Norton de Matos, the general who founded Huambo and defied Salazar

On the afternoon of Monday 3 January 1955, the front page of the Diário de Lisboa carried a short, unsigned piece headed “Um exemplo”, An example, beside a photograph of an old man in round glasses. “General Norton de Matos has died,” it began. Further down the page, a small box told readers that the issue had been seen by the Censorship Commission.1 source1 source

The general had died at his home in Ponte de Lima, the town on the river Lima where he had been born in 1867. Six years earlier he had stood for president against the regime's own head of state. Now the Lisbon paper gave him most of page 3, praising the soldier and colonial administrator and passing quickly over the opposition leader.3 sources3 sources

Norton de Matos was a republican and a freemason who opposed Salazar to the end. He was also, in the words of the historian René Pélissier, the most striking example of the governors who ruled Angola like proconsuls, and historians have judged that record more harshly than his obituarists did.3 sources3 sources

José Mendes Ribeiro Norton de Matos was born in Ponte de Lima on 23 March 1867 into a liberal, middle-class family with an English line on his father's side. He studied mathematics at Coimbra from 1884, where he read pamphlets summarising Marx and then the works of Proudhon, which he later said influenced him more than anything else he read as a student. He trained as a staff officer at the Army School and was commissioned in 1890.2 sources2 sources

In 1898 he sailed for Portuguese India. On 4 August that year the governor-general, Joaquim José Machado, made him director of a new surveying department, and for ten years he mapped Goa's territory and drew up its land register, while also running the forests and public works. In 1901 he served as military governor of Satari to put down a revolt there.3 sources3 sources

Back in Lisbon in October 1908, he sailed again in May 1909, for Macau, as secretary of Machado's mission to negotiate the territory's borders with China. The talks stalled. By 1910 he was home again, and from 1911 he taught geodesy and topography at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon.3 sources3 sources

In April 1912 the young Republic named the 45-year-old major governor-general of Angola. On 17 May, before sailing, he was initiated into the Lisbon lodge Pátria e Liberdade under the masonic name Danton, and pledged to abolish slavery in practice. He left on the steamer Beira on 1 June.1 source1 source

In his memoirs he recalled finding, on arrival, that the camp at Huambo, on the central plateau where the Benguela Railway was heading, was being called by an English name, Pauling town, after the railway's contractor, Pauling & Co. He ordered the post office to send back letters addressed that way. On 8 August 1912, by his own account, he signed the order creating the city of Huambo.2 sources2 sources

Those details come from a history of the Benguela Railway by Elísio Romariz Santos Silva, which quotes the memoirs. It dates the opening of the railway section to Huambo to 21 September 1912 and the city's formal inauguration, in Norton's presence, to 23 November. A later high commissioner, Vicente Ferreira, renamed the city Nova Lisboa, New Lisbon, in 1928. Since independence it has been called Huambo again.3 sources3 sources

His first labour measures were remembered as reforms. A colonial history of 1933 credited him with banning corporal punishment, tightening the contracts under which Africans were hired and forbidding officials to take fees for supplying workers. The historian Cláudia Castelo points out that his plans for Angola's economy also depended on those measures. Rui Ramos, as summarised by Paulo Cesar Gonçalves, describes a governor who wanted Portuguese rural families to emigrate to Angola as well as Brazil while defending forced labour for Africans.3 sources3 sources

He was also convinced Germany would invade. On 1 January 1913 he wrote to the colonial minister that within months Germany would start a war and attack Angola and Mozambique. He resigned in early 1915 under the dictatorship of Pimenta de Castro and was back in Lisbon on 8 March.2 sources2 sources

Norton de Matos helped plan the revolt of 14 May 1915 that overthrew Pimenta de Castro. He was elected deputy for Ponte de Lima for the Democratic Party, served briefly as colonial minister and took the war ministry on 22 July 1915. He held it through the governments of Afonso Costa and the Sacred Union cabinet, until December 1917.2 sources2 sources

After Germany declared war on Portugal on 9 March 1916, about 20,000 men were gathered at the army camp at Tancos between April and June to be trained as a division. Norton de Matos made the camp a national spectacle, publicised with film and photographs under tight censorship, ending in a parade at Montalvo on 22 July 1916. The press soon hailed it as the “miracle of Tancos”.3 sources3 sources

The historian Helena Pinto Janeiro calls it the largest public relations and propaganda operation the army had ever organised in Portugal, and letters opened by censors that summer show that opinion was not won over. The article on the convention of 3 January 1917 tells how the corps reached Flanders.1 source1 source

When Sidónio Pais seized power on 5 December 1917, Norton de Matos was acting prime minister and could not stop him. His house on the Avenida Miguel Bombarda was ransacked, he took refuge on a British warship and he spent the next year in exile in London. Reinstated after Sidónio's assassination, he was promoted to general on 4 September 1919, received the grand cross of the Tower and Sword and sat in Portugal's delegation to the Paris Peace Conference.2 sources2 sources

In 1920 he was offered a new post, high commissioner, which gave the holder wide legislative and financial powers over the colony. He governed Angola with it from April 1921 to 30 June 1924. His programme was huge: railways, ports, roads and housing first, then hospitals, telegraph lines and radio stations, then geological and scientific services, all funded largely from the colony's own resources and loans.2 sources2 sources

Settlement by white Portuguese families was at its core. Decrees from 1921 to 1923 reserved some 30 million hectares of the Benguela plateau for white farmers and 5 million for capitalist companies. The historian Fernando Rosas notes that he planned 600 villages for whites only, kept entirely apart from Black Africans, and credits him with about 23,000 kilometres of roads.2 sources2 sources

He spent far more on schools than his predecessors: by his own account he found the education budget cut to 26 contos in 1921 and raised it to 2,662 contos in 1923-24. But the education historian Sílvia de Oliveira notes that he saw Africans as little more than “simple instruments of labour”, a phrase from his 1926 book on Angola. His schools for Africans were meant to be workshops more than places of learning, turning out cheap skilled labour.1 source1 source

His Decree no. 77 of 1921 made Portuguese compulsory in every mission and barred mission schools from teaching African languages. Those languages could be spoken only in catechism, and as a temporary aid while pupils learned Portuguese; writing them, in pamphlets or newspapers, was forbidden.2 sources2 sources

Money ran out first. The deficit already stood at half a million pounds in 1921. His plan to borrow and build, meant to run for at least ten years, lasted three without the results he wanted, and the Banco Nacional Ultramarino, the colony's bank of issue, obstructed him. Francisco Cunha Leal attacked him in a book titled Calígula em Angola, accusing him of despotism and losing control of the finances. After clashes with the colonial minister, Rodrigues Gaspar, he resigned in 1924.2 sources2 sources

Norton de Matos always presented himself as the enemy of forced labour. Writing in 1953, he said decrees issued in Angola between 1915 and 1921 had almost established forced labour there, and that undoing them earned him campaigns from those who exploited African workers. After he left in 1924, he wrote, his protective laws were torn up so fast that Afonso Costa warned Lisbon of the bad impression it made at the League of Nations in Geneva.1 source1 source

Outside observers saw something else. Edward Alsworth Ross, a sociologist from the University of Wisconsin, gathered evidence in Angola between 19 July and 3 September 1924, weeks after Norton de Matos left, questioning the villagers themselves first of all. His report, sent to the League's Temporary Slavery Commission in June 1925, described road gangs, two-thirds of them women in one case, often working without pay or food, and called the labour system “virtually state serfdom”.1 source1 source

Later historians have been blunt too. In his RTP documentary series on Africa, Fernando Rosas sums up Norton's view as “work educates and gives value and is, therefore, compulsory” (translated from Portuguese). Rosas argues that the contracts he drew up for African workers soon lapsed and forced labour returned and spread. He calls him the first political figure to use indígena, native, as a rank below both whites and wage-earning Africans, and says he defended an apartheid-style racial regime.1 source1 source

René Pélissier calls him autocratic. He writes that in 1922, citing rumours of a plot, Norton banned the Liga Angolana and the Grémio Africano, associations of educated Africans and people of mixed descent, and jailed or deported activists such as António de Assis Júnior.1 source1 source

Cláudia Castelo adds that his scheme to settle Portuguese civil servants, workers, fishermen and small farmers pushed Angola's creole elites down the social ladder. The historian Armando Malheiro da Silva, who has worked through his private papers, describes his ideas as liberal and philanthropic but markedly ethnocentric and nationalist, and notes that only a small part of his plans was carried out.2 sources2 sources

The Republic made amends by sending him to London as its ambassador. The University of Lisbon's social history archive dates his appointment to 1 July 1924; Malheiro da Silva says he left for London in August 1925. The military dictatorship born on 28 May 1926 dismissed him on 21 June. After taking part in the failed republican revolt of February 1927 he was arrested and sent to live in Ponta Delgada, in the Azores, until 1929.3 sources3 sources

Portuguese freemasonry then gave him a platform. Elected Grand Master of the Grande Oriente Lusitano on 31 December 1929, he took office on 30 April 1930 and travelled to masonic congresses in Antwerp and Brussels. In early 1935 he protested publicly against the bill banning secret societies. That year he gave up the grand mastership, on the eve of the law's publication, was forced out of the Instituto Superior Técnico on 16 May and retired from the army.3 sources3 sources

He had already paid for his opposition: during the Madeira revolt of April 1931 he was held for about a month at the Estrela military hospital in Lisbon. After 1935 he went into business to earn a living and wrote four volumes of memoirs. In 1943 he became president of MUNAF, the anti-fascist unity movement, and he later chaired the advisory board of the Movement of Democratic Unity, the MUD, formed to contest the 1945 election.2 sources2 sources

In April 1948 his supporters lodged his candidacy with the president of the Supreme Court, for the presidential election that was eventually held on 13 February 1949 against Marshal Carmona. He was the democratic opposition's first presidential candidate against the Estado Novo. His Manifesto to the Nation appeared in July 1948, and his platform drew in republicans, socialists, liberals, communists, Catholics and even a few monarchists.3 sources3 sources

His conditions for a fair vote were the regime's pillars in reverse: the abolition of the political police and of the prison regime that allowed torture, the closure of the Tarrafal camp in Cape Verde, an amnesty for political prisoners, the end of censorship and freedom for political parties. His house was kept under guard, his post was read by censors and supporters were arrested.2 sources2 sources

The campaign ran through January 1949, with rallies in Lisbon, Porto, Évora and Beja. In Porto on 23 January he spoke to a crowd that the Museu do Aljube puts at about 10,000. But the coalition split over whether to go to the polls at all, with the communists pressing for withdrawal. His great-nephew and biographer, José Norton, records family accounts of scenes close to physical violence at his house in the days before the vote, meant to force him to pull out.5 sources5 sources

On the evening of 11 February Mário de Azevedo Gomes, who ran the candidacy's central office, told the press that the general would withdraw the next day because the government had not given enough guarantees. On 12 February Azevedo Gomes himself handed the withdrawal to the Supreme Court, and Carmona was re-elected unopposed.2 sources2 sources

The bitterness of never reaching the polls, Castelo writes, estranged Norton de Matos from the communists for good. A year later Azevedo Gomes wrote to him that he still did not know whether withdrawing had been a grave mistake, although few around the general had left him any other choice. The earlier MUD campaign is covered in the article on the 1945 election.3 sources3 sources

In August 1953, at 86, he made what Malheiro da Silva calls his last public appearance, at an opposition meeting in Aveiro during the legislative campaign. He urged a fight against communism and called on the head of state and on Salazar to bring in real freedom. In the same speech he said that, had he been elected, he would have expelled communists from the colonies, so that no communist propaganda could reach Africans he described in the racial language of his age.3 sources3 sources

He had been ill for some time at his house in Ponte de Lima, and he died there on 2 January 1955. The Diário de Lisboa noted that he had kept his lucidity to the end and was still writing about colonial affairs. Its obituary praised the “miracle of Tancos” and his work in Angola, and dealt with the 1949 campaign in a few lines.2 sources2 sources

After the revolution of 1974 he won a posthumous rematch on the map. Lisbon's first street-naming edict after 25 April, No. 161 of 30 December 1974, changed only five names. One turned the Avenida Vinte e Oito de Maio into the Avenida das Forças Armadas; another turned the Avenida Marechal Carmona, named after the man he had run against, into the Avenida General Norton de Matos.1 source1 source

In Huambo, a square built between 1935 and 1940 and first named after Manuel de Arriaga was home to a monumental statue of him, with figures of four virtues: justice, wisdom, temperance and prudence. In 1975 and 1976 it was known as Largo 11 de Novembro, after the day of independence, and since its rebuilding in 2006 it has been Praça Doutor António Agostinho Neto, with a bronze of Angola's first president. The Angolan news site Ver Angola still calls Norton de Matos the creator of the city.1 source1 source