I was attending the Third Pan-African Congress and I walked to the Palacio dos Cortes with Magellan. It was in December, 1923, and in Lisbon. I was rather proud. You see Magalhaes (to give him the Portuguese spelling) is a mulatto—small light-brown and his hands quick with gestures. Dr. José de Magalhaes is a busy man: a practising specialist; professor in the School of Tropical Medicine whose new buildings are rising; and above all, deputy in the Portuguese Parliament from Sao Thomé, Africa. Thus this Angolese African, educated in Lisbon and Paris, is one of the nine colored members of European Parliaments. Portugal has had colored ministers and now has three colored deputies and a senator. I saw two Portuguese in succession kissing one colored member on the floor of the house. Or was he but a dark native? There is so much ancient black blood in this peninsula.

Between the Portuguese and the African and near African there is naturally no “racial” antipathy—no accumulated historical hatreds, dislikes, despisings. Not that you would likely find a black man married to a Portuguese of family and wealth, but on the other hand it seemed quite natural for Portugal to make all the blacks of her African empire citizens of Portugal with the rights of the European born.

Magalhaes and another represent Sao Thomé. They are elected by black folk independent of party. Again and again I meet black folk from Sao Thomé—young students, well-dressed, well-bred, evidently sons of well-to-do if not wealthy parents, studying in Portugal, which harbors annually a hundred such black students.

Sao Thomé illustrates some phases of European imperialism in Africa. This industrial rule involves cheap land and labor in Africa and large manufacturing capital in Europe, with a resultant opportunity for the exercise of pressure from home investors and the press. Once in a while—not often—a feud between the capitalists and the manufacturers at home throws sudden light on Africa. For instance, in the Boer War the “Cocoa Press” backed by the anti-war Liberals attacked the Unionists and exposed labor conditions in South Africa. In retaliation, after the war and when the Liberals were in power, the Unionists attacked labor conditions in the Portuguese cocoa colonies.

When I heard that an English Lieutenant-Colonel was lecturing in Lisbon, on this very island and its cocoa, I hastened to listen. As he talked, I remembered. He was soothing the Portuguese.

The Colonel was an avowal reactionary, a hater of the “Aborigines Protection Society,” Nevinson, Morel and all their ilk, and his explanations were most illuminating. It would seem that “little Englanders” backed by the Cadbury “Cocoa” press of “pacifist” leanings, made a severe attack on the Unionists during the Boer War and particularly attacked labor conditions on the Rand; besides opposing Chamberlain, “Empire preference” and protection. When the Liberals came into power in 1906 the Unionists in retaliation began to attack labor conditions in Portuguese Sao Thomé, where Cadbury and others got their cocoa and made the profits out of which they supported the “Daily Mail.” The Colonel declared that labor conditions in Sao Thomé were quite ideal, whereas Nevinson and others had declared that they constituted black slavery. The point that interests us, however, is that the English cocoa manufacturers were forced by frantic efforts to justify themselves and deny all responsibility. They therefore proceeded to say that it wasn’t true and if it was, the Portuguese were responsible. Under cover of this bitter controversy an extraordinary industrial revolution took place: a boycott was placed on Portuguese cocoa the world over, and under the mists of recrimination the center of the cocoa-raising industry was transferred from Portuguese to English soil—from Sao Thomé and Principé to British Nigeria and the Gold Coast. Before 1900 less than one thousand tons of cocoa had been raised in British West Africa annually; by 1920 this had risen to one hundred and seventy thousand tons.

Of the real facts behind this rush of smoke I only know: that in the end two new groups of black folk appeared above the horizon—the black proprietors in Sao Thomé who still raise the best cocoa in the world and who, freed of the over-lordship of English capital have achieved a certain political independence in the Portuguese empire; and the black peasant proprietors of the cocoa farms of Nigeria who have performed one of the industrial miracles of a century and become the center of a world industry. In this development note if you please the characteristic of all color-line fights—the tearing across of all rational division of opinion: here is Liberalism, anti-slavery and cocoa capitalism fighting Toryism, free Negro proprietors and economic independence. Thus with a democratic face at home, modern imperialism turns a visage of stern and unyielding autocracy toward its darker colonies. This double-faced attitude is difficult to maintain and puts hard strain on the national soul that tries it.

Thus in this part of Portuguese Africa the worst aspects of slavery melted away and colonial proprietors with smaller holdings could afford to compete with the great planters; wherefore democracy, both industrially and politically, took new life in black Portugal. Intelligent black deputies appeared in the Portuguese parliaments, a hundred black students studied in the Portuguese universities and a new colonial code made black men citizens of Portugal with full rights. But in Portugal, alas! no adequate democratic control has been established, nor can be with an illiteracy of seventy-five percent; so that while the colonial code is liberally worded, and economic power has brought some freedom in Sao Thomé, unrestrained Portuguese and English capital still rules in parts of Angola and in Portuguese East Africa, where no resisting public opinion in England has yet been aroused. This shadow hangs heavily over Portugal.

The African shadows of Spain and Italy are but drafts on some imperial future not yet realized, and touch home industry and democracy only through the war budget. But Spain is pouring treasure into a future Spanish Morocco, and Italy has already poured out fabulous sums in the attempt to annex north and northeast Africa, especially Abyssinia. The prince who is to-day visiting Europe is the first adult successor of that black Menelik who humbled Italy to the dust at Adowa in 1896. Insurgent Morocco, independent Abyssinia and Liberia are, as it were, shadows of Europe on Africa unattached, and as such they curiously threaten the whole imperial program. On the one hand, they arouse democratic sympathy in homeland which makes it difficult to submerge them; and again, they are temptations to agitation for freedom and autonomy on the part of other black and subject populations. What prophet can tell what world-tempest lurks in these cloud-like shadows? Then, there is Belgium.