Nkokolani, May 12, 1895
Your Excellency Counselor José d’Almeida
Today I took stock of the arms held at this post. Just as this building cannot be called a barracks, neither can we call the rusty pile of junk here weaponry. It was because they were worthless that they escaped the late Sardinha’s lust for profit. The situation is as follows: with the exception of the rifles that I myself brought, there isn’t a single firearm of any use to us. The natives are convinced that there is a powerful arsenal here. Let them go on believing. This lie is the only purpose our outpost here possesses.
I have heard it said that not far from here, in the village of Nhagondel, there is a military post in exactly the same situation. The ruins and the state of abandonment are identical to this one. The only difference is that there they appointed a poor black as sergeant. In view of this other case, I appreciate the respect shown me. If it weren’t for the letters I write you, Excellency, my solitude would be unbearable. God forgive me, but I would have preferred a thousand times to have stayed in prison in Porto than face this harrowing exile. Your Excellency may not read my missives. You may never honor them with a reply. But I shall persevere with these manuscripts just as a drowning man obstinately keeps surfacing. Only when I am writing do I feel alive and capable of dreaming.
Do you know one of my rare sources of entertainment here? It is to inspect the munitions held at this post. They may be old and obsolete, but when I touch them, I rediscover a passion I felt during my years at military school. And among the old papers left here, I have found literature on the wars between the English and the Zulus. From my reading, it has become clear that one of the greatest disadvantages for the Europeans was the time it took for them to reload their rifles. The time it took was more than a delay; it was deadly.
I have to confess that I was astounded by our decision to buy an Austrian repeat-action rifle known as a Kropatschek. Not because of the gun itself, but because we made such a decision. We are the first to use the Kropatschek in Africa. Let me explain myself better, before Your Excellency loses his patience and stops reading. It is just that when we made our choice we won an unexpected victory. But you know who were the first to be defeated? It was we Portuguese. If I tell you this rifle defeated us, it is because it overcame our provincial tendency to imitate the English in everything. Forgive the petulance of my conclusion, but this is how any war is won: by causing us, first and foremost, to defeat ourselves.
As Your Excellency knows only too well, in Portugal there are increasing protests against the expense incurred by the war in Africa. The irony is that there is no war at all here. And if there is to be one, we shall be massacred mercilessly, and there will not be a single Kropatschek to save us.
I admit that my pessimism may be the result of the dramatic events I have witnessed. The storekeeper Sardinha’s suicide perturbed me far more than one might have thought. I cannot forget that a compatriot of mine lies buried in my backyard without a headstone or a coffin. He may have been the target of the most serious accusations, but he was a Portuguese who was not given the chance to defend himself. The finger that pulled the trigger was his, but the indictment I read him was mine. Though Sardinha’s bones are no burden to the soil, they are a burden I have to bear during my sleepless nights.
I know what I am talking about, for, like Sardinha, I was summarily convicted, and there is no distance in this world that will make me forget the unjust exile I have been subjected to. It might be different if I were totally immersed in Africa. The fact is, part of me remained in a Porto square with my own army’s gunfire brushing past my skin and grazing my very existence. More than the revolt of January 31, I cannot get out of my head the memory of that day when they took me and the other mutineers from the jail to a ship. We marched down the streets and through the port of Leixões under a strong military escort. We were not the ones they feared. What scared them was the reaction of the crowds who filled the city. For the first time, I felt pride in the uniform I was wearing. But this feeling faded away immediately when we boarded the ship to face the court-martial that would judge us. Great was the cowardice of those who governed us. It was not enough for us to be concealed from the eyes of others. The absurdity of the verdict had to be delivered hidden by the sea mists. The ship I boarded was coincidentally called the Mozambique. Little did I know that the military tribunal would elect to deport me to the colony of the same name.
What I went through on that ship, awaiting my judgment, is impossible to describe. We were made to wait for days on end, suffered storm after storm; weakened by hunger and seasickness, we were so exhausted when we were brought before the court that we lacked the discernment to answer even the simplest questions. In truth, any acuity we might have had would have been of little use: we were condemned from the start. Whether we were civilians or soldiers, innocent or guilty, there wasn’t even a pretense of justice.
One of the detainees, an elderly teacher, recalled a curious episode from the history of France. Knowing that Protestant leaders had come to the city, the Catholic king ordered his army to round them up and kill them all. The officer who received the order asked how, once they had arrived in the area, they would be able to distinguish between the Protestant leaders and the rest of the population. To which the king answered: “Kill them all. God will recognize his own.”
I certainly wished to forget the tribulations that had led to my exile. But they all came flooding back when I was part of a firing squad in the wake of the skirmishes in Lourenço Marques. In our sights was a group of black rebels who had been captured the previous day. As was the custom, the firing squad consisted only of Portuguese.
The condemned men were lined up before us. They were all adolescents, little more than children. None of them had had a trial; no one had heard them, in Portuguese or in their native language. Those who were about to die had no voice. At that moment, some kind of emotional upheaval, motivated possibly by fear or by guilty conscience, convinced me that those who were going to die bore within them sufficient liability from birth: their race, the gods they did not have. But there followed a curious mishap. The trigger of my gun jammed. At that precise moment, I sensed that this wasn’t merely a technical fault but a sad omen. I pressed the trigger again, and there was a sudden crack, a flash, and a scorch mark. The bullet had exploded inside the rifle.
It wasn’t the lesion that shocked me, for that was slight and a passing phenomenon. For me, the root cause of the incident was imponderable. It was a message from that other inferno, where not even the demons dwell. The bullet had detonated not inside the rifle but in the depths of my being. And the gunpowder would seep from my hands like burning lava for the rest of my life.
I am haunted continually by the thought that those young blacks, so far removed from me because of their color and features, were in the end like me. Just as they had rebelled, so had I. Like them, I too had dared to point my gun at the powerful. Perhaps that was why my gun had jammed and the bullet discharged inside the chamber. That bullet continues to explode inside me. If I were a bird, I would have long ago plummeted to the ground, stoned.