by Guy Arnold
Between 1966 and the end of the decade Banda had enacted the constitutional changes that made him a formidably powerful president of a one-party state. In May 1966 he was elected first President of the Republic by the National Assembly, acting as an electoral college, and on 6 July Malawi became a republic and the MCP became the only legal party. The President was authorized to appoint up to three persons as cabinet ministers who were not MPs. In February 1968 this limitation was removed. In December 1970 the constitution was amended to provide that Dr Banda should hold the office of President for life.
Banda’s open policy of engagement with white Southern Africa was unique and provocative and led to especially hostile relations with his two neighbours, Tanzania and Zambia. Before independence, at the beginning of the 1960s, Banda had assumed (wrongly) that Mozambique would also soon be independent and he had denounced the Portuguese for their repressive policies, while the Malawi News had described Portugal as ‘a country of 4ps (Poverty, Prostitutes, Priests and Police).’27 Meanwhile Banda, who faced the same problems of dependence for communications upon his neighbours as did Kaunda, had been flirting with the possibility of closer ties with Tanzania and using Mwanza as a principal outlet and port of entry for Malawi. The possibility of using Mtwara had been discussed with Tanzania in August 1961 before either country became independent. However, Banda was already inclined towards coexistence with the Portuguese in Mozambique and in May 1964, six weeks before independence, he paid a one-day private visit to northern Mozambique during which he appears to have sealed an agreement with the Portuguese to construct the Nacala railway through to Malawi (as it was shortly to become). He had been advised, meanwhile, that the northern route through Tanzania could not be justified economically. What made Banda choose to turn southwards was never easily explicable and, for example, in 1969 he claimed that he had had a pre-independence agreement with Nyerere about the use of Mtwara and that a railway was to be built from Central Nyasaland around the end of the Lake (Lake Malawi) to Mtwara, but that Kaunda had persuaded Nyerere to go for the TANZAM railway instead. Banda had wanted the railway to pass through northern and central Nyasaland and cross the border at Fort Jameson into Zambia though that would have made it much longer. Chipembere was to claim that the collapse of this scheme gave Banda the excuse to promote closer links with the Portuguese, which was what he favoured anyway.28
By March 1967, when Malawi signed a trade agreement with South Africa, its relations with Zambia were at an all-time low and, for example, Banda was to reply to criticisms of his decision in the Zambian press: ‘While they are criticizing me for trading with South Africa openly they themselves are trading with South Africa secretly.’ Six months after sending a goodwill mission to South Africa, in September 1967, Banda announced that he was opening diplomatic relations with Pretoria. The first Malawian representative in the Republic was to be a white civil servant, Philip Richardson, with a black understudy. Banda attacked his principal critic – Kaunda, and Zambia – in vitriolic terms: ‘As for my critics in neighbouring countries, I treat them with utter contempt, because they are physical and moral cowards and hypocrites… While they are decrying South Africa, they are doing so on stomachs full of South African beef, mutton and pork… They are doing so while allowing South African financiers and industrialists to invest heavily in their mines, industries and agriculture.’29 On 12 December 1967 a South African career diplomat, Jan Francois Wentzel, became his country’s Chargé d’Affaires in Malawi. South Africa quickly followed its breakthrough in Malawi with a loan of £4.67 million for the new capital at Lilongwe; this was followed by a second loan of £6.4 million to Malawi Railways for the Nacala link through Mozambique.
Banda’s biographer explains his switch to the South as follows: ‘Yet for all the unpopularity of Banda’s plain speaking, and of his policies towards the white South of Africa, Malawi’s gradual move into isolation at the end of 1965 and beginning of 1966 was not entirely involuntary. No less important was Banda’s own disenchantment with the unrealism and discord which seemed to him to be becoming endemic, not only in African affairs and at the OAU, but also at the United Nations.’30 In March 1968 South Africa’s Foreign Minister, Hilgard Muller, made a formal visit to Malawi where he spoke of ‘co-prosperity’ and warned of the dangers of Communism. By 1969, experts loaned from Pretoria were helping to control some of Malawi’s key institutions, including the broadcasting services which were audible in parts of Zambia, and in February of that year a new director of the Malawi Information Services began work: he was David van der Spuy from the South African information department. Malawi Air services increased their flights to Johannesburg to cope with the increased two-way traffic. By May 1970 when South Africa’s Prime Minister J. B. Vorster visited Malawi, Banda’s isolation in Africa was almost total. In a speech at the official dinner for Vorster, Banda said: ‘What I do know is simply this: your way of life is your way of life. Our way of life is our way of life. There are certain things on which we agree, let’s think more of those things, let’s work more from the basis of those things on which we agree, on which we see eye to eye… Those things on which we do not agree, on which we do not see eye to eye, will take care of themselves.’31 Banda was to remain adamant in his determination to co-exist peacefully with the apartheid state and not to support any form of violence.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Portugal in Africa
In 1960, as the two principal colonial powers, Britain and France, were conceding independence to their colonies, Portugal was making plain it did not see self-rule, let alone full independence, as an option for its African possessions and was entrenching itself, apparently determined to hold on at almost any cost. The British and French, no matter how much they subsequently employed neo-colonialist tactics to manipulate and, where practicable, to control their former colonies, had at least bequeathed political structures, which their successors could develop, or not, as they chose. The Portuguese, on the other hand, had prepared nothing that could be bequeathed to their successors because they had no intention of quitting the continent. They did not believe in a ‘civilizing mission’ and they did not go through the motions of preparing their subjects for a future in which they would rule themselves.
The white question, what to do about the European settlers in Africa, was and would remain a major stumbling block in the path of African development for years to come. ‘The self-deception of Europeans in multi-racial societies is undoubtedly the major political problem still facing Africa. European supremacy is firmly maintained on an elaborate structure of propaganda both intentionally and unintentionally designed to reassure the white rulers of the justice of their cause, and to prevent the outside world from understanding what is really happening.’1 If that applied to South Africa and Rhodesia, it applied still more to the Portuguese in Angola and Mozambique. When at the beginning of the 1960s it became clear that Portugal was determined to hold on in Africa, the West demonstrated its collective racism by supporting Portugal’s efforts even if for form’s sake it also protested at some of the more blatant manifestations of Portuguese colonial brutality. Arms supplied to Portugal for NATO purposes by the United States, Britain, France, West Germany and Italy were to be regularly diverted without concealment or pretence for use in Portugal’s African wars. As Amilcar Cabral, the charismatic leader of the revolt in Portuguese Guinea, was to write of Portugal’s colonial policy at the beginning of the decade, ‘While hastily modifying the Portuguese constitution so as to escape the obligations of the UN Charter, the fascist colonialism of Portugal also took care to suppress all means of non-official information about its “overseas provinces”. A powerful propaganda machine was put to work at convincing international opinion that our peoples lived in the best of all possible worlds, depicting happy Portuguese “of colour” whose only pain was the yearning for their white mother-country, so sadly torn from them by the facts of geography. A whole mythology was assembled.’2 In the struggles that erupted at the beginning
of the 1960s two themes dominated Portuguese propaganda: its defence of Western values and its fight against the spread of Communism.
PORTUGAL’S STAND
Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who governed Portugal for 36 years from 1932 to 1968 and was the creator of the New State (Estado Novo), was responsible for his country’s Africa policy, announcing in 1961 in the face of escalating world opposition that Portugal would defend its African possessions; at that time he personally assumed control of the Ministry of War. Salazar’s colonial policies were based upon a narrow political and economic nationalism and a total refusal to contemplate self-government at a time when the rest of colonial Africa was undergoing rapid decolonization. The Portuguese ignored the lessons of Algeria, the Congo and Kenya and ‘It took over a decade of colonial wars, the collapse of the dictatorship and the return to democracy in Lisbon, before Portuguese Africa was set free. Here again, this singularly violent process of decolonization marked out the Portuguese colonies from the rest of Africa.’3 On 20 June 1960, as pressures mounted for independence throughout Africa, Salazar said: ‘Portugal will never agree to discuss self-determination for its overseas territories.’ In 1961 Dr Adriano Moreira, Minister for Overseas Provinces, announced that Africans in Portuguese territories were now full citizens of Portugal, effectively bringing an end to the indigenato system under which a minority could become assimilados. However, he said that power should always be exercised by those most fitted for it and the law should define the conditions under which anyone might intervene actively in political life. At that time, of Portugal’s 10.5 million African subjects, 99 per cent were illiterate, less than 4 per cent in Mozambique and less than 8 per cent in Angola could speak Portuguese, less than 5 per cent in Mozambique and less than 10 per cent in Angola lived in or around the white towns. Portuguese interest in the Africans of these territories was entirely centred upon their economic usefulness as labour.
When on 27 September 1968 Marcelo Caetano became Prime Minister, following Salazar’s incapacitating stroke, he appeared set to continue Salazar’s African policy.
Although miscegenation in Portuguese Africa was usually free of the sense of white shame that was too often a part of it elsewhere on the continent, it was still seen as an ‘erotic experience’ and was only turned into an aspect of colonial policy in retrospect. In the late nineteenth century, for example, the limited numbers of Africans who had achieved assimilado status found they faced increased racial discrimination as more Europeans came to settle in Angola. Whatever the stated aims of Portuguese colonialism, the pace was excruciatingly slow. In 1950, there were 30,000 assimilados in Angola out of a population of four million, and only 4,353 assimilados in Mozambique out of a population of 5,733,000. Thus, when the Angolan war began in 1961 less than 1 per cent of the African population had been ‘assimilated’. Although Salazar could tell the National Assembly proudly in 1960 that the Portuguese had been in Africa for 400 years, only 0.74 per cent of Angolans had become assimilados by that date, and only 0.44 per cent of Mozambicans and only 0.29 per cent of Guineans. Up to 1961, when the indigenato system was ended, an African applying for assimilado status had to be 18 years old, able to speak Portuguese, and be of good character (with a clean police and military record); then he could submit his application for the privilege. However, if he had a job in the colonial bureaucracy, had a high school education or was a merchant, in industry or business, those conditions were waived. As the Frelimo leader Eduardo Mondlane claimed: ‘The most that the assimilado system ever sets out to do is to create a few “honorary whites”, and this certainly does not constitute non-racialism.’4
When the process of decolonization got under way in the 1950s, Portugal (with Ireland and Greece) was one of the three poorest countries in non-Communist Europe and it needed its colonies both as a source of wealth and as lands to which poor Portuguese peasants could be sent to start a new life. As far back as 1928 an editorial in the South African Cape Times had suggested that Portuguese Africa was a guarantee of ‘any permanent and expanding national prosperity for which Portugal may hope’ and that, although Angola and Mozambique were then undeveloped and, in effect ‘costly hobbies’, the future held promise. The idea was to persist that Angola was a kind of national saviour of the modern era. By the beginning of the 1960s Angola and Mozambique had become profitable, ‘and because they have become profitable they have given Portugal, and not only the government there, a positive sense of accomplishment as a world power. These were to be significant considerations in the decisions of 1961’.5
The United Nations exercised considerable international authority during the 1950s on the side of the nationalists, in Africa and elsewhere, who were demanding an end to colonialism and by Christmas 1960, after five years of UN pressures, Portugal felt its isolation acutely. As a colonial power it stood very much alone since all the others (except for Franco’s Spain whose African possessions were negligible) had accepted decolonization in principle and were implementing it in practice. On 9 June 1961, after the explosion in Angola, the UN Security Council voted nine to nil, with Britain and France abstaining, to call upon Portugal to end its repressive measures against the African population of Angola. Salazar gave a defiant reply in the Portuguese National Assembly. On 30 January 1962, the UN General Assembly, by 99 votes to two (South Africa and Spain), with France abstaining, condemned Portugal’s ‘armed action against the people of Angola as the denial to them of human rights and fundamental freedom’. The Assembly called on Portugal to take immediate steps to speed the process of self-government. On 17 December 1962 the UN General Assembly by 82 to 7 (Belgium, Britain, France, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and the United States) with 13 abstentions and 8 absentees condemned Portuguese colonial policy as ‘inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations’ and called on all states to cease selling military equipment to the Portuguese government. The resolution upheld ‘without any reservation’ the claims of the Portuguese territories to immediate independence. These and similar UN pressures would be exerted upon Portugal until its final withdrawal from Africa in the mid-1970s.
The 1950s witnessed the dissolution of the British, French and Dutch empires though the process was to continue throughout the 1960s, but Salazar viewed with extreme scepticism the British hope of transforming the empire into the Commonwealth. His own policy was clear: ‘Portugal’s overseas territories were “Portugal Overseas”, an extension of Portuguese soil, and not colonies. To a hostile world, this proposition was simply a device for evading Portugal’s obligation under the UN Charter to lead her subject peoples to independence and thus to terminate her empire.’6 The Portuguese had first landed in Africa (and the Far East) five centuries earlier and a century before the other Western powers (except Spain) had even begun to envisage the creation of overseas empires. As a consequence, the Portuguese believed that he ‘belonged’ to the places he had settled. Although such intellectualization of Portuguese colonialism might be justified in relation to early settlements it could not be applied to the large groups of poor Portuguese peasants who had been sent out to Angola and Mozambique under government schemes in the years after 1945. In fact, the Portuguese ruling hierarchy followed three basic traditions: colonialism, authoritarianism and nationalism. In the early 1960s, ‘The Portuguese government blamed the rebellion on Communists without and Protestant missionaries within, and applied its propaganda efforts to establishing the image of a civilized and white Christian Portugal confronted by a savage heathen and black Africa. This was race war undisguised. There were public references to a war of extermination, and the Minister of Defence, presiding at the embarkation of soldiers for Angola, proclaimed: “You are not going to fight against human beings, but against savages and wild beasts.”’7 The conflicts in the Portuguese territories lasted as long as they did precisely because Portugal refused to entertain the idea of any negotiations to end colonialism. While soldiers were being despatched to Angola to fight ‘savages and wild beasts’ More
ira, the Minister for Overseas Provinces, was encouraging Portuguese settlers to go to Angola and on 28 August 1961 said, ‘We believe it necessary to increase the settlement of our Africa by European Portuguese, who will make their homes there and find in Africa a true continuation of their country.’8