Colin Darch writes about attending the anniversary last month of the Portuguese revolution on 25 April 1974. This was the “fourth revolution” alongside the anti-colonial transformations in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola. Darch argues that it remains vital to remember that between 1974-1975 radical socialist transformation in a small country on the south-western edge of Europe was on the cards – and that it was African leaders such as Amílcar Cabral, Samora Machel and Agostinho Neto who were showing the way.
By Colin Darch
A few weeks ago, on the afternoon of the 25 April, I joined a massive broad left demonstration in Lisbon to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Revolução dos Cravos – the Carnation Revolution – the military revolt that had overthrown Portugal’s dictatorial Novo Estado regime in 1974. That revolt was a direct consequence of liberation struggles in Portugal’s African colonies – struggles that the increasingly demoralised Portuguese army was unable to suppress over more than ten years.
As it happens, I remember the original date vividly. In April 1974, I was working part-time at night as an announcer in the (secular) newsroom at a private radio station in Addis Ababa, financed for missionary purposes by the World Lutheran Federation. By chance, I was working on the evening of 25 April, when our lead story was, of course, the overthrow of the Fascist dictatorship in Portugal by the army, and the assumption of power by General António Spínola, whose name nobody in the studio had the faintest idea how to pronounce correctly.
Now, half a century later, I linked up with perhaps half a million people marching the one and a half kilometres from the Praça Marquês de Pombal down the gently sloping Avenida da Liberdade (the aptly named Avenue of Freedom) to Rossio, in what was reportedly the largest public demonstration since the one on the 1 May 1974, a week after the coup. This time there were so many people in the crowd – peaceful and generally good-humoured – that the march took around four or five hours to complete the short route, and one local newspaper commented the next morning that this was the day when the Avenida da Liberdade – which is 90 metres wide – was just too small.
The first part of the “desfile” – march – consisted mainly of individual citizens, a few carrying cardboard placards with handwritten slogans on them. After some time, they were followed by two “blindados” or armoured troop carriers, and then by multiple blocks organised by political parties, trade unions, women’s groups, LGBTQ+ rights movements, anti-racist organisations, and various other activist NGO’s. Prominent and highly visible among them, with red flags and red balloons flying high, was the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc), a loosely structured party made up of various left tendencies which continue to exist as associations. Another group that was proudly flying red flags was Vida Justa, a militant organisation based in the poor neighbourhoods around the outskirts of Lisbon, focusing especially on the rights of African immigrant workers. They campaign for better wages, less taxation, and a better public transport system – and against racism, police abuses and price inflation. Vida Justa was among several groups that were flying Palestinian flags alongside their red banners.
The march took place in the shadow of an ultra-right resurgence in Portugal – the racist, populist and xenophobic Chega Party received 18% of the vote in the March 2024 election, winning 50 seats and becoming the third largest party in the Assembly of the Republic.[1] Chega is also deeply Eurosceptic.
Early on the morning of the 25th, I saw a small group of young demonstrators, with flags decorated with the Cross of the Order of Christ, chanting fascist slogans in the Praça do Comércio. I also spoke briefly to a young Brazilian man, who self-identified as a supporter of “fascism”. Understandably these developments are seen – for example – by Djass, a leading anti-racist organisation that defends the interests of people of African descent in Portugal, as truly alarming: we didn’t know that there are a million racists in Portugal, commented one militant.
In this context, what was almost completely missing – at least from what I was able to see for myself, or from what I read later in such newspapers as Público, Diário de Notícias, Sol, or the venerable weekly Expresso – was any explicit recognition of the critically important role played by the liberation struggles in Africa in creating the necessary conditions for what nearly became a fourth revolution in Portugal itself.
By 1973 the wars for independence had effectively been lost in both Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique.[2] “25 de Abril” in 1974 quickly led to a victorious conclusion for the liberation movements with the independence of Angola and Mozambique – Guinea-Bissau’s PAIGC had already declared independence on 24 September 1973. But the idea that “o 25 de Abril começou em África” (the 25 April started in Africa) was far from being a dominant theme in either the afternoon demo or the earlier government-sponsored celebrations – despite the presence in Lisbon of the presidents of all five former African colonies, the PALOPs.[3]
The afternoon demonstration was not the only recognition of the significance for Portugal of 25 de Abril. Earlier in the morning there had been a show of military force, with participation from all three branches – army, navy, and air force – in the Terreiro do Paço, a large open space on the banks of the river Tagus. The parade attracted a large crowd, and was presided over by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, an elderly former Social Democrat whose father Baltasar had been one of the last governors of Mozambique in the late 1960s. The event was undoubtedly aimed at helping to maintain the military’s dubious reputation as a progressive force in Portuguese politics, the glorious liberators of the people. It included historical re-enactments with well-preserved military vehicles from the 1970s, some of which remained parked nearby so that the public could poke around inside them.
The presidents of all Portuguese-speaking countries except Brazil were present in Lisbon and were hosted by President Rebelo de Sousa at a “commemorative session” held in Belem, about six km. away from downtown Lisbon. In diplomatic but barbed remarks the Angolan president, João Lourenço, pointed out that 25 de Abril was an historic event for Portugal’s former colonies as well as for the metropole:
While the Portuguese people fought against the fascist dictatorship since 1932, we were fighting against Portuguese colonisation ever since the 15th century.
He added that the slave trade and the pillaging of resources were central to the experience of Portuguese colonialism and went on to emphasise the importance of such turning points as Guinea-Bissau’s declaration of independence in September 1973, and what he called the “fiasco” of Operation Gordian Knot, the failed military offensive against FRELIMO in 1970.[4]
A few days before the celebrations, on 23 April, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa had stirred up controversy in some comments to foreign journalists, admitting that Portugal was responsible for the crimes it had committed through its involvement in the slave trade,[5] as well as during the lengthy colonial period:
Portugal takes full responsibility [and] we have to pay the costs. Are there actions that were not punished and those responsible were not arrested? Are there goods that were looted and not returned? Let’s see how we can repair this.[6]
The right – and especially Chega – subsequently took the opportunity to attack the president fiercely during the “solemn session” of commemoration at the Assembleia da República on the 25 April. The leader of Chega, André Ventura, accused him of “betraying the Portuguese people” by opening up the question of reparations. “I am proud of our history” said Ventura, adding that Marcelo had not been elected by either Guineans or Brazilians. Ventura complained later that there was no mechanism in the Portuguese constitution for impeaching a president. Another party leader, a centrist, called attention to Portuguese settler families who had been abandoned to their own devices during what he called “the disastrous process of decolonisation”.
In early May, several of the directors of major Portuguese museums denied that their collections contained items that had been pillaged from territories colonised by the Portuguese, arguing rather that such objects had been acquired through the normal channels of international trade.[7] Several letters were published in the dailies and weeklies from individuals, who, ignoring the collective character of the advantages of Portuguese colonialism for the metropole, asserted that since they had not themselves personally benefitted from colonial exploitation, it would be unjust to use their taxes to compensate the exploited ex-colonies.
The 19 months between the military seizure of power and the 25 November 1975 – the heady period of the Processo Revolucionário em Curso (PREC), the “ongoing revolutionary process” – were marked by failed coup attempts as well as left policies supported by organised labour. The so-called “hot summer” of 1975 was a period of intense political turmoil, even violence, with extensive nationalisations and land seizures. But the possibility of deep revolutionary change in Portugal ended in November 1975, when the countercoup by elements in the armed forces led by the “moderate” António Ramalho Eanes, put an end to PREC. Indeed, Eanes, now nearly 90, commented recently in an interview that it would be a mistake not to celebrate the 25 November as well as the 25 April:
There was, as everyone knows, especially the older ones, that terrible disturbance that they called PREC and there were, obviously, significant threats to the original objective of the 25 April, which was democratic in its intentions. The 25 November reestablished the original promise…
After fifty years of liberal democracy, current Portuguese politics are overshadowed by the alarming resurgence of the ultra-right in the March elections, as well as a generalised failure to acknowledge the character of Portugal’s relationship to its former colonies either in the past or in the present. From a left perspective, although the chances of a metropolitan “fourth revolution” alongside the transformations attempted in Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and Angola, were always exceedingly slim, it remains important to remember that for at least a few months in 1974-1975 social transformation in a small country on the south-western edge of Europe was on the cards – and that it was African leaders such as Amílcar Cabral, Samora Machel and Agostinho Neto who were showing the way. That possibility was permanently closed off on the 25 November 1975, despite Ramalho Eanes’ nostalgic claims. In any event, at least one of the demonstrators on Avenida da Liberdade bitterly recalled the moment when he scrawled on a piece of cardboard the angry slogan, “Eu quero que o 25 de Novembro se foda”, in English, “I wish 25 November would fuck itself”.[8]
Writer and socialist Colin Darch worked in Mozambique from 1979 to 1987, and is the founder of the website Mozambique History Net. With the late Amélia Neves de Souto he’s the author of A Dictionary of Mozambican History and Society (HSRC Press, 2022).
Notes
[1] The word Chega can be translated as “Enough!”
[2] See the assessment by Norrie McQueen, “O balanço militar em 1974 nos três teatros de operações” in O adeus ao império: quarenta anos de descolonização, ed. Fernando Rosas, Mário Machaqueiro and Pedro Aires Oliveira (Lisbon: Veja, 2015), p.44-59.
[3] One of the few books that explicitly attempts to analyse the connection between the African liberation struggles and the military intervention in Portugal in April 1974 is O 25 de Abril começou in África, ed. António Simões do Paço and others (Vila Nova de Famalição: Ed. Húmus, 2019), which includes the first publication in Portugal of Perry Anderson’s seminal 1962 essay “Portugal and the end of ultracolonialism”.
[4] This event was not widely reported; the Lisbon daily newspaper Diário de Notícias, for example, tucked its account of the session away at the end of a report on the controversy about reparations, on page 5 of the edition of 26 April.
[5] It’s estimated that a total of around six million African people were enslaved by the Portuguese and transported to Brazil, more than any of the other European countries involved in the trade.
[6] In an article published in the online daily O Observador (25 September 2023), the historian João Pedro Marques estimated that Portugal owed Brazil alone US$20 billion in reparations for slavery, without taking any African countries into account.
[7] José Cabrita Saraiva, “Diretores de museus dizem que não há nada para devolver às ex-colónias,” Sol (3 May 2024), p.12-13.
[8] My thanks to Carmeliza Rosário for comments on a previous draft of this text.
That is, a revolution born out of a dispute over wages and careers.