Samuël Coghe: Population Politics in the Tropics: Demography, Health and Transimperialism in Colonial Angola (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) 317 pp. ISBN 978 1 10894 3 307
Ineke Phaf-Rheinberger (Giessen)
In Population Politics in the Tropics, Samuël Coghe studies the population politics of the Portuguese government in colonial Angola from 1890 to 1945, instigated due to its fear of depopulation. In view of the abolition of slavery, the indigenato-system was set up in 1870, which implied a system of forced labor leading to a formerly unknown regional mobility of African people (The transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1836 but continued along illegal routes until the end of the century. Slavery was officially abolished in 1875). In times of an increasing influx of Portuguese farmers and traders to “modernize” the colony, especially after the Berlin Conference of 1884/85, smallpox and famines increased because of the breakdown of the ecological control of the lands, based on centuries of long-established modes of agriculture. Now, with the construction of the railway and the introduction of different agrarian cultivations for export, the organization of the land gradually changed and the traditional knowledge of ecological landscapes faded away. Consequently, a “racial disease” (p. 31) spread, known as the sleeping illness, to which native Angolans were especially vulnerable, which made the Portuguese even more convinced of their inferiority. However, the high numbers of sicknesses and deaths made intervention necessary to avoid losing the African working force. This background explains the rise of biomedical interventionism in the region, that took the form of a call for medical assistance and led to the development of the discipline of tropical medicine. In 1902, the Escola Medicina Tropical (EMT) was set up in Lisbon, specializing in sleeping sickness, later followed by the initiative of the Asistência Médica aos Indígenas (AMI) in 1926.
These issues, in a nutshell, are what Coghe’s book investigates, not forgetting that the relationship between Portugal and Angola was determined by the strategies of the Third Portuguese Empire, from 1822 to 1975, when, after India (the First Empire) and Brazil (the Second Empire), politics shifted towards concentrating on the trade and exploitation of its African colonies. The author makes an argument against the commonly held opinion that Portuguese colonialism was exceptional and isolated by emphasizing the circulation of international knowledge and actors between countries and empires in both Europe and Africa.
Coghe first discusses the emergence of depopulation anxieties and population politics in Angola around the turn of the nineteenth century. His second chapter considers the multi-faceted practical efforts to check and cure sleeping sickness in Angola until the end of the First World War. Next, he lays out the debates leading to the establishment of the AMI program in the interwar years. In the fourth chapter, he examines the work of doctors as “field demographers” and population experts in tropical Africa. Step by step, he demonstrates that the focus of the attending medical supervisions on sleeping illness shifted toward a focus on children’s health care, with the underlying presumption of a strongly negative image of African motherhood. In the sixth and final chapter, the author goes beyond medical interventions and emphasizes the spatial dimension of European population politics in their colonies in the first half of the twentieth century. Many Angolans migrated to neighbouring countries, either forced to work on the coffee and cacao plantations in São Tomé and Príncipe or in the mines in surrounding countries, among other reasons, and this problem of migration produced conflicting views between the Colonial Ministry in Lisbon and the central government in Luanda.
The archival material Coghe found in different places was of overwhelming abundance and he repeatedly states that although medical assistance is generally considered to be a “tool” of the colonial empire to control the health of its workers, this view should be cautiously modified. For instance, he found that medical doctors often manipulated their reports on the health situation, hiding their dependence on local intermediaries’ expertise to obtain better results with other types of medication and treatment. Practitioners of local belief resisted European methods which seemed to be opposed to their own interests. Coghe makes the effort to read beyond the narratives contained in archival documents and his suggestions about the role of local medical knowledge are quite revealing.
He equally documents that this medical system was not specific to Portuguese colonization; instead it was a trans-colonial phenomenon. Coghe observes intra-imperial differences and addresses their common strategies for exploitation, modernization of the medical service, colonial actors, debates and policies in other parts of the colonial world. Of particular interest are his arguments against so-called Portuguese exceptionalism. He opposes the influential thesis, developed by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre, concerning the unique character of Portuguese colonialism as constituting a big interracial family, living peacefully together. Coghe argues that, in Angola, this ‘harmonious’ family refers to a special situation. In the first place, there were also many unattended white children of degradados parents, of convicted criminals deported from Portugal, often with their families. Until 1932, Angola served as Portugal’s ‘imperial prison’” (p. 193) and the convicts lived in physical and moral misery at the margin of the colonial society, mistreating the local population. Also, Coghe questions that the number of people who were officially identified as mestiços was, in absolute numbers, high compared to other colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in urban areas:
These [high] numbers, however, do not necessarily indicate any special Portuguese propensity of ‘racial mixing’, a long-standing accusation against the Portuguese, and as the Estado Novo would start claiming in the 1950s [….] Gerald Bender has argued that the number and percentage of mestiços in Angola was not exceptional for African colonies when compared to the high number of whites and considering the imbalance in the male-female ratio across the white population. Moreover, definitions of mestiço (and their official number) varied greatly between actors and over time, as they oscillated between somatic, race-biological and cultural criteria, partly depending on political purposes (p. 193).
In his epilogue, Coghe discusses the eventual fear of overpopulation, never a reality in Angola. On the contrary, the country was one of the least heavily populated in sub-Saharan Africa, therefore, in the early 1960s, Portuguese migration reached unprecedented heights, many taking refuge from the rigid dictatorial rule in the metropole. In his closing sentences, Coghe points to the high fertility rates among the local population notwithstanding the long war period after independence from 1975 to 2002, explaining that Angola has one of the highest fertility rates in the world until today.
Coghe’s well-documented study on health in Angola is recommended reading for medical historians, historians of Lusophone Africa, or indeed anyone interested in health strategies in Angola and former African colonies. Furthermore, in my opinion, his observations could also be relevant to those interested in historical novels, in which some characters obviously suffer from sleeping illness, without mentioning it as such, for example, Arnaldo Santos’ A casa velha das margens (The Old House at the Margins, 1999), set in the nineteenth century. Coghe’s cautious interpretation of colonial archives, his detailed understanding of facts and his overall critical tone outlays many controversial issues in health policies in a Portuguese colony in the past, connecting them to the international networks of knowledge at that time.