Orlando Ribeiro’s last work, A Colonização de Angola e o seu Fracasso [The Colonisation of Angola and its Failure] is also particularly noteworthy. It was published in 1981 by the Imprensa Nacional and its first edition went almost unnoticed. Reedited in 2014, this book is still largely ignored today, even by the most highly valued scholars of African studies. Conceived and written at a time when long periods of depression allowed the author very brief moments of respite, this complexly structured work is perhaps the one that best accounts for his way of conceiving a historical-geographical theme. Its broad timeframe and the materials used range from the multiple landscapes observed in his frequent journeys between 1935 and 1969, to the conversations with random people he had happened upon, to his own family traditions and the reading material he had accrued since his youth. This is undoubtedly, as noted by historian René Pélissier in 1983, “a somewhat disconcerting work”, a “non-conformist book of which there are only a very few among learned men”, but it is also one of the books that provides a better understanding of the way Orlando Ribeiro worked.

Another way of characterising his work is by considering the impact it had on his disciples. As a university Professor,  he was highly esteemed by a wide range of students from diverse areas, both for his brilliant lectures and also, perhaps even more so, for what he managed to convey to those taking part in his field trips . It is indeed by considering the work of some of his disciples that a better understanding of his historical-geographical view of the world can be achieved, a view that he shared with his disciples and with me, from the 1960s onwards when he took me on a methodical discovery of Portugal.

Almost all his first disciples chose a small island as the theme for their doctoral theses, thus following the model he had given them regarding Madeira in 1945, and Fogo in 1955. Such was the case of Raquel Soeiro de Brito in 1951, with the island of São Miguel, of Francisco Tenreiro in 1961, with São Tomé, and of Ilídio do Amaral in 1964, with Santiago. Carlos Alberto Medeiros followed suit when he devoted his first research to the small Island of Corvo in the Azores. Several years later, his doctoral thesis focused on a less common theme of historical Geography, namely a vast hinterland African region: A Colonização das Terras Altas da Huíla (Angola) [The Colonisation of the Huila Highlands (Angola)]. In the words of historian René Pélissier (Le Sud-Angola dans l’Histoire, [South Angola in History] 2017, p. 388), this is the masterpiece of a geographer who “cool-headedly and open-eyed” managed to pen “marvellous pages of social, economic, and political Geography.”

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