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Angola Administration and Development
Portuguese colonial policies toward civil
administration were
first formulated in Mozambique, where in the 1890s António
Enés,
former minister of colonies, advocated close control and
full use
of African labor, administrative reorganization, and
colonization
schemes. In 1899 Paiva Couceiro, who had been with Enés in
Mozambique, published a volume in which he advocated white
colonization, decentralization of administration from
Lisbon, and
the necessity of inculcating in the Africans the "habit of
work."
As governor general of Angola between 1907 and 1910,
Couceiro
prepared the basis of civil administration in the colony.
Military
officers were to oversee administrative divisions, and
through them
European civilization was to be brought to the Africans.
Many of
Couceiro's reforms were incorporated in legislation in
1914 that
brought, at least in theory, financial and administrative
autonomy
to the colony.
There was considerable progress toward the development
of an
economic infrastructure during the first quarter of the
twentieth
century. New towns sprang up in the interior, and road
construction
advanced. The key to development, however, was the
Benguela
Railway, which would become Angola's largest employer and
which
linked the mines of the Belgian Congo's Katanga Province
(in
present-day Shaba Province in Zaire) to the Angolan port
at Lobito.
In the 1920s, the Diamond Company of Angola (Companhia
de
Diamantes de Angola -- Diamang), an exclusive
concessionaire in
Angola until the 1960s, initiated diamond mining. As the
employer
of more Africans than any other industry, Diamang deeply
affected
the lives of its 18,000 African workers through extensive
investment and the provision of social services.
The Portuguese, however, were generally unable to
provide
Angola with adequate development capital or with settlers.
Trade
had fallen off sharply when the rubber boom ended just
before World
War I, and the war itself produced only a brief revival of
foreign
trade. At the end of what is commonly referred to as
Portugal's
republican era (1910-26), the finances of the colony were
in
serious difficulty.
Data as of February 1989
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