Pink Map

The Pink Map (Portuguese: Mapa cor-de-rosa), also known as the Rose-Coloured Map, was a document prepared in 1885 to represent Portugal's claim of sovereignty over a land corridor connecting their colonies of Angola and Mozambique during the "Scramble for Africa". The area claimed included the whole of what is currently Zimbabwe and large parts of modern Zambia and Malawi.

The British government actively worked to prevent the claim's success; the 1890 British Ultimatum ended the Portuguese hopes, caused serious damage to the prestige of the Portuguese monarchy, and encouraged republicanism.

At the start of the 19th century, Portugal exercised only limited effective governance in Africa south of the equator. Portuguese Angola consisted of the areas around Luanda and Benguela, and a few almost independent towns over which Portugal claimed suzerainty, the most northerly of which was Ambriz. Portuguese Mozambique was limited to the Island of Mozambique and several other coastal trading-posts or forts as far south as Delagoa Bay. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Angola's main function was to supply Brazil with slaves. This trade grew, firstly due to the development of coffee plantations in southern Brazil from the 1790s, and secondly, due to the agreements of 1815 and 1817 between Britain and Portugal, which (on paper at least) limited Portuguese slave-trading to areas south of the equator. The slave trade diminished after Brazilian independence in 1822, and more sharply following an agreement between Britain and Brazil in 1830 by which the Brazilian government prohibited further slave imports. To find slaves for export from the Angolan towns, Afro-Portuguese traders had penetrated as far inland as Katanga and Kazembe, but otherwise there was little penetration of the interior and no attempt to establish control there. When the Brazilian slave trade declined, slaves were used on Portuguese plantations which stretched inland of Luanda along the Cuanza River and to a lesser extent around Benguela. After Moçâmedes had been founded south of Benguela in 1840 and Ambriz had been occupied in 1855, Portugal controlled a continuous coastal strip from Ambriz to Moçâmedes, but little inland territory. Although Portugal claimed to control the Congo River estuary, Britain would at best accept that Lisbon had limited rights in the Cabinda enclave north of the river, although these rights did not make Cabinda Portuguese territory.

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