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Portugal keeps Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe

R

Ricardolindo

Well-known member
Location
Portugal
What if, after the Carnation Revolution, the Portuguese government had not drifted so far to the left and did not grant independence to Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe, making them autonomous regions, like the Azores and Madeira, instead? It would have made sense, as both archipelagos were uninhabited when the Portuguese discovered them, there were no insurgencies there and the people seemed indifferent towards Portuguese rule.
Regardless, what effects would this have? Both archipelagos would be richer and more developed, due to funding from mainland Portugal and, later, from the EEC/EU.
 
Wasn't that exactly what they originally intended to do with Cabo Verde but they ended up offering independence instead due to unrest? You're not wrong about the lack of insurgence compared to elsewhere but I think the important point was how much the resistance in guinea-bissau had cabo verdean independence as a war aim.

You'd need your POD to be with the PAIGC rather than in Portugal I think.
 
Perhaps the early leadership of the Cabral's turns sour and you get a reaction against a perceived Cabo Verdean dominance of the Guinea-Bissau independence movement on the mainland?
 
Gary Oswald said:
Wasn't that exactly what they originally intended to do with Cabo Verde but they ended up offering independence instead due to unrest? You're not wrong about the lack of insurgence compared to elsewhere but I think the important point was how much the resistance in guinea-bissau had cabo verdean independence as a war aim.

You'd need your POD to be with the PAIGC rather than in Portugal I think.
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The PAIGC wanted independence for both Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde but its guerrillas were only in Guinea-Bissau. It wasn't feasible to carry out guerrillas in Cabo Verde. How, exactly, was the PAIGC going to force Portugal to give Cabo Verde independence? Indeed, even after the Carnation Revolution, the PAIGC was afraid to touch Cabo Verde. Ultimately, though, they took advantage of the Portuguese political instability of the time.
 
I don't know about São Tomé, but with Cape Verde its fate is also tied in with the US and all that jazz, . . .

. . . so maybe give Cape Verde the Azores treatment and thus treat it as a NATO floating base as a complement to Lajes Field? It would be a bit of a stretch, as it's outside of the NATO sphere of responsibility. As long as it provides jobs for Cape Verdeans and can be billed as an anti-Soviet deterrence mechanism, I guess.
 
Cape Verde might be able to pick up some of the vast numbers of tourists which visit the Canaries and Madeira, particularly if it ends up in the Eurozone.
 
Read a bit more about this.

I knew that the original plan up to september 1974 had been for Portugal to keep the islands and Angola but that this failed due to chaos back home and the way the guerrillas in Guinea Bissau and Mozambique were hoping to negotiate full independence for everyone. I also knew that the sao tome exiles in gabon were in a full alliance with PAIGC, MPLA and FRELIMO where the agreement was that noone would accept anything less than full independence.

What I didn't know is that Portugal had originally planned to sideswipe that by holding an independence referendum in sao tome rather than negotiating with the exiles at all before abandoning that idea. Every thing I've read about sao tome indicates some hostilty to portuguese rule from the creoles, the bapeda massacre etc, but there was a much larger white population prior to independence and a lot of the creoles were in exile.

It's possible, though I still think unlikely, that independence wouldn't have won that referendum. Which would put the cat among the pigeons in a big way.

There doesn't seem to have been any plans at all for a referendum on cabo verde, portugal's original position was they weren't on the table and then in order to get the peace negotiations with bissau sorted, they eventually offered independence but not union.

However if sao tome has had a referendum, and it has voted to stay with portugal, then doing the same for cabo verde is an obvious choice.

The key here is when does it happen. Cabo Verde at the time was suffering from an appalling famine which led to a great deal of bad feeling. But in 1975 the wet season was a good one and they began to recover. Again I'd still bet on a vote for independence but if it's delayed until the worst of the famine is over, that gives the Portuguese a better chance.
 
Alex Richards said:
'Free and fair election where Sao Tome votes to be an Overseas Province of Portugal' is definitely going to cause conniptions across Africa.
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Oh absolutely. Especially if it's a Djibouti style situation where the fairness of the election is in question. I don't think it's a coincidence that four times as many people registered to vote in 1975 than 1973 in cabo verde despite both being one party elections because the portuguese had dropped the literacy in Portuguese requirements upon agreeing to grant independence.

I will say that I think both island groups would probably vote for independence, neither country is good territory for guerrilla warfare but there was civil discontent in both. Both had suffered during recent portuguese rule (the famine and the massacre respectively) in a way the azores and madeira hadn't and both were much less white than those islands. But it's not impossible for remain to win and I think in that case independence is very hard to grant and you could reasonably stay the status quo linger until 2020.
 
Gary Oswald said:
I will say that I think both island groups would probably vote for independence, neither country is good territory for guerrilla warfare but there was civil discontent in both. Both had suffered during recent portuguese rule (the famine and the massacre respectively) in a way the azores and madeira hadn't and both were much less white than those islands. But it's not impossible for remain to win and I think in that case independence is very hard to grant and you could reasonably stay the status quo linger until 2020.
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I can see it becoming a very New Caledonia situation. Long-term 40-45% support for independence, arguments about people putting them on the UN colony list despite being integrated to the metropole and so on, frequent spells of government by a pro-independence party and it never quite goes over the top because of a combination of those who benefit from the current situation, and just enough people who reckon that it's better to be subject to Portuguese rule rather than give the local strongmen more power.
 
Couldn't Portugal simply argue that as Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe were uninhabited when the Portuguese discovered them, they were Portuguese by right of discovery?
 
Is it possible that any Portuguese government that tries even diplomatically or democratically to keep the archipelagos might leave itself open to criticism, however unwarranted, accusations of the same thinking that led to the Colonial War? Possibly making the hot summer of 1975 even hotter and endangering the transition to democracy?
 
RyanF said:
Is it possible that any Portuguese government that tries even diplomatically or democratically to keep the archipelagos might leave itself open to criticism, however unwarranted, accusations of the same thinking that led to the Colonial War? Possibly making the hot summer of 1975 even hotter and endangering the transition to democracy?
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Not really. Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe had no native populations and weren't good for insurgencies.
 
Ricardolindo said:
Not really. Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe had no native populations and weren't good for insurgencies.
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Accusations at home I said. I'm in no way seeing they could find themselves in another conflict, rather how getting embroiled in a diplomatic mess seemingly to keep colonial possessions might look at home.
 
RyanF said:
Accusations at home I said. I'm in no way seeing they could find themselves in another conflict, rather how getting embroiled in a diplomatic mess seemingly to keep colonial possessions might look at home.
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Thing is, even some in the left, like Mário Soares, didn't want to give up Cabo Verde.
 
Ricardolindo said:
Not really. Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe had no native populations and weren't good for insurgencies.
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Yes but the fact they had no native populations doesn't change the fact that their populations weren't majority white portuguese but in cabo verde were mostly the descendants of slaves imported to the island.

That does look different to the azores where the population is much more white.
 
Gary Oswald said:
Yes but the fact they had no native populations doesn't change the fact that their populations weren't majority white portuguese but in cabo verde were mostly the descendants of slaves imported to the island.

That does look different to the azores where the population is much more white.
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Yes. That being said, we should remember that Cabo Verdeans and São Toméans are mostly mulattos, not fully African.
 
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