Gendering Development and Social Control in the Iberian Empires in Africa, 1950s–1970s

Abstract

Abstract In the 1950s and 1960s, ‘cultural uplifting’ of women in the Global South went hand in hand with the mantra of socio-economic development. This essay contends that the Iberian empires followed the general path set by international bodies and other European colonial powers, notwithstanding their cultural and ideological peculiarities. The sustained focus on the relationship between the violent socio-economic changes and the cultural transformations of African societies during the Portuguese colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique (1961–1974) and Spain’s oft-forgotten imperial War in Ifni-Sahara (1957–1958) allows us to assess the interrelated and gendered processes of forced resettlement and community development schemes in the Portuguese and Spanish territories during periods of armed conflict. Furthermore, this essay highlights the remarkable analogies between conceptions of women’s roles in society held by the Angolan and Mozambican revolutionary nationalists and the Iberian colonizers. In order to support the revolution, African women were once again called on to transmit cultural values to the next generation. By juxtaposing revolutionaries’ notions of women’s roles in the envisaged independent societies with the Portuguese and Spanish imperial projects, both continuity and revolutionary rupture become visible. Overall, the essay shows that concepts of ‘women’s advancement’ did not evolve in isolation, but in a broader context of war and violence.