Portugal in the 1950s

We had the exact same model and year (1954) of Opel Kapitän that is shown in the photo. We took the train down from Nkana-Kitwe (Copperbelt of Northern Rhodesia) to Uitenhage GM plant to pick up the Opel, and then drove it back home. We had it until 1964 when the “Winds of Change” blew down on colonial central Africa. We did take our Opel into PEA (Moçambique) for holidays though. And recently I ran into this incredible footage of what Lorenço Marques (Maputo) was like during the last years of Portuguese colonial rule. Take a look at this (it is not an image that even today people outside of Africa have of what city life was like there in a Portuguese “provincia ultramarina”):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUuUybBmqDc&NR=1

Bare with the video quality; this was taken in 1970 and transferred digitally, so quality has suffered.

“…might be unaffluent but it was still quiet, still kindly, still human. The lack of development and the poverty struck one as a blessing. The absense of advertisers and of mass media men…was like relief from the presence of the demented.”

Good grief, that’s pathetic. What an idiot. Of course he’s not the first nor will he be the last.

I’m sorry, I just can’t abide such a sentiment.
(He didn’t move there, did he?)

So you must be an advertiser then, Edwise Sigma. Or a mass media man?

I’m neither, but my family’s from the Third World, and I can’t help but be p###d when anyone thinks it cute to romanticize/sentimentalize poverty and underdevelopment.

Maybe I overreacted a bit, but people who live in such societies *suffer.*

Mr Lane:

Sadly, you will never be able to convince people like “Edgewise” on these matters because in the deranged world and time we live in it is nearly impossible for them to grasp the concepts of simple poverty. And, of course, he understands little about the poverty of Portugal at that time. No, they didn’t have gadgets, but they had humanity, and goodness, and nourishing food, and the Faith.

Perhaps, though, looking how far down into the abyss Portugal has gone lately, with its foul, stinking government, its growing acceptance of perversion and murder and its new affluence, “Edgewise” would look upon that and pronounce it a success.

“they had… nourishing food”

Perhaps the Portuguese of the 1950s were lucky (I don’t know much about the time or the place), but I would say that LACK of nourishing food is generally a distinctive characteristic of true poverty. If the Portuguese had good food, then they were not poor so much as, in Sir Walter’s words, merely “unaffluent.”