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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
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