Manuel António de Sousa (10 November 1835 - 20 January 1892), also known as Gouveia, was a Portuguese

merchant A merchant is a person who trades in goods produced by other people, especially one who trades with foreign countries. Merchants have been known for as long as humans have engaged in trade and commerce. Merchants and merchant networks operated i ...

and military captain of

Goan Goans ( Romi Konkani: , ) is the demonym used to describe the people native to Goa, India, formerly part of Portuguese India (''Estado Português da Índia''). They form an ethno-linguistic group resulting from the assimilation of Indo-Aryan, ...

origin.''Boletim Geral do Ultramar. XXXVII - 427 e 428''. Lisboa, 1961. pp. 445-447

Biography

Manuel António de Sousa was born in

Mapuçá Mapusa () is a city in North Goa, India. It is situated 13 km north of the state capital of Panaji. The city is the headquarters of Bardez taluka. It is located on the main highway NH-17, linking Mumbai to Kochi. During Portuguese India, t ...

Bardez ''Bardez'' or ''Bardes'' ( IPA: ) is a ''taluka'' of the North Goa district in the Indian state of Goa. Etymology The name is credited to the Saraswat Brahmin immigrants who emigrated to the Konkan via Magadha plains in northern India. B ...

municipality (

Goa Goa (; ; ) is a state on the southwestern coast of India within the Konkan region, geographically separated from the Deccan highlands by the Western Ghats. It is bound by the Indian states of Maharashtra to the north, and Karnataka to the ...

) in 1835. He was the son of Félix de Sousa, a

landlord A landlord is the owner of property such as a house, apartment, condominium, land, or real estate that is rented or leased to an individual or business, known as a tenant (also called a ''lessee'' or ''renter''). The term landlord appli ...

and proprietor, and D. Doroteia Tomásia Mascarenhas. He studied at the

Rachol Seminary The Rachol Seminary, also known as Patriarchal Seminary of Rachol, is the diocesan major seminary of the Primatial Catholic Archdiocese of Goa and Daman in Rachol, Goa, India. Historical outline The edifice that presently houses the seminar ...

Salcete Salcete or Salcette (Konkani: ''Saxtti''/''Xaxtti'') is a subdivision of the district of South Goa, in the state of Goa, situated by the west coast of India. The Sal River and its backwaters dominate the landscape of Salcete. Historically, ...

, Goa, until the age of 16.

Migration to Africa

In 1853, de Sousa emigrated to Zambézia to assist in the administration of the estate of his uncle Félix Mascarenhas. On his arrival in Portuguese Mozambique, he married his cousin, Maria Anastácia Mascarenhas, the only daughter of his uncle. He became an established businessman in the Sena region, and had a reputation of loyalty to the

governor general Governor-general (plural governors-general), or governor general (plural governors general), is the title of an official, most prominently associated with the British Empire. In the context of the governors-general and former British colonies, ...

of Zambézia and to the

Kingdom of Portugal The Kingdom of Portugal was a Portuguese monarchy, monarchy in the western Iberian Peninsula and the predecessor of the modern Portuguese Republic. Existing to various extents between 1139 and 1910, it was also known as the Kingdom of Portugal a ...

. He later became involved in the

ivory trade The ivory trade is the commercial, often illegal trade in the ivory tusks of the hippopotamus, walrus, narwhal, black and white rhinos, mammoth, and most commonly, African elephant, African and Asian elephants. Ivory has been traded for hundred ...

, gaining wealth and power in the region. Armed elephant hunters formed the core of his personal militia. de Sousa engaged in multiple battles with local chiefs and indigenous kings to expand his influence in the region.Galli, Rosemary. ''Peoples' spaces and state spaces: land and governance in Mozambique''. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003. pp. 54-55. In 1856 he took part in the war of succession of the local kingdom of Gaza and settled in the mountains of Gorongosa, where he established the basis of an aringas system which, together with his private army, was used to defend his interests.

Help in battles

de Sousa's personal militia helped the Portuguese official forces on several occasions, particularly in campaigns against the

Bonga Bonga is a town, woreda and one of the multicapital of the South West Ethiopia Peoples' Region in Ethiopia. Located in the Keffa Zone upon a hill in the upper Barta valley, it has a latitude and longitude of with an elevation of 1,714 meters a ...

.Rasmussen, R. Kent e Lipschultz, Mark. R. ''Dictionary of African historical biography''. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989. pp. 223. In 1863, on account of the services rendered, he succeeded Isidoro Correia Pereira as the chief captain of Manica and Quiteve ( Kiteve). During this absence from Sena to receive the commission, his position in Gorongosa was taken by Umzila, the king of Gazaland. de Sousa was later able to retake the region.

Lord of Manica

Around 1874 he was recognized as the Lord of Manica, and married the daughter of the Báruè

king King is a royal title given to a male monarch. A king is an Absolute monarchy, absolute monarch if he holds unrestricted Government, governmental power or exercises full sovereignty over a nation. Conversely, he is a Constitutional monarchy, ...

. Their son was later recognized as king of that region. Manuel António de Sousa became a close friend of artillery captain Joaquim Carlos Paiva de Andrada, one of the mentors of the Companhia de Moçambique. A raid in support of the Mutassa chief, on land disputed by

Cecil Rhodes Cecil John Rhodes ( ; 5 July 185326 March 1902) was an English-South African mining magnate and politician in southern Africa who served as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896. He and his British South Africa Company founded th ...

British South African Company The British South Africa Company (BSAC or BSACo) was Chartered company, chartered in 1889 following the amalgamation of Cecil Rhodes' Central Search Association and the London-based Exploring Company Ltd, which had originally competed to capital ...

, led to them being taken prisoner by the police of that company. Their capture resulted in a diplomatic conflict between the Portuguese and

British Empire The British Empire comprised the dominions, Crown colony, colonies, protectorates, League of Nations mandate, mandates, and other Dependent territory, territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It bega ...

s. The two were eventually released following the intervention of the Portuguese government.Newitt, Malin. ''A history of Mozambique''. London: C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 1995. pp. 288-9. During his arrest a rumour surfaced that he had been killed, and this led to unrest among the Báruè population. Gouveia died in combat while trying to re-establish control of Báruè.

Role in history

Malyn Newitt''A History of Mozambique'', 1995: C. Hurst & Co, p.288-289 describes Manuel António de Sousa as "a new name ... beginning to be heard in the 1850s" who was to become "in some ways the greatest of the ''muzungo'' warlords, but he did not belong to a traditional

Zambesi The Zambezi (also spelled Zambeze and Zambesi) is the fourth-longest river in Africa, the longest east-flowing river in Africa and the largest flowing into the Indian Ocean from Africa. Its drainage basin covers , slightly less than half of t ...

an family and cannot strictly be called

Afro-Portuguese Afro-Portuguese ''(Afro portugueses'' or ''Lusoafricanos)'', African-Portuguese ''(Portugueses com ascendência africana)'', or Black Portuguese are Portuguese people with total or partial ancestry from any of the Sub-Saharan ethnic groups of ...

." Souza took advantage of the death of

Gazaland Gazaland is the historical name for the region in southeast Africa, in modern-day Mozambique and Zimbabwe, which extends northward from the Komati River at Maputo Bay, Delagoa Bay in Mozambique's Maputo Province to the Pungwe River in central Mo ...

King

Soshangane Soshangana Ka Gasa Zikode (), born Soshangana Nxumalo, was the founder and first monarch of the Gaza Empire, which, at its peak, spanned from the Limpopo River in southern Mozambique to the Zambezi River in the north. He ruled the Gaza state fro ...

in 1856, and the subsequent succession dispute, to establish himself in the interior in Gorongosa. Around 1875, says Newitt, "Souza (sic) had by that time become as important a figure as the Gaza king in the politics of the area."

Tributes

On 28 November 1960, a statue of Manuel António de Sousa sculpted by was inaugurated in the north

town of

, in commemoration of the 125th anniversary of his birth. This statue was destroyed on 15 December 1961 by a bombing just prior to the military action that led to the integration of

into India.

Bibliography

* GALVÃO, Henrique. ''Ronda de África''. Porto: Editorial "Jornal de Notícias", 1950. * ANDRADA, Joaquim Carlos Paiva de. ''Relatório de uma viagem à terra dos landins.''. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1885. * ANDRADA, Joaquim Carlos Paiva de. ''Relatório de uma viagem à terra do changamira.''. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1886.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Manuel Antonio de Sousa People from Portuguese Mozambique 1892 deaths 1835 births People from Portuguese India 19th-century Portuguese military personnel 19th-century Portuguese businesspeople Colonialism People from Mapusa