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Cape Verde, Let's Go
Creole Rappers and Citizenship in Portugal
By Derek Pardue UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09776-8
CHAPTER 1
Creole's Historical Presences
O sangue e as almas, as vozes e as histórias, a música e as saudades, o amor e os versos, — são Portugal e África fundidos, afeiçoados pelo mesmo destêrro nostálgico, consolado e dorido, — resignado, sem revolta, nas ilhas que são cárceres, conventos e mirantes perdidas ao meio da vastidão do mar.
The blood and soul, the voices and histories, the music and longing, the love and verses — [all of this] roots Portugal and Africa, blessed by the same nostalgic exile, consoled and pained, — resigned, without revolt, on the islands that are prisons, convents and lookouts lost in the middle of the vast sea.
— Augusto Casimiro
This passage from the Portuguese chronicler Augusto Casimiro exemplifies the typical story of blood and soul constitutive of the ideal Portuguese collective self. Moreover, Casimiro depicts what Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen call the "social space of migration [within the] imagined entity of the empire. And this is particularly true in the Portuguese case, with a historically deep integration of Africa into the national imagining" (2012:19).
Portuguese collective memory, particularly as it relates to Luso-Africa, often begins with the Moorish occupation of Iberia, which lasted for several centuries until the late thirteenth century when King Alonso recaptured Lisbon and the southern region called Algarve, a nominal Arabic holdover. The idea of Portugal as a geopolitical entity was born. The Moorish period was a time of what in the Brazilian context would later be termed mestiçagem, or racial mixing.
For its part, Cape Verde emerged as a place name and social construct in the late fifteenth century. It was a place created from Luso-Afro trade and encounter and then left to creolize for a time with other populations, especially after Portugal's formal abolition of the slave trade and Brazil's independence in 1822. Along with Belgium, England, France, and Italy, Portugal redirected its efforts toward Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Casimiro, a popular writer of his time, Portugal's identity is essentially lodged in African encounters mediated by the ur-metaphor of the island, a nod to the pain of voyage and the beacon of discovery. Cape Verde is the archetype of the encounter, the primary figure of Portugal's national construction.
The notion that Portugal is a product of long, sustained intercultural encounters with Africa is not simply something that happened supposedly out there in the mysterious world of colonialism and early capitalism. The blood and soul of a Luso-Creole were not relegated to territories outside of Europe, whose inhabitants would only return to the metropole in a post–World War II milieu of migration as a result of reorganized capital, labor, and political regimes. Indeed, Africanity has been an intermittent but formative part of, particularly, Lisbon's history for over a millennium, whether it be the "negros" in the era of regional governor Al-Judami, the so-called black moors (mouros pretos) during early slavery periods of the late fifteenth century, the roving bards and fishermen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries depicted in museum exhibits, the elite Luso-African college students, and future revolutionary leaders of the 1950s or the poor, working-class badiu (vagabond; from the Cape Verdean island of Santiago) Kriolu rappers of today.
This chapter provides historical depth to the claim of a Creole citizenship by delineating the spatial presence of Africanity inside Lisbon and detailing the special relationship Portugal had with Cape Verde. As implied above in Casimiro's text, the Luso-African experience is an intimate "exile," one that produces nostalgia via contact linked directly to the organization of labor and the language of encounter. For late nineteenth-century political leaders, such as Antonio Ennes, labor was one of the defining characteristics of the civilizing mission of the Portuguese in Africa. For example, in his 1891 "Mozambique — Report Presented to the Government," Ennes utilizes scientific racism to justify policies of taxation and forced labor campaigns by the Portuguese colonial administration. In Ennes's view, nostalgia and pain are the unavoidable human elements of colonialism and part of the price to forge a strong, modern Portugal ([1893] 1971). However, some of the "voices and histories" of Casimiro's Portugal are in Kriolu, and they interpret the toils of labor, island hardships, and Atlantic travel as ultimately an idiom of emplacement, a discourse that links encounters abroad with social relations inside Portugal. More of Kriolu linguistics as it relates to Lisbon place making, rap rhetoric, and flow is discussed in chapter 3.
Historical Presences
Historical presences are manifested in symbolic and material forms. For example, figure 4 shows a poster from the exhibit Os Africanos em Portugal (Africans in Portugal) held in 2011 at the Torre de Belém (Belém Tower). Belém, a neighborhood on the Tagus River bank, is between major landmarks, such as the Commerce Plaza and Rossio, and the picturesque city of Cascais, the setting for so many World War II historical fiction novels. The poster displays several examples of residential street signs in the Lisbon area, the racialized or African names thereby representing the incorporation of Portuguese colonialism (and, occasionally, African liberation) into everyday Lisbon geography. For example, the poster presents the well-known street Rua do Poço dos Negros, which joins Travessa do Judeu, literally the intersection of Well of Blacks Street and Jew Crossing. The names represent a time of return in the early eighteenth century, a return of Moors, Africans, and Jews attempting to reestablish residency and legitimacy in Europe after the Inquisition and massive expulsion during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Following the massive earthquake of 1755, a combination of progressive politics and modern urbanization under Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the first Marquess of Pombal (Marquês de Pombal), resulted in an "enlightened" disengagement from the slave trade, thereby diminishing the visible presence of Africans in the metropole and in the process scattering current African residents into fragmented communities (Henriques 2009, 2012). An encore of such race-space politics more than two centuries later with the urbanization campaigns to "integrate" immigrant communities relocated them away from improvised or autoconstructed residences and into social neighborhoods, as chapter 4 describes. Currently, Kriolu rappers and other Cape Verdean youth are attempting to reinsert themselves in the city, giving new meanings to Lisbon race and space through language, music, and grassroots politics. Such action constitutes a type of social agency that helps define the concept of emplacement, a response to the legacy of displacement referenced above.
The history of Africanity in Lisbon is a dynamic process of historiography, culture, and law. The ebbs and flows of Portuguese (and by extension European) interest in Africans inside the metropole coupled with ambiguous terms of classification during colonialism due to shifting state policies of citizenship and formal inclusion have produced many contradictions and complicate the notion of a straightforward account of African presences inside Portugal (Henriques 2009, 2012). Portugal is a fascinating example of racialization and migration because its contradictions are a formative part of national development. Fascism and Lusotropicalism seem to go hand in hand. Scientific racism shares ideological space with Lusotropicalism. Popular press during the first half of the twentieth century depicts Africans as happy children, foolish dandies, and terrorizing cannibals. In more recent periods, Portuguese xenophobia and robust multiculturalist policies have operated in a parallel fashion.
The dialectics of African desire and disgust were certainly just as influential in Portugal as in more well-documented areas, such as Latin America (see Skidmore 1992; Graham 1990). Isabel Castro Henriques describes the contradiction involving race and citizenship in this manner: "If Portuguese laws recognized Africans as free and theoretically Portuguese, the secular consolidation of the African image as being naturally a slave made it difficult to consider a change in the African's status" (2012:79). Further back in history are the remarkable antislavery laws Marquês de Pombal issued. On September 19, 1761, the so-called Leis Pombalinas (Pombaline reforms) outlawed officially the importation of slaves into Portugal. Pombal's reasoning appears futuristic as it reminds one of the urban sociologists of the 1920s in their explanations of the "problems" of the "negro" and other immigrants in the city as a result of conditions and the environment. Pombal remarks,
This extraordinary number of black slaves, who are sorely missed abroad in my overseas territories as part of an earthly, rural culture. They come here and occupy the role of the servant boy struggling for housing. They fall into idleness and tend towards vice, to which they have natural proclivities. (1761)
The logic that construes social problems as activated by environment is a rationale based on space. For Pombal, Walter Reckless ([1933] 1969) or, for that matter, contemporary urban planners in Lisbon, the ills of the city made manifest are a problem of human geography. LBC, an activist Kriolu rapper from the Cape Verdean autoconstructed neighborhood Cova da Moura, provides a contemporary example: "The police last Saturday night [summer of 2013] came up to one black guy at the bottom of the hill near Damaia [an adjacent neighborhood] and said, 'You can't be here. Just you being here, I can hit you.' And he did. This kid obviously didn't know what every youngster here in Cova da Moura grows up knowing — the places where the police can just beat on you and the places where you're supposed to be" (LBC, personal communication, 2013).
The question latent in the accounts of LBC, Henriques, Pombal, and Ennes can be summarized as: what are the social, cultural, and political forces that afford space to some and not to others? What I refer to as "Kriolu presence" addresses this issue of social geography and the processes of dis/emplacement. In figure 4, poço (well) refers to what was a large cemetery that once contained the corpses of a substantive African population dating back to the early days of Portuguese expansion and colonialism. Is this street sign a preview of what would become "the growth of a particular black metropolitan aesthetic that gives distinct shape and direction to questions of post-colonial culture and identity" (Chambers 1994:68), what Homi Bhabha theorizes as a "third space" resulting from hybridity and the encounter (1990)? Or is it what Mary Louise Pratt describes, "while the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery ... it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis — beginning, perhaps, with the latter's obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its other continually to itself" (1992:6)? Do common place names and Creole chatter produce civil society, or are these signs just a simple case of patriarchal control, a hegemony located in landmarks and ephemeral talk?
The questions asked in this chapter likewise complement those of Morier-Genoud and Cahen when they reflect historically on the relationship between migration and "autonomous social spaces" in the Portuguese empire (2012:1–30). Do the African occupations in Lisbon of residence and profession, education and expressive culture, take on a life of their own? Do their legacies, evident in Kriolu-speaking youth and robust immigrant neighborhoods, constitute recognized publics with influence on collective notions of the city of Lisbon and ideas of Portuguese citizenship?
State Representations of Africanity and Space
State-sponsored cultural production in Lisbon has generally portrayed Africanity in Portugal as an exceptional offer by an understanding colonial regime. For example, in 2011 the Torre de Belém, a four-story tower monument that actually sits in the Tagus River, was the site of an attractive retrospective exhibit on Luso-African history inside Lisbon. Since 2006 the Portuguese state and the public postal service (CTT) have commissioned a group of scholars and publicists to produce coffee-table books. A Herança Africana em Portugal — séculos XV–XX (The African inheritance in Portugal) presents a heavy tome of thick, glossy paper and is dedicated to the role of the Luso encounter abroad in the making of "Portuguese" culture back "home" in the metropole. The poster session in the tower was essentially a series of cropped and enlarged text highlights and prominent images from the book, which is specifically about the African presence in Lisbon (Henriques 2009).
To see the exhibit, I descended into what resembles a dungeon. Beyond the expected depiction of African religious, culinary, aesthetic, and other ethnic practices that became visible in Portugal and, specifically, Lisbon, the exhibit underscored the importance of place. The visual narrative began with Lagos, in the southern region of the Algarve and the first European port of the slave trade, dating back to 1444. The long centuries of trade structured by a racist market logic of value came through in the documents of African bodies, institutions, and place names.
The exhibit designers transformed what might have appeared as an inauspicious start to any sort of national Africanity narrative into a story of pioneering urban policies regarding residential patterns and linguistic geography. Beginning in 1593 with a royal license, Africans built the Mocambo, a series of what would now be considered neighborhoods, located on a stretch of land adjacent to the city center to the west along the Tagus (Henriques 2009). The better translation of mocambo, following the conventional connotation of the Umbundo term, perhaps is village. Brazilianists will recognize the Kimbundo cognate of quilombo, a word that reveals many layers of race, space, self-liberation, and contemporary identity politics in Brazil (see, for example, Silberling 2003; French 2009; Kenny 2013). The authors of the exhibit concluded by reassuring the public that by the seventeenth century, the population of the Mocambo had become significantly mixed with slaves, freemen, Portuguese, and women participants of religious orders.
The Mocambo is, thus, upheld as a Creole space with folks dedicated to the commerce of the sea, a market organized around the encounter. The implication is that a sense of "black" space existed inside the metropole early in modern immigration history and that interethnic and interracial Creole mixture has always been the Portuguese way. Africanity in Lisbon was not limited to street names, as suggested by figure 4.
Such historical material of race and space echoes in contemporary Portugal, as residents continue to reflect on identity. One can interpret the following 2007 headline from the Lisbon newspaper Ípsilon as an attempt to incorporate "outside" influences as self-identification. "Lisbon wants to be black again?" sets the tone for the 2007 review of the third annual Africa Festival, a multiday event featuring world beat musical artists. For this year, journalists invited a number of academics and cultural promoters to discuss race and multiculturalism. What is "black culture"? Is it the same as Africanity? Antonio Contador, a Portuguese sociologist, who has published widely on urban youth culture and rap music in Lisbon, asserts that "Africanity has faded" from a set of cultural expressions that constitute contemporary negritude and added, "Lisbon has been cosmopolitan and black for a long time. It is legitimacy that is slow in coming" (Contador quoted in Ípsilon 2007:15). Contador's scholarship contributes to a larger corpus of work that argues that contemporary forms of so-called black culture are more than simply "African" expressions. They are more not because the cultural forms consist of other discrete "elements" from other cultural groups but because "blackness" has been cosmopolitan and part of globalized flows for centuries and has become part of "essential" cultural expressions that represent Europe, the Americas, and so on. One implication of Contador's statements in the Ípsilon interview is that the Portuguese have been comfortable with Africanity as a relative ad hoc distinction to national culture but are reticent in accepting the idea that blackness has been formative in what is considered Portuguese and what the Portuguese and foreigners might recognize as Portugal.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Cape Verde, Let's Go by Derek Pardue. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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