Luís Vicente Álvares

Journalist and poet. He studied at the Liceu Nacional de Nova Goa and at the Rachol Seminary, where he completed his Theology course in 1903. From 1895 to 1906 he contributed to the Bombay weeklies Luz Bombaense and O Anglo-Lusitano. In 1907 he moved to Lourenço Marques, where he worked at an English bank. In that city he began by contributing to the newspapers A Vida Nova, a republican weekly (1907-1910), O Africano, aimed at the population of colour and funded by Freemasonry, O Brado Africano, the organ of native Mozambicans of colour, and O Direito. In these newspapers he was a pioneer in the fight against racial discrimination, always using arguments based on Christian morality in his writings, which was linked to his almost fanatical Catholicism. In 1919, at a time when Indo-Portuguese people were heavily discriminated against in Mozambique, including by the Catholic Church itself of which they were followers, which did not allow their children to enroll in schools belonging to it, then reserved exclusively for «children of European parents», Luís Vicente Álvares founded a Catholic weekly titled O Oriente, which carried the following meaningful motto: «The law is equal for all, with no other difference than that of their talents and virtues – Respect for individual merit». There he continued his anti-discrimination struggles until the first press law of the Estado Novo closed his newspaper in 1927. He returned to his crusade in 1932 with O Oriente d' África, replaced again in 1933 by O Oriente, which continued to be edited by him within his uncompromising Catholic principles and defense of the Indo-Portuguese until the founder's death. After the death of Vicente Álvares and several vicissitudes it underwent under the direction of a son, the weekly would curiously come to an end at the hands of the Church, after having been donated to the Archdiocese of Lourenço Marques with the express obligation, documented and accepted by it, never again to interrupt its publication. In book form, his main work is a poem: Apóstrofe Dissonante: Canto Preliminar à Visão da Eternidade, Epopeia da Humanidade (1911).