With reference to the June 16 goanet story on the above subject which appeared as an advert in Goa, I see some similarities with the Portuguese passports allocation for people whose parents or grand-parents were born in Goa before December 19,1961.
All the dates mentioned pertain to the day these countries were granted independence by Britain following constitutional conferences.This was normally held in the dependency or in London, and chaired by the then Secretaries for the Colonies. We need to clarify dates and names of countries at the time of independence- 1) Singapore before 1959 -obviously means she became independent in late 1958. 2) Tanganyika - should be before December 9, 1961 . I do not know how December 8 came into play. Tanganyika merged with Zanzibar on April 26,1964 to form Tanzania. When differentiating the two autonomous countries,Tanganyika is known as -Tanzania Mainland, and Zanzibar retains its original name. I am assuming Malaya got its independence around the same time as Tanzania . Malaya merged with Singapore in the sixties to form Malaysia. The union broke up, but Malaya continued to use the new name - Malaysia. Uganda and Kenya have their respective independence dates of October 9 , 1962 and December 12, 1963 respectively. Britain granted the Arab Sultanate of Zanzibar independence on December 10, 1963. But on January 12, 1964, the Afro-Shirazi Party (ASP) came to power after a revolution in which over 12,000 people (including five goans) were killed. The Zanzibar government does not celebrate the December 10 event as it considers it a "sham" independence by Britain. This is attributed to the fact that the party that won the elections - in this case the ASP party-did not come to power on that day. The other dates mentioned for Aden - part of present day Yemen, Dubai- one of the seven emirates constituting the United Arab Emirates, and Hong Kong which was returned to China after its 99 year lease expired, are independence dates. The irony of the list is that it did not include the West African States of Gambia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Ghana, the central african nations of Malawi and Zambia and the southern african countries of Botswana, Swaziland and Lesotho which were all granted independence by Britain in the sixties. My "gut" feeling is that Britain is "plucking" two "leaves" from the Goa experience with Portugal. Firstly, it is probably only applicable to people who were born in the listed countries before independence, and may be only for non-blacks in Africa; i.e. only they can apply for British passports.(I presume, the non-Chinese British passport holders in Hong Kong will benefit from this change, as they could not apply in mid-1997 for the vouchers which were only allocated to ethnic Chinese). They have probably excluded the other african states as there were'nt many non-blacks with British passports; for while the Indians controlled the commerce in East Africa, in West Africa, it was controlled by Lebanese who must have either had Lebanese passports or passports from France - their colonizers. Britishers of white stock controlled the commerce in the other states- hence there were'nt many British passport holders there. Having come from Tanzania, I do remember that many goans in East Africa changed their Portuguese documents to British passports before the dates mentioned to beat the deadline. Most of the Indians in Kenya and Uganda had British passports, unlike Tanzania where the majority of the Asians at the time of independence were Khoja Ismailis-followers of the Aga Khan- who became Tanzanian citizens almost immediately after independence. The situation changed after mid-1968 when Britain changed their immigration laws to avert a mass influx of British passport holders. Those who did get to Britain before the laws changed, or did not get immigration vouchers after the new law came into force, were virtually stateless; For they could not enter Britain with what was then called a "D" passport- making the passport a purely travel document. Hence, it is not very clear when the advert states , and I quote- "Nationality of British passport holders will now be "British citizen". Although many goans are proud to be given this unique privilege of acquiring Portuguese passports, many still wonder why the locals in the other African colonies like Mozambique and Angola, Macau and East Timor in Asia were not accorded similar facilities. Time will only tell. Tony Barros. New Jersey/New York. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month! http://sbc.yahoo.com ########################################################################## # Send submissions for Goanet to [EMAIL PROTECTED] # # PLEASE remember to stay on-topic (related to Goa), and avoid top-posts # # More details on Goanet at http://joingoanet.shorturl.com/ # # Please keep your discussion/tone polite, to reflect respect to others # ##########################################################################
