A Sober Commitment to Liberation?’ Mozambique and South Africa 1974–1979

Portugal, poor, 40 per cent illiterate and anachronic, despised by her own allies, became an embarrassment to Europe, appreciated only for her natural strategic usefulness to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Her colonial policies were constantly assailed at the United Nations and elsewhere during the 1960s. Despite their fundamentally opposing policies toward their African majority, Portugal and South Africa drew closer to each other. While Portugal theoretically adhered to the policy of assimilation (based on the premise that all men are born equal), South Africa practised a policy of legal discrimination and segregation. Whereas Portugal publicly claimed that her aim was to create a united multi-racial society in a tight Luso-African empire where all citizens would be treated equally as Portuguese citizens, South Africa openly advocated a system of apartheid based on race, colour, and ethnic origineuphemistically called 'separate development' designed to split the black population into homelands or Bantustans-leaving South Africa proper for whites only. However, the lack of a serious application of the policy of assimilation by Portugal (which in the final analysis implied an inferiority of the African culture) in Mozambique and other colonies, and the obstinacy of the Portuguese government to continue to hold on to its old empire in an age of nationalism and independence, made the overall situation in Mozambique not too different from the reality prevalent in South Africa. As more African territories achieved independence, Portugal and South Africa remained the strongest bastions of white supremacy and 'western civilization' in Africa. They cemented their ties and confronted hostile world opinion together. When the war of liberation erupted in Angola (1961), Guin&-Bissau (1963), and Mozambique (1964), both white regimes felt threatened and vowed to stop these 'winds of change'. The liberation movements' rhetoric singled out

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