–Analysis–
It was 00:20 in Lisbon on April 25, 1974, when the forbidden song “Grandola, Vila Morena” was broadcast on Catholic radio. It was the signal the putschists had been waiting for to take action.
In a matter of hours, 50 years ago, Europe’s oldest dictatorship fell; the regime established in 1932 by Antonio Salazar, and continued by Marcelo Caetano, collapsed in the face of the determination of the Armed Forces Movement, a collective of officers bent on putting an end to Portugal’s colonial wars.
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It was in Africa that the dictatorship sealed its fate, not in Portugal, where its fearsome political police, the PIDE, prevented any dissent. In Guinea Bissau, Angola and Mozambique, Portugal ignored the winds of decolonization that swept across most of the continent in 1960. Fourteen years later, its unwinnable colonial wars produced their most astonishing result: the “Carnation Revolution”, the democratization of the metropolis.
Why did it all start in Africa?
Letters from Angola
To understand this, it’s necessary to read the Letters from Angola that future writer Antonio Melo Antunes wrote to his wife while serving as a military doctor in Africa’s main Portuguese colony in the early 70s. They reveal the life experience and disillusionment of young officers sent to fight guerrillas that had motives they understood.
Portugal was an anachronistic colonial power.
For some officers, it was even the occasion of their conversion to Marxist ideas that had been banned by their regime, but which were permeating the main nationalist movements during the Cold War. This politicization was reflected in the “Carnation Revolution”.
This revolution would take at least two years to settle down, between right-wing attempts to save the empire and extreme left-wing dreams of a proletarian dictatorship, before transforming Portugal into a democracy compatible with the rest of Western Europe. Portugal joined the European Community with post-Franco Spain in 1986.
A radical change
This revolution has left Portugal with a strong relationship with Portuguese-speaking Africa, despite a hasty and botched decolonization process, particularly in Angola, which suffered a terrible civil war. As the poorest country in Western Europe, Portugal was an anachronistic colonial power: this enabled it to avoid the neo-colonial temptation of Gaullism, since it didn’t have the means to do so.
In half a century, this country has gone from archaic dictatorship to cool tourist destination.
But it was in building a modern country that Portugal legitimized its revolution, which today has won consensus. There are hardly any people nostalgic of Salazarism, and if the far right made a breakthrough in the last elections, it’s because Portugal is joining the European norm — no country is immune to this today.
It’s remarkable that in half a century, this country has gone from archaic dictatorship to cool tourist destination, from land of emigration to envied country. Despite the debt crisis 15 years ago, despite property prices, despite climatic uncertainties… Portugal has normalized, in the best meaning of the word. And it owes this primarily to a handful of officers who returned frustrated from their military missions in Africa.
