It was by accident rather than design that Mozambique came up with the ideal compromise to commemorate its most notorious colonial figure.
After a flood of the country’s national archive in Maputo in 2002, a life-sized bronze of the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar was shifted outside to the car park, where it still stands, almost two decades later, facing a broken drainpipe.
“When I put Salazar there facing the wall it was to protect him from the elements, not punish him,” Joel das Neves Tembe, former director of the national archives, told The Times.
The statue of Salazar, in academic robes, was an anomaly even then; one of the few to survive the cleansing of colonial-era names and paraphernalia after Mozambique gained independence from