Assimilado

[4] In Angola, for instance, the procedure started with the applicant proving his ability to speak and write Portuguese; show that he had a source of income; and, pay a fee.

"[7] A historical account even cited a covert surveillance system that monitored and ensured that assimilated parents do not teach their children any of the African languages.

[11][12] Only through being Portuguese in every facet of life, from language to schooling to personal association, could one be considered a useful tool in society, and thus be afforded special rights.

[1] In this perspective, Portuguese rhetoric, which stressed the luso-tropical myth of a particular affinity to non-European cultures, including the emergence of mestiço populations and an easy way to assimilation, appears as pure and voluntary hypocrisy.

[21] Thus, Africans were supposedly not going to abandon their superstitions and be fit for the consideration of assimilation, further proving the hypocrisy of the Portuguese colonial government and its empty propaganda.

[21] With increased time spent in the colonies, Portugal made it increasingly more difficult for the status of assimilado to be reached; after the Second World War in colonial Angola, the New State, the Portuguese regime, decided to alter the requirements necessary for the acquisition of assimilado status, making it more difficult to do so, and thus minimizing actual African presence in government and society; for example, in the Colonial Statute of 1954, in order to be considered for assimilado status, one needed to "have a Catholic baptismal certificate, obtain a civil marriage license, secure a Portuguese sponsor, be employed in a "civilized" job, and live like a Portuguese.

[22] Due to the extremely rigid requirements, obtaining Portuguese citizenship proved to be so difficult that by 1958, there were only 30,089 assimilados out of the 4,392,000 total population of Angola.

These prompted Eduardo Mondlane, the late leader of Mozambique Liberation Front, to describe the assimilado system as nothing but a mechanism to create a few "honorary whites.

[26] Assimilated and educated Africans played an important role in the fight for liberation, but since UNITA and UPA were both local-run, unity was hard to achieve; "the indications Mabeko Tali gives us for the East of Angola, where the MPLA armed front split in two because of incompatible attitudes between a local leadership and intellectual radicals, suggest that major gaps existed between 'educated militants' and the peasants of the Angolan interior".