COLONIAL REVOLUTIONS

To the Editors of The Crimson:

In his recent article ("Spinola Move Could End Proxy Issue," Crimson, July 30) on Harvard's perennial problems arising from its share holdings in Gulf Oil, Nicholas Lemann detracts from an otherwise informative story by citing misleading statements regarding self-determination in Portuguese colonies that he attributed to Professor Francis M. Rogers. It may well be that Professor Rogers's Euro-centric vision of the African experience, which has occasionally compelled him to describe Portuguese colonies as "provinces" in defiance of historically established practice as well as current United Nations parlance, has this time led him to overlook African initiative in the wars of liberation now in progress. I get this impression from Professor Rogers's characterization of President Antonio de Spinola of Portugal, whom he portrays as a benevolent ruler ready to hand out independence to the colonies at appropriate intervals.

On the contrary the weight of the evidence suggests that during the past thirteen years African nationalists in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique have waged a protracted armed struggle that has inflicted great damage to Portuguese military capability as much as it has weakened that country's economic vitality. My own assessment of the military situation in Mozambique, based on interviews I conducted there this summer as well as on eyewitness accounts and newspaper stories that abound in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia), persuades me to believe that nationalist forces of The Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) have an upper hand in the armed conflict with the Portuguese. This is an aspect of the Portuguese-African relations Lisbon tried to conceal during the first few days following the April 25th coup d'etat. Yet hardly a month after the overthrow of the Caetano regime Antonio de Almeida Santos, a member of the provisional government set up after the coup and a minister in charge of Portugal's overseas colonies, as reported in The New York Times of May 23, conceded that "there is no doubt that the majority of the people of Mozambique will choose independence." At that time the Spinola junta was smarting under the illusion that plebiscites could decide the issue of independence; but when African nationalists asserted that the quest for independence was irreversible, Portuguese pretensions were exposed. In Mozambique FRELIMO demonstrated its military prowess by launching the Tete offensive, which paralyzed several railway networks and enhanced its prestige.

It is significant that The Rhodesia Herald, a colonial paper which understandably records FRELIMO's victories with jaundiced eyes on account of the revolutionary fervour such successes are likely to engender among Southern African blacks, has nevertheless had to carry several grim stories of Portuguese military reverses. For example, on July 24, the paper reported:

A company of Portuguese troops led by their field commander has deserted to join Frelimo. The troops, based at Macossa, about 80 km from Vila de Gouveia, Central Mozambique, have drawn up a manifesto which has been sent to the Portuguese High Command in Nampula. The Manifesto tells High Command that the company has joined Frelimo as "the only valid party in this country..."

...The desertion is the culmination of rumblings of discontent which have been going through the armed forces in Mozambique for some time. Last week more than 2000 newly trained troops at Boane Barracks, outside Lourenco Marques, refused to move to the northern war zone.

Nor are press reports the only sources of information on the war front. Eyewitness accounts, once shorn of the rather rich vernacular imagery, do point to marked disarray among colonial forces in sharp contrast to FRELIMO's high morale and that movement's inexorable march to political independence.

Under the circumstances it seems obvious that the junta in Portugal, having lost the war on the ground, has neither the military capability nor the political clout to dictate the course of events in Mozambique; the junta's position is even weaker in Guinea-Bissau, where African nationalists unilaterally declared the country independent in September 1973 and have had the succour of international recognition by over eighty nations. African nationalists in Angola have, through the urgings of the Organization of African Unity, recently agreed to band together to fight for their independence. All in all the story of African resistance against Portuguese colonialism reveals remarkable indigenous initiative throughout the period of belligerency. To attribute the looming African victory to Spinola's reflections in his book ("Portugal and the Future") is to suggest that effects are more important than, or even unrelated to, causes. Surely Portugal's inability to dislodge African liberation movements is more significant than Spinola's admission of that fact! If Spinola's book does achieve a measure of immortality it will gain that distinction less for the role it played in the liberation of African colonies than the insight it affords scholars to understand the metamorphosis of a colonial general's soul.

Finally, a word about the caliber of leadership among African nationalist movements. Professor Rogers suggests that Guinea-Bissau alone has an able leadership ready to take over the reins of government and implies that Lisbon is in a position to groom leaders for both Mozambique and Angola. Apart from the fact that Lisbon has lost the colonial prerogative to decide "when the native is ready for independence," the fact of the matter is that thirteen years of fighting have produced a more seasoned leadership than four hundred years of Portuguese colonialism could master. In my opinion such leaders as Samora Machel in Mozambique, Holden Roberto, Agostinho Neto and Jonas Savimbi in Angola and Luiz Cabral in Guinea-Bissau--to mention a few--have demonstrated a capacity for leadership that seems superior to Lisbon's crop of leadership during the past fifty years.

J. Mutero Chirenje,

Assistant Professor

of Afro-American Studies