, 80, 81, 83, 183, 184 Saramago, José, 326, 355 Schachtzabel, Alfred, 34 Schefer, Raquel, 52n165 Schmidt, Wilhelm, 164n62, 181 Schouten, Maria Johanna, 180 Schwarcz, Lilia Moritz, 309n38 Science natural, 72, 77, 162 social, 13, 57, 143–145, 151, 156n32, 165, 169 Scott, James, 79 Seager, D. W., 14 Secca, Mário Fernandes, 223n18 Secord, Anne, 76n22

481

Segurado, Adrião, 275n43 Sekula, Allan, 17 Sena, 32, 88n5, 108, 111 Senegal, 29, 38, 298, 372 Serres, Étienne, 18, 18n49, 19, 21, 22, 22n64 Severo, Ricardo, 182n37 Shipanga, Andreas, 50 Shire River, 100n35 Shona-Karanga (Chona-­ Caranga), 94n19 Sierra Leone, 41, 77, 84, 85 Sila, Titina, 384 Silva, Calane da, 443–444, 446, 458 Silva, Denise Ferreira da, 25 Silva, João Augusto, 273–276, 273–274n37, 274n40, 276n44 Silveira, José Nunes da, 32 Simmel, Georg, 441, 447 Slavery, 20n60, 22, 23, 26, 27, 43, 49, 61, 196n1, 282, 315, 316, 439 enslaved people, 20n61, 23 slave trade, 22 Slimani, Leïla, 308, 316 Smith, Charles Piazzi, 32 Soares, Ana Maria, 290n14, 379, 384 Sobral (Brazil), 35 Socone, 220 Sofala, 15, 17, 21–24, 23n69, 26–28, 31, 89, 196, 197, 207, 213, 246, 247, 275 Solms, Filipe de, 271 Sontag, Susan, 2, 210, 274, 274n39, 327, 333 Sopa, António, 270n32 Soromenho, Fernando Castro, 133, 137 Sousa, Albano Neves e, 260 Sousa, Júlio de, 262, 262n12 Sousa, Manuel António de, 102n43 Soustelle, Jacques, 329

482 

INDEX

South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), 50 Soviet Union, 381, 382, 384 Spee, Rudi, 50, 51n157 Spínola, António de, 374 Stahl, Augusto, 23n67 Steffen, Don Carl, 52 Steinhart, Edward I, 210, 210n37 Stepan, Nancy Leys, 78 Struk, Janina, 410n35 Stübel, Alphons, 27 Swan, Charles A., 44 Sweden, 51, 360 Switzerland, 144, 164, 345 T Tambara, 92, 92n14, 92n15, 94 Tavares, Abel, 178, 179 Tavares, Emília, 264n19, 265n21, 300, 300n22, 301 Teixeira, Constantino, 378 Teixeira, José Augusto, 32 Teixeira, Silva, 223 Tete, 88n5, 106 Thierry, J., 17n46 Thiésson, E., 15–19, 17n46, 22, 27, 31 Thompsell, Angela, 214, 214n49 Thompson, Drew, 9, 47 Timor, 133, 180, 192, 286 East Timor, 6, 417n5 Todd, David, 34, 35n106 Tomás, Américo, 49 Tonga, 94, 94n19, 98 Touré, Sekou, 376, 391 Tribe, 122, 128, 132, 134, 157, 261, 266 Angolan, 120, 262, 266 Botocudo, 17 Tuck, Eve, 25 Tungue Bay, 99

Twain, Mark, 43 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 172 U Ukraine, 384 União dos Povos de Angola = Union of the Peoples of Angola (UPA), 332, 351–353, 356, 357, 359, 362, 363, 366, 396 United Kingdom (UK), 144, 310, 312, 316, 348, 360, 429n14 United States of America (USA), 20, 20n60, 28, 34, 48, 50n155, 51, 144, 158n40, 200n16, 340, 347, 352, 354n99 University, 20, 60, 68–73, 184, 229, 229n36, 282, 316, 320 Brown University, 321 University of British Columbia, 62 University of Coimbra (UC), 68–71, 69n7, 71n13, 118 University of Lisbon, 58 University of Porto, 57, 176, 261n9 University of the Western Cape, 63 V Valle Flôr, Marquis, 44 Vargaftig, Nadia, 59, 241n4 Vasconcelas, Otilio de, 445 Vasconcelos, João, 42n127 Vasse, Guillaume, 207 Vatican, 158n35, 380n39 Venezuela, 46 Vera, Yvonne, 1 Vicente, Filipa Lowndes, 45 Vidal, Antonino, 69n7 Vieira, Carlos Alberto, 445 Vieira, Nino, 388 Vila Henrique de Carvalho, 422 Vila Paiva de Andrada, 422

 INDEX 

Vilhena, Ernesto Jardim de, 416, 416n2 Violence, 19, 24, 28, 43, 44, 48, 50, 60, 61, 112, 113, 115, 222, 222n14, 231, 279–322, 326–328, 332, 337–349, 351–354, 357, 359, 360, 362, 363, 366–368, 391, 394n3, 396, 401, 403, 404n26, 407, 414, 427 colonial, 25, 305, 332, 340, 360, 403 political, 327 racial, 24, 25 sexual, 12, 305, 307, 316, 318 Visual, 2, 4–8, 13–15, 21, 23n69, 26–28, 30, 33, 35, 37, 38, 43, 44, 46–52, 52n162, 54–57, 60, 62, 78, 82, 88, 94, 110, 114, 125, 144, 145, 148, 150, 151, 154, 156–161, 163, 166, 169, 182, 203, 218, 219, 226, 232–237, 243, 245, 248, 264, 267, 273, 277, 279–284, 286, 288–292, 299, 305–313, 315–317, 319, 322, 326, 327, 332–334, 343, 354–356, 363–365, 367, 371, 379, 394, 396, 400–403, 405, 406, 410–412, 412n40, 414, 416, 426, 437, 439, 440, 456 archive, 28, 52n163, 53, 68, 280, 307, 309, 312, 315–317, 322, 402 document, 21, 306 economy, 5, 51, 280 footage, 53 knowledge, 2 media, 2, 44, 50, 62 regimes, 4 representation, 25, 47, 51, 57, 62, 222, 277, 298, 312, 318, 326, 394, 396, 399, 404 See also History, visual Vunduzi, 92 Vunvuti, 92

483

W War, 28, 44, 46, 49, 50, 52, 61, 62, 88, 92n15, 101n37, 102, 104, 105, 105n52, 107, 109, 111, 113, 114, 114n81, 115, 166, 182, 217, 237, 281, 289, 294, 306, 307, 318, 326–328, 330, 332, 335, 339, 342, 343, 346, 347, 351, 354, 355–357, 359, 361, 362, 366–372, 374, 375, 377–380, 382, 384, 386–404, 406, 407, 407n30, 408, 411–413, 416, 416n1, 458–461 Cold War, 380, 382, 383, 392 colonial war, 39, 61, 62, 102, 258, 283, 300n23, 305n29, 306, 319, 320, 369–414 decolonization war, 12n37, 61, 327, 330, 332, 368 First World War, 145, 326 liberation struggle, 61, 369–392 Second Anglo-Boer War, 294 Second World War, 121, 154, 222, 244n13, 294, 318, 326, 369, 415, 429n14 war godmother, 399, 400, 409, 411–413 World War I (see First World War) See also Photography, war photographs Warburg, Aby, 302 Wayne, John, 275n41 Weems, Carrie Mae, 20 Weinert, Hans, 182n37 Welwitsch, Friedrich, 80n35 Wessing, Koen, 51 Westermann, Diedrich, 164n62 Wilder, Kelley, 119n7 Williams, Mennen, 48 Willis, Deborah, 315, 316, 322 Wiriyamu, 51, 356

484 

INDEX

Woodberry, Billy, 52 Woodward, Arthur, 182n37 Worm, Júlio, 132 X Xai Xai, Queen of, 23, 23n69 Xavier, Sandra, 82 Y Yang, K. Wayne, 25 Yugoslavia, 384

Z Zagourski, Casimir, 40 Zambezi river, 89, 91, 92n13, 99 Valley, 88n1, 89, 90, 102n43, 108n64, 114 Zambezia, 90n8, 97, 101, 109, 220 Zangue River, 94n19 Zanzibar, 33 Zealy, Joseph T., 20 Zimbabwe, 96, 114n82, 199 Zola, Émile, 26 Zululand, 100n33, 200n15, 212n39