When I, José Antonio Maria Vaz, first came to Dona Esmeralda's bakery, which she had named the Holy Bread Bakery, I had just turned eighteen. I was a trained baker, although I was still lacking my master's certificate. But I had been baking bread since I was six years old.

It was my father who took me over to my uncle, Master Fernando, who ran a bakery in the African bairro out past the airport. My father, who all his life long was an extremely impractical man, had one day looked at my hands and decided that they were suited for shaping croissants. I would find both my future and my livelihood as a baker. Like almost all other Africans, we were poor. I grew up during the time when no one had yet heard anything of the young revolutionaries who had already gone across the northern border. No one could possibly imagine that anyone would ever question the power of the whites who ruled our country and our lives, and even less that one day the whites would have to flee head over heels, never to return. For generations we had been forced to bow our heads in submission. Even though I now know that oppression can never become a habit, and even though back then opposition did exist in the silence levelled at all the whites who ruled over our lives, there was still no one except the young revolutionaries who seriously believed that anything could be changed. On many occasions, and when he was certain that no white person could hear what he said, my father, who spent his long life talking incessantly, would curse those who had come across the sea and forced us to work on their tea plantations and in their fruit orchards. But it was a protest that tied itself into complicated knots and never led to anything but more words.

For forty years my father sat under a tree in the open area among the sheds and hovels of the bairro. He sat in the shade and talked with the other unemployed men while he waited for the food to be ready which my mother prepared over an open fire.