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A Short History of Mozambique by Malyn Newitt (2017)

This is a very good book – scholarly, serious, authoritative. Newitt summarises the latest thinking in a whole range of issues which affect Africa’s prehistory, early modern history, colonial periods and contemporary history. It doesn’t aim to please. There are no fascinating anecdotes, colourful vignettes or pen portraits of key figures. Just the most up-to-date facts, dryly presented.

Born in 1943 (and so now 80 years old) Malyn Newitt had a long academic career during which he wrote over 20 books on Portugal and Portuguese colonialism. He was a professor in the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King’s College London, and then deputy vice chancellor at Exeter University, before retiring in 2005. So this book is by way of being the summary of a long and distinguished academic interest in the subject.

Mozambique factsheet

The first European to land in Mozambique was the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in 1498.

The coast, territory inland and coastal islands were very slowly settled and colonised by Portugal over the next 200 years. Initially the refuelling ports scattered along the west and east coasts of Africa and onto India, later reinforced with defensive forts, were all part of the same entity, the Estado da India, way stations on the sea journey to India which was where the spices and wealth were.

In the early years the main Portuguese settlement was on the Island of Mozambique, lying off the coast at the northern end of the modern country. The sea between the island and the mainland is still known as the Mozambique Channel. The Portuguese established a port and naval base on the island in 1507 and it remained an important part of their maritime estate for centuries. It became the capital of what came to be known as Portuguese East Africa until 1898, when the administrative centre was moved to Lourenço Marques in the far south of the country, ‘reflecting the shift in economic and political importance’ (p.115).

The name of the island, and so the country, is derived from the name of Ali Musa Mbiki, Muslim sultan of the island when da Gama arrived. So never a western name, then.

For centuries a handful of coastal ports and some territory further inland were part of a huge tract of coast known as Portuguese East Africa. Only at the end of the nineteenth century, as rival European nations like Britain, France and Germany staked out their claims to Africa, was this huge territory pared away and reduced to the borders of the current Mozambique, which were only finally defined in 1891.

Mozambique is bisected by the Zambezi River, the fourth longest river in Africa (after the Nile, Niger and Congo) which rises in Zambia then flows through eastern Angola, along the north-eastern border of Namibia, the northern border of Botswana, then along the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, until it enters Mozambique.

North of the Zambezi a narrow coastal strip gives way to inland hills and low plateaus, then onto rugged highlands further west. South of the Zambezi the lowlands are broader with the Mashonaland plateau and Lebombo Mountains located in the deep south.

Until the 1960s there was no paved road link between the north and south halves of the country. A railway bridge across the Zambezi linking north and south was only completed in 1932.

In 1964 guerrilla fighting broke out and developed into what became known as the Mozambican War of Independence. It lasted for ten years. The main independence fighters were the Marxist Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) led by Samora Machal.

After ten years of conflict Mozambique gained its independence from Portugal on 25 June 1975, following the overthrow of Portugal’s authoritarian regime in the so-called Carnation Revolution of April 1974.

Soon after independence a civil war broke out which was to last from 1977 to 1992 between FRELIMO and the anti-communist insurgent forces of the Mozambican National Resistance (RENAMO). Like so many African wars it was exacerbated by the Cold War: the Soviet Union and Cuba backed the Marxist government (cf Angola and Ethiopia) while the USA, South Africa and Rhodesia provisioned, helped and trained RENAMO.

Mozambique’s capital was for centuries known as Lourenço Marques after the 16th century Portuguese explorer who explored the area. (It was only made Mozambique’s administrative centre in 1898). Soon after independence, in 1976, the city was renamed Maputo and remains the country’s capital. The distinctive thing about it is that, instead of being in the centre of the country, maybe on the mouth of the mighty Zambezi, Maputo is way down at the southernmost tip of Mozambique, less than 75 miles from the borders with Eswatini and South Africa.

Mozambique has a land area of 801,590 square kilometres, compared to Portugal’s 92,225 km².

Newitt’s book

A Short History of Mozambique is a brisk, no nonsense, 225-page overview of the subject, written in a very dry, very academic style, a very theoretical style. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anyone as a history of Mozambique since it’s the kind of history which deals with issues and theories rather than dates and people. For example:

Newitt gives a sophisticated explanation of the concepts of language, ethnicity, empire, kingdom and tribe which Europeans have used ever since the Portuguese first landed on the coast of Mozambique to try and categorise and order and understand its inhabitants. He carefully explains why all of them are flawed and inaccurate. ‘Ethnicity’ is a notoriously slippery category. People’s identities change and even the idea of what an ‘identity’ is has changed over the period we have records for, roughly 1500 to the present.

It was interesting to learn that even right up-to-date contemporary linguists struggle with African languages. It is interesting to learn that modern linguists can’t agree a common definition of what a language is; some linguists consider some African languages as discreet languages, others consider them dialects of parent languages. This explains why even ‘experts’ consider there might be anything from 17 to 42 languages spoken in Mozambique. Just as confusing is the notion that ‘most Africans speak more than one local language or dialect’ (p.19) with the result that language isn’t a reliable indicator of ‘identity’.

Languages in Mozambique Wikipedia article

You know how progressive critics complain that the Western imperialists imposed nations and categories and tribal names onto much more fluid African identities? Well, Malyn is their dream come true, deconstructing pretty much every type of western category and concept to indicate a fluidity of identity which is, by definition, hard to capture, and equally challenging to read about.

This carries on being the central theme for chapter after chapter. When he’s covering the historical records left by the earliest Portuguese traders and administrators in the 17th and 18th centuries, and even more so in the full-blown imperialist 19th century, Newitt goes to great lengths to explain that the names which westerners assigned to tribes were almost always wrong. Sometimes, to take a blunt mistake, they called tribes after native words which simply meant ‘king’ or ‘leader’. (The country of Angola takes its name from the title ngola, a formal title which was held by the kings of Ndongo and Matamba.)

Westerners assigned social structures familiar to their own history – of empires and emperors, kings and kingdoms – to societies which had completely different, alien structures and identities.

The Africans were organised in groups and social structures but modern scholars have to reach back beyond the distorted and error-ridden Portuguese records to try and piece them together. Some societies were matrilinear, but there appear to have been several types of matrilinearity. Archaeology is not much help, since Africans built so few towns and their villages, made entirely of organic materials, disintegrated back into the earth.

Incidentally, Hewitt’s history obviously focuses on the territory and towns (mostly the notable ports) of what is called Mozambique, but he is not the first to point out the arbitrariness of the borders the Europeans drew up – in Mozambique’s case, finalised in 1891 – and how the deep history of the peoples who lived in this randomly drawn territory obviously had a huge overlap with peoples in the surrounding areas.

His account gives a bewildering sense of a kaleidoscope of peoples, continually migrating, fighting, conquering and holding territory, establishing dynasties that ruled for a few generations before a handful of recurrent issues – drought and famine, flooding, invasion of outsiders – reshuffled the picture.

The result is an immensely detailed and complicated picture, consisting of a blizzard of unfamiliar names – using names the tribes in questions may not even have called themselves – which is very hard to follow. This is why I’m not recommending it as a practical history. Two names which recur are the Ngoni and the Karanga, but there are many more.

Another theme which emerges very strongly indeed is the role of slavery. Slavery was present well before white Europeans arrived. They discovered it to be an intrinsic part of many African societies’ strategies, not only of war and conquest but even of basic survival. Newitt tells us that drought and famine have been recurrent features of the huge territory now known as Mozambique and the region around it, often threatening tribes’ very existence (pages 31, 50). Thus slaves, especially women, could be seized from other groups simply to provide more breeding vessels in order for the group to survive.

What comes over is that all the African groups practised slavery before the Europeans arrived but (as in everything else in this complex account) in a multitude of ways. Some slaves were relatively high caste, and might even serve as warriors or leaders. Some were forced into menial agricultural work. There was a recurring category of sex slaves i.e. women taken from tribes defeated in war.

The capture of slaves, especially women, in warfare had always been a way in which communities that depended on agriculture rather than cattle herding increased their productive (and reproductive) capacity. (p.71)

For hundreds of years the Portuguese were just one more invader-warrior-trading group among many, in a region used to wars and incomers. Alongside the Portuguese were Arabs from the Persian Gulf. These set up trading stations manned by an Arab elite which traded heavily in slaves. For centuries before the Europeans came there had been a trade capturing African slaves and carrying them off to the Arab gulf kingdoms.

For many hundreds of years slaves had been exported from the ports of eastern Africa to markets in Arabia, the Gulf and India where they were in demand as soldiers, domestic servants and sailors. (p.52)

But the numbers were relatively small, maybe 3,000 a year. A sea change occurred when the French established plantation agriculture on the Mascarene and Seychelles islands after about 1710. The numbers jumped again in 1770. Between 1770 and 1810 around 100,000 slaves were exported. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807, France only in 1848.

Another major shift occurred in 1840 when the Sultan of Oman relocated the centre of his kingdom from the Gulf to the island of Zanzibar. Arabs not only transhipped slaves to the Gulf but set up their own plantations which required African labour, setting in train the ethnic mix of peoples on Zanzibar which was to cause conflict at independence, hundreds of years later. As the years passed Arab slavers penetrated further inland, setting up bases of operation and converting natives to Islam (p.71). This combined with the many slaves working on Zanzibar or other Arab-owned plantations to spread Islam. Today about a third of Mozambique’s population is estimated to be Muslim.

The Royal Navy cracked down on the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa. In response business boomed on the East coast. After the Napoleonic War Brazil boomed as an exporter of coffee and sugar, and importer of slaves. Between 1800 and 1850 Brazil imported around 2,460,000 slaves, mostly from Portuguese East Africa. Under increasing pressure from Britain, Portugal finally outlawed the slave trade in 1842 (pages 62, 67) and Brazil formally ceased to import slaves in 1851.

The peak of slavery from Portuguese East Africa around 1830 coincided with a bad drought. This disrupted local societies and led to invasion from outsider tribes: Ngoni warbands from modern-day Natal and groups of Yao moving from northern to central Mozambique. These a) conquered and enslaved their adversaries b) became involved in trading to the coast.

Although the external slave trade was severely dampened in the 1850s, explorers like David Livingstone arrived to discover it was still flourishing inside Africa, as native and Islamic warlords led militias which conquered and enslaved weak tribes, then sold them on to burgeoning plantations. Maybe 23,000 mainland slaves were exported to Madagascar every year till the end of the nineteenth century.

The hectic nineteenth century

1858 to 1864 – David Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition.

1866 – Livingstone’s ‘Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries’ becomes a bestseller and inspires a generation of British explorers.

1867 – First gold and then diamonds are discovered in South Africa.

1871 – Discovery of the Kimberley diamond mines.

1874 to 1877 – Henry Morton Stanley undertakes his epic journey, crossing Central Africa from east to west, mapping the route of the river Congo.

1875 – The French president confirms Portugal’s right to Delagoa Bay, the best deep sea port in south eastern Africa. This encouraged the Boers in the Transvaal to think of it as an outlet to the sea rather than the Cape, which was owned by Britain.

1877 – Britain annexes the Transvaal.

1879 – Portugal helps Britain in the Zulu War.

1881 – The Transvaal Afrikaners rebel against Britain, which grants them independence.

1884 – Congress of Berlin called to clarify the rights of the colonial nations in the Congo and Niger regions, turns into a general carving up of Africa.

In the late 1880s there was a race between Portuguese authorities – who dispatched explorers and agents to sign deals with natives in a bid to create a band of Portuguese territory right across central Africa – and agents working for the British buccaneer, Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes won, his people planting flags and seizing territory in what came to be called north and south Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe and Zambia) thus ruining Portugal’s plans to own one uninterrupted band of territory across Africa.

Prolonged negotiations about the frontiers of British and Portuguese south Africa began in April 1890 and continued until August 1891 when the borders of modern Mozambique and Angola were almost completely finalised (p.93). Failure to achieve their much-trumpeted goal of creating a ‘rose corridor’ across Africa was perceived in Portugal as a public humiliation and rocked the Portuguese monarchy.

The early colony 1891 to 1919

You tend to think of the imperial nations as large and mighty powers engaged in fierce rivalry to gobble up even more third world countries. It comes as a bracing surprise to learn that after its diplomats had fought hard to win these two huge new territories, Angola and Mozambique, they didn’t know what to do with them. They had developed coastal ports and trade networks up the rivers and licensed companies to develop some areas (fertile highlands). But most of the territory was undeveloped, there were few roads, even fewer railways, much land remained in the hands of native rulers, and some parts had never even been explored or mapped by white men.

Moreover, Portugal was very poorly placed to take on such onerous responsibilities. It had experienced not one but two civil wars earlier in the century and was currently the poorest and arguably the most backward country in Europe. People were leaving in droves. Newitt gives the striking statistic that between 1890 and 1920 some 750,000 Portuguese emigrated to Brazil, while 170,000 went to America.

It’s fascinating to learn that Britain and Germany signed not one but two secret treaties agreeing how they would carve up Portugal’s colonies if, as most expected, the country went bankrupt.

But Portugal’s solution to its challenge was to revert to a variation of the 17th century idea of leasing out land to individual landlords or businesses to develop. On a much bigger scale the government now divided Mozambique into half a dozen territories and leased them out to commercial companies to develop. The result was very mixed.

The big story in this period was the importance of South Africa. The details are complicated but it became ever clearer to the Portuguese authorities that its neighbour to the south was rich and getting richer due to the discovery of diamonds and gold. So three things:

1) South African mines needed miners and so a large number of blacks from southern Mozambique became migrant workers in South Africa, and the government established a steady stream of income by taxing them.

2) The Portuguese built a railway from the Transvaal into Mozambique and to the deep-water port at Delagoa Bay. This became very commercially successful, as the government raked off various taxes and fees.

3) It was these very close economic connections with South Africa which led the Portuguese to move their administrative capital from Mozambique Island in the north right down to the settlement at Delagoa Bay, named Lourenço Marques. The capital’s dependence on South Africa (it even got its power from SA) was to have big implications for the future (p.115).

Mozambique developed into a reserve of migrant labour for British South Africa and South Rhodesia, while also serving as an outlet (via the railway) to the sea.

The mature colony 1919 to 1974

In 1910 Portugal’s tottering monarchy was overthrown in a revolution and replaced by a liberal republic (pages 114 and 116). This promised all Portugal’s colonies greater autonomy though nothing like democracy. Even the whites had no say in how their colonies were run and the native population had no rights at all.

These plans had hardly got going before the First World War. Portugal joined on the Allies’ side in 1916 and emerged heavily in Britain’s debt. South Africa’s General Smuts wanted to annex the entire Delagoa Bay railway and Lourenço Marques into his country.

In 1926 the Liberal republic was overthrown in a coup. After two years of uncertainty the authoritarian Estado Novo (New State) regime of António de Oliveira Salazar emerged. In 1930 this published a Colonial Act declaring Portugal and all its colonies one political entity. The colonies were expected to balance their books without subsidies from the centre.

The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression confirmed Salazar’s regime in its theory of Autarky i.e. a protectionist policy of trading among themselves, which boiled down to: the colonies supplied raw materials, the metropole converted them to manufactured goods and sold them back. So the colony was divided up into sugar, cotton and rice growing areas, the investment in farms, the wages paid to natives, the prices sold to middle men and onto importers, all controlled and dictated from Lisbon.

The Second World War saw a spike in prices of raw commodities which greatly benefited Portugal, which carefully stayed neutral during the conflict. Using some of its profits, Portugal began to sketch out a network of health and education facilities across Mozambique.

It was only in 1942 that the last of the business concessions dividing the country into separate entities came to an end and the country came under one unified government, tax and business regime (p.147).

After much bureaucracy, a comprehensive 5-year plan was published in 1953, with two more to follow in the 1960s. Schools, hospitals, more railways, a huge dam across the river Limpopo.

All populations grow. At the First World War there were around 10,000 Europeans in Mozambique. In 1945, 31,000. By 1970, 164,000 (out of a population of 8.5 million). Half of these lived in the capital, many as administrators.

Independence movements

Ghana kicked off the rush to African independence in 1957. Between 1958 and 1962 the Salazar regime back in Portugal experienced a crisis of support and vision. A general stood in the presidential election against Salazar’s candidate and attracted a wide range of opposition movements. In January 1961 a revolt broke out in Angola. In March India unilaterally seized Goa, a move which staggered the Portuguese regime.

In June 1962 the various opposition groups in exile reluctantly agreed to come together to form Frelimo, which commenced a low-level guerrilla insurgency. Tensions between secular, left-wing modernisers and conservative, traditional ‘Africanists’. It was only at the second party congress in 1968 that the modernisers under Samora Machal triumphed. Dissidents fled abroad where some were assassinated. By 1970 Frelimo was a disciplined and effective fighting force that was successfully keeping the Portuguese army tied down.

In 1973 Frelimo moved into Tete Province and for the first time launched attacks south of the Zambezi. In the same year a Portuguese general published a book questioning the entire future of Portugal’s colonies. The army was tired of fighting in Angola and Mozambique. In April 1974 a military coup overthrew the regime.

Frelimo never succeeded in mobilising the general population let alone fomenting a mass uprising. They just fought the Portuguese army in the northern two provinces of the country for ten years with very little impact on the rest of the country, none on the capital far away in the deep south. Frelimo came into power because the Portuguese simply gave up and withdrew. But this left Frelimo lacking either military or political legitimacy (p.146).

The civil war 1977 to 1992

First of all, the transition to independence was bungled. Frelimo came into power with a programme of hard-core Marxism-Leninism with the result that 90% of the white educated population and an unknown number of the Asian business community simply left. Frelimo immediately made enemies of the white nationalist governments in South Rhodesia and South Africa. These set about training a combination of Frelimo dissidents and anti-communists into what became Renamo, short for Resistência Nacional Moçambicana i.e. Mozambican National Resistance.

Renamo’s insurgency against the Frelimo government lasted for 15 long years with atrocities committed, of course, by both sides. Peace was eventually made possible when Frelimo softened its doctrinaire communist ways in the later 1980s as the writing on the wall for the Soviet Union became clearer. Newitt doesn’t go into the relationship between Frelimo and the USSR, and how this changed with the advent of Gorbachev, which feels like a glaring omission.

Negotiations began in the late 1980s but the war dragged on because neither side was capable of ending it. Eventually Frelimo caved in to the demands of Renamo and the international community for a multiparty system and free elections.

These have actually been held, in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014. They were accompanied by violence, international monitors say they were rigged, but in each of them Renamo won 40% or so of the vote i.e. they weren’t a complete stitch-up. As communism faded away, Frelimo converted itself into your standard African corrupt, nepotistic patrimonial government, committed to staying in power forever.

However, Mozambican politics are notable for two exceptions to African traditions. One is that tribalism hasn’t reared its ugly head. Leaders on both sides refrained from playing the tribal card which so often, in the rest of Africa, led to massacres. Instead the country’s politics continue to be dominated by what have become entrenched regional divisions, with Frelimo being seen as the part of the south and far north, Renamo holding the centre and mid-north.

Second exception is that, whereas in most African countries presidents turned themselves into dictators-for-life (Mobutu, Mugabe, Kagame, Afwerki) in Mozambique, although Frelimo is committed to eternal rule, it has actually changed presidents after each has completed his two terms.

Interesting to learn that some 50% of the government budget is funded by international donors, over $2bn in 2014 (p.210). Frelimo has become dependent on staying in office on foreign aid (pages 187, 192). In fact Newitt drily comments that, seen from one angle, Frelimo’s chief skill has been dancing to the changing whims and fashions of western aid to ensure the money keeps flowing (p.212). The Frelimo elite then channels the aid to itself and its followers, who live a luxury, First World existence in one of the poorest countries in the world.

After twenty-five years the most striking consequence of the government’s policies is the huge disparity in living standards between rich and poor. A relatively small Mozambican elite, which includes many senior members of Frelimo and the foreign business, diplomatic and NGO communities, enjoy an exaggeratedly high standard of living. The modern buildings of Maputo are grand and even ostentatious, the city hotels are clad in marble with fountain courts and air conditioning. Expensive cars are parked outside to whisk businessmen to the ministries or the banks. (p.222)

I was interested to read that Frelimo set out in 1977, under Marxist puritan Machel, to create New Socialist Man, to force peasants off their traditional land into collective farms, to ban pagan religions and old spiritual beliefs, to educate the population into zeal for the revolution. Obviously all that failed, and Newitt quotes peasants (who make up 75% of the population), interviewed by researchers, who expressed relief at being able to return to their ancestral land, worship their ancestral spirits, practice polygamy, and so on. The African way.

Why, Newitt asks, are the bottom 25 countries on the Human Development Index all in sub-Saharan Africa (with the one exception of Afghanistan)? Because of the special style of patrimonial politics which has established itself as distinctively African, meaning rule by a corrupt elite which run national budgets to benefit themselves, their cronies, and keep themselves in power. Screw their actual populations (p.204).

The 1992 Peace Accord, and the aid bonanza that followed, rapidly transformed the Frelimo elite into a patrimonial political class which, in spite of the lip-service being paid to liberal democratic ideals, was determined to hang on to power at all costs. And the costs increasingly involved not only corruption, soon to achieve gargantuan proportions, but crime, fraud and political assassinations. (199)

Newitt is entertainingly satirical about the bureaucratic, organisation-speak of the countless plans and strategies and policies unleashed on poor Mozambique by a never-ending stream of western institutions like the World Bank, the IMF and the UN with its utopian Millennium Development Goals. He quotes some of these documents purely to mock their high-minded rhetoric, which usually bears no relation to what’s happening on the ground.

Apart from killing each other, which they still do in periodic outbursts of renewed fighting between the last Renamo holdouts and government forces, the main thing happening on the ground in Mozambique is that its inhabitants, like humans all round the planet, are destroying the environment and degrading the ecosystems they rely on for their existence.

Forests are being cut down and the native iron wood and ebony has been plundered uncontrollably; illegal hunting is emptying the game parks and illegal fishing is plundering the seas; the Zambesi dams are radically altering the ecology of the river valley and illegal washing for gold is destroying whole landscapes. (p.211)

In 1964 when the war for independence started, the population of Mozambique was 7.3 million. Now it is 32 million. Human beings are like locusts, locusts with machine guns.

Credit

A Short History of Mozambique by Malyn Newitt was published in 2017 Hurst and Company. All references are to the 2017 paperback edition.

Africa-related reviews

Africa reviews

Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire by Roger Crowley (2015)

Our Lord has done great things for us, because he wanted us to accomplish a deed so magnificent that it surpasses even what we have prayed for… I have burned the town and killed everyone. For four days without any pause our men have slaughtered… wherever we have been able to get into we haven’t spared the life of a single Muslim. We have herded them into the mosques and set them on fire… We have estimated the number of dead Muslim men and women at six thousand. It was, Sire, a very fine deed. (Afonso de Albuquerque describing the Portuguese capture of Goa on 25 November 1510, p.286)

In 1500 the Indian Ocean was the scene of sophisticated trading networks which had been centuries in the making. Muslim traders from the ‘Swahili Coast’ of Africa traded up the coast to the Red Sea and across land to Cairo, heart of the Muslim world, while other traders crossed the ocean eastwards to the coast of India, where Hindu rajas ran a number of seaports offering hospitality to communities of Muslims and Jews in a complex multi-ethnic web.

The trading routes were well established and the commodities – such as pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and mace – were managed via a familiar set of tariffs and customs. Even if you were caught by one of the many pirates who patrolled the sea, there were well established procedures for handing over a percentage of your cargo and being allowed to continue on your way.

All this was dramatically changed by the sudden arrival in 1497 of the super-violent Portuguese, who had orders from their king and from the pope:

to destroy all Muslim bases and ships
to establish European forts at all convenient harbours
to bully all local rulers into proclaiming complete subservience to the King of Portugal
to build churches and convert the heathens to Christianity

This is the story of how an idyllic, essentially peaceful, well ordered and multicultural world was smashed to pieces by the cannons, muskets and unbelievable savagery of barbarian Europeans. This book is a revelation. I had no idea that the Portuguese ‘explorers’ of the ‘Age of Discovery’ were quite such savage sadists.

Massacre of the Miri

Probably the most notorious incident, which epitomises the behaviour and attitudes of the invaders, was the massacre of the Muslim pilgrim ship Miri.

The Portuguese sent their ships to conquer the Indian Ocean in large groups or ‘armadas’.

On September 29, 1502, the fourth great Portuguese Armada spotted a large merchant ship carrying Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca. The ship, the Miri, was identified as belonging to al-Fanqi, thought to be the commercial agent representing Mecca – and the interests of the Muslim Mamluk dynasty in Cairo – in Calicut, one of the commercial seaports on the west India coast.

Portuguese Captain Matoso cornered the pilgrim ship which surrendered quickly, the captain and passengers imagining they would be able to buy off these ‘pirates’ in the traditional manner. But these were not pirates; they were Christians or, as they would come to be recognised around the Indian Ocean, sadistic, uncivilised barbarian murderers.

Commander of the Armada, Vasco da Gama, ignored all the offers of gold or cargo. His Portuguese crew plundered the ship, stole all its cargo and then made it plain that he planned to burn the ship with all its passengers – men, women and children – on board. As this realisation sank in the civilian passengers desperately attacked the Portuguese with stone and bare hands, but were themselves shot down by muskets and cannon from the Portuguese ships.

On October 3, 1502, having gutted the Miri of all its valuables, the Portuguese locked all the remaining passengers in the hold and the ship was burnt and sunk by artillery. It took several days to go down completely. Portuguese soldiers rowed around the waters on longboats mercilessly spearing survivors.

All in all it was a fine example of:

The honour code of the fidalgos with its rooted hatred of Islam and its unbending belief in retribution and punitive revenge. (p.144)

the honour code which, as Crowley emphasises, inspired the Portuguese voyages of conquest and terror.

The Calicut massacre

It helps to explain this behaviour, and put it in context, if you know about the Calicut Massacre. Back in December 1500 the Second Portuguese India Armada, under the command of Pedro Álvares Cabral, had gotten frustrated at the slow pace at which his ships were being filled with spices at Calicut, the largest spice port on the western coast of India, despite having made an agreement with its raja or zamorin.

To hurry things along Cabral ordered the seizure of an Arab merchant ship from Jeddah, then loading up with spices nearby in the harbour. Cabral claimed that, as the Zamorin had promised the Portuguese priority in the spice markets, the cargo was rightfully theirs anyway.

Incensed by this theft, the Arab merchants around the quay started a riot and led the rioters to the ‘factory’ or warehouse which the Portuguese had only just finished building to store their booty. The Portuguese onboard the ships in the harbour watched helplessly while the Calicut mob successfully stormed the ‘factory’, massacring 50 of the Portuguese inhabitants, including some Franciscan friars.

Once the riot had quietened down, Cabral sent to the Zamorin asking for redress. When it wasn’t forthcoming, Cabral seized around ten Arab merchant ships in the harbour, confiscating their cargoes, killing their crews, and burning their ships. Blaming the Zamorin for doing nothing to stop the riot, Cabral then ordered all the guns from his fleet to bombard Calicut indiscriminately for a full day, wreaking immense damage, killing many citizens and starting fires which burnt entire quarters of the town.

Crowley shows us again and again how one bad deed, a bit of impatience or a slight cultural misunderstanding was liable to blow up, in Portuguese hands, into explosions of super-destructive wrath and mass murder.

The crusader mentality

It helps to understand the Portuguese approach a bit more if you realise that the Portuguese kings – John I (1481-1595) and Manuel I (1495-1521) – didn’t send out explorers and scientists – they sent warriors. And that these warriors were still steeped in the aggressive anti-Muslim ideology of the crusades.

Crowley’s narrative sets the tone by going back nearly a century before the Portuguese entered the Indian ocean, to describe the ‘crusade’ of an earlier generation when, in 1415, Portuguese crusaders attacked Ceuta, an enclave of Muslim pirates on the north coast of Africa. The Ceuta pirates had been a pest to Portuguese shipping for generations, and the Portuguese finally had enough, stormed and sacked it.

Having established the sense of antagonism between Muslims and Christians, Cowley leaps forward to the next significant moment, to when the Muslim Ottoman armies took Constantinople in 1453. The fall of Constantinople to the Muslims sent shocks waves throughout Christian Europe.

It made Christian kings, and their peoples, all over Europe feel threatened
It cut off trade routes to the East, for spices and so on

1. The quest for new routes to the spice trade

In other words the fall of Constantinople provided a keen commercial incentive to navigators, explorers and entrepreneurs to come up with alternative ways of reaching the Spice Islands by sea. While in the 1490s Christopher Columbus was trying to persuade the King of Spain to fund his idea of sailing west, around the world, to reach the Indies, the King of Portugal was persuaded to fund expeditions in the opposite direction – down the coast of Africa with the hope that it would be easier to cruise around Africa and reach the Spice Islands by heading East.

The spices in question included the five ‘glorious spices’ – pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and mace – but also ginger, cardamom, tamarind, balms and aromatics like wormwood, Socotra aloe, galbanum, camphor and myrrh.

Also brought back from India were dyes like lac, indigo and dyewood and precious ornamental objects and materials like ivory, ebony and pearls. All these good fetched up to ten times as much on the quaysides of Lisbon or Venice as they cost to buy in Calicut. But that was when they had been transhipped from warehouses in the ports of the Middle East. The conquest of Constantinople reduced the transhipment trade and led to a more aggressive attitude from Muslim traders, which badly hurt the commercial prosperity of Venice, in particular.

2. Outflanking Islam

But the aim of the explorers was not only to get commercial access to the spice trade. throughout the Middle Ages it had been widely believed that Christianity had been carried by the apostle James and others, deep into Africa, into Arabia, and even as far as India.

So there was a military element to the expeditions. Christian strategists thought that, if the explorers could make contact with the Christian communities which were believed to exist in faraway India, and were able to link up – then together they would be able to surround, the European armies attacking from the west, the newly awakened Indian Christian armies attacking from the East.

In other words, alongside the element of exploration, ran an aggressive continuation of the fierce anti-Muslim, crusading mentality of John and Manuel’s medieval forebears.

This helps to explain the unremitting anti-Muslim hostility of the commanders of all the great Portuguese Armadas to the East. Not only did their kings demand it, not only was it part of their explicit, written instructions (which survive to this day), but their conquering mentality was backed up by the full force of the pope and the Holy Catholic Church.

The whole European apparatus of state power, religious intolerance, and the technology of war – metal armour and huge shipboard cannons – was brought to bear on the inhabitants of the Indian Ocean.

Wage war and total destruction… by all the means you best can by land and sea so that everything possible is destroyed. (The Regimento or instructions given by King Manuel I to Dom Francisco de Almeida in 1505)

Thus it was that warrior-sailors like the Sodré brothers or the du Albuquerque cousins received orders quite simply to destroy all Muslim ships and trade between the Red Sea and Calicut.

Sadism and intimidation were seen as legitimate tactics. The reader loses count of the number of local hostages, ambassadors and civilians who are taken by the Portuguese who, if anything displeases them, proceed to hang their hostages from the yardarms, before dismembering them and returning their scattered body parts to their horrified relatives waiting on shore. This happens lots of times.

When Vicente Sodré intercepted a large Muslim ship carrying a full cargo of treasure, commanded by the wealthy and well-known merchant Mayimama Marakkar, Vicente had Marakkar stripped naked, tied to the mast, whipped and then subjected to the Portuguese practice of merdimboca or ‘shit in the mouth’ – the name says it all – with the added refinement that the Portuguese forced Marakkar – an eminent and pious Muslim – to eat pork and bacon fat (p.141).

Deliberately offensive, determined to rule by Terror, fuelled by genocidal racism, unflinching, unbending and merciless, the Portuguese conquerors, in this telling, seem like the Nazis of their day.

Conquerors

So this is the story which Crowley’s book tells: the story of how tiny Portugal, at the far western tip of Europe, managed in thirty or so years, from the late 1490s to the 1520s, to establish the first global empire in world history – in reality a set of connected outposts dotted along the west and east coasts of Africa, the west coast of India – before moving on to explore the East Indies – all the while pursuing this policy of unremitting intimidation and extreme violence. It’s a harrowing read. Noses are slit and hands chopped off on pretty much every page.

Conquerors is divided into three parts:

Reconnaissance: the Route to the Indies (1483-99)
Contest: Monopolies and Holy War (1500-1510)
Conquest: The Lion of the Sea (1510-1520)

Over and above the narrative of events, we learn a couple of Big Things:

1. How to round the Cape of Good Hope

The navigational breakthrough which allowed all this to happen was the discovery of how to round the Cape at the southernmost tip of Africa. For generations Portuguese ships had hugged the coast of Africa as they tentatively explored south and this meant that they struggled with all kinds of headwinds, shoals and rocks, particularly as they rounded the big bulge and struggled east into the Gulf of Guinea. The net result was that by 1460 they had established maps and stopping points at the Azores, Madeira, but only as far south along the African coast as the river Senegal and Sierra Leone.

The Great Breakthrough was to abandon the coast altogether and give in to the strong north-easterly winds which blew sailing ships south and west out into big Atlantic – and then, half way down the coast of Brazil, to switch direction back east, and let the strong west winds blow you clean back across the Atlantic and under the Cape of Good Hope. See the red line on the map, below. This immensely significant discovery was made in the 1460s.

That’s if things went well. Which they often didn’t – with calamitous results. Crowley reports that of the 5,500 Portuguese men who went to India between 1497 (the date of Vasco de Gama’s first successful rounding of the Cape), 1,800 – 35% – did not return. Most drowned at sea.

All the armadas suffered significant loss of life to shipwreck and drowning.

Outward and Inbound routes of the Portuguese Indian Armadas in the 1500s (source: Wikipedia)

2. The accidental discovery of Brazil

The Second Portuguese India Armada, assembled in 1500 on the order of Manuel I and commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral, followed the strategy of heading west and south into the Atlantic in order to catch easterly winds to blow them round the tip of Africa. But the ships went so far that they sighted a new land in the west, landed and claimed it for Portugal.

It was Brazil, whose history as a western colony begins then, in April 1500, though it was to be some time before anybody made serious attempts to land and chart it, and Crowley makes no further mention of it.

3. Rivalry with Venice

I knew the Portuguese were rivals with the Spanish for the discovery and exploration of new worlds. I hadn’t realised that the creation of a new route to the Spice Islands rocked the basis of Venice’s maritime trade and empire.

Venice had for generations been the end point for the transmission of spices from India, across the Indian Ocean, through the Red Sea to Suez, across land to Cairo, and by ship to Italy. This was all very expensive, especially the transhipment across land. Venice was rocked when the entire supply chain was jeopardised by the new Portuguese sea route, which resulted in huge amounts of spices and other exotic produce ending up on the quays of Lisbon at a fraction of the Venetian price.

With the result that the Venetian authorities sent spies to Lisbon to find out everything they could about the Portuguese navigators, their new routes and discoveries. They also sent emissaries to the Sultan in Cairo, putting pressure on him to either take punitive measures against the Portuguese, or to lower the taxes he charged on the land journey of Venetian spices from Suez to Cairo and on to Alexandria. Or both.

The sultan refused to do either. Venetian fury.

The rivalry of Venice is sown into the narrative like a silver thread, popping up regularly to remind us of the importance of trade and profit and control of the seas 600 years ago, and of the eternally bickering nature of Europe – a seething hotbed of commercial, religious and political rivals, all determined to outdo each other.

Prester John and a new Crusade

Medieval Christendom was awash with myths and legends. One such tale concerned a mythical Christian King who ruled in wealth and splendour somewhere in Africa, named ‘Prester John’.

When King Manuel sent out his conquerors, it was not only to seize the spice trade of the Indian Ocean, but to make contact with Prester John and unite with his – presumably massive and wealthy army – to march on Mecca or Cairo or Jerusalem, or all three, in order to overthrow Islam for good and liberate the Holy Places.

Vasco de Gama had this aim at the back of his mind as he set off to round the Cape, and so did Afonso de Albuquerque who, at the end of his life, was still planning to establish Christian forts on the Red Sea and to locate the mysterious John in a joint crusade against the Muslim sultan of Cairo.

If anyone was Prester John it was the self-styled ’emperor’ of Ethiopia, who some of the Portuguese did travel to meet, although he turned out – despite all his pomp and pageantry – to be completely unprepared to help any kind of European Christian Crusade against his Muslim neighbours, not least because they completely surrounded and outnumbered him.

Still, it is important to remember that the whole point of funding these expensive armadas into the Indian Ocean wasn’t primarily to open up new commercial routes: for the king and his conquerors, that was a happy side aim, but the Key Goal was to link up with the kingdom of Prester John and the imagined Christian kingdoms of the East, in order to exterminate Islam and liberate the Holy Places.

Crowley’s approach – more adventure than analysis

Crowley’s approach is popular and accessible. He prefers anecdote to analysis.

Thus the book’s prologue opens with a giraffe being presented to the Chinese emperor in Beijing in the early 1400s. This had been collected by the Chinese admiral Admiral Zheng He, who led one of the epic voyages which the Yongle Emperor had commissioned, sending vast Chinese junks into the Indian Ocean in the first decades of the 15th century. The flotillas were intended to stun other nations into recognition of China’s mighty pre-eminence and had no colonising or conquering aim.

The Yongle emperor was succeeded in 1424 by the Hongxi emperor who decided the expeditions were a waste of time and so banned further ocean-going trips, a ban which within a few decades extended to even building large ocean-going vessels: small coastal trading vessels were allowed, but the Ming emperors hunkered down behind their Great Wall and closed their minds to the big world beyond.

One way of looking at it, is that the Hongxi emperor handed over the world to be colonised by European nations.

The point is Crowley gets into this important issue via an anecdote about a giraffe, and doesn’t really unpack it as much as he could.

A few pages later, the main text of the book opens with a detailed account of the erection of a commemorative cross on the coast of Africa by Diogo Cao in August 1483. It was one of several he erected on his exploratory voyage down the west African coast.

In both instances Crowley is following the time-honoured technique of starting a chapter with an arresting image and dramatic scene. The problem is that when he proceeds to fill in the background and what led up to each incident, I think his accounts lack depth and detail. For example, my ears pricked up when he mentioned Henry the Navigator, but Henry’s life and career were only fleetingly referenced in order to get back to the ‘now’ of 1483. I had to turn to Wikipedia to get a fuller account of Henry’s life and importance.

Once on Wikipedia, and reading about Henry the Navigator, I quickly discovered that ‘the invention of the caravel was what made Portugal poised to take the lead in transoceanic exploration’, because of the light manoeuvrability of this new design of ship.

A 15th century Portuguese caravel. it had three masts and a lateen or triangular sail which allowed the caravel to sail against the wind.

Crowley certainly has some pictures of caravels, and describes them a bit, but doesn’t really give us enough information to ram home why their design was so game-changing.

It may be relevant that Crowley studied Literature not History at university. He is continually drawn to the dramatic and the picturesque, and skimps on the analytical.

To give another example, Crowley periodically namechecks the various popes who blessed the armadas and gave instructions as to the converting of the heathen and fighting the Unbeliever. He briefly mentions the famous Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, whereby Pope Alexander VI brokered the deal deciding which parts of the New World would belong to the rivals Spain and Portugal. But there is nowhere any real analysis of the enormous role the popes and the Catholic Church played in the geopolitics behind all this exploring and conquering.

Instead, Crowley is continually drawn to the most vivid and melodramatic moments: battles are described in terms of who got an arrow in the eye, and strategy is more seen as deriving from the raging impatience of this or that Portuguese commander than from higher-level geopolitical imperatives.

The personal, not the wider geo-political situation, is what interests Crowley in Europe and Indian and Islamic politics.

Crowley’s style

Crowley writes the short staccato sentences of a popular thriller – fine if you’re looking for poolside entertainment, but not enough if you’re looking for something with a little more analysis and insight.

It was time to move on. However, the wind thwarted their departure. The wind turned. They were forced back to the island. The sultan tried to make peace overtures but was rebuffed. Ten nervy days ensued. (p.67)

This is thriller writing, or the prose style of a modern historical romance.

Either Crowley, his editors or his publishers decided that hos book would be best marketed as popular, accessible, hair-raising history. Thrilling, gripping and often quite horrible history.

In the rain, with the continuous gunfire, in a tropical hell, soaking and sweating in their rotting clothes, they were increasingly gripped by morbid terror that they were all going to die. (p.275)

He gives us gripping individual scenes, but not so many real insights, let alone overarching analysis or ideas.

Thus, despite the book being some 360 pages long, and including lengthy end notes, I felt I’d only scratched the surface of these seismic events, had been told about the key dates and events, and seen quite a few hands being cut off – but was left wanting to understand more, a lot more, about the geographical, economic, technological and cultural reasons for the success of Portugal’s cruel and barbarous explorers and empire makers.

This feeling was crystallised when the book ended abruptly and without warning with the death of the bloodthirsty visionary, Afonso de Albuquerque, in 1415.

For sure he was a central figure, who grasped the strategic importance of seizing Goa, who tried to storm Aden, who arranged a native coup at Ormuz, who burned Muslim towns and ships without mercy, who chopped the hands and ears off his hostages by the score. By page 330 he had become the dominant figure of the book, almost as if it the book was at one stage intended to be a biography of just him.

So the book ends with his death in 1515 but … the Portuguese Empire had only just got going. There would be at least another century of colonising effort, in Brazil, on the coast of Africa, and further East, into Malaysia, Japan and China. A century more of adventures, wars and complex politicking.

None of that is here. Crowley briefly refers to all that on the last pages of his book, before a few sententious paragraphs about how it all led to globalisation and modern container ships. But of the real establishment and running of the Portuguese Empire which stretched from Brazil to Japan there is in fact nothing.

The book’s title is therefore a bit misleading. It should be titled something more like The generation which founded the Portuguese empire. That would excuse and explain his relatively narrow focus on de Gama, Cabra and Albuquerque, and on the king who commissioned their exploits, Manuel I. Maybe adding Manuel’s dates – 1495-1521 – would make it even clearer.

In fact, with a bit of rewriting, the book could have become Manuel I and the conquerors who founded the Portuguese Empire: that accurately describes its content.

The current title gives the impression that it will be a complete history of the Portuguese Empire – which is why I bought it – and which is very far indeed from being the truth.

Books & Boots