Mozambique - dark past, bright future. (Lest we Forget).

To be white and a dedicated Africanist is only one more example that in the modern world, the colour of one's skin is now less relevant than what you stand for. I owe to Mozambique my early attachment to Africa and African democratic causes.

To use a genteel English expression, it was nice of Tony Blair to visit Mozambique on his way to the world Summit in Johannesburg. It is a pity, however, that the press entourage that flew with him, hardly mentioned that, that former Portuguese colony has had, since the 1 990s, the distinction of being one of the rare members of the Commonwealth which was not a former British possession.

But then, the former Portuguese empire, like small Portugal itself, through the six-centuries-old Anglo-Portuguese alliance, was politically like a satellite of the almighty empire that gave Britain the status of a superpower until world war II.

A secret clause in a further Anglo-Portuguese alliance treaty in 1889 foresaw the closure of the port of Lourenco Marques (now Maputo) to the besieged landlocked "Boer" republic of Transvaal, thus aiding the victory in the Anglo-Beer war that a century ago completed the British conquest of Southern Africa.

Economically, with the older ports of Maputo and Beira, and more recently Nacala, being the gateways to the sea for the landlocked hinterland--extending from the gold-rich Transvaal up to the copper-rich Katanga, across Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Mozambique--found its main sources of income from ports and railway services, the sea-seeking white settler tourism from South Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as from the export of "native" black labourers, recruited by the Wittersrand Native Labour Association from around South Africa.

This, under a temporary contract system that (while preventing the creation of a local working class and all the pension and other rights that go with it), made the man-intensive South African gold industry one of the best study-cases of the Marxist theories on the exploitation of 'colonial labour' anywhere in the world. I myself, while a young banking clerk, in charge of economic reporting, reading company accounts, found that if black labourers earned one tenth of the salaries of white technical and administrative staff, there would be no profits or economic viability.

Black labour was turned into gold, as it were. I can write this fluently, because as it happens, my life long involvement with Africa, and Africanism, are not just a humanistic abstraction but a life long experience.

This included a 10-year long career as a banking economist in Mozambique and inter-disciplinary knowledge that entitles me to believe that Mozambique, like most of Africa, for all its dark past, has the potential for a bright future, when its as yet untapped human and economic resources are developed and modern technology allows to make up for lost time. Hence, partly, the reason for Blair's visit.

Since I am now an old man, and my life became intertwined with the transition from colonial rule to independence, my long biography reflects my Africanism. In short, my father was a young settler in Beira, Mozambique, when he died--aged only 30--of malaria, in 1929.

Contrary to the west African axiom that "the mosquito had saved west Africans from whites", many white working class settlers risked their lives in the development of other equally inhospitable areas of the continent. In fact, according to modern Mozambique guides, in 1929, when lions still roamed in the suburbs of Beira, malaria was so rampant that "the company that built the railway line to Rhodesia (for which my young father worked) lost 60% of its European staff to malaria within two years". My mother was left with three children, my two sisters and myself, then only five weeks old. After a childhood in Portugal, comparatively as poor and hard as that of most of African children, I was sent to Beira at 17 and after, serving military conscription in Boane, near Maputo, I got a job with Barclays Bank, in 1949, just as it was abbreviating its full surname Dominion, Colonial and Overseas, to Barclays Bank DCO. I welcomed this as one of the signs that the "winds of change" were being felt at the headquarters i n London even before they reached Southern Africa.

As I have described in books and other writings, I used my 10-year career in the Bank, which included as I said, the task of economic reporting, to satisfy my natural curiosity concerning "colonial sociology", as it were.

Having secretly been a member of the Portuguese clandestine resistance to the Salazar regime--which I myself described as "national colonialist" by allusion to Nazism and Fascism--I became the local representative of the leader of the anti-Salazar movement, General Humberto Deigado.

This gave my access to a copy of a famous report by Henrique Galvao, a former high ranking administrative officer in Angola, on labour conditions in the Portuguese colonies. The report, concerning the practical implications of the Statute of Mozambique, stated that only the dead are exempted from forced labour"; accordingly, blacks not qualifying for citizenship; by assimilation" through "Portuguese" education, were like a common pool of state slaves, without even the life-long subsistence obligations that the old private ownership provided.

In other words, the "indigenato" system, as I myself took the care to study by visiting the so-called "shibalos" recruited for public services, ports, railways, road building as well as "contracted workers" for labour intensive plantations or "exported" to the Rand (now Gauteng) mining industries, was Portugal's own version of the colonial systems that had been adopted all over British, French and German African colonies for the post slavery colonial exploitation of poverty-stricken indigenous Africans, under the cover of a supposedly "civilising enterprise" which to this day, as evidence shows, has only met with a very limited success.

Curiously enough, even before I ever travelled outside the Portuguese colonial world, turned by the Salazar regime into a single state, comprising Portugal and "Overseas Provinces"; widely far flung and varying in size, the whole thing did not make any sense to me.

How dare we, Portuguese, a small nation, the majority of which were oppressed, rule over "provinces" 22 times as big as our own country? How could we repeat in Angola and Mozambique, with their overwhelmingly black population, new Brazils?

Despite the anti-discriminatory laws, and the periodical changes in the governor-ships and high-ranking officialdom sent from Lisbon, Salazar's empire -- without imperialism -- was a fantasy heading towards a form of apartheid, contrary to Portuguese Catholic traditions.

In fact, although a precocious agnostic, one of my first mentors had been none other than the Bishop of Beira, Soares de Resende, who under pastoral letters entitled "Anti-Communist Order" managed to expose and condemn the inequities of the system, trying to spread the message that true Christianity was the best pre-emptive defence against communism.

Eventually, having been framed and arrested by the Salazar regime's PIDE state police and subjected to an inquisitorial process, the regime ended up by discovering that I had been the "moral author", as they put it, of articles and studies expounding my own doctrines.

In these I held that since, without censorship and forced labour, the Portuguese ruling class could not hold the empire, decolonisation was a common cause for both the oppressed black natives in the "Overseas Provinces" and the majority of white natives in Portugal.

One of the main "pieces" of the two separate PIDE files against me, was a report by a young American professor, Marvin Harris, ("Portugal's African Wards") who was to become one of my closest friends. The publication of this report by the American Committee on Africa in 1959, became a pioneering contribution for the abolition of the "Native Statute" in 1961. Marvin Harris was to become one of America's foremost social anthropologists.

As for myself, I was arrested, held incommunicado, separated from my wife and six-year-old daughter, deported to Lisbon, where I was interned in a mental hospital. With the help of the Portuguese underground resistance, I escaped to London where, after asking a Home Office official to make consular enquiries about my past, I asked for and was given political asylum.

I hope I have made the best use of it in the pursuit of my libertarian ideals. I am now the oldest outside contributor of the BBC World Service. As for my young wife, she had to move to South Africa, then, believe it or not, still freer than Salazar's Portugal.

The daughter I had to leave behind, while I lived without a passport and unable to travel, eventually married an Afrikaner, and, now with three grandsons and (so far) three great granddaughters, all my descendent family is white African. My Africanism, therefore, is one of the many "webs woven by empires" as one of Portugal's poets, Fernando Pessoa, put it.

To be white and a dedicated Africanist is only one more example that in the modern world the colour of one's skin is now less relevant than what you stand for. I owe to Mozambique my early attachment to Africa and African democratic causes.