Interracial Marriage in the Last Portuguese Colonial Empire

 

Maria Eugénia Mata
University of Lisbon
[email protected]


Abstract

The paper presents both the institutional background and the government philosophy regarding equality and non-prejudice within all of the territories under Portuguese sovereignty in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as tests carried out to discover if the decision to marry and racial homogamy could be considered independent variables, using annual data from statistical yearbooks relating to the colonies.
The conclusions demonstrate the existence of a social prejudice towards inter-racial marriage. The paper supports the belief that social divisions based on ethnicity must be included as part of the explanation for decolonization and independence.

Keywords

Colonialism, Marriage, Prejudice, Social Cleavages, Last Portuguese Colonial Empire.

Resumo

O artigo apresenta o enquadramento institucional e a filosofia governamental sobre a igualdade e a ausência de  preconceito em todos os territórios sob soberania portuguesa, e testa para as décadas de 1940 e 1950 se as variáveis casamento e raça  eram independentes, usando dados estatísticos dos anuários das colónias.
As conclusões demonstram preconceito social no casamento inter-racial. O artigo defende que as divisões sociais assentes na etnicidade têm de ser acrescentadas à explicação da descolonização e independência.

Palavras-chave

Colonialismo, Casamento, Preconceito, Clivagens Sociais, Último Império  Colonial Português.

 


The Government’s philosophy on cohesion during the last Portuguese Empire

In the last phase of the Portuguese empire (1930s-1974/5), the government’s political philosophy in relation to the colonial territories was based on considerable propaganda about the respectful relationship between the Portuguese and other peoples in their colonies.1 It is the aim of this study to describe the official Portuguese literature on these issues and check its accuracy for interpreting social interaction through marriage in the Portuguese colonial territories of the period.

In political speeches, Portugal was presented as a vast and great nation. Its domains and sovereignty spread over a vast range of territory and were distributed across all the continents of the planet. This was a supreme achievement, according to J. M. da Silva Cunha, one of Salazar’s Secretaries of State, later appointed Overseas Minister: “Providence led Portugal to the mission of bringing all the peoples of Europe and other continents together, taking to them the Christian message, along with European civilization”.2 Official speeches usually presented Portugal as an honorable nation that had set sail from Portuguese coasts to discover the whole world. This heritage was still present in the Portuguese empire, made up of a mainland territory in Western Europe, four archipelagoes in the Atlantic (the Madeira Islands, Azores, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe), Angola and Mozambique on the African continent, several territories in India, a special pearl close to China, namely Macau, and the territory of East Timor in the Pacific Ocean.3 So, Portuguese territory was comprised of several provinces, beginning in the northern mainland province of Minho (near Spanish Galicia) and reaching all the way to the antipodes, in Timor.

Also, according to the language of its government, the Portuguese people were a cohesive nation, speaking the same language (Portuguese), sharing the same faith (Christianity), working under the same political rule (the Portuguese administration), and taking pride in the same flag (the Portuguese flag), which was flown in all of the national territory on every continent. There were no ethnic conflicts: “We arrived where we are now, more than five centuries ago, to spread Christianity and to remain”.4 School children were taught that all Portuguese were equal.5Whatever might be their birth, their geographical origin, or the color of their skin, they were all equal. As Cunha (1964) puts it: “So, from the beginning we considered Africans as our equals, in this way eliminating all racial discrimination”.6

The Portuguese culture was a single culture, it was said. Even considering that local conditions might be different, the official ideology always stressed that, although they might differ, there were no superior or inferior cultures. Miscegenation was to be the rule, as nineteenth-century literature accused Portugal of a weakness in terms of colonization, which stemmed from miscegenation: “(…) specialist literature of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (…) accused us of a colonizing disability (as was said at the time), because we could not preserve the purity of our race”.7

So, the Portuguese nation, according to the government, was a multi-continental, multi-racial unit based on a Portuguese identity of high moral and political standards: “Portugal will continue to remain integral, with her own features of a State and multi-continental Nation, made up of the most varied ethnicities”.8 Even scholars and academics shared a good deal of this vision. According to Boxer (1961), “It is to the credit of Portugal (…) that she made no distinction of race and color and that all her subjects, once they had become Catholics, were eligible for official posts.”9 Despite abandoning the thesis of  a shared religious faith, a Portuguese professor of economics at the Technical University of Lisbon was to write in an academic work: “We have created throughout five centuries the most extraordinary multi-racial, national community of all times, in which merit comes from the value of the human being and not from the color of the skin. (…) Historically and currently, the Portuguese nation is, as a consequence, a mosaic of multi-continental, multi-racial populations with religious diversity”.10

Sometimes a “civilization-based” argument was added, and contradictions about the “non-superior character” of some cultures appeared: “While the Portuguese policy for human relationships in the overseas territories is impressive because of the vastness of the territories in which it applies, it is even more impressive because of its purpose of transforming aborigines into Portuguese, as Portuguese as anyone born in mainland Portugal, as it is high moral and social standards that lead them to Lusitanity, and to complete integration in the Nation”.11

Did such honorable official aims result in a social cohesion that could be expressed in terms of statistical categories or indicators? Did territorial discontinuities encapsulate different societies, with different literacy levels and prejudice? Was this philosophy confirmed in terms of race relationships, inter-racial marriage and miscegenation? Is it possible to find such a Lusitanity expressed in attitudes towards marriage that lie hidden in the data of registered marriages recording different colored skins throughout the empire? It is a fact that Portugal had one of the most far-reaching colonial empires in world history and that the Portuguese had a reputation for particularly integrative and intimate relations with the indigenous groups that were colonized. In order to unify all of the territories under the same legal rules, to endow them with the same status, and to prove that they were considered as a homogeneous territory, each of the colonies was designated a province, an institutional status that was introduced in the constitutional reform of 1951.12 In this new institutional framework, overseas provinces and mainland provinces were partners in the same empire. However, did this predominant official discourse reflect the truth? Can we believe in this perspective for the Portuguese colonial empire in the period after the Second World War?

The aim of this paper is to test the accuracy of the language used in official political speeches during these decades, by observing how different kinds of local cultural cleavages led to different social experiences of marriage in the various territories. As far as culture, education and ethnicity are concerned, interracial marriage and miscegenation were two important aspects to be observed in Portuguese colonial territories. This paper observes that social and color differences can help to explain how there was a racial prejudice in the Portuguese Empire that must be recognized as yet one more factor helping to explain the success of the colonial wars for independence.13

There is a long bibliography on the period, dating from the creation of the Estado Novo to the independence of the territories that were previously under Portuguese sovereignty (1920s-30s to 1974-75).14 However, most of the contributions are devoted to imperial, political or economic aspects, and even those studies devoted to analyzing the colonial philosophy, social prejudice and social cleavages do not approach the aspects of inter-racial marriage in a quantitative way.15 A recent work (Matos, 2006) is quite exhaustive in dealing with questions of racial representations and color from the 16th century to the 1970s, although it follows an anthropological approach and does not use any consistency checks.

The independence achieved by the different colonies also makes the study of ethnic and social cleavages much more interesting in so many countries, since they have such different features and geographical locations, while nonetheless sharing a common Portuguese colonial past. This paper seeks to shed some light on the study of all of these colonies today.

Fractionalization in Portuguese colonial societies (from the 1940s to the 1960s)

In the colonies, a small and thinly spread white bureaucracy came to represent the central power of the distant mother country during the first half of the twentieth century.16 The Colonial Act that was published in 1930 and the 1933 Organizational Structure for the Portuguese Overseas Territories (Carta Orgânica do Ultramar Português) outlined a new administrative model with economic and financial consequences. Slow economic growth in Portugal could not provide enough financial resources for either the private or public sector to invest in the colonies. However, during World War II, when prices for colonial goods became rewarding again and the Portuguese economy picked up, the mother country moved toward sustainable economic modernization. As a result, relationships between the colonizers and those that were colonized blossomed into closer interactions. From this perspective, it is possible to concentrate the analysis of the peaceful Portuguese administration of this last colonial empire into the period from the 1940s to the 1970s, which includes the fastest economic growth experienced throughout what Kuznets has styled the Golden Age, beginning with the conclusion of the Second World War until the first oil shock of 1974, and a general trend toward decolonization for all the other European colonial powers.17

Because of the huge differences in location and size, each of the eight Portuguese colonies formed a separate administrative, economic and political unit, with its own laws, currency, taxes and customs. Although, throughout the empire, the institutional framework existed for the territories to be ruled from a common legal and political point of view, different social developments unfolded from the 1940s until decolonization in the 1970s. Excellent statistical information is available for this period. Three Censuses, from 1950, 1960 and 1970 contain vast data on the Portuguese colonial empire. Of course, there may be some incomplete information, but this may also be equally true of statistical records pertaining to the mainland. Moreover, the central state was greatly interested in amassing information on the colonial territories, allocating resources for a uniform collection of data, which was attempted in accordance with specified sets of questions and surveys, using a specially appointed staff for this purpose. Marriages lying outside the boundaries of the survey undertaken by the administrative authorities, in remote zones, were surely those of couples belonging to the same local somatic group, creating a bias toward interracial marriage in the sample. Other sources might be used, but they would only present sparse qualitative information. It is curious that Matos (2006) neglects this source, thereby losing the chance to benefit from the classification of people living in colonial territories that was formally used by the colonial administration for statistical purposes. Of course, ideological and political bias is included, and this is exactly the point that is to be discussed, while the available quantitative time series that the colonial administration collected allows for a detailed statistical analysis. It should be remembered that during this period the “winds of change” began to blow across Colonial Empires, and central administrations adopted a “wait and see attitude”, using local bureaucracies to collect information in order to manage the territories.18 The Portuguese response involved the constitutional reform of 1951. References to the Colonial Empire and colonies were formally dropped from official texts. “Overseas provinces” became the official term to designate the non-European territories under Portuguese sovereignty19. At the same time, the economic situation of Portugal proper and its “overseas provinces” improved, and the only loss was the occupation of two small Indian territories (Dadrá and Nagar-Aveli) by India in 1954.20

Territories were quite different in size. Note that Angola, the largest territory, was fourteen times the size of mainland Portugal, Mozambique was about seven times that size, while Guinea was only about half the size of mainland Portugal, and the other colonies were small spaces. Population and demographic density were also quite different, as Table 1 shows. In the same way, they were made up of different cultures and peoples.

Table 1- Population and demographic density of Portuguese colonial territories in 1950

Territory

Cape
Verde

Guinea

São Tomé
and Príncipe

Angola

Mozambique

India

Macau

Timor

Total resident
population

148,331

510,777

      60,159

4,145,266

     5,738,911

637,591

187,772

442,378

Inhabitants
per km2

    36.8

    14.2

          62.4

      3.3

        7.3

160.0

11,045.4

    23.3


Source: Portuguese Yearbook, 1950, vol. II.

Fragmentation (in the sense of territorial discontinuity and a vast variation in population density throughout the territories) was quite evident in the Portuguese colonial empire of the twentieth century. There was no legal discrimination by race anywhere in the empire, but this did not mean that everybody enjoyed the same legal status. Although formal political speeches stressed that all citizens were equal, the official statistical sources that are available present data according to race and “civilization”, even if in a disguised way.21 Everywhere, except in Cape Verde, there was a distinction between citizens who lived according to standard Portuguese law and people who lived according to particular regimes. In the African colonies and Timor, this took the form of a distinction between civilized and indigenous inhabitants. People of European origin and literate natives working for the Portuguese administration or in the modern sector of the economy (the so-called assimilados or assimilated citizens) enjoyed civilized status, corresponding to full citizenship. Illiterate natives, especially those still living in the framework of traditional tribal societies, were ruled according to their own particular indigenous regimes.23

The Statistical Yearbooks for the Colonial Empire consider the “civilized”, “uncivilized” and “assimilated” categories, and also distinguish ethnicity by using the label “somatic groups” (grupos somáticos). Tables 2A and 2B present the data for 1950, according to the classifications of “Race” and “Civilized”, the largest categories being indicated in bold, while Table 2C reports the share of Civilized people in the totals. No definitions are presented to characterize these categories individually. This fact may mean that they were quite obvious at the time, and therefore “understood”. Although cultural aspects are involved, Matos (2006) demonstrates that the color of the skin was the basis for racial representations in colonized societies that had earlier been a source of slaves, as nineteenth-century theories considered that negritude was a degenerative variation from original man – the white man.24, According to Caselli and Coleman (2002), it would be better to say that color was also a clearly important indicator for failsafe reasons: “ethnic cleavages based on differences in skin color and other physical characteristics should be almost perfectly defection proof, as such physical differences offer very low-cost devices to detect infiltrators”.25 In fact, while differences in religion may be overcome through conversion, and differences in language may be improved through learning, differences in skin color are insurmountable, and may have underlain very difficult and costly attempts toward assimilation. According to other literature on social cleavages, “conflict is more likely when the characteristics that distinguish the ethnicities are more difficult to change”.26 This sociological interpretation has also been discussed for other Colonial Empires. In the case of British India, for example, Alison Blunt writes that “although Anglo-Indians were “country-born” and domiciled in India, many imagined Britain as home and identified with British life in India. (…) I argue that ideas of Britain as home were intimately bound up with ideas of whiteness”.27

The statistical yearbooks consider six classifications, in spite of the official rhetoric of the government: whites people (brancos), mixed (mestiços), blacks (negros), yellows (amarelos), Indians (indianos), and Timorese (Timores).

Table 2 - The population in Portuguese colonial territories in 1950, according to the Portuguese Yearbook, 1950, vol. II.
A- Racial composition of total population


Territory

“Somatic group”

Cape Verde
%

Guinea
%

São Tomé and Príncipe
%

Angola
%

Mozambique
%

India
%

Macau
%

Timor
%

“Whites”

2.0

0.4

1.9

1.9

0.8

0.1

1.4

+0

Mestiços

69.6

0.9

7.1

0.7

+0

+0

1.0

0.5

“Negroes”

28.4

98.7

  90.9

97.4

98.5

+0

+0

+0

“Indians”

+0

+0

+0

0

0.2

99.8

+0

+0

“Yellows”

0

0

+0

+0

0

+0

97.5

0.7

“Timorese”

0

0

0

0

0

0

+0

98.7

Other or unknown

+0

0

0

+0

0

+0

+0

+0

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

100

B – The composition of the category “Civilized”


Territory

 

Cape Verde

Guinea

São Tomé and Príncipe

Angola

Mozambique

 India

Macau

Timor

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

%

“White”

2

27

3

58

52

+0

1

8

“Mestiços”

70

55

10

19

27

+0

1

27

“Negroes”

28

18

87

22

5

+0

+0

+0

“Indians”

+0

+0

+0

0

14

100

+0

1

“Yellows”

0

0

+0

0

2

+0

98

42

“Timorese”

+0

0

0

0

0

0

+0

21

Other or unknown

+0

0

0

+0

0

+0

+0

1

C - Share of “Civilized” in Total Population


Territory

 

Cape Verde
%

Guinea
%

São Tomé and Príncipe
%

Angola
%

Mozambique
%

India
%

Macau
%

Timor
%

Share of “Civilizedin Total Population”

100

2

72

3

2

100

100

2

Source: Anuário Estatístico, Império Colonial, 1950, vol. II.

Of course, there existed an ideological background behind the definition of these categories and their identification for inclusion in Statistical Yearbooks.28 Cultural elements were also certainly used in deciding marginal cases.

The “white” category would include people from mainland Portugal or other European countries. Would it also include people with miscegenation relatively far back in their family history? Very probably it would, while the “mestiços” included all mixed people, most probably those whose miscegenation was more recent and visible. The “negroes” group included native Africans. Did it also include people of mixed ancestry? This is a difficult question, as we know how variable its meaning is in current societies. If we compare the Brazilian meaning of “negro” or “mixed race” with the prevailing meanings in the USA or in South Africa, there is obviously a wide range of difference. “In fact, the word ‘mestizo’ as it is used in Spanish America does not translate well into Portuguese, for in Portuguese a ‘mestiço’ can be any mixture. In the case of Brazil, it can mean either a descendant of Indian-European parents or of African-European parents”, says Nazzari (2001).29 According to Telles (1995), in Brazil “structural inequalities are particularly great between whites and non-whites compared to between browns and blacks”.30 The category of yellow was reserved, very probably, for people having a Chinese link, as their share was almost completely confined to classifications in the territory of Macau, reflecting relatively low mobility between the territories before the colonial wars. To what extent did this classification of “yellow” include mixed people? As the statistical share in the territory of Macau for “Negroes” and “mixed” people is almost negligible, this may mean that all miscegenation with “yellows” was lumped together into the same category of “yellow”. People from Timor or neighboring regions were classified as “Timorese”. Did this classification of “Timorese” include “mixed” people? Just as in Macau, the statistics refer to the presence of “mixed” people (probably from miscegenation with blacks). So, very probably miscegenation with Timorese was considered in the group of “Timorese”. In any event, if these were the classifications used, they surely reflected the social divisions according to the mental background of those societies at that time. In one way or another, the use of these categories is unavoidable in this paper.

The distribution among these groups was quite different in the various Portuguese colonial territories, as the table shows. In a brief summary, one can see that white people never represented more than 2% of the total population. Numerically dominant categories are the natives of each territory: Negroes in Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola and Mozambique, Indians in India, Yellows in Macau, Timorese in Timor, and “mestiços” in Cape Verde, which is the territory showing the largest miscegenation, by far.

Another major conclusion can be drawn. Among residents in Cape Verde, there were no Asians (Indians, Yellows or Timorese). In Guinea, there were no Indians and no “Timorese”. “Negroes” represented 99% of the population and miscegenation was very scarce. In the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, miscegenation was significant: “Where miscegenation was practiced as a matter of Crown policy at an early date was in the island of São Tomé”. This archipelago was not inhabited when Portuguese navigators visited the two islands for the first time in the 15th century, and tended to share the characteristics of the continental African colonies. Since the 19th century, this colony had been devoted to the production of cocoa, using an Angolan labor force. As there was no guarantee that these workers would ever return, miscegenation in the islands reached a level of 7% of “mestiços” in 1950 and represented the middle class and the administrative services, while the white population, made up of landowners and senior local government staff, was residual. In fact, these “somatic groups” represented a real ethnic classification in Portuguese colonial societies, according to McClintock’s terminology: “race (…) and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other”.31

As for the definition of “uncivilized”, this was said to include those “who preserve a traditional African culture”, while the “assimilated” were those “who totally or partially adopted a Western European culture”. In practice, only a small minority of people enjoyed civilized status in the Portuguese colonies. In 1950, figures amounted to 8,000 in Guinea (less than 2% of the population), 135,000 in Angola (less than 4% of the population), 93,000 in Mozambique (less than 2% of the population), 7,000 in Timor (less than 2% of the population). São Tomé and Príncipe stood apart from the other colonies with 43,000 civilized people (around 72% of the population). As pointed out above, there was no indigenous status in Cape Verde. The same was true in India and Macau, but most of the population did not live according to standard Portuguese law, as there were special regimes for Hindus in India and for Chinese people in Macau. The classification was therefore used for five territories (Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, Mozambique and Timor), but it did not apply to the other three colonial territories (Cape Verde, India, and Macau), where all people were considered “civilized” for statistical purposes. This was a general consensus in the Portuguese society of the time, as we can read: “(…) in India the designation of “indigenous” never applies, as this word is appropriate, in its technical-juridical meaning, to the backward populations of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea. In India there never were “indigenous” in the legal sense of the word and they are all citizens, even the most uncultivated”.33

Curiously, the same definition was used in British India. Indians were considered civilized. The community of mixed people from British/Indian parents, the so-called Anglo-Indians, were defined as “Statutory Natives of India” and “for defense and education were classified as European”.34 The mixed Anglo-Indian community of about 300,000 persons in the 1940s, 100% literate, were considered reliable, and it’s members had access to the Indian Defense Force, for example. Sons of British parents went freely into the “covenanted ranks of the British services and reached the highest positions of trust and responsibility” while 80% of nursing services were provided by Anglo-Indian women.35

In all Portuguese colonies, the army recruited local soldiers. People from Cape Verde, India and Macau also had frequent access to the highest functions in the bureaucracy or in private activities, as some of them were even very eminent and erudite: ministers, officers in the Army or the Navy, magistrates, university teachers, doctors, priests, scientists, and diplomats, according to Godinho (1954).36 There may be two reasons for this: a high level of miscegenation or the hegemony of a different culture and civilization. The explanation based on “miscegenation” applies more to Cape Verde. The archipelago was settled by a mixture of European colonists and African slaves, and thereafter became the main base for Portuguese contacts with the nearby coasts (Guinea proper and the Gulf of Guinea, respectively).38 Cape Verde developed a mixed population with its own language, a creole of the Portuguese and Guinea languages, and 70% of the “civilized” people were of mixed ancestry. A higher level of education prevailed in the islands of Cape Verde as well. Cape Verdeans mostly occupied the available administrative positions in their islands, in Guinea and in other African territories.
  
The reasons related to the dominance of different civilizations and cultures apply much more to the cases of Portuguese India and Macau. People from India and Macau were respected because of the sophistication of the Indian and Chinese civilizations and their respective influences on mentalities in these territories, according to the official texts (or because of their light color, according to anthropological studies).37 In Goa and Macau, an elite comprising people of European origin and natives who had converted to Christianity formed the dominant social stratum and manned the administration of the other Indian territories and Timor. The bulk of the population remained linked to Hindu, Chinese and Timorese cultural traditions and languages (Concani, Cantonese and Tetum, respectively). Once more, the color ranking may also be an explanation.38

While in São Tomé and Príncipe 72% of the population was considered “civilized” according to Portuguese statistics, in Guinea, Angola, Mozambique and Timor only 2 to 3% of the population was counted as such.

For a better understanding of the “civilized” category, educational levels should also be considered. There are insufficient classifications crossed with educational levels. It would be desirable to have details about the educational levels of each “somatic group”. Unfortunately, data on education for Portuguese colonies is not broken down according to “somatic groups”. Curiously, one can find educational information for whites only (including the territory of Macau).  This may be for one of two reasons: 1 - All categories of literate people were related with “white” people and; 2 - Difficulties in conducting surveys or racial prejudice hampered the collection of statistics in the Portuguese empire.

The first possibility is not plausible, although values would certainly be very low for some other somatic groups, particularly for blacks (“negros”). The second explanation must, therefore, apply. The two territories of continental Africa - Guinea and Mozambique - had developed in the late 19th century from trade factories established on the coast in the 15th or 16th centuries. Although in both of them the bulk of the population remained linked to traditional cultures and languages, the presence of large private companies in Mozambique may mean a stronger connection with markets and literacy. A small elite of European, Cape Verdean (in the territories of West Africa, especially in Guinea) and Goan (in Mozambique) origin joined the dominant social stratum and manned the administration.


E – Educational composition of “white” people in 1950


Territory

Education

Guinea
%

Mozambique
%

Macau
%

Illiterate

24

15

7

Reading abilities

1

+0

93

Reading and writing abilities

7

38

+0

Primary school

43

34

+0

High school

21

10

+0

University

4

3

+0

Source: Anuário Estatístico, Império Colonial, 1950.

One may see that there were clear asymmetries among “white” people in the empire. While most of the university graduates were “white” most of the  “white” were only primary or high school graduates (from Table 2-E). Of course, it is important to bear in mind that the dominant alphabet in Macau was Chinese and statistical criteria reflect the use of the western script.

Marriage as an indicator of social interaction

According to Stoler (1997), “Imperial discourses that divide colonizer from colonized, metropolitan observers from colonial agents, and bourgeois colonizers from their subaltern compatriots designated certain cultural competencies, sexual proclivities, psychological dispositions, and cultivated habits. These in turn defined the hidden fault lines (…) along which gendered assessments of class and racial membership were drawn”.39 According to Easterly (2000), racial fractionalization means social fragmentation, even where institutions tried to overcome conflicts or at least mitigate cleavages. Law is a very important institution for addressing potential social conflicts. However, whatever the legal background existing for the settlement of conflicts, social fractionalization may continue if people do not accept differences in everyday life. In the 1950s and 1960s, Gilberto Freyre assumed miscegenated persons were the supreme expression of Luso-Tropical social integration and developed a theory of peaceful social interaction.40 According to Freyre (1961), miscegenation in Portuguese colonial territories resulted from the human and Christian orientation of Portuguese colonization and represented a social engineering process.41 His theses were very easily coupled with the official government perspective at the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator, the prime instigator of the Discoveries, in 1961.

According to Freyre, miscegenation is an excellent way to obtain a broader social (and political) consensus. Portuguese historical experiences in colonization were always strongly marked by miscegenation. For many authors the foremost example of miscegenation is the case of the Brazilian empire, which lasted until the independence of this colony in 1822.42 Sometimes miscegenation is not based on marriage, but on personal relationships that have no legal recognition. (Miscegenation without legal marriage may represent no social cohesion. Think of the large-scale South African miscegenation). This seems to have been the case of the first Luso-Africans in Angola, according to Miller (1988).43

If, however, a fragmented society experiences a large amount of interracial marriage, membership in a coalition is reinforced between the participant groups in mixed marriages. As in the work of Cott (2002), this paper regards marriage, a special institution, as a very safe solution for attaining social cohesion. “Anyone (…) knows that marriage is a legal creation.”44 Moreover, mixed marriage is a very special institution for achieving this aim.45 It is possible to say that sharing the same public spaces, attending the same schools and applying for the same jobs are good examples of racial interaction. However, the ready example of affability comes from legal mixed marriages, because of the family ties of blood between different social/ethnic groups. Qian and Lichter (2001) measure immigrant acculturation through marital assimilation. Not only do legal mixed marriages mean miscegenation, they also translate into socially assumed personal ties of strong solidarity and love.

Moreover, violent confrontation along ethnic lines may be prevented, because ethnic cleavages break down. It should be remembered that the economics literature stresses how different groups, particularly ethnic groups, may have different preferences regarding which type of public goods to produce in a society.46 In fact, for Alesina et al. (1999), for a given public good, each ethnic group’s utility level seems to drop whenever other ethnic groups also use it. Such a situation introduces considerable difficulties for public choice in economics and much indecision for government and political or administrative authorities. This argument has been used by Easterly and Levine (1997) to explain how the present-day ethnic division on the African continent can explain such enormous difficulties in determining a safe economic growth path.47 The more mixed a society is, the fewer effects of this kind will occur.

A large amount of miscegenation in divided societies occurs spontaneously and depends on cultural and moral factors. Of course, miscegenation outside marriage may also be a focus of segregation and violence. Legal miscegenation through interracial marriage, however, represents the public acceptance of color differences and the assumption of a personal private relationship. Moreover, as marriage is a legal relationship established within the legal system that provides the framework for society, it also bases its economic structure on property rights, in order to legitimize filial descent and inheritance. It is hardly necessary to quote Douglass North to stress the decisive role that property rights played in twentieth-century societies.48 Social and political consensus is, therefore, a condition for economic efficiency, economic growth, development and peace, and miscegenation contributes toward reducing social tensions, it is argued.

Surely racial homogamy included not only racial prejudice, but also educational homogeneity. Sociological studies show that educational homogamy across cohorts is considerable, both in absolute terms and also when controlling for the general increase in educational levels in recent periods. Usually racial prejudice exists to the extent that it is coterminous with educational homogamy.49 In adopting this perspective, it becomes clear that inter-racial marriage can also be assumed to be an indicator of social, educational and cultural openness and integration.50

Data

For every year from 1944 to 1960, the colonial yearbooks present a chart breaking down marriages according to the “somatic group” of husband and wife in the married couples in each territory (with the exception of Macau). The samples include hundreds of marriages each year in the small territories and even thousands of marriages in each large territory.51 It is impossible to distinguish whether any of them refer to second marriages. This means that we have information on couples in existing marriages, but not on previous relationships. Such inconvenience may, however, be very small, as divorce was quite rare at that time. According to data on inter-racial marriages collected from these Portuguese Statistical Yearbooks on the Portuguese Colonial Empire for the 1940s and 1950s, marriages occurred mainly between people belonging to the same group. The vast majority of marriages occurred with connubial partners that were both “white”, “mixed”, “Negro”, “Indian”, “Yellow” and “Timorese”. Mixed marriages also occurred, although in smaller numbers. It is possible to represent this information using a matrixwhere both rows and columns include “White”, “Mixed” , “Negro”, “Indian”, “Yellow” , and “Timorese”. Not only is the whole sample significant, but so is the number of marriages that were included in the data represented in each element aij. The yearbook explains that data were collected from information provided by local administrations in the municipalities of the colonial territories.

In the matrix, the elements aii represent homogamic marriages of couples (where husband and wife belong to the same somatic group). All other elements of the matrix, the aij with , represent mixed marriages, describing different husband/wife combinations, according to their position in the matrix.

The analysis will be performed for each of the territories and not for the whole colonial empire. According to Harris and Ono (2005), it is incorrect to perform any marriage analysis that disregards the regional aspects, because the market for marriage is local. Opportunities to meet a potential spouse are based on personal networks.52 The test for marriages in the USA for the year 2000 supports the accuracy of this hypothesis. For Portuguese colonial territories, this is a decisive aspect for several reasons. Not only were transport and travel less frequent and efficient, but also geographical discontinuity and cultural diversity require separate analyses.

It is highly relevant to state that, from 1960 on, ethnic information on marriages disappeared from the National Statistical Yearbooks. Marriages were presented without any breakdown by “somatic groups”, and no further reference was made to this characterization. From then on, statistical data report only on the number of marriages and divorces as a whole, in each of the territories. This fact may mean that the motivation to choose ethnicity as a major factor for describing marriages statistically was considered to be politically incorrect. The label “somatic groups” evoked identity. Expressing such somatic cleavages could evoke a perceived threat of conflict in the historical context of the upsurge in colonial movements that led to the colonial wars.

Even so, for the previous decades, a large database, consisting of a vast number of observations recorded in each year in each territory and drawn from the scores of marriage that were registered, supports the exercise, depicted in annual matrices for each of the territories. How to manage the data in order to obtain conclusions on social interaction in the Portuguese colonial society and test the government philosophy on sociability within the Portuguese empire? In observing annual matrices, it is easy to guess that most marriages in Cape Verde were between couples consisting of a husband and a wife both of miscegenated background, as “mixed” people were dominant in this territory, that most marriages in Guinea, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola and Mozambique were between couples consisting of a black husband and a black wife, as blacks were dominant there, and that most marriages in India (Macau and Timor) were between couples in which both husband and wife were Indian (Yellow or Timorese), as these were the dominant “somatic groups” in each of these cases. Did the observed number of inter-racial marriages parallel the proportion of “somatic groups” in each territory?

Testing the hypothesis of independence between marriage decisions and race 

To study intermarital patterns, it is necessary to provide a method for controlling for the population size of each group. This means that the racial mating that is depicted must be adjusted to account for the racial composition in the different colonial territories. For this purpose, contingency tables  were calculated.

Sii =                                                     

Estimations of contingency tables  provide what should be the number of marriages of each kind of husband/wife combination, supposing that the probability of marrying someone from any of the different “somatic groups” was equal. The hypothesis corresponds to a situation of no social prejudice (the government’s rhetorical philosophy and the guidelines for Freyre’s Luso-Tropical project).
The comparison with other data obtained through the calculation of the bias defined as

provides the distribution test of the hypothesis of independence between race and (the observed) decisions on marriage.

The bias proves that race and decisions on marriage were not independent variables, with probabilities of 0.99 for the confidence margin for all the Portuguese colonial territories. One important analytical aspect deserves to be mentioned. As some “somatic groups” were very small in some territories – particularly whites – there is a bias in the statistical conclusions towards exaggerating the estimated probabilities. Be that as it may, one may accept it as certain that there was non-independence between race and decisions on marriage in the Portuguese colonies. No causal relationship can be established, but the  test makes it clear that race and marriage were not independent facts in the final Portuguese Colonial Empire. The startling finding emerges that not only were the proclaimed political aims of racial equality untrue (or at least, not practiced), but also that the data show high preferences for racially homogamous marriages in all of the colonies, as well as ranking preferences for races. It is also interesting to note that the data in matricesshow that men are much more willing than women to marry someone from a different “somatic group”. In fact, as the columns represent men and the rows represent women, we can see that the values are much more widely spread along the columns than along the rows. This is also recognized in the Luso-Tropical thesis. This fact was already noticed in Boxer (1961) in the case of the Brazilian colonization: “The French circumnavigator, Le Gentil de La Barbinais, who stayed for some months at Bahia in 1718-19, was scandalized by the local citizens’ preference for a colored woman even if a white woman was available”.53

This means that decisions to cross-marry belonged much more to men than to women in a world where “European men were the most direct agents of empire”.54 The model of civilization that was used in colonization was that of white civilization. Color meant social ranking. Moreover, in previous decades, some legal constraints also existed in forbidding inter-racial marriages for Portuguese civil servants and army or navy officers.

Building an indicator for racial homogamy

According to the described data, a racially homogamous indicator may thus be calculated. (A different aim may be to discuss whether a hint of social cohesion may be measured through the blending of races by legal inter-racial marriage as a social institution, by considering the share of mixed marriages in Portuguese colonial societies as a proxy for social cohesion).
Consider the squared matrix A, above, describing the marriages observed among ethnic groups in a territory in a given year. As the diagonal of the matrix, made up of the elements aii, contains the number of marriages intra-ethnic groups and the other elements of the matrix describe the marriages inter-ethnic groups, the index I defined as

     with                   

measures the proportion of mixed marriages. It varies from 0 to 1 (zero if all marriages were mixed and 1 if all were between persons belonging to the same ethnic group). So, for an indicator of  racial homogamy, we shall consider

 ,

which measures the proportion of mixed marriages in society, also varying from 0 to 1 (zero for no cohesion resulting from the absence of inter-ethnic marriages, 1 for the maximum cohesion resulting from the absence of  intra-ethnic marriages).

Indicators of racial homogamy () were estimated for all of the years for each colonial territory. An overall indicator was calculated for the whole period for each territory in Table 3 from the average of the estimated indicators for each territory.

Table 3 – Average indicator of racial homogamy in Portuguese colonial territories


Cape Verde

Guinea

S.Tomé and Príncipe

Angola

Mozambique

India

Macau

Timor

0.15

0.05

0.10

0.15

0.10

0.003

?

0.01

Source: Estimation, according to the methodology described in the text, on data for marriages, taken from  several issues of the Anuário Estatístico, Império Colonial.

The value of this indicator for racial homogamy deserves a comment. It is based on legal marriage, a paramount expression of personal openness to other people. Legal marriage is a formal union. It requires sanctioning by the state and usually all family members and friends expect that it will involve someone who is thought to be socially equal or even superior. So, it is only fair to say that many other informal marital relationships also occurred. All kinds of inter-racial relationships contribute toward reducing social distances. Legal marriage is, however, the highest expression of accepting a partner, neglecting social barriers and promoting imitation. In fact, the more inter-racial marriages that occur, the greater is the encouragement to other people to consider romantic love across racial lines. In conclusion, the indicator downgrades social cohesion and racial interaction. It is biased by neglecting informal unions, concubines or other marital couples. This fact leads to the belief that the following analysis on social permeability is very safe.

Table 3 shows that there is a wide gap between the official ideology expressed in political speeches and the reality expressed through statistical evidence. Ethnic cleavages, particularly black/white fractionalization, were very prominent on the African continent. Although no Portuguese colony may be pointed to as representing a case similar to Zimbabwe or South Africa, ethnic stigmatization still characterized Portuguese colonial societies.

Of all the Portuguese colonial territories, Cape Verde and Angola were the societies that were most open to mixed marriages. They represented, on average, 15% of the total during the two decades studied. São Tomé and Príncipe and Mozambique followed, with about 10%. Among the African colonies, Guinea was the territory most averse to mixed marriages, and it deserves to be seen as a third case level. In fact, social cohesion as measured by the proportion of mixed marriages reached only 5%.

In all of the Portuguese colonies, the most common story for single white men who arrived from the mother country was marriage to white girls from domiciled white families or white girls from the mainland, who joined them after a legal marriage by proxy (casamento por procuração), according to the prevailing moral rules of the time, which prohibited sex before marriage. The brides might be their girl friends at the time of their departure, or might be chosen by parents and family remaining in the mother country, or even found through advertisements in newspapers.55 Difficult personal financial situations, dreams of a transatlantic marriage, or the aim of women to find a good husband among wealthy colonial employees helped to ensure the success of this social mechanism for seeking marriage to a white woman. Dreams of this kind always encouraged female mentalities of the time to attempt imitation.56 The character of the Portuguese African colonies also evoked the role of the “frontier”, which wrapped this kind of wedding in “multi-layered imaginaries”, just as was noted in the case of Australia and other regions.57

The Portuguese Asian colonies show a very different structure for inter-racial marriages. These were much more closed colonial societies, although they demonstrate some openness to geographical mobility into African colonial territories. Data on the distribution of the population according to the so-called “somatic groups” can show their presence in Mozambique, Angola and even Guinea. In the Asian colonies, colonizers were even scarcer than they were in the African colonies, as they represented well below 1% of the resident population (Table 2-C). The annual observations of thousands of marriages in the database for Portuguese India and Timor show that almost all of them occurred between Indian couples or Timorese couples, respectively. For the Indian territories, it is absolutely necessary to evoke the prominent role of religious cleavages, including Hindus (61%), Catholics (37%), and a minority made up of Orthodox Christians and Muslims.58 Both Hindus and Muslims respected the social organization through the division into “castes”. Note that, for the African colonies, the so-called “somatic groups” may be seen much more as social “orders” (ordens),and never as castes. According to Sreenivas (2003), despite new cultural elements such as the availability of women’s magazines, which introduced or “developed new notions of subjective inferiority” in Tamil Indian women in British colonial India, displacing “such conventional identity markers as kinship or caste”, it is impossible to ignore the strong influence and the social role of religious elements in Indian society.59 In this case, religious conversion was not enough to offset the social cleavages, although castes were not supposed to exist among Catholics there. In any event, the Hindu religion was also the religion of the vast majority of the population. For historical reasons, India had its own civilization and the social system was quite firmly rooted in race and lineage: “Pride of race and of caste proved too strong for the legislation, which the Portuguese authorities periodically enacted to encourage mixed marriages”.60 Anglo-Indians are also considered as an endogamous community in the available literature.61 Notably, Portuguese was not the only language spoken among the most erudite members of the Portuguese territories in India. People in general spoke Konkani in Goa and Gujarati or Urdu in the other territories.63 Some of them could also write Marata, while the English language prevailed as the civilized European language. From the Portuguese official perspective, this fact was not a reason to classify people as “indigenous”, as noted above.64

Although this was the legal framework, such deep cleavages in ethnicity, language and religion, which are absolutely clear in the structure of marriages, made social and inter-racial integration in India difficult. Weights and measures in India did not follow the universal metric system, another proof of the prevailing British influence. In all other Portuguese colonial territories, the metric system was used.70 Note also that the Portuguese colonial territories in India were the first to leave the Portuguese empire.

With this social background, it is easier to comment on the data indicating that Indians only married Indian people (wives or husbands) and did not mix with other ethnic groups. Mixed marriages represented only 0.3% of total marriages. Among these, marriages between a white husband and an Indian wife were statistically predominant, although inter-racial marriages also included mixing with other minorities (particularly with “mixed” people and blacks). Although it is quite difficult to establish a comparison with British India, because “any effort to compare different imperial systems (…) raises questions about what it is we should be comparing”,65 it should be noted that inter-marriage in British India also occurred “between Britons and Anglo-Indian women”, although Indian and Anglo-Indian men were mostly endogamous. Caplan (2001) refers to the strong past presence of the Portuguese in India (Madras and San Thome, near Madras, for example) leading to marriages between Englishmen and “half-castes of Portuguese extraction” in his attempts to report on Anglo-Indians, whom he describes as the “Children of Colonialism”.66 Women always introduced diversity and miscegenation, as is very well known. Like Anglo-Indian women, Portuguese-Indian women also married European males. On the contrary, only better-placed male Anglo-Indians, after going abroad to complete their studies, could marry British (or other European) women, while Anglo-Indian women could aspire to marriages with whites (Europeans).67

International Comparisons

Portuguese colonization in Africa was too brief for inter-racial marriage to produce the effects of social inter-racial integration as hybridization, as it lasted for only just under half a century. In the USA “1 in 40 persons identifies himself or herself as multi-racial”, which is 2.5% of the population. And “this figure could soar to 1 in 5 by the year 2050”, which will be 20%.68 With the exception of the islands, the Portuguese colonies in the 1940s and 1950s were less mixed than the USA is today. Note that a much greater degree of miscegenation was reached in the Atlantic islands under Portuguese colonization. Not only does insularity help to encourage miscegenation, but Portuguese colonization had also persisted throughout the previous centuries. The islands, therefore, were much more creole societies than continental territories. Of course, one may find fault with these comparisons as they suppose that “legal, economic, religious and familial structures are treated as phenomena to be judged by Western standards”.69

Moreover, racial prejudice was much more bipolar (black/white) focused.70 In Portuguese colonies no black (“negro”) husbands married “white” women. In America, “5.5 percent of black males married white females in 1990”.71 This fact may indicate less social prejudice, but surely also results from more asymmetric educational levels between whites and blacks in the Portuguese colonies.72 Social classes and education were coterminous, so race and education were coterminous as well.

It is also easy to believe that inter-racial marriage was more difficult in view of the stage of economic growth. As African colonies were weakly urbanized, there was very little exposure of blacks to whites: in each colonial territory, most of the native people lived in the countryside, while whites concentrated in urban centers. When blacks did live in the urban centers, they concentrated in the peripheral neighborhoods, the musseques of Luanda, for example, leading to social segregation but also hybridization and métissage.73 This means that color and residence were coterminous and in large cities the ghettoization of poverty led to segregation, but also to inter-racial marriage and creolization. This is a very well-known process, which is also documented for other countries and their cities.74

The longest-lasting Portuguese colonization, the one in Brazil, produced a widely mixed society. Brazilian segregation is well documented, but even so it is also considered “moderate when compared to the extreme black-white segregation still found in major US cities”.75

Conclusions and epilogue

In this paper, the results presented indicate that racial homogamy was the predominant feature in Portuguese colonies. The paper also demonstrates that race and marriage were not independent variables and rejects the notion that government political philosophy was successful in considering formal and juridical equality for all the Portuguese people living there. Low levels of segregation allowed for inter-racial interaction, including inter-racial friendship and intermarriage, at least among similar social classes or cohorts. However, cultural assimilation through university attendance could not be as efficient as social cohesion resulting from inter-racial marriages. According to recent studies, shifting social attitudes, rather than laws and courts, have a greater impact than do formal or legal changes. Instead of considering that “mixed” people were marginal groups in relation to each of their origins, one would do better to understand that they established cultural linkages for bringing together separate patterns and traditions in a society where the binary opposition between white colonizer and colored colonized was the main social cleavage.76

This paper therefore adds one more perspective to decolonization and independence. It is possible to say that the colonial wars waged for fourteen years from the early 1960s onwards in the three main colonies of Guinea, Angola and Mozambique led to attempts to increase ethnic and cultural merging, as a way of creating greater sociability, and economic integration for growth and development. These political attempts could not accommodate the conflicts, which led, in turn, to political independence for all the territories in the mid-1970s, immediately following the first oil shock.77 Traditional explanations only include the international pressure to decolonize that was placed upon Portugal by the great powers (including the United Nations), the financial constraints imposed in order to support the colonial administration and colonial war, or the failure of the attempts to create an integrated Portuguese space that included the mother country and the African colonies, along with Portuguese participation in European integration through EFTA.78 It would be better to adopt the recent perspectives on liberation movements, which consider them to have been genuine rebellion groups fighting against the ruling racial minorities made up of white and assimilated people. Of course, these minorities claimed control of the resources that the colonizers and assimilated had been monopolizing, if an economic perspective may be used, as is the case in many recent papers devoted to these issues.79

Notes

1Special institutions, films and exhibitions were used to spread government propaganda. Matos (2006: 68-83, 94-99, 112-122).
2Cunha  (1964: 1). On the subject of racial prejudice in Christian conversion and missions, see Matos (2006: 123).
3According to the literature, the expression “the Portuguese colonial empire” only appeared in the 1930s: Matos (2006: 55).
4Cunha (1964: 2).
5Matos (2006: 83-94).
6Cunha (1964: 13).
7Cunha (1964: 13). On “the search for purity among the impure” in the case of Anglo-Indians, see Anthony (1969: 368). For more information about the Portuguese colonies in Africa, see Matos (2006: 148-159).
8Cunha (1964: 19).
9Boxer (1961: 113-138).
10Godinho (1962: 15).
11Godinho (1962: 15).
12Mata and Valério (1994: 201).
13For other factors see Ferreira (2004).
14Lopes (1963), Rocha (1977), Rocha (1982), Laíns (1998) and Ferreira (2002).
15Alexandre (1979), Alexandre (1995), Alexandre (2000), Maxwell (1985) and Newitt (1981).
17A school for colonial studies was created, offering courses for positions in the colonial administration. Matos (2006: 143-144).
18British India became independent in 1947, paving the way for the Dutch, Belgian and French decolonization experiences that followed.
19China, India and Indonesia advanced their claims on Macau, Portuguese India and Portuguese Timor, respectively. Independence movements began to form in the African colonies.
20It is worth noting that these terms had previously been the official ones until the overthrow of the constitutional monarchy in 1910.
21It should be remembered that India became independent from the British empire in 1947.
22 Matos (2006: 133) even considers explicit forms of racial discrimination based on supposed scientific arguments, including “physical anthropology”.
23For the connections between the definition of these categories and color, see Matos (2006: 43-68).
p. 44.
24Caselli and Coleman (2002: 1).
25Caselli and Coleman (2002: 2).
26Ghosh (2005). See also Blunt (2003: 281-294). Like Anglo-Indians, “mixed” people felt the cleavage of the Portuguese empire when independence brought identity problems to most of them. Many of them felt that they were Portuguese and thought of Portugal as their mother country, as well.
27The label “somatic group” evokes nineteenth-century anatomical theories for measuring cranial capacities. Matos (2006: 41).
28Nazzari (2001: 497).
29Telles (1995: 396). See also Ghosh (2005).
30Boxer (1961: 116).
31McClintock (1995: 5). For the present time, see Vala et al. (1999).
32 Godinho (1954: 33).
33Anthony (1969: 3).
34Anthony (1969: iv, x, 9, 141-142).
35 Matos (2006: 159) remarks that, in other colonies, it was not until the 1960s that non-whites people were elected to high positions.
36Boxer (1961: 121).
37Matos (2006: 103) associates the concept of beauty (and respectability) with whiteness.
38This distinction was already expressed in the 15th century, according to Gomes Eanes Zurara.
39Stoler (1997: 8).
40Although Freyre (1933) was the author’s main study on the general profile of Portuguese colonization in producing a hybrid Brazilian society from the ethnic and cultural perspectives, his main book relating to the last Portuguese colonization experiment is Freyre (1961: 25, 27).
41For Freyre, miscegenation helped in disseminating a mixed architecture made of Portuguese and local housing models and in consolidating all cultural aspects of private and collective life, including music, dancing, cooking and dressing. Agriculture and agronomic science reflected the mixed influence of Portuguese habits and local conditions or attitudes from the tropics. Therefore, all the colonized regions, although geographically spread across Africa, as well as being situated in Asia and South America (Brazil) had unified characteristics and institutional similarities because of this experimental philosophy made up of compliance and moral values and showing a readiness to accept other people’s differences. This was a very widespread conviction that also supported the ideological basis and legitimacy for the Portuguese colonization of the 1960s, during the African colonial wars, while the Conference of Bandung was presented as “the first Indian and Chinese attempt to share Asia and Africa between them, in zones of influence” in expressing the political competition between Nehru and Chou-en-Lai. Freyre (1961: 17).
  42Bailey (2004: 728-747). For racism and anti-racism in Brazil, see Telles (1995). For Matos (2006: 201), miscegenation is appreciated because “mixed” people are more similar to whites.
43Miller (1988: 246-250).
44Cott (2002: 88-90).
45For the role of mixed marriage and assimilation seen as a natural means for overcoming and solving the problem of the so-called Indian “backwardness” and poverty, see Jacobs (2002: 29-54).
46(pp. 1243-1284).
47(pp. 1203-1250).
48North (1990).
49For the Brazilian case, see Telles (1995). For the usual forms of prejudice in the Portuguese colonies in Africa, see Matos (2006: 122-134).
50For the case of Norway, see Birkelund and Heldal (2003).
51The sample is made up of 7,273 marriages for Cape Verde, 974 for Guinea, 456 for São Tomé and Príncipe, 2,238 for Angola 7,918 for Mozambique, 46,124 for India and 3,822 for Timor.
52 Harris and Ono (2005: 236-251).
53See Cott (2002: 88-90).
54McClintock (1995: 5).
55To compare this situation with that of Portugues
e immigrants in Argentina, see Borges (2003: 445-479).
56For the Australian experience. see McGrath, 2005. For the role of wealth in seeking partners for marriage, see Breslaw, 2003: 657-673.
57McGrath (2002: 76-108).
58 Godinho (1962: 18).
59Sreenivas (2003: 59-82).
60Boxer (1961: 127).
61Anthony (1969: 365).
62Godinho (1962: 19).
63The justification may be found in the Portuguese literature of the time. It may mean that Indian culture was seen as superior or was at least greatly respected: “Even the fact that some of them did not speak Portuguese does not deserve objection concerning their quality as Portuguese, as great patriots have always spoken other languages. Homeland is a spiritual reality, beyond racial or language groups”. (…) “Regarding religions, it is convenient to stress that in Portuguese India there exists freedom and respect for worship. Hindu or Muslim temples, as well as those of other religions, deserve respect (…). We shall not make any distinctions, for the effect of considering Portuguese, among poor or rich, Hindus or Muslims, Parsees or Christians. All of them and regardless of the ethnic group or religion to which they belong are equally Portuguese.” Godinho (1962: 34).
64Godinho (1962: 24).
65Stoler (1997: 29).
66 Caplan (2001: 51).
67Anthony (1969: 210).
68Lee (2004: 221).
69Mohanty (1997: 272).
70Rosenfeld (2001: 161-175). Qian and Lichter (2001: 289-312).
71Wong (2003: 803).
72For biases on admission to school and scholarships in the USA, see Myers (2002).
73Or favelas in the Brazilian case, Telles (1995: 397).
74 Telles (1995 and 2004), for Brazilian cities.
75 Telles (1995: 395).
76Renee (2003: 104) and Anthony (1969: 8).
77Following the 1974 revolution in Portugal, the independence of Guinea-Bissau was recognized in the same year, and independence was granted to Cape Verde, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Angola in 1975. Portuguese rule over Macau ended in 1999. In 1975, Indonesia occupied Portuguese Timor. As Portugal refused to accept the situation, and the Timorese independence movement refused to yield to Indonesian occupation, the conflict dragged on, until a referendum was held in 1999, with a clear majority voting for independence. After some unfortunate incidents, Indonesia withdrew, the United Nations took over the administration of East Timor, and the country gained its independence in 2002, Lloyd-Jones and Pinto, (eds.), (2003); Torres (ed.), (1991).
78Ferreira (1990); Valério (1998: 53-69).
79Hodler (2004).

 

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Copyright 2007, ISSN 1645-6432
e-JPH, Vol.5, number 1, Summer 2007