3. Rolling the Dice
A Shinning Light – History Is This Moment, perhaps – The Curtain Falls
The only present worth the name is one that can be revisited. That’s what I’m doing today talking at a Portuguese Television program on the 2nd of May, 1974. Sixteen minutes and twenty seconds of riveting awareness and rejoice, discussing the eminence of a homeland to be born. This only happens once in a lifetime, and this is my lifetime. Joana is my name (1).
As a spectator I conjure up our two interacting figures – journalist and I – contained in a tiny device, flickering between light and darkness. Black and White. A striking thought: black and white are needed if you’re able to see, feel and understand what is to be human. Light over darkness, life beyond death, love above hate: what a liberating thought if the end of war for independence is truly the dawn of social harmony. What is History if not this moment, when all is being reinvented: color, creed, circumstance? Is this perhaps what ‘history in the making’ means? I sense that although being the face before a media story – I am also standing here as a symbol of so many others, before and after me.
As the interview unfolds, I become aware that my words and concerns are not being heard, my wake-up call incapable to awake up the sleepy. Do they know that the dying old order is leading us into the most dangerous of times, when bad government reform may provoke political unrest? Are they blind to the arrogance of a new autocracy now emerging? I beg for answers: which positive values will be kept, what is to be discarded? What is the future and wholeness of a nation if not made of all its parts?
Overdue colonial dictatorship drove Portugal to isolation and stagnation, in contrast to the prospering of its colonies. Cold war fostered the dichotomy of the ‘We’ and the ‘Other’. I hear myself reminding us for the need to preserve the real We, the plural and universal. The Other, if unstoppable, will fanatically enforce their ‘history laws’, the ruling of an imagined proletariat, greedy winner takes it all policies. Is there no one grasping what true History has shown us? We’re heading back to an authoritarian regime where purges and executions without a trial will be the new normal.
I fear that dialogue and peaceful negotiations will be a farce. Tragically, only those with weapons seem to have the power to reason. All others will be traitors as soon as they raise a word of caution. If legitimacy of political order rests purely on their military victory over ‘fascism’, is the new order better than the older? Will democracies turn a blind eye to the looting and theft of individual property ‘nationalization’ of homes and businesses in the name of the ‘right’ to collective good? Will the new Frelimo leadership have the right to govern a 26-languages nation disregarding tribe, color, and creed?
This interview could well be my last. The voice of reason and good faith is rarely heard until too late. It is known that truth passes through three stages: ridiculed, violently opposed and finally accepted as self-evident (2). For now, I point the finger to the fact that Portugal has historical responsibilities over national minorities in their colonies. A local referendum should therefore be required. But in the prevailing chaos and political vacuum, the revolutionary army in Portugal, dominated the Communist Party is rather anxious to pull out from the colonial war and to assist their pro-Soviet Mozambican brothers-in-arms, instead of wasting their time with negotiations.
I look again straight into the camera following my motions, wondering how I will end up showed in the small screen, the fading neon light, the ephemeral figure soon to be subdued by the blinking imagery of History. I visualize my profile as I want it to endure me standing proudly against the gloomy back-scene of the TV studio, casting the dice that only fate will know. I force myself to look at the interviewer seemingly intimidated by my presence. He stutters at times and I’m sorry to realize that he could do with the absent glass of water to disguise his uneasiness.
The journalist run out of questions and is rescued by a telegram unexpectedly delivered in hand by someone rushing in. It read (…) as announced today by Samora Machel in Dar-Es-Salaam Frelimo will start tomorrow in Lusaka negotiations with Portuguese representatives to discuss the terms for Mozambique’s independence. I dreamt so long for this moment and although fearing in a split-second what felt like an undefined premonition of tragedy – I surprisingly hear myself uttering ‘Bravo!’.
In a heartbeat I sense plenitude creeping in my veins, my whole body freezing as if beholding a blink of everlasting life. I had felt it once, falling in love, the electrifying joy of being alive, before the glowing sunset, sounds and smells falling into decay. Would life, by any other beating heart, be more real than this?
Recording time is over. As we stand up the fading spotlights unmask our own winding shadows. The limelight is now on to another, far-away backstage, down in Africa. The curtain falls. The dice will roll elsewhere.
(1) Joana Simeão (1937-?) was interviewed on behalf of the Democratic Group of United Mozambicans (GUMO) advocating reform as a peaceful and representative political transition to independence, an approach rejected by the military struggling, soviet-inspired, Frelimo party. The TV program (https://arquivos.rtp.pt/conteudos/entevista-a-joana-simeao/) took place a week after the 25th April, 1974 revolution: Salazar’s autocratic and long-lasting regime had two major issues pending solution at least since the 60’s: (1) to promote a commonwealth like transition of its colonial empire in pace with many African independence, and (2) the end of an obsolete political status at home. Hence, when the Portuguese military organized the ‘carnation’ revolution in 25th April, 1974 and virtually relinquished the colonies, there was a short-lived hope for a democratic and orderly changeover since (i) the war had not been won by any of the parties, (ii) no major hostility existed among its citizens which would prevent the various ethnical and cultural communities to gradually merge into new nation-states, and (iii) last but not least, there was sound local expertise, economic development and modern infrastructure available particularly in Angola and Mozambique. Notwithstanding ideological bias (the cold war was ongoing and the Soviet Union had supported the anti-colonial struggling parties) the nationalist leaders were all of European cultural extraction. Regretfully, Portugal failed to negotiate peace agreements in all of their colonies which would safeguard the rights of all its communities and interests, allowing ‘interim governments’, all Soviet inspired to deliberately promote a chaotic departure of ‘European’ citizens, the majority born and bred in those countries. Roughly half a million of those outcasts were hardly integrated in Portugal (many left to other countries such as South Africa, Brazil, USA and Canada), were ever economically compensated for their losses or recognized in an official apology. A striking monument to the ‘Unknown Colonial War Soldier’ has been raised in Lisbon and every 25th of April the 'April Captains' receive their praise but no jubilee, monument or testimonial remembering the colonial 'retornado' (refugee) exist nearly fifty years on. Worst still, in April 1975, shortly before independence, Joana Simeão, a few other democratic leaders and over three hundred prisoners were last seen locked up in Nachingwea, a Frelimo Military Camp in Tanzania. It is presumed that they were arbitrarily executed sometime afterwards when sent back to northern Mozambique (M'Telela), their bodies never retrieved, their fate remaining virtually unknown. More at Cabrita J.M. (2000) M’telela — The Last Goodbye in Mozambique, Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333977385_19
(2) Arthur Schopenhauer, see https://quoteinvestigator.com/tag/arthur-schopenhauer/ and https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~shallit/Papers/stages.pdff