The Movement for Freedom in Mozambique - Page 15.
life, to assimilate him into the Portuguese community, whether
through education, missionary work, health programmes, colonizations schemes, etc., have been peripheral v/hen compared v/ith
that of the "obligation to work".  If one asked an African who
has some acquaintance with other European colonial systems in
Africa what he considered to be the main difference between the
Portuguese and any of the other colonial powers, the answer would
be that the Portuguese have the system of forced labour, while
the others do not seem to have.  This system has, of course, been
influenced from time to time by forces outside Portugal.
The most clear statement concerning this Portuguese position
was outlined by Professor Marcello Caetano, former Colonial
Minister and Rector of the University of Lisbon, thus:
"The blacks in Africa have to be directed and indoctrinated by Europeans....The Africans have not learned how
to develop alone the territories they have inhabited for
thousands of years."
He claimed further that this belief in the Africans1 obligation to work was a part of Portugal's vision of herself as a
civilizing power in a primitive world inhabited by lazy children.
Another former Colonial Minister in Salazar's regime, Vieira
Machado, stressed the same point in the following words:
"It is necessary to inspire in the black the idea of
work, and of abandoning his laziness and his depravity,
if we want tc exercise a colonizing action to protect
him. ...If we want to civilize the native, v/e must make
him adopt as an elementary moral precept the notion that
he has no right to live without v/ork.  a productive
society is based on painful hard work, obligatory even
for vagrants, and we cannot permit any exception because of race.
"The policy of assimilation which I conceive of must be
complete.  Therefore, it is necessary to establish a rule
of conduct for the black which exists for the white,
making him acquire a sense of responsibility.  It is to
be an "unenlightened Negrophile not to infuse the African
with the absolute necessity of work."
One of the amazing things about these pontificatiors is the
assumption that the African is naturally lazy, therefore, he
must be taught the value of work, when in actual fact all of the
major economic successes which the Portuguese colonialists have
ever had were due to the sweat and blood of the African labourer.