Rosa Bonaparte

  • Revolutionary
  • activist
Organizations
Movement
  • Anti-colonialism
  • East Timorese nationalism
  • Feminism
RelativesBernardino Bonaparte Soares (brother)

Rosa Filomena "Muki" Cardoso Bonaparte Soares (18 February 1957 – 8 December 1975) was an East Timorese revolutionary and women's rights activist.

Early life and education

Rosa Filomena Cardoso Bonaparte Soares was born on 18 February 1957 in Manatuto, a small town on the northern coast of what was then Portuguese Timor.[1][2][3][4] Her father, Joaquim Bonaparte Soares, was a Manatuto native and worked for Correios, Telégrafos e Telefones, a Portuguese mail and telecommunications company.[2][3] Her mother, Alda da Costa Oliveira, came from nearby Metinaro.[2] Bonaparte was the first of thirteen siblings, the others being Bárbara, Mariano, Diogo, Rosa Helena, Margarida de Oliveira, Bernardino Joaquim Ribeiro, Deolinda Severina, Rosalino de Oliveira, Madalena Apolonia Gomes, and Alda Maria de Oliveira, stepsister Maria Felizarda, and an unnamed baby who died before birth.[3]

Bonaparte began her primary education at the Canossian sisters' school for girls in Ossu.[1][3][4] There, she also learned sewing.[3] In 1967, she continued her schooling in Dili, moving on in 1969 to the Escola Industria e Comercial Professor Silva Cunha.[3] Graduating in 1973 with high marks, she won a scholarship to pursue her university studies in Portugal in commerce.[1][3][4]

Revolutionary activity

In Portugal, Bonaparte joined the Movimento Reorganizativo do Partido do Proletariado, a Maoist group.[4] She also frequented the Casa dos Timores, an apartment in Lisbon which became a site of political discussion and anticolonial activist organizing by Timorese students.[1][3][4][5] Bonaparte's studies in Portugal coincided with the April 1974 Carnation Revolution, after which Timorese political parties began to operate openly.[3][4] In the months that followed, the Casa dos Timores accelerated its political activities. On 13 July 1974, the group passed a resolution reaffirming its solidarity with national liberation movements around the world, and in particular those in the Portuguese colonial empire, including the MPLA in Angola, FRELIMO in Mozambique, the PAIGC in Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde, and the MLSTP in São Tomé and Príncipe.[1] During this period, Bonaparte visited PAIGC-controlled areas during the war of independence in Portuguese Guinea.[1]

The Casa dos Timores' next political move was to send a delegation to Timor to take part in the changing politics in the colony.[1] The Portuguese government had already made available some funds for university students who had achieved good marks to return to their home countries for a holiday.[1] With some members having already obtained this funding, the Casa dos Timores held a meeting and elected Abílio Araújo, António Carvarinho, and Vicente dos Reis to return to Timor for political work.[1] Several others joined the trip, including Bonaparte and Araújo's wife Guilhermina dos Santos.[1] The group arrived in Dili by plane at the Aitarak Laran airport on 11 September 1974 at 1pm.[1][4]

Upon returning to Timor, Bonaparte joined the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin), the leading pro-independence party, and quickly established herself among the organization's leadership.[4] She became one of only three women to serve on Fretilin's original central committee, along with Guilhermina Araújo and Maria do Céu Pereira.[1][4][6][7] Along with many other former Casa dos Timores members, she participated in Fretilin's grassroots mobilization work, and in May 1975 she took part in the Portuguese Decolonization Commission negotiations in Dili.[1][4][6] Noted for her intensity and small figure, the Portuguese negotiators called her "the petite revolutionary" and "Rosa Luxemburg".[1][4][6] To her Timorese comrades, she was known by the nickname "Muki".[1][3]

On 28 August 1975, Bonaparte became secretary-general of the newly-formed Fretilin women's wing, the Popular Organization of Timorese Women (OPMT; Portuguese: Organização Popular da Mulher Timor).[1][3][4] Within weeks, the OPMT had grown to 7,000 members, with chapters across the colony.[4] Bonaparte authored the group's manifesto, titled "The Popular Organization of Timorese Women: Analysis of the Situation of Timorese Women", published in the Fretilin newspaper Jornal do Povo Mau Bere on 27 September 1975 and presented to Fretilin's central committee the following day.[1][4] Offering a theoretical analysis of the women's liberation movement in East Timor at the time, Bonaparte argued that Timorese women faced a "double exploitation" by both "traditionalist" and "colonialist conceptions" and identified the causes of their oppression as "both cultural and structural."[1][4][8][9] The manifesto condemned barlake (the traditional Timorese wedding traditions, including bride price), polygamy, and the sexual exploitation of women by "colonialist bosses".[1][10] Bonaparte wrote several other articles in the Jornal do Povo Mau Bere and another published in a Trotskyist newspaper and reproduced posthumously in 1977 in East Timor News, the Australian solidarity movement's publication.[1][4]

The OPMT's two central objectives, as described by Bonaparte in an article published in the Australian labor newspaper Direct Action in September 1975, were "firstly, to participate directly in the struggle against colonialism, and second, to fight in every way the violent discrimination that Timorese women had suffered in colonial society."[1][11] By the first week of September 1975, the OPMT had established childcare centers in Dili, Maubisse, and Turiscai to serve orphans and others affected by the previous month's fighting between Fretilin and the Timorese Democratic Union, a conservative political party.[1][3][9][10][12] Under Bonaparte's leadership, the organization also carried out literacy drives for Timorese women, which were taught, for the first time, in Tetum rather than Portuguese.[3][4][12]

Bonaparte returned early from Maubisse, where she and several other OPMT members were operating the Mau Koli childcare center, to Dili to take part in Fretilin's unilateral declaration of independence on 28 November 1975.[1] She was reportedly the first to unfurl the new flag of the Democratic Republic of East Timor.[1][4]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x da Silva, Antero Benedito (2011). FRETILIN Popular Education 1973-1978 and its Relevance to Timor-Leste Today (PDF). Armidale: University of New England. pp. 65, 148–152, 163–164. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  2. ^ a b c Sword Gusmão, Kirsty; Gusmão, Xanana (2015-07-01). Muki: Rosa Bonaparte Soares Nia Diáriu [Muki: Rosa Bonaparte Soares' Diary] (in Tetum). Melbourne: Rotary. p. 3.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Pires, Joaquim (2023-05-15). "Rosa Muki Bonaparte". Revista Lafaek (in Tetum). Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r Hutt, David (2017-08-18). "East Timor's "Red Rosa"". New Mandala. Retrieved 2024-09-12.
  5. ^ Hill, Helen Mary (1978). Fretilin: The Origins, Ideologies and Strategies of a Nationalist Movement in East Timor. Monash University. p. 78.
  6. ^ a b c Franke, Richard W.; Kohen, Arnold S. (1979). "Bibliography: East Timor". Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. 11 (2): 70 – via Taylor & Francis Online.
  7. ^ Blackburn, Susan; Ting, Helen (2013-07-31). Women in Southeast Asian Nationalist Movements. NUS Press. p. 229. ISBN 978-9971-69-674-0.
  8. ^ Dunayevskaya, Raya (1996). Women's Liberation and the Dialectics of Revolution: Reaching for the Future. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-0-8143-2655-8.
  9. ^ a b Tilman Pereira, Berta Antonieta (2021-10-01). "Women's Emancipation and Maubootizmu" (PDF). Watch Indonesia!. Retrieved 2024-09-09.
  10. ^ a b Leach, Michael (2017). Nation-Building and National Identity in Timor-Leste. New York: Routledge. pp. 70–71. ISBN 978-1-315-31164-7.
  11. ^ Niner, Sara (2013). "Between Earth and Heaven: The Politics of Gender" (PDF). In Leach, Michael; Kingsbury, Damien (eds.). The Politics of Timor-Leste: Democratic Consolidation after Intervention. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. pp. 9–10. ISBN 9780877277897 – via Fundasaun Mahein.
  12. ^ a b Tilman Pereira, Berta Antonieta (August 2020). "Women of Timor-Leste: Unyielding in the fight against oppression and violence" (PDF). Blickwechsel. Retrieved 2024-09-17 – via La'o Hamutuk.


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