While cooperation discourse was centered on confident expectations borne out by cultural and natural affinities supposedly shared by the two sides of the Southern Atlantic, those operating at the front line of cooperation showed a much more diverse range of concerns, addressing the multiple domains they encountered while making their way into Africa’s intricate development landscape. As it turned out, the idiom prevalent in the Brazilian diplomats’ discourse could also be found among most other emerging donors, and was just as often conveyed through presumed historical connections or analogies. Thus, in their cooperation efforts, Indians have evoked ties with Africa from pre-history – the landmass where India stands today broke off from the Southeastern part of Africa before it bumped into Asia to form the Himalayas – to the common struggle against colonization, where that continent would have figured as “the land of awakening of the Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi”, to language, food and Bollywood songs and films . The Chinese have made extensive use of a “rhetoric of commonality, analogous underdevelopment, suffering at the hands of colonialism and encouragement of self reliance” . Age-old sea trade and the imaginary of the millenarian Silk Road linking Asia to East Africa have been lavishly deployed by both Asian giants. Emerging donors from the African continent– South Africa and some Maghreb countries – have drawn on their alleged natural vocation to act as mediators between Sub-Saharan Africa and Northern and Southern donors.
Even those who do not enjoy significant historical ties with Sub-Saharan Africa, like the Japanese,round nursery pots are finding their way around this handicap by partnering up with those who do, like Brazil. When one looks closer at the historical record, however, a series of strategic “occlusions and associations” quickly emerges. Based on several case studies, some of them by anthropologists, Emma Mawdsley remarked for instance how China’s South-South rhetoric draws extensively on the Maoist era’s close engagement with Africa while in contemporary China itself, that period is a subject to be avoided ; how India’s “sanitized historical referents” have excluded “troublesome realities” like the expulsion or hostility against Indians in some East African countries, or their participation as lower-level officials in British colonization in Africa ; or how, in today’s reemergence of Poland as a donor, it is as if cooperation experiences during its socialist past “had never existed” . Therefore, all emerging donors have a “symbolic politics” of re-writing their joint history towards a naturalized narrative of affinities and commonalities.This chapter will discuss this symbolic politics in the case of Brazil-Africa relations. Although in this case the rhetoric of affinities and commonalities is equally prevalent, it has addressed with particular poignancy and tenacity a domain in which anthropologists have also made much investment over the decades: culture. The first section will probe into the historical roots of Brazilian diplomacy’s exceptional interest in culture, and discuss some of the contradictions to which this has led. I then go on to suggest some of the ways in which culture appeared at the front line practice of contemporary cooperation, as it was observed during fieldwork.
The last section takes up the claim that Brazilians’ views on Africa have been historically imbued with a persistent “culturalist grammar”, originally popularized by the work of sociologist Gilberto Freyre from the 1930’s onwards in Brazil, and later on in Portugal. Looking at Freyre’s ideas and their vulgarized version through the lenses of Said’s Orientalism, I elaborate the notion of nation-building Orientalism to suggest how Brazilians’ views on Africa have been shaped by the double directionality of coloniality discussed in the Introduction: on the one hand an internal colonialist concern with the incorporation of African descendants into the national polity, and on the other, Brazil’s sense of sub-alternity and quest for recognition vis-à-vis European and U.S. hegemony. In October 18th 2010, Embrapa’s brand new training center in Brasília opened its doors to its first cohort of African trainees, from 27 countries in both Sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. In the opening ceremony, government officials and Embrapa managers received them with a warm welcome, urging them to feel at home, “brothers and sisters” of Brazilians as they are. A representative of the Brazilian Cooperation Agency opened the speaker series by presenting Brazil’s model of South-South cooperation along the lines described in Chapter 1: demand-driven, non-conditional, based on solidarity and free of commercial interests, tailored to particular conditions of recipient countries. In the case of Africa, he argued, success in adapting Brazilian experiences would be further linked to a series of enabling elements: ethnic and historical resemblances produced by past migratory flows; a common cultural heritage expressed in the arts, sports, food, music; natural and climatic similarities; and comparable challenges in developmental fields like agriculture or energy.
In his afternoon presentation, he addressed Brazilian culture: the country is highly mixed racially, he explained, with an “open, dynamic and versatile culture” marked by religious and racial tolerance. Both plural and original, it is diverse across the country’s different regions, while being capable of producing modern world-class “jewels” like Brasília. The assumption of “indissoluble cultural ties” between Brazil and Africa, and that Brazil’s unique cultural outlook owes much to African contributions in domains like food, language, music and other arts, sports and other bodily techniques, is one of the most recurrent threads in written and spoken official discourse on Africa-Brazil cooperation.A secondary one is the ample deployment of an idiom of kinship, especially that of siblinghood, where Brazil occasionally appears as a more mature brother. President Lula was one of its most enthusiastic users, and even his temperate successor Rousseff has maintained it; in their statements during trips to Africa or when receiving Africans in Brazil, irmãos e irmãs africanosor vizinhos próximoswere a sure reference. A third theme speaks of Brazil and African countries in terms of a common historical experience of having been subjected to colonization or imperialism, and the almost automatic ties of solidarity that would ensue from it. Different from Europe’s racialized rule that “relied on assertions of fundamental cultural differences between Europeans and Africans to legitimate imperial projects of civilizing improvements” , relations between Brazilians and Africans would be characterized by cultural familiarity and spontaneous affinities. The recurrence of these claims led me to ask the obvious questions: is this indeed the case? If not, what role is this discourse playing in contemporary rapprochements between Brazilians and Africans? How is it able to sustain itself in spite of its potential for contradiction vis-à-vis both front line practice and the historical record? One of the first things my research effort unveiled is that none of this is new; in fact, if it weren’t for some recent inflections, one would be tempted to suggest that contemporary discourse on Brazil-Africa cooperation is at least half-a-century old. In his reference book on Brazil’s international relations with the African continent, Brazilian historian José Flávio Sombra Saraiva remarked an “intriguing continuity” throughout the decades, despite oscillations in virtually all other domains: what he called,plastic flower pots in a formulation that I will take up here, the culturalist grammar of Brazil’s discourse on Africa. This rhetoric is not only long lasting but in many ways unique; according to Saraiva , it stands out sharply for its “emotional” elements, in contrast with the tone dedicated to other regions historically privileged by Brazil, such as Latin America, the U.S., and Europe. This grammar can be found with particular salience in the two other moments when Brazilian diplomats, policymakers and businessmen sought a closer approximation with their African counterparts.
One harks back to the first wave of independences in the African continent beginning in the late 1950’s, when Brazilian President Jânio Quadros inaugurated in 1961 an official foreign policy for the African continent which was carried forward by his successor João Goulart until his overthrow by a military coup in 1964. The first three years of military rule swung back to Brazil’s traditional Occidentalist alignment with Europe and the U.S., downplaying relations with African countries and other decolonizing nations. But this did not last long: in another shift around 1967, begun what Saraiva called the “golden years” of Brazil-Africa relations, which this time would last over a decade. Both Quadros and Goulart used to refer to Africa in today’s tropes of familiarity, a common cultural identity and history, and a natural bridge across the Southern Atlantic. Correspondingly, it was often taken for granted that Africans would be “naturally” receptive to Brazil’s gestures of political and cultural solidarity , and that the nascent African nations would be eager to learn from Brazil’s more mature post-colonial nation-state, including as an “example of complete absence of racial prejudice” . Brazil’s constitutive “Africanness” and its marginal position within the Western sphere were cast by Brazilian diplomats as a positive vocation for mediating between former European colonizers and the new “tropical civilizations” in Africa, or between the First and the Third Worlds at large – even to “lead the bloc of Afro-Asian nations” in its relations with the West . But if metaphors of approximation have framed the Southern Atlantic as Brazil’s “Eastern border” , an “inner sea” , or “no more than a ‘river’ between two continents” , the 1,600 miles that separate continental Brazil’s Easternmost portion from the Senegalese capital of Dakar have also been regarded as a line of key geopolitical importance for protecting the West from the communist threat . In spite of the discursive emphasis on spontaneous solidarity, geopolitics, global trade, and imperatives of national development played from the start a key part in shaping Brazil-Africa relations. In fact, this kind of rhetoric showed to be highly flexible to different uses; its basic logic would persist even when Brazil’s orientation towards Africa followed a very different direction than Quadros’ and Goulart’s distinctive Third-Worldism. In those moments when an engagement with decolonizing Africa was downplayed in favor of a realignment with the West, the culturalist grammar undergirded the confidence placed on the supposedly higher civilizing capabilities of Portuguese colonialism – of which Brazil itself would be the most finished exemplar. Supporters of Portugal would often deploy kinship or sentimental terms to describe its relations with former and current colonies, going to such lengths as to declare that “Our policy with Portugal is not really a policy. It is a family affair”, or that “I have no policy. I came here to love Portugal” . A common starting point in narratives about Brazil-Africa relations, including in SouthSouth cooperation discourse, is the arrival, in the 1550’s, of the first African slaves to the shores of recently “discovered” Portuguese possessions in South America. Most of them were shipped from slave trade outposts established by the Portuguese in what is today Angola, and in the Gulf of Benin in West Africa. By the late seventeenth century, Portugal had become a subaltern Empire politically and economically dependent on the British, and from the late 1700’s, Brazilians themselves had surpassed the Portuguese in direct trade with Africa . The nineteenth century, which saw a gradual receding of legal and then illegal slave trade across the Atlantic, is generally regarded as a moment of relative silence between Brazil and the African continent . During this period, the rising British Empire succeeded not only in significantly curbing the transatlantic traffic in slaves, but in consolidating its hegemony over South Atlantic trade routes . The encroachment of European powers on the African continent, which would culminate in the late nineteenth century “scramble” and from there in the effective colonial occupation of the African hinterlands, finished closing off the continent’s channels of exchange with Brazil. And this included Angola as well as all other Portuguese colonies – as part of its independence deal with Portugal in 1822, Brazil had renounced any attempt to gain control over its former colonizer’s possessions in the African continent. But the reasons for Brazil’s retreat did not refer solely to changing international arrangements: the first decades of independence were a key moment for internal colonialism and territorial integration, marked by multi-pleinternal rebellions and upheavals as well as by an outflow of retornadose specially to the Bight of Benin. Such returnees would become a central element in the twentieth-century reinvention of a shared tradition between Brazil and Africa .