Appearing on television on April 13th 1961, Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, who came to power in 1932, infamously declared: “To Angola, rapidly and in force!”
Two months earlier, on February 4th, pro-independence militants in Angola had mounted an attack on two prisons in the capital Luanda to free comrades held there by the Portuguese colonial authorities. The events marked the launching of the armed struggle for the independence of Angola.
In turn, uprisings began in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, two other “overseas provinces” of Portugal. Already, in 1960, a total of 14 French sub-Saharan colonies gained independence, as did the Belgian colony of the Congo, the Italian colony of Somalia and the British colony of Nigeria.
Those populations still under Portuguese rule had become impatient for their own independence. But imperialism was one of the pillars of the doctrine of Salazarism, whereby the Portuguese colonies were an integral part of the country’s national identity, anchored in the narrative of the “discoveries” of its great navigators in the 15th and 16th centuries. The constitution under the dictatorship even stated that the Portuguese nation had “the historic function of possessing and colonising overseas domains and to civilise the populations found there”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
In response to the insurrections in its colonies, Portugal sent thousands of troops to Africa, many of whom were conscripts. As of 1968, national military service in Portugal lasted four years, of which two were to be spent in either Angola, Guinea-Bissau or Mozambique. Portugal spent 40% of its state budget on military action in the three countries, know as the “Portuguese Colonial War”, in which around 100,000 Africans and 5,000 Portuguese were to die. France aided the Portuguese with a – discreet – supply of attack helicopters, as well as training in anti-insurrection techniques, a know-how developed by France during the 1954-1962 Algerian War of Independence.
In face of the horror of the colonial wars, many young Portuguese decided to flee their country. During the 1970s, around 20% of those called up to serve in the military evaded the draft. The movement against fighting the colonial war so disturbed the regime that in 1972, then interior minister Gonçalves Rapazote called on those who deserted to commit suicide, telling them to “prepare the rope with which they should hang themselves”.
Published in France in March this year, Exils. Témoignages d’exilés et de déserteurs portugais (“Exiles. The accounts of Portuguese exiles and deserters”) is a 160-page book compiling the first-hand stories of 13 of those who evaded being drafted to serve in the dirty war, translated into French from the original Portuguese by Ilda Nunes, and prefaced by historian Victor Pereira.
Between 1961 and the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in the Carnation Revolution on April 25th 1974, as many as 200,000 draft evaders, according to some historians, chose to take the “jump” – o salto in Portuguese, the term to describe making a clandestine crossing over the border. Meanwhile, some estimates report 8,000 soldiers deserted while stationed abroad.
The first-hand accounts in Exils were selected from a book of two volumes published in Portugal by an association of political exiles – Exílios (which came out in 2016) and Exílios 2 (2017) – which contain numerous personal stories of and by deserters and draft evaders during the colonial wars. The subject remains such a taboo that the book caused scandal, notably when the Portuguese daily Público published a full-page article on the subject, in which Fernando Cardoso, one of the book’s contributors, declared: “I was a deserter, and I am proud of it.”
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Jorge Valadas was a draft evader who now lives in Paris, and whose personal account, like that of Fernando Cardoso, is among the 13 translated into French in Exils. “In truth, one talks little or not at all of the real war, that which tens of thousands of human beings lived and suffered,” he says*. “The theme is even banished, above all during family meals or in the presence of children.”
Paris is one of the places where a large number of Portuguese deserters landed. In his own account, Fernando Cardoso recalls the safe haven he found in the French capital’s southern 13th arrondissement, at number 15, rue du Moulinet. He describes it as an all-in-one “shelter house, community house, solidarity house, committee house”, run by “our friend Thérèse” who, in a small and secret room, hosted clandestine Portuguese exiles and draft evaders.
Another of the personal accounts is that of Ana Rita Gandara Gonçalves, who remembers the “antipathy of Parisians towards ‘poor’ foreigners”, and who underlines that the French authorities refused refugee status to those who evaded their military obligations.
Sweden, on the contrary, did provide political exile status to the young Portuguese deserters, and the stories in Exils tell of the solidarity between “deserters’ committees” in the country. “They gave support, gave guidance, never letting anyone be abandoned to despair,” recalls Carlos Brazão Dinis, a conscript who was called up to fight in Mozambique and who fled his barracks, finally reaching the Swedish coastal city of Malmö. “They organised parties, celebrated the dates that were the most evocative for an exile.”
The geography of exile recounted by the deserters, for example between Paris and Grenoble, Copenhagen and Algiers, is also the story of the borders that must be crossed, of the fear of being caught by the Salazar regime’s notorious secret police services, the PIDE, of the quest for false identity papers, and of a peripatetic existence according to where there was work with which to survive.
There is also the combat of women, those who had to follow their partners abroad and those who were engaged in the anti-colonial cause, like Maria Irene de Lima Martins who was involved in smuggling draft evaders from Portugal to France via Spain, then ruled by the dictator Francisco Franco.
Exils shines a light not only on a whole section of the vast anti-colonial movement which shook the 20th century, but also a little-known story of Portuguese emigration and which runs counter to the image of Portuguese immigrants put about in the 1960s by the French authorities; this was the caricature of a docile worker, one who was apolitical and who could be assimilated. In a 2020 interview with Mediapart, historian Victor Pereira from the Institute of Contemporary History at the New University of Lisbon, specialised in Portuguese migration and who wrote the preface to Exils, argued that this caricature served, in contrast, “to legitimise racism towards Algerians” in France.
Finally, Exils demonstrates just how much we are missing so many other accounts of the period – outside of some in literature. They are those of the around 80% of young Portuguese conscripts sent to fight in Africa during the 13-year colonial war and who returned from it, in the words of deserter Jorge Valadas, “in wooden boxes, or with the brain turned upside down and ravaged sleep”.
* All extracts from the book cited above in English are based on the French translation.
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- Exils. Témoignages d’exilés et de déserteurs portugais is published in France by Les éditions Chandeigne, priced 17 euros.
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- The original French version of this review can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse