“THE GATES OF TIME”

Wake up, the Cape Verdean, son of a bitch; we’re finally going to liberate his land! –
shouted an ensign when the time came to wake up the men in the dormitories, the more or less 200 men who had to leave for Lisbon to end the state that Portugal had reached.” This is an excerpt from journalist Adelino Gomes’ speech at the launch of the book “25 de April 1974, Thursday”, with photographs by Alfredo Cunha (some of which are previously unpublished) and texts by Luís Pedro Nunes (preface), Carlos de Matos Gomes, Fernando Rosas, Adelino Gomes and the Cape Verdean to whom the ensign from the Practical Cavalry School in Santarém referred to when it was a few minutes past one in the morning on April 25, 1974, was one of the cadets in the militia officers’ course, known as a PAIGC sympathizer.

Although I don’t know him personally, we could have met in the course of our lives.
We were born in the early months of 1950; he was on the island of Santo Antão in Cape Verde, and I was born in Lourenço Marques, now Maputo, in Mozambique. We came to mainland Portugal as teenagers, and in Lisbon, we started our electrotechnical engineering course at the Instituto Superior Técnico (the Technical Institute). Later, we both interrupted the course. I joined the Naval School, and he did compulsory military service in the Army. At the age of 24, we lived the April 25th Revolution, separated by the Tagus. I was in Alfeite, he in Salgueiro Maia’s force, in Terreiro do Paço and Carmo.

On the 25th anniversary of April 25, the newspaper Público brought him from Mindelo to recall the events that dictated our luck and to recall the events that dictated the fate of the Empire, my Cape Verdean contemporary said: “I experienced a unique moment of consonance with nature. It was a collective event, and I was lucky enough to attend.
It was indeed a unique moment in which a Cape Verdean man, linked to the PAIGC, armed with a G3, symbolized the role that African liberation movements played in the genesis and consolidation of the military movement that overthrew the dictatorship.” And, without having the opportunity to confirm it, I think I recognize him in one of the magnificent photographs by Alfredo Cunha that I always show children and young people at Semear Abril-Sowing April (an excellent program to teach children in Portugal the values of April).

We both practiced engineering as our main activity throughout our professional lives, but my Cape Verdean colleague has also adopted writing as a weapon and a means of learning. He has published eleven books; his most recent is “As Portas do Tempo.” In it, Carlos Manuel de Melo Araújo points out that the world is full of doors that, if we were attentive, would probably that if we were attentive, they would probably reveal a very different world to the one we are building.
Because between parallel lives, some people and stories cross paths, not by chance, but because of our choices to evolve or not. The consequences of our choices to evolve or not to evolve, and our love of Freedom.

Jorge Bettencourt – retired Commander from the Portuguese Navy (one of the various officers of the April Captains Movement)

In Portuguese, a brief report on the launching of the book by Carlos Araújo in Cape Verde.