Portugal established its first outposts on what is today the coast of Angola in the late fifteenth century. It only abandoned this territory in 1975. However, the notion that the Portuguese ruled Angola for five centuries, which became a propaganda punchline for the Salazar regime, was a myth. Until the late nineteenth century, the empire only controlled a spattering of fortifications, mostly along the coast. Beyond these bulwarks, Lisbon’s power remained, at best, nominal. Portuguese domination of Angola only began in earnest at the turn of the twentieth century. Through a succession of military campaigns, Portugal gradually subdued the Angolan interior.
The historiography on Portuguese colonialism in Angola is vast. However, it is highly uneven. Most scholars have concentrated on the war of independence of 1961–74 and on the economic, cultural, and social underpinnings of late colonial rule in Angola.Footnote 1 Further back in time, there is a corpus of literature on the transatlantic slave trade, where Angola served as a crucial hub until this “business” petered out in the 1840–60s.Footnote 2 The intervening period, between the demise of slavery in the mid-nineteenth century and the consolidation of direct colonial control under the Estado Novo, has attracted limited historiographic attention. Yet this period was crucial for the transition from slave-based commercial domination to modern imperialism. Violence shaped this process, which consisted in the de facto subjugation of territories that Lisbon had only controlled de jure, if at all. These military campaigns shattered or prostrated African power structures and replaced them with, or subsumed them under, Portugal’s administrative machinery.
This article examines Portugal’s military expedition in southern Angola in 1915. The campaign primarily targeted the Ovambo peoples, who inhabit the middle reaches of the Cunene River straddling the border with modern Namibia and had staged a major uprising in the aftermath of a Portuguese-German border dispute in late 1914. The Portuguese campaign was important for several reasons. Firstly, because of its unprecedented scale and cruelty, which, I will argue, amounted to a genocide. Secondly, because this expedition was a crucial turning point in the subjugation of the Angolan interior. Thirdly, because this episode enriches our general understanding of colonial violence and its connection with genocide. Fourthly, because these campaigns had a considerable impact on Portugal’s First Republic, as they propelled a generation of colonial officers whose authoritarian demeanour contributed to the rise of dictatorship in the 1920s.
This campaign has attracted little historiographic attention. Patricia Hayes and Emmanuel Kreike wrote excellent general histories of the Ovambo.Footnote 3 Authors such as Märta Salokoski, Meredith McKittrick, Napandulwe Shiweda, and Kletus Likuwa, have focused on particular aspects of the region’s history, such as social hierarchy, forced labour, and religion.Footnote 4 However, these studies mostly concentrate on southern Ovamboland, under German and (after 1915) South African control. They pay limited attention to Portuguese policies north of the border and treat the 1915 campaign in passing. René Pélissier’s 1978 magnum opus on colonial campaigns in Angola devotes a chapter to the events of 1915.Footnote 5 However, Pélissier wrote this work during the Angolan war of independence, which, as he admitted, restricted his access to archival material. Portuguese military histories of the First World War comment on the violence of 1915 in Angola. These studies seldom analyse events on the ground in any detail, taking the campaigns in south Angola as a sidenote in Portugal’s road to intervention in the First World War in March 1916. When they do, they usually focus on narrowly military matters.Footnote 6 These works do not examine the savagery of the Portuguese army, possibly reflecting a certain “colonial amnesia” (which is certainly not unique to Portugal).Footnote 7 Jakob Zollman’s study of the First World War in Angola is very sensitive to colonial violence, although he prioritizes the Portuguese-German border dispute.Footnote 8 For their part, comparative studies on colonial violence rarely contemplate the Portuguese case study.Footnote 9
This article sheds light on the broader significance of this campaign for the strengthening of Portuguese colonialism in Angola. Rather than focusing on the military aspects of the expedition, which are well-known, this study concentrates on the understudied repression meted out after the defeat of the Ovambo. The article uses a variety of sources, ranging from Portuguese army documents, German archival materials, and autobiographies of fighters. An important source are the minutes of the so-called secret sessions of the Portuguese parliament, which extensively discussed massacres in southern Angola. Although these minutes were published in the 2000s and are widely known among historians of the Portuguese Republic, they remained an underutilized source for scholars of Angola. Another vital source are the documents of the Portuguese reparations’ commission at the Versailles peace conference, which shed light on the events of 1915 with extraordinary detail. These reports include countless interviews with African eyewitnesses conducted in September 1919. They provide an invaluable African account on the war. Since the article is based heavily on Portuguese sources, it uses Portuguese orthography for Ovambo terms to avoid confusion (rather than the English- and Finnish-based standards) and avoids Bantu-language plural prefixes (opting, for example, for lenga instead of omalenga), except for the commonly used Ovambo.
Subordinating the Hinterland
Despite longstanding Portuguese presence in southwest Africa, Angolan territory under Lisbon’s direct control was minuscule until the late nineteenth century. This is not to say that the Portuguese footprint in this territory was insignificant. On the contrary, Portugal reshaped social relations in the region. But this largely owed to European commercial prowess rather than to military control.Footnote 10 The Portuguese traded guns, alcohol, and fabrics for wax, ivory, and, most importantly, slaves. A complex patchwork of political coalitions developed around this commerce. Military force played an auxiliary role in this system, protecting trade routes and helping do or undo alliances.Footnote 11 In southern Angola, Lisbon’s influence was even shakier. Portugal only founded its first major outpost in the area, Moçâmedes, in 1840. Its commercial influence gradually spread eastwards, where the outskirts of the Namib Desert end abruptly at the lush and cool Huila plateau. Ovambo and Humbe chiefs in the region struck trade deals with the Europeans, but they remained jealous of their independence.
The Berlin Conference of 1884–85, which inaugurated the so-called scramble for Africa, gave a shakeup to traditional Portuguese complacency in Angola. Turning Angola into a viable possession was above all a military endeavour that demanded the subordination of independent peoples. This was done through a succession of military expeditions that were common to all colonial powers.Footnote 12 The Portuguese colonial army staged countless such campaigns at the turn of the century. Pereira d’Eça, a colonial army officer and one of the protagonists of the 1915 campaign, set out the rationale of these expeditions with remarkable clarity:
The overseas army has the aim of dominating the nation’s colonies, therefore its mission is to either subdue the people who inhabit a region already under national rule, but that has rebelled against the established authority; or to occupy territory where the action of colonial rule has not been felt; and finally to ensure the complete pacification of the territory, so that trade, agriculture and industry may develop freely.Footnote 13
The imposition of direct Portuguese administration involved the payment of taxes (mostly in kind) and the provision of army conscripts and forced labourers. The latter (often a euphemism for slaves) became critical for the building of infrastructures and, increasingly, for the operation of new mines and plantations. Unsurprisingly, Lisbon’s efforts to extend its fiscal and administrative apparatus into the interior met intense African opposition. Genipro da Cunha, a Portuguese colonial officer, candidly explained the reasons for this resistance:
Whatever the immediate causes […], there will always be in Angola, as in every place where peoples are subjected to a foreign yoke, a ferment of revolt against the dominator. The revolts that have occurred […] are manifestations of that spirit of independence that characterizes the entire human race.Footnote 14
The establishment of the First Portuguese Republic in 1910 added momentum to efforts to subdue the colonial hinterland. Republicans espoused an aggressive imperialist vision that sought to strengthen the empire and exploit it along modern capitalist lines. Yet progress was painstakingly slow. This was due to the determination of the African peoples, but also to the limited reach of the Portuguese army. In the words of officer Genipro da Cunha:
The extreme dispersion of our force, the resulting insufficiency of our units and the enormity of the territory that we intend to occupy… makes it impossible to deal effectively with revolts when they break out…. The intervention of [our] force is slow and lacks the intensity that would be necessary to instil into the natives [gentio] a notion of our undisputable superiority.Footnote 15
The Ovambo
Explorations into southern Angola in the 1840s sparked the interest of the colonialists. This was a fertile region with mild weather. However, in the early twentieth century, the territory remained unproductive for the colonial economy and white settlement proceeded slowly. The Ovambo peoples inhabiting the middle reaches of the Cunene River resisted Portuguese designs. They were divided into the militaristic chieftaincies, most importantly the Cuanhama (Kwanyama), Cuamato (Ombandja), and Evale, which were used to waging war with their Humbe (Nkhumbi) and Nhaneca (Nyanyeka) neighbours, to which they were closely related (see Fig. 1).Footnote 16 They beat back repeated Portuguese assaults.Footnote 17
Map of Southern Angola.
The transformations brought about by colonial encroachment had a profound destabilizing effect on Ovambo society. The arrival of firearms in the nineteenth century increased intercommunal violence. Cattle netted in raids funded weapon purchases, which in turn facilitated even more aggressive raids and counterraids. The rinderpest epizootic decimated animal husbandry in Angola in the late 1890s. The 1890–1900s were decades of violence, hunger, and dislocation in southern Angola.Footnote 18 On the eve of the First World War, Portugal scored major victories against the Evale and the Cuamato, and built forts in their territory. However, Portuguese control of these realms was shaky, while the Cuanhama continued to resist.Footnote 19 “The Ovambo tribes,” wrote German agronomist Paul Vageler after visiting the region in 1914, “are by no means subdued, despite the forts established in their territory.”Footnote 20
Strong leadership hardened the resolve of the Ovambo. Mandume ya Undemufayo ascended to the Cuanhama throne in 1911. Combining ruthlessness and flexibility, the new soba (king) was a reformist who sought to adapt the Cuanhama to the disruptions brought about by colonial penetration and to defend his people’s independence.Footnote 21 However, the Ovambo were not Lisbon’s only bugbear in this region. South of the Cunene, in German South West Africa (modern Namibia), another powerful enemy threatened Portuguese rule: the German Empire. Berlin’s quest to expand into Portuguese territory was an open secret. This encroachment did not happen in a vacuum. German authorities cultivated alliances on the Angolan side of the border. They tried to woo local Afrikaner settlers, who had migrated to the region in the 1880s and whose relations with the Portuguese were tense. However, in a potential clash with Portugal, the key actor would be the indigenous population. The Portuguese feared the Ovambo would rise in case of a German attack. The Germans had established close commercial and diplomatic connections with the Cuanhama. “Before the war the Germans often came to buy livestock,” recalled Chimanda, a local chief.Footnote 22 Lisbon pictured a nightmare scenario: that a German incursion would coincide with an Ovambo uprising. This is what happened in 1914–15.
The Naulila Incident and the “Native Rebellion,” 1914–15
The outbreak of the First World War increased Lisbon’s misgivings. Tensions ran high on the Angola-South West Africa border in the middle months of 1914. In October 1914, a Portuguese patrol came across a small German army mission in Angolan territory near the fort of Naulila. The encounter ended with the killing of the Germans. Over the following weeks, Germany carried out a succession of retaliatory incursions, which culminated with the assault of the Naulila fort and the killing of most of its garrison in December 1914. The Germans then withdrew into South West Africa, which was being attacked by South African forces as part of the Allied war effort.Footnote 23
Fearing an all-out German invasion, the Portuguese army retreated chaotically from the border area. This, in turn, provoked a major indigenous uprising. Sources speak of a “native rebellion,” although this is only partially true. West of the Cunene, in Humbe, the uprising dislodged the tenuous Portuguese presence. Further west and north, in Nhaneca territory around Gambos, it amounted to a spate of violent protests against the Portuguese and their local allies, which included riots, the destruction of tax records, and guerrilla attacks.Footnote 24 João Freitas, a Portuguese merchant from the region, reported: “West of Humbe, there were no armed rebellions, and in Gambos the presence of different elements of the [Portuguese army] column prevented the natives from gathering strength, [so] they only engaged in looting and in acts of defiance.”Footnote 25 In Gambos, the revolt came up against General Roçadas’s troops. It also met the resistance of the population of the Cahama and Chipelongo chieftaincies, who, in the words of headman Kalacua from Chicuma, “did not join the war because they had no weapons and because hunger had already decimated almost all of them.”Footnote 26 Scenes of civil war followed, as the advancing Humbe rebels sacked and killed local opponents. “The Muhumbes,” recalled elder Lucuce, from Cahama, “seeing that the natives of Chipelongo and Cahama were not revolting with them, attacked them, but the natives defended themselves.”Footnote 27 The Portuguese later utilized these divisions, mobilizing loyal chiefs.Footnote 28
For the Ovambo, however, this was not a “revolt,” but a reaffirmation of their independence under the leadership of the Cuanhama. King Mandume emerged as the hegemon of southern Angola, rallying neighbouring chieftaincies behind him or cowing them into submission.Footnote 29 Exiled Cuamato and Evale chiefs returned to their lands and reclaimed their power under Mandume’s umbrella. Datipo, a Cuamato chief interrogated about these events, told the colonial authorities that “he was detained” by returned soba Chietequela “but he escaped from him by promising he would never be friends with the Portuguese whites.”Footnote 30 Drought, bad harvests, and violence, however, soured the Ovambo victory. Indeed, the independent territories witnessed internecine conflict. Colonial encroachment had destabilized Ovambo society and weakened its social and economic fabric, which facilitated the spread of anomie in 1914–15.Footnote 31
After the war, many witnesses were eager to blame the Germans for encouraging the “revolt.” One of Mandume’s lenga (headmen), Muterifa, from Efinge, directly blamed Berlin for the violence in an interview with Portuguese officers in September 1919:
The people of Cuanhama revolted against the Portuguese because the “soba” Mandume, who everyone obeyed, ordered them to do so, and he, in turn, was pushed to do so by the Germans who had visited him, telling him that this country belonged to them and that the natives should drive the Portuguese out.Footnote 32
Another chief, Muene Catunda, explained that the rebels “said that the Germans would come and govern the country.”Footnote 33 Three French priests, Fathers Felix, Bellet, and Bonnefoux, who witnessed the revolt in Humbe, recalled that a Cuamato envoy brought documents announcing the imminent arrival of the Germans.Footnote 34
The Germans contemplated these events with schadenfreude. However, their direct involvement in the uprising was limited. The peoples of southern Angola needed little encouragement to revolt. According to Chief Chimanda, “the uprising of the indigenous people of Cuanhama against the Portuguese was ordered by the ‘soba’ Mandume to whom all the Cuanhamas pledged obedience, but [Chimanda] did not know whether the ‘soba’ had acted on the basis of an understanding with the Germans.”Footnote 35 The defeat at Naulila catalysed an uprising that had been long in the making. In the words of a German agent deported from Angola after the outbreak of the First World War, “there is no doubt that the Portuguese defeat at Naulila… revived the old spirit of the defeated tribes, which today, together with the still unconquered Cuanhama, are likely in full revolt.”Footnote 36 The “native rebellion,” which targeted white settlers and harassed the retreating Portuguese army, profoundly humiliated the colonialists. “Some of the retreating forces from Naulila were horribly massacred,” fumed a Portuguese officer.Footnote 37 The Portuguese army craved revenge.
Terror
The Portuguese backlash came in March 1915. President Pimenta de Castro, a conservative committed to neutrality, dispatched a large contingent of European troops under General Pereira d’Eça, numbering around 3,000. In Moçâmedes, this force merged with regiments already stationed in Angola. It also marshalled bands of Afrikaner and African irregulars (euphemistically known as “auxiliaries”), the latter commanded by exiled Herero warlord Orlog.Footnote 38 Pereira d’Eça’s army thus came to number around 10,000 (though estimates vary). Regime change in Lisbon in May 1915—when radical, pro-Allied republicans around Afonso Costa returned to power—did not alter the course of the campaign.
The expedition faced numerous challenges. As Pereira d’Eça put it:
The rebellious natives were bellicose and very numerous…, they must have been around eighty or one hundred thousand strong, and it was necessary to consider that their morale was very high after the retreat of our troops following the Naulila events, and that they had been trained and armed by the Germans to a considerable extent, and, in addition, at the forefront of this coalition were the Cuanhamas, who had never suffered our domination and whose state of civilization was, according to all sources, very significant.Footnote 39
In July, the Portuguese reoccupied Humbe. Thereafter, Pereira d’Eça’s army split into three columns, directed against the Evale, the Cuamato, and the Cuanhama, with a smaller detachment sent to Naulila. The turning point in the war took place in August in the battle for the strategic Mongua wells. The Europeans came out victorious, clearing the road for the conquest of the Cuanhama capital, N’Giva, in early September. Mandume and his retinue fled into South West Africa, which had just fallen to the Union of South Africa.Footnote 40
During the campaign and in its aftermath, the colonial forces made use of terror on a large scale, massacring civilians, burning villages, and aggravating famine by requisitioning food and cattle. In the words of officer Ernesto Machado:
Alongside the operations that brought about the domination of the Cuanhama came a harsh punishment: relentless raids, the capture of herds, and exterminations deemed convenient beyond the natural course of combat. Across the plains of Cunene blew a wind of terror. To those who witnessed it, it was clear: the Negro [preto] expired, phlegmatically spitting at us his final farewell to life, in mortal hatred.Footnote 41
In the words of Júlio Gonçalves, a campaign veteran, “the retribution of the Mueneputo [white lord] needs to be inexorable. On our march [to N’Giva], so that the memory of our powerful march may live on, the chilongos [households] are burned in devastating fires and the furious vendetta of our auxiliaries is left unrestricted.” “Such is the common practice when it comes to peoples of rudimentary cerebral development,” he affirmed.Footnote 42 On August 22 the command of the column “recommended” that “unarmed natives be received peacefully and serenely, so as not to produce disquiet [perturbação].”Footnote 43 However, as a German agent in Angola noted, “theory and practice when it comes to the natives can hardly be further apart.”Footnote 44
The evidence suggests this terror was a conscious policy to strike terror into the hearts of Africans. Pereira d’Eça set out his attitude towards indigenous insurgency in his undated notes on colonial war, probably written in the 1900s. “Territorial administration under these circumstances demands a military regime,” where ordinary law did not apply. Enemies “should never be considered prisoners of war, but rather as armed savage rebels.”Footnote 45 In his correspondence with South African forces across the border, he reiterated this view: “Hostilities were not being waged between my troops and those of the Chief of the Ovambo Nation.… It was an act of pure rebellion… that was quelled in a manner that all civilized states quell analogous acts.”Footnote 46
Pereira d’Eça’s official campaign report inadvertently reveals the methodical character of terror. A dispatch cited by Pereira d’Eça casually comments:
Some shots are fired from the villages against our vanguard that was marching ahead, raiding and burning, as had been ordered.… The vanguard overran the villages, shooting in all directions and killing a hundred natives, who were fleeing.Footnote 47
In another report on the conquest of Humbe, lieutenant João Sarmento Pimentel, who headed an Afrikaner unit, admits: “I began to raid the region, burning over 100 households and killing more than 600 Negros during my different expeditions.”Footnote 48 Pimentel provides further texture to these atrocities in his memoirs:
Narrow trails, opened in the sand by the bodies that had been carried away beyond the road, were stained with dried blood going to the edge of the forest where the turned earth revealed the remains of the feast of hyenas and jackals.… We marched on through the long dusty trail… feeling no horror at those scenes, resembling those of Atila, which indicated the passage of a “civilized army” through enemy territory.Footnote 49
The diary of the Evale column transmits an atmosphere of terror. “We continued to raid [raziar] the region, more intensely than yesterday… burning many chilongos.”Footnote 50 The Cuanhama column recounts: “We fired some artillery rounds on the natives… and on their huts.”Footnote 51 For its part, the Cuamato column reported upon the conquest of the village of a prominent Ovambo noblewoman: “we set fire to several libatas [hamlets] in that mucunda [district] and apprehended all the cattle.” They executed the noblewoman and her retinue.Footnote 52 The Naulila detachment reported: “we burned the libatas and killed all the natives we found.”Footnote 53 Terror was not exclusive to the columns that penetrated Ovambo territory. It was also practiced in quieter areas west of the Cunene. “Humbe, Dongoena, Hinga did not resist, because they went to join forces with the Cuanhamas,” noted a Portuguese official, but “those who did remain were justly punished for their rebellion.”Footnote 54
Testimonies from the campaign were disclosed to deputies at a closed session of the Portuguese parliament in July 1917. Compiled by Tomás de Sousa Rosa, from the ruling coalition, the accounts described the atrocities in gruesome detail. Sergeant Joaquim Pinto described:
I saw that many Negro men and women were hanged following orders from above.… The Negros were hanged from trees, sometimes using barbed wire. The Landins [Mozambican soldiers] carried out the executions. Along the way, I found many Negro men and women who had been killed and stabbed, with many hanged on the road itself.… I know of one child and one man who were buried alive.… The child was buried alive because it was found stealing a little food from the horses. I can also say that the hangings targeted Negros who had not attacked our forces. Any Negro that was found was killed, and it seems this was done for entertainment.Footnote 55
Another Portuguese soldier, Francisco Filipe de Sousa, recounted:
I saw the hanging of many Negros from a baobab, and they say that this operation always responded to orders from above. The Negros were buried before they had died, and when I asked a Negro executioner why he buried the Negros alive, he said that these were orders from the “manéputo,” the name they gave to the General.Footnote 56
Frutuoso Alves described:
Marching inland, I saw many Negros who surrendered and who had wires tied to their necks and were dragged towards the rear-guard by cavalrymen at a gallop.… At the Damião Dias fort I saw entire families turning up at the high command. The men were hanged and the women and children driven towards the enemy where they were liquidated.… I saw children be buried alive and pregnant women be knifed. I do not know who is to blame for this, but I am inclined to think that they are a consequence of indiscipline among our forces and of the orders that were given to them to carry out these atrocities.Footnote 57
A cavalry corporal, Abílio Dias Moreira, indicated in a letter written in March 1915, as he began the march towards Cuangar: “We have orders to kill all the natives over ten years of age.”Footnote 58
The difficulty in distinguishing fighters and civilians shaped the brutality of the colonial army. In the words of an officer, “natives from Mulondo and Quiteve are surrendering, and it is impossible to find out if they followed the armed rebels in their movement.”Footnote 59 The most bloodthirsty units in the Portuguese column were the Damara, Herero, and Afrikaner irregulars. For them, war was an opportunity for enrichment and for venting out grievances. The Afrikaners in particular, although ill-disposed towards Portugal, were shaken by the “native revolt” and yearned for vengeance.Footnote 60 For its part, the Portuguese army sought retribution for the humiliating retreat at Naulila and for what an official called “the crimes of the miserable Negro.”Footnote 61
The murderous behaviour of the Portuguese expedition became an open secret in Lisbon. The reports read out at the closed parliamentary session fed into the political infighting between the opposition and Afonso Costa’s fragile coalition. “We need to investigate… the atrocities and outrages [barbaridades e selvagerias] that, as people are loudly saying, were committed by our troops in Angola,” protested opposition deputy Tamagnini Barbosa.Footnote 62 Another deputy from the opposition, Vasconcelos e Sá, branded these actions as “monstrosities” and as “an aberration of pathological cruelty.” “The executive power has been implicated—it is the main culprit, as proven by the documents,” he deemed. He speculated that the orders to “give no quarter to Negros of over ten years of age” must “have been given by General Eça, possibly receiving them secretly from the government.”Footnote 63
The government flatly refused to act on these accusations. In the words of President Costa, a radical republican and freemason, “these events cannot lead to the destitution of General Eça, and this Government would never allow such a thing.” He alluded to the fact that such atrocities “also happen in other countries but no one ever denounces them.” “No country at war, like us, with martial law in place, would ever publicize acts that dishonour its army,” he added. He warned his colleagues that “we cannot be moved by idealisms or forget that the Negroes consider humanitarianism as a sign of weakness or cowardice.”Footnote 64
News of the Portuguese terror campaign eventually made its way to international public opinion. In June 1923, South African MP Walter Madeley denounced in parliament the “massacre of 5000 or 6000 natives” during Pereira d’Eça’s march to N’Giva, where “no prisoners were taken.”Footnote 65 The Portuguese authorities reacted indignantly. Perhaps rightly, they claimed the South Africans used the atrocities in Angola to distract public opinion from their own violence against the Bondelswarts rebellion. They scrambled to gather testimonies to refute these claims. Three high-ranking officers came forward with reports. They refuted the accusations angrily. However, all accepted that the casualty rate among the Ovambo was inordinately high and that no prisoners had been taken. They gave different explanations for this. One of the witnesses, José Esteves da Conceição Mascarenhas, conceded that “no prisoners were taken” owing to “the system of combat of the natives,” who either fought to the death or “fled completely.” In the end, he admitted to the cruel predisposition of some of the men but blamed this exclusively on the Afrikaners. Another veteran, Couceiro de Albuquerque, admitted that thousands of Africans died, but this owed to the ferocity of the fighting. The killing was “an act of pure self-defence.” He then explained:
But there was no “massacre,” because massacre is understood as a violent attack on harmless creatures. For that to happen, it was necessary to have them at hand. Now, when the square [column] began to advance, it found no inhabitants anywhere.Footnote 66
Another high-ranking officer similarly asserted that “there was no butchery [chacina] as such, in the pejorative sense of the term.” However, he confessed: “I cannot estimate the enemy’s losses; they were numerous.” “Not only did the natives die in the fighting, but also from famine, for which they alone were to blame, because of their revolt,” he concluded.Footnote 67
There was another victim of the 1915 campaign: the Portuguese army conscripts (European and African), forced to march, fight, and die in distant lands under strenuous conditions. Pereira d’Eça treated them ruthlessly. “I started operations convinced that I had to subject my troops to all sorts of discomforts and, worse, to hunger and thirst, but I did not hesitate for a second.”Footnote 68 Officer Cameira describes their plight in the march to N’Giva:
Many, most of them… were collapsing along the route, struck by the sun that left them prostrate on the ground, apathetically. Some of them wailed in loud and melancholic cries, which echoed stubbornly in the depths of our souls, mixed with the invocation of their mothers, to whom they were bidding farewell!Footnote 69
Unsurprisingly, there was persistent resistance to military service during the First World War. The rate of desertion in the Portuguese army was high and mutinies frequent. In Moçâmedes, before the departure of Pereira d’Eça’s army, hundreds of conscripts “drank poisoned water” in the hope they would be sent home.Footnote 70 A German agent in Lisbon reported that “the embarkation [to Angola] took place without any enthusiasm; on the contrary, I saw many women and even soldiers crying.”Footnote 71
Genocide
Terror, large-scale displacement, and famine depopulated southern Angola. Colonial occupation did not bring order. It ushered in a reign of violence and banditry. The Portuguese invasion and the ensuing terror and chaos and large-scale displacements aggravated preexisting food scarcity, creating a cataclysmic famine, aggravated by drought (a periodic phenomenon in the region).Footnote 72 This famine is still remembered today on the Angolan-Namibian borderland, where it is known as the Ekuuku (the Sweeper). A dysentery and beriberi epidemic further decimated the famished population. These cataclysms had a longstanding impact on the region’s demography (see Fig. 2, below). Population loss from hunger and violence was compounded by large-scale emigration into South West Africa.Footnote 73
Effects of Famine.
After visiting the region, Ernesto Machado wrote:
Anyone who was in Cunene in the past and returns there today is distressed. Humbe was a human anthill, today it is a desert. Dongoena was very populated, it is deserted, almost extinct; Cuamato and Cuanhama are depopulated. Everywhere there are signs that lands had been cultivated and traces of abandoned settlements.Footnote 74
Writing in October 1915, the government delegate in Huila reported that “the entire region is ravaged by hunger.” Footnote 75 “Here,” he recounted, “in the heart of Lubango, the natives are dying in the street.” “Even today,” said Lenga Muterifa in his 1919 interrogation, “we can see the large number of bones scattered across the bush of people who died due to the famine.”Footnote 76
French priest Benedicto Maria Bonnefoux left a gruesome testimony of the effects of the famine:
The starving natives seized everything they found, fiercely fighting over roots to eat, and failing these, in an inconceivable state of hallucination and confusion, they ate poisonous roots and rotting corpses, which they tore up and dried in the sun, and disembowelled human corpses that poisoned and killed them. And—an even more horrible spectacle—fathers killed their children and husbands killed their wives to feed on their flesh, eager to prolong a life they felt was fading away. In this way, hundreds of settlements were left deserted, depopulated, in regions once rich in livestock and food.Footnote 77
There were many such testimonies of cannibalism. The population “only ate flesh from corpses,” noted a Cuamato chief, “and because of that they caught stomach diseases.”Footnote 78 “Such is the hunger that some are eating the flesh of other Negros, as I have witnessed myself,” reported an officer in Naulila.Footnote 79 Lieutenant Pimentel recalls in his memoirs: “At the foot of one of the [corpse] heaps, a skeletal boy, who only had eyes, large and luminous with sorrow, leaned over the sand, his three-foot-long body greedily gnawing on a piece of one of his kin!”Footnote 80
Greek settler Dimitris Metropoulos had resided in Cuanhama until 1906. Ten years later he returned to N’Giva and was struck to find that “the population greatly diminished, since from the border of Cuamato to N’Giva there were no longer any inhabitants because they had died in the war or because of the famine, while others had accompanied Mandume” into South West Africa.Footnote 81 Others fled northwards but found no relief. Charles Bellet, a French missionary from Tchiale (Techiulo), lamented that “every day in 1915 dozens of men, women, and children came to the Tchipelongo mission asking for refuge and that many starved to death before his very eyes.”Footnote 82
A group of European settlers interviewed after the war noted:
The number of natives killed in this terrible scourge is unparalleled and inestimable, it can be considered a real catastrophe the memory of which will remain for a long time in the populations of the District because there is no memory of such a great and terrible hecatomb.Footnote 83
Not only did the colonial authorities fail to provide support to the starving population, but they considerably aggravated the famine through their policies of repression, forced labour, and food requisitioning. Inadequate communication lines meant the occupation forces sustained themselves by ransacking the local population. In the words of a European witness: “the means of transport were insufficient to supply the numerous troops both during the operations and, later, during the occupation.”Footnote 84 The occupation forces stationed in Cuanhama initially numbered 3,700, and were later reduced to 2,200.Footnote 85 Muene Acampita, chief of Caholo, stated: “When asked about the causes of so much damage and so many deaths, he said that they were due to the [Portuguese] troops who had just arrived to wage war against the Germans, and to the natives of Humbe who came to rob cattle.”Footnote 86 “We lost a lot of livestock during the war because it was eaten by the rebels and by the troops of the [Portuguese] column, and also by the famine… due also to the lack of rain and to the arrival of the Muhumbes who came here looking for refuge,” said Lenga Muterifa.Footnote 87 Food confiscation detachments left a trail of destruction.Footnote 88
The impoverishment of the region was dramatic. “Before the war there was a lot of cattle, which was the wealth of the people of Cuanhama, they also had a lot of goats; the cattle greatly diminished throughout the region during the war,” noted Chief Ichica.Footnote 89 For the director of the zootechnical post of Humpata “the most patent source of natural wealth of Huila… the animals of these plains” had been “totally lost.”Footnote 90 Mume-Pambambi, from Mahengue (Humbe), commented in 1919 that “before, there was a lot of livestock in the region; and when a native wanted to give a present to a White he gave him a cow or a bull because all had a lot of cattle and that now they could not even give a chicken.”Footnote 91 The aforementioned zootechnical director concluded that “it is no exaggeration to situate the losses [of livestock] at 90 percent.”Footnote 92 Agriculture also took a devastating blow. Francisco de Meireles, a state agronomist in Huila calculated that the price of native staples such as millet and sorghum almost quadrupled during the war. “The effects of the war have been very disastrous,” he wrote, “and it is hard to say when the district will recover.”Footnote 93 Generalized insecurity undermined agriculture, as farmers feared bandits or occupation forces would seize their crops.
The authorities of the Huila district claimed to have distributed 150 tonnes of maize to the starving natives, complemented by another 100 tonnes from religious missions. However, little of this food reached the southern floodplains. Indeed, as the authorities admitted, most of the maize was eaten up by famished refugees in the town of Sá da Bandeira. Joaquim Moraes, an officer in charge of famine relief, reminisced in 1919 that “hundreds of natives dying from hunger were gathering in the town, coming from the interior and decimated by the famine and in such a state that many could not be saved.”Footnote 94
Whatever food was transported to the south was gobbled up by the Portuguese occupation forces. João Freitas, a Portuguese merchant from Chibemba, on the Huila plateau, considered the death toll owed “to the lack of assistance from the state.” He blamed “the lack of transport to bring the necessary resources to the devastated regions and not the shortage of crops,” and observed “that the transport network was not sufficient for the supply service of the [Portuguese] column for operations in the south of the district.”Footnote 95 Cuamato chief Chiricola observed that “carriages were coming in from Sá da Bandeira with noies, but they were for the soldiers.”Footnote 96 The captain mayor of Gambos was explicit in blaming the Portuguese state for the famine. He explained that “this mortality was a consequence of the war, because all the transports and resources that the state could have used to mitigate the loss of life were directed to [the war effort].”Footnote 97
In addition to direct food requisitioning, the Portuguese authorities levied heavy taxes in cattle or grain. Tax collection was often a euphemism for violent “razzias” (a term the Portuguese themselves often used, meaning a punitive raid or plundering). “In 1918–1919,” reported a commission of civilian and military authorities in Huila, “almost all the entirety of the sparse population of the rebellious region beyond the Cunene that had escaped the scourge of famine paid its taxes.”Footnote 98 In the famine years 1915–19, the Portuguese gathered 29,100 escudos in taxes in kind in the occupied districts.Footnote 99
Not only did the Portuguese authorities confiscate food. They also mobilized an unprecedented contingent of forced labourers. A group of European farmers complained in 1919 about the “lack of farmhands,” which further undermined agriculture. This shortage of labourers owed primarily “to compulsory conscription by the Government in its effort to expel the invasion, drafting men as carriers, auxiliaries, etc., evaluating their number at 10,000.”Footnote 100 Some of these labourers were taken to distant provinces in Angola and even to the cash crop plantations in São Tomé. Forced labour was a punitive weapon in the hands of the Portuguese army. Upon the defeat of the Cuanhama, Pereira d’Eça ordered:
The recruitment of labourers [serviciaes], for work in this zone or sector but also in other parts of the province and even to the island of S. Tomé, considering the civilizing influence that emanates from work, and also the economic benefits that this work represents for S. Tomé.Footnote 101
A decade later, a British missionary who visited the Angola-South West Africa borderland denounced that the Ovambo “dwelling north of the line will be liable to be seized for ‘indenture’ labour in the cocoa plantations of S. Thomé and Principe, where they mostly die within the year.”Footnote 102
The Portuguese lamented the loss of African lives for its impact on taxation and on the forced labour system. The government delegate in Huila protested that “the number of natives who can do useful work… is relatively small, such is their state of weakness.” He called for famine relief “so as to use [aproveitar] the labour of those who can work in the opening of roads.”Footnote 103 In one of the reparation reports on the “depreciation of colonial agriculture,” the colonial authorities argued:
The work of the Negro is irreplaceable in the tropical colonies…. The products of the labour of a Negro are estimated to be $125,000 per year. If we suppose each Negro yields 15 years of productive labour, the deaths of 130,000 we suffered corresponds to the value of colonial products of $138,500,000.Footnote 104
Population losses from violence, starvation, and overwork were compounded by the flight of thousands of refugees into southern Ovamboland in former German South West Africa, now under South African control (with ultimate British oversight). This population movement continued into the 1920s, lastingly changing the demography of the region.Footnote 105 Despite the greater aridity of southern Ovamboland, this territory became a safe haven due to the leniency of the South Africans, much to the frustration of the Portuguese who complained that “the [South African] authorities behave more like merchants than anything else.”Footnote 106
The colonial forces used famine to subdue the population (a tactic that was not unique to the Portuguese Empire).Footnote 107 The Cuamato column, for instance, upon decreeing the abolition of the Cuamato kingdom, gave forty-eight hours for all African men to surrender and “bring all their cattle, from which we will take as much as the commander desires upon fixing a fine that everyone will pay.”Footnote 108 In the words of a German agent, writing in early 1915 about the Humbe: “the Portuguese, quite correctly, recognized the removal of the cattle as the best way to break the tribe’s resistance.”Footnote 109 The government delegate in the Huila district observed that “considering how famished these people are, you can see that the military problem of the district is limited to the east Cunene” (where Mandume continued to roam the border).Footnote 110
Banditry spread across the region, often displaying “social” features overlapping with armed insurgency.Footnote 111 The Portuguese responded in kind. Populations suspected of harbouring bandits or guerrillas were punished with raids where villages were burnt and livestock seized. For instance, after the theft of two goats in Humbe, a detachment of almost one hundred soldiers “raided” the village of the alleged thieves, “seizing seven cows and five goats” and “burning about fifteen households.”Footnote 112
Hunger had been used in the past to crack African resistance, but the losses from the largely manmade famine of 1915 were still staggering. A Portuguese commission in Sá da Bandeira comprising military and health authorities compiled estimates of the death toll in 1919 after interviewing dozens of witnesses (see Table 1, below).
Death Toll Estimates, 1919
Source: BAB R/1001/6647, Dossier 10, “Dépositions,” 332.
Historian Emmanuel Kreike, who consulted the general findings of the commission (apparently without examining the full reports held in the German archives), argues that its mortality rate was inflated “by as much as a factor of three.” With this exaggeration, the Portuguese supposedly sought to exact greater reparations from Germany at the Versailles Conference following the First World War. Focusing on a particular area impacted by the violence, Kreike calculates that the population of the Lower Cunene fell from 78,000 to 35,000 between 1915–25.Footnote 113 Patricia Hayes, in turn, using missionary sources, places the population loss at between one quarter and half the population of southern Angola.Footnote 114 Both these historians identify immigration into South West Africa as the main culprit of depopulation. However, working mostly with British and South African sources, Kreike and Hayes arguably play down the direct and indirect effects of Portuguese colonial violence.
The head of the Portuguese reparations commission instructed officials to focus on deaths from violence and hunger rather than on immigration to South West Africa. It is true he asked investigators to emphasize German responsibility for the atrocities.Footnote 115 Moreover, witnesses, European and, especially, African, were interviewed in an atmosphere of fear and trauma. However, considering the prevailing context, the reports of the reparations’ commission were remarkably thorough and rigorous. The government delegate in Sá da Bandeira, who coordinated the research mission, ordered that “the testimonies of the native chiefs… should be recorded carefully and skilfully, never omitting important pieces of information.”Footnote 116
If anything, the hair-raising estimates of the reparations commission might have been somewhat conservative. Writing in October 1915, when the famine was in full swing, the government representative in Huila predicted: “it is perhaps no exaggeration to calculate that eight tenths of the population will vanish as a result of this scourge.”Footnote 117 In Gambos, Victor Vendling, a French missionary, calculated the loss of life at 80 percent.Footnote 118 Datipo, a Cuamato soba from Lutula, noted that “in his ‘mucunda’ there are 66 uninhabited ‘chilongos,’ and he also said that before 1914 every ‘chilongo’ was inhabited by 6, 8, 10, or 12 people, and that now in every ‘chilongo’ there are 2, 3, or 4.”Footnote 119 Muné Quiovo, a Humbe chief, listed seventy-seven settlements in his district that had been entirely depopulated.Footnote 120 Whatever the exact number, all sources point to an extraordinary demographic collapse that continued to plague the region for decades.Footnote 121
The death toll was highest among the Humbe, Nhaneca, Evale, and Cuamato, who were on the periphery of the “native rebellion,” whereas Cuanhama territory, the bastion of Ovambo resistance, was less affected. This owes to the fact that the Portuguese had managed to subdue the Evale, the Cuamato, and the Humbe before 1914, but not the Cuanhama. Colonial domination had eroded the economy and social fabric of the occupied regions, rendering them more vulnerable to famine. The Cuanhama, who were independent until 1915, proved more resilient.
Conclusion
The terror campaign in southern Angola achieved its objectives, at least temporarily. “The power of the whiteman has been further forcibly borne in… by the complete defeat of the Ovakuanyama,” noted South African major Pritchard, who served as the native affairs commissioner in South West Africa.Footnote 122 Violence and hunger subdued the locals and cracked their will to resist. In the words of Muene Ochinhande, “if famine had not caused so many deaths, perhaps there would have been [a new] war against the whites (the Portuguese).”Footnote 123 The southern Angolan campaign of 1915 was a milestone in a longer process of violent subordination of the Portuguese colonial hinterland, which cut across the epoch’s different regimes (the constitutional monarchy, the Republic, the military dictatorship, and the Estado Novo). The imposition of direct military and bureaucratic control was driven forward by the quest for the modern capitalist exploitation of the country’s possessions.Footnote 124
The South Angola campaign of 1915 stands out for its cruelty, but it was not unique, either in the Portuguese Empire or in other colonial settings.Footnote 125 As Dirk Moses observed, “colonial war could mean total war on a local scale.”Footnote 126 Contextualizing Portuguese atrocities, opposition deputy Brito Camacho pointedly asked his colleagues in 1917 to remember “what was done in Australia, in India, in America, and, only a few years ago, in Transvaal.”Footnote 127 Indeed, while the British and South Africans expressed “horror” at the Portuguese policies, showcasing their putative “Pax Britannica” in South West Africa, they cynically used Pereira d’Eça as a convenient battering ram against the Ovambo.Footnote 128 From the border, South African officer Pritchard observed:
In the heart of the country famine is rampant and assistance is urgently required to prevent possible extermination in many parts. Circumstances are in our favour, and we should take advantage of the Natives’ frame of mind and set. It will be difficult to imagine so unique an opportunity for establishing a political administration in a country in which in other circumstances resistance to authority might with reason have been anticipated.Footnote 129
The imposition of European rule implied the fragmentation or destruction of precolonial sources of power. The wreckage of traditional social structures created a blank slate for the imposition of capitalism under European domination. The violence of this process largely depended on the degree of indigenous resistance.Footnote 130 The strength of the Cuanhama kingdom, a centralized state—that, moreover, could pivot between rival German and Portuguese colonialism—explains the brutality with which the Ovambo were repressed. As expressed in a decree issued by Pereira d’Eça after the defeat of Mandume:
We must consider that the essentially harmful element are the big chiefs, and it is therefore convenient to liquidate them [acabar com eles] and destroy their prestige and build smaller nuclei around trustworthy chiefs who must be kept under close watch.Footnote 131
The term genocide is nebulous and politically charged. However, the Portuguese terror campaign of 1915, accompanied by inhumane taxation and forced labour policies, provoked a calamitous (and essentially man-made) famine that claimed tens of thousands of lives, with long-term demographic consequences. These atrocities, directed at a confederation of rebellious peoples in southern Angola, are comparable to the massacre of the Hereros in German South West Africa in 1904 and of the Mucumbal shepherds in southeastern Angola in 1940–41, both of which have been labelled as genocides.Footnote 132 The events of 1915 in Angola highlight the connection between colonialism and genocide. Imperial exploitation demanded the atomization of the native population, which, in extreme cases, could result in genocide.Footnote 133
Pereira d’Eça’s terror lacked the explicit codification found in German General Von Trotha’s orders for the extermination of the Herero. However, the evidence suggests that the brutal policies of the 1915 campaign were the brainchild of Pereira d’Eça, who enjoyed the support (or at least the forbearance) of his superiors in Lisbon. The Afonso Costa administration rewarded Pereira d’Eça for his “services” with the governorship of Lisbon in March 1916, where he enjoyed the discretionary powers of martial law. He used them profusely until his death in November 1917, cracking down heavily on working-class protest. He brought to the metropole (in blunted form) the demeanour he had displayed in Angola. Deputy Moura Pinto warned the Portuguese parliament that Pereira d’Eça “can now apply in the streets of Lisbon the horrible virtues that he put into practice in the African forests and deserts.”Footnote 134
Not only did colonial violence have longstanding consequences for southern Angola, but it also shaped the evolution of Portuguese political life. The pacification campaigns, in Angola and elsewhere, steeled a generation of authoritarian military leaders.Footnote 135 They grew accustomed to absolute power, even when martial law was not in place. A high-ranking official in Huila admitted his impotence in October 1915, after martial law had been lifted: “Government interference is absolutely absent in this district… because it must subordinate itself to military demands.”Footnote 136 Many of these colonial officers made their way into high-ranking posts after the First World War. Some were prominent in the military dictatorship of 1926–33 and later in the Estado Novo, such as the aforementioned Albuquerque and Mascarenhas. Another veteran, captain João Maria Ferreira do Amaral, became the infamously repressive chief of the Lisbon police in the 1920s. The campaign of 1915 in southern Angola revealed the savagery of European imperialism, which, in Portugal, attained its fruition under the dictatorship, when it was turned (in a diminished form) against the metropolitan population in what Aimé Césaire famously called the “boomerang effect.”Footnote 137
Acknowledgements
This publication is an outcome of the Lisbon-based research project “The Constitutional Road to Dictatorship: States of Exception and Authoritarianism in Europe, 1900–39” (STEXEU), funded by the European Research Council. The Instituto de Historia Contemporanea is funded by national funds through FCT — Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the projects UID/04209/2025 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/04209/2025) and LA/P/0132/2020 (DOI: https://doi.org/10.54499/LA/P/0132/2020). I gratefully acknowledge this support.
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