Witness to TerrorAuthor(s): F. Ian GilchristSource: Africa Today, Vol. 10, No. 4, Angola: Witness to Terror (Apr., 1963), pp. 4-7Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184411 .

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Growing up in Angola, he was...

WITNESS TO TERROR

Leopoldville Republic of the Congo

The Chairman Committee on Decolonization United Nations, New York.

Dear Sir: I believe that by virtue of some of the experiences

that I have had, I may be able to contribute some in- formation which may be of value to the Committee in its consideration of Angola.

My father first went to Angola in about 1930 as a Protestant medical missionary. I myself was born in Canada while my parents were on furlough in 1935; but at the age of three months, I too went to Angola. I returned to Canada in 1940 and remained there through 1946. In 1947 we returned to Angola. I re- mained there until 1951.

The Angola that I grew up in was not a pleasant place. There was always suffering and always fear.

Central Angola has a temperate climate; a climate cool enough in the dry season to produce frost. In the wet season the rains are heavy and prolonged. The staple crop is maize, which is raised by the crudest agricultural. methods with the crudest sort of instru- ments. It's not that the people do not appreciate better methods, because w~hen some are so fortunate as to have access to something like a plow, others are quick to take advantage. But few can afford such things and so they continue to scratch the earth with hoes and sticks to try to coax forth enough to quiet the belly . . . and the ever-hungry tax collector.

The train which travels between Lobito and Katanga burns wood. So every dry season when the country is a tinder-box, the showers of sparks set the country aflame. Then the rains come and wash the precious minerals and topsoil into the sea. Every year the land becomes less fertile, crops become harder to raise, taxes become harder to. pay, and the people become hungrier. The trees are small and stunted. When the wind blows, the earth flies as a new desert prepares itself. And everywhere there are the deep, ugly gashes of erosion.

My friends were always hungry. Find a few cater- pillars, catch some flying ants, and come back from the nearby Post with tears in their eyes because they saw the big dogs kept by the Portuguese eating meat.

They worked hard to pay the taxes-about 150 angolares per male head more than 12 years old. But most people earned less than 50 angolares. Then there were the unusual taxes. If a Portuguese community wanted to hold a party, for instance, a special area tax would be imposed; and it was a choice of paying or going to jail. And there were special taxes for per- mission to drum (drumming is a tradition of the people) and many other varieties of special taxes.

Sickness was prevalent; the infant mortality rate was probably close to 90 percent.

Parties of police used to stage night raids on vil- lages frequently-to terrorize and to steal. Often men would be taken off to prison without reason. I remem- ber one night when one of my friends was taken away. When he came back the next day, he showed me a cob of corn he had had in his pocket. He said: "I had this corn, and I had not eaten for some time, but because I was afraid, I could not eat even one kernel." In the prison they were subjected to various tortures, and he explained how they had been forced to mastur- bate into a hollow brick.

It was our habit to make trips to various villages on Sundays, but we would always have to stop at the Police post to pay our respects to the' Chef de Posto . . . a most unpleasant duty, for often we would be enter- tained by the screams of men being beaten in the jail.

And there was convict labor everywhere. I remem- ber one trip to the lovely and modern city of Nova Lisboa when I saw a line of little boys, aged 10 to 11 years, all roped together, dressed in tatters and rags, working on the street under the watchful eye of a guard armed with rifle, bayonet and whip.

4 - AFRICA TODAY

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Women usually buillt the roads because so many of the men were away. Valiantly the women of Angola have built thousands of kilometers of roads with their little primitive hoes, and their babies strapped to their backs. Roads which so regularly are washed away by the merciless rain, and must be laboriously recon- structed. A friend once told me of an incident which

I

occurred near to where we lived. Women were working away on one of these chronically disrupted roads. One had set her baby down by the roadside to sleep. While she was working, the child awoke and started to toddle towards her. The guard ordered him back, so as not to disturb the women's work. Uncomprehending, he cQntinued on. The guard picked up th6 child and with one blow killed him.

Plantations were springing up everywhere-sisal, eucalyptus, citrus, etc., so that men were always go- ing away to work on these. But a far greater number of men went on contract labor. Everyone feared it. So many who, went away never came back, particularly those who went to Sao Tome. I remember once a rela- tively well-dressed man falling at my feet. On his knees he said: "Please help me. I had nothing, but I worked hard and planted a few orange trees, and did well. See, I have even been able to buy a bicycle. Now they have said I must go on Contract."

As the trucks carrying the "contrat4dos" to the Coast used to pass by, one could often hear the men softly singing the laments of a gentle but oppressed people.

At Lobito, on the Coast, the ships would sit in har- bor for several days on end, with men crowded on their decks, awaiting the trip to Sao Tome. Also in Lobito, 20,000 Africans lived on the mud flats in the most abject poverty and squalor-with four fresh- water taps among them. The few thousand whites lived in the lap of luxury. Ten years later, Lobito had

changed little, except that there were more whites, and even a few poor whites living in the African slums.

A minority of Africans aspired to "Portuguesesa- tion." The more Portuguese a man's attitude and be- havior, the better was the treatment he received; so that by-and-large he came to despise his own culture. The smart man was the one who wore pants, no mat- ter how tattered, rather than a loincloth, who spoke his native tongue with an assumed Portuguese ac- cent, and who refrained from any manual labor except that forced upon him.

But though the Angolans have been debased by five hundred years of Portuguese barbarism, they have not been destroyed as men-a fact which the Special Committee of the International Labor Organization does not seem to have appreciated. For those who can know them intimately and gain their confidence, there is the reward of discovering a wisdom and human comprehension which is nothing short of wonderful.

As to the Portuguese . . . towards their fellow whites, they were usually polite and kind. But for the Africans, they had only contempt. They boasted of Portuguese civilization and history, of how it was the greatest the world has known. An exeeption to this rule were the old settler families, some of whom had been in the country for hundreds of years. These often took African women and assumed a peasant, agricul- tural way of life. The- mulatto children of these unions, however, almost invariably rejected their mother's race and became Portuguese, in every way. Very often they became as hard and cruel to Africans as the Portuguese.

Few Portuguese respected an African's life. On my way to Portugal in 1951, I shared a cabin with two Portuguese men: One of them persistently expounded on the necessity of exterminating the blacks. He per- sonally had killed three Africans.

Portuguese with a professional education are rare. A few hospitals will admit Africans, but the doctors are not very good, and few Africans go to them. One medical officer of my acquaintance was a narcotics addict. In an area where kwashiorker (a diet disease) was rife, the medical officer noted in his report that nutrition was "good." In the same area the ancilosta infestation rate is better than 80 percent. The same officer expressed surprise and disbelief that ancilosto- miasis could exist because there were "no mines in the area." Diagnoses of smallpox are not accepted for official report.

Nurses are also poorly trained. State nurses are not even allowed to take blood pressure-for they don't know how.

At the conclusion of my medical studies in 1961, I applied to the Portuguese Consulate in Canada for a visa to enter Angola. I unexpectedly received a 90-day visitor's visa for my wife and myself in July. In August I flew to Angola and my family followed a month later.

APRIL 1963 5

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The important events which occurred in Angola in the previous months were told to me by someone I trust and who had been present at the time.

It was just before Easter that the rumor spread suddenly among the whites that on Easter Sunday the blacks were to rise and kill them. Because of the swiftness and completeness with which the rumor spread, it seemed likely that it was spread by the authorlties. In any case, the effect was immediate and terrible. White communities formed themselves into vigilante groups which terrorized the country-side, shooting Africans indiscriminately. At the same time, the authorities began to arrest men who were edu- cated or otherwise leaders of their people. Most of these were shot. In the Andulo area, many were shot for simply being found with pencils or pens-these indicated that their owner could write and hence was potentially dangerous. The Balombo and Bocoio areas suffered particularly.

The whites of Bailundo similarly organized a vigi- lante party which visited my father's mission each night, searching the buildings and interrogating the staff. One night, he heard a particularly disturbing commotion. He jumped out of bed and found the Ad- ministrator arresting his entire nursing staff (about a dozen nurses). The Administrator explained that he was actually doing the men a favor because the vigi- lantes were on their way down to kill them. They were taken to Nova Lisoba and detained for more than a year. Two were later released. All had been arrested on the charge. of conspiring together to raise funds to send a spokesman to the United Nations. It is be- lieved that they had at least three separate trials on this charge, and that they were often beaten. In sum- mer 1962, they were transferred to a concentration camp in Pouthern Angola near Vila Serpa Pinto. The Nova Lisoba PIDE chief confided that final judgment would come from Luanda, and that there was "no hope." Many others suffered similar fates, including many "assimilados," who were told:- "We'll take the pants off of all you bastards." They were not treated differently from ordinary Africans.

When I arrived in Luanda in August 1961, soldiers and police were everywhere. Later, on visiting the Colonato of Cela (a Portuguese "colony".), I saw barbed wires and towers with searchlights surrounded the place. This colonato was originally to have been made up strictly of whites. While I was there I actu- ally did see a white man working on the road-the only time in all my years in Angola that I ever saw a Portuguese doing manual labor. But of the 120 families for whom the colonato was intended, only some 70 remained, the rest having found it more profitable to move elsewhere, and African labor had been brought in.

Bailu.ndo, the community of my youth, wa sur- sounded by big searchlights facing the surrounding country~side. In nearby communities, doors and win- dows of churches and warehouses had been boarded so that the whites could sleep in them at night. Many

other communities I visited were similarly fortified with sandbags, barbed wire, and slit trenches. And all this in an area where not one African had attacked or menaced any white, even in self-defense.

Later in Bailundo and other large centers, the ac- tivities of the vigilantes were taken over by the Mo- bile Police. And so the night patrols and interrogations have been continued.

Besides these developments, Angola had not changed much in my 10 years' absence. There were more whites The people were, if anything, poorer; the villages were- quite empty of men; contract labor groups now were made up mostly of small boys and even women. At Vila Mariano Machado, I saw a group of probably 200 boys, 11 and 12 years old, awaiting shipment to the north to work the coffee plantations.

I met many people who had escaped from the region of the River Cuanza. Their uniform story was one of wholesale slaughter along the banks of the river-to prevent the epidemic of rebellion from contaminating the rest of Angola. Often the heads of people were impaled on poles.

After the initial panic and terror of April and May 1961, the authorities gradually resumed control from the vigilantes. The process of elimination became more discreet. People were less often rounded up and shot in large numbers. It became more usual to arrest a single individual and take him away for "trial." This is the pattern followed to the present. Leaders and the educated elite are regularly picked up and taken away, a much less disturbing, but equally effective form of genocide.

There is no doubt that the whole Portuguese phil- osophy has changed within the last 10 years. Where there originally was severe paternalistic exploitation, there is now genocide. Angola must be maintained as a white province of Portugal. So immigration f om- Europe is encouraged.

Letters coming from Angola are now stamped with the following slogan: ";Angola, discovered and civilized

6 AFR^IA TODAY

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by the Portuguese, will be forever Portuguese." The old Colon families who once had some influence

have now been drowned out by the new white immi- grants with no ties and no sympathy with the country.

D * *

At the end of 1961, we were given four days to leave Angola. We went to Sierra Leone. After a year there, we came to the Congo to work with refugees under the auspices of the Emergency Relief for An- gola program of the American Committee on Africa.

I have not, in this communication, attempted to give the total Angolan picture from all points of view. I have tried only to present that part which I have

known intimately. There is much that can be learned of past history and modern atrocities from more quali- fied sources. But it is my hope that this letter may help the Committee know something more of the An- golan tragedy, for it is my earnest belief that the Portuguese policy of genocide and white immigration may very well succeed if something is not done quickly to stay their madness. My communication is contrib- uted freely but with a heavy heart because I am not unaware of the likely consequences to members of my family and all my friends still in Angola.

Sincerely, F. IAN GILCHRIST, M.D.

IN MEMORIAM

MELVILLE JEAN HERSKOVITS

M ELVILLE JEAN HERSKOVITS died February 25, 1963, at his home in Evanston, Illinois. He had

been released from the hospital on February 20 after what appeared to have been an excellent recovery from a stroke on January 18. Shortly before, he had returned from Accra, where he had delivered a major plenary paper at the First International Congress - of Africanists, December 12-17, 1962, on "The Develop- ment of African Studies in the West." This was a fitting climax to the long and productive career of the acknowledged founder of African studies in the United States.

More than anyone else, and almost singlehandedly at first, he struggled to develop an interest in Africa among American social scientists, who, until World War II, dismissed it as too remote and unimportant. He often recalled that even anthropologists gave little attention to his papers on Dahomey in the 30s, and that there was no one with whom he could discuss Africa at the anthropological meetings. Today the African Studies Association in the United States, only six years old, has more than a thousand members drawn from a variety of disciplines. Herskovits was the first President of the Association, and his passing marks the end of an era in African studies.

His first field work in Africa in 1931 led to "An

Outline of Dahomean Religious Belief" (1933), "Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom" (1937), and more recently "Dahomean Narrative" (1958). He co-edited "Continuity and Change in Afri- can Cultures" (1959), based on the work of his stu- dents in Africa. In addition to many shorter visits, he spent two years, 19'53 and 1957, traveling through subsaharan Africa; and from these trips came two works that gave him great satisfaction: "United States Foreign Policy: Africa" (1959), a study pre- pared for the Committee on Foreign Relations of the United States Senate, and his most recent book, "The Human Factor in Changing Africa" (1962).

Herskovits' interest in Africa goes back to his early days at Columbia University, and to his contacts with Franz Boas, to whom he acknowledged a lasting debt. He was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, on September 10, 1895, and spent part of his youth in El Paso, Texas. He received his Ph.B. from the University of Chicago in 1920, and went on to Columbia, where he completed his M.A. in 1921 and his Ph.D. in 1923. Boas was

WILLIAM R. BASCOM, an important Africanist and head of the Robert H. Lowie Museum at the Uni- versity of California (Berkeley), was one of Pro- fessor Herskovits' first students.

APRIL 1993 7

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