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In general, the indigena masses are no problem, and the Portuguese doggedly insist that they never will be so long as the frontiers can be sealed off from the ferment in surrounding territories. Last June, when freedom came to the neighboring Congo, the Portuguese government rushed hundreds of tough commandos and seven spotter planes to Angola to help police the 1,000-mile-long Congolese-Angolan border. Similarly, when Tanganyika and Nyasaland took a long step toward black rule this summer, four companies of commandos were dispatched from Portugal to protect Mozambique from infection by the independence virus.
Whites Needed. Curiously enough, it is not among the blacks but among the Portuguese white settlers themselves (90,000 in Mozambique, 200,000 in Angola) that Salazar's ubiquitous secret police search hardest for political agitators. The African-born whites, like the first-generation Americans in the U.S.'s thirteen colonies, resent rule from the mother country. Five whites, a mulatto and a black drew stiff prison sentences in an Angola military court last August for distributing pamphlets demanding independence from Lisbon. Another 20, accused of "crimes against external security," were convicted last week, and a third batch of 19 now faces trial.
Salazar's long-range solution is to flood Angola and Mozambique with Portuguese immigrants, making them the only areas in Africa that are being actively colonized by a European power. An immigrant is offered an ample plot of land, two cows, two pigs and a flock of chickens. Some 13,000 new settlers went to Angola in 1959 alone. There are also plans for irrigation schemes on the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers, efforts to expand industry and agriculture so that when independence does come—a generation hence, say the Portuguese hopefully—the territories will remain firmly allied to the old country.
To this, African nationalists in other territories retort with jeers and open vows to foment revolt in both Angola and Mozambique as a means of "liberating our African brethren." The Africans last week successfully blocked Portugal as the West Europe candidate for a two-year term on the Security Council. They were also the moving force behind a U.N. General Assembly vote fortnight ago demanding that Portugal report on conditions in her overseas territories. Portugal has always refused to do so on the legalistic ground that its chunks of Africa are "provinces" of the homeland, not colonies at all. In both countries and back home in Portugal, the gagged press never prints news of unsavory disturbances, leaving Portugal's critics to spread their own stories of native uprisings; last week Moscow Radio accused the Portuguese of using napalm to kill native agitators.
Dictator Salazar insists that Portugal has no intention of leaving, no matter what the changes in the rest of Africa. In a speech last month he warned: "Our minds must be ready for one of the greatest ordeals of our history. Great sacrifices will be called for ... and, if necessary, the blood from our veins." A top Portuguese official in Angola put it more directly: "We have been here 500 years. We will stay another 500 years, and we don't care particularly how we do it."
* And, with its scattered Asian holdings (e.g., Goa, Macao, Portuguese Timor), the world's third largest after Britain and France.