From the Padrão to the quay

Let us begin with the myth. The Padrão was put up in 1940, in materials that were not meant to last, for the Exhibition of the Portuguese World, and rebuilt in stone in 1960, five hundred years after the death of Prince Henry the Navigator (the infante D. Henrique).⁵ At the prow stand the prince and 32 figures of the expansion; only one of them is a woman, Queen Philippa of Lancaster (D. Filipa de Lencastre) — his mother.⁶ The “Discoveries”, the name given to the voyages of the 15th and 16th centuries, served Salazarism to legitimise the regime and the empire.²

The compass rose at its feet was a gift from South Africa in 1960⁷ — a gift made, writes the historian José Pedro Monteiro, “at a critical moment for the projects of white supremacy on the African continent”.⁸ Months later, the war in Angola began. In mid-1975, next to this Padrão, the crates of those arriving from the colonies that were becoming independent piled up.⁹¹⁰

A kilometre to the west, by Bom Sucesso Fort, stands the Monument to the Overseas Combatants (Monumento aos Combatentes do Ultramar), inaugurated on 15 January 1994; plaques with the names of some ten thousand soldiers killed in the colonial war, including African soldiers of the Portuguese Armed Forces, were later added to the walls of the fort. By the end of the war, soldiers recruited in the colonies made up almost half of the troops.¹¹

This square was laid out for the Exhibition of the Portuguese World, which opened on 23 June 1940, the day after the armistice between France and Germany. To make way for it, working-class houses and shops in Belém were demolished.² In the centre, the Fonte Monumental; around it, the pavilions of the Portuguese in the World and of Honour and of Lisbon.⁵

The empire was the centrepiece. The Colonial Act of 1930 had stated: “It is of the organic essence of the Portuguese Nation to fulfil the historic function of possessing and colonising overseas domains and of civilising the native populations”.¹² The Portuguese Colonial Exhibition, in Porto, in 1934, and the one in Belém were the largest undertakings of this “collective pedagogy” of the empire, writes Cláudia Castelo; the one in Belém had some three million visits.²

In January 1975, by the Jerónimos Monastery, people who had arrived from the colonies demonstrated here: “Decolonisation Yes! Discrimination No!” (Descolonização Sim! Discriminação Não!), read a placard.¹³ And in 2014 the renovation of the garden sparked a controversy over the floral coats of arms of the former colonies, planted in the 1960s; the garden reopened in 2023, with the coats of arms of the district capitals remade in stone mosaic paving (calçada).¹⁴ In those debates, notes the historian Márcia Chuva, the “human zoos” of 1940 were forgotten.¹⁵

The former Colonial Garden housed the exhibition’s Colonial Section, directed by Captain Henrique Galvão, who years later would break with the regime and, in 1961, seize the liner Santa Maria.²¹⁶ The programme, the Diário de Lisboa reported, made it possible “in two hours, for the visitor to travel through the whole of our empire, from Africa to the Pacific, with stopovers of true enchantment”.² Among pavilions and replica villages, 138 men, women and children brought from the colonies lived here for months, in a “human zoo”, as the historian Cláudia Castelo calls it.² The Bijagós from Guinea were put on the island in one of the lakes, “for the delight of visitors”, as the garden’s museum writes today.¹⁷ “It is forbidden to enter the native villages, but all of them are perfectly visible from outside the palisades”, warned the official guide.²

Of the women, few traces remain: the queen and the princess of Kongo, who came with the king, Dom Pedro VII; Verónica, the wife of a Timorese chief, who came with her husband, two children, a manservant and a maidservant; Chopi women from Mozambique, photographed at a sewing class given by a missionary nun; and a woman sent from Manica and Sofala, whose photograph, writes Castelo, “expresses longing for home on arrival in Lisbon”. How they lived through the journey and the exhibition, “we know little”, the historian admits. Teams of scientists came every day to measure the “indígenas” (natives), in anthropometric studies; in October the exhibition committee decided to send all these people back before the winter, citing health reasons. Their names are in the exhibition papers kept in the Overseas Historical Archive, in Junqueira, which this route passes through.²

Still here are the fourteen busts of African and Asian “types” sculpted for the exhibition, and the colonial house and restaurant. The museum says it is giving them new meaning, together with the communities of origin.¹⁷

In May 1966 the President of the Republic, Américo Tomás, received at this palace the central committee of the National Women’s Movement’s “Hora Voluntária de Trabalho” (Voluntary Hour of Work) — Cecília Supico Pinto, Renata Cunha e Costa, Clara Taborda do Couto and Maria Arminda de Certima — and symbolically handed them one hour of his working day.¹⁸ Founded in 1961, the movement put women at the service of the war — the “war godmothers” (madrinhas de guerra) wrote to the soldiers — and it issued more than 300 million aerogrammes.¹⁹²⁰ In 1971, in an RTP programme, Cecília Supico Pinto showed the support for soldiers’ families, the layettes, the aerogrammes and “Operação Saudade” (Operation Longing), in which women from the movement flew by helicopter into the bush.²¹

In its magazines, the movement asked Portuguese mothers to sacrifice their sons “for the Nation”.²² In the letters and aerogrammes studied by the historian Joana Pontes, those who write back to the soldiers are their mothers, war godmothers and friends — rarely their fathers.²³

The MFA Programme held as a principle that “the solution to the wars overseas is political and not military”; on 27 July 1974, Law No. 7/74 drew from it the recognition of the right to self-determination and the “acceptance of the independence of the overseas territories”.²⁴ On 10 September, in this palace, Portugal recognised the independence of Guinea-Bissau — and the President, Spínola, used the ceremony to attack the course of decolonisation and to appeal to the “silent majority” (maioria silenciosa).²⁵

From here on, Rua da Junqueira lines up the institutions of the empire. In this building, the former Royal Ropeworks (Real Fábrica da Cordoaria), the School of Tropical Medicine and the Colonial Hospital were installed in 1902, created by the same law, of 24 April.²⁶²⁷ The hospital treated officials and soldiers “who were returning from overseas in deplorable physical condition with infectious diseases”; the school trained the doctors who went to the colonies.²⁷

Here too, women from the colonies were objects of study: in 1953 the Anais (Annals) of the Institute of Tropical Medicine published an analysis of the breast milk of women in São Tomé, signed by Gabriel Jorge Janz and Gabriela Lopes Pinto. She was one of the Institute’s few women researchers between 1943 and 1966, who were nearly always co-authors with male colleagues and are almost absent from the institution’s official history.²⁸

From 1925 the hospital gradually moved to buildings of its own further along this street — it became the Overseas Hospital (Hospital do Ultramar) and is today Egas Moniz Hospital — and the Institute followed in 1958.²⁶²⁷

Along the way you passed the Palácio da Ega, bought by the State in 1919, which became home to the Colonial Historical Archive, created in 1931 and now the Overseas Historical Archive.²⁹ It was conceived as a monument to the imperial past, but it also holds, write the historians Ricardo Roque and José Miguel Ferreira, records of “voices and actions that the colonial order sought to dominate or marginalise”³⁰ — among them, the papers with the names of the people put on display in 1940.²

This palace was bought in 1940 by the Ministry of the Colonies, which installed the councils and boards of the empire here.³¹ In 1962 the school for colonial administrators arrived: founded in 1906 as the Colonial School, the Higher Colonial School from 1926 and the Higher Institute of Overseas Studies from 1954, it was inaugurated in this palace by Américo Tomás on 20 November 1962 and renamed, four days later, the Higher Institute of Social Sciences and Overseas Policy.³² For the researcher Frederico Ágoas, these changes of name were above all “political cosmetics and propaganda” in defence of the empire.³¹ One of the professors at the Higher Colonial School, António de Almeida, had in 1940, with Artur Ricardo Jorge, led the measuring of the people put on display in the Colonial Garden.²

After independence, many of the belongings of the “retornados” (returnees from the former colonies) ended up in this street: hundreds of containers were left in the former Lisbon International Fair building, right next door, and in 1977 RTP filmed crates still stored “in a warehouse on Rua da Junqueira”.³³³⁴

In October 1970, two explosions left the freighter Cunene, which supplied the colonial troops, “flooded and immobilised” in this dock, according to the communiqué of 26 October with which Armed Revolutionary Action (ARA) claimed its first action. The ARA, the armed organisation of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), was active until 1973, against the colonial war and the dictatorship.³⁵

There were women in this struggle. In the group that set up the ARA in 1970 was Maria Machado, born in 1949 into a communist family, who at the age of eleven joined her parents in one of the PCP’s clandestine houses; she took part in preparing several actions, and only came out of hiding on 1 May 1974.³⁶ Emília Morgado joined the ARA in July 1970 with her husband, Ramiro Morgado, who took part in the destruction of the Cunene.³⁷ In the same year, in a split in the PCP over armed struggle, Isabel do Carmo and Carlos Antunes gave rise to the Revolutionary Brigades, which in July 1972 destroyed fifteen Army lorries bound for the war and let loose pigs dressed as admirals in the Rossio and in Alcântara.³⁸³⁹

The station was supposed to open for the 1940 exhibition, but it was only inaugurated in 1943; on its walls, instead of the regime’s heroes, Almada Negreiros painted the poor people of the river and the hard labour of the women coal-heavers on the quay.⁴⁰⁴¹ From 21 April 1961, when the Niassa took the first contingent sent by sea to Angola, the soldiers left mainly from the Rocha do Conde de Óbidos quay, a kilometre to the east, but also from this one: RTP filmed embarkations at the Alcântara quay in 1961, 1962 and 1964 — “soldiers’ relatives wave white handkerchiefs”, the archive records.^423434445

“Theirs — mothers, sisters, wives, girlfriends — are the faces contorted with pain at the farewells on the embarkation quay”, writes the researcher Margarida Calafate Ribeiro.²² The National Women’s Movement was always at the embarkations and, according to the historian Sara Primo Roque, would not let the women cry: those who cried were called “abject wailing women” (abjetas carpideiras).¹⁹ It was on this quay, where she had come with a colleague who was saying goodbye to her boyfriend, called up for Guinea, that the nurse Maria de Lourdes Gomes saw that there were women in the military and heard of a new course for paratrooper nurses; she signed up, and gained her parachutist’s brevet in 1970.⁴⁹ Photographs of the embarkations disappeared from the newspapers from 1969 onwards, and from 1971 the troops went by air.²²⁴² Not everyone went: more than eight thousand Army soldiers deserted — some nine thousand, according to the Commemorative Commission — and it is estimated that between 10,000 and 20,000 young men were draft evaders, refusing to go, and that some 200,000 failed to report for the military inspection.⁵⁰⁵¹¹

Through the same quay came African students bound for the House of the Students of the Empire, and African women brought to work as maids in the homes of white employers.⁴ In 1975, as the colonies became independent, more than half a million people arrived, and the crates holding what they had been able to bring covered this quay for months — “the strongest and most symbolic images of the end of European colonialism”, says the interpretation centre housed in the station.⁴