Reordering Colonial Society: Model Villages and Social Planning in Rural Angola,1920–45

In 1926, the Director of the Health Services in Portuguese Angola, António Damas Mora, began to advocate publicly the creation of so-called model villages for the native population of the colony. His plan, which he further developed over the next few years, envisaged the establishment of new villages, located in healthy environments and provided with hygienic houses, in which Africans would voluntarily resettle under the supervision of administrative and medical authorities. Only married and monogamous couples that medical examinations had proven to be free of communicable and other grave diseases would be admitted and alcohol would be strictly prohibited. Moreover, each village would have a nurse and a midwife educated in the nearest hospital, and thus be self-sufficient with regard to its basic health needs. Economic incentives and special privileges were offered as a means to enhance the attractiveness of the scheme for the African population. Thus each couple would receive a land allotment large enough to nourish a family, all villagers would have access to education and agricultural aid and family fathers would be exempted from compulsory long-distance labour recruitment and military conscription. ¹

By the end of the 1920s, Damas Mora's ideas on the model village had broadened from a medical project, intended to regenerate the colony's dwindling native population, to a holistic reform programme. Damas Mora had become convinced that model villages embodied the solution not only to all sanitary and demographic, but eventually also to the economic and social problems of the colony. In his vision, the construction and multiplication of model villages throughout the territory would give rise to sustained population growth and a steady increase in the agricultural production of the colony. Simultaneously, it would also resolve the issue of labour recruitment. Young males between 18 and 22 would not be allowed to start their own family in these privileged villages, even if they had been raised there. For this period of four years, they would be obliged to work for state or private enterprises or to perform military service, and thus constitute the large, vigorous and growing labour reservoir that was needed for the colonial economy. ²

As such, Damas Mora's model village scheme did not materialize. While it was embraced by other members of the medical staff, Damas Mora failed to gain the necessary political support for its implementation. ³ This was partly due to his conflict with the new High Commissioner for Angola, Filomeno da Câmara Melo Cabral (1929–30), a right-wing adept of Salazar's emerging Estado Novo (‘New State’) (1926/33–74). ⁴ Yet the idea of model villages was not fundamentally at odds with the colonial ideology of the Estado Novo and it did not disappear from colonial debate. On the contrary, furthered by the impact of the world economic crisis in the early 1930s, it even turned into a focal point of colonial reform in Angola.

In this article, I analyse how, from the late 1920s to 1945, a wide array of colonial actors, both in Angola and in the metropolis, came to see the resettlement of the colony's native population into model villages as a crucial reform project for the future of Angola, embodying the promise of medical, agricultural, economic, societal and political improvement. I thereby argue that the discussions in Angola were not only connected to similar endeavours in other Portuguese colonies, notably Timor and Mozambique, but were also part of a larger, and in many aspects, global project of colonial reform. Indeed, between the two world wars, colonial states throughout the globe began to envision and implement programmes of social engineering that aimed at improving the hygienic and economic conditions of the rural populations under their rule. Influenced by eurocentric ideas of space and social order, they considered the ‘native village’ as the basic unity of future colonial society and hence the ideal site for such transformations. Colonial administrators and a growing group of experts in tropical medicine and agriculture devised plans to villagize those who did not yet live, or no longer lived, in village structures and to alter the location, composition and scale of the existing villages, their architectural features and hygienic provisions, as well as the hygienic habits and economic activities of their inhabitants. The discussions on model villages in Angola were intimately connected with these global debates, as they followed similar logics and were often openly shaped by intra- and inter-imperial comparisons and borrowings.

Yet, during the interwar period, model villages mostly remained a utopian vision rather than a social reality. I show how, despite the emphasis and support that villagization plans received from high-level officials in Angola and Portugal, their implementation was hampered by problems such as insufficient funding, the dearth of skilled experts, the often messy and irrational practices of colonial administrators and the resistance of rural populations. Here I also argue against a widespread exceptionalist take on nineteenth and twentieth-century Portuguese colonial history, which emphasizes its particular brutality and incapacity compared to other European powers. ⁵ Although some of the aforementioned problems might to some extent have been exacerbated by Portugal's economic and financial problems and the dictatorial nature of the Estado Novo, they were not as such exceptional, but rather typical for rural development schemes in colonial Africa in the interwar period, and even after 1945. ⁶

Historiography has thus far largely overlooked colonial plans for new, model-like villages in the interwar period. With regard to spatial interventions, historians of colonialism have mostly focused on urban sanitation and segregation plans in the early twentieth century, ⁷ on the new villages established much later as part of counterinsurgency strategies during the anti-colonial wars for independence in Algeria, Kenya, Malaya, Mozambique or Angola, ⁸ or on post-colonial villagization schemes like that of Nyerere in Tanzania. ⁹ A notable exception is an article by Christophe Bonneuil in which he has highlighted the ‘attempts to capture the peasantry into stable, legible, and more productive units’ within the context of the rural development schemes of the ‘developmentist era’ in colonial Africa (1930s–1970s). ¹⁰

The present article, however, moves beyond Bonneuil's analysis. It demonstrates that such attempts were not confined to large-scale agricultural resettlement schemes, but part of a much broader project, with a longer history and a wider geographical scope. During the interwar period, the model village was debated from multiple perspectives and in multiple arenas – as the panacea for agricultural, but also hygienic, demographic, societal, industrial and even political problems. Moreover, through its empirical focus on Angola and the Portuguese empire, this article contributes to integrating the under-researched and often neglected Portuguese case into the global history of rural development in twentieth-century colonialism. ¹¹

From a medical perspective, Damas Mora's model village project stood at the crossroads of two major shifts in sanitary thinking in colonial Africa at the time. ¹² On the one hand, there was a paradigmatic shift towards rural African healthcare. Before the First World War, the chronically underfinanced and understaffed colonial medical services had mainly concentrated their efforts on curing the ills of Europeans and sanitizing colonial cities, with the anti-sleeping sickness campaigns as perhaps the most noticeable exception. ¹³ With the resurgence of the civilizing mission after the First World War as dual mandate (Lugard) or mise en valeur (Sarraut), concepts which implied that the economic exploitation of the colonies had to go hand in hand with the ‘development’ of their human resources, colonial states began to envision, plan and implement more comprehensive schemes of public health that also included rural African populations. ¹⁴ While ‘vertical’ mass campaigns against sleeping sickness were continued and expanded, most colonies in tropical Africa also began to implement a ‘horizontal’ system of basic healthcare, which in the French, Belgian and Portuguese colonies ran under the term of Assistance Médicale aux Indigènes or Assistência Médica aos Indígenas, abbreviated to AMI. The investment in rural African healthcare was not a humanitarian endeavour, but clearly obeyed economic and political imperatives. It was a reaction to persistent and widespread anxieties of depopulation, which threatened the development of the continent and the legitimacy of colonialism as a whole. It was further fuelled by inter-imperial competition.

On the other hand, many of these new rural health schemes projected a transition from curative and individual medicine to preventive and collective healthcare, often subsumed under the term of social medicine. In the interwar period, ideals of social medicine, which had originated among hygienists in late nineteenth-century Europe and stressed the social causes of both disease and health, gained broader acceptance, partly because they were pushed by a powerful international epistemic community of public health experts associated with the League of Nations Health Organization (LNHO) and the Rockefeller Foundation (RF). ¹⁵ If leading colonial doctors also began to embrace preventive and collective healthcare in the 1920s, that was because it bore the promise of being less expensive and labour-intensive than clinical medicine. Given the restricted budgets and staffs of colonial health services, they considered that it was the only reasonable way to extend healthcare to the rural masses in the colonies. One well-trained and well-equipped hygienist, Damas Mora argued, could control up to 50,000 or 100,000 natives in contrast to about 3000 for a clinical doctor. ¹⁶

Both shifts stood out in the AMI reform project that Damas Mora outlined for Angola in the late 1920s. ¹⁷ In three stages, it intended to bring the entire native population under medical surveillance and to make the transition to social medicine. The first two stages aimed at the ‘sanitary occupation’ of the colony through a gradually expanding structure of AMI zones and sectors, health centres, village-infirmaries and mobile medical teams that regularly surveyed and examined the rural population during compulsory gatherings. For Damas Mora, however, this was only a prelude to the radical shift of the third stage. He was convinced that if one truly wished to tackle the demographic and sanitary issues of Angola at the roots, there was no other alternative than to establish a system of collective and preventive hygiene, like some of the more advanced countries in Europe and America had already done. Here, expensive individual, curative medicine would become a private issue (that is, a paid service) between doctor and patient. The state health services, for their part, would concentrate on their ultimate goal, which was not to cure the ill, but to take care of the healthy.

Damas Mora and his supporters viewed the creation and multiplication of model villages as the most adequate way to bring about this Copernican turn. If they were fashioned according to their proposals, model villages would improve some of the key ‘social determinants of health’, such as living environment, housing conditions, diet, income, education level as well as access to child and general healthcare. ¹⁸ The urge for hygienic model villages, therefore, clearly rested on a negative and stereotyped assessment of living conditions in ‘traditional’ African villages.

On doctors' advice, the new villages would be located in places that were free from flies and mosquitoes transmitting sleeping sickness, malaria and other parasitic diseases and close enough to rivers or water springs as well as roads to have access to water and be easily accessible for medical assistance. The villages would also serve to concentrate the population, which often lived in very small and dispersed villages, into larger agglomerations – an increase in scale that would further enhance the efficiency of the health services and enable the villages to have their own auxiliary African nurse and midwife. ¹⁹

The relocation of native villages also provided the perfect opportunity to improve housing conditions. Although housing structures varied substantially throughout the colony, many doctors and administrators viewed the archetypical African cubata (hut) as utterly unhygienic, as a construction that lacked space, proper ventilation and cleanliness. Therefore, European officials were to ensure that, in the new villages, individual dwellings were built using more durable materials, with more than one and more spacious rooms, and with enough distance between them. ²⁰

Another key improvement was the construction of communal pit latrines in order to combat ancylostomiasis or hookworm disease, a parasitic disease that spread through contact with infected faeces. ²¹ In the 1920s, AMI doctors had discovered that this disease was very common in Angola and attributed this to Africans' carelessness with regard to where they defecated. ²² Combating soil pollution and instilling African natives with new habits of cleanliness was hence both a civilizational and medical necessity.

Portuguese plans for hygienic model villages were not exceptional in interwar Africa. To a large extent, they drew on already existing practices of rural healthcare in tropical Africa. The relocation and sanitation of villages, for instance, had already been a common preventive measure in anti-sleeping sickness campaigns throughout tropical Africa, including Angola, since the early twentieth century. ²³ But above all, the hygienic model villages were inspired by the transnationally circulating medical practice of so-called village-infirmaries (sanzalas-enfermarias). Since the early 1920s, Portuguese colonial doctors, including Damas Mora, had presented plans to annex such sanzalas-enfermarias to the medical centres (postos sanitários) that were to be established in rural areas all over the colony as part of the new AMI approach. ²⁴ In tune with similar endeavours in other colonies, the guiding principle behind the sanzalas-enfermarias was to accommodate Africans in need of medical assistance in separate hygienic houses that were spacious and well-ventilated, constructed in durable material, built along geometrical lines and equipped with shared kitchens and latrines. Most importantly, relatives would be allowed to live with and look after them. Colonial doctors viewed these ‘open’ village-hospitals as an alternative to the ‘closed’ concentration camps that had thus far been used to segregate sleeping sickness patients from the healthy population and that had provoked much resistance from African patients and their families. They believed that the sanzala-enfermaria was better adapted to Africans’ lifestyle and sensibilities and would thus meet with more success. ²⁵ From the late 1920s onwards, dozens of village-infirmaries were built throughout Angola, most notably in the special AMI zones. ²⁶ For Damas Mora, the village-infirmary and the model village were conceptually linked: ‘In social hygiene’, he stated, ‘the model village will play the role that the sanzala-enfermaria fills with regard to therapeutic assistance.’ ²⁷

Moreover, the perception that it was necessary to sanitize, rebuild and/or relocate native villages in order to improve rural health conditions was also taking root in other parts of the (colonial) world. It reflected a new and global concern with rural hygiene in the interwar period.

A good example for this trend are the shifting contents of the global campaign against hookworm disease conducted by the Rockefeller Foundation's International Health Board (IHB, 1913–51), one of the foremost global players in international health in the first half of the twentieth century. Whereas the IHB approach to eradicate hookworm disease had initially, that is during their campaigns in the Americas in the 1910s and 1920s, centred on drug therapy, IHB doctors in Southeast Asia in the 1920s and 1930s increasingly focused on reforming the behaviour of the rural populations with regard to human waste, by introducing pit latrines or sanitary pails. ²⁸ In both the (US–American) Philippines and (Dutch) Indonesia, IHB doctors even expanded the anti-hookworm campaigns into more comprehensive programmes of preventive rural hygiene, which paid much attention to health education through speeches, posters and films. Despite the initial passive resistance of colonial health officers, who did not believe that it was possible to change the hygienic behaviour of the native populations, their efforts were particularly successful in Java, where IHB doctor John Lee Hydrick set up a Demonstration Unit encompassing 60 model villages and a school for the education of native hygiene officials in order to display and teach the correct practices and advantages of rural hygiene. ²⁹

The global importance that rural hygiene gained among hygienists in the interwar period was also reflected in the work of the LNHO. In the late 1920s and 1930s, rural hygiene became, as Iris Borowy has argued, ‘the largest and most important project of the LNHO, the one that most determined its emerging profile'. ³⁰ Most noteworthy were the European Conference on Rural Hygiene in Geneva in 1931 and the Intergovernmental Conference of Far-Eastern Countries on Rural Hygiene held in Bandung (Indonesia) in 1937, which set new issues and standards of preventive rural healthcare on the national and international agenda. ³¹ The issue of rural hygiene was also discussed during the first LNHO conference for Africa, held in Cape Town in 1932, but with much less success and long-lasting influence. Against initial plans, South Africa had shifted the agenda's focus from rural hygiene to the protection against yellow fever, causing the French and Belgians to withdraw their participation. ³²

In interwar Angola, concepts of model villages were usually not confined to hygienic improvements, but closely linked to coeval plans for agricultural reform. These connections were already present in Damas Mora's plans. When, in his programmatic writings, he referred to several endeavours in different parts of the colonial world that had inspired him, he did not only mention the hygienic villages used to combat epidemic venereal disease in Dutch New Guinea or those situated along the roads in Ubangi-Shari in French Equatorial Africa, but also the new agricultural communities in Timor and the plans for model villages in the French mandated territory of Togo. ³³

Damas Mora knew these last two projects from personal observations. During his service as chief medical doctor in Timor (1914–19), the island's colonial government had started agricultural reforms that granted land property rights and agricultural guidance to village communities, in order to sedentarize them and intensify their production. ³⁴ But even more influential were the model villages he had learnt about (and perhaps even visited) during his stay in Togo in early 1926, when he participated in a two month study tour for senior colonial health officials through West Africa organized by the LNHO. ³⁵ In 1925, the French administration in Togo had started the resettlement of Kabiyè people from presumably overpopulated north-eastern Togo to new hygienic villages in fertile regions further south. Here, villagers received seeds, tools and advice from the agricultural service and were exempted from tax payment during the first year. By 1929, 33 ‘villages cabrais’ had been created with a total population of more than 4500 inhabitants. ³⁶ Beyond the hygienic improvements it entailed, this resettlement scheme was an early example of ‘internal’ or ‘native colonization’ (colonisation indigène), a concept that implied the resettlement and sedentarization of ‘native peasants’ in fertile regions and that mirrored practices of white European settlement in the colonies and, to a certain extent, even of internal colonization in Europe. ³⁷ Similar to later and better known projects of native colonization, like the Office du Niger in the French Soudan, the main goal of the Kabiyè scheme in Togo was to relocate people to regions that were considered fertile but underpopulated in order to develop them and thus increase the agricultural production of the colony. ³⁸ Although these projects were supposed to run on a voluntary basis, French officials often had to use force to recruit peasants. ³⁹

Damas Mora's holistic model village plans were clearly inspired by the villages cabrais. Although they did not involve the large-scale resettlement of peasants into one particular region, they combined hygienic and agricultural rationales in a similar way. Simultaneously, other leading officials in Angola, like the Provincial Secretaries of the Interior and of Agriculture, began to discuss genuine projects of ‘native colonization’ in the late 1920s. ⁴⁰ While no such grand schemes would be effectively implemented in Angola in the 1930s, the idea of model villages as ideal sites for agricultural reform gained further strength.

In 1931, the head of the Agricultural Services of the Benguela region, João Casimiro Jacinto, thus presented what he believed model villages ought to be. Jacinto did not reject hygienic considerations, but he placed stronger emphasis on the possibilities model villages offered for agricultural reform. The concentration and sedentarization of African families in such villages would enable the colony's agricultural services to more efficiently assist them in improving their cultivation methods. Families living in the villages would be obliged to cultivate the land allotted to them, but to do so they would receive tools and seeds. Moreover, they would be taught new techniques and be allowed to test new plants and cultivation methods on a small experimental field next to the village. And in the seedling nursery, they would learn ‘to love trees’ instead of destroying them. ⁴¹

Three years later, model villages were also discussed during the First Congress of Colonial Agriculture in Porto. Agronomist Álvaro de Noronha e Castro, who had worked in Timor and Angola, presented a paper on the compulsory cultivation of food crops in which he defended model villages as the ideal solution to hunger. The problem, he stated, was that the natives (in Timor as well as in Angola) were lazy vagrants; their harvests were only sufficient for eight to nine months and during the rest of the year they would suffer from hunger and disease. The solution he proposed was to settle them in model villages, where each family would be obliged to cultivate at least one hectare of land with food crops and herbs for their own consumption. In addition, he recommended that they keep animals, where possible, as well. Castro viewed this not only as a means in itself, but also as a behaviouristic exercise. Once they had learnt to secure their own subsistence by growing food crops in a more systematic manner, they would easily repeat this experience with other crops destined for the export market, he assumed. ⁴²

These partly overlapping proposals reveal in an exemplary way why agronomists came to see model villages as ideal sites for agricultural reform. If built and managed accordingly, model villages would cope with some, if not all, of the most urgent questions that colonial powers had identified with regard to African agriculture: the problems of shifting cultivation and deforestation, low productivity, food insecurity and malnutrition, sedentarization and land property, and the lack of technical assistance. ⁴³ These concerns had gained increased attention in the interwar period, when the modernization of native agriculture became an important project of colonial reform, not only due to the imperative of ‘native development’ formulated by the likes of Sarraut and Lugard, but also because of new scientific insights and a changing economic framework. ⁴⁴ To be sure, this was a gradual process and many large-scale schemes of agricultural development would only reach their apogee after the Second World War. ⁴⁵

The criticism which agricultural experts and other colonial officials levelled against ‘traditional’ African agriculture primarily regarded the widely used method of shifting cultivation, in which peasants cyclically cleared new fields by cutting and burning woodland and then abandoned them after a couple of years when they were exhausted. This extensive method, they asserted, yielded low returns and was, in combination with the ‘natural laziness’ and ‘improvidence’ of the Africans, responsible for recurrent food shortages and low export quotas. In addition, experts and officials advanced ecological arguments according to which shifting cultivation destroyed forests that were indispensable for the ecological balance, thus accelerating soil erosion. Finally, they also criticized the fact that shifting cultivation intrinsically led to mobile, itinerant cultivators which were often difficult to find, tax, recruit and control. ⁴⁶ Certainly, this was not a monolithic discourse. As Helen Tilley has recently shown, some British agronomists and pedologists in the 1930s came to consider ‘native’ methods as better adapted to the environmental conditions of tropical Africa than their European counterparts. ⁴⁷ However, with regard to Angola, such minority views would only have a tangible impact on colonial policies well after 1945. ⁴⁸

Agricultural reform plans were also animated by growing fears that under- and malnutrition might be widespread among the native populations in Africa and Asia. Clearly, nutritional problems had not gone completely unnoticed until that point; colonial officials had been aware of recurrent famines and their devastating effects for many decades, and in the case of Angola even for centuries. ⁴⁹ Yet, it was arguably only after the First World War that, due to the growing attention towards native health and new insights in nutritional science, colonial powers grew anxious over the ‘normal’ nutritional status of the rural populations in their colonies and put the issue on their scientific and political agenda. ⁵⁰ If first attempts to increase food security, like the French politique du ventre plein (‘policy of full stomachs’), ⁵¹ included agricultural reforms, that was also because the radical shift in the perception of the nutritional status of native populations was closely linked to a more pessimistic view on the fertility of tropical soils. Whereas tropical regions had long been perceived as a land of plenty, where a luxurious and generous nature produced an abundant amount of food for ‘indolent natives’, studies between the two world wars reversed this image. They suggested that tropical soils were not only much more diverse, but in many cases also far less fertile than previously assumed, given that they only had thin layers of humus, which was in turn endangered by soil erosion and often lacked elements like calcium and phosphorus essential for plant growth. ⁵²

But perhaps most of all, the desire for the modernization of ‘native agriculture’ was pushed by economic rationales and the effects of the world economic crisis of the early 1930s. To combat these effects in Portugal, the emerging Estado Novo reinforced the division of labour within the Portuguese empire, according to which Angola and the other colonies were mainly to produce cheap raw materials and agricultural produce for the Portuguese and international markets. ⁵³ In Angola, however, as in many other colonies, the crisis cast doubt on the viability of European agriculture, which had still been the primary focus of agricultural reform plans in the 1920s, as the large-scale schemes of state-sponsored agricultural colonization by Portuguese immigrants conceived by High Commissioners José Norton de Matos (1921–4) and António Vicente Ferreira (1926–8) demonstrate. ⁵⁴

Experts like Ivo Benjamim de Cerqueira, the Director of the Native Affairs Department (1930–2), firmly believed that most of the existing European farmers and agricultural companies would not survive the economic crisis. African smallholders, by contrast, were more resilient to the fall in agricultural prices, he stated, because they had fewer needs and because their productivity could still be easily enhanced through the introduction of new techniques, better seeds and distribution channels. Cerqueira set high hopes in the economic potential of Angola's rural masses: ‘Only with native agriculture will we be able to redress the economic situation of the colony’, he concluded in his paper presented at the Economic Conference in Luanda in 1932. ⁵⁵ In Angola, but also in many other colonies in Africa, the development of native agriculture was viewed as an adequate means to combat the world crisis, while simultaneously fulfilling the imperatives of the civilizing mission. ⁵⁶

The agricultural model villages that Jacinto and Noronha e Castro recommended tied in with two other reform projects that were vividly discussed at the time and similarly imbued with ideas of state interventionism and economic planning: forced cultivation schemes and state farms.

In the interwar period, many colonial states, including Angola, discussed and/or introduced forced cultivation schemes that obliged all adult native men (and sometimes also women) in certain regions to cultivate a given amount of land with the type of crops indicated by local administrators or agricultural services. ⁵⁷ Although these schemes, which partly drew upon the former Cultivation System (1830–70) on Dutch Java, would be condemned as a form of forced labour by the ILO in the 1930 Geneva convention, colonial officials praised them as the ideal solution to reconcile the potentially conflicting imperatives of increasing export production and enhancing food security. ⁵⁸ They would also increase the income of African farmers and teach them healthy habits of work. In practice, however, compulsory cultivation schemes often turned out to be less beneficial for African farmers, as they provoked food shortages, particularly in cotton zones. In Angola, forced cultivation was decreed in 1931 but not officially implemented. ⁵⁹ Nevertheless, it became a social reality in the demarcated cotton zones, similar to what happened in Mozambique. ⁶⁰

In Angola, the discussion on the model villages also intersected with the debate on the granjas administrativas (state farms). In the 1930s, the granjas, the first of which had already been established by military commanders and governors around 1900, also in Mozambique and Timor, became the cornerstone of a comprehensive scheme of agricultural education and reform. ⁶¹ It was decreed that each of the nearly 300 administrative posts was to have a well-defined granja where, under the supervision of the chefe de posto and the colony's Agricultural Services, local cultures would be improved and promising new ones introduced. Africans would be taught how to use new tools and techniques, for instance with regard to soil rotation and fertilization. Where possible, each granja would therefore employ a professional farmer trained in Portugal, as well as European or African overseers. The main target group would be 14 to 16 year old African boys and girls, who would all work on the farm for the duration of four months. ⁶²

Local administrators, however, prevented the implementation of this scheme. Their criticism was that it was too bureaucratic, incompatible with the restricted budgets of the postos and that it transferred too much power to the agricultural services. ⁶³ It was only after the simplifying reform decree of 1936 that the scheme took root: by the end of the 1930s, there were dozens of officially recognized granjas administrativas in each of the five provinces. ⁶⁴ Critical observers, however, contended that many of these granjas did not perform well. Due to the shortage of agricultural engineers and skilled farmers, or their own stubbornness, the chefes de posto often chose the wrong crops, soils or seeds. Bad harvests, in turn, inspired little confidence in the African population. ⁶⁵ Some observers also added that the Africans who worked at the granjas generally did not become the champions of agricultural reform the colonial authorities had hoped for. Many of them would experience their time at the state farms as a form of punishment and not bother to transmit the knowledge they had acquired to their wives, who were usually in charge of daily agricultural work in the villages. ⁶⁶ While this criticism addressed the long-standing issue of differently gendered visions of agricultural work between Europeans and Africans, it was also a consequence of the 1936 reforms, which had replaced the initial target group of male and female adolescents with male only convicts and adults who had failed to pay their taxes. Despite the rhetoric of modernization, the granjas administrativas were in practice often less about the dissemination of new agricultural techniques than about the production of food and sometimes even the generation of surplus income for the administrative authorities.

Plans of agricultural model villages were not exclusive to the Portuguese. Agricultural experts in other colonies often debated peasant villagization in similar terms. The so-called ‘centralization policy’ in British Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, is a good example. In 1929, the chief agriculturist in the Native Affairs Department, Emory Alvord, started to advocate the idea of permanent model villages as ideal sites for the dissemination of ‘modern’ land husbandry methods. The villages were to be established in ‘native reserves’ on the borders of arable land and to comprise hygienic houses, a school, a church, grain bins and pit latrines. Alvord's policy was highly successful: by 1944, almost one third of the colony's native reserves had been ‘centralized’. ⁶⁷ Another example may be found in the so-called paysannats in the Belgian Congo. Much debated during the world economic crisis of the early 1930s, this agricultural settlement programme was conceived along similar lines: in order to modernize ‘traditional’ agriculture, it targeted the ‘stabilization’ of African peasants in newly defined villages. Due to the resistance of European planters, however, who did not want to lose their labour force nor their predominant position in the agricultural sector, the policy of paysannats was only implemented on a large scale after the Second World War. ⁶⁸

As the multiple connections with Timor and Mozambique have already suggested, Angola was not the only Portuguese colony in which the villagization of native populations was discussed. In Timor, 20 model villages with up to 70 families each had already been built in 1927–8 under Governor Teofilo Duarte, a project that would be resumed a decade later under Governor Álvaro da Fontoura. ⁶⁹ And inspired by the debate about the granjas in Angola, the government in Mozambique had planned, built and populated a model farm village in Nhangau in the early 1930s. ⁷⁰ By the early 1930s, when the emerging Estado Novo curtailed the autonomy of the colonies and recentralized imperial decision-making in Lisbon, the model village had clearly become a subject of broad imperial interest that was also amply debated in the metropolis.

A crucial moment of discussion was the First Congress of Colonization in Porto in September 1934. Organized by the influential Geographical Society of Lisbon, it was one of the six major colonial conferences that took place during the Portuguese Colonial Exposition in Porto that year. Over the course of four days, eminent Portuguese colonialists discussed the possibilities and modalities of both ‘white’ and ‘native’ colonization. With regard to ‘native’ colonization, most papers advocated villagization (aldeamento) as its cornerstone and, more generally, as a key measure to improve the situation of the native populations in the Portuguese colonies. ⁷¹

Participants approached the issue from different perspectives. Missionary António Miranda Magalhães, for instance, praised the Christian villages which usually surrounded Catholic missions in the colonies as examples of progress. These villages, in which former mission pupils and other Christianized Africans lived under the vigilant eye of the missionaries, were composed of ‘modest but hygienic, aligned and well-situated houses.’ Moreover, their inhabitants benefited from the civilizing facilities of the mission station: church, school, farm, workshops and dispensary. ⁷² José Silvestre Ferreira Bossa, the Head of the recently founded Inspecção Superior da Administração Colonial (ISAC, ‘High Inspection of the Colonial Administration’), for his part, tackled the issue from the perspective of land rights. ⁷³ If Portugal wanted to develop its colonies and pursue its civilizing mission, he argued, it had to sedentarize and villagize the populations, which habitually lived scattered and in (semi-)nomadic conditions, and as such were hardly within reach for all sorts of medical and technical assistance. According to Bossa, however, villagization would not be self-evident. In order to succeed, it would be necessary to instil the African natives with an understanding and an acceptance of private landed property. Until now, he criticized, few Africans in Portuguese and other European colonies had made use of the colonial laws that had been expressly designed to give them legal ownership over the land. Therefore, Bossa pleaded for new laws that would entice natives to gain full ownership over the land within demarcated ‘native reserves’. Ownership would, in turn, be the key to successful sedentarization, in that it would entail certain rights and advantages but also obligations and responsibilities.

The most elaborate and concrete paper came from António Leite de Magalhães, a senior colonial official with long-standing experience in the military and civil administrations of Timor, Angola and Guiné. ⁷⁴ His villagization plan, which he presented in the form of a law proposal, was basically a synthesis of many ideas that circulated at the time. Borrowing from Damas Mora and agricultural reformers, it strove for a profound transformation of African rural life by combating endemic diseases, improving hygienic conditions, excluding the weak and the sick, modernizing and increasing agricultural production, regulating communal work, reforming labour recruitment and integrating ‘traditional’ African or newly appointed authorities into the administrative apparatus of the colony. Moreover, his proposal distinguished between ‘pagan’ villages, to be peopled preferably by former conscripts or contract labourers, and more advanced ‘Christian’ villages composed of former mission pupils, thus calling upon the state to support and further enhance a long-standing missionary practice. His model villages were also supposed to develop a sense of private property in the inhabitants: the family farms, which would each comprise a farmhouse, stables and 1 hectare of land for fruit trees and vegetables, were never to be sold or subdivided, but only passed on through the mechanisms of inheritance.

Leite de Magalhães' proposal was highly acclaimed by the audience and, at the end of the conference, all participants agreed upon the necessity to villagize the native population in the Portuguese colonies. ⁷⁵ Although the terms of this recommendation were vague and not binding, the conference proved highly influential. Leite de Magalhães' proposal was re-discussed during the Second Conference of Colonial Governors in Lisbon in 1936, a six week-long platform for high-level discussions between the governors of all eight Portuguese colonies and the Colonial Ministry, and it subsequently served as the basis for a decree proposal on native villagization presented by the Minister of Colonies, Francisco Vieira Machado, in 1939. ⁷⁶

Officially denominated as the ‘Social and Economic Organization of the Native Populations’, this decree proposal and the preceding discussions illustrate to what extent new and reformed villages were, in the 1930s, being imagined by leading colonialists as the cornerstone of a new and progressive social order for the Portuguese colonies. By improving the conditions of life and work of the native populations, villagization would help to resolve ‘all problems of administration, settlement, civilization, development and nationalization’ in the colonies, Vieira Machado concluded. It would be a long-term endeavour, he added, possibly even ‘of more than one generation’, but the important thing was to get started. ⁷⁷

Yet although the decree proposal was approved by the Conselho Superior do Império (‘Colonial High Council’) and the Câmara Corporativa (‘Corporative Chamber’) two years later, it would never be promulgated. ⁷⁸ Probably that was because these consultative organs had recommended many (and diverging) alterations and because various influential members, such as António Vicente Ferreira and Marcello Caetano, had even rejected the decree wholesale. They did not oppose villagization as such, but criticized the modalities and even the very raison d’etre of the decree. They objected that it would be both unfeasible and undesirable to villagize all natives, given their different lifestyles and ‘degrees of civilization’, and that the respective governments in the colonies were better placed than the Colonial Ministry to work out regulations that were adapted to the cultural and economic differences between population groups.

Interestingly, this was exactly what the administration in Angola had already been doing. Shortly after his arrival in Angola in 1935, the new Governor-General António Lopes Mateus (1935–9) had presented his villagization project, which included many of the elements and rationales exposed in the plans of Damas Mora and Leite de Magalhães, to the five province governors and exhorted them to study its implementation in their respective provinces. Each governor was to devise a type of model village that, while adhering to overarching principles, was adapted to the local conditions of their own province. ⁷⁹ Just like Damas Mora, Lopes Mateus was not afraid of thinking big. His ultimate aim fell nothing short of reordering Angola into a colony of model villages. In a first stage, he proposed that the construction of ‘300 to 400 villages, that is, 60 to 80 in each province’ would be financed with money from the central government in Luanda. After that, it would be the responsibility of the local administrators to front the construction costs of any new villages. ‘I would even think’, he concluded, ‘that after that [first stage], the administrators will compete to establish as many villages as possible.’ ⁸⁰

All province governors agreed upon the expediency of Lopes Mateus’ project and, over the next few years, the issue was repeatedly and prominently rediscussed during the (semi-)annual meetings of the local administrators with their respective province governor and also in the annual reports of the province governors to the Governor-General. At the end of 1935, the Governor of the Luanda Province thus reported that ‘all circunscrições [‘administrative circles’] [were] working on the construction of villages aimed at concentrating the natives and organizing the sobados [‘African chieftaincies’]’. Throughout the Luanda Province and mainly in the Congo District, ‘there [were] already important new villages, all of them in selected locations and close to the roads.’ For those driving through the region, he added, it was most satisfactory to ‘observe the succession, in short distances, of villages as centres of prosperity and well-being’. ⁸¹ Three years later, one of his successors called attention to the hygienic model houses that the local administration had been (and still was) building in the Damba circunscrição. They were spacious, made of durable materials and had ‘the characteristic look of constructions in the Congo District’. They were built in neat rows and, in the near future, collective latrines would be constructed as well. ⁸²

Positive messages also came from the Provinces of Bié and Benguela. ‘Close to Silva Porto’, Bié Governor António de Almeida stated in 1936,

I have already laid the foundation of a model village. The chapel is already finished and the school well on its way. I hope to start the construction of the houses, in stone, brick and lime, also in this year. ⁸³

In the same report, the chief doctor of the province referred to the – presumably identical –

model village which [was] being founded in Catemo in accordance with all principles of hygiene, with toilets, bath rooms and washing places and which [would] serve as an example for the natives who would come from the interior to Silva Porto. ⁸⁴

In the Province of Benguela, the first model village was effectively inaugurated in August 1937 in the presence of the Governor-General and many other high-ranking officials. ⁸⁵ The location of this village illustrated the nexus between agricultural reform and villagization. It was established on the lands of the Estação de Sementes e Fruteiras da Cuima (‘Station of Seeds and Fruit Trees in Cuima’), one of the new experimental sites of the Agricultural Services in Angola, and coordinated by Jacinto Casimiro, the agronomist who had already advocated peasant villagization years before. Province Governor Eurico Nogueira, who had been an active supporter of Lopes Mateus’ project from the very beginning, instructed his administrators to treat the subject as a top priority, and in 1938 at least one other model village was inaugurated in Ganda. ⁸⁶

In the semi-arid southern Province of Huíla, by contrast, the situation proved more complicated. When, during their annual meeting in 1938, the province governor questioned his administrators about the feasibility of villagization, he received very divergent answers. While some stated that they were making progress, others objected that it was impossible to villagize the nomadic pastoralists living in the province, and a bad idea as well, since it would increase the risk of cattle diseases. ⁸⁷ These objections did not just appear out of thin air. Previously, other ‘experts’ like the veterinarian doctor and amateur anthropologist António Lebre, who had studied the customs of the pastoralists in the southern part of the province, had dismissed the idea on similar grounds. ⁸⁸ Eventually, the province governor instructed his administrators to attempt villagization whenever possible, but warned them not to press too hard, since ‘he did not want the concentration of the natives to disturb their peace’. ⁸⁹

Although these high-level sources are mostly silent or vague on the local processes of planning, implementation and resistance, they nevertheless offer some valuable insight. They strongly suggest that Lopes Mateus' recommendations jolted the administrative apparatus into action, but that over the next few years his vision of hundreds of model villages was only incompletely and unevenly realized. Province governors were generally in favour of the project and even tended to assign high priority to it, but its implementation was hampered by some of the basic tensions of colonial development policies in the interwar period.

First, there was a lack of experts. The historiography on planning has emphasized the crucial role of experts in both the conception and implementation of plans. ⁹⁰ In interwar Portuguese Angola, the plans for model villages were mostly conceived on the basis of expert knowledge in hygiene or agriculture, but medical and agricultural services did not expand quickly enough to provide comprehensive technical assistance to local administrators when it came to implementing these plans. Moreover, local administrators did not always appreciate the involvement of experts, as the debate over the granjas administrativas has illustrated.

With regard to model villages, administrators, doctors and agronomists often had diverging priorities, which led them to give different interpretations to the concept of ‘model village’. The relocation of villages to the vicinity of roads, which became a widespread policy in the 1930s, is a telling example. ⁹¹ In theory, this practice, also known from other colonies, could have advantages for administrators, doctors and agronomists alike, as it turned villages more visible and accessible for tax collection, medical control and agricultural assistance – and facilitated the transport of agricultural products. Yet, in their quest for legibility, some administrators lost sight of hygienic and agricultural aspects. Out of ignorance or even indifference, they sometimes chose locations where the soil was not fertile enough. Thus ISAC inspector Óscar Ruas warned in 1937 that the displacement of native villages was a practice administrators needed to ‘treat with the greatest caution, since there were settlements which had previously been rich and which now lacked everything, as the land where they had been settled did not produce anything.’ ⁹²

Second, despite the support of most province governors, the practical realization of model villages seems to have depended primarily on the initiative of local administrators. Yet, if one follows the incessant complaints of ISAC inspectors in the late 1930s and early 1940s, these administrators were neither numerous nor, with exceptions of course, were they well-trained, well-equipped and zealous enough to fulfil the myriad tasks assigned to them. The inspectors also accused the central government of further aggravating this situation by transferring administrators from one post to another every other year, thus preventing them from acquiring the necessary in-depth knowledge of local conditions and winning over the confidence of the local population. ⁹³ Using a concept from the German sociologist Trutz von Trotha, one can argue that the ‘internal intermediarity’ (Binnenintermediarität) of colonial rule, that is the dependency of the central government on its local administrators, remained a problem until 1945 at least. ⁹⁴

A third reason why Lopes Mateus' villagization scheme presumably failed to transform the colony's countryside was its lack of funding. In 1935, Lopes Mateus had promised to finance the first stage of his scheme with money from the central government in Luanda, but it seems that, in practice, local administrators had to make do with their own restricted budgets. ⁹⁵ This constraint fitted into a broader picture. During the interwar period, colonial development schemes were severely constrained by the reigning ideology of colonial self-sufficiency: colonies had to fund their projects almost exclusively with the (always scarce) money that they had themselves generated from such sources as head taxes and customs duties. ⁹⁶ The Portuguese colonies were no exception to this general trend and probably even worse off, since Salazar's obsession with balanced budgets and financial austerity, for both metropolis and colonies, was notorious and long-lasting. ⁹⁷ Even when, in 1938, Angola's first development plan (Fundo de Fomento) was passed, the bulk of the 150 Million escudos was to be spent on large infrastructure works, such as railways, harbours, roads and mine prospecting and not on social improvement. ⁹⁸ Angola (and Mozambique) might indeed have received their first development plans ahead of the British and French colonies in Africa, as Clarence-Smith has remarked, but these plans still followed an older logic of development that the British Colonial Development and Welfare Act from 1940 and the French Fonds d'Investissement pour le Développement Economique et Social from 1946 – both explicitly designed to raise the standard of living – would render obsolete. ⁹⁹

Last but not least, the displacement and sanitation of villages was an intervention that often elicited protest and resistance from African villagers. Although the available (mostly high-level) sources are not at all prolific on this issue, several motives for protest can be discerned. In open contradiction with the colonial commonplace that Africans did not feel any bond with their birth- or homeland, villagers often opposed resettlement because this meant that they would have to abandon their fields. ¹⁰⁰ Even when these were situated in insalubrious lowlands, they were not always willing to move to new locations. ¹⁰¹ According to Serra Frazão, villagers were also wary of leaving their memories, ancestors and the protective spirits of these ancestors behind. ¹⁰² The alignment of houses, the use of new building materials and other hygienic provisions did not meet with unanimous approval either. Resettling Africans in an improved village was, as a colonial official admitted still in 1955, ‘always a matter of controversy, because of the difficulty to adapt the village to the native traditions and psychology and at the same time reconcile it with the most recommended conditions of hygiene and comfort.’ ¹⁰³

But an even more fundamental obstacle was probably that many Africans did not want to go living in new villages close to roads or administrative posts, where they would be under the constant vigilance of the colonial administration and where, consequently, they could be easily subjected to taxation, military conscription and (forced) labour recruitment. The available sources from Angola are silent here, but Teofilo Duarte and Álvaro da Fontoura, former governors of Timor with ample experience in villagization efforts, were most probably right when they later identified this nexus as a crucial problem for (and cause of failure of) villagization efforts in all Portuguese colonies. ¹⁰⁴ Certainly, Lopes Mateus had proposed to dispense the inhabitants of the model villages from tax payment, public works and long-term labour contracts. ¹⁰⁵ Yet, given the general administrative ‘obsession’ with precisely these issues in interwar Angola, ¹⁰⁶ such promises might not have been enough to dissipate African mistrust, nor might they always have been (thoroughly) implemented.

Debates about model villages and villagization in the interwar period were never about hygienic and agricultural reform alone. In somewhat contradictory ways, they were also underpinned by anxieties over the potential dangers of colonial ‘progress’ and societal change. Many colonial officials viewed the resettlement of the ‘native’ population, and in particular its most ‘progressive’ groups, in model-like villages as a way to better control them and, with them, the way colonial society was changing. In their opinion, villages were a basic and indispensable unit of colonial society and villagization promised to restore (or maintain) the advantages of a societal order that colonialism itself was about to destroy. Only in villages could hygienic and agricultural reforms be implemented without disrupting society at large.

Indeed, in the interwar years, colonial officials and intellectuals were increasingly concerned with the alleged disintegration of ‘traditional’ rural societies in colonial Africa. In their view, labour migration, military conscription and missionary education had created a growing group of Africans who did not live in their ‘traditional’ tribal structures and did often not reintegrate into ‘traditional’ village life after the completion of their contracts or education. These ‘detribalized’ Africans went on living, often without fixed residence, near the bigger colonial towns, where, beyond the intermediary control of ‘traditional’ authorities, they posed a problem of control for colonial governments. But also those who returned to their villages were often seen as ‘an element of disorder and a germ of destruction’, as they introduced new habits and views. ¹⁰⁷

Colonial anxieties over ‘detribalized natives’ laid bare the ambivalence of the civilizing mission. Rather than embracing them as bearers of progress who were on their way to assimilate European culture and become ‘modern citizens’, the alleged telos of the civilizing mission, many colonialists primarily emphasized the residual difference of these ‘socially hybrid beings’ and the potential threat they posed for colonial rule and order. ¹⁰⁸ As a solution, they recommended that former workers, soldiers and mission pupils either be reintegrated as quickly as possible in what Europeans viewed as their ‘tribal’ societies or be placed under close colonial control and guidance in special settlements, where they could keep their intermediate status. ¹⁰⁹

From this perspective, villagization appears as the rural counterpart of the larger special settlements for ‘detribalized’ Africans near the bigger cities, like the so-called centres extra-coutumiers that would be established from the 1930s onwards in the Belgian Congo. ¹¹⁰ Arguably, if model villages in interwar Angola were preferably planned and/or organized for former soldiers, wage labourers or mission pupils, that was not only because these particular groups were deemed more receptive for European notions of hygiene and agriculture (due to prior exposure), but also to enclose and better control groups that were considered ‘dangerous’. ¹¹¹ This rationale was not new; it had already guided a prior experience with villagization in Angola, when, in the 1910s, the colonial government had resettled a part of the workers that had been repatriated from the cocoa plantations on São Tomé and Príncipe – and who were notorious for their unruly and vagrant behaviour – in newly established villages. Until 1919, 21 such villages had been created in various districts with in total more than one thousand inhabitants. ¹¹²

Unlike their (peri-)urban equivalents, however, model villages also served to counter the threat of proletarianization. The villages were congruent with the rural future that several eminent Portuguese colonialists had envisaged for Angola in the interwar years – a future, in which the colony would be peopled by farmers, living under a traditional authority or a newly appointed regedor (village headmen) and bound to their villages by landed property. ‘It is towards ‘peasantship’ (ruralato) that the native must evolve. “Déracinement” and forced labour implemented outside the present social framework would be prejudicial to the rational evolution of Africa’, Cerqueira concluded in 1932. ¹¹³ Another prominent advocate of (re)peasantization was General Norton de Matos, former Governor-General and High Commissioner of Angola (1912–15 and 1921–4). In his view, the (re)ruralization of the African population went hand in hand with rethinking European colonization and agriculture. Angola, he stated at the National Colonial Congress in 1940, was not a place for large European plantations with subordinate African labourers. Such plantations should disappear and African peasants should become independent smallholders, rooted in rural village structures. Whenever the colony's mines, factories or harbours would need African labourers, these should be taken from villages in the region or those nearby that had been created especially for that purpose, so that the labourers would remain rooted in village structures, and not become proletarianized. ¹¹⁴

This vision gained popularity in the 1930s and 1940s, since it seemed to present a solution to the eternal problem of (forced) labour recruitment, while simultaneously avoiding proletarianization and its consequences, such as labour movements and strikes as well as the costs that would arise in the case of unemployment, disability or retirement. ¹¹⁵ Keeping wage-labourers bound to their villages would also enable employers to avoid paying family wages and to devolve the costs of reproduction to the village economy. ¹¹⁶ In the opinion of high-ranking colonialists in Angola such as Governor-General Álvaro de Freitas Morna (1942–3), resettling workers with their families in new hygienic villages near the work place would also solve two much-discussed demographic problems caused by the hitherto common practice of long-distance single-male labour migration to European plantations and mines: the high mortality that, in addition to the hard work itself, changes in climate, disease environment and diet caused among migrant labourers and the alleged decline of the birth rates (and increased immorality) amongst the wives they had left behind. ¹¹⁷ Therefore, Freitas Morna had high hopes in this villagization scheme. Upon his resignation in 1943, he appeared confident that the construction of such worker villages was well underway and that ‘within three or four years, the labour recruitment problem would be fully resolved.’ ¹¹⁸

This was certainly too optimistic, but a private enterprise that most actively endorsed this policy was Diamang, a multinational diamond company with a large concessionary area in the north-eastern district of Lunda. ¹¹⁹ After first timid efforts in the late 1920s, Diamang created, in 1937, the Serviço de Propaganda e Assistência à Mão de Obra Indígena or SPAMOI (‘Service for Propaganda and Assistance to the Native Labour Force’). Through this special service, which by 1943 employed a dozen European and almost 200 African officials, Diamang implemented many of the model village policies that had been discussed over the past decade by Portuguese government officials. ¹²⁰

In order to house its contratados, that is workers that were – mostly forcibly – recruited with the help of the administrative authorities in Angola, SPAMOI constructed new villages and sanitized existing ones, with standardized brick houses, access to clean water, improved pit latrines and rubbish pits, and even separated spaces for the preparation of manioc. In each village, an African guard (sentinela) was appointed to make sure that hygienic regulations were observed. Simultaneously, SPAMOI offered seeds and agricultural assistance to the workers' wives, inducing them to cultivate new crops such as soya and sorghum and to increase the production of the existing ones on the fields around the worker villages. The yield of these fields and the newly planted fruit trees was distributed among the workers' wives and children. SPAMOI also created further institutions, such as regulated market places, where workers could buy food from regional producers at much lower prices than before, an experimental plant station and a school to train its personnel. In addition, the service organized agricultural and hygienic campaigns in the hundreds of villages belonging to the administrative posts around the mining area, so that their inhabitants would produce enough food for themselves and the mines.

While the direct aim of these measures was to improve the overall living conditions of the contratados and their families, they were also part of a larger campaign aimed at stabilizing the workers with their families near the mines – a campaign that also included the provision of maternal and infant healthcare. ¹²¹ Diamang hoped that stabilization would reduce the cost of recruitment and acclimatization and create a work force that was better trained and more motivated. Such a villagization and stabilization policy, however, was far from self-evident in interwar Africa. In South Africa, the foremost mining area of the continent, the mining companies continued to rely on short-term single-male labour migration and to house their labourers in large compounds. ¹²² Diamang's decision in the 1930s to discard the compound system was, perhaps more than was to the influence of Angolan government officials, due to the transnational influence of the mining companies in the neighbouring Belgian Congo, such as Forminière and the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga (UMHK). UMHK had started to stabilize its workers in the late 1920s and this policy was later also copied on the adjacent Northern Rhodesian Copperbelt. ¹²³ Diamang had close ties to these companies. Significantly, SPAMOI had been established upon the recommendations that UMHK doctor Mottoulle had made during his inspection visit to Diamang in 1936. ¹²⁴

In comparison with UMHK, Diamang was less successful in stabilizing the labour force. The percentage of accompanying women rose from 7.2 per cent in 1927 to an average 38 per cent during the Second World War, but it fell again after 1945, never reaching the level of the UMHK. ¹²⁵ Moreover, only a few percent of the contratados prolonged their contracts, despite the promise of salary increases and less demanding work and the risk of being forcibly recruited another time when back home in their villages. ¹²⁶ Clearly, model villages alone were not enough incentive for Angolans to become long-term voluntary mine workers.

If Diamang nevertheless continued its villagization efforts, that was not only out of hope that stabilization rates might still increase, but also because the village structure was considered useful to maintain order and combat detribalization. Certainly, company villages were not exact copies of ‘traditional’ village life, as they were not explicitly segregated along ethnic lines and did not have ‘traditional’ authorities (sobas) and healers, potentially subversive groups which Diamang avoided recruiting. ¹²⁷ Nevertheless, the inhabitants used the village setting to reproduce parts of their culture. They practiced ‘traditional’ music, songs and dances, re-enacted ceremonies and often the eldest in the mining villages would gather to form the council of elders in order to resolve disputes amongst workers. Sometimes, a sentinela would thereby assume the role of soba. According to Cleveland, Diamang officials even encouraged such activities, as they were believed to counter detribalization tendencies. ¹²⁸

In the interwar period, a broad range of colonial actors came to advocate model-like villages as the solution to some of Angola’s most pressing problems and as the basis of its future order. Yet, although model village schemes were intensely and repeatedly discussed by health officials, agricultural experts and senior members of the territorial administration, as well as by high-level imperial institutions in Lisbon, few such villages were reportedly established before the end of the Second World War, apart from those organized by Diamang. This contradiction reveals that, while the Portuguese colonial state displayed an increasing desire for social engineering in interwar rural Angola, it was not able to overcome the severe constraints on colonial power and to implement such grand schemes.

This, however, does not at all mean that the discussions remained without effect. Beyond the few genuine model villages that were effectively established, colonial officials in interwar Angola began to intervene more broadly and consciously into the hygienic and socio-economic conditions of African village life. In fact, the discussions on model villages both reflected and reinforced what was already an ongoing process, since they built on contemporary ideas and experiences of hygienic, agricultural and societal reform, such as the AMI healthcare programme, the granjas administrativas or the relocation of villages closer to the roads. Model village plans were an attempt to bundle these reforms in a single passe-partout concept.

Moreover, interwar visions of hygienic, well-ordered and economically prosperous African villages persisted and were implemented more systematically after 1945, when gradually more money and expertise was invested into rural development programmes. ¹²⁹ The scheme of colonatos indígenas (‘native rural settlements’), for instance, revived many of the ideas present in Vieira Machado's aborted project from 1939 and led to the creation of large agricultural settlements, comprised of several villages each, in Damba, Caconda and Vale do Logo in the late 1940s and early 1950s. ¹³⁰ And beyond Diamang, other companies began to construct hygienic model villages as well, like Angola's largest sugar company Cassequel and the Colonial Boards of Cotton, Coffee, and Cereals, corporative organizations that had been founded in the late 1930s to coordinate the production and trade of colonial goods. ¹³¹

Finally, the interwar discussions also shed new light on the vast villagization efforts that occurred during the war of decolonization (1961–75), when the Portuguese military and civil administrations in Angola forcibly resettled more than a million rural Africans into strategic and rural development villages. ¹³² By doing so, they followed a counterinsurgency strategy that had already been applied by the British and the French in other wars of decoloniziation – a strategy that aimed at preventing contact between guerrilla forces and Angola's rural masses and, simultaneously, at winning the latter's ‘hearts and minds’ through accelerated rural development efforts. ¹³³ Yet while war had provided the opportunity, the legitimation and the means for such a massive and utterly disruptive villagization policy, this policy also drew from a much older colonial dream of reordering rural Angola.