Portuguese Africa

The Portuguese believe they have a special kind of colonialism that makes them different from other imperialists. In the Portuguese view, their kind of inspired colonialism gives them the right to stay in Africa during an era of black independence and the duty to stay in the face of African rebellion. They say their colonialism is special because of its tenure and nonracial quality. They believe that five centuries of rule tie their nation to Africa and that Portuguese colonialism creates societies that are color-blind and colorblended. Both beliefs are delusions.

The Portuguese like to show visitors the Isle of Mozambique, a crowded, tiny, historic island off the northern coast of Mozambique in East Africa. Vasco da Gama, the great Portuguese explorer, found the island in 1498 while looking for a sea route to India. The island is engulfed in history, almost five centuries of Portuguese history. It was the capital and chief port of the Portuguese in East Africa until hate in the nineteenth century.

Boast

Its hot streets are crowded with Arabs, black Africans, Indians, Portuguese, and mulattoes. There are six old mosques and six old churches, fishing boats beached on the sand, and an enormous statue of Vasco da Gama in the square by the old Governor’s Palace. The aging, yellowing buildings of the island face the streets with only a plain front and a gate showing. But inside, like the homes of the French Quarter in New Orleans, they have a special life of their own, with patios and gardens and arched passageways. The island is elegant and splendid, like all aging colonial cities. But it is no proof at all of a great Portuguese tradition in Africa. However dynamic, the island is a rare exception to the desultory development of Portuguese colonialism in Africa.

Although Portuguese explorers reached West Africa in 1444, Angola in 1483, and Mozambique in 1498, the Portuguese ignored their African territories in the next 400 years save to pull out millions of slaves and sell them to plantation owners in the New World, mainly in Brazil. A few forts, trading posts, and ports — like the Isle of Mozambique — were established, but the interior of most of the territories was left uncontrolled.

By the late nineteenth century, Portugal still had hardly any control beyond these few scattered towns and forts. The activities of Catholic missionaries were scattered and slight. The colonial administrators had no educational or medical programs. In fact, a good number of tribes still refused allegiance to Portugal.

True Portuguese interest in the African colonies dates back only to the early twentieth century or, at best, the late nineteenth century. That was made clear in a recent interview with Dom Manuel Vieira Pinto, the young Roman Catholic bishop of Nampula, who said that for all practical purposes, the Church, usually in the forefront of colonialism, had worked in the interior of his northern Mozambique diocese for only twenty-five years. In short, Portuguese colonialism has no greater roots in Africa than the colonialism of any other European power.

The Portuguese like to impress upon visitors that racial tension and distrust wilt in Angola and Mozambique as Portuguese work, eat, play, and most important, sleep with darker races. The Portuguese constantly talk about Brazil as the great legacy of Portuguese colonialism, and, in the words of former Premier Antonio dc Olivéira Salazar, call Brazil “the most vivid example of a multiracial society, universally recognized today as the ideal to be achieved in human relations.” In their view, Angola and Mozambique are approaching that ideal.

Portuguese mulattoes

These themes of racial harmony are repeated continually in Portuguese Africa. “We have segregation here,” says an agricultural officer in the Angola coffee district of Uige, “but it is segregation between those who wash and those who don’t.” A railway administrator in the Angola port of Lobito says, “Here we have a saying: God made the white people. God made the black people. But the Portuguese, they made the mulatto.” “When I used to visit the old Belgian Congo,” an editor recalls in the north Angola town of Carmona, “the Belgians would say that I belonged to a white people of the second class, because we Portuguese live, work and cat with the Africans.”

A traveler finds an impressive amount of race-mixing in Angola and Mozambique. In the Limpopo settlement of Mozambique, for example, 1100 white Portuguese peasants and 450 Africans farm together with generous loans from the government. They live side by side in cramped European-style cottages all equipped with African-style privies.

The schools throughout Angola and Mozambique are integrated. On any day a visitor can see brown, black, and white girls skipping rope together in the school playground and then walking away hand in hand, or boys of all colors gatheringin little groups outside classrooms to gossip about the twists and turns of the latest soccer match.

Europeans and Africans often work at the same job. The counters at the main post office in the Angola capital of Luanda, for example, are manned by a variety of colors. The Benguela Railway in Angola, short of staff, is now training fifteen locomotive drivers. Nine are white, and six are black.

There is no color bar. An African, if he can afford it, can go into any hotel or restaurant in town. In Cape Town recently, an educated mulatto couple talked eagerly of their forthcoming vacation in Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, where they would escape apartheid for a while and feel some human dignity.

Stratified mix

And yet, despite all this mixing, all this seeming harmony, any close look at Angola and Mozambique makes it clear that these Portuguese territories are stratified, dominated in the main by a white class on top that rules the black masses below.

An African elite class hardly exists in Angola and Mozambique. There are a few African administrators and professionals in the big cities but not many. Any African may go to the elegant restaurants of Lourenco Marques and Luanda, but hardly any African can afford to go. Moreover, now that there is African guerrilla fighting in various areas of Portuguese Africa, the Portuguese have diminished the numbers of the African elite even more by arresting African members of the professional class and charging them with subversion.

The expanding school systems of Angola and Mozambique may fill the gap by producing more African leaders and professionals, but the schools are not doing this as fast as Portuguese officials pretend. A school may be integrated, but its classes will grow whiter and whiter in the upper grades. Poor enough to be tempted by any job that pays moderately well, most Africans drop out of school before they reach the top.

Under Portuguese rule, which encourages white immigration from Portugal, Africans must face competition for many jobs. White Portuguese drive taxis, wait at tables, work as traffic policemen — all jobs that Africans filled under British or French colonialism in other African countries.

Even the vaunted miscegenation of the Portuguese seems rather wan under examination. In Benguela, Padre Galhano, the priest of the Nossa Senhora do Populo Church, says that while there are a good number of marriages between whites and mulattoes in Benguela, there are none between whites and blacks or between mulattoes and blacks. No statistics are kept by the Portuguese, but simple observation indicates that the padre’s analysis of marriage in Benguela holds for the rest of Angola and Mozambique. Of the 12 million people who live in Angola and Mozambique, perhaps 400,000 are white and 100,000 mulatto. This is a smaller proportion of mulatto to white than exists in South Africa.

It is clear that society is dominated by whites in Portuguese Africa. The reason, however, is not all racial. Portuguese have little social mobility in their own society. A poor white man hardly has a chance to rise to the top. Why should a poor black man? The members of the Portuguese oligarchy are color-blind in the way they close the door to outsiders.

But, whatever the reason, the reality of Portuguese colonialism is bleak for the African. Despite his good relations with Portguese whites, the chances of a Portuguese African getting ahead are very limited; better, of course, than his chances in South Africa or Rhodesia, but nothing like the chance an educated African had under British or French rule or has today in independent black Africa.

Deluded by their own mythology, the Portuguese fail to understand the grievances of the Africans under them. For this reason, the Portuguese are bewildered by the rebellions they now face in Angola and Mozambique, their main African colonies, and in their small West African holding of Portuguese Guinea. Failing to understand the rebellions, the Portuguese have only one way of dealing with them — trying to put them down with military force.

“The confusion”

The first rebellion began in the morning of March 15, 1961, in northwest Angola. Thousands of Africans, mostly members of the Bakongo tribe, surrounded towns and plantations, brandished their long, curving machetes called cantanas, and killed almost a thousand Portuguese officials, farm managers, shopkeepers, and their wives and children. Many were mutilated.

That began a period that the Portuguese now call “the confusion.” The rebels killed and looted over an area that extended 200 miles from the Congo border to towns near the capital of Luanda. Portuguese civilians organized into vigilante groups and began killing any African they suspected of harboring rebel notions. Portugal rushed more military forces into Angola. They evidently restrained the vigilantes but then began strafing, bombing, and dropping napalm on any African village that struck them as an enemy.

By the end of the first year of fighting, there were perhaps 2000 Portuguese and anywhere from 20,000 to 50,000 Africans dead. At least 250,000 Africans fled the Portuguese guns and planes, crossed the border, and settled as refugees in the Congo. More refugees joined them later.

The war has lost much of its intensity since then. The Portuguese say they now lose only 110 soldiers a year. With 60,000 troops, the Portuguese have been able to push the few thousand original rebels into a thick forest area between Luanda and the coffee town of Carmona. Other rebels, however, have infiltrated into eastern Angola from Zambia.

Two rebel groups operate in northern Angola. The first, which calls itself the Angolan Government in Exile, is made up mainly of a Bakongo political party called UPA (Union of the People of Angola) and is led by Holden Roberto, who keeps This headquarters in Kinshasa. A second group, which is headquartered in Brazzaville, is called MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and is led by mulatto intellectuals and members of the Kimbundu tribe. Most observers believe that the MPLA is infiltrated by Communists.

Classic tactics

Both the UPA and the MPLA ambush Portuguese patrols, lay mines on the roads, attack white farms and fortified villages, and fight each other. Sometimes fighting each other takes precedence over fighting the Portuguese.

Using classic tactics, the Portuguese try to beat down the insurgency by putting African civilians into new fortified villages. With civilians tucked away, Portuguese soldiers can scour the countryside for guerrillas. In addition, the clustering of civilians makes it easier for the Portuguese to prevent guerrillas from persuading or intimidating the civilians. The Portuguese admit, however, that they cannot penetrate the Dembos Forest, where most of the UPA guerrillas camp.

A new front opened on Christmas Day. 1966, when a band of 500 rebels attacked Teixeira de Sousa, the railroad town and border post in eastern Angola. The rebels were members of still another organization, UNITA (the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). Headquartered in Lusaka, Zambia, UNITA rebels are mostly members of the Ovimbundu, the largest tribe in Angola. Since the fighting began in the East, the MPLA has joined the fighting there. UNITA has shown a great deal of resentment over this attempt by MPLA to move into its territory.

The profusion of rebel groups has helped the Portuguese. It is obvious that Portugal is in a dangerous position when rebel bands can move through large areas of the country, often close to major cities and rich agricultural regions. But the danger is blunted when the rebel groups waste their energy sniping at each other with words and bullets, and when their leaders waste as much energy jockeying for positions of meaningless power in Lusaka, Kinshasa, and Brazzaville.

Intense

The war in Mozambique has recently intensified. Portuguese officials admit that the 6000 to 8000 rebels are better trained and equipped than before and killed more Portuguese soldiers in 1968 than during any similar period in the past. But the rebels have still failed to break out of the north, penned there by 45,000 to 60,000 Portuguese troops.

The war is very far away from the rich farmlands of central Mozambique or the huge ports and big cities of southern Mozambique. The most significant area of fighting is in the Cabo Delgado district in the northeast. That is where the rebellion broke out in the fall of 1964.

The rebels in Cabo Delgado belong to FRELIMO (Front for the Liberation of Mozambique), the organization of Mozambique Africans based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and led by Dr. Eduardo Mondlane, a forty-seven-year-old former professor of anthropology at Syracuse University. FRELIMO troops roam an area from the Montepuez River north to the Tanzanian border, about a half to two thirds of the district. This is where the fighting is most bitter and intense.

The area is underpopulated and underdeveloped, and the Portuguese never bothered to administer it well or set up social services in the past. Now Portuguese troops control the towns and have enough control of the seaeoast and the land alongside the Montepuez River to round up African farmers and force them to live in fortified villages. The underpopulated areas between the fortified villages are estimated as rebel territory or, at best, no man’s land.

Courageous, determined

There is one area where the Portuguese have been unable to move Africans into fortified villages.

This likely means that, for all practical purposes, it is administered by FRELIMO. Called the Mueda Plateau, the area is the heartland of the Makonde tribe in the northern third of the Cabo Delgado district.

The second major fighting area is in the Niassa district in the northwest. Here the fighting sweeps from the bush area below the district capital of Vila Cabral, west to Lake Nyasa, and then north to the Tanzanian border. The situation seems similar to that of Cabo Delgado. with the Portuguese controlling the towns but unable to move with safety in the countryside.

The Portuguese have a great deal of respect for the FRELIMO soldiers, particularly the Makonde tribesmen, who make up a large part of the African army. The Portuguese say their enemy is courageous. determined, efficient, and well trained. Using Russian, Czech, and Chinese weapons, FRELIMO soldiers lay mines on the roads, attack fortified villages, and ambush Portuguese army patrols and convoys. Occasionally, the Africans may group into a company of 150 men and attack a Portuguese post.

Tribal turn

Like most situations in Africa, the war, to some degree, turns on tribalism. The Portuguese, in fact, like to call the fight a tribal war between die Portuguese and the Makonde. The Makondes are a tribe split by the Tanzania-Mozambique border; 80,000 live in Mozambique, and 120,000 live in Tanzania. That makes it easy to recruit them, train them in Tanzania, and slip them back and forth across the border.

Dr. Mondlane, who comes from southern Mozambique, gets angry about talk of a Makonde war. He says that only three of his top twelve army officers and 3000 of his 8000man army are Makonde. The truth seems to be that though FRELLMO’s best fighters are Makonde and its most controlled territory is Makonde, the war has spread to other tribes. Even the Portuguese admit that there is fighting in the lands of the Ajawa and Nianja tribes in the Niassa District.

Nevertheless, there is a strong tribal factor in the war. The Portuguese seem to have set up their major line of defense in the area of the large Macua tribe. Most of the people who have moved into the fortified villages are Macua. For this reason, the Macua may be the key to the struggle. Whether by persuasion, intimidation, or show of force, FRELIMO has to win allegiance of the Macua tribe before it can hope to crack the Portuguese defense and break through to the south.

There are similarities in both guerrilla wars and generalizations that can be drawn from them. The Portuguese have managed to contain the rebels in both territories so far and prevent them from disrupting the economies. But these are exhausting wars that are draining the limited resources of a small and poor country. There are dangers ahead for Portugal.

In fact, there are a number of factors outside the battlegrounds that may determine whether Portugal keeps its African empire.

Holding on

The first is the question of what direction Portugal will take under its new premier, Dr. Marcelo Caetano, sixty-two years old, who succeeded the ailing Salazar last September. The new regime might feel less of a need to hold on to the troublesome empire. The war, after all, is not popular among the Portuguese, who have to send their sons off to light and face death in strange, little-known lands.

Events in Angola and Mozambique also might be changed by events in Portuguese Guinea. The Portuguese Army seems to have a far more difficult time holding the rebels there than in the two larger and richer colonies. This small West African territory is worthless, but its loss might depress morale of the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique and embolden the rebels there.

There are other uncertainties that could change the course of the war: will South Africa send its troops into Angola and Mozambique if the Portuguese falter or withdraw? It’s likely. Will the whites of Angola and Mozambique, supported by the troops overseas, declare their independence of Portugal if there is any hint that Lisbon wants to withdraw? This kind of Portuguese Rhodesia is a possibility. Can the various tribalist and antagonistic liberation groups overcome their differences and mount a united drive to defeat the common enemy? Perhaps. For now the Portuguese, sustained by imperialist delusions, are holding their own, but no more, in Angola and Mozambique.

&emdash; Stanley Meisler