João dos Santos Albasini

João dos Santos Albasini

João dos Santos Albasini , also known as (N) Wadzinguele , (born November 2, 1876 in Magul, Gaza , Portuguese East Africa ; † August 16, 1922 in Lourenço Marques ) was a Mozambican journalist, nationalist and activist for black rights in Mozambique.

Life

Youth and education

João dos Santos Albasini was born on November 2, 1876 in Magul in the province of Gaza, about 110 km from the future capital Lourenço Marques. His father, Francisco Albasini, had married the granddaughter of the tribal leader of Mpfumo near Maxaquene, Kocuene Mpfumo (Portuguese Joaquina Correia de Oliveira ). He grew up with his three siblings José, Maria Isabel, and Antônio Paulino. Albasini's grandfather was also called João Albasini, also known as Juwawa, who later became Portuguese Vice Consul in the Transvaal Republic. Albasini attended the primary school of the Catholic Mission of São José de Lhenguene, a secondary education was not available there at the time. Nevertheless, he is said to have been an avid reader, and wrote texts in Portuguese such as Ronga.

At the age of majority, the Portuguese colonizers led by Mouzinho de Albuquerque defeated the last resistance in the colony of Portuguese East Africa in the form of the Kingdom of Gaza and its leader Gungunhana . At the same time Portugal moved the capital of the colony from the small island of Ilha de Moçambique south to Lourenço Marques . The political stability led to the small port town turning into a large capital for the time within a few years. Albasini worked for a short time in the capital's main post office before moving to the port administration of Lourenço Marques as a forwarding agent. Around 1897 Albasini married Bertha Carolina Heitor Mwatilo, from whom he divorced in 1917. They had two children, Beatrice and Carlos Eduardo.

Foundation of the Grémio Africano

The collapse of the Portuguese monarchy and the democratic interregnum (1910–1926) made unfamiliar, new freedoms in the area of ​​freedom of the press and freedom of expression possible, both in continental Portugal and in the colonies. As one of the capital's black intellectuals, Albasini founded the Grémio Africano (African Club), an association of intellectual, well-educated black and mestizo men who developed the first ideas for the emancipation of the colony's black population.

Albasini, together with his brother José Albasini and friend Estácio Bernardo Dias, founded the association's magazine, O Africano (“The African”), the first Mozambican magazine to be written exclusively by black Mozambicans. In 1918 Albasini re-launched the magazine under the name O Brado Africano ("The African Scream"), which then appeared weekly. In both newspapers, the authors expressed themselves very critical of the Portuguese colonial policy, especially the new Portuguese citizenship and assimilation law introduced in 1919. This differentiated between Civilizados ("civilized"), Assimilados ("assimilated") and Não Civilizados ("not civilized"). In his texts Albasini complained about corruption and abuse of power on the part of the colonial administration, as well as an outflow of the money earned in the colony into the metropolis. In his texts he called for more investment in the colony, as well as more rights for blacks, especially black women.

Despite his texts, the colonial administration appointed him head of the black ("indigenous") staff of the port administration in 1914. Black dock workers, on the other hand, criticized Albasini for accepting this position because he had spoken out vehemently against forced labor.

Albasini preferred to express his opinion in a written, journalistic way. He tried to win a seat in the Portuguese parliament as representative of Mozambique in the parliamentary elections in 1920, but lost the election to a Portuguese physicist named Jaime Ribeiro. According to the Grémio Africano, he had never been to Mozambique.

death

In 1919 Albasini fell ill with tuberculosis. He traveled to Lisbon between 1919 and 1920 for treatment. Albasini died of the disease on August 16, 1922 in Lourenço Marques. A collection of five of his letters was published posthumously in 1925 under the title O Livro da Dor (The Book of Pain). To date, Albasini is not particularly strongly present in Mozambican anti-colonial collective memory.

bibliography

• Jeanne Marie Penvenne: João dos Santos Albasini (1876-1922): The Contradictions of Politics and Identity in Colonial Mozambique , in: The Journal of African History 37, No. 3 (1996), pp. 419-464
• Fátima Mendonça and César Braga-Pinto: João Albasini e as luzes de Nwandzengele: jornalismo e política em Mozambique , 1908–1922 , Alcance Editores, Maputo, February 2014

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Albasini, João dos Santos . In: Emmanuel K. Akyeampong and Henry Louis Gates, Jr (Eds.): Dictionary of African Biography . Oxford Press, Oxford 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-538207-5 , pp. 158 .