“No one will
understand
that name”
João Séco Mané only found out he was called João on his first day of school. His mother was still pregnant when she received the message from the colonial administration: “As soon as the child is born, your husband must come here to register them.”
Source:
“Sarmento Rodrigues, a Guiné e o luso-tropicalismo”, António E. Duarte Silva
He was born on a Wednesday, on 29 January 1948 in Nova Lamego (now the city of Gabu), in eastern Guinea-Bissau. At the time, the first winds of Portuguese development had started to blow across the then colony: roads were being built, bridges erected, and conversations about health, education and sanitation had begun.
As ordered, Bolom Mané went down to the civil registry to announce the birth of his son. He was received by a Portuguese official who, now well-versed in the process, started to complain—“this name won’t do, no one will understand it”—and quickly chose an alternative. João was the name luck bestowed on him; at home he was always just Séco Mané. This was the first of many rules that he would have to follow to be Portuguese.
João Séco Mané
Lance-corporal
Portuguese Guinean section
of the African Commandos,
1st Company
“My father told me this story. He told me that the registry stuff started practically at the same time as I was born. Nearly everyone in my generation has a Portuguese name. They got it into our heads that we had to change our name; they chose them, it was forced on us.”
Séco Mané was 15 when the Party for the Independence of Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) attacked the Tite barracks in January 1963. This event would go down in history as marking the beginning of the war in Portuguese Guinea. The conflict, which one side called the “War of Independence” and the other called the “Colonial War”, split his life in two. His father was detained in September 1965 by the International Police for State Defence (PIDE) – accused of conniving with the “terrorists”, allowing them to take food from the family vegetable plot; they took him to the island of Galinhas, an open-air prison, where they tortured and beat him. His mother, with four children in tow and another still in the womb, was taken to the bush by the PAIGC guerilla. Some on one side, others on the other, all hostages against their will. Séco Mané and his brother Boquindi Mané were stuck in the middle, forced to join the army. Now military, Boquindi had to be Joaquim. At the time, neither brother imagined that ten years would pass before they saw their mother or siblings again.