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It was evident by now that the Government’s interest in Africa had sharply increased, as is shown by the fact that the position of governor-general of Angola, for instance, obtained a new status that attracted men who managed to impose a tighter administrative control over the territories.
In this way, a penal colony such as Angola was gradually transformed into a colony of occupation, to the detriment of not only the thousands of contratados—contract workers employed in the plantations in a semislave regime—but also the creole elite, progressively forced to cede rights, privileges, and positions to the new administrative, military, and commercial staff directly proceeding from the metropolis.
The Fall of the Creole Elite
At the turn of the century, a series of decrees were gradually established declaring that the issue of any kind of publication, periodical or not, had to be considered a crime of free-press abuse. As the repressive measures adopted by the metropolis and the subsequent worsening of the basic-rights situation in the colony roused the reaction of Angolense intellectuals, Portuguese colonial policy was consolidated by new internal wars and occupations, by the countrywide instalment of administrative units, and by the enhancement of economic development. Although there were fewer than ten thousand whites in Angola in 1900, there had been a substantial increase in white-female immigration: the male-to-female ratio that year was a bit more than two to one. Concomitantly, there was a drop in the ratio of mestiços to whites; whereas mestiços had outnumbered whites in 1845 by more than three to one, by 1900 this ratio was reversed. Of course, black Africans still constituted more than 99 percent of the population, even if their number reportedly declined from an estimated 5.4 million in 1845 to about 4.8 million in 1900—although some scholars dispute these figures.24