On 25 April 1974, the Armed Forces Movement overthrew the Estado Novo dictatorship and initiated the PREC – the Ongoing Revolutionary Process (1974 – 1976). Portuguese society was reshaped by mass mobilisation, occupations, and a profound political transformation. At the centre of this revolutionary horizon stood the “three D’s”: Democratise, Develop, and Decolonise.
To democratise meant securing political freedoms and fundamental rights. To develop implied overcoming structural inequality and economic backwardness. Yet it was the third D — Decolonise — that posed the deepest challenge, for it required confronting five centuries of empire.
Between 1974 and 1975, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and São Tomé and Príncipe became independent. Formally, the Portuguese empire ended. But political independence did not produce historical reckoning. Decolonisation was treated primarily as a diplomatic and military process, not as a transformation of memory, institutions, and social hierarchies.
In 1975, around half a million people arrived in Portugal from the former colonies — the so-called retornados (the returned). Their arrival reshaped the country. Yet public narratives focused almost exclusively on metropolitan loss, silencing a deeper structural truth: modern Portugal, and Lisbon in particular, had long been built upon colonial exploitation and racialised labour.
In 1444, the first documented group of enslaved Africans arrived in Lagos, Algarve. This moment inaugurated a prolonged process of dehumanisation that embedded racial hierarchy into the formation of the Portuguese state. Papal bulls of the fifteenth century granted religious legitimacy to conquest and enslavement, providing juridical cover for imperial violence. The Empire was not only an economic or geopolitical project; it was also a racial one. The category of the “Other” as inferior accompanied the consolidation of a European identity that imagined itself universal and civilising.
Violence inflicted on Black bodies – physical, economic, and symbolic – structured the colonial order. Yet this genocidal project did not succeed in erasing resistance. African liberation movements rendered the colonial war unsustainable and affirmed the legitimacy of self-determination. It was their struggle that precipitated the regime’s crisis and created the conditions for the 25 April Revolution. 13 years, 2 months, and 3 weeks of colonial war. Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique. The resistance of São Tomé and Príncipe, Cape Verde, and East Timor.
Here lies the unfinished dimension of the third D.
The revolution opened the path to democracy, but it did not dismantle the colonial matrix that continued to shape memory and power. Decolonisation remains incomplete so long as collective memory, public space, curricula, and institutions fail to acknowledge that Portuguese modernity was co-produced through slavery, empire, and racialised labour.
Fifty years after the Carnation Revolution, the missing D calls not for territorial withdrawal, but for historical justice. Only by confronting the colonial past as constitutive — rather than peripheral — can democracy be understood as an ongoing project rather than a completed event.
