Page 27 - Afrika Must Unite

12 AFRICA MUST UNITE
among the worst in Africa. In recent years, the average African
wage in M ozambique was about ninepence a day. Education has
been shamefully neglected. In 1955, there were only 68 African
high school students in the whole of Angola.
But the system of forced labour, which still operates, is
perhaps the worst blot on the Portuguese record in Africa. It
amounts to a form of slavery. M en are treated not as men, but as
chattels, to be pushed around from place to place at the whim
of the local Ghefe do Posto, or district officer. The ‘assimilado’
or ‘civilizado’ system, whereby an African may, by process of
law, become in effect a ‘white’ man, if he comes up to certain
European standards, demonstrates yet another aspect of the
Portuguese brand of colonialism. Quite apart from the arrogant
assumption of racial superiority implied in the idea that every
African would wish to become ‘white’, is the insidious effect
of a policy aimed at deliberately trying to turn Africans into
Portuguese. I am reminded of the African from Lourengo
M arques who said: ‘The Portuguese think that it was a mistake
on the part of God to make the African, African. Their assimi-
lado policy is an effort to correct this divine error.’
I intend to discuss the social and economic effects of colonial­
ism as a whole in a later chapter. It is sufficient at this point to
state that all the injustice, social degradation and slavery of the
Portuguese regime in Africa reached a climax at the time of the
1961 revolt in Angola. The Angola people have entered the
African nationalist revolution, and the country will never be the
same again.
Doubtless the ending of Belgian rule in the neighbouring
Congo encouraged the rise of nationalism in Angola. The vast
country of the Congo, about 77 times the size of Belgium, was
between 1876 and 1908 the exclusive property of one man, King
Leopold II of Belgium. He became one of the richest men in the
world by mercilessly exploiting the country. African workers
were mutilated or shot if they failed to bring in the required
amount of rubber or ivory, the two chief objects of value in the
Congo at that time. A reliable source has put the cost of lives of
Leopold’s regime at between five and eight million. In 1908, as
a result of a Commission of Enquiry set up to investigate
atrocities, the Congo Free State became a colony under the