Word: assimilados
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Since January, his guerrillas claim to have killed 350 government soldiers or Cubans, while suffering only 150 fatalities. Savimbi has recruited heavily among his fellow Ovimbundu (40% of the country's population) and other southern Angolan tribes, which have deep-rooted hostility toward Neto, a mixed-race assimilado, and the Cubans. He has also received substantial backing from South Africa, which wants UNlTA's help in controlling the Namibian guerrillas of SWAPO (Southwest African People's Organization), who operate from base camps in southern Angola...
Within the M.P.L.A. leadership there appears to be a split along racial lines. Neto is an assimilado, meaning a Portuguese-speaking Angolan who in colonial times had the same privileges as a European. His wife Maria Eugenia da Silva is white?a fact that prompted the appearance of mysterious posters in Luanda demanding "Morte a rainha branca " (Death to the white queen). An unsuccessful coup last year led by former Interior Minister Nito Alves, an Angolan black, may have been triggered by the ethnic split...
According to the 1950 census, only one-half of one percent of the total African population had achieved the "civilized" status of an "assimilado," an African enjoying full priviledges of citizenship. The other 99.5 percent are classified as "indigenous." They have virtually no civil rights under Portuguese law, and are required to do forced labor on the roads and plantations of the colony...
There are advantages. Debtors' prisons are only for "natives." Assimilado children are admitted to government schools; children of natives are not-in fact, they are allowed to attend mission-run schools for only three years. And it is the natives who are subject to forced labor. If they protest, they are beaten; if they run away, members of their families are imprisoned. When the International Labor Organization sponsored a measure banning forced labor, Portugal duly enacted a law forbidding the practice, but advised colonial administrators not to worry...
...Mozambique only 1,500 natives qualified as assimilados in the decade from 1950 to 1960, raising the total to a mere 6,000. In Angola perhaps 30,000-0.7% of the population-have won assimilado status; no one knows for certain, since embarrassed officials have stopped issuing statistics on them...