Portugal s occupation of Africa began with violence, it was maintained by violence, and after five hundred years it is coming to an end through violence.

The story of Inhaminga, the bloody events of resistance and reprisal in the war in Mozambique, is the last chapter of the longest and most use/ess colonial ordeal in Africa's history. It is one more measurement of the lives which were lost, the bodies which were sold, and the destruction which was wrought in the course of Portugal's pursuit of gain and imperial dignity in Guinea, Angola, Mozambique.

The diary by five Dutch missionaries stands with the anguished letters of Afonso, sixteenth century African king of the Congo, with the letters of condemnation written by Jesuit and Dominican missionaries, with the reports of occasional Portuguese governors and administrators, with the speeches of the humanitarian prime minister Si da Bandeira, with the accounts of British consuls, with the exposes of Casement, Nevinson, Cadbury, Ross, and in our time, with the works of Davidson and those of African poets and patriots, Neto, Andrade, and dos Santos.

There is nothing in what has been written in protest—and little that has been written in praise—of the Portuguese occupation of Africa which even at the end can give any sense or dignity to an absurd colonial adventure, a violent misappropriation of Africa and Africans.

And it is this force of violence—turned against the Portuguese army and colonial administration—which has led to Lisbon s sudden and frantic attempts to disengage. In these accounts of the last days of empire one distinction stands out from the protest of other times. As much as the story of Portuguese atrocities, this is the story of African resistance to those atrocities and the rule which created them. The Diary of Inhaminga is an extraordinary document in its simplicity of emotion and detail. It is worthy of the resistance it recounts.