Colonial Wars, Colonial Alliances: The Alcora Exercise in the Context of Southern Africa

Abstract

Images of violence have marked the political landscape of southern Africa since the independence of Portuguese and British colonies. The recent discovery of secret documents attest to the alliance linking white supremacist governments in South Africa and Rhodesia with Portugal’s corporatist–fascist regime. This article focuses on the roots of so much of this violence: the formation of a little-known but crucial white alliance in the subcontinent, code-named ‘Exercise Alcora’, which aimed to perpetuate the minority regimes in the region. South Africa, Rhodesia and Portugal, with its two colonies of Mozambique and Angola, thus constituted a political project that sought to frustrate African liberation movements. A critical approach to the (re)construction of national memories is then crucial to understanding the roots of present-day social and political crises in southern Africa, as well as to recognising how important Exercise Alcora, as revealed in confidential documentation, was for the maintenance of white hegemony in this region until the very end of the 20th century. While South African–Rhodesian relations have been extensively dealt with in the literature, the relations between those countries and Portugal were more tenuous and shadowy.