Portuguese tropical geography and decolonization in Africa: the case of Mozambique

Abstract

Portuguese decolonization involved the formal dissolution of an authoritarian regime which hadmaintained through law that all its colonieseeuphemistically named‘overseas provinces’after 1951ewere integral parts of Portuguese territory. Dissolution came after a thirteen-year war (1961e1974) withthree fronts, culminating in the bloodless Carnation Revolution of April 1974. Decolonization of Portu-gal's colonial empire precipitated the emergence of newly independent countries, includingfive in Africaalone. From the late 1940s through to the early 1970s, a small group of Portuguese geographersresearched their country's overseas possessions within an authoritarian political and social context andwith a concern for tropical conditions. After 1974 everything changed, and most geographers who wereconductingfieldwork or had been stationed overseas returned to Lisbon. This paper considers the politicsand practices of Portuguese geographical scholarship as it intersected with late colonialism and decol-onization in Africa, and in terms of its concern with tropical geography. It seeks to contextualize Por-tuguese tropical geography in Africa by outlining the development of the Lisbon School of Geography. Italso examines the late development of the university geography degrees in Mozambique and Angola. Inparticular, the paper engages with the intellectual biographies of three geographers who were deeplyinvolved in the geography degrees created in Lourenço Marques (presently Maputo, Mozambique), andhow their lives intersected with late colonial and post-independence Mozambique. Thefinal sectionsdiscuss how the 1974 revolution, the transitional governments, independence and later the civil wars inAngola and Mozambique impacted on Portuguese geographical research and how these developmentswere bound up with the abrupt end of Portuguese tropical geography