Africa, Portuguese colonies in Second, toward the end of the 18th century, the supply of labor was affected by the spread of sleeping sickness in the interior Consequently, the Portuguese had to rely on forced labor for its supply The colonies were subjected to a great deal of economic exploitation From the start, Portuguese enterprises in Africa were dictated by the desire to procure slaves Indeed, slaves constituted almost the sole export of the colonies This continued up to the end of the 19th century In Angola, the Portuguese established their rule of ruthless exploitation for the purpose of procuring large numbers of slaves for the Brazilian market The exploitation of Angola for slaves came to be known as the era of the pombeiros The pombeiros, half-caste Portuguese, were notorious for their activities, which consisted of stirring up local conflicts in order to capture slaves for sale at the coast The pombeiros were the masters of the interior whom the slave dealers relied on for procurement INTELLECTUAL REACTION In 1901 a decree was issued by the government in Lisbon to put a stop to recruitment of labor by violent means In Luanda, some pamphlets were published to denounce the practice of forced labor This was an intellectual reaction to the phenomenon of forced labor In practical terms, it did not have any substantial effect on the practice There was a violent reaction to the phenomenon of forced labor, starting with the Bailundo Revolt of 1902 In 1903 fresh regulations were issued to tackle the issue of forced labor, but they achieved little or no success Portugal’s objection to forced labor was not born out of their concern for Africans, but such a stance was taken whenever the authority felt that certain individuals were gaining too much local power Indeed, the official view, embodied in a law of 1899, was that forced labor was an essential part of the civilizing process, provided it was done decently and in order The Portuguese attitude to race was one of superiority on their part and inferiority on the part of Africans No colonial power was entirely free from racial prejudice Segregation, whether pronounced or not, was often used as a means of preserving the racial purity of European settlers in Africa In the case of the Portuguese, the authority was interested in ensuring the racial purity of Portuguese agrarian settlers in Angola However, the conditions in the colonies did not favor or encourage Europeans to settle in large numbers Conse- 17 quently, white populations could be maintained only by settling convicts and by miscegenation Because of this, racial mixing in Portuguese colonies was accepted—it was necessary to maintain the population Portugal’s colonial history provides a particularly illuminating case of Europe’s impact on the racial and ethnic character of Africa as far as racial-demographic engineering was concerned No substantial infrastructure development can be ascribed to Portuguese colonial enterprise in Africa Even though the Portuguese treated their colonies as the “private estate of the motherland,” no major policies and programs were put in place to address infrastructural development For instance, even though Angola produced excellent cotton, none of it was actually processed in Angola Additionally, communication was poor The Portuguese settlements were isolated from one another For instance, when Lourenzo Marques was engulfed in crises in 1842 and the governor was killed in a raid organized by the indigenous people, it took the authorities in Mozambique a year to hear of the happening by way of Rio de Janeiro But Portugal was lucky to benefit from development initiated by other countries In 1879 the Eastern Telegraph Company’s cable, en route to Cape Town, established “anchor points” in Mozambique and Lourenzo Marques In 1886 the telegraph line reached Luanda en route to the Cape This provided the first major link between Portugal and its overseas colonies Furthermore, in 1880 Portugal and the Transvaal concluded a revised version of their existing territorial treaty of 1869, in which they agreed to build a railroad from Lourenzo Marques to Pretoria British control of the Transvaal stalled the progress of the work Portugal on its own did not make efforts to connect its colonies in Africa in a manner that would make sense with regard to Africa’s needs and development Lastly, bureaucracy was not effective as far as Portuguese colonial rule in Africa was concerned There was no regular cadre of trained civilian recruits on which to draw The effect of this was that there was an almost complete absence of the routine competence that a good administration needs This affected the coordination of Portuguese colonial activities in Africa CONCLUSION Between 1750 and 1900 the Portuguese presence in Africa was one of economic exploitation much more than actual colonial rule In fact, the Portuguese had no major administrative systems in place in their African colonies Instead, the primary motive for the creation