I was doing some research on the NSB (the biggest dutch pre war fascist party) and while doing so I came upon the Anton Mussert's so called Guyanaplan. The plan basically seeks to create a Jewish homeland in the Guyana's for which the countries involved are then to be compensated with various colonial holdings elsewhere. The Dutch, who would have to give up their colony of Suriname, would be compensated with the Delagoa Bay area in Portugese Mozambique. That got me curious, why specifically the Delagoa Bay?
Mussert did state that he thought Portugal should compensate the Netherlands since Portugal had one of the largest empire to country ratio's but I couldn't find why he wanted the Delagoa Bay specifically.
I did notice that the area borders the former Boer lands (it even specifically says so in the newspaper) but i'm not sure if that has anything to do with it since Mussert repeatedly stated that he didn't think the Boers could be considered "of dutch blood". So, where there any other reasons or did the boers play a mayor role in this decision?
Hi there, Dutch historian of 20th century political culture here.
So first of all I think it is noteworthy that the source you posted is the NSB-newspaper of extremely limited reliability and factuality. This particular edition glorifies the efforts of NSB-member d'Ansembourg for delivering the Guyana-plan to the Parliament in 1938. This plan was met with widespread derision, and at this point in time the NSB was a very marginal party in Dutch national politics. The plan in and of itself relied on the cooperation of various nations that the Dutch at this time had cordial if not downright cool relations with. In essence, no support for it whatsoever existed outside of the minds of NSB-nomenklatura. Your question regarding Maputo Bay is extremely illustrative of the frenzied antisemitism and modernism the NSB had started advocating from the 1937 elections onward.
The source you posted states that the order of colonial powers as understood by Mussert was 1. UK, 2. France, 3. Netherlands, 4. Portugal, 5. Belgium. Conveniently not mentioned in this equation are the US, Japan, Spain, and Italy for unclear reasons. The equation seems to be built on nothing else than land area, procluding any deeper thought-out notions of empire-to-country or population-to-landmass ratios.
The reason why Portugal and Belgium are part of the equation had to do with the NSB's increasingly erratic geopolitical ambitions. Mussert viewed angering/testing Belgium as counterproductive, as elements within his own party strongly advocated the annexation of Belgian Flanders as an ethnostrategic objective in European politics. Moreover, the Belgians possessed no colonies or lands of military strategic importance for the Dutch colonies in Indonesia, as Congo lay far away from the most important trade- and access routes to Dutch Indonesia. The bounteous riches of the Congo river basin may have well interested Mussert (who was a civil engineer before turning to politics), but clear strategy was formulated at all towards accessing those.
Portugal on the other hand was headache dossier for the Dutch government. The possessions in Timor Leste were a thorn in the side of the local government in Indonesia, and the pro-British geopolitical status of Portugal remained a persisent issue for the colonial authorities in Indonesia, who were forced to consider unfriendly neighbours to the west (British Malaya), east (Portuguese possesions in Timor as well as Australia), north (the 'anti-colonial'-yet-imperialist USA) and hostile neighbours to the fart north (Japan).
By the presumptive master-stroke of fixing the 'Jewish issue' through the Guyana Plan, Mussert and the NSB hoped to curry favour with the Germans, whilst simultaneously improving the Dutch access to the colonies in Indonesia. By depriving Portugal of Delagoa bay and the use of the port of Maputo, the Dutch would improve their own ability to access the Indies by virtue of Maputo's port, while diminishing the naval ability of Portugal and Britain to exercise control over the Southwest Indian Ocean.
Now, what about the Boers? These pretty much didn't feature at all in the equation, and the NSB considered them ethnic halfbrothers, tiering them well below the Flemish, more akin to the Walloons of Belgium in their racial hierarchy. Interest in the Boers from the Nazi's and northern-European fascists greatly diminished during and after the First World War. Although consideration was given in various political musings to their fate and their future on the African continent, the inherent 'own-citizens-first' mentality of many of these movements saw the Boer cause fall from grace as things heated up in continental Europe.
