African Histories

This project investigates the everyday life under Portugal’s Estado Novo regime, a topic that has been somewhat overlooked in both Portuguese and international research. It aims to apply the everyday life history approach to study the complexities of authoritarian rule in 20th-century Europe, including in Portugal and its African and Asian colonies. This approach has revealed its potential through debates on Portugal’s political police (PIDE/DGS), suggesting it can offer fresh insights into the Estado Novo era, which ended nearly fifty years ago. Due to the politicized nature of these discussions, the project is proposed to be based in a leading center of Lusophone studies in Switzerland, particularly in Geneva, which has been a major destination for Portuguese immigrants post-1974.
The project will explore various themes such as the dynamics between rural and urban life, racial discrimination, rural ordering, and the specific challenges in the Atlantic islands, through interdisciplinary workshops and publications. It aims to understand how individuals and communities under the Estado Novo regime navigated, resisted, or complied with the government’s attempts at control, including through sociocultural associations, housing projects, and strategies during the anticolonial wars. The project will also examine the regime’s complex relations with local elites in the Atlantic archipelagos and African island colonies, as well as how contemporary Portuguese literature reflected life under the regime.
By conducting four case studies, the project seeks to provide a comprehensive view of social policies, social engineering, and the local responses they elicited, moving beyond simplistic narratives of repression and resistance. It will analyze individuals’ agency within and beyond the state’s repressive mechanisms, including in the context of racist discrimination in the colonies, aiming to integrate the experiences of both “white” Portuguese and colonial subjects into a broader understanding of the Estado Novo’s impact on daily life.

My doctorate thesis explores the response of local populations in Portuguese Guinea to colonial labor regulations through the lens of the Secretariat of Indigenous Affairs between 1917 and 1935. With over 3,000 documents preserved at the National Archives of Guinea Bissau, the thesis embarks on a social history of law to delve into the dynamic aspect of labor norms and the expectations of those involved within the colonial legal framework. It challenges traditional legal history perspectives that often overlook the roles of non-political and non-jurist actors. The thesis reveals that the colonial justice system in Guinea was not confined to judicial courts but included commercial courts, private indigenous courts, and the Secretariats of Indigenous Affairs or curatorships, which played a pivotal role in resolving disputes involving indigenous workers. Despite the intended focus on labor relations, these institutions also handled cases of witchcraft, murders, kidnappings, and robberies. The research underscores the active participation of local populations in the legal system, not merely as observers but as advocates for their rights, both within and beyond the labor codes established by Portugal. This engagement with the secretariats, while seeking better labor conditions, paradoxically reinforced their dependence on the colonial administration, acknowledging its legitimacy in mediating their conflicts. This thesis posits that the Secretariat of Indigenous Affairs was a central element of the colonial state in Portuguese Guinea, essential to the implementation of colonial policy and offers a nuanced understanding of colonial justice mechanisms.

Mapping Bolama is…

The project addresses the overlooked role of Africa in Global Legal History debates, particularly highlighting the extensive and complex involvement of Africans in normative production, even during colonial times. It challenges the prevailing assumption that European legal concepts were the dominant force in colonial legal systems, by showcasing the significant influence of local populations, their vernacular understandings of law, and non-European legal frameworks through daily normative practices. The research emphasizes the importance of local archives and court cases as valuable resources for understanding the interaction between various normative systems and the resolution of conflicts in colonial settings. The initiative involves collaborating with local archives to organize, preserve, and catalog court case collections, which are rich in information but often unorganized and unidentified, making them inaccessible to researchers. The project has already seen success through a partnership involving Mariana Dias Paes, Mariana Candido, and Juelma de Matos Ñgala, which organized and inventoried a significant collection of court cases from Angola. Moving forward, the project is expanding its efforts to include the digitization and cataloging of court cases from Cabo Verde, aiming to enhance accessibility to these documents and support research that offers new perspectives on Global Legal History from the viewpoint of daily normative production in Portuguese colonial societies.

The thesis examines the historiographical debates on the “transition to free labor” post-emancipation, highlighting the rejection of simplistic views that slave labor was merely replaced by wage labor. It emphasizes the nuanced understanding of free and slave labor histories in recent studies and notes the shared experiences of post-emancipation societies in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. The study particularly focuses on the conditions imposed on freed individuals, such as compulsory labor, legal restrictions, and limited access to resources. It also explores the lesser-studied post-emancipation context in Portuguese Africa between 1850 and 1910, analyzing the discussions and legislative efforts concerning the future of Africans in the post-emancipation Portuguese Empire. The research reveals the complexities of emancipation policies and the varied forms of labor exploitation faced by African indigenous people during this period.