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A Robust Operation: Resettling, Security, and Development in Late Colonial Angola (1960s–1970s)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2020
Abstract
The forced removal and resettlement of population was a main feature of late European colonialism, in Africa and elsewhere. Both were crucial to the formulation and enactment of securitarian projects and developmental schemes, and to their recurrent intersection and close interdependence. The repertoires of repressive developmentalism—the shaping of development strategies by securitarian concerns and the contamination of schemes of security by socioeconomic rationales—were diverse, inspiring the various authorities and guiding many specific operations on the ground. This text provides one telling example of these repertoires, the Operação Robusta (1969–1974), which entailed the forced removal of thousands of men, women, and children from the district of North Cuanza to the district of Zaire (both in the north of Angola, under Portuguese rule, and in the middle of an armed conflict that started in 1961), and was seen as a model for similar actions. Assessing the drives and the prospects associated with the operation, this text also addresses its violent dynamics and effects, namely the substantial separation of families, the meagre provision of welfare, and the intense processes of land expropriation.
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- Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University
Footnotes
Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. He has been working on the historical intersections between internationalism(s) and imperialism since the nineteenth century, and on the late colonial entanglements between idioms and repertoires of development and of control and coercion in European colonial empires. He is the author of The “Civilizing Mission” of Portuguese Colonialism (c. 1870–1930) (2015), and the coeditor of The Ends of European Colonial Empires (2015), Internationalism, Imperialism and the Formation of the Contemporary World (2017), and Resistance and Colonialism: Insurgent Peoples in World History (2019). He coordinates the international research project The Worlds of (Under)Development: Processes and Legacies of the Portuguese Colonial Empire in a Comparative Perspective (1945–1975), funded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (2018–2021).
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