Lourenço Marques, November 21, 1894
Your Excellency Counselor José d’Almeida
I write to you, Your Excellency, in my capacity as your humble servant, Sergeant Germano de Melo, appointed captain of the garrison at Nkokolani to represent Portuguese interests on this frontier with the enemy State of Gaza. This is my first report to Your Excellency. I shall do my best not to tire you, and shall restrict myself to the facts of which I believe Your Excellency should be aware.
I arrived in Lourenço Marques the day before the city was attacked by the Landins, local rebels, from the immediate area. It happened early in the morning. We heard shots, and soon Negroes, Indians, and whites had filled the streets in panic. I was staying at a boarding house run by an Italian woman, right in the heart of the town. The guests battered on my door, shouting and screaming, demanding that I defend them at the entrance to the inn. They had seen me arrive the previous night, armed and in uniform. I was an angel fallen from the heavens in order to protect them.
The proprietress of the inn, who goes by the name of Dona Bianca, took control of the situation, assembled the guests, and locked them in a cellar. Then she invited me to follow her onto a terrace from which one could look out over most of the city. Here and there were columns of smoke, while farther over toward the estuary one could hear gunfire and explosions. It was clear that our opposition to the assault by the natives was almost nonexistent.
Before long, the only focus of resistance was the Fort. The assailants—who were Landins and not Vátuas, as people seem to insist—were operating in the streets at will. After they had overcome all the defensive lines around the city, they attacked shops, looted stores, and could have killed more people but simply chose not to. Here at the inn, we avoided the maelstrom produced by the kaffirs because they thought all the Portuguese had taken refuge in the Fort.
From the terrace where we watched our approaching fate, I saw a scene that left a great impression on me: Among the thick curtains of smoke, two galloping horses appeared. They were ridden by two Portuguese, one in uniform and the other in civilian attire. It was this latter individual who sparked my curiosity, because he had only one arm, and remained mounted thanks to the strength of his legs. With his one hand, he both clutched the reins and held a gun, which he fired more or less at random. The owner of the boarding house identified him as One-Arm Silva, a deserter who had fled to the Transvaal, where he had suffered an accident while handling a consignment of dynamite. He had returned to Mozambique, and was pardoned for his desertion because of his acts of bravery.
Behind this man Silva was the soldier, mounted on a white horse, trotting along in a much more restrained fashion. As the distance between the two horsemen increased, the dashing soldier was surrounded by a horde of Negroes brandishing spears and shields. In a panic, the man fired his gun a number of times, until he had all but run out of bullets. Seeing himself ever more tightly encircled, and guessing what his end would be, the horseman shot himself in the head. Alarmed by the shot, the horse accelerated, dashing forward in leaps and bounds. Later, it slowed down, allowing its almost headless rider to remain seated in his saddle, blood spurting from him like some abundant fountain. And so the horse advanced slowly until it disappeared in the mist. It occurred to me that this funeral march would continue out of the city and lose itself in the African veld until the body of the suicide victim was no more than a skeleton swaying in the saddle of that solitary animal.
I was awoken from these gloomy flights of the imagination by the sound of cannon fire. Our ships out in Espírito Santo Bay were shelling the town. That was our last line of defense. And it worked, thanks be to God. The kaffirs eventually retreated, leaving behind them a trail of destruction and chaos.
Allow me, nevertheless, to record the absurdity of it all: in order to get rid of the enemy, we were obliged to bombard our own city, one of the largest settlements on the coast of Portuguese East Africa. The boarding house where I was staying was hit by a cannonball. As she looked at the ruined wall, the owner of the establishment wept in despair, knowing that she would be unable to claim damages from anyone. Bianca was crying so intensely that she did not notice the body of a Portuguese soldier lying next to the razed wall. As I knelt down to cover him with a sheet, I noticed that on his forearm he bore a tattoo of a heart with the words “A Mother’s Love” written across it. I was more moved by that tattoo than I was by the sight of the dead man.
Your Excellency will benefit from more detailed accounts of this unfortunate incident that befell the city of Lourenço Marques. I suggest you seek to establish the true causes that provoked the revolt of the local chiefdoms around the city. However, do not rely on the usual sources. I discovered, by both direct and indirect means, that the royal commissioner himself requested a report from a Swiss missionary by the name of Henri Junod. This report was drawn up on the basis of statements provided by black Christians, who attribute the origin of the revolt to causes that do not cast us in a favorable light. I suggest Your Excellency study this report.
Whatever the true explanation may be, the fact is that my presence in Africa has got off to the worst possible start. On the terrace of that inn, the Italian lady showed me in a matter of minutes what I had already suspected was the case: our domains, which we so pompously call “Lands of the Crown,” have been consigned to a state of lawlessness and immorality. For centuries, we have failed to maintain a true presence in these territories. And in those areas where we have left our imprint, the situation is even more serious, because we have allowed ourselves to be represented by deportees and criminals. Among our officials, no one believes we are capable of defeating Gungunhane and his State of Gaza.
The new royal commissioner, António Enes, has an exceedingly difficult mission, surrounded as he is by adversaries as well as adversities. The commissioner is viewed badly by most of the military, who consider him to possess the paltry skills of a civilian, and a writer and journalist at that. On the other hand, it is obvious that our commissioner will receive no replies or support from the Lisbon government. The monarchists are too busy trying to survive. And the military advisers who have been assigned to him by the Admiralty and the Ministry for the Colonies know nothing of Africa. We are thankful to have people such as Your Excellency, with years of experience in Mozambique, Angola, and Guinea. I ask you, in all humility, not to deprive me of your timeless and precious counsel.
It is because of these concerns that I leave with an anxious heart for Nkokolani, which is more than five hundred miles from here, in the vast hinterland of Inhambane. I hope the military authorities will remain true to their promises to convert that unfinished outpost into a proper garrison. And I have faith that they will send me a contingent of Angolan soldiers, so that I may exercise my functions in a prompt and appropriate fashion.
The Italian woman, who knows many of our officials intimately, told me I should forget any promises made to me. For, according to her, I am a military man only in my appearance. She told me that the serenity of my gaze was enough for her to be sure of this. Her rash opinion aside, the truth is that Dona Bianca began to list other reasons for her hasty conclusion. She asked me to whom I was answerable, and I took the liberty of telling her that the superior to whom I sent my reports was the counselor José d’Almeida. She laughed. And then she commented with a degree of cynicism: You’ll never fire a shot. And you’ll be lucky if you don’t get shot yourself.
Then she added that she knew of other cases involving an endless wait for a garrison. When she took her leave, the Italian woman promised that she would visit me at Nkokolani. She would undertake the journey because she knew that Mouzinho had been appointed to the regiment at Inhambane. She wanted to meet the gentleman again, as if that were her sole aim in life.
I began to think about Bianca’s prediction, and I feared that there might be some truth in it. Everyone here is aware of my republican past, and they all know the reason for my presence in Africa. Nor, surely, is my participation in the revolt of January 31 in Porto unknown to Dona Bianca. I cannot complain about the sentence I received, given that most of the rebels were jailed indefinitely. In my case, they decided I should be deported to the remote interior of Inhambane. They did so in the hope that there I would encounter a prison without bars, a prison which, for that very reason, I would find more suffocating than any other. They were, however, prudent enough to make me responsible for a bogus military mission. The Italian woman is absolutely right: It is not a soldier inside this uniform. It is a political exile who, in spite of everything, has agreed to bear the responsibility of his duties. On the other hand, I have no desire whatsoever to sacrifice my life for this timeworn, mean-spirited Portugal, for this Portugal that made me leave Portugal. Mine is another country, which is waiting to be born. I know that these outbursts exceed the tone that should be guiding me in this report. But I hope Your Excellency will understand the utter solitude that is my current lot and appreciate how my isolation is starting to deprive me of my powers of discrimination.
Just this by way of conclusion: This morning, I was received by the royal commissioner in a brief courtesy meeting. Although sparing in his words, Commissioner António Enes confessed that he was relying heavily on two trusted individuals he had chosen to work in Mozambique: Captain Freire de Andrade and Lieutenant Paiva Couceiro. He even announced that, immediately after our meeting, he and his two faithful advisers were going to draw up the so-called Plan of Action for the Southern Districts of the Colony. Neither Ayres de Ornelas nor Eduardo Costa had been invited. I thought this detail should be brought to Your Excellency’s attention.
Although he was apprehensive, there was for a moment joy on the face of António Enes, visible in the fleeting glint behind his spectacles, which failed to conceal his slight squint. This joy became clear when he showed me a telegram from Paiva Couceiro revealing that the settlement of Marracuene had been renamed Vila Luiza, in honor of the commissioner’s beloved daughter. His expression glowed soulfully when he recalled that, farther north, we had founded a town and named it after Queen Amélia. From what one can gather, among all the individuals in Lisbon, only the queen bothers to give the abandoned commissioner moral support. From the king and other prominent Lisbon personalities, he receives not a word of comfort. Poor kingdom of ours that rules neither here nor in Portugal. Poor Portugal.
I apologize, Excellency, for this long, sad catalog of confessions that are personal in character. I believe you will appreciate that I see in Your Excellency the tutelary father figure whom, I must confess, I always lacked.