Our Town, April 28, 1953

No Other Voice

Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, Portuguese East Africa. –

Like the home land of Portugal, the colony of Mozambique is a dictatorship. 

In a dictatorship a man thinks what he pleases and says what pleases his government. And here it becomes one of life's more degrading discoveries to find that most men accept this, learn to live with it and even to know a kind of happiness under it. 

 There are six newspapers in Loureneo Marques. Two of them, the Guardian and the Xoticias Tarde, have English pages catering to the small colony of British and Americans and to South African tourists who swarm here for their holidays. 

In small type at the top of the Portuguese pages you will see the terrible words "Visado  Pela Comissao de Cen-sura." On the English  pages it is "Passed by Censor." 

I sat this morning in one of the newspaper offices and watched the galley proofs being carried away to the censor and returning with heavy red pencil cuts in them. 

 I watched the young reporters and editors (there is a universal look to newspapermen) accepting these edicts without a murmur. 

And I found myself thinking of the newspapermen at home who howl in pain if a word is taken from their copy for "business office" reasons.

 The censor puts his "auto-rizado" on every line, every word of copy that may be read by the five and a half million residents of Mozambique (50,000 of them "whites") and he is obviously a man burdened by heavy responsibility. If he is in doubt about a story he marks it "reserved," in which case the editor obligingly puts it away in a drawer until the censor has checked with the Governor-General who, in turn, may appeal directly to the front office in Lisbon to learn what the subjects are supposed to know. 

Not a word of the Mau Mau activities, for example, has fouled the pristine purity of the Mozambique papers, the theory being (as one editor put it), "that kind of thing is dangerous to put in the hands of the natives." No criticism of the Catholic Church, from any source, is considered news. Neither is any news about trade unions. 

Should a rebel make any anti-government move, as happens occasionally in the odd clandestine pamphlet, the news of his quiet banishment to the Governor-General African west coast colony of Angola –Mozambique's Siberia – is never consigned to printer's ink.

This would seem to leave mighty little for an editor to work with. But that problem is solved, too.

In a colony where a Communist would last about four minutes, the Mozambique papers fill their columns with horrible stories of the world menace of Moscow, lightening this diet with news of movie stars and the latest information from the Vatican. (The major front page story on the day of my arrival concerned the death of the English philosopher and comic, Professor Joad, who was probably known to no more than eight t people in all Mozambique.)

 It would have been less than discreet for me to have questioned the newspapermen and, in fact, I learned about the rules of censorship only from my own observation but the Portuguese people are an approachable and hospitable people and leave no doubt about their outlook. "

"You ask me, 'Do I have a mind of my own?' " a leading businessman said over an afternoon coffee at a sidewalk cafe. "Does anyone in the world? One must think of such things nowadays as a luxury and get on with one's living. 

We do not trouble about those things which may displease us and we are left alone." I was taken for a drive about the city. We passed a beautiful new high school and I commented on it.

"Too beautiful," my guide remarked. "They like to make a great show of such things. Why, the cost of the marble used in the statues alone would have been enough to put up another badly needed school. "You know, my friend," he added in a bemused way, "I would write a letter to the paper about it, but of course that would not be a good business for me. And, in any event, it would not be permissible."

A German Jew who escaped from Germany and settled and prospered here said, "You must not think of it as an old- fashioned dicatorship. We don't have a Gestapo who know each move. 

So long as you are quiet you are never bothered. "I am, myself, a man of democratic feeling, you understand, but I am content to think my own thoughts. For me it is a benevolent dictatorship."

He smiled and winked broadly and that seemed to answer tne question of why dictators stay so long in business.