Universalistic approaches to colonial citizenship IN PORTUGUESE EMPIRE
The assertion that “all those who were born in overseas provinces are Portuguese citizens[...],” no matter their origin, culture, or the color of their skin, was emphatically proclaimed in the Portuguese political discourse of the nineteenth century.
As indicated above, this assertion gained legitimacy in the Portuguese Constitutional Charter of 1826 (Art. 7). This universal character of citizenship was more than once put into action in central and local projects led both by the agents of colonial power and by some groups of the “colonized.” What is noteworthy is that when leading such projects, the colonized presented themselves as Portuguese citizens and claimed corresponding rights. Bernardo de Sa Nogueira Figueiredo, Marques de Sa da Bandeira (1795-1876), was the Portuguese politician who over the course of the 19th century strove the hardest to reform and enlarge the overseas territories. In the course of these efforts he appealed more than once to the universality of rights and to Portuguese citizenship to promote the inclusion of the indigenous groups of several territories. He sought support for his campaign for the abolition of slavery by drawing attention to the declaration of freedom as a right in Article 145 of the Charter (Sa da Bandeira 1873, 13-14). He did the same when he attempted to put an end to the practices of forced labor in Angola, reminding the local authorities that the negroes recruited for this work in the interior of Angola were citizens and that freedom of work was a right recognized by the Constitution as belonging “to all Portuguese citizens, irrespective of their place of birth, race or color.”[609] In 1839, he had already declared his support in favor of the citizenship rights of the Muxiluandas, the inhabitants of the islands adjacent to Sao Paulo de Luanda, as well as his opposition to their subjection to forced labour in maritime activities related to the slave trade.[610] Later, in the context of his plans for expansion on the Mozambican coast, and also in the context of local conflicts between Portuguese-born colonists, traders from India, and Muslim populations, he granted citizenship and political rights to the Muslim inhabitants of Sancul, in the Island of Mozambique in 1858. In doing so, he went against a decision of the Government Council of Mozambique, which in 1846 had denied these Muslim inhabitants the right to vote by arguing that they were not Portuguese citizens.[611] One of his aims was to motivate the inhabitants of Sancul to register their slaves, an aspect of the abolitionist legislation he was trying to enact. This allows us to conclude that Sa da Bandeira's legal arguments in favor of universal citizenship rights were directly related to his plans to develop a modern plantation system based on free labor in the African territories.Despite his programmatic interests in Mozambique, Sa da Bandeira was nevertheless committed to the principles that he based this program on. This is evidenced in the manner in which he asserted the citizen status of all the Hindu and other nonChristian populations living in Portuguese Asia or Africa.[612] His objective was to take a position in a long-lasting conflict in Portuguese Asia, centered on the territory of Goa in the Indian subcontinent.[613] But his decision shows that he admitted not only the multi-religious and polylingual nature of Portuguese nation, but also overseas legal pluralism: as we shall see, non-Christian populations from India were not submitted to Portuguese Law.
The same universalistic approach was taken by Hassan Musa Lukusedi, the Sheik of Sancul himself, when asking the Queen of Portugal to grant him political rights (Pelissier 1994, 63-64), and by a deputy of Indian origin from Goa, Joao Xavier de Sousa Trindade, Bishop of Malaca, when arguing in the Parliament in favor of the political rights of the non-Catholic inhabitants of the Goan territories named “New Conquests”, by claiming that they were Portuguese citizens.[614] These Goan Catholic elites of Indian origin were the most persistent authors of the notion that an equal relationship linked the Portuguese metropole to its colonies. Their arguments provide a clear example of how the agency of the colonized was central to the recognition of their rights, as well as in the construction of colonial ideologies.
In a certain way, those elites were seen as a kind of living proof of the universal nature of Portuguese citizenship, for since the beginning of the liberal regime they had been represented by elected deputies of Indian origin in the Portuguese Parliament. Two of the three deputies elected to represent the Estado da India in the first Portuguese Constituent Assembly (1820-11), where the decision was made in favor of the political representation of all the overseas’ provinces, had been recruited from this group. This group then continued to elect representatives to other constituent and ordinary assemblies throughout the nineteenth century (Carreira 1998, 664ff.; Oliveira e Carmo 2011, 55ff.). One of them was Bernardo Peres da Silva (1755-1844), another “natural” from India, who was nominated Governor (Perfeito) of the Estado da India after the liberal civil war. In 1832, while asserting the fidelity of Goans to the new liberal regime, he systematically elaborated the idea that indigenous people from the Overseas were Portuguese citizens (Silva 1832; Lobo 2013, 8-16). This argument is once again very revealing of the negotiated nature of Portuguese colonial citizenship.Also represented in the Parliament, although with less influence, were other colonial elites of indigenous origin from the African territories, especially Angola. One of these “sons of the soil” (“filhos da terra”), Joaquim Antonio Carvalho e Menezes, who was descended from a slave woman and managed to be elected deputy for Angola in the early 1840’s, was a singular but expressive example (Dias 1981, 269; Corrado 2007; Havick and Newitt 2007). It is worth recalling that full Portuguese status (“naturais portugueses”) had been extended to both these “filhos da terra” as well as to the “naturais” from India during the modern period due to their birth in Portuguese territory, but also (or mainly) due to their conversion to Catholicism. During this period non-Catholics (“gentios”) could not accede to the status of “naturais” unless they converted; their baptism was described by modern legal doctrine as a kind of new birth which turned them into “naturais portugueses” (Hespanha 1995, 29-30; Hespanha, this volume). This status formally subjected them to Portuguese common law, Portuguese courts and also to the privileges of the “reinois,” even though this general rule almost always suffered from distortion in its local observance (Hespanha, this volume; Xavier 2011).
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