Description
Irene GIL.
[Society for Mozambique Studies. Presidential Visit. Symposium. Women in Mozambique]
Maputo (Lourenço Marques): August 1956.
This is a transcript of the speech on the “women of Mozambique”, presented at the symposium, held at the occasion of a highly influential visit of the Portuguese president Francisco Craveiro Lopes (1894 – 1964) to Mozambique, at the time still a Portuguese colony. Although severely denied by the government, the indigenous inhabitants of this African country were at the time continuously victims of racism and suppressive regulations, which did not apply to the populationof European roots.
As he visited Mozambique in 1956, the president of Portugal, a figurehead of the Salazar regime, told a French reporter that the Portuguese did not have a “racial problem.” “No distinctions whatsoever are made between whites and blacks,” he said, “except in respect to the degree of civilization reached by Africans, and in this area we give them. all the encouragement possible for them to elevate themselves.” (David Morton, Age of Concrete. Housing and the Shape of Aspiration in the Capital of Mozambique, 2019, online source).
In a similar spirit the present speech glorifies Portuguese women, in all cases wives or daughters of explorers or colonialist, who could according to the text adapt to harsh conditions of their new country and brought warmness to many rough locations in Mozambique for centuries. In modern times some of these Christian women even developed their own careers and started financially participating to the welfare of the families. The end of the speech in somehow patronizing tone calls for organization of education for girls and women from poorer areas, possibly meaning indigenous inhabitants, so they could follow the steps of the Portuguese women, who developed a modern Christian life in Mozambique.
The text was also published in Boletim da Sociedade de Estudos de Moçambique – ano XXVI, nº 100 (Set./Out. 1956), pp. 53-63. We could not find any institutional examples of the transcription of the speech on Worldcat.
