1952–2014
Portuguese historian of the colonial war and of Angola's 1977 purge
Died in Lisbon on 30 October 2014; her husband and co-author Álvaro Mateus had died about a year earlier, in August 2013.
Portuguese historian. Born in Viana do Castelo in 1952; she died in Lisbon on 30 October 2014. Her research covered Portuguese colonialism, the colonial war and the political police; her doctoral work became A PIDE/DGS na guerra colonial 1961-1974 (2004), a reference study showing the PIDE was more brutal than assumed, worked closely with the Army in the colonies, and persisted in Africa after being dissolved in Portugal itself, siding with those who obstructed decolonisation. With her husband and co-author Álvaro Mateus (a former PCP militant, d. 2013) she published on Angola and Mozambique, including Purga em Angola (2007) on 27 May 1977, in which she held President Agostinho Neto responsible for the killing of Nito Alves's supporters. She interviewed former political prisoners; recordings and transcripts are held at the Torre do Tombo.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1952Born in Viana do Castelo, Portugal
- 2004Published her doctoral research as A PIDE/DGS na guerra colonial 1961-1974
- 2007Co-authored Purga em Angola with Álvaro Mateus
- 2014Died in Lisbon on 30 October
Related historical events
From doctoral thesis to A PIDE/DGS na guerra colonial
Dalila Cabrita Mateus's first major research project analysed the Portuguese political police, the PIDE/DGS, in the African colonies during the colonial war of 1961-1974. The Portuguese National Bibliography records that the book grew out of her doctoral thesis in Modern and Contemporary History, submitted in 2003 at the Instituto Superior das Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE). It first appeared from Terramar in 2004, followed by a revised and expanded edition in 2011.
The study argued that the political police was even more brutal in Africa than in the metropole, and that, although dissolved in mainland Portugal, it continued to exist in the colonies, backing those who tried to obstruct decolonisation. Those findings sat alongside her solo books Memórias do Colonialismo e da Guerra and A Luta pela Independência, and her co-authored works with her husband Álvaro Mateus on the colonial war in Angola and on Mozambican nationalism, which took up colonial memory, forced labour and anticolonial resistance.
She herself acknowledged that the theme produced discomfort. "This is not an easy book to digest. We were educated in a country that never knew how to live History except as Holy History," she observed at the time. As with Purga em Angola on the events of 27 May 1977, the work drew hostile reactions, several of them from figures connected to the MPLA.