The Silent Apartheid*
ORTUGAL has been disguising her oppression of eleven million Africans under the cloak of the so-called policy of 'assimilation:' After 500 years of her occupation (`presence' is the of word), only 0.3 per cent. of these Africans are assimilados. The remaining continue in- digenas, and, though they are called Portuguese, do not have any of the civil rights enjoyed by Portuguese citizens—political rights, of course, do not exist in any part of the Portuguese world. They have to carry passes and cannot- travel from one district to another, even for a funeral of a relative, without a special permit, but they can be drafted for forced labour or removed from their traditional lands to make way for the settlers. For any offence they are summarily Punished by the administrative authority with a hide whip and sent for correctional labour. If police or settlers beat them to keep them in order, they have no remedy—not even running
away.
The only practical difference between apar- theid and Portugal's policy of assimilation seems to be that Portugal is prepared to grant citizen- ship rights to Africans at the rate of 0.3 per cent, for every 500 years. Otherwise, even the theoretical basis of these two policies is almost the same. The supremacy of the white man and his Civilisation. in the policy of assimilation, goes as far as the destruction of African culture. In fact, to become ass-Mulatto and obtain citizen- shiP rights, an African has to forsake his own Culture, read and write Portuguese and adopt the Portuguese way of life— only three of the many legally established conditions for obtaining the Quint/ludo status. Clearly the policy is as foolish and impractical as apartheid.
How is it, then, that the oppression of Africans in Portuguese colonies has not had the same explosive results as in South Africa? The reason is that Dr. Salazar has been wiser than Dr. Malan and his successors; he realised long ago that democracy, however fragmentary, and edu- cation cannot go with oppression. He has not built a single university for the eleven million Africans in an area as large as that of Western Europe. He has allowed few schools, and most or them are in the hands of Portuguese Catholic Missionaries, one of whose objects is to prevent any sudden decrease in the illiteracy rate.
Fearing that these preventive measures may not be enough to maintain Africans in peace and national harmony, Salazar has not allowed
*By a correspondent recently returned from Portuguese West Africa. winds of change. Fierce censorship, absolute control over the press and books, has been im- posed. The Portuguese Gestapo, PIDE, and its informers have long since been introduced in the Portuguese colonies. P1DE, a brutal enough organisation in Portugal, is much worse in her colonies. In Goa, for instance, nationalists have been tied to a jeep and dragged to the nearest town, where kerosene was poured on them and set alight (Camilo Pereira and Suresh Kerkar in Ponda on February 17, 1957); or beaten and kicked to death in front of family and neigh- bours (Sakaram and Shirodkar from Pomburpa). With such an organisation Salazar has been able to crush spontaneous nationalist movements such as that which began to spring up in Angola in 1953. Leaders of these movements have dis- appeared in the concentration camps of Bic and Baia dos Tigres and their followers massacred.
More efficient underground organisations, such as Uniao das Populacoes de Angola, Movimento Popular pant a Liberlacao de Angola, Movi- mento Africano pare a Independencia da Gland and Movimento Anti-Colonial (which has branches in all Portuguese African colonies), were able to survive; but in 1956 some of the leaders of UPA were arrested: Liborio New- fane and Lello Figueira were deported to Bie and Julio Alfonso, Isaias Kamutuke, Alfredo Benge, Cunha, Loureiro Siqueira and Ambrosio Luyanzi disappeared—according to reports they were tortured to death. In October, 1958, over 200 Africans of the Bakongo tribe from Cabinda were deported to unknown places. In August last year over fifty Africans from Portu- guese Guinea were killed after a strike organised by the nationalists; and between March and August over 200 leaders arrested in Angola, Mozambique and the Cape Verde Islands. Most of them were deported to concentration camps and to far-away gaols without trial, but many are still in the military gaol of Luanda awaiting trial. They include thirty-two assimilado.r,' eighteen coloured and seven Europeans, and come from all walks of life: civil servants, engineers, clerks, printers, teachers, one architect and one well-known doctor. They were to be tried on March 7, but the news of the trial leaked out abroad and a series of protests was received by the Portuguese Government. There was a risk that the trial might turn out to be not of the thirty-two assimilados but of Portu- guese colonialism. It was postponed sine die.
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