Christmas 71

Margarida Cardoso

I look at a Picture. But what can we really see in a Picture? What can we hear on a record or on a Tape?

Natal 71 is the name of a record given to the soldiers of the portuguese colonies overseas for Christmas 1971. Niassa’s Songbook is the title of an audiotape illegally recorded by soldiers during the war years, in Mozambique. At that time, Portugal was a great colonial empire – at least that’s what I read in my school books – and, in order for that to go on, my father and a major part of his generation fought in that war which lasted thirteen years. Today, we carry those memories in silence. In my father’s house, I found some pictures, the record and the tape. The tape is a voice of rebellion. The record is a piece of nationalist propaganda. They are memories from a country which was shut from the rest of the world, poor and ignorant, laid to sleep by a stale and primitive propaganda which tried to hide all the conflicts from us and kept us from thinking and recognising the repressive nature of the regime we lived in.