The Shadow Of Portugal

I was attending the Third Pan-African Congress and I walked to the Palacio dos Cortes
with Magellan. It was in December, 1923, and in Lisbon. I was rather proud. You see
Magalhães (to give him the Portuguese spelling) is a mulatto – small light-brown and
his hands quick with gestures. Dr. José de Magalhães is a busy man: a practising specialist;

professor in the School of Tropical Medicine whose new buildings are rising; and
above all, deputy in the Portuguese Parliament from São Tomé,3 Africa. Thus this
Angolese4 African, educated in Lisbon and Paris, is one of the nine colored members
of European Parliaments. Portugal has had colored ministers and now has three
colored deputies and a senator. I saw two Portuguese in succession kissing one colored
member on the floor of the house. Or was he but a dark native? There is so much
ancient black blood in this peninsula.

Between the Portuguese and the African and near African there is naturally no
“racial” antipathy – no accumulated historical hatreds, dislikes, despisings. Not that
you would likely find a black man married to a Portuguese of family and wealth, but
on the other hand it seemed quite natural for Portugal to make all the blacks of her
African empire citizens of Portugal with the rights of the European born.
Magalhães and another represent São Tomé. They are elected by black folk independent
of party. Again and again I meet black folk from São Tomé – young students,
well-dressed, well-bred, evidently sons of well-to-do if not wealthy parents, studying
in Portugal, which harbors annually a hundred such black students.
São Tomé illustrates some phases of European imperialism in Africa. This industrial
rule involves cheap land and labor in Africa and large manufacturing capital in Europe, with a resultant opportunity for the exercise of pressure from home investors and the
press. Once in a while – not often – a feud between the capitalists and the manufacturers
at home throws sudden light on Africa. For instance, in the Boer War the “Cocoa
Press” backed by the anti-war Liberals attacked the Unionists and exposed labor conditions in South Africa. In retaliation, after the war and when the Liberals were in power, the Unionists attacked labor conditions in the Portuguese cocoa colonies.
When I heard that an English Lieutenant-Colonel was lecturing in Lisbon, on this
very island and its cocoa, I hastened to listen. As he talked, I remembered. He was
soothing the Portuguese.

The Colonel was an avowal reactionary, a hater of the “Aborigines Protection
Society,”5 Nevinson, Morel and all their ilk, and his explanations were most illuminating.
It would seem that “little Englanders” backed by the Cadbury “Cocoa” press of
“pacifist” leanings, made a severe attack on the Unionists during the Boer War and
particularly attacked labor conditions on the Rand; besides opposing Chamberlain,
“Empire preference” and protection. When the Liberals came into power in 1906 the
Unionists in retaliation began to attack labor conditions in Portuguese São Tomé,
where Cadbury and others got their cocoa and made the profits out of which they
supported the “Daily Mail.” The Colonel declared that labor conditions in São Tomé
were quite ideal, whereas Nevinson and others had declared that they constituted
black slavery. The point that interests us, however, is that the English cocoa manufacturers were forced by frantic efforts to justify themselves and deny all responsibility.

They therefore proceeded to say that it wasn’t true and if it was, the Portuguese were
responsible. Under cover of this bitter controversy an extraordinary industrial revolution
took place: a boycott was placed on Portuguese cocoa the world over, and under
the mists of recrimination the center of the cocoa-raising industry was transferred
from Portuguese to English soil – from São Tomé and Príncipe6 to British Nigeria and
the Gold Coast. Before 1900 less than one thousand tons of cocoa had been raised
in British West Africa annually; by 1920 this had risen to one hundred and seventy
thousand tons.

Of the real facts behind this rush of smoke I only know: that in the end two new
groups of black folk appeared above the horizon – the black proprietors in São Tomé
who still raise the best cocoa in the world and who, freed of the overlordship of English
capital, have achieved a certain political independence in the Portuguese empire; and
the black peasant proprietors of the cocoa farms of Nigeria who have performed one
of the industrial miracles of a century and become the center of a world industry. In
this development note if you please the characteristic of all color-line fights – the tearing
across of all rational division of opinion: here is Liberalism, anti-slavery and cocoa
capitalism fighting Toryism, free Negro proprietors and economic independence.
Thus with a democratic face at home, modern imperialism turns a visage of stern and
unyielding autocracy toward its darker colonies. This double-faced attitude is difficult
to maintain and puts hard strain on the national soul that tries it.

Thus in this part of Portuguese Africa the worst aspects of slavery melted away and
colonial proprietors with smaller holdings could afford to compete with the great
planters; wherefore democracy, both industrially and politically, took new life in black Portugal. Intelligent black deputies appeared in the Portuguese parliaments, a hundred
black students studied in the Portuguese universities and a new colonial code
made black men citizens of Portugal with full rights. But in Portugal, alas! no adequate
democratic control has been established, nor can be with an illiteracy of seventy-five
percent; so that while the colonial code is liberally worded, and economic power has
brought some freedom in São Tomé, unrestrained Portuguese and English capital still
rules in parts of Angola and in Portuguese East Africa, where no resisting public opinion
in England has yet been aroused. This shadow hangs heavily over Portugal.

The African shadows of Spain and Italy are but drafts on some imperial future not
yet realized, and touch home industry and democracy only through the war budget.
But Spain is pouring treasure into a future Spanish Morocco, and Italy has already
poured out fabulous sums in the attempt to annex north and northeast Africa, especially
Abyssinia. The prince who is to-day visiting Europe is the first adult successor of
that black Menelik7 who humbled Italy to the dust at Adowa8 in 1896. Insurgent
Morocco, independent Abyssinia and Liberia are, as it were, shadows of Europe on
Africa unattached, and as such they curiously threaten the whole imperial program.
On the one hand, they arouse democratic sympathy in homeland which makes it difficult
to submerge them; and again, they are temptations to agitation for freedom and
autonomy on the part of other black and subject populations. What prophet can tell
what world-tempest lurks in these cloud-like shadows? Then, there is Belgium.