The Missing Pictures: Southern European Catholic Missionaries, Humanitarian Photography and the Fall of the Portuguese Empire in Mozambique

This article contributes to two sets of growing historiographies: one on the role of religious actors in the fall of European Empires; and another one on humanitarian photography. The article’s focus is on the visual campaign organised by a network of Southern European Catholic missionaries to denounce colonial massacres during the war of independence in Mozambique. Whereas the written reports made by the missionaries have been the object of lengthy research, the paper reveals the very specific use the missionaries made of humanitarian photography in a context characterized by the Estado Novo’s fierce censorship. Despite the missionaries’ atrocity pictures failed to persuade the Church hierarchy to publicly condemn the Portuguese crimes, the paper demonstrates how the leap of their images into the public domain had a major rhetorical and symbolic role both in facilitating the fall of the Portuguese Empire and in legitimising FRELIMO’s postcolonial authority. Moreover, given the concurrence of the denunciation campaign with the fall of fascism in Portugal and the global boom of the Human Rights movement in the 1970s, the paper also explores the particularities of the entangled history of decolonisation, humanitarianism and human rights when seen through the eyes of Southern European actors.