Guess where the French consul took the visiting Kabaka of Buganda for dinner in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in 1957. To a ‘Whites Only’ restaurant, where, Alexander Keese tells us, the presence of African royalty ‘provoked a scandal’ (p. 247). Keese does not record the Kabaka's reaction to his encounter with ‘João Crow’, but the minor diplomatic incident it engendered represents only one of many awkward moments when the differences between Portuguese and French modes of colonial governance in Africa appeared to be greater than their similarities. Keese's fine Living with Ambiguity offers a comparison of these two purportedly assimilationist empires, whose agents looked upon the strategies of their counterpart with reactions ranging from admiration to amusement. The book spans several decades, from the interwar years to just after the independence of francophone Africa, and it offers an impressively thorough example of the potential of comparative imperial history.
Both the French and the Portuguese empires in Africa espoused a colonial rhetoric of assimilation, and both trumpeted a ‘civilizing mission’ their imperial peers had not assumed. Examining how each saw the other reveals a great deal about the attitudes and strategies of these two regimes and how they imagined themselves. Yet while administrators on either side recognized something of themselves in the other, they often ignored how different they really were. For example, while both feared a Communist menace in the 1940s, for the authoritarian Portuguese state that menace was external. For the French administration, on the other hand, the Communist Party represented an important voice in national affairs, and until 1950 was a key ally of African political parties. Such differences became increasingly apparent in the decade to come, even as agents of the two imperial powers paid ever greater attention to the actions of their foreign counterparts.
Keese demonstrates convincingly that, in their African colonies over the course of the 1950s, both the Fourth Republic and the Estado Novo moved towards what he terms a ‘benign paternalism’ that sought to moderate economic exploitation and the pace of political reforms while channeling the latter away from the rural areas, in which each hoped to maintain the authority of chiefs. As agents of an authoritarian state, Portuguese administrators were largely successful in doing so under the guidance of imperial inspectors and the rare ‘courageous’ governors who led the way (p. 175). Even so, the slow pace of Portuguese reform eventually provoked revolt. French administrators, on the other hand, were subject to the dictates of a parliamentary regime that engaged in reforms many of them considered rapid and rash. Until the loi cadre of 1956, they observed with increasing interest the programs of their hitherto disdained Portuguese counterparts, whose policies of rural modernization without political innovation seemed to represent a prudent middle path in a rapidly changing world. After the loi cadre and the gradual devolution of internal autonomy within the former colonial federations, the Portuguese model was no longer relevant, although some continued to regret it as a road not taken. Keese sharply disputes the thesis that France managed a ‘successful’ decolonization south of the Sahara, arguing that colonial administrators ‘retreated involuntarily’ while continuing to look to Portugal as a salutary counter-example (p. 295). Whether their admiration survived the outbreak of anti-colonial wars across lusophone Africa remains an open question, but Keese argues that the strategy admired by the French contributed directly to the outbreak of violence.
Keese is a formidable bibliographer, drawing on an impressive array of books and articles, some of them in obscure publications. He is also a diligent and exhaustive archival researcher, having dug deeply into at least eight distinct archival lodes in Lisbon, Dakar and France (p. 36 fn. 118). At times, Keese writes rather directly from the archives, and one might disagree with some of his reporting. Is it true that ‘organized violence was a party strategy’ for the inter-territorial RDA in the late 1940s, or is it merely true that colonial administrators thought it so (p. 117)? Political violence was recurrent and multi-lateral in those years, but it is not clear that it was strategic, and the administration organized it better than its rivals could.
Readers of this journal are likely to look to Living with Ambiguity not for a blow-by-blow political history of any given territory, but for a comparative imperial history. They will find one that more than compensates for its minor flaws, just as it does for the occasional linguistic infelicities inevitable in a book on French and Portuguese colonialism written in English by a German. Alexander Keese has written a unique book of a generally high standard. Living with Ambiguity has much to offer students of empire and decolonization in francophone and lusophone Africa and beyond.
