Land of Brotherly Love

Reporters hustled to Portugal's torpid African colony of Angola last month in the belief that it was the destination of the cruise ship Santa Maria, seized by Portuguese Rebel Henrique Galvao and his 28 men. When the captured ship was tamely interned at Recife in Brazil, many reporters went back to their normal posts, but seven stayed on in Angola to see what they could see.

Governor General Alvaro da Silva Tavares was proud of the unruffled calm displayed by his larger-than-Texas colony. In his chandelier-hung office in the capital city of Luanda, he told the few remaining reporters that the Santa Maria incident had united his people as never before. "Even those who don't agree with us are indignant at this attack on the Portuguese nation," he said, and boasted of the brotherly love existing between 200,000 Portuguese settlers and 4,300,000 Africans. The governor general had one cautionary note: "We are aware of the threat of Communists and international agitators. We know that if we are divided we would fall. But we aren't divided."

Marching Machetes. Scarcely three days later, bands of men armed with catanas, wickedly sharp Angolan machetes, padded through the steamy quiet of predawn Luanda. Four Portuguese policemen were surprised in a parked car and hacked to death. Some 50 of the raiders made a sudden assault on the midtown military prison but were cut down by machine guns. Others attacked a police headquarters close to Luanda's huge African city of shacks and grass huts; police officers tumbled from bed to fight for their lives. Three days later, the casualty list was curtly announced: six members of the police force, one African army corporal and 14 attackers of undisclosed race had been killed; 53, mostly Africans, were wounded, and some 100 arrested.

Thus, to the sound of guns, Angola woke from its sleep of centuries. Angola's dream world was founded on the fond Portuguese belief that there was no bitterness between white and black because there was no discrimination. Any black man in the colony who could learn to speak good Portuguese and adopt the white man's ways could acquire "assimilated status" with all the rights of a citizen of the Portuguese republic. Only some 40,000 of Angola's 4,300,000 blacks have achieved assimilation.

There are advantages. Debtors' prisons are only for "natives." Assimilado children are admitted to government schools; children of natives are not--in fact, they are allowed to attend mission-run schools for only three years. And it is the natives who are subject to forced labor. If they protest, they are beaten; if they run away, members of their families are imprisoned. When the International Labor Organization sponsored a measure banning forced labor, Portugal duly enacted a law forbidding the practice, but advised colonial administrators not to worry.

Chain Reaction. When the funeral of the slain policemen was held last week in Angola, Governor General Tavares "suggested" that all Angolans of whatever color would want to pay their respects to "these defenders of the nation." Most of Luanda's 50,000 Europeans, some of its 50,000 mulattoes, and almost none of its 120,000 Africans responded. Women in lacy veils, children and uneasy men swarmed into the big walled cemetery on the outskirts of town. In still another show of friendship between races in Angola, Governor General Tavares and the army commander, both in dress whites, accompanied the first coffin, which contained the body of the African soldier slain by the attackers.

No one seems to know what happened next. Some said an African went berserk, and his wild screams set off a chain reaction of panic among the jampacked whites. Whatever started it, there were shouts and screams from the road outside, then pistol shots. The mourners in the cemetery ran wildly over the graves. Men picked up sticks, clubs and stones, began cursing and crying, "Mata Todos!" (Kill them all.!).

In the end, the frenzied crowd saw any African as an enemy. One was killed outside the cemetery gate, and for half an hour passing Portuguese would stop and flail the lifeless body. With police help, a terrified African woman and her children escaped in a hail of stones. An African man was cornered in a shed across the road and shot to death. Another was chased to the roof of a warehouse, ran wildly along the ridge as whites took potshots at him like a duck in a shooting gallery. Ten Africans died in the rioting.

Foreign Devils. What had happened in Angola seems beyond the comprehension of Portuguese officials, who are agreed upon only one thing: that it cannot be their own fault. Governor Tavares said it was all the work of "Communist agitators," and promised to produce documents proving that the attacks had been organized abroad. Days passed without any documents. Lisbon declared that guns made in Czechoslovakia had been used by the attackers. A leading Luanda newspaper found another villain--foreign newspaper editors. It headlined a story that foreign reporters who asked permission to leave Angola were ordered by their head offices "to stay because important events were going to happen."

In the tense atmosphere, a Portuguese army lieutenant one night shot and gravely wounded a British reporter because he was "prowling" in the lieutenant's garden. Several reporters were arrested and deported; cameras were seized and film was confiscated. Photographers' exposed negatives flown out of Angola were delayed in Lisbon long enough to destroy the undeveloped pictures--possibly with X rays or fluoroscopes. When the film reached home offices and was developed, it was blank. At week's end the jittery Portuguese reported beating off another assault on a Luanda prison and killing seven of the attackers.

In Portugal itself, aging but agile Dictator Antonio Salazar was having trouble with his own aftermath of the Santa Maria. He decided to allow people to let off a little steam. Newspaper editors in Oporto and Lisbon were given permission to publish an open letter addressed to the government by three opposition leaders. "Speaking in the name of many we know," the petition asked for "a government capable of inspiring the confidence of the country," and demanded "restitution to the Portuguese of their fundamental liberties--those same liberties which the constitution promises and which have become, to our regret, a dead letter."

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