Chocolate Islands by Higgs Catherine

Chocolate Islands by Higgs Catherine

Author:Higgs, Catherine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780821444221
Publisher: Ohio University Press


FIGURE 25. Alfredo Augusto Freire de Andrade, c. 1910. Photograph in Francisco Mantero, Manual Labour in S. Thomé and Principe (Lisbon, 1910), facing p. 38. By permission of Mantero’s great-grandson, Francisco Mantero.

Pause for a moment in laborious days

Of governance and ruling of the land,

And lend thine ear to the glad song of praise

Of one who sees the mercy of thy hand,

And like a flower upon a rugged stone,

Thy love of the dark children of this zone.

Despite his “toil-worn face,” Andrade was Burtt’s senior by just three years. Commissioned a second lieutenant in the Engineering Corps in 1883 at the age of twenty-four, he had studied mining engineering in Paris on a state scholarship, completing the course in 1888. By age thirty, he had been appointed commissioner-general of mines in Mozambique—part of a plan, in light of the Transvaal gold strikes, to revive the gold mines north of Lourenço Marques at Manica, which had been known to Portuguese traders since the sixteenth century. Andrade visited Johannesburg for the first time in 1889, and three years later, he served on the commission to delineate the border between the South African Republic and Mozambique. In 1895, the bureaucrat became a soldier, joining Enes first in the relief of Lourenço Marques against the Tsonga and then in the conquest of Gaza, supervising the building of the fortifications and portable bridges that facilitated Portugal’s effective occupation of the colony.14

As a young civil servant and soldier, Andrade evinced great loyalty to the Portuguese Crown but little “love of the dark children of this zone.” Once appointed governor-general in October 1906, however, he formulated ambitious plans to develop the territory—plans that, when realized, would gain him instant fame and wide respect. He built hospitals and schools and affordable housing for state employees, established the Department of Agriculture and Veterinary Science, extended the railroad into Gaza, and constructed roads into the interior to transport agricultural exports to the coast. He accomplished all this with limited financial support from Lisbon and documented it carefully in a series of reports that by 1907 comprised more than eleven hundred pages in three volumes. These reports demonstrated Andrade’s essential pragmatism in dealing with his African subjects. Regarding the still-troublesome Gaza chiefs, he advocated demobilizing their remaining soldiers and completely suspending what remained of the African kingdom, thereby essentially eliminating chiefly power. Peasants, he conceded, migrated to the Transvaal’s mines to earn money to pay their taxes. To keep them in Mozambique and encourage agricultural development, he proposed limiting African emigration from certain districts, and more significantly, he suggested reconsidering the hut tax rate. He also sought to address corruption in the labor-recruiting system “undertaken by many individuals who profit from it at the expense of Africans whom they frequently do not pay.” In Andrade’s opinion, the 1901 Modus Vivendi with the Transvaal Colony, which linked the supply of labor with the usage of Mozambique’s railroads and port, also had to be renegotiated. That prospect worried some in the British Transvaal Colony, but



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