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 António 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 Lourenço 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 palmatória—a stout, flat bat with holes in it. A dozen sharp blows of the palmatória on the open palm leave welts and blisters that last for weeks. Persistent troublemakers disappear quietly to the labor camps of São Tomé, Portugal's little island prison in the Gulf of Guinea.