ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Cementing Portuguese Colonialism: The Technopolitics of Soil Stabilization in Mozambique (1948-1974)

• In Event: Science, Technology and Politics in the 20th Century

English Abstract

This paper looks at Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique through the lens of the technoscientific practices associated with the materiality of its infrastructures. The intensification of white settlement in the Portuguese colonies after World War II went hand in hand with cement. In a global context of increasing decolonization, the strategy of the fascist Portuguese state for maintaning colonial rule in Africa combined military control with “development” policies. In Mozambique, Portland cement factories were created and concrete was poured in in large quantities in buildings, bridges, dams, ports and airports, especially after the start of the colonial wars in the 1960s. The Cahora Bassa dam was just the biggest of a large number of infrastructures and public works that “concretized” postwar colonialism in Mozambique.

In particular, this paper focuses on the technopolitics of soil stabilization for road construction. It analyzes the experiments in soil cement performed by the Materials Testing and Soil Mechanics Laboratory, created in 1948, and relates them to colonial ideologies and infrastructural policies by following the scientific and political trajectory of civil engineer Manuel Pimentel dos Santos, its first Director, who would eventualy become the last Governor-General of Mozambique, after having served as General Director of Public Works and Communications of the Overseas Ministry. A close look at mobile laboratories, racial labour regimes, mechanization of construction, scientific publications, or technical cooperation with other regional apartheid states, shows that the design of roads embodied a specific political view and that laboratory practices in soil mechanics aimed at stabilizing not only clay soils but also the colonial order.

Authors

• Jaume Sastre-Juan, Institute for the History of Science - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

• M. Luísa Sousa, CIUHCT, NOVA FCT