A new book by journalist, documentary maker and CES researcher Diana Andringa, based on the RTP series of the same name and with hundreds of testimonies from those who lived through this decade in Portugal, between censorship, colonial war, university crises and a lot of political and international unrest.

Author’s note

This book was first conceived in the 1980s as a series for RTP. A rematch for the ignorance to which we young people had been condemned in the 1960s, when the world and the country around us were undergoing profound changes. A fight for the memory of what we had not been allowed to know, hear, see, tell properly: from the escape from Peniche in early January 1960 to the demonstrations of 1969, the academic crises of ’62 and ’65, the Santa Maria hijacking, the Beja coup, the liberation struggles in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, the assassination of General Humberto Delgado, the great floods of 1967, the replacement of Salazar by Caetano. All sifted through by Censorship, told by the voice of power, only suspected by the news coming in clandestinely from abroad, by international examples, by the songs that the radio banned but we knew by heart, by the films that the film clubs brought us, even if they were cut off.

In the limited international news, we also followed the civil rights struggles of black Americans, the opposition to the Vietnam War, and the Sino-Soviet schism. The world was changing and we wanted to be part of that change. Twenty years later, as a journalist at RTP, I realised how Censorship also made it difficult for us to access the past. Nevertheless, we had to do justice to those who opposed the dictatorship throughout that decade. Geração de 60 tries to do that through around a hundred testimonies from protagonists, both known and anonymous, and various documents from the time. Now also in book form.’ [Diana Andringa]