By Elton Paul Ziki

THERE is an erroneous belief that the Portuguese during the carving out of Africa by Europeans were a magnanimous lot. Because of their policy of ‘assimilation’ the Portuguese would insist that the indigenes, in the country they called Portuguese Mozambique or Portuguese East Africa a part of the Portuguese overseas territory, were better off for being colonised by the country. According to Portugal’s official policy of the colonial era, Mozambique was not a colony at all, but a part of the ‘pluricontinental and multiracial nation’ of Portugal. Portugal sought to ‘Europeanise’ the local population and assimilate them into Portuguese culture and retain the colonies as trading partners and markets for its goods. But those aspirations to make Africans full citizens with full political rights and business partners, through a long development process, were soon overtaken by the real desire of Europe which is to plunder, exploit and make money out of Africa through exploitation of its natural resources and people. The exploitation of Mozambique by the Portuguese began way before the 18th or 19th centuries when they came with or began to have more ‘noble’ aspirations towards the Africans. When Portugal lost its northern African coastal possession to the Omanis in 1699, the Portuguese put all their focus on the little that remained to them, their holdings in Mozambique. Slave trade became an increasingly important element in exploiting the territory. The Portuguese became active participants in the export of humans from the interior going as far afield as modern day Zimbabwe.  In 1787 the Portuguese developed Lourenço Marques, now Maputo, into a town, from a fort. And by 1790, 9 000 people were being exported as slaves from the colony every year. Historians state that, approximately one million slaves were exported from Mozambique during the 1800s and violence and conflict wracked the interior to the extent that the entire areas were depopulated, societies disintegrated and local economies collapsed. When the rest of Europe abolished slavery the ‘magnanimous’ Portuguese were reluctant to do so and only ended it after increasing pressure, but it was not effectively suppressed until the early 20th century. The Portuguese in 1899 created a labour law that mobilised, forced and unpaid labour, for the colonial authorities, from those not engaged in wage labour elsewhere. A majority of Africans were not employed. According to Macamo (2002), “throughout Portuguese colonial rule, Mozambique was nothing more than a labour reserve for neighbouring countries and Portuguese claims over the country relied almost entirely on the ability of its colonial administration to control the movement of labour. “It was neither in the interest of South African mining capital nor Portuguese colonial administration to see the labour migrant develop into a proletarian.” Portugal completely neglected to develop Mozambique or make any kinds of social progress for the inhabitants like schools and hospitals which were only created for the Portuguese. The Portuguese developed prazos which were large estates leased to colonists, settlers and traders in order to exploit the continent’s resources. Prazos operated like a semi-feudal system and were little kingdoms of cruelty that saw brutal exploitation of Africans. There was not much development done by the Portuguese in Mozambique as substandard facilities were created for Africans. So poor were these facilities that Africans could not achieve what was embodied in a law passed in 1914 that laid out what was required for full citizenship to be attained. According to the law, the person would have to be able to read, write and speak Portuguese and children had to be raised as Portuguese, the person must adopt Christianity and abandon indigenous customs for Western ones. Thus one could only come to be regarded as a person by renouncing oneself, so meeting these criteria was extremely difficult and few could qualify.  Responding to the changing environment in the world, especially the African independence movements, Portugal changed the status of Mozambique first in 1951 to ‘overseas province’ and again in 1972 to ‘self-governing state’. Indigenes eventually took up arms against the colonisers. Africans had had enough of the brutality, especially when the Portuguese killed more than 500 locals in June 1960 in what came to be known as ‘The Meda Massacre’. The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique, FRELIMO, led by Eduardo Mondlane was formed and initiated an armed struggle with the first shot fired in September of 1964. The fight lasted 10 years and Mozambique attained its independence in 1975 under the leadership of Samora Machel who succeeded Mondlane who had been assassinated. A majority of the white settlers left Mozambique after destroying as much as infrastructure and machinery as they could to in a bid to cripple the black Government. Up to date, the evil and destructive actions of the colonial Portuguese is evident for all to see.