Mustafah Dhada

In 1966, guerrillas of the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) extended their war for independence into Tete district, the western salient bordered by Malawi, Zambia and the then Rhodesia. Imperial Portugal responded in a manner well known to observers of civil war: with violent reprisals against the civilian population. One particularly brutal episode in this campaign of counter-insurgency forms the subject of Mustafah Dhada's book: the mass execution of several hundred people on 16 December 1972, in a cluster of five villages collectively referred to as the Wiriyamu Triangle. Dhada's multi-layered work is as much a narrative about the making of history as it is an account of events. The rural character of the location and the restrictions that the colonial regime imposed upon the flow of information ensured that the killings remained unknown outside the local area for more than six months. News of the massacre reached the world beyond Mozambique thanks to the efforts of missionary priests who brought the story to the attention of The Times in London. Portugal responded with a counter-information campaign, enlisting rival British papers to its campaign to discredit The Times's account. Subsequent writings on the events at Wiriyamu have differed on the death toll and on the lines of responsibility. Dhada takes issue in particular with a 2012 article which, although it does not deny that mass killings took place, urges a cautious reading of events on the grounds that there is insufficient affirmative evidence regarding the number of deaths, and the direct culpability of the Portuguese colonial authorities (see Bruno C. Reis and Pedro A. Oliveira, Civil Wars, xiv [2012]). As though in answer to scepticism, Dhada presents here a hefty dossier of evidence that he began to gather in 1994. While he has assiduously made his way through a mass of archival and other written sources, the pre-eminent original contribution of this book is the material gathered from interviews with survivors of the killings and others who had been in and around Wiriyamu at the time. These include a perpetrator who, penitent in the decades after the event, provides testimony that strengthens the case for official culpability. The information which Dhada has amassed allows him not only to piece together the details of the killings but also to provide new information that elucidates the cultural, social and political context of the events. The divisions within the Catholic church are an important part of the story: on one side, a church hierarchy playing its role as the state religion of the empire, and, on the other, missionary priests—many of them dissident Spaniards whose experience of the Franco dictatorship left them with no appetite for the collaboration that Portugal demanded of its prelates. Chapter Nine provides an ethnography of life in Wiriyamu before the killings, which serves to frame a credible account of people's movements on the day of the massacre. It also, incidentally, reveals the painstaking detail in which Dhada and his assistants conducted their investigation.

Não há nenhuma dúvida, e eu não sou o único historiador a dizê-lo, que estas violências em massa eram parte inerente do sistema fascista colonial português. Se pensarmos no massacre de Mueda, ou em Luanda ou Cabinda, vemos que se trata de uma metodologia do sistema colonial português. Mas eu tenho que dizer isto, que os próprios portugueses foram vítimas de uma violência estrutural semelhante, não de violência em massa, mas estrutural. A diferença é que em Portugal era possível resistir via emigração ou através de uma resistência passiva. O único elemento que resistiu não necessariamente com violência, mas com uma consciência ideológica pura nos últimos anos de Caetano, foi a Igreja, que nessa época desempenhou um papel muito importante em Portugal. Quanto à comparação entre Wiriamu e My Lai era uma comparação que não tinha uma base histórica significativa. O que aconteceu é que o editor-executivo do Times naquele dia, Louis Heren, tinha estado em Washington quando se estava a discutir o caso de My Lai. Só que agarrar nesta teoria para racionalizar o que se passou é fazer da história uma farsa. Quero dizer isto de forma categórica: para nós enquanto historiadores é fácil racionalizar e dizer “Wiriamu foi uma aberração e não houve qualquer ordem para limpar”. Mas as provas que reuni sugerem que isto foi planeado, já estava decidido, que às 6h30 a ordem dada a Antonino Melo [o alferes miliciano que comandou a operação] foi “vais ali e limpas aquilo tudo”. Isto não era uma aberração. Só que não há documentos que confirmem isto.

Framing The Context

This interpretative essay examines teaching, scholarship and service for the Department of History at California State University, Bakersfield, as Professor of History, between Spring Quarter 2010 and Spring of 2015. The period involved teaching 63 formal courses and independent studies to 978 students, 608 of whom took HIST 210 and HIST 211. One hundred-and-fifty-four attended courses on the Middle East. They constituted 15.75 percent of the total 27 who took my thematic courses, leaving 13 to undertake graduate courses and independent studies. In other words, the bulk of my teaching in the department, just over sixty percent, was in General Education under HIST 210 and HIST 211, with the remainder evenly split in percentage terms, between courses on Africa, the Middle East, and theme related instruction under the HIST 477 rubric, i.e, Why We Kill?

The period also witnessed both, the publication of ten juried scholarly works, namely, one monograph, one book chapter, three articles, and five book reviews; and eleven discipline-wide and ten departmentally-focused services. Copies of publications appropriate for the period under river are to be found enclosed herein.

Service records are listed in the enclosed Curriculum Vitae, and backed by evidence under an indexed tab. Placed in its appropriate context, this portfolio represents one sixth of a thirty year career in teaching and service in the academy. The scholarly publications under review on the other hand, form just under one quarter of the total thirty seven works spanning just under twenty significantly productive years, of which ten were exclusively devoted to academic administration. Viewed in this contextual light, the portfolio as presented here represents the most productive teaching, scholarly and service period of my career.

Autobio Snippets

I was a little over six or seven – cannot remember which. I recall sitting beside my mother in front of a jacaranda tree on the cement verandah of the small zinc-roofed house waiting for my father to arrive from work. I normally could spy him walking at a distance near the river bend where the boats took him to work on the other side of the river where he worked then at a sugar cane plantation processing plant.

The heat of the afternoon snaked up in gaily-abandoned waves from below the veranda slab. I lay my head on her lap and found myself looking at the sky up above. It was as blue as a domed lapis lazuli speckled with candy fluffs heading towards the river estuary. I asked her, “If God is merciful and compassionate then how come there is hell.” Somehow that moment defined my journey in search of meaning and in search of inner peace and inner reality for a lifetime of living. That journey of course took me first towards the Jesuits and then the Sufi Tekkes of Central Asia. The shaved head followed and without the mane my ears popped-out, erect outwards as if antenna ready for that ever elusive find. When I see this image, a flood of memories bathe my soul in a whoosh of concatenated tingles. There you have it!

It does however appear that the search for Logos, for me at least, was a structured rather than a free spirited affair; not that it matters, as I am sure searches are by definition an intensely personal affair. I do think though that the process in the search of meaning, governed as is within the rubrics of order, is perhaps more important that the arrival at Truth itself. Imitatio Cristi is itself far critical for Christian mystics than the revelation of a lived-in and experienced truth of transubstantiation in Christianity. I am sure similar operative dynamics apply to other paths and other searches and faiths.

Of course, the ultimate challenge once the process gets underway is not the journey of discovery or discoveries of Truths, or discoveries of several competing Truths or discoveries of segments thereof, but their systematic and sustained distillation to form a template to guide one’s living. To achieve that template entails gargantuan discipline, effort, and ordered existence; and does ultimately lead one to achieve at greater glimpses of The Ultimate Reality, which by very definition must remain elusive.

Portugal’s five-hundred-years’ rule in Africa came to an abrupt end in 1974. Having waged counter-insurgency for over a decade, Lisbon had failed to contain nationalist insurrections on three colonial fronts, Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique. In the end, three narratives accelerated Portugal’s demise in Africa. One, initiated in the summer of 1973, revealed Portugal’s mass violence at Wiriyamu, colonial Mozambique. In short, the Wiriyamu mass violence was a significant event in Portugal’s imperial history, one that aided Lisbon’s unforeseen departure from Africa.

Significant though these events were, neither the colonial nor the nationalist archives hold anything materially unique on Wiriyamu; memories of those involved in the affair however, do. The real challenge here was to find ways to prize open some of these memories to reveal in their own words what the boab tree saw, so to speak, and then tell us how the story got out. This book tackles just that challenge! The research and publication of such a text gives us the opportunity to shield Wiriyamu’s veracity from contesting terrains.

Viewed in this light, the book is unique and original, the only record of its kind that immerses interested readers to “experience” minimally intruded narratives on colonial mass violence. The book has no contenders in the market — and will prove an ideal text of primary reference for undergraduates in African history, colonialism, and mass violence.

“This book is a feat of investigative research and layered storytelling. Dhada unearths with exceptional degree of detail the events surrounding the infamous Portuguese colonial massacre of Wiriyamu, as well as the ways in which competing narratives about this event were crafted, buried, revealed, diffused, and contested. The book leads the reader through a maze of documents and memories, until a shattering vision of the destruction of Wiriyamu in which even the trees come to life to testify. The writing is alive with personal passion spanning decades; rich, sophisticated, and utterly compelling.” –  Paolo Israel, University of the Western Cape, South Africa, author of In Step with the Times: Mapiko Masquerades of Mozambique

“The murdered inhabitants of Wiriyamu, casualties of brutal Portuguese refusal to relinquish imperial rule, now have the recognition they deserve. Mustafah Dhada's heroic work of historical reconstruction relocates these lost lives: documenting the names of the 385, he reminds us of the potential they represented. Dhada interweaves the narrative of the massacre with the fierce course decolonization and subsequent debates on the legacy of Wiriyamu. Portugal's young officers, persuaded by Mozambicans, overthrew their generals and made Portugal a democracy; Mozambique gained independence but could not get free of Cold War or imperial struggles. In its interplay of revolutionaries, priests, villagers, soldiers, and journalists, this multilayered work shows how senseless exercise of power, accompanied by denial, remains with us.” –  Patrick Manning, University of Pittsburg, USA and President, American Historical Association
- See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/the-portuguese-massacre-of-wiriyamu-in-colonial-mozambique-1964-2013-9781472506221/#sthash.xukZAMWG.dpuf

Review - 01
"Warriors at Work is Mustafah Dhada’s compelling account of Guinea’s struggle for independence from Portuguese rule. It is a balanced and extensive assessment of this struggle, giving a comprehensive and nonromantic reconstruction of Amilcar Lopes Cabral, instigator of the revolutionary movement to set Guinea free. A Cape Verdian agronomist fully committed to nationalist unity in Luso-Africa and to the independence of Guinea, Cabral helped form the African Independence Party of Guinea Verde (PAIGC) (Partido Africano da Guine e Cabo). Through PAIGC’s efforts, a nationalist army was established, a guerilla war was launched, and a protracted drive for a nation-state mounted.

Warriors at Work addresses for the first time key questions regarding the fight to free Guinea: Was the PAIGC the only nationalist movement to emerge in Guinea? Was the mobilization drive and nationalist war a straightforward march to victory with the PAIGC calling the shots? Was the campaign for statehood instigated solely to forge a new social order?

Dhada cuts through revolutionary rhetoric to reveal a remarkable human drama fought at the front lines and beyond. He has woven a thorough, exciting, and precise analysis of a military and a political contest."

Review - 02
Rosemary Galli, the author of Guinea Bissau's entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. In her work, Guinea-Bissau, World Bibliographical Series, Volume 121 (Santa Barbara, Clio Press, 1990), p. xi, and entry numbers 118, 133, and 147, cites the work as "one of the most complete records (sic) of the military situation...a non-romantic view of the struggle...(that) strips away the revolutionary rhetoric... (a study providing) a balanced assessment...an extensive (and) exhaustive...listings of UN documents."

Review - 03
Another critical reviewer judged the book to be "thoughtful, thoroughly researched and exquisitely written piece of scholarship... buttressed by political-historical analyses... (with) a rich array of meticulous documentation...(combining) the disciplinary skills of historian and political scientist to leave us with an essential reference for scholars...a balanced, (and)...a rather elegant articulation of an interesting revolutionary movement in Africa with nuggets of insightful commentary. It is a fascinating portrayal of actors, institutions, events and relationships seemingly non-doctrinaire description(s) of the individuals, ideas, institutions, interests and nation-states involved in the dismantling of the Portuguese empire in that part of West Africa...thought-provoking."

Review - 04
"Warriors At Work: by Mustafah Dhada. It's a book about the revolution in Guinea Bissau enactd by the PAIGC back when they ousted the Portugese from their country. The book is comprehensive in that it covers the war itself, and in a separate section the social-economic programs that the PAIGC orchestrated during the war."
Accessed 14 July 2013. http://anotherdirtysoapbox.blogspot.com/2005_09_01_archive.html

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0870812874/ref=cm_cr_mts_prod_img

In their text published in May 2012, Bruno Reis and Pedro Oliveira proposed six theses on the massacre at Wiriyamu. They claim or imply that as a location of well-developed villages Wiriyamu did not exist; the massacre as reported might not have happened; although an atrocity may have occurred, the events are too complex to accurately unravel even today; lack of an independent or official inquiry makes the numbers of the dead as reported inaccurate; and that the exigencies of the counterinsurgency determined its context and magnitude within the framework of a civil war. This response examines these six theses, and concludes that Reis and Oliveira fail to advance the narrative. They accept at face value the Portuguese propaganda denying the existence of Wiriyamu as a place, rather than consider data that incontrovertibly proved the existence of Wiriyamu, the massacre, its context, and the overall integrity of the narrative. Finally this text sends a mixed message to its readers by contextualizing it as a case study in civil war.

This text on the Wiriyamu massacre of 1972 in Mozambique uses fieldwork and archival materials to address its historical context, the methods used to collect data for the narrative, the trajectory that the narrative took to reach the pages of The Times of London, the contest that ensued over its veracity, and its eventual acceptance as true by all parties concerned. The text concludes that both the context as well as the construction of the massacre narrative was much more complex and nuanced than the extant literature suggests. Its revelation too was governed by a series of factors, some directly related to the story and the timing of its arrival in London, and others entirely disconnected from the text of the massacre as received by The Times of London. The text discusses in the end how both the preponderance of evidence and a change in regime in Portugal among other factors delivered the narrative safely for all to agree on its veracity as a common text.Cet article sur le massacre des Wiriyamu en 1972 au Mozambique utilise les études d’archives et de terrain pour évaluer son contexte historique, les méthodes de collection des données utilisées pour créer le récit de cet évènement, sa trajectoire vers les pages du journal The Times of London, les protestations qui suivirent concernant la véracité de ce récit, et finalement son acceptation par tous les partis concernés. Cet article conclut que le contexte aussi bien que la construction du récit du massacre, étaient bien plus complexes et nuancés que la littérature qui en subsiste veut bien le suggérer. Sa révélation fut également le résultat d’une série de facteurs, certains étant reliés à l’histoire et au timing de son arrivée à Londres, et d’autres complètement disconnectés du récit du massacre tel que The Times of London l’a reçu. Enfin, cet article démontre qu’à la fois la prépondérance de preuves, et un changement de régime au Portugal furent parmi les autres facteurs qui rendirent le récit du massacre une version de la vérité acceptable pour tous.

Life in exile, especially after a massacre, does things to you. It slams you against a wall of aching silence. Ask any Kosovar Albanian. She will tell you! You no longer have an active social matrix as a point of communal reference. In a sense, exile—even if temporary—is worse than death. The ground gives way. You free fall, body intact. Your land below vanishes. You can hear it whimper or pulsate, but you can do nothing about it. It can no longer propel you to action.

The purpose of this course is to explore human creativity in the formation of world
civilizations, including religion, politics, economy, society, and culture in Mesopotamia,
Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe from ancient times to about 1500, or the beginning of Europe's global expansion. It stresses individual and social innovations and discoveries as humans shaped their societies and encountered other peoples.
This course, lasting for fifteen weeks is filled with interesting and fun-filled activities! The course will require a time commitment of at least 6 hours and 42 minutes a week from you.

Its 15 modules contain a variety of assessment-driven activities: readings, lectures, short video presentations and course activities, practice tests, multiple choice exams, 2 movies to watch, 2 short movie reviews to write, an applied history project, 2 mystery objects to solve, 1 primary source document analysis, and 1 term paper, which is short, focusing on a personal and historical narrative from your view point. The course also includes a syllabus quiz, a basic capacity diagnostic survey, another basic capacity diagnostic exit survey, and one student opinionnaire of course instruction survey. The practice midterm and final tests are ungraded.

The syllabus is tightly structured, which dictated extensive use of abbreviations. They are there for the benefit of assessors, course reviewers, peer instructors and highly motivated and savvy would-be-teachers among students taking this course. The rest of you may elect to ignore these. You will notice that the headings of the course materials here appear as FAQs — Frequently Asked Questions, to help you find answers to questions you may have already formulated on the course.

https://www.academia.edu/27900689/HIST_4510-01_81319_History_of_European_Empires_1500-2000_Lecture_TTh_5_30-6_45PM_DDH_104K_Aug_22_2016_-_Dec_14_2016


https://www.academia.edu/27933575/HIST_3420-01_81312_How_Islam_Changed_The_West_Discussion_TTh_8_30-9_45_PM_CB_103



https://www.academia.edu/27933725/HIST_1418-03_81287_World_History_Pre-History_to_1500_Lecture_TTh_2_30-3_45PM_Music_Bldg_114


The purpose of this course is to explore human creativity in the formation of world
civilizations, including religion, politics, economy, society, and culture in Mesopotamia,
Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe from ancient times to about 1500, or the beginning of Europe's global expansion. It stresses individual and social innovations and discoveries as humans shaped their societies and encountered other peoples.
This course, lasting for fifteen weeks is filled with interesting and fun-filled activities! The course will require a time commitment of at least 6 hours and 42 minutes a week from you.

Its 15 modules contain a variety of assessment-driven activities: readings, lectures, short video presentations and course activities, practice tests, multiple choice exams, 2 movies to watch, 2 short movie reviews to write, an applied history project, 2 mystery objects to solve, 1 primary source document analysis, and 1 term paper, which is short, focusing on a personal and historical narrative from your view point. The course also includes a syllabus quiz, a basic capacity diagnostic survey, another basic capacity diagnostic exit survey, and one student opinionnaire of course instruction survey. The practice midterm and final tests are ungraded.

The syllabus is tightly structured, which dictated extensive use of abbreviations. They are there for the benefit of assessors, course reviewers, peer instructors and highly motivated and savvy would-be-teachers among students taking this course. The rest of you may elect to ignore these. You will notice that the headings of the course materials here appear as FAQs — Frequently Asked Questions, to help you find answers to questions you may have already formulated on the course.

With the conquest of vast territories, Islam was to change Western Civilization itself. This course explores the great Muslim discoveries in science, technology, medicine and the social sciences. Particular attention will be paid throughout the course on select key figures whose contribution to the body of human knowledge made a lasting impression in the world in which we live in today.

This course will begin with an introduction to theories and definitions of imperialism and colonization, and a discussion of the motivations of, and explanations for, the European quest for colonies.  The course will then focus on one empire in particular, depending upon the instructor. The implications of imperialism for the rulers and their citizens, as well as the impact of conquest and colonization on those who were invaded, ruled and dominated will be examined.  Documents will be consulted which will reveal the voices of all those concerned with, and affected by, the imperial process. Formal and informal imperialism, the tools of imperialism, gender and imperialism, resistance to imperialism, decolonization and post-colonial societies will be among the topics covered in this course. May be repeated for credit if instructor and imperial focus are different. (Empires/Europe)

History 490 is a “capstone course” in our department’s curriculum. Its goal is to provide a culminating experience for history majors by allowing students to bring together all the skills and knowledge they have acquired in our program. To this end students are expected to conduct historical research using primary print-media and oral sources. The thematic focus for this seminar will be Muslims in America: A History. Students will engage in hunting secondary literature, scan, assess and evaluate these sources, formulate an exploratory thesis, construct a bibliography to be used for secondary research, write a review of the literature whence the exploratory thesis emerges, conduct oral interviews, transcribe and edit these into mediated narratives, write a clearly-crafted research paper buttressed by culture of evidence, and share the findings electronically among peers, and submit the final text for juried evaluation — if deemed appropriate.

Course Description
The history of African decolonization between 1922 and 1994, a process through which 54 new nations were born, resulting in the demise of imperial and settler colonies in Africa.  The course is film-text intensive and engages primary source evidence to examine the causes of African decolonization, the various factors that shaped it, its impact throughout the African continent, and the relationship of decolonization to freedom for the African peoples.

This course covers the Ottoman Empire from 1299 to the birth of the secular Republic of Turkey in1923. The course will pay particular attention to imperial relations with the neighbors, its economy and society, and gender issues in the context of orientalism. The course ends with the Armenian Genocide and discourses on Ottoman Empire’s legacy in world history.

Course Description
This course begins with the European Overseas Expansion. I then delves into major developments affecting Europe, Africa, China and Japan, while discussing the evolution, development and demise of the Muslim Empires in India, the Fertile Crescent and Central Asia. The course continues with a discussion of industrialization, the rise of new imperialism, and its demise, which brought with it the onset of the cold war and modernity.

Dear Founding Founders: I want you to know how I feel — having come to the land you help found, however flawed its foundations were since it left Indians, Slaves and Women silent and in the margins of your thoughts as you penned what we are about to shred into pieces. Let me add these thoughts as we cross the Rubicon on Tuesday! It is a mistake to view the multi-tiered elections, overburdened as they are with partisanship and vitriol, as a contest of two " gender biased despicables. " Careworn analysis, albeit Althuserian, tells us bouleversements/putsches are not driven by social classes but are long time in the making. They are led by an alienated bourgeois leadership. They are supported by silent subterranean elites. The latter constitute half of their ilk. The other half hedge its bet on the other side of the coin — more on this a bit later. This lot tough is in the majority, owners of means of production terrified to lose their pots of gold either through progressive taxation or business ethics, both of which curb unbridled or socially irresponsible capitalism. Trickle down economics only works when taxation acts as a structurally-mandated spigot compelling corporations to flood back some of their profits for the state to use for the greater public good. Once you legalize such corporations as individuals, you allow them to buy votes thereby acting as " voters-by-proxy, " and therefore furthering the interests of capital in service of profit. As such they hold democracy hostage by either transcending or manipulating pluralism via lobbies. By acting outside democratic restraints they structurally work against the interests of the republic. In the event of a Trumpian victory, expect Gaius Octavius or his avatar to haunt the halls of the White House. The election this time is a contest over two ideological issues, both set in motion at the onset of the Nixon presidency, which I will not go into here. Race and class are the core of these elections — gender here is a victim. Gender, four elections ago was a real issue, but we chose race over gender, then. Now, neither the electorate nor Trump and Clinton control the issues of race and class in this electoral cycle, I am afraid. Trump, has captured the imagination of 43% of the potential voters, if we trust the polls. He has done so with elegant toxicity. As an alienated bourgeois, wounded by lack of unbridled access to free-flowing capital for his business enterprises, he has aligned himself with the white working poor, economically and culturally, under a solid race tent. His focus on misogyny legitimizes predatory power of alpha males, thereby continuing the illegitimacy of gender-biased discourses and policies on two issues, reproductive rights, and unequal pay. His supporters respond to his attacks on a woman, truly more as an icon of womanhood, more so than a human being at par with an alpha. They also respond to allegations that the system is rigged, with threats of armed violence and mass violence. These are not entirely empty threats. They should be viewed for what they are: a life-giving amniotic fluid feeding partisanships laced with threats to unravel the state after Tuesday.

I am delivering this paper at the African Studies Association Meeting in Washington DC on Friday of this week, December 02, 2016. This draft will remain for view here until Sunday to benefit those unable to attend the meeting and would still like to view the text. Comments and critiques are welcome.

The most significant event that set the stage for the end of empire in Portuguese colonial Mozambique was the Wiriyamu massacre, when in December 1972, nearly four hundred people were slaughtered in three days in five villages located in Mozambique' s central northwest district of Tete. The Times of London published the story in the summer of the following year. Thus began the narrative of what came to be known as the Wiriyamu massacre. Six months after the revelation in the summer of 1973, Caetano' s Portugal fell and Mozambique headed for constitutional independence a year later. Significant though the event was, the colonial and nationalist archives remain silent, leaving the events as unspoken memories deeply buried in those associated with the event. This paper reviews the literature in the field; explores the methods used to exhume these memories; and narrates the challenges faced in foreclosing texts of denials, and doubt in the public and scholarly spaces.

Life in exile, especially after a massacre, does things to you. It slams you against a wall of aching silence. Ask any Kosovar Albanian. She will tell you! You no longer have an active social matrix as a point of communal reference. In a sense, exile—even if temporary—is worse than death. The ground gives way. You free fall, body intact. Your land below vanishes. You can hear it whimper or pulsate, but you can do nothing about it. It can no longer propel you to action. You can no longer ght, re ect, commune socially, or cultivate ...

Departing From The American Soil
My aim was to air leap 6362 miles from San Diego via Madrid Spain to Coimbra and Orgiva, that is where I wanted to be back to sort out family papers before heading home. I was slated to give a seminar in Coimbra on my forthcoming monograph on the massacre of Wiriyamu. Prepared with capsules, vitamins, extra supplies of pills, a well pressed suit, half-moon reading glasses, and an iPod Nano, vintage edition, filled with Gypsy King, Buika, Bebe, Alabina, and Judy Collins, I set out to brave American Airlines. Savvy travelers and their sandwiches, potato chips in crunchy bags, and sodas were already queued at the gate as I approached it to wait my turn. I saw no need to get in line since my seat was reserved, I said to myself. Besides, a seat from a distance at the lounge would afford me the best view to people watch, young and old. The old appeared traveling light and carried small manageable hand luggage. The young lugged their room in a box to seek comfort from the cyber unknown. Age does something to you - it gives you a margin of safety to savor life. You know your time is terminal or at best can be extended by surgery and Mephistopheles!

Mass violence narratives are prone to attack from two passive-aggressive opponents: memorial silence and deniers. Both ultimately aim to negate the legitimacy of a truth revealed by chipping away at it 1 with lacuna of evidence; both rely on the passage of time to corrode their affirmative potency with which to force it to vacate the historical space they occupy; both call for defensive strategies to protect the truths revealed; and both are in effect agencies for erasure, or what Paul Ricouer so elegantly phrased as " oubli de réserve " — agencies for selective forgetting. The case of the Wiriyamu massacre is no exception. The 2 narrative began with an affirmative endeavor, was promptly denied, memorialized, and once its public presence disappeared in Portugal' s colonial historical past, it re-emerged as a narrative of doubt. This article/paper traces the trajectory of the Wiriyamu narrative. It begins with a review of the literature in the field; identifies the main gaps with which deniers and doubters attacked the affirmative narrative; and fills them with fresh evidence. The tail end of the essay then evaluates the role played by the new findings and their authors in two areas of historical endeavour: quelling texts of doubt in the literature on Wiriyamu; and combating memorial entropy in history.

Peter Pringle’s paper addresses the first question, revealing the London Sunday Times’ role in the Wiriyamu affair, the lacuna in the revelations that continued to haunt the pages of unwritten history, where the narrative stands today with the appearance of a newly published monograph, and where new evidence could be tapped to fully complete the scope of the narrative our level of understanding of this atrocity.

Today's America shares three features with Russia, and some of the developed nations, Britain is a case in point here. The rest of the developing world will ultimately come to have some of these features, should they prove susceptible to these trends in race-baited economic nationalism. The three features are the rise of oligarchies; the increase of robots in modes of production; and the social search for identity in knowledge-based economies. The Russian Trajectory In the Russian Federation, the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 saw its sudden departure from the Afghan stalemate against the CIA-backed mujahideen, whose victory ultimately ushered in the Taliban. Internally it left intact two formidable 74 year old structures, both impregnable to regime change in Russia. One was the nomenklatura, an oligarchy with access to state-controlled resources designed to advance Communism at home and stimulate global change through the Komintern. The other was the KGB, an accomplished apparatus for gathering intelligence to know the enemy within and outside the state; and disseminating misinformation to fracture it with fictional narratives masquerading as authentic facts. After the 1991 fall, Soviet ideology crumbled but not the structures that sustained it. They found a new purpose. The former state-appointed oligarchs now had access to a rapidly privatizing economy. The intelligence operatives on the other hand, spread out to occupy governance and control the electorate within and outside the Russian Federation, using cyber technologies, political assassinations, and subversions. By the by, Russia was not the exclusive practitioner of such ethically tainted actions. We too engaged in similar tactics. The last count places us at 74, the number of times we sought to subvert regimes deemed inimical to our national interests. Ultimately, these two forces of administration and intelligence coalesced into three forms of oligarchies: one came to gain control of the former state owned corporations dealing in cyber technology, oil, banking, construction, and gas; one took possession of the ethically challenged black market enterprises; and the last set, the renaissance brokers, revived Russia as a viable post-Soviet super power. The confluence of these three forces ultimately gave rise to Putin, a former KGB operative, setting the stage to make post-Soviet Russian Federation Great Again, one that had a clear identity and a two-headed mission: claw back from the Soviet defeat, territories lost during and after Glasnost; and pierce through the NATO, CENTO, and SEATO curtain to expand its global reach. The American Unravelling The rise of oligarchs in the United States followed a similar ascendancy, practically in the same time frame. Nixon had already racialized the south, thereby laying the electoral foundations for an obstruction-obsessed Republican party. Its dominance by a new white nomenklatura then followed, aided by the forces of secular and religious right. After all, over 40 million people across the social, economic and educational spectra, young and old voted for Trump, unconcerned by his race-gender-and-religion-baiting rhetoric. By the time Reagan came to power, liberalization policies and tax reforms accelerated the concentration of wealth northwards, inverting the base of America's socioeconomic pyramid. Several measures at the tail end of the Clinton and the beginning of Bush senior reigns further emaciated the Republic's middle class, corroded the white working poor's economic survival in the industrial belt and coal mining states, and dimmed the public's voting capacity to think critically about policy — all for good reason. The church had remained untaxed, and left free to undermine