The Creole Elite and the Rise of Angolan Proto-Nationalism, 1870– ...

Evangelisation, just like any effort to legislate and draw up policies in colonial possessions that, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, were isolated and scattered in vast territories, required impossible expenses. Nevertheless, Portugal managed to consolidate its authority and even extend its influence, containing both the pressure exerted by neighbouring colonial powers and African traditional societies’ enervating resistance. According to historian Richard Hammond, this was also possible because part of the metropolitan elite developed, during the second half of the nineteenth century, an attitude in relation to African colonies that can be explained by introducing the idea of “uneconomic imperialism”. The possession of overseas territories could not be simply justified by prospects of material profit that—as Eça de Queirós ironically put it—were nothing more than sordid trivialities despised as much by the heroes of the golden age of discovery as by their intrepid, determined descendants. On the contrary, overseas territories, a source of national pride, were there mainly to be contemplated and to reaffirm that Portugal was a mariners’ land, a coloniser nation.¹⁰ In this sense, the glorification of the colonising mission served psychological rather than political needs of successive Portuguese regimes. Portuguese historians agree in stating that in Portugal, after Brazil’s independence, the perception of the country’s decay progressively turned into a widely diffused national feeling that reached its peak with the 1890 ultimatum. Elaborated since the beginning of the nineteenth century by different branches of colonial society, the discourse on Portuguese claims on Africa was characterised by deeply rooted pessimism, by contented melancholy about an idealised glorious past, and by an ambivalent attitude denoting at the same time humility for the present indigence and pride for past glory. As symbols to decipher, the colonies were reminders of the age of caravels. Moreover, representing a possible continuity with that mythic time, they also reminded the Portuguese people how important were the effects of this continuity for the very same existence of Portugal as an independent national state, even if poor and humiliated by Great Britain and France.¹¹