Angolan settler exodus (1975)
앙골라 정착민 이탈(1975)
The mass departure of Angola's Portuguese settler population around independence in 1975. In 1974 the colony's ethnic European residents numbered about 400,000 (excluding enlisted and commissioned soldiers from the mainland), the mixed-race population about 100,000, and the total population around 5.9 million. Those who left were overwhelmingly white but included some mestiço and black Portuguese citizens. The term retornado (returnee) was seen as derogatory, and most returnees preferred "refugee" (refugiado).
In depth
Timing and scale
The mass exodus began as the MPLA–Portugal transfer-of-power agreement became public after the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, and peaked around independence on 11 November 1975. English-language accounts date the start of the Portuguese airlift of white Portuguese Angolans from Luanda to Lisbon to 12 August 1975; Portugal's 25 de Abril 50th anniversary commission states instead that the authorities ran a large air bridge (Portuguese: ponte aérea) between May and November 1975, evacuating 133,982 people from Angola on 464 flights, with a Huambo–Luanda leg from 11 August to 4 October. English-language accounts state that over 300,000 people had left Angola by November, most of them evacuated aboard TAP Boeing 707 aircraft, and that the British Royal Air Force sent Vickers VC10 airliners to evacuate about 6,000 additional refugees.
The scale is not a single agreed number. The English-language figures of a 12 August start, more than 200,000 airlifted and over 300,000 gone by November coexist with the Portuguese figures of 464 flights and 133,982 people, because they count different carriers and different things, so both must be given. More broadly, from May 1974 to the end of the 1970s over a million Portuguese citizens left Portugal's African territories, with estimates of those actually arriving in Portugal ranging from 500,000 to 1 million, so Angola-specific figures cannot be read off the metropolitan total.
Who left
Many Portuguese settlers came from poor strata and worked manual urban jobs such as cleaners, taxi drivers and waiters. At the same time they dominated business life, owned almost all the coffee plantations, and supplied many lower- and middle-ranking civil servants. The exodus therefore removed capital, ownership and labour together. Most Afrikaner and German settlers in southern Angola had already left for Namibia and South Africa by 1975, before the bulk of the Portuguese exodus.
Consequences and aftermath
The Portuguese made up the majority of skilled workers in administration, agriculture and industry, and after they left independent Angola faced deterioration in central planning, economic development and growth, security, education and health. In the Alvor Agreement the Portuguese government's main negotiating goal was preventing the mass emigration of white Angolans, yet the agreement allowed only the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA to nominate candidates to the first assembly elections, deliberately disenfranchising Bakongo, Cabindans and whites.
The exodus also fed Portuguese politics. Some returnees, especially from the military, came into conflict with the communist wing of the new government, and their involvement fed the right-wing and pro-democracy forces that thwarted an attempted coup by radical leftist military units on 25 November 1975. The 1975 settler exodus was therefore a factor in Portugal's political crisis as well as in Angola's labour supply shock.