Portugal had become a police state under Dr Salazar (ruled 1928-68), who set up a fascist style Estado Novo or 'New State'. The instrument of Salazar's rule came to be the PIDE or secret police, whose operations were extended to the colonies. Salazar regarded Portuguese Africa as an integral part of Portugal in the same way as Algeria was treated as an integral part of metropolitan France.

In 1951 the Portuguese territories overseas officially ceased to be colonies and became provinces of Portugal. But unlike the French government's treatment of Algeria, Lisbon was not prepared to make even the slightest political concession to the four Portuguese African territories: Cape Verde Islands and Guine (Bissau), Sao Tome and Principe, Angola, and Mozambique. Anyone engaging in anti-colonialist actions or discussions was invariably detained, for a period of up to six years. It was against the law to form political associations and trade unions.

On paper there existed a form of democracy in which even Portuguese Africans could participate. Any African man who had attained the status of assimilado had the right to vote in elections for the Portuguese National Assembly. In practice this right had no value.

In the first place, the status of assimilado was awarded only to those Africans who were Westernized enough in education, religion and social habits to be 'uplifted' out of the inferior status of indigena or 'native'. Thus the Portuguese confused racial equality with assimilation to Portuguese culture.

In the second place, by the 1960s only half of one per cent of the Africans had acquired assimilate status (a sign of the lack of educational progress under the Portuguese), so very few Africans could vote.

Thirdly, it was hardly worth voting anyway. The African territories were grossly under-represented in the Assembly, Mozambique for example forming only one electoral district.

Furthermore, the parliament in Lisbon was merely a facade to lend respectability to Portugal' s one-party and semi-fascist dictatorship. In time the lack of any constitutional means of registering protest and attaining democratic and majority rule was to lead to a series of armed uprisings in Portuguese Africa.

African political protest was also stimulated by the growing social barriers between Portuguese and Africans. By the 1960s colour prejudice and discrimination in the Portuguese colonies had increased not declined, following the heavily increased settlement of poor white' settlers in Angola and Mozambique in the 1950s. Racialism was also on the increase as a result of accelerating migration of rural Africans to the towns and cities where they competed with whites for employment. Yet in spite of these developments the Portuguese persisted in propagating the myths of luso-tropicalism and the 'civilizing mission' of empire.

Luso-tropicalism was the doctrine that the Portuguese whether in Portugal or Africa or Brazil were in partnership with non-whites and did not share the colour prejudice so prevalent among other European peoples. In fact the educational system reflected the racial reality of Portuguese rule: government schools were reserved for the children of white settlers; while an African child could attend only a church mission school, if there happened to be one near home.

Attempts at peaceful change by the Africans in the Portuguese territories had little success in the post-war period. Mozambique can be taken as an example. In 1949 a group of African secondary school pupils set up NESAM, a cultural association which asserted the value of African culture and spread nationalist ideas among the educated youth.

Throughout the period from 1945 to I960 there were regular strikes by urban workers against their low pay and bad conditions. Another form of protest was the organization by Lazaro Kavandame of peasant co-operatives in the north in the 1950s to take over production and selling from exploiting Portuguese middlemen. The colonial administration managed to restrict the co-operatives severely by imposing heavy financial levies. These isolated actions of isolated groups students, workers and peasants proved to be quite ineffective. Their separate failure revealed the need to develop a mass revolution based on the peasantry.

In 1961, after the outbreak of armed revolts in Angola, Portugal abolished the inferior status of indigena and declared that all inhabitants of Portuguese Africa were Portuguese citizens. This reform was rendered meaningless with the issue of two separate kinds of identity card to those who had formerly had the status of indigena and those who had not.