Chicomo, December 15, 1894
Your Excellency Counselor José d’Almeida
I shall begin by requesting Your Excellency’s lenience regarding the account of my meeting with the royal commissioner. Please accept my sincerest apologies. My account was absolutely impartial and bears no relation to any particular sympathy I may have for the person of António Enes. I was completely unaware of any mutual hostility between Your Excellency and the royal commissioner. I now know that the animosity is long-standing, and dates from the first mission to Mozambique undertaken by the commissioner, in 1891. I shall never interfere in this conflict, and shall maintain my complete devotion to Your Excellency, to whom I respond with a sense of rectitude that far exceeds the duties required by rank.
However, I could not fail to convey to Your Excellency the hostility displayed by António Enes when I spoke to him about the duties I shall carry out at Nkokolani, providing a presence alongside the peoples who, at such risk to themselves and in such a spirit of sacrifice, give us their support. Clearly, the commissioner was not criticizing me by making his views felt. It was against Your Excellency and against the negotiations undertaken by you with the State of Gaza, which, in the commissioner’s opinion, appear to be overly protracted. It was clear, though never explicitly declared, that the commissioner suspects that we are making too many concessions to Gungunhane. Also to be lamented was that taking so much time will severely compromise the efficacy of our military campaigns. Finally, António Enes complained about the military command at Inhambane, currently the responsibility of Colonel Eduardo Costa, who, in his view, finds every excuse not to make any territorial advances.
This delay could prove fatal for us, were Enes’s words. And he said more, this time with malicious insinuations concerning Your Excellency’s good intentions. His exact words were as follows: José d’Almeida has never cared a fig for the nation’s interests! Whereupon he suggested that Your Excellency was benefiting Gungunhane’s policy, which is to make us lose the war long before there has been any battle. According to him, this war will be lost if we concentrate our military resources in the cities, with neither the desire nor the aptitude to place our troops in the heartlands of the enemy’s territory. We shall perish in our encampments, besieged by inertia and fear, and assailed by fevers and the despair of waiting. And our European enemies, with England at their head, will rejoice triumphantly, because we will have provided them with proof of our inability to possess colonies in Africa. War requires warriors, and all I have been given are functionaries, António Enes complained. This is what the commissioner said. And this is what I feel the need to communicate to you in this already lengthy report.
Permit me to say, Your Excellency, that as a military man I cannot remain indifferent to the arguments of António Enes. In truth, the worst way to lose a war is to wait endlessly for it to occur. It has to be said that our victories in Marracuene, Coolela, and Magul improved morale and promoted our image among the natives. Throughout this journey to Nkokolani—a journey that I shall relate in due course—I have encountered numerous local chiefs in many places who, in the wake of these glorious battles, switched their allegiance. They are now with us. But it must be said that we won our victory against the Vátuas, who are the slaves of the Ngunis. It did not involve a victory over the forces of Gungunhane. As for this latter potentate, we still have much work to do.
I will now relate the details of my journey to Nkokolani. Yesterday we reached Chicomo, after a two-week trek through an interior that both fascinates and terrifies me. Every time we go through a forest, I imagine us being ambushed. In the darkness of each night, I sense a trap. Whether he is attacked by monstrous beasts or savage Negroes, what is the difference for the one who is going to die?
I must admit that, in spite of my fears, the journey has progressed without any great mishaps. Along the way I have passed kaffir villages, and everywhere I turn, I am struck by the way terrified children run away screaming when they see us. Alarmed mothers grab their children by the arm and drag them into their huts. It is true that one word from the local chief is enough to make their fear vanish. There have even been instances when initial terror has turned to effusive cries of welcome, when they learn that we have come to fight Gungunhane. But one question haunts me: why do they fear white folk so much? I can accept that they might be frightened, because, in most cases, they have never seen a European before. But the horror that we seem to inspire in them can only be explained by our being, in their eyes, tormented souls.
And this has led me to more extensive thoughts: What do these blacks think of us? What stories do they dream up to explain our presence? I know very well that as a soldier I should not be bedeviled by such questions. Perhaps I ask too many questions for a military man. Maybe I shall never become a proper soldier—at least, to serve this regime. Not because I am a die-hard Republican, but because, as I have already told you elsewhere, I did not enter the Military Academy from a sense of vocation. My family gave me no alternative. They left me with my packed suitcase at the front gate of the college. And they never paid me any visits while I was there. Nor do they know or want to know where I am now. It was the army that took care of my education. And, for sure, it is the army that will take care of my funeral.
At the encampment in Chicomo, where I have spent the night and from where I am sending you this letter, I had the opportunity to meet Captain Sanches de Miranda. As I listened to his stories about Africa, I could not help asking myself these questions: Who, among our officers, has this type of knowledge of Africans? How can we rule them if we know so little about them? What army can we defeat if we are so ignorant of our enemy?
I told Sanches about the terror I cause upon arriving in a village. He smiled and said that the fear they have is no different from ours in our belief that blacks eat human flesh. It is just that these people believe we are the ones who are the cannibals. And that we take them away on our ships in order to eat them on the high seas. We Europeans and Africans are very different, to be sure. No one doubts—not even the poor Negroes—the superiority of our race. On the other hand, how similar we are in our fears, whatever side of the ocean we come from.
Moreover, Captain Sanches de Miranda added this: He had read the reports on the attack on Lourenço Marques, which he considered more than a little confused. It was not Gungunhane’s troops who attacked us. Our enemies, at this precise moment, are certain Tsonga chiefs, not the Vátuas of Gaza. They invented Gungunhane’s soldiers where there were none. And Sanches de Miranda wondered why we obstinately failed to understand. Why we persist in placing them all in the same basket when it would be to our advantage to divide them up.
One final word on this great Portuguese, this valiant Sanches de Miranda. The natives believe that he is the son of Diocleciano das Neves, the famous mafambatcheca. As Your Excellency knows very well, he was a traveler and an ivory trader, well respected among the kaffirs and a close friend of Muzila, Gungunhane’s father. This mistake is so convenient that Sanches de Miranda has wisely never denied it. Quite the contrary, our captain insists that Diocleciano made certain confessions to him on his deathbed. And that he, as a favorite son, promised his poor father he would do justice to his African legacy and would respect the affectionate nickname given him by the locals, mafambatcheca, which in the language of the blacks means “he who travels joyfully.” I do not consider the physical similarity that the kaffirs find between the two Portuguese unreasonable. I realize that we all have the same mustache and haircut—a black man asked me if the Portuguese were born like this, already with a mustache.
Sanches de Miranda makes much of being the son of the late Diocleciano das Neves. He is certainly unaware of how much this piece of opportunism would disgust Diocleciano himself. And Miranda is also ignorant of how much his adopted progenitor had distanced himself politically from our authorities, protesting against the arrogance of our administrators and the continuing practice of selling slaves. Moreover, he is completely unaware of how much Diocleciano detested the city of Lourenço Marques. Among my papers, I came across a statement written by Diocleciano in which he refers to the city in the most unflattering terms. I include an excerpt here: “… Lourenço Marques consists of very little sand and a great deal of mud; once a fortnight, it is totally covered by the high tides. The pestilential emanations inhaled by the wretched inhabitants soon poison their lungs. Within three years of their arrival, two-thirds of the Europeans succumb; and the health of those who survive has deteriorated to such an extent that they can be of little use to themselves or to their country.”
I too am happy to escape this disease-ridden city. Tomorrow I shall be joined by Mariano Fragata, Your Excellency’s adjunct, and together we shall descend the River Inharrime in a dugout. It will take us some hours before we finally disembark at our destination, where I hope to carry out the mission assigned to me with energy and courage.
In closing, I have been told that in Nkokolani there is a Chopi family closely allied to us and completely devoted to our struggle against the devil Gungunhane. I have also been told that the head of this Christian family has placed a son and a daughter at my disposal, both of whom speak Portuguese and have been educated in accordance with our Portuguese values. I thank God for this providential support.