Earlier this month, the British writer and documentary film-maker, Matthew Teller, wrote a viral thread on Twitter that started like this: “Exactly 54 years ago, 3 Aug 1968, Portugal’s authoritarian prime minister António de Oliveira Salazar, 79, slipped over in the bath & hit his head. He seemed to be ok, but then complained of feeling ill. In hospital, he lapsed into a coma. It looked like he was about to die. Portugal’s president appointed a new prime minister to replace Salazar, who had been in office since 1932.”
Now came the twist, “Salazar woke up.
Rather than break the news to the dictator that he had been dismissed, his
aides set up an elaborate scheme to fool him that he was still in charge.
Ex-ministers held “policy” meetings with Salazar. Every night, the editor of
Salazar’s favourite newspaper printed a fake edition that removed mention of
the new government and substituted bogus stories as if Salazar was still PM.
The dictator read the fictional newspaper unawares. The charade carried on for
two years. The dictator had no idea he was being duped. Eventually, on 27 July
1970, Salazar died, less than four years later the authoritarian state he had
built collapsed.”
It’s an incredible story, which hits
particularly hard in Goa, where it was apparent that Salazar was
extraordinarily delusional long before he slipped and hit his head. As we see
in the British historian Tom Gallagher’s adept recent biography Salazar: The
Dictator Who Refused to Die (2020, Hurst & Company), it was a way of life
that first made him, and then proved his unmaking: “He would use the
indomitability which had marked his family’s story to define Portugal’s
relationship with the rest of the world, and especially with the great powers.”
Gallagher writes that Salazar was frugal and punctilious, and
never travelled outside Iberia except once, to whistle-stop through France to
Belgium and back. He was happiest in the village of Santa Comba Dão where “only
major crises prevented him from being back in the autumn for the gathering-in
of grapes or the bottling of the wine on his small estate.” But behind this
ostentatious austerity was rampant cronyism. Mario Soares pointed out that he
“left that clique of vultures uncontrolled [and able] to go on creating an
inextricable web of political and economic connections.”
Timing is the crux of legacy. Salazar burst into the historical
frame when his country needed his bent, convictions and skills. In just one
year, he balanced the budget and stabilized the escudo. Then - an
unquestionably great feat – he navigated Portugal’s neutrality through World
War II. But immediately afterwards came the winds of change, which he failed to
recognize, and refused to believe. The same characteristics which were once his
strengths proved his country’s undoing.
Gallagher says Salazar was “simply too old to shed his
paternalistic and at times racist approach to empire.” Certainly, even by the
standards of the time, the dictator was shockingly ignorant about the world,
including Portugal’s own African and Asian territories. In one meeting with
Jorge Jardim, his former Secretary of State, he disrupted proceedings by
referring to “little black folk.” The elegant Maria de Lourdes Figueiredo de
Albuqerque, who sat in the Portuguese parliament, was surprised to discover he
believed most of her Goan compatriots had European blood.
Even more than the post-accident farce, it is Salazar’s abysmal
miscalculations in Goa that most accurately reveal his mania. While always
losing, he absurdly claimed victory. Instead of negotiating with dignity, he
preferred to burn the house down. It is not as though there hadn’t been enough
warning. By 1950, there was huge support for decolonization building both
within and outside the territory. This could easily have been resolved the
Pondicherry way, where a general election resulted in the peaceful transfer of
territories. But that was anathema for the Portuguese dictator, who argued
ridiculously that “Goa is the expression of Portugal in India and the Goans
have no wish to be freed from Portuguese sovereignty.”
In fact, Salazar had already received the secret report of
Orlando Ribeiro, who testified, “I have visited all the Portuguese territories
in Africa, starting from Mozambique, and have studied Guinea and the islands of
Cape Verde; I have spent four months in Brazil and observed its deep recesses.
I had thus acquired a good preparation to initiate my research [and] Goa
appeared to me as the least Portuguese of all the Portuguese territories I had
seen so far, even less than Guinea, which was pacified in 1912!”
Ribeiro concluded, “The predominant relationship is of distance
and suspicion, when it is not an outright or camouflaged antipathy. I had
witnessed a near total ignorance of our language, the persistence of a society,
not only strange and indifferent, but even hostile to our presence, our limited
influence, encrusted as a schist in the body of renascent Hinduism, all this
has left me very disillusioned about Goa.”
By
this time, almost a decade after 1947, New Delhi’s initial indulgence was
steadily deteriorating. The defence establishment (which had many Goan
officers) was keen to act, and Nehru - who had referred to Goa as “the pimple
of the face of Mother India” - was impatient. Salazar was already become a
laughing stock, but still the stubborn old man refused to see what everyone
else had realized. His foolish blunders cost the Goans greatly.