About O Combate

O Combate

O Combate was a Portuguese-language weekly newspaper published in Macau from 1923 to 1927. The Macao Public Library's Senado Library catalogue preserved its complete numbered run, numbers 1 to 188, in two bound volumes. It was founded by the journalist Domingos Gregório da Rosa Duque, a republican militant and Freemason, who edited and directed it under the masthead motto "pela pátria e pela república" — "for the fatherland and for the republic." O Combate was the combative republican paper of 1920s Macau: it feuded with the Catholic and nationalist A Pátria and with Monsenhor Manuel Teixeira, and in April 1927, a year after the military coup that destroyed Portugal's First Republic, Rosa Duque used its front page to declare his condition as a Freemason in defiance of the new order. The paper ceased in 1927. This profile is written in the past tense.

Identity and motto

The title O Combate meant "The Combat" or "The Struggle" in Portuguese, and the paper wore its purpose in its subtitle. The catalogue of the Porto Municipal Public Library recorded the title in full as "O Combate: pela Patria e pela Republica," edited and directed by Domingos Gregório da Rosa Duque; the motto — for the fatherland and for the republic — was, as the paper's historians have noted, the statement of its editorial line. O Combate was published in Macau, the territory on the western side of the Pearl River Delta that Portugal administered until December 1999, when it became a Special Administrative Region of China. It belonged to the tradition of the Portuguese political weekly in Macau: small, personal, polemical papers through which the territory's Portuguese and Macanese factions fought their battles in print, in a community where the same few dozen men staffed the newspapers, the Leal Senado, the administration and the masonic lodge by turns.

Founding in 1923

O Combate was founded in 1923 by Domingos Gregório da Rosa Duque, who was its editor-in-chief and director. The founding date is given by the Senado catalogue, whose run begins in that year, and by modern scholarship: Joaquim Grave dos Santos, in his 2022 study of the Grand Orient Lusitanien Uni in Macau published in the Chroniques d'histoire maçonnique, recorded that in 1923 Rosa Duque "founded the republican weekly O Combate, of which he was editor-in-chief and director." The paper appeared in the last, unstable years of Portugal's First Republic, when Macau's republican elite — organised substantially around the masonic lodge Luís de Camões nº 383 and the memory of the revolution of 5 October 1910 — still treated the newspaper as the natural instrument of politics. Rosa Duque was no newcomer: he had served as secretary of O Liberal, the independent republican weekly founded in 1919 and directed by Constâncio José da Silva. O Combate was his own paper, founded to speak in his own voice.

The founder: soldier, deportee and Freemason

Domingos Gregório da Rosa Duque's biography, reconstructed by Grave dos Santos, explains the paper he made. He had fought as a sergeant on the barricades of the Rotunda in Lisbon during the republican revolution of 5 October 1910. Afterwards he was deported to Angola, and then to Macau, where he was reinstated in the army with the rank of captain. In Macau he was initiated in 1916 into the lodge Luís de Camões nº 383, with the symbolic name Sócrates, and he became, in the study's words, one of the great personalities of the republican press in Macau. The lodge to which he belonged was a centre of the territory's republican elite — native Macanese and expatriate officers and officials — and constituted a counterweight to the influence of the Catholic Church in a predominantly religious and conservative society. A deportee of the Republic he had fought for, remade as an army captain and a mason in exile at the edge of China, Rosa Duque brought to O Combate the temperament its name announced: the paper was an instrument of combat, and its editor's life had been a preparation for the role.

The surviving run, 1923 to 1927

The Senado Library held O Combate in two bound volumes, microfilmed on rolls 13 and 14, and its entry recorded a complete numbered run: numbers 1 to 4 in 1923; numbers 5 to 53 in 1924; numbers 54 to 114 in 1925; numbers 115 to 155 in 1926; and numbers 156 to 188 in 1927. The catalogue described the paper as a weekly, and the numbering broadly bears that out — roughly fifty issues a year, rising to sixty-one in 1925. A complete run of 188 issues preserved entire is a bibliographic distinction: most Macau political weeklies of the period survive in the Senado collection with gaps, suspensions and missing years, while O Combate's five calendar years sat on the shelf unbroken. The run is also the paper's chronology in miniature: founded part-way through 1923, at full strength through 1924 and 1925, still publishing through the coup year of 1926, and ending in the course of 1927, after its editor's most famous gesture.

Rivalry with A Pátria

O Combate's defining feud was with A Pátria, the rival Macau paper of the Catholic and nationalist camp, which had begun as a weekly in 1924 and became a daily in December 1925. The two papers embodied the two poles of Portuguese Macau's public life under the late Republic: the republican, masonic and anticlerical current represented by Rosa Duque, and the Catholic, patriotic current that looked to the Church and to an authoritarian renewal of the nation. Their disputes were, in the recollection preserved by the paper's historians, sharp — before the editorship changed, the quarrels conducted in O Combate were acerbic. The feud was also social and institutional, not merely editorial: the Macau Club's reading room, as a study of the territory's guidebook literature noted, stocked the newspapers of Macau such as A Pátria and O Combate side by side, so that the territory's principal Portuguese residents read the two enemy papers in the same room. In a city of Macau's size, a press war was a quarrel among neighbours, and O Combate waged its side of it for four years.

The April 1927 declaration

The paper's best-documented moment came after the world that created it had fallen. On 28 May 1926 a military coup in Lisbon overthrew the First Republic and installed a dictatorship. In Macau, as press historians have recorded, the new regime's first governor, Tamagnini Barbosa, arrived in December 1926 to find the local press already reduced, and the era of the free political weekly was ending. Rosa Duque answered in print. On 23 April 1927 — the issue of O Combate illustrated in the paper's modern reference entries — he published a front-page article in reply to the nationalist and Catholic A Pátria, entitled "Freemasonry, the reactionary students and A Pátria," in which, as Grave dos Santos summarised it, he assumed his condition as a Freemason and as a head of Freemasonry. A year after the coup, with the dictatorship consolidating and masonry about to be driven underground, the declaration was a deliberate act of defiance: the editor of a small Macau weekly putting his secret-society allegiance on his front page, under a masthead that still read "for the fatherland and for the republic."

Feuds with Monsenhor Teixeira and the change of editorship

O Combate's other long quarrel was with Monsenhor Manuel Teixeira, the Macau priest who became the territory's most prolific historian. The paper's historians recorded that in its early phase the disputes conducted against Monsenhor Teixeira were particularly bitter — the young cleric and the masonic editor were natural antagonists in the Macau of the 1920s, where the Church and the lodge contested the allegiance of the same small Portuguese community. In time, Rosa Duque was succeeded in the direction of the paper by Herman Machado Monteiro, who gave its writing a more measured tone. The succession marked the paper's transition from personal organ to a calmer publication, though it came at the very end of the run: the Senado numbering ends in 1927, the year of the April declaration, and no issues of 1928 are preserved. Whether the paper was closed by authority, by exhaustion or by the departure of its animating editor, the consulted record does not say; what is certain is that its end coincided with the dictatorship's tightening grip, under which an avowedly republican and masonic paper had no future.

The founder's later career and the paper's world

Rosa Duque's career outlasted O Combate and defines its place in Macau journalism. In 1931 he founded another newspaper, A Voz de Macau, to which he remained linked until his death in 1947; A Voz de Macau became the principal Portuguese daily of the territory through the 1930s and the war years. The trajectory — secretary of O Liberal in 1919, founder of O Combate in 1923, founder of A Voz de Macau in 1931 — made Rosa Duque the central newspaperman of republican Macau, and O Combate the middle and most militant of his three papers: the one in which the sergeant of the Rotunda, deported to the edge of China, fought the Republic's last press battles in the territory. The world that sustained such papers — a few hundred Portuguese-speaking readers, a masonic lodge, a Catholic establishment, a governor answerable to Lisbon — was already disappearing as O Combate ended; the censorship law of the dictatorship's colonial regime, codified in 1937, subjected all Macau publications to prior censorship, and the combative weekly of the 1920s had no successor of its kind.

Preservation and record

The documentary record of O Combate rests on the Senado Library of the Macao Public Library, which preserved its complete run of 188 issues in two bound volumes on microfilm rolls 13 and 14, as one of the 101 foreign-language newspapers in its collection; on the Porto Municipal Public Library's catalogue record of the title with its motto and its editor-director's name; on the account of Macau journalism by the journalist and historian João Guedes, which preserved the paper's feuds and its change of editorship; and on modern scholarship, above all Grave dos Santos's study of Macau Freemasonry, which documented Rosa Duque's life, the paper's founding and the April 1927 article. A reproduced front page of the issue of 23 April 1927 circulates with the paper's modern reference entries. No website or continuing publication exists for the title.

Assessment

O Combate was the most personally stamped of Macau's republican weeklies: founded, edited and directed by a single militant journalist, carrying its creed — for the fatherland and for the republic — in its subtitle, and ending its five-year run with an act of printed defiance, its editor's public avowal of Freemasonry under a dictatorship that was about to outlaw it. Its complete preserved run in the Senado Library, its documented feuds with A Pátria and with Monsenhor Manuel Teixeira, and its founder's central place in the journalism of republican Macau make it one of the best-evidenced small political papers of the territory's twentieth century, and a primary source for the last years of the Portuguese Republic in Asia.