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Angola Table of Contents

Angola

Mestiços

In 1960 a little more than 1 percent of the total population of Angola consisted of mestiços. It has been estimated that by 1970 these people constituted perhaps 2 percent of the population. Some mestiços left at independence, but the departure of much greater numbers of Portuguese probably resulted in an increase in the proportion of mestiços in the Angolan total. In 1988 mestiços probably continued to number about 2 percent of the Angolan population.

The process of mixing started very early and continued until independence. But it was not until about 1900, when the number of Portuguese in Angola was very small and consisted almost entirely of males, that the percentage of mestiços in the population exceeded the percentage of whites (see The Demographic Situation , ch. 1).

After a number of generations, the antecedents of many mestiços became mixed to the extent that the Portuguese felt a need to establish a set of distinctions among them. Many mestiços accepted this system as a means of social ranking. One source suggests that the term mestiço used alone in a social context applied specifically to the offspring of a mulatto and a white; the term mestiço cabrito referred to the descendant of a union between two mulattos; and the term mestiço cafuso was applied to the child of a union between a mulatto and a black African. It is possible that an even more complex set of distinctions was sometimes used.

Most mestiços were urban dwellers and had learned to speak Portuguese either as a household language or in school. Although some of the relatively few rural mestiços lived like the Africans among whom they dwelt, most apparently achieved the status of assimilados, the term applied before 1961 to those nonwhites who fulfilled certain specific requirements and were therefore registered as Portuguese citizens.

With some exceptions, mestiços tended to identify with Portuguese culture, and their strongly voiced opposition over the years to the conditions imposed by the colonial regime stressed their rights to a status equivalent to that of whites. Before World War II, only occasionally did mestiço intellectuals raise their voices on behalf of the African population. Thus, despite the involvement of mestiços in the nationalist struggle beginning in 1961 and their very important role in the upper echelons of the government and party, significant segments of the African population tended to resent them. This legacy continued in the late 1980s because mestiços dominated the MPLA-PT hierarchy.

Starting in the late 1970s, an average of 50,000 Cuban troops and civilian technical personnel (the overwhelming majority of whom were male) were stationed in Angola. As a result, a portion of the nation's younger population was undoubtedly of mixed African and Cuban descent. This new category of racial mixture, however, had not been described by researchers as of late 1988, and no figures existed on how many Angolans might fall into this category.

Data as of February 1989