(Post)colonialism, Globalization, and Lusofonia or The ‘Time-Space’ of the
Portuguese-Speaking World
My objective today is to briefly offer a critical framework that provides historical, geopolitical, discursive, and cultural coordinates in order to understand the emergence and development of Portuguese-speaking nations as individual entities, but also as a group of nations, varyingly interconnected for several centuries through the experience of colonialism as well as the trans-
Atlantic slave trade, but more recently, through globalization. In agreement with
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I argue for the importance of looking at the situatedness of specific colonial and postcolonial experiences that theoretical currents emanating mostly from the Anglophone world since the late twentieth century, as a result of the experience of British colonialism, cannot fully account for in their nuanced differences. Nevertheless, postcolonial theory has provided key insights into European discursive constructions of its others and their deployment in the fields of power (Said), the psychic underpinnings of the relations between colonizers and colonized in the contact zone, with their manifold effects in relationship to racial, ethnic, gender, or class differences
(Fanon, Memmi, Bhabha, Spivak), or the cultural place of postcolonial diasporic intellectuals in the metropole (Hall, Bhabha), among others. I do not intend to rehearse the main arguments, terminological or others, within the field of postcolonial studies, or for that matter, the arguments in favor or against hegemonic neoliberal or counter-hegemonic globalization. Instead, I wish to

focus on the specificities of the (post)colonial experience as they pertain to the
Lusophone world and how they inform the historical and epistemic turn from postcoloniality to globalization em português.
The Portuguese maritime-colonial empire in its various geopolitical arenas
—Asia, Africa, and Brazil— became subordinate to more dominant imperial powers such as Spain (by virtue of annexation between 1580-1640 in the wake of the battle of El-Ksar-El-Kebir in Morocco), Holland (by fierce competition throughout the seventeenth century over maritime trade routes and strategic posts in Asia, Africa, and Northeastern Brazil), and England (by virtue of friendship, but more specifically, the Methuen treaty of 1703, signed in the midst of England’s rise to imperial hegemony worldwide, giving it preferential commercial treatment by Portugal). Ruler of the seas by the nineteenth century,
England had an enormous influence on Luso-Brazilian affairs, among others, in relationship to the Portuguese crown transfer to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 and in connection to the prohibition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade after 1845.
However, it was the British Ultimatum of 1890 that sealed the subordinate character of Portuguese colonialism in the context of the scramble for Africa by
European colonial powers in the late nineteenth century.
Even if Portugal’s condition as subalternized colonial power was one of its primary historical traits, characterizations of Portuguese colonial exceptionalism must be tempered by the reality that Portugal was still able to forge a tightly centralized and interdependent triangular trade system across the Atlantic after

it lost its commercial and military hegemony in the Indian Ocean by the end of the sixteenth century. During the annexation of the Spanish crown, such system served the overseas’ strategic interests of the Iberian kingdoms. Furthermore,
Portugal, at various points of its colonial trajectory did not hesitate to violently exert power over its subjects through the arm of the Inquisition, either in Brazil or Goa, or through sometimes devastating military campaigns in Angola,
Mozambique, and (former Portuguese) Guinea at various historical junctures.
Yet, the colonial (and even postcolonial) relationship between Brazil and
Portugal was (and is) indeed exceptional in ways that differ greatly even from the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain. Already before its independence, Brazilian economic output and natural resource base was far greater than that of the metropole, therefore creating a relation of economic dependence of the mother country vis-à-vis the former colony. No other colonial power transferred its capital from the metropole to the colony as
Portugal did between 1808-1821 due to the Napoleonic wars. This particular move led to the emergence of Rio de Janeiro as the center of the Portuguese empire. In fact, as Carlos Guilherme Mota and Fernando Novais point out, during this era there was an inversion of the colonial pact between Portugal and
Brazil whereby the metropole became a de facto appendix of the colony (as cited in Santos' Pela mão de Alice 130-31). This is one of the most blatant examples of a
Portuguese condition that Boaventura de Sousa Santos describes as intermediate and semi-peripheral from a geopolitical point of view; simultaneously semi-

colonizers and semi-colonized (this, in relationship to Brazil but also to England).
Borrowing a major trope from Shakespeare's "The Tempest," but also from
Hispanic American postcolonial reelaborations of this trope, Santos adds that the
Portuguese colonizer was a hybrid who combined aspects of Prospero and
Caliban: "If Prospero ever disguised himself as Caliban, it was through the mask of the Portuguese" ("Espírito de Timor Invade o Rio" 2). In his article, ”Between
Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Inter-Identity” (2002),
Santos develops the suggestive trope by arguing that the identity of the
Portuguese colonizer does not only encompass the identity of the colonized other, but also that the identity of the Portuguese colonizer is in itself colonized:
“The Portuguese Prospero is not just a Calibanized Prospero; he is a very Caliban from the viewpoint of European super-Prosperos. The identity of the Portuguese colonizer is thus doubly double” (17). While I partially subscribe to Santos’ recodifying of the colonial bipolarity between Prospero and Caliban by introducing the figure of the “hybrid Portuguese colonizer,” on account of Portugal’s subalternized position in the world system after the late sixteenth century, or the fact that the Portuguese have been viewed at various points in history as a
“barbaric other” by Northern Europeans, or by many Brazilians who after independence harbored deep feelings of anti-colonial resentment towards the
Portuguese and/or disdain for the condition of many of them as poor rustic immigrants to Brazil. Nonetheless, I would like to still bring attention to unambiguous Prospero-like figures in the history of Portuguese colonialism such

as Mousinho de Albuquerque, commander of major war campaigns against native populations in southern Mozambique in 1895; Kaúlza de Arriaga, commander in chief of Portuguese armed forces in Mozambique in the war against nationalist forces between 1969-74; or Tomé de Souza, first governor general of Brazil in 1549 who was in charge of centralizing the colonial administration as well as pacifying the native populations through extermination and/or catechism.
In spite of the autonomy gained by Brazil in all spheres of national life after independence, the political framework that was first established was a binational monarchy, whereby the same monarchical family ruled both countries
(the father, João VI in Portugal, and the son, Pedro I in Brazil). Thus, strong political ties (as well as economic and cultural ones) between both countries continued after independence. However, Emperor Pedro II’s rule (1840-88) was characterized by a gradual but definite disentanglement and distancing from the
European colonial matrix. Nevertheless, the Brazilian Empire was firmly anchored in a conservative, plantation-based, slave-holding system that critics
(Nelson Vieira, Boaventura de Sousa Santos) describe as tantamount to the continuation of colonialism but in the form of internal colonialism (this is a sociohistorical dynamic dramatized by the epic historical novel Viva o povo brasileiro
(1984) [Invincible Memory, 1989] by João Ubaldo Ribeiro). In fact, the key importance of slave labor to the economic survival and development of colonial
Brazil meant that the Portuguese as well as the Luso-Brazilian elites had as much

at stake in the continuation of the slave trade. Thus, in the struggles against the
Dutch occupation of the Brazilian Northeast and Angola during the first half of the seventeenth century, Luso-Brazilians and Portuguese acted as co-colonizers in their quest to recover the Angola-Brazil lifeline that the Dutch had wrested away from them. The continued dependence on slave labor in independent
Brazil during the nineteenth century, meant that even after independence, Brazil was still inextricably linked to the colonial Black Atlantic matrix until the abolition of slavery, lending credence to Luiz Felipe de Alencastro’s view of the aterritorial basis for the formation of Brazil. He argues that Brazil emerged from an economically and socially bipolar space located in the south Atlantic, created by Portuguese colonialism and largely based upon slave labor, encompassing an area of slave reproduction centered in Angola and an area of slave production in various enclaves throughout Portuguese America. Hence, this line of reasoning suggests a space-time disjuncture occuring during Brazilian independence, that is, a break from the European colonial matrix, thus empowering the Luso-
Brazilian ruling class who, by the same token, became responsible for extending
Brazil’s colonial economic dependence on the African slave-trading matrix.
Consequently, Brazilian independence entailed the passage from colonial power structures to the power structures of “coloniality” (a term borrowed from
Santos), both internally and externally.
Even though Brazil severed formal ties from Portugal in the course of the nineteenth century, the large Portuguese presence in the daily life of Brazil,

especially in Rio de Janeiro, continued unabated (this phenomenon is widely documented in nineteenth-century Brazilian literature from Manuel Antônio de
Almeida to Machado de Assis, Adolfo Caminha, and Aluísio Azevedo). Heavy immigration from Portugal to Brazil did not come to a halt in 1822 but in fact continued well into the twentieth century, only subsiding after the Portuguese
Revolution of 1974 that toppled the Salazar/Caetano right-wing authoritarian regime. The constant migratory wave from Portugal to Brazil is a manifestation of a peculiar (post)colonial dependence. In fact, emigration throughout the history of Portuguese colonialism in Brazil since the sixteenth century (as well as in Angola and Mozambique, particularly after Salazar's ascent to power in 1933) served as an escape mechanism for millions of rural Portuguese in search for a better life, at the same time as it served as an economic strategy to rid the country of its poor, while avoiding some of the pressing developmental problems that plagued Portugal since the "epic navigators" set sail to India in the fifteenth century. Hence, colonialism and emigration went hand in hand in the case of the
Portuguese, and its relationship of dependence vis-à-vis Brazil continued on after
Brazilian independence.
In the discursive field, one remarkable instance of Luso-Afro-Brazilian interconnectedness that has had lasting effects in the (post-)colonial time-space of the Portuguese-speaking world is the theoretical work of sociologist/anthropologist Gilberto Freyre. His concept of Lusotropicalism has become one of the most powerful and controversial metanarratives to explain (or

some would argue, to justify) Portuguese colonialism. In synthesis,
Lusotropicalism argues that due to a series of interrelated climatological, geographical, historical, cultural, and genetic factors, the Portuguese have been more inclined to racially intermix with peoples of the tropics. This inclination would have somehow made the Portuguese a softer, more benign colonizing nation. The epistemological basis for Lusotropicalism is laid out in Freyre’s Casa grande e senzala (1933) [The Masters and Slaves], emerging as the other side of the coin of Brazilian national identity as posited in his magnum opus, which the myth of racial democracy, attributed to Freyre, would encapsulate. Hence, the national identities of both Brazil and Portugal would be inextricably intertwined.
In fact, for Miguel Vale de Almeida, the discursive field of Lusotropicalism is
“built like a game of mirrors played by Portuguese history, the formation of
Brazil, and Portuguese colonialism” (An Earth-Colored Sea 49). As Freyre elaborated his Lusotropicalist theorization in subsequent lectures and publications, its epistemological reach would be extended not only to the African colonies, but also to the various Asian enclaves that were part of the Portuguese empire. Ultimately, Freyre provides a discursive nexus of cultural exceptionalism in order to explain Portuguese, Brazilian, as well as Lusophone individualized and collective identities. In the particular cases of Brazil and Portugal, the
Freyrean Lusotropicalist nexus, in spite of its many detractors and critics, has proven to be quite resilient as it has migrated from the intellectual field to the realm of politics and that of mentalities with lasting effects until today. In fact,

notions such as miscegenation, mestiçagem, and hybridity in the Lusophone world have become, according to Almeida, “discursive knots that contaminate
(political) emancipatory practices with ambiguity” (79). The ambiguity derived from the lasting seductive power of Lusotropicalist ideology is illustrated by a fascinating conversation between former Brazilian and Portuguese presidents
Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Mário Soares published in O mundo em português (1998) :
FHC—Na especificidade cultural brasileira há uma parte que é também portuguesa: a plasticidade, a capacidade de absorção de fatores culturais exógenos. Por que digo isso? Por causa do livro de Gilberto Freyre O mundo que português criou, que talvez, como já dissemos, tenha sido mal percebido na época por causa da próximidade de Freyre com o regime salazarista. Mas, a despeito disso tudo, mostra que o português criou um mundo diferente. Claro que há um pouco de ideologia conservadora, sabemos que há. Mas há na cultura lusa uma percepção do “outro” e a capacidade de aceitar o
“outro.”
MS—E uma grande curiosidade pelo outro.
FHC—Há uma curiosidade pelo outro que é portuguesa e nós a herdámos, faz parte do ethos luso-brasileiro. Nesse sentido, Gilberto Freyre tinha razão em buscar identidades que não eram aceitas naquele momento, principalmente por razões políticas, e talvez também porque nessa altura ainda existia um preconceito antiportuguês. Talvez não fosse agradável às elites brasileiras perceberem, naquele momento, que eram fruto do mundo português. Hoje não, hoje aceitamos essa influência com muito prazer. Se é assim, e eu acho que é, por que razão não vamos trabalhar juntos na África? (276-77)
Aside from the obvious reiteration of the Lusotropicalist vulgate by both leaders, this exchange also underscores the continued prominence of Gilberto
Freyre’s intellectual contribution as the former Portuguese colonial empire has re-configured itself into the community of Portuguese-speaking nations, otherwise known as Lusofonia or its formal institutional name CPLP (Comunidade
de países de língua portuguesa), and as both Portugal and Brazil reflect upon their

possible roles in such a community. We shall turn our attention to these questions toward the end of our talk.
Today, when in Brazil, one confronts the postcolonial paradox of a generalized indifference towards Portugal, and still, signs of a Portuguese presence seem to be widespread throughout the culture, and yet, oftentimes barely tangible. On the other hand, it is impossible to ignore Brazil in everyday
Portuguese life. It is a well known fact that Brazilian popular and media culture exert an enormous influence in contemporary Portuguese culture (as well as throughout Lusophone Africa). This is reflected in the proliferation of Brazilian
novelas on a daily basis on Portuguese television, together with several Brazilian
TV channels via satellite or on cable. The daily contact with Brazilian culture has produced significant changes in Portugal, particularly in the realm of language, but also to a certain degree, in the realm of mentalities (this statement is also applicable to Angola, as well as other Lusophone African countries).
Brazil has functioned historically as an imaginary compensatory mechanism for Portugal due to its smaller dimensions, as well as economical and even ontological limitations. Brazil was in fact the “crown jewel” of the
Portuguese colonial empire, thus, its “superlative” place, according to Eduardo
Lourenço, within the Portuguese cultural discourse before and after Brazilian independence:
Para o discurso cultural português, o Brasil existe superlativamente, mesmo que essa existência seja quase sempre mítica, sobretudo como suporte simbólico dos nossos antigos sonhos imperiais. Para o discurso cultural brasileiro, Portugal existe pouco ou

nada, mas, se existe, é apreendido como o pai colonizador que o Brasil teve de matar para existir (Lourenço, “Nós e o Brasil: ressentimento e delírio”, A nau de Icaro 150)
From a Brazilian perspective, Portugal has become a mixture of a distant historical echo, a supressed memory, a remote parent, a relatively important piece of a much larger cultural mosaic that is contemporary Brazil, as well as an
“impoverished reality” in relationship to the vision of a country that has seen itself as “forever modern,” at the risk of obliterating its cultural memory.
As far as Portuguese-speaking Africa is concerned, the independence of the five former colonies took place as a result of the collapse of the fascistcolonialist regime of Salazar/Caetano under the pressure of a protracted threefront national liberation war in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique, as well as the strong dissent within the Portuguese military which was a direct consequence of the colonial wars in Africa, eventually leading to the Revolution of 1974 that signalled the beginning of the end of Portuguese colonialism. The collapse of the Salazar/Caetano regime brought about a peculiar post-colonial scenario of a short-lived belated marxist regime in Western Europe and the emergence of marxist-nationalist parties to govern in every single former
Portuguese colony, even in briefly independent East Timor before the Indonesian invasion of 1975. These single-party and economically-centralized regimes lasted until the early 1990s with the shift to multiparty systems and market-oriented economies. Angola and Mozambique, the largest and richest of the five
Lusophone African states, sunk into the depths of two of the most tragic human

conflicts of the late twentieth-century with devastating consequences for both nations. The civil war in Angola, in circumstances that are still an object of reflection and debate among historians, started immediately after independence in 1975, lasting until the death of UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi in 2002.
Meanwhile, the armed conflict in Mozambique lasted between 1977 and 1992, when a peace treaty was signed between the governing party FRELIMO and guerrilla movement RENAMO. Both scenarios were to a large extent microcosms of the Cold War, indirectly pitting both super powers at the time, though directly involving Cuba (in the case of Angola), and apartheid-era South Africa (in both
Angola and Mozambique).
After the civil war that ended in 2002, Angola is now focused on reestablishing sovereignty over its national territory, re-building infrastructure, the social re-insertion of refugees, displaced populations, and de-mobilized soldiers, as well as on democratization. One of the chief players in the “global geopolitics of hydrocarbons,” (Mbembe) with its center of gravity in the Gulf of
Guinea, and one of the world’s primary diamond suppliers, Angola continues to be one of the potentially richest countries in Africa. However, after the civil war, the remaining obstacle for the materialization of wealth for the benefit of the whole national community is widespread government corruption. As is generally known, Angola, together with Nigeria, are among the most corrupt countries in the world.

The two African Portuguese-speaking island-states display contrasting scenarios from a political, economic, and cultural-linguistic standpoint. Cape
Verde —a Creole-speaking nation in its entirety and a culturally homogeneous society— remains a hopeful case in the African context, in that despite a substantially limited natural resource base, its economy has been managed with a minimal amount of corruption (according to aid experts) and within the framework of a democratic political culture. Among the three African
Portuguese-speaking micro-states, Cape Verde is undoubtedly the most closely linked to global economic flows, for instance, through international aid, the remittances sent by the Cape Verdean diaspora based in Portugal, the
Netherlands, the US, France, and Italy, among other countries, as well as through tourism, which is fast becoming one of the most important economic activities in the archipelago. São Tomé and Príncipe, on the other hand —a culturally Creole society, even though less so linguistically— is undergoing a period of political and social unrest largely due to its enormous potential as an oil exporting country and the economic opportunities based on such potential for the nation as a whole, and in particular, for the various societal segments in power (or those vying for power). According to Gerhard Seibert, the main obstacle for the economic development of São Tomé and Príncipe lies in the incapacity on the part of the liberal democracy in place since 1991, of transforming the administrative apparatus into an efficient institution, free of patrimonialism and corruption. He suggests that there may be aspects intrinsic to the culture and/or

to the geographical dimensions of the two island-society that deter sociopolitical change.
The third oficially Portuguese-speaking micro-state in Africa, Guinea
Bissau —where Guinean Creole, is in fact the most widely spoken language among more than ten different West African languages— reveals a tenuous democracy within a weak state that, until today, is still mired in economic stagnation and political uncertainty. Most likely because of its poor natural resource base, Guinea Bissau, in spite of the terrible consequences of the civil war of 1998-99, has not reached (and probably will not reach) the levels of barbarity encountered in the civil wars that devastated its West African neighbors of
Liberia and Sierra Leone. There are now great expectations, but also a sense of urgency for Guinea Bissau in terms of its economic recovery and democratization after the overwhelmingly popular coup d’état that took place in 2003.
Finally, Mozambique, much like Angola and other partners in the southern African region, is a nation of great linguistic, ethnic, and racial heterogeneity. After its brutal civil war that ended in 1992, it has embarked on a relatively successful course of redemocratization, national reconstruction, and peace. In the last few years, Mozambique has registered significant economic growth together with considerable foreign investment in the areas of industry, agriculture, and tourism. Nevertheless, the optimism surrounding
Mozambique’s case has been dampened by major natural disasters and some anti-democratic and corrupt tendencies on the part of the government in power.

The linguistic designator “lusophone” is in fact a reality today in Angola,
Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, yet the role of the Portuguese language must be relativized in view of the fact that
Portuguese, even though it is the “official” language, it exists in national spaces that are either bilingual or multilingual. Still, the use of Portuguese is expanding in these African nations through national and international radio and television via satellite, through the printed media, the school system, as a vehicle for social mobility, or as the língua franca in Angola, Mozambique, and to a certain degree in São Tomé and Príncipe. At the same time, however, the Creoles of Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau continue to develop and consolidate themselves in their respective national spaces, while there have been concerted attempts at standardizing various national languages in the cases of Mozambique and
Angola.
The Lusophone African countries are social formations that present commonalities and divergencies vis-à-vis each other and the rest of Africa in terms of their political interests, economic potential and priorities, cultural manifestations, and ways of domesticating global time. At the same time, they are not de-linked from the West, or more precisely, from the former metropole or from Brazil, with whom they maintain relatively rich and diversified relationships, and where the diasporas of colonialism and slavery endure, and in some cases, prosper.

The cultural, political, and economic ties between Portugal and
Lusophone Africa today are very strong by virtue of the recent experience of colonialism, massive immigration from Africa to Portugal, significant
Portuguese investment in many key sectors of the national economies, the widespread reach of Portuguese radio and television throughout the region, economic aid, and institutional exchanges and cooperation, among other areas.
These strong ties are not unlike those that both France and Great Britain foster with their former African colonies; ties that many would describe as neocolonial, although with the acquiesence of the various African national governments in question, largely for pragmatic reasons.
Even in the midst of long lasting civil wars in Angola or Mozambique,
Portuguese economic interests never ceased to look at its former African colonies as potential or actual lucrative markets. By far, Angola, and especially so since 2002, has figured as the most attractive market for investments in the oil, diamond, construction, and financial sectors. In the case of Mozambique, most Portuguese investment is focused on the banking, agricultural, and industrial sectors. However, it is in Cape Verde where most Portuguese economic interests are concentrated in terms of number of businesses. By the same token, in recent years there has been a steady flow of thousands of
Portuguese migrants to its former African colonies, specifically to Mozambique and Angola. Most of these migrants are middle and upper class entrepreneurs, many of them young, with or without a prior African experience, in search of

greater freedom, a sense of adventure, and above all, high profile economic opportunities in countries where, for historical and cultural reasons, the
Portuguese enjoy a certain level of competitiveness in relationship to other economic powers in the region such as South Africa, Britain, France, the US, and
Brazil, aside from a degree of white neo-colonial privilege.
Relatively scant attention has been paid so far to the role of Brazil in contemporary Africa, more concretely, in relationship to Lusophone African countries. The key contribution of African slaves and their descendents to the historical formation of the Brazilian nation particularly from a cultural, socioeconomic, and racial/ethnic point of view is a well-known and celebrated fact today, yet contemporary Africa is largely unknown to most Brazilians, either as a whole, or in its heterogeneous regional or national particularities. Yet, various historical studies and novels point to the active co-involvement in the trans-
Atlantic slave-trade of the “white” Luso-Brazilian elites during colonial times, or the important role in such trade on the part of “white” Brazilian ruling class in the nineteenth century after independence from Portugal, or the migration of freed Brazilian slaves in the nineteenth century and their establishment of slave trading posts on the West African coast in today’s Benin and Nigeria [see particularly the studies by Pierre Verger (1968; 1987), Manuela Carneiro da
Cunha (1985), and Alberto da Costa e Silva (2003)].
* * * * *

There are two major contemporary Angolan novels that thematize the historical and geopolitical, but ultimately, the human drama that unfolded in the South Atlantic in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries co-involving
Portugal, Brazil, and Angola, and in which the trans-Atlantic slave trade played a pivotal role: Pepetela’s A gloriosa família (1996) [The Glorious Family] and
José Eduardo Agualusa’s Nação crioula (1997) [or Creole, published in English in
2002]. Both novels are situated during key moments of world colonial history:
Pepetela’s novel takes place during the Dutch-Iberian geostrategic conflicts over the immensely profitable Brazil-Angola slave trade system in the 1600s, while
Agualusa’s novel takes place during the second half of the nineteenth-century in the heat of the abolitionist debate across the Atlantic.
Pepetela’s A gloriosa família highlights the pivotal role played by luso-
fluminense elites (i.e. the Luso-Brazilians of Rio de Janeiro) in expelling the
Dutch from Angola in 1648 (the Dutch occupied coastal areas of Angola between 1641-48, while they occupied Northeastern Brazil between 1630-54), thus recovering the strategic Angola-Brazil slave trade route to secure the continued survival of colonial Brazil under Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian rule.
A gloriosa família also details the complex geopolitical map of the interior of
Angola where the Portuguese, Dutch, and various kingdoms (including that of powerful Queen Nzinga Mbandi as well as the Kongo kingdom) competed in the pursuit of strategic alliances to ensure, among various other objectives, the continuity of the slave trade. This historical and geopolitical horizon serves as a

backdrop to the dramatic kernel: the story of the Van Dunem family (or Van
Dum as it is used throughout the novel). Through a postmodern fictional wink of the eye to Gilberto Freyre, Pepetela stages an Angolan casa-grande e sanzala (as the term is pronounced in Kimbundu), where assimilated Flemish patriarch
Baltazar Van Dum lives with his “official woman” D. Inocência (an African chief’s daughter), their vast mulatto progeny (including Baltazar’s ‘bastard’ children), and a cohort of slaves. Van Dum’s casa-grande e sanzala is portrayed as a multilingual Kimbundu-Portuguese-Flemish-speaking space, racially-mixed from top to bottom, yet rigidly hierarchical in its sex-gender system, where the sons routinely make the female slaves pregnant, while the daughters are systematically policed in all of their social interactions. At a certain point, both the relatively fluid racial hierarchy and rigidly defined sex-gender systems are undermined by the weight of their contradictions and ambiguities, thus providing for a devastating critique of the terrible psychic, emotional, and material consequences on all the women and men victimized by the patriarchal slave-holding system, that was to an extent at the root of the Angolan nation.
José Eduardo Agualusa’s Nação crioula, on the other hand, focuses on the complicity of Luanda’s Creole elites and Portuguese as well as Brazilian merchants in the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade during the second half of the nineteenth century, providing a nuanced critical reading of the history of the triangular relations between Angola, Brazil, and Portugal, rooted in the slave trade. Hence, Agualusa calls attention to the fact that at the historical heart of

today’s celebrated multicultural family of Portuguese-speaking nations, or
lusofonia, lies the disgraceful history of the commerce of human lives. Nação
Crioula, along with Pepetela’s novel is an example of postmodern historiographical metafiction that is organized in an epistolary fashion. The letters are mostly written by the central figure, Fradique Mendes, a doublyfictional character, who was in fact a collective creation by Portuguese nineteenth-century writer Eça de Queiroz, together with Antero de Quental and other intellectual contemporaries, in A correspondência de Fradique Mendes
(1900). Eça dubbed him, “the most interesting Portuguese man of the nineteenth century.” A veritable citizen of the world, Fradique was a tireless traveller with a sensitive soul, open to other cultures, while adopting the habits and ideas of the lands he visited. Agualusa’s Fradique, on the other hand, is as humanistically inclined as Eça’s, but even more cosmopolitan, who spends a significant amount of time in Angola and Brazil, whose cultures he quickly adapts to, and where the original Fradique actually never went. In Nação crioula, Fradique shares center stage with Ana Olímpia —his lover—, a former slave, daughter of a Congolese prince, who is herself involved in the slave trade.
Ana Olímpia emerges as an “African goddess” of unparalelled beauty and intelligence; an idealized example of a hybrid colonial subject, equally comfortable in African as well as in European culture. She is as knowledgeable about the European Enlightenment, as she is about Bantu languages and cultures of Angola. In fact, both Fradique Mendes and Ana Olímpia appear as

near utopian embodiments of what we could call a “progressive strand” of
Lusotropicalism, whereby both individuals embrace the racial and cultural differences of the other, as they each tensely and richly inhabit the ambiguities and ideological contradictions of a borderland existence, while they set out to fight the injustices of slavery. Escaping attempts at re-enslaving Ana Olímpia, both protagonists set sail from Angola to Northeastern Brazil in what Fradique describes “possibly the last slave-trading ship in history.” The Nação Crioula (or
“Creole Nation”), populated simultaneously by slaves, slave traders, and abolitionists literally becomes a floating-signifier, reminding us of Paul Gilroy’s description of the chronotope of the trans-Atlantic slave ship crossing the middle passage: “a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” (The
Black Atlantic 4). In this case, Nação Crioula emerges as the final mobile vessel linking the various points of the Luso-Brazilian/Angolan colonial-slave-trading system across the south Atlantic with all of its historical and cultural contradictions, at the same time, symbolizing the inescapable interconnectedness of the nations and cultures that were forged out of this tragic system: hybrid and multicultural yet profoundly unequal in racial and socioeconomic terms.
* * * * *
After its abolition of slavery in 1888, Brazil mostly but not completely disappeared from the African scene until the independence of the Portuguese
African colonies in 1975. Brazil, under the military rule of General Ernesto

Geisel was one of the first countries to recognize the MPLA government that presided over Angolan independence, a historical fact that Angolans never forget. As documented by Carlos Piñeiro Íñigo in his study on Lusotropicalism and Luso-Afro-Brazilian diplomatic history, Sueños paralelos (1999), Africa emerged as object of political and economic interest to Brazil (independently of
Portugal) in academic and diplomatics circles after the creation in the late 1950s of the ISEB (Instituto Superior de Estudos Brasileiros), by Hélio Jaguaribe and the Instituto de Estudos Afro-Asiáticos by Eduardo Portella. Influenced by the insights of these intellectuals, the Quadros/Goulart administration of 1961-64, in line with its populist inclinations, assumed what it called Brazil’s “natural vocation towards Africa,” by opening various diplomatic posts throughout the continent (including in the Portuguese colonies). Both Goulart’s populist democratic government and the subsequent military regime (in its various individualized administrations) assumed a policy of “active neutrality” in regards to the Portuguese colonial question in Africa. As is well known, the military regime that took power after 1964 assiduously courted Gilberto Freyre, while his Lusotropicalist ideology was favored by segments of the military who saw a key role (even a “sub-colonial” role) for Brazil in Africa in accordance to their megalomaniacal vision of Brazil’s place in the world. Thus, in the 1960s
Africa offered the opening of a modest frontier for Brazilian economic expansion, especially Apartheid-era South Africa and Nigeria (the latter in the
1980s due to oil). The political and economic opening of Brazil towards Africa

during this time period was accompanied by a historical, cultural, and affective discourse that was profoundly imbued by Lusotropicalist ideology, where the
Luso-Brazilian fades out in favor of the Afro-Brazilian component.
Today, the level of admiration and affection of Portuguese-speaking
Africans towards Brazil is remarkable, though largely unrequited, by virtue of sheer ignorance on the part of most Brazilians regarding African matters, in spite of manifold historical, cultural and symbolic links between Brazil and the continent. Brazil, for its part, exerts a considerable amount of influence in the
Lusophone African imaginary through media, popular culture, and soccer (this is especially true in the case of Angola). Brazilian socio-economic interests in
Angola, for instance, cover a large spectrum from telecommunications, media, construction, banking to health, education, and food industries. President Inácio
Lula da Silva, in fact, has made the global South one of Brazil’s geopolitical and economic priorities. Lula’s trip to various African countries between 2003-04, including São Tomé & Príncipe, Angola, and Mozambique, only confirms his role as respected spokesperson for the world’s poor as well as his adherence to a new agenda for Brazil in the global arena. Lula travelled with numerous cabinet ministers and more than a hundred business entrepreneurs. During his trip, various cooperation agreements were signed (technology transfer to
Mozambique and Angola for AIDS prevention and the development of generic medications against the disease), new initiatives were launched (Casa de Cultura
Brasil-Angola), and on-going projects were reinforced (e.g. the Brazilian

Cooperation Agency in Angola). Ultimately, the Lula government sealed a symbolic pact with Angola and with Africa, highlighting Brazil’s historical, moral, and political debt to Africa.
* * * * *
In the context of contemporary globalization, Portugal and all of its former colonies —Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, as well as newly independent East Timor— occupy today in differing degrees and at times simultaneously, core, semi-peripheral or peripheral locations, either in the world system at large, or in their respective regions and/or sub-regions. The material empire has now dissolved into a transnational symbolic as well as institutionalized heterogeneous community
(embodied by the CPLP) linked by common historical, linguistic, and cultural bonds. There are substantial constitutive asymmetries in terms of territorial size, demographics, levels of material amd technological development, economic output, and/or geopolitical weight, while as a whole, on the global stage, the community of Portuguese-speaking countries occupies a decidedly peripheral location (though Brazil on its own is fast becoming a world agricultural super power). Lusofonia as a collective project is shared varyingly by individuals and elite groups in the political, cultural, artistic, and academic realms in the countries involved, but it is still an open question as to the degree with which
Brazilian society, with a relatively insular and self-contained view of itself as a culture, is even fully aware of such project or feels interpellated by it. In

Portuguese society Lusofonia is a contested signifier, where nostalgic neo-colonial discourses in the political arena or in the media compete with uncompromisingly anti-colonial views (Margarido) or pragmatic postcolonial positions (Lourenço,
Santos, Almeida) in the intellectual field. Meanwhile, the Lusophone African states (as well as East Timor) wait expectantly for the actual dividends to be gained from belonging to such a community, at the same time as they pragmatically cultivate relations with other regional or multinational organizations.
Lusofonia is a concrete, though differently experienced, reality in the countries that share it. Portugal, even though it constitutes its original linguistic matrix, must abandon claims of being the center and instead recognize as well as foster a multi-polarity where Brazil, the five African states, and East Timor
(where the future of the Portuguese language is still an open question), together with Portugal, may build a community of mutual interests in a decidedly postcolonial setting and under the aegis of a global order that continues to evolve before our own eyes and intellectual discernment.
Portugal, on the edge of Europe; Brazil, an island in an overwhelmingly
English- and Spanish-speaking continent; the nations of Portuguese-speaking
Africa, a largely unknown part of the most forgotten continent on earth. Caetano
Veloso sums it up as he evokes the image of fog surrounding the Portuguese language and the countries who speak it, echoing Fernando Pessoa's vision of early twentieth-century Portugal as a nation on the margins of history, shrouded

in fog, yet poised to renew itself through the power of the poetic word. Decades later, Caetano translates Pessoa's vision into Brazilian music which has undoubtedly become the most obvious presence of the Portuguese language in the world today (Verdade tropical 19).

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