She’s a Portuguese African? Interesting. I met a Jewish doctor from the Belgian Congo a little while ago - lots of people from countries that don’t really exist anymore.
I don’t know the motivation for the coup, but hindsight indicates it was shortsighted, maybe a coup of convenience, if there is such a thing? Those involved in it I think thought they were benefiting Portugal by cutting the colonies loose, since they were taking draft-age men away to sometimes die, and costing Portugal a great deal of money to retain against communist and Black terrorist operations - but in the end, less money than the resources from those colonies, which would also have benefited the former colonies, being managed by people who knew what they were doing, and knew what the resources were, or are, really.
The wars weren’t popular, they went on for years with no end in sight, and the demographics weren’t in their favor; France found that out the hard way in Indochina and especially Algeria (which they considered part of France itself). The odd thing in both Spain and Portugal is how far left they swung in reaction to the overthrow of the military government in Portugal and the nearly-simultaneous death of Franco in Spain; those countries very quickly became unrecognizable to immigrants who left shortly before those incidents. Many in my area still visit family there, and are disgusted (with both countries); to understand the reaction, these people came here from conservative countries, without the English language to acclimate them to the growing leftism here, and found themselves to the right of the popular cultures of both their adopted and home countries.
As a collector of coins, stamps, and banknotes, I have a collection of these from a lot of “extinct” countries, along with other interesting ones. South Vietnam, Japanes-occupied Philippines and Indonesia, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, British East and West Africa, Portuguese India, Timor, Angola, and Mozambique (even a Brazilian one from the mid-1800s, though not in nice shape), Tsarist Russia, Kingdom of Serbia, Biafra, Rhodesia (both the colony and the short-lived independent state), Italian Somaliland, British India, Italian-occupied Albania, Nazi-occupied Greece, Danzig Free State, Poland pre-WWI (a “German-sector” piece and a “Russian-sector” piece; the latter has 2 denominations - rubles and zloty - on 1 coin)...sorry, I’m rambling.
I love history & geography; they explain today’s world.