The Sleeper

Amid the tumult of a crumbling continent, one massive chunk of Africa sleeps on. It is the Africa of Portugal, oldest of all the colonial powers.*

Its two big territories straddle the continent's southern stem and cover an area as large as Western Europe. One is square, massive Angola (pop. 4,500,000), which sprawls below the Congo along 1,100 miles of the western Atlantic shore, where Lisbon's navigators arrived in the isth century. Across the continent is the other half of Dictator-Premier Antonio de Oliveira Salazar's African empire, Mozambique (pop. 6,300,000), whose Indian Ocean ports are among the best on the east coast. In both, the populations are sealed off from the outside world with ruthless efficiency by a European regime that openly proclaims its intention to hang on to them indefinitely.

At first glance, Salazar's Africa seems a verdant paradise, for it is free of the ugly racist rules white men have installed elsewhere. In Luanda, hot, bustling capital of Angola, blacks ride the same elevators as whites in the gleaming modern office buildings, and share the same queues at post offices and bus stops. In Mozambique's busy Lourenc,o Marques, no one bothers to lock the door of his house or take the keys out of his parked car, and it is safe for whites to walk the darkest alleys at midnight; everywhere, the natives are quiet and polite.

The Hidden Fist. Portugal's formula for success in race relations is simple: keep the natives illiterate, keep them working, keep them scared. But it may in the end prove no more lasting than Belgian policy in the Congo. Although higher education technically is open to all, the cost is prohibitive for blacks. In all Angola there are only 200 Africans in high school; Mozambique boasts just 50, and has produced only one college graduate, a young African who went to Lisbon University on the proceeds of a lucky lottery ticket. For indigenas, this paucity of educational opportunity hardly eases the path toward the precious status of assimilado, which promises total equality with the whites for those who can speak Portuguese fluently and adopt European modes of life (i.e., live in a house instead of a hut, eat with a knife and fork instead of the fingers).

In Mozambique only 1,500 natives qualified as assimilados in the decade from 1950 to 1960, raising the total to a mere 6,000. In Angola perhaps 30,000--0.7% of the population--have won assimilado status; no one knows for certain, since embarrassed officials have stopped issuing statistics on them.

For the overwhelming mass of the indigenas, there is no future whatsoever beyond menial labor. Under the obligatory labor system, the government rounds up tens of thousands of blacks annually, proclaims them to be "idle.'' and assigns them to public works projects for stints of six months at wages ranging from $2 to $5 a month.

The Island Residents. Indigenas who endure the system without protest live peacefully enough. For those who rebel there is the palmatoria--a stout, flat bat with holes in it. A dozen sharp blows of the palmatoria on the open palm leave welts and blisters that last for weeks. Persistent troublemakers disappear quietly to the labor camps of Sao Tome, Portugal's little island prison in the Gulf of Guinea.

In general, the indigena masses are no problem, and the Portuguese doggedly insist that they never will be so long as the frontiers can be sealed off from the ferment in surrounding territories. Last June, when freedom came to the neighboring Congo, the Portuguese government rushed hundreds of tough commandos and seven spotter planes to Angola to help police the 1,000-mile-long Congolese-Angolan border. Similarly, when Tanganyika and Nyasaland took a long step toward black rule this summer, four companies of commandos were dispatched from Portugal to protect Mozambique from infection by the independence virus.

Whites Needed. Curiously enough, it is not among the blacks but among the Portuguese white settlers themselves (90,000 in Mozambique, 200,000 in Angola) that Salazar's ubiquitous secret police search hardest for political agitators. The African-born whites, like the first-generation Americans in the U.S.'s thirteen colonies, resent rule from the mother country. Five whites, a mulatto and a black drew stiff prison sentences in an Angola military court last August for distributing pamphlets demanding independence from Lisbon. Another 20, accused of "crimes against external security," were convicted last week, and a third batch of 19 now faces trial.

Salazar's long-range solution is to flood Angola and Mozambique with Portuguese immigrants, making them the only areas in Africa that are being actively colonized by a European power. An immigrant is offered an ample plot of land, two cows, two pigs and a flock of chickens. Some 13,000 new settlers went to Angola in 1959 alone. There are also plans for irrigation schemes on the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers, efforts to expand industry and agriculture so that when independence does come--a generation hence, say the Portuguese hopefully--the territories will remain firmly allied to the old country.

To this, African nationalists in other territories retort with jeers and open vows to foment revolt in both Angola and Mozambique as a means of "liberating our African brethren." The Africans last week successfully blocked Portugal as the West Europe candidate for a two-year term on the Security Council. They were also the moving force behind a U.N. General Assembly vote fortnight ago demanding that Portugal report on conditions in her overseas territories. Portugal has always refused to do so on the legalistic ground that its chunks of Africa are "provinces" of the homeland, not colonies at all. In both countries and back home in Portugal, the gagged press never prints news of unsavory disturbances, leaving Portugal's critics to spread their own stories of native uprisings; last week Moscow Radio accused the Portuguese of using napalm to kill native agitators.

Dictator Salazar insists that Portugal has no intention of leaving, no matter what the changes in the rest of Africa. In a speech last month he warned: "Our minds must be ready for one of the greatest ordeals of our history. Great sacrifices will be called for ... and, if necessary, the blood from our veins." A top Portuguese official in Angola put it more directly: "We have been here 500 years. We will stay another 500 years, and we don't care particularly how we do it."

* And, with its scattered Asian holdings (e.g., Goa, Macao, Portuguese Timor), the world's third largest after Britain and France.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.