Today’s South-South cooperation has also included projects for restoring their material and immaterial culture in countries like Ghana or Benin. In Accra, I visited the Brazil House, a small museum dedicated to the Tabom returnees which was, according to the ambassador there, one of President Lula’s “pet projects”. When he inaugurated the museum in 2008, Lula praised the returnees as “a true example for us”, for “never giving up the dream” of overcoming their condition as slaves.Not all Africans returned to their continent of origin by choice, however. A significant contingent was deported by the Brazilian state in the aftermath of slave revolts, most notably that of the muslim Malês in Bahia during the 1830’s . In the mid-twentieth century, the resumption of more intensive contacts was marked by excitement and hope by sectors of Itamaraty and Brazilian intelligentsia imbued with ideas about Africa’s affinities with Brazil . Multiple missions crossed the Southern Atlantic back and forth carrying diplomats, intellectuals, returnees, artists, and athletes. Even if all Brazilian diplomats were white,plastic garden container the culturalist grammar allowed them to claim some degree of Africanness.
When President Quadros decided to appoint a black ambassador to Brazil’s first embassy in Sub-Saharan Africa, he had to choose someone from outside of Itamaraty’s regular ranks: Raimundo Sousa Dantas, a journalist. This initial enthusiasm occasionally ran into its own inflated expectations and Brazilians’ poor knowledge of on-the-ground realities in Africa. A particularly evocative story tells of how, when Dantas arrived in Accra to take up the Brazilian embassy, Ghana’s iconic independence leader Kwame Nkrumah would have replied that a true demonstration of racial integration in Brazil would have been to appoint a black ambassador to Sweden rather than to Africa. This anecdote points to the sharp potential for contradiction between Africa’s place in Brazil’s nation-building imaginary and Africans’ views on race, colonialism and their own processes of internal colonialism. In the aftermath of decolonization, for instance, not all Africans saw their supposed legacies to Brazilian culture in a positive light, connected as they were with a tradition that those eager to modernize wished only to leave behind. Another telling anecdote recounted by D’Ávila speaks of a Nigerian student in Salvador who went crazy of fear of the Orishas ,associated as they are by many urban, Christianized Africans with the dangers of the bush. But the potential for disjuncture between the affinities discourse and the historical record is not limited to culture and race relations. One of them had to do precisely with the historically peripheral position shared by Brazil and the African continent in the domain of trade and finance.
If, at certain moments, horizontal relations across the South appeared as a cooperative move stemming from some inherent Third World solidarity with the potential to reduce economic dependence on the hegemonic West, at others they have translated into fears about competition for foreign investment and for consumer markets for tropical commodities. During the Kubitschek administration , which boiled its interest in Africa down to economic relations, a major concern shown by Brazilian diplomats and policymakers related to Africa’s privileged commercial ties with Europe, which remained in place even after independence. In the view of some, this was an “unfair” advantage , given African countries’ cheaper labor force and their preferential access to European markets for agricultural products also exported by Brazil such as coffee, cocoa and cotton. When looked at with contemporary eyes accustomed to Brazil’s undisputable prominence as a top world exporter of agricultural commodities – a stark contrast with many African countries’ struggle with their own food security —, such concerns with competition may seem at best overrated, at worst morally questionable. It should be kept in mind however that it was during the 1960’s and 70’s that many African countries knew their best economic moment, including in the agricultural sector. Yet, even after Brazil’s “agricultural revolution” in the 1970’s and the simultaneous stagnation of productivities in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, concerns with real or potential commercial competition have not entirely subsided.
On the contrary, this was an uncanny undercurrent to many conversations I had in the field that rarely came to the fore forthrightly. Some of the few occasions where such concerns were publicly aired and even defended were during debates in the National Congress on South-South cooperation with Africa and in the press coverage that accompanied them. In these debates, such positions were generally associated with members of the powerful farm lobby and their associates in government and society at large . These and other domestic concerns with national development have been an important drive behind Brazil’s policies for Africa, but they were not always aligned with diplomacy. This tension has been perhaps nowhere more pointed than during the early years of the golden period of Brazil-Africa relations, when two major African issues interpellated Brazil directly: South African apartheid and Portuguese colonization. Both were issues against which virtually the entire African continent and much of the Third World had firmly closed ranks. And in both cases, Brazilian diplomacy failed to take a clear oppositional stance, acting with hesitancy and ambiguity in the United Nations. Although these two issues are central to the academic literature on Brazil-Africa relations,in commonsense they are almost totally eclipsed. This may also be true of many of those working at the policy and perhaps even diplomacy level, given that even today we come across statements by Itamaraty personnel such as that what unites Brazil and Africa are “emblematic facts, such as Brazil’s support to political emancipation of African countries, joint efforts in overcoming underdevelopment, Brazil’s condemnation of the apartheid regime in South Africa”.Yet, it hasn’t been forty years since Portugal’s African colonies became independent, and even less since the apartheid regime collapsed. The historical literature tells us that, like most other nations South and North, successive Brazilian governments did condemn the apartheid regime in principle. However, even in the period of independent foreign policy, commercial and strategic interests would prompt silence when it came to supporting concrete measures against South Africa in the United Nations . Faithful to their Occidentalist alignment, the Brazilian military considered this African country an important and reliable ally of the West in a continent otherwise marked by fluid coalitions and leaders prone to strategically playing the communist vs. capitalist card. The easy story behind Brazil’s hesitancy in supporting the independence of Portugal’s African colonies, on its turn, is that of the “sentimentality” towards its “friendly colonizer” .
Indeed, Portugal’s stubborn attachment to its colonies even while independences were being rapidly achieved all around them seemed beyond comprehension by those in more “rational” societies such as the U.S. . Caution should be taken however not to take the facile road of accounting for Portugal’s moves as merely irrational or emotional, nor to overestimate the significance of these affective drives . Portugal’s stubbornness was in part a matter of missed timing. As Vale de Almeida pointed out, “African colonies became ‘real’,plastic pot important factors for the economy and self-representation of the country [Portugal] precisely at the moment when anti-colonial protest started” . As for Brazil, the eventual shift in attitude towards these two issues indicates that there is more to the story than sentimental attachments or even geopolitics. The Geisel period in particular was marked not only by the heyday of Brazil’s so-called economic miracle, but by what some scholars have called a renegotiation of dependence: that is, efforts at diversifying Brazil’s pool of trade partners away from the United States towards not just Africa, but also Japan, Western and Eastern Europe and the Middle East . Another major drive related to the 1970’s oil shocks: at a moment when Brazil’s energetic vulnerability was much higher than it is today, exporting manufactured products to Africa was a way of offsetting growing oil imports especially from Nigeria, which by the late seventies had displaced South Africa as Brazil’s main commercial partner in the continent . Brazil’s pragmatic shift was, moreover, hastened by an immediate constraint: a geopolitical alliance between Sub-Saharan Africa and Arab countries that threatened Brazil with an oil embargo due to its “recalcitrant stances” on South-African apartheid and Portuguese colonization in Africa . In Geisel’s foreign policy, this shift was rationalized in terms of the doctrine of “responsible pragmatism”, and allowed for moves that would be otherwise incomprehensible from a strictly ideological point of view. Thus, in November 1975, during the harshest period of Brazil’s anti-communist military regime, it was the first Western country to recognize the independence of Angola – under a Marxist guerilla government, Agostinho Neto’s People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola . According to D’Ávila , this was a belated attempt at redemption from the lack of firm commitment to decolonization in other parts of Lusophone Africa, which had bred acrimonious resentment from independence leaders from Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique to the point where the Brazilian government was not even invited to the latter’s independence celebrations in June 1975. Even if Brazil’s long-awaited gesture was made obsolete by the Carnation Revolution that happened months earlier, in April 1974, the recognition of Angola’s independence would, it was hoped, demonstrate to African leaders, to their Arab allies and ultimately the rest of the Third World that Brazil was not a “toy in the hands of U.S. interests in Africa” . A legacy of this moment was Brazil’s special relationship with Angola, which persists to this day even with China’s huge strides in that country during the past decade or so.By the end of the eighties, however, the commercial ties achieved during the golden years of Brazil-Africa relations had come mostly undone. As it turned out, Brazil’s 1970’s economic miracle was short-lived, eventually collapsing under the weight of a severe and long-lasting debt crisis. Relations with Africa suffered accordingly, as economic recession sweeping both sides of the Southern Atlantic “cooled down Brazil’s dreams of becoming a world power and crushed Africa’s expectations of economic autonomy” . Relations would not reintensify until Lula’s presidency beginning in 2003. Like in the 1970’s economic miracle, Brazil sees itself in a moment of economic and geopolitical emergence. But this time, in a changing international context where the North is arguably losing ground to so-called emerging powers, most notably China, it is hoped that such emergence will be for good – and so will the country’s commitment with Africa. In his latest book, Saraiva even made a case for a rupture with Brazilian diplomacy’s decades-old discourse on Africa. In his view, during the Lula administration there would have been a shift away from the fanciful culturalist idiom of affinities to a more realistic idiom of indebtedness. Rather than clinging to Africans’ imagined contributions to Brazilian civilization, this new discourse would recognize “slavery, rather than the official cordiality of culturalist discourse” as Brazil’s fundamental historical link with Africa, as well as the unequal socio-economic inclusion of African descendants that unfolded from it. Indeed, during the last decade or so, the hegemony of the racial harmony ideology has been visibly shaken by the rise of race-based movements in Brazil. Affirmative action claims have gradually gained ground especially during the FHC and Lula administrations , most visibly in the form of quota policies in public universities and civil service. Yet, just as Brazil’s diplomatic body has been, historically, a fertile ground for the proliferation of the culturalist grammar, it seems to be less permeable to these and other challenges to it. So how far have these recent discursive displacements gone in constituting a real shift? My fieldwork experience indicated that Saraiva’s recent celebration of a change in Brazil’s discourse on Africa should be taken with a grain of salt. As himself one of the crafters and champions of this new discourse in policy making circles,this celebration is possibly better understood as an attempted self-fulfilling prophecy. As such, it tends to gloss over some of the ambiguities and contradictions that characterize what could perhaps be a transition to a different rhetoric. Although the displacements underscored by Saraiva are indeed perceptible, they do not seem to be sufficiently robust, widespread or concerted to constitute a shift. Sometimes what I heard in informal situations would even go in a direction other than indebtedness: claims about Africans’ own responsibility in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, that Africans had their own slaves, and so forth.