Portuguese Army

The Portuguese Army was a central instrument of Portugal as colonial ruler in Angola, a territory shaped by centuries of military campaigns and, in the final colonial years, an armed struggle for liberation. In the account, its history spans the long pattern of colonial warfare, its suppression of the 1961 uprising, and its presence amid the evacuation of Luanda in 1975.

Colonial Rule and the Scale of the Army

The Portuguese presence in Angola was closely tied to the extraction of enslaved people. To capture them, Portugal conducted repeated wars, and warfare remained a persistent feature of colonial rule: from 1579 to 1921, historians found barely five years in which Portuguese forces were not fighting somewhere in the territory. This history places the army within a wider system of conquest and extraction, rather than presenting it as an institution separate from colonial expansion.

In the final years of the colonial war, the Portuguese Army numbered more than 70,000. The scale of that force belonged to a larger colonial presence that included a rapidly growing European settler population. In 1970, Angola had 5,673,046 inhabitants, including more than half a million European settlers, mainly Portuguese. Some Portuguese who came to Angola were soldiers; others were landless peasants or impoverished members of the lower middle class whom the governments of Salazar and Caetano sent to the colony in the hope of easing social tensions in Portugal. These groups had different roles, but their presence reflects the breadth of the colonial project as independence approached.

The 1961 Uprisings

On 4 February 1961, MPLA fighters attacked the Casa de Reclusão Militar in Luanda, a prison holding Angolan patriots. The book identifies this attack as the beginning of the armed struggle for Angola’s liberation. The prison’s military designation places the Portuguese military institution within the opening scene of that struggle, though the account does not specify the army’s response to this particular attack.

On 15 March, the UPA initiated an uprising in the north directed against non-Bakongo communities. Armed bands killed Portuguese civilians as well as Angolan people of mixed ancestry and members of the Ovimbundu and Kimbundu communities. The Portuguese Army suppressed the insurrection. It was followed by a massacre of Bakongo people and the emigration of many Bakongo to Zaïre. The sequence marks the army’s direct role in putting down the uprising, while also showing that suppression did not end the violence or its consequences for the population.

Luanda During the 1975 Exodus

By 1975, Luanda was filling with Portuguese residents fleeing from across Angola and trying to leave by air. As evacuation became disorganized, people disputed who should be given places on departing planes. The army intervened in one such confrontation: it removed men who had boarded and directed women with children to take their places. The episode shows soldiers enforcing an evacuation order amid a civilian departure in which no allocation rule won general approval and people sometimes obstructed planes in desperation.

The episode belongs to a wider collapse of ordinary institutions and services in the city, but the evidence distinguishes the military’s specific intervention from that broader breakdown. More than 95 per cent of Angola’s European inhabitants left in 1975, travelling to Portugal and other countries, especially Brazil. The book does not describe the Portuguese Army’s subsequent withdrawal or provide a complete account of its final operations; its presence in the evacuation scene is a limited but concrete glimpse of the military amid the end of colonial rule.

Historical Significance

The Portuguese Army’s roles in these accounts are linked by a shift in the purpose and setting of military power. The long colonial history connects warfare to the capture and export of enslaved people; in 1961, the army suppressed an uprising during the opening of the liberation struggle; in 1975, soldiers intervened in the contested departure of Portuguese civilians from Luanda. Taken together, these episodes place the army within both the coercive history of colonial rule and the unsettled process by which that rule was ending.