Word: assimilados
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Dates: during 1961-1961
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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...
...only 200 Africans in high school; Mozambique boasts just 50, and has produced only one college graduate, a young African who went to Lisbon University on the proceeds of a lucky lottery ticket. For indigenas, this paucity of educational opportunity hardly eases the path toward the precious status of assimilado, which promises total equality with the whites for those who can speak Portuguese fluently and adopt European modes of life (i.e., live in a house instead of a hut, eat with a knife and fork instead of the fingers...
...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...