Imágenes del colonialismo tardío portugués a través de la lente de fotógrafas
Inês Vieira Gomes
Instituto de Ciências Sociais da Universidade de Lisboa
nesgomes@gmail.com
Abstract:
This article examines the uses of photography by women within the Lusophone Africa and will consider what part their images played in the production of the colonial imaginary. My aim is to survey the work of women who produced knowledge through the photographic lens and to question their absence in Portuguese historiography. By recognising women as active agents of the empire allows to give visibility to women photographers in colonial spaces while also refuting the label “women” as being a homogeneous category.
Considering some case studies, I will focus on the production of some women photographers from different backgrounds and with distinct purposes through a chronological perspective with the assumption of the relevant women’s contribution to the history of photography.
Resumen:
Este artículo investiga los usos de la fotografía por parte de las mujeres en el África lusófona y analiza el papel que desempeñaron sus imágenes en la producción del imaginario colonial. El objetivo es examinar el trabajo de las mujeres que produjeron conocimiento a través de la lente fotográfica y cuestionar su ausencia en la historiografía portuguesa. Reconocer a las mujeres como agentes activos del imperio permite dar visibilidad a las fotógrafas en los espacios coloniales, al tiempo que refuta la etiqueta «mujeres» como categoría homogénea.
Considerando algunos estudios de caso, me centraré en la producción de algunas fotógrafas de diferentes orígenes y con distintos propósitos a través de una perspectiva cronológica con la asunción de la relevante contribución de las mujeres a la historia de la fotografía.
Keywords:
Photography; Colonialism; Gender; Portuguese Colonial Africa.
Palabras clave:
Fotografía, colonialismo, género, África colonial portuguesa.
1. Introduction
The history of photography in Portuguese Colonial Africa –Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe– during the 19th and 20th centuries is still under-researched but in the last years prominent studies have emerged. When trying to outline a genealogy of studies focused on the subject, it is necessary to go back to the early 1990s. Beatrix Heintze, a German historian and cultural anthropologist, and the anthropologist Jill Dias (born in England and later naturalised Portuguese) were the first scholars writing about photography within colonial context (Heintze, 1990; Dias, 1991). In common, they had the fact of being foreigner women writing in English about the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Yet, being written by women did not mean these articles displayed a particular concern about gender.
More than twenty years later, the historian Filipa Lowndes Vicente coordinated the project “Knowledge and Vision: Photography within the Portuguese colonial archive and museum (1850-1950)”, with a historical perspective but with an interdisciplinary approach. One of the outputs of the project was the identification and inventory of photographic collections in colonial context in Portuguese archives, libraries, and museums. The most visible result of the project was the publication of a book on photography within the Portuguese colonial empire (Vicente, 2014). In 2023, a revised version was published in English (Vicente & Ramos, 2023).
There are few studies that approach gender and colonial contexts. Most of them focus on works of literature. Studies that cross photography and gender are even less. Usually, women’s studies there are the subjects of photography and not the photographers: it is the case of articles about the representation of black women’s bodies in iconographic material, such as photographs and postcards, within the colonial archive (Carvalho, 2002, 2004, 2008; Vicente, 2017).
The book Women and Photography in Africa. Creative Practices and Feminist Challenges, edited by Darren Newburry, Lorena Rizzo and Kylie Thomas, published in 2020, explores case studies that cross gender and photography in Africa in both historical and contemporary perspectives in Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone contexts. However, the attempt to give an overall picture reveals a strong focus of the study of photography in South Africa, and an absence of research on women photographers in East Africa.
Writing about women photographers is therefore writing about absence. What are the main reasons for this? Throughout history, the woman’s role was confined to a private and family environment. As women were traditionally relegated to more domestic roles, it is difficult to find information about them exclusively in public archives –these tend to be ‘male archives’. This fact worsens when one considers that in Portugal not many private archives are available to the public. In addition, taking photographs was an expensive process only available to a minority. Being a writer is easier and less expensive than being a painter (Vicente and Vicente, 2015, p. 41), or a photographer.
As Naomi Rosenblum notes (1994), historians have tended not to write about women photographers because it is difficult, though not impossible, to find them. The invisibility of women in Art History (Vicente, 2012) or in History at large should be considered one of the main reasons for a specific context that did not value their inclusion in the academic discourse. But there are some examples of women protagonists that remained in historiography, namely those who were able to transgress more traditional roles.
Even if most of the Portuguese women were confined to a domestic and private sphere, the current text is mainly about women, especially from abroad, who were able to transgress a domestic and familiar role and produce photographs in former Portuguese African colonies. Although they were exceptional cases, little is known about these women. What is the meaning of their apparent invisibility?
Despite the difficulties, it is possible to outline a genealogy of women photographers in Portugal beginning in the mid 19th century (Barros, 2000; Flores, 2017; Vicente, 2019). Madame Fritz (1807-1876), who came to Portugal from Paris and established in Lisbon ca. 1843-1845, Margarida Relvas (1838-1887), daughter of the well-known photographer Carlos Relvas, Maria da Conceição Lemos de Magalhães (1863-1949), commercial photographer between 1905 and 1915, and Maria Eugénia Reya Campos (?-1917), the first Portuguese woman photographer, as she likes to mention (Almeida, 2017, p. 310). They were all women with a high social status, who benefited from special conditions, money, and time to be photographers. This was also the case of members of the Portuguese Royal Family, such as Maria Pia of Savoy (1847-1911) (Flores, 2017) and Amélia of Orleans (1865-1951) (Pavão, 2016).
Maria Lamas (1893-1985) was a writer, journalist, feminist and opponent of the Portuguese fascist regime Estado Novo [New State] and the author of the well-known book As Mulheres do meu País [“The women from my country”] published in fascicles between 1948 and 1950[1]. The book was conceived after her political dismissal from the feminist magazine Modas e Bordados [“Fashions and Embroidery”]. She was not allowed to travel to the United States of America to research and write about the American women and decided therefore to travel alone in Portugal, interviewing and photographing Portuguese women workers. This social survey served as a photographic documentary, and it is the most important photographic work made by a woman in Portugal (Cabral, 2021). In 1948, Maria Lamas stated that she wanted “true, expressive photographs with documentary value and unpublished”. She was not a professional photographer, and it was her son-in-law, who worked for the Kodak company, that taught her the rudiments of photography and dealt with the material.
As Mulheres do meu País is an example of photographs of women taken by the vision of a woman. The photographs published in the photobook were deliberately chosen to represent the life and condition of many women throughout the country. But could it be an exceptional case? Generally, are the photographs taken by women different from those taken by men? Does the gender of the photographer impact the subjects or the context portrayed?
The case of Beatriz Ferreira (1916-1996) is also an extraordinary example of a woman who reinvented herself through photography. A hairdresser turned photojournalist of the newspaper O Século and the magazine O Século Ilustrado from 1947 and 1977, she was responsible as well for the photographic services, and accompanied Américo Tomás, President of the Republic, in his trips to Brazil and the Portuguese African colonies (Serra and Subtil, 2023)[2].
2. Photography and the Portuguese colonial context
The invention of photography and the consolidation of the Portuguese empire in Africa are contemporary. Photography was the privileged medium that legitimised power at a crucial moment in the definition of the empire in the first decades of the 19th century. In the beginning, photography emerged in the context of expeditions and campaigns to study and to control the territory. Explorers and military men were the main actors to use photography. In the early 20th century, other journeys emerged and no longer depended on the military structure, marking a moment of transition in the democratisation of photography. During the construction of the colonial state, there was a proliferation of professional and amateur photographers, on the one hand, and the circulation and reproduction of photographs in albums, periodicals, postcards, and exhibitions, on the other, contributing to the dissemination of the colonial project.
There is some knowledge about women who photographed in the Portuguese colonial context in the 20th century: Mary Hall, author of the book A woman’s trek from the Cape to Cairo (1907), was in Mozambique and took photographs there; Hélène of Orléans, Duchess of Aosta (1871-1951), and sister of Queen Amélia of Portugal, did several trips to Africa, including to Mozambique, in 1909, with records of films and photographs (Hanson, 2017; Gomes, 2020); the South Africans Dorothea Frances Bleek (1873-1948) and Mary Pocock (1886-1977) were in Angola in a field trip to study the Bushmen in 1925 (Bank, 2006; Dold and Kelly, 2018; Gomes, 2020); the anthropologists Diana Powell-Cotton (1908-1986) and Antoinette Powell-Cotton (1915-1997) –daughters of the Major Percy Horace Gordon Powell-Cotton, founder of the Powell-Cotton Museum at Quex Park, Kent, England– were in Angola in 1936 to 1937 and photographed, filmed, and collected artefacts with the help of a native couple, Hamjungo and Datilla; the Portuguese scientist Amélia Bacelar (1890-1976), who photographed in the context of the first zoological mission to Guinea in 1946 (Martins, 2013); Helena Corrêa de Barros (1910-2000), a Portuguese amateur photographer who was in Angola in 1950 (Vicente, 2018; Gomes, 2020); the expeditions of the Belgian art historian Marie-Louise Bastin (1918-2000), who studied the Angolan art and culture COKWE, and took photographs in Lunda, Province of Angola, in 1956; and the geographer Raquel Soeiro de Brito (1925), who worked closely with Orlando Ribeiro (1911-1997) and took photographs in Angola in 1967. The history of women in science in Portugal seems to demonstrate that most of them usually had lab or desk work while men worked in the field, which means they probably had different activities based on gender (Keller, 1985, 2006) and had no chance to document their own ways of seeing (Newbury, Rizzo, and Thomas, 2020, p. 3).
An attentive eye to the sources reveals other names, such as Sara Ferreira, mentioned as one of the photographers in Álbum das Colónias Portuguesas (1933); or Maria Helena de Figueiredo Lima, author of the photographs published in the book Paisagens e Figuras Típicas do Cuanhama (1969). In the late 1940s or 1950s, photography was much more accessible and democratic than before. New studies should reveal the personal and professional trajectories of these women.
The fact that most of the identified women photographers are foreign and white is not a mere coincidence. As was stated, “any study of women and photography in Africa has to acknowledge the relationship between race and privilege that has shaped the medium’s history” (Newbury, Rizzo & Thomas, 2020, p. 6).
3. Margot Dias
After the end of the Second World War, Portugal was subject to several pressures, especially from the United Nations, regarding its colonial empire. In 1951, the Portuguese Constitution was reviewed, and the designation of colonies changed to Overseas Provinces, a political strategy to mask the colonial administration. Five years later, the Center for Research on Political and Social Studies was created at the Overseas Research Council revealed that the political situation within the colonies was a concern of the Portuguese regime (Pereira, 2006, p. 1). In the frame of the creation of the first African nationalist organizations after the Bandung Conference, and the foundation of the Portuguese Overseas Ethnic Minority Study Mission, in 1956 the anthropologist António Jorge Dias travelled to the Portuguese colonies and decided that the northern region of Mozambique would be the main subject of the commission (the region where the Mueda massacre occurred in 1960 with the murdering of hundreds of people who protested against the Portuguese regime and the forced labour in the cotton plantations). In the same year of 1956, Marvin Harris, an American professor at the University of Columbia, visited Mozambique to study the exploitation of African forced labour but immediately was considered by the Portuguese regime as persona non grata and was forced to leave Mozambique.
Travelling with Jorge Dias was his wife, Margot Schmidt Dias (1908-2003), a German pianist that he met in Rostock at the beginning of the Second World War. When they came to Portugal in 1944, Margot Dias started to work with him in the field of ethnology in the North region. She was the assistant of Jorge Dias, always seen as his wife (West, 2004), and her professional work was not recognized as independent from her husband.
Jorge and Margot Dias were in Mozambique between 1956 and 1961 –the year of the beginning of the war in Angola and the fall of the Portuguese State of India– to record the Makonde, one the ethnic groups that lived in both sides of Ruvuma River, near the border between Mozambique and Tanzania. Margot states that:
In 1957, the first time we went there, all we had was a photo camera, a Leica and (our) Retina. I thought it was essential to have a film camera. But even with António this was an uphill battle, he thought that was a ‘foreign thing’. But in our second year we got a camera and some money to film. It was our last chance. We wanted to go back in 1961 (…) He got a telegram in Lourenço Marques and all of a sudden, I had to go to northern Mozambique on my own. To publish the Makonde book in 1964 (volumes 1 and 2) I really needed to go there, to check and adjust the final data on kinship structure… We were conscious, that year, 1961, that it was the last time. That everything was about to change. (C. Alves Costa, 2016, p. 59)
The idea to have a film camera came from Margot Dias. Even though Jorge Dias had considered the camera a “foreign thing” in their contact with Makonde, he took at least some photographs. It seems like she was more aware of the possibilities the images gave her of capturing and recording the Makonde in a specific time that she knew “was about to change”. Margot also knew that the photographs and the films are not a simple mirror of the “reality”. In that sense, she used the images to instrumentalize the people that she was studying. Through the film material, is possible to see and to listen to how Margot Dias indicates the proper behaviour that indigenous should have in front of the camera (Domingos & West, 2016, p. 69)[3]. Thus, Margot Dias used her power to influence the material that ‘documented’ the Makonde.
Os Macondes de Moçambique was published in four volumes (the first two volumes in 1964, the third volume in 1970, and the fourth in 1966). Images had an important role, and more than five hundred photographs (and drawings by Fernando Galhano) were published alongside the text. Margot Dias was responsible for writing about the traditional technologies of the Makonde in the third volume, and later she wrote about musical instruments in Mozambique (1986).
F1. Moçambique. Macondes. Antupa. 20.08.1957, Margot Dias, © National Museum of Ethnology, Museus e Monumentos de Portugal, E.P.E / Photographic Documentation Archive
The photographs by Margot Dias are the less known part of her work. As the films, the photographs were understood as auxiliary documents of their research on the Makonde. But the images had immediately a central role. In February 1959, an exhibition about the Makonde people, Vida e Arte do Povo Maconde, was held at Palácio Foz, the headquarters of the National Secretariat of Information (SNI, the former National Secretariat of Propaganda), in Lisbon. The ethnologist Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira wrote about the exhibition emphasizing the importance of photography:
The main interest of the exhibition resulting from the combination of objects and photographs, was that the public found in the photographs the same things that had in front of their eyes, alive in their authentic function, almost warm even from the hands that touched them in their normal use, integrated in the natural and human environment that is its raison d’être; and the atmosphere of living reality was further enhanced by a discreet background of Makonde music... which was muted all the time, riddled with exclamations, laughter, or phrases from those in the photographs listening to the musicians. It was not (…) simple detached objects that came to us in a cold display of more or less seductive and understandable exoticism: it was really the total life of a people, beyond these objects themselves, their cultural context in the suggestions they gave us the images, the atmosphere of your real life, both simple and mysterious. (Oliveira 1959, p. 6, apud Pereira, 2005, p. 473)[4]
The exhibition gave form to the anthropological mission allowing the public contact through a sensory experience with the Makonde. This kind of installation, combining different objects to dialogue with the photographs, had already been explored thirteen years earlier with the Exhibition of Angolan Ethnography by Elmano Cunha e Costa at the same exhibition space (Gomes, 2023).
In her last years, Margot Dias totally refused any kind of political engagement in their scientific work. But as Harry G. West noted, there is an ambiguity in the information that Jorge Dias wrote and in some points the reports could have been compromised their interlocutors in Mozambique (West, 2004).
Related to other missions within the colonial context, the work of two women related to the geography field should be noted: the already mentioned Raquel Soeiro de Brito, one of the first women to get a doctorate in Portugal, and Suzanne Daveau (1925). Both worked closely with the geographer Orlando Ribeiro and participated in several study missions in the colonies where they took photographs and produced slides available at the Photographic Archive from the Centre of Geographical Studies of the University of Lisbon.
4. The Portuguese colonial empire and the beginning of the war
The Colonial Act, approved in 1930 and enclosed in the 1933 Constitution, defined that it was “in the organic essence of the Portuguese Nation to carry out the historic function of possessing and colonizing overseas domains and civilizing the indigenous populations that are included in them, while also exercising the moral influence attributed to it by the Padroado do Oriente”. By reaffirming the historical right to colonization, based on a five-hundred-year history, it was argued that the constitution of the Portuguese nation categorically involved possessing colonized territories.
In an interview with the French journalist Christine Garnier, published in the book Férias com Salazar [“Holidays with Salazar”] in 1952 and with photographs by António Rosa Casaco, António de Oliveira Salazar (1889-1970) considered that the empire was so vast that it was only possible to have an overview of the overseas domains from afar. In other words, for him the general was more important than the particular. This homogenous idea of the colonized territories is reinforced by Christine Garnier, who concludes Salazar’s speech by saying that “the set of territories scattered around the world constitutes a whole and not an association of people” (Garnier, 1952, p. 149).
The vast territory of the Portuguese colonial empire was not unique and indivisible. Conquering territories, controlling borders, and dominating populations through force and administration was a gradual process that was only consolidated in the first half of the 20th century. Guinea-Bissau, the last territory to be dominated by the Portuguese, was only effectively colonized in 1936 and was the first African colony to declare independence from Portugal in 1973.
With the end of the Second World War in 1945, the long process of global decolonization and African and Asian independences began, relegating Portugal to an international isolation. This led to the revision of the Colonial Act in 1951, changing the term “colony” to “overseas province”. The maintenance of the empire culminated in the armed conflict known as the colonial war by the Portuguese, or the liberation struggles by the Africans: Angola (1961); Guinea-Bissau (1963) and Mozambique (1964). The Carnation Revolution, as the military coup of 25 April 1974 became known, led by a group of military officers who opposed the Estado Novo [New State regime], put an end to the authoritarian regime that lasted forty eight years. One of the main reasons for this revolution was the thirteen years of the colonial war, the last and longest colonial war waged by a European country. Guinea-Bissau proclaimed the independence on 24 September 1973, but it was only recognised by Portugal one year later, on 10 September 1974.
The war started in Angola in 1961, after the attack of March 15, carried out by forces of Holden Roberto who led the Union of the Peoples of Angola (União dos Povos de Angola, UPA). One month after the first events, the Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar declared on 13 April 1961, “Para Angola, rapidamente e em força” [“To Angola, quickly and massively”]. In August 1961, the regime produced a photographic exhibition at Palácio Foz Why we are fighting in Angola, with images of the first uprisings against the Portuguese in Angola, which were widely reproduced in newspapers, booklets, and monographs. Showing the atrocities of UPA in northern Angola, the regime knew the power of images and knew that they could help them win the battle of public opinion, not only nationally but above all internationally[5]. In the same year, Angola os dias do desespero was published with photographs by Horácio Caio, a reporter of RTP, the Portuguese television, and author of the script Angola: A Decisão de Continuar [“Angola: The Decision to Continue”] (1962), a propaganda film of the SNI. The book focuses on the first days of massacres against white people, and it shows shocking images of death, violence, and nudity (Ramos, 2021). This photobook is an initiative among many others of the war effort converted into reports and documentaries of propaganda. In a country under censorship, where the media was controlled, the government soon realised the powerful role that images would play in raising public awareness and in mobilising civil society for the need to defend the colonised territories in Africa.
By 1969, the photographs of the soldiers embarking and disembarking in the ports had disappeared from the newspapers (Ribeiro, 2007, p. 31)[6]. Three years later, Marcelo Caetano – the Prime Minister of Portugal who replaced Salazar in 1968 after an accident that injured him – stated that Portugal was not at war. The apparent invisibility of the war in the public sphere did not mean it had not a great impact in the private lives of many Portuguese. The Portuguese soldiers in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique took photographs in their leisure time, including photographs with indigenous women (Vicente, 2017 and 2023). Many were staged photographs where men wanted to represent themselves with semi-naked women's bodies available to them, a kind of a performance of masculinity. This male, erotic, and even sexual gaze of private photographs, taken in the war context, was forwarded to families or kept as an object and a document that memorized a period of time coincident with the beginning of the soldiers’ adult life far from their homeland. One could think that the war is the main field of men –but many women were directly or indirectly connected with the war stage: women who accompanied their husbands, or professionals taking positions such as nurses, as Margarida Calafate Ribeiro showed in the book África no Feminino. As Mulheres Portuguesas e a Guerra Colonial [“Africa in the Feminine. Portuguese Women and the Colonial War”] (2017), or as Marta Pessoa presented in her film Quem vai à Guerra [“Who goes to war”] (2011), a feminine discourse about the war. In the personal collections of these women and in their family-albums probably remain photographs from the African territories. Would it be possible to think about photographs with a female gaze?
Images of motherhood (women breastfeeding their children), one of the key representations of colonial imaginaries, are also explored during colonial/liberation wars. The cover of the magazine PAIGC Actualités, nr. 15, March 1970, reproduces a photograph with Titina Silá (Ernestina), one of the main figures of the party and fighters in the north of the country, with a child (her daughter?) on her lap. Inside the magazine, a photographic report with 11 photographs with women – in different settings and roles, such as breastfeeding, working, in guerrillas – during the occasion of the International Women’s Day, stating that “the activists of our party extend their best congratulations and wishes for peace and progress to their sisters in Africa and to all women in the world”. The Italian photojournalist Uliano Lucas (1942), who was in Angola and Guinea-Bissau during the war, reproduced an image of a woman wearing a gun in the cover of his book Guinea Bissau. Una rivoluzione Africana” published in 1970[7].
The proliferation of images of guerrilla women reflects the growing activism and emancipation of women. During the colonial/liberation wars the following organizations emerged: UDEMU –Women’s Democratic Union of Guinea and Cape Verde (União Democrática das Mulheres)– in 1961; OMA –Organization of Angolan Women (Organização da Mulher Angolana)– in 1962; and OMM –Organization of Mozambican Women (Organização da Mulher Moçambicana)– in 1973. In Portugal, the MDM –Movement of Democratic Women (Movimento Democrático das Mulheres)– was founded in 1968. These are examples of the political action of women’s groups and transnational networks giving attention to women as political subjects (Strippoli, 2002).
The liberation movements attracted the interest of many intellectuals and journalists, namely women. The Italian Bruna Polimeni (1934) was in Guinea-Bissau between 1965 and 1973 and was the so-called ‘official’ photographer of Amílcar Cabral being the only Italian photographer to attend the unilateral independence proclamation of Guinea-Bissau on September 24, 1973.
The Italian photographer Augusta Conchiglia (1948) and her partner Stefano de Stefani (1929), of the Italian National Public Television (RAI), went to Angola in 1968 to report the national liberation in Angola. Her decision was influenced by Joyce Lussu, who, in 1963, had translated the poems of Agostinho Neto (1912-1998), the first President of Angola (1975-1979). For five months she recorded the daily life of guerrilla zones of the MPLA (The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and some of the photographs –especially close-up portraits– were published in 1969 in the photo book Guerra di Popolo in Angola (Lerici Editore, 1969) / La Guerre du Peuple en Angola (MSACP, 1969)[8]. Some of the photographs were also shown in the final credits of Sarah Maldoror’s film Monamgambé (1968) based on the tale O fato completo de Lucas Matesso (1967), by the Angolan writer Luandino Vieira about the brutality to which the political prisoners were subjected (Piçarra, 2018, p. 182). As a result of her trip, a 20-minute documentary was released by RAI TV and a larger version was exhibited at the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algeria, 1969. In 1970, Conchiglia and Stefani came back to Angola to produce a documentary on the subject.
The American journalists Ingeborg Lippmann (1927-1988) and Marvine Henrietta Howe (1928) were also in Angola and Mozambique during the process of decolonization. Like Lippmann, Marvine Henrietta was in Portugal from 1962 to 1971 and between 1975 and 1976, when she travelled to Angola.
5. Ingeborg Lippmann
The journalist Ingeborg Lippmann was born in Germany and moved to the United States of America in 1955, becoming an American citizen in 1960. As a correspondent for the New York Times, Lippmann covered the liberation movements and the independence of Angola and Mozambique (1974-1976). She knew Portugal since 1963 and a few years later published the book A fisherboy of Portugal (New York: Julian Messner, 1971), a visual book about Joaquim António, a 13-year-old fisher boy living in Peniche (Vicente, 2019, p. 16). Her interest in Portugal led her to photograph the Agrarian Reform in Southern Portugal (1975), with a special emphasis on women workers.
The interest in Angola and Mozambique in a crucial moment of their independences led Lippmann to these territories to record the social and political changes. In Mozambique she focused on FRELIMO guerrilleras, women that played a central role in the liberation struggle and were the symbol of the ideals of women emancipation.
One of the most well-known guerrilla fighters was Josina Machel (born name Josina Abiatar Muthemba) (1945-1971), who died in 1971, and was the first wife of Samora Machel. The image of Josina smiling is one of the most iconic images of the iconography of guerrilla women in Mozambique and probably of the emancipation and fight during the war. In the first anniversary of her death, in 1972, FRELIMO published a tribute booklet called “FRELIMO – 7th April 1972 – 1st anniversary of the death of comrade Josina Machel, Mozambican woman fighter”[9].
Ingeborg Lippmann published at least two articles about FRELIMO’s women and women’s liberation[10]. In Porto Amelia, in November 1974, Lippmann met Geraldina Valerio Mitwo, a FRELIMO fighter (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique / the Mozambican Liberation Front). In the words of Lippmann, “Geraldina, bright-eyed, intelligent, with an open smile flashing perfect teeth is a vibrant example of the liberated African woman” (F2).
F2. Untitled (“Geraldina telling her story to the photographer”). Pemba, November 1974.
Collection Ingeborg Lippmann, © Mário Soares Foundation
Geraldina belongs to the Makonde, a warrior tribe in Northern Mozambique where Jorge Dias and Margot Dias had their ‘scientific’ missions, as mentioned before. She attended a Catholic mission school in Northern Mozambique for five years and in 1965, only 14 years old, she joined the FRELIMO with the support of her family.
Ingeborg Lippmann says that her talks with Geraldina and with other women made her realize that “the emancipation of women is not regarded as a humanitarian or compassionate act but as a necessity of the revolution”. Within FRELIMO, women were trained as men and performed different tasks, not only as guerrillas, but also nurses, teachers, and in children care. Geraldina said that she proved that a woman could do the same thing a man does, “if I can do it, anyone can do it too.”
It is possible that the fact that Ingeborg Lippmann was a woman allowed her to be more aware to the condition of women in general and to the kind of role that could be defined in a ‘new’ society under ‘construction’. But the awareness of being a woman led her to ask Geraldina if, “as a woman, [she] had ever any qualms about killing another human being”, suggesting a possible relationship between gender and sensitivity.
The photographs of Ingeborg Lippmann show a documentary gaze but assign a sense of individuality to all individuals photographed. Lippmann also covered Angola’s transition to independence, interviewing UNITA’s historic leader Jonas Savimbi, and producing articles to The New York Times about the evacuation of refugees via the air bridge linking Angola to Portugal in 1975 (F3).
After the independence, in 1975, another woman photographer deserves to be mentioned: Moira Forjaz (Zimbabwe, 1942), who settled in Mozambique as a photographer and documentary filmmaker (she was assistant to the filmmakers Ruy Guerra and José Fonseca e Costa). She studied graphics arts at the Johannesburg School of Arts and Design and then worked as a photojournalist at several southern African countries. She was in Mozambique in 1961 where she met the architect Pancho Guedes and the visual artist Malangatana. When she came back to Mozambique, she recorded the first years of the independence of Mozambique (her husband, the architect José Forjaz, integrated the first government of the new Popular Republic). In the beginning of the 1980s, she participated in the foundation of the Mozambican Association of Photography. In the following decade, she founded in Lisbon the Moira Gallery, which was open until 1998[11].
F3. Untiled. Ingeborg Lippman. Huambo, October-November 1975.
Collection Ingeborg Lippmann, © Mário Soares Foundation.
In 2015, she edited a photo-album related to the first years of Mozambique as an independent country, Mozambique 1975-1985 (Jacana Media, Johannesburg). That selection of black and white photographs, framed by a political context and by the social changes that marked the first years of independence, was a tribute not only to famous people, as the President Samora Machel or the photographer Ricardo Rangel, but mostly to all the anonymous she captured with her lens, in the daily life of men and women workers.
5. Conclusion
The case studies selected illustrate a genealogy of women photographers within Portuguese Colonial Africa, namely in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, to demonstrate a predominant number of foreign women when compared to the Portuguese. This conclusion could be motivated by different facts. Did foreign women have more conditions –social, economic– than Portuguese women to become photographers? Or are their photographs more accessible and visible?
How did photography extend the vision(s) of the multiple women in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique? Can we enunciate any particularity in the photographs taken by women? Or is the relationship between photography and women defined by the social and historical relations that determined women’s role(s)?
Unavoidably, the selection of case studies was limited to analysing women whose photography was made possible by a degree of social and economic freedom that many Portuguese women, and particularly indigenous women in Portuguese colonies, did not have.
The history of photography in Portugal and in the former Portuguese colonies is dominated by men: on the one hand due the lack of unofficial sources and of studies about the archives; on the other hand, due to the scarcity of studies questioning the absences of a predominant (official) discourse.
Recognizing the limitations of the archive and photographic history is essential, as is thinking about how we may begin to broaden our understanding and perspective on women and photography in the Portuguese colonial empire. This article is part of a wider movement for questioning the absences of women photographers in Lusophone Africa.
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[1] The photographic work of Maria Lamas was shown for the first time in 2009 in the exhibition Au féminin. Women Photographing Women 1849-2009, curated by Jorge Calado at Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris, France. Maria Lamas appeared alongside 100 women photographers, including the Portuguese Helena Almeida, Rita Barros, Luísa Ferreira, Brígida Mendes and Ana Telhado. In 2024, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, dedicated an exhibition to Maria Lamas entitled As mulheres de Maria Lamas, also curated by Jorge Calado.
[2] Some of her photographs are available online at the ACTD, a digital repository of the Tropical Research Institute (IICT). The online archive of RTP –Rádio e Televisão de Portugal [Radio and Television of Portugal]– has, at least, two clips about her: one about her photographic exhibition at Palácio Foz (headquarters of SNI – Secretariado Nacional de Informação [National Secretariat of Information]) in 1970, with the presence of the President of Republic, Américo Tomás: https://arquivos.rtp.pt/conteudos/exposicao-de-fotografia-de-beatriz-ferreira-em-lisboa/; and an interview about her life from February 18, 1980: https://arquivos.rtp.pt/conteudos/beatriz-ferreira/.
[3] About the edition of ethnographic films of Margot Dias, also consult Sanches, 2017.
[4] Veiga de Oliveira, E. (14 de Abril de 1959). Vida e Arte do Povo Maconde numa Exposição em Lisboa. O Comércio do Porto, p. 6. Quoted by Pereira, 2005, p. 473.
[5] On the subject, Ramos, 2017, 2023.
[6] On the subject, see also Lobo Antunes, 2017.
[7] In 2023, there was an exhibition of his photographs at Museu do Aljube – Resistência e Liberdade, in Lisbon: REVOLUÇÕES: Guiné-Bissau, Angola e Portugal (1969-1974) – fotografias de Uliano Lucas (from April 13 to September 30, 2023), curated by Elisa Alberani, Miguel Cardina and Vincenzo Russo and coordinators of the book with the same title published by Edições do Saguão (2023).
[8] In 2021, there was an exhibition about her photographs and sounds titled Augusta Conchiglia nos Trilhos da Frente Leste – Imagens (e Sons) da Luta de Libertação em Angola in Museu do Aljube – Resistência e Liberdade, in Lisbon, from 22 July to 31 December 2021, curated by Maria do Carmo Piçarra and José da Costa Ramos: https://www.museudoaljube.pt/en/expo/augusta-conchiglia-on-the-tracks-of-the-eastern-front-images-and-sounds-of-the-liberation-struggle-in-angola/
[9] Available online: http://casacomum.org/cc/visualizador?pasta=04323.010.001 The Malangatana’s photographic collection at Fundação Mário Soares, has, at least, one photograph of guerrilla, Folder 07364.029.005: http://casacomum.org/cc/visualizador?pasta=07364.029.005.
[10] One manuscript addressed to United Press International and the other one to the Portuguese magazine Flama (both available online at: http://casacomum.org/cc/visualizador?pasta=07896.002 and http://casacomum.org/cc/visualizador?pasta=07896.003).
[11] Interview with Moira Forjaz in the context of the publication of the book Islanders/Ilhéus – Ilha de Moçambique (Jacana Media, 2018) at CNBC Africa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6ZjmXDYAsY
