The Razors’s Edge: Portuguese Imperialism Vulnerability in Colonial Moxico, Angola

The author approaches the study of colonialism in practice by replacing notions of superiority and hegemony with those of vulnerability and colonial collectives. He analyses the Portuguese occupation of an inland province of Angola called Moxico from 1894 to 1905, a period generally regarded in the historiography of colonial expansion as the heyday of imperialist territorial and military expansion in Africa. He critiques colonial narratives of vulnerability as events of heroism, and thus describes the diverse ways of narrating colonial vulnerabilities. He first makes clear the notion of vulnerability as emergent in the colonizers’ own experiences. Next, he describes the horror and heroic narratives that made up colonial literary and political imagery of Moxico and its imperial occupation during the first decades of the 20th century. He demonstrates how imperial imaginations either conceived empire in Moxico as a fractured and internally disruptive enterprise or turned colonial vulnerabilities into elements of an elastic and powerful ‘blood and tears’ rhetoric of sacrifice, heroism and victory. Finally, he offers an alternative account of vulnerability events by paying attention to the occupation of Moxico in 1894. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]