Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950-1980

by Jerry Dávila

Overview

In the wake of African decolonization, Brazil attempted to forge connections with newly independent countries. In the early 1960s it launched an effort to establish diplomatic ties with Africa; in the 1970s it undertook trade campaigns to open African markets to Brazilian technology. Hotel Trópico reveals the perceptions, particularly regarding race, of the diplomats and intellectuals who traveled to Africa on Brazil's behalf. Jerry Dávila analyzes how their actions were shaped by ideas of Brazil as an emerging world power, ready to expand its sphere of influence; of Africa as the natural place to assert that influence, given its historical slave-trade ties to Brazil; and of twentieth-century Brazil as a "racial democracy," a uniquely harmonious mix of races and cultures. While the experiences of Brazilian policymakers and diplomats in Africa reflected the logic of racial democracy, they also exposed ruptures in this interpretation of Brazilian identity. Did Brazil share a "lusotropical" identity with Portugal and its African colonies, so that it was bound to support Portuguese colonialism at the expense of Brazil's ties with African nations? Or was Brazil a country of "Africans of every color," compelled to support decolonization in its role as a natural leader in the South Atlantic? Drawing on interviews with retired Brazilian diplomats and intellectuals, Dávila shows the Brazilian belief in racial democracy to be about not only race but also Portuguese ethnicity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822348559
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	08/03/2010
Pages:	326
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jerry Dávila is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. He is the author of Diploma of Whiteness: Race and Social Policy in Brazil, 1917-1945, also published by Duke University Press.

Read an Excerpt

Hotel Trópico

BRAZIL AND THE CHALLENGE OF AFRICAN DECOLONIZATION, 1950-1980

---

By JERRY DÁVILA

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4867-2

---

Chapter One

Brazil in the Lusotropical World

AS LUANDA SIMMERED in civil war, Ovídio de Melo wiled away the long, sleepless curfews by painting images of Angola's upheaval. One of his paintings captured a version of a common scene in the capital: a municipal crane made the rounds, lifting heroic statues of Portuguese explorers and colonial administrators off their pedestals and hauling them away. The painting, Luis de Camões Goes to Municipal Storage, shows a city square marred by bullet holes and revolutionary graffiti. Men with guns and other bystanders watch, one with his arms held triumphantly in the air, as a crane lifts away the statue of Camões, the sixteenth-century poet whose epics about Portuguese seafaring captured the Portuguese role in stitching together Africa and the Americas, his arm raised as if bidding farewell. Melo's choice to represent the removal of Camões from African soil, of all the statuary to choose from, was a meaningfully Brazilian one. Conventional imagination held that Brazil was the product of the fusion of Portuguese and African peoples, shaped by a supposed special proclivity of the Portuguese to extend civilization into the tropics and to soften racial lines through miscegenation. Yet the image that Ovídio de Melo captured shows this world being violently forced apart.

This image separates ingredients that Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987) drew together to make himself Brazil's most widely recognized intellectual. Freyre was the principal conduit of Brazilian national identity, reappropriating ideas already in circulation but also sharpening and popularizing them. For example, the term "racial democracy," so tightly associated with Freyre, perhaps originated as the "social democratization" described by one of his intellectual mentors, Manoel Oliveira Lima, in 1922. Freyre's name became a shorthand for several beliefs: Brazil was a "racial democracy"; Brazilian society was saturated with African culture; racial mixture was a national virtue; and Brazilian society was shaped by a special Portuguese proclivity for sexual and cultural mixing.

The imagination about Brazilian national identity that Freyre channeled was so powerful and influential in the middle years of the twentieth century that it pervaded the thinking of all Brazilians who shaped policy toward Africa or traveled there. Though Freyre was a partisan advocate for Portuguese colonialism, even those who disagreed with him relied upon his logic. Freyre's writing underpinned the Brazilian understanding of Africa and its significance to Brazil. By casting Brazil as the dialectical synthesis of Portuguese and African elements, Freyre created a framework within which both those who supported Portugal and those who pursued ties with Africa would operate.

This chapter explores how Freyre's influence, beginning in the 1950s, was felt among two different and increasingly incompatible constituencies. The first included Portuguese authorities seeking to preserve their overseas empire, as well as Portuguese ethnic communities in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. Together the Portuguese government and Portuguese ethnic groups in Brazil placed sufficient pressure on Brazilian national politics to command the support of Brazilian presidents, particularly Getúlio Vargas (1951-54), João Café Filho (1954-55), and Juscelino Kubischek (1956-61). For them Freyre's ideas synthesized the rationale for Brazilian support for Portugal and its effort to create "future Brazils" in Africa. The second constituency saw in Freyre's writing a justification for building ties with newly independent African countries and supporting decolonization. This group included younger diplomats, members of the intellectual left, and the organizers of Brazil's academic centers of African and Asian studies. Their opportunity came when President Jânio Quadros (1961) introduced what he called the Independent Foreign Policy, which pursued autonomy from traditional allies like the United States and Portugal and sought ties with the developing world.

Freyre was the intellectual protagonist of the nationalist cultural and economic transformation of Brazil that began in the 1920s and 1930s. Culturally this nationalism envisioned Brazil as different from and better than Europe and the United States. Economically it meant finding a path from an agrarian to an industrial society, be it through private enterprise and the free market, extensive intervention by the state, or both. This nationalism suffused Brazil's political life. It also guided Brazil's foreign relations and defined how Brazilians interpreted the opportunities and pitfalls of African decolonization.

The cultural awakening merged European modernist aesthetics with a project to "discover" what was authentically Brazilian. Freyre drew a seductive landscape in which the nation was an extended colonial plantation characterized by intimate and cordial interactions between blacks and whites (notwithstanding the reality that the blacks were enslaved by the whites). He not only cast the presence of blacks and of race mixture as a virtue, but also reimagined Brazil's Portuguese colonizers positively: though Britain had the Industrial Revolution and produced the United States, Portugal alone had the aptitude for creating civilization in the tropics, through harmonious mixture with nonwhite peoples. White Brazilians, like Freyre and his readers, romanticized plantation life because it started to seem remote. With abolition a half-century in the past, the number of surviving former slaves dwindled. And as in other industrializing and urbanizing societies, the embrace of modernity brought nostalgia for an idyllic, pastoral past. Freyre exploited similar sentiments to those popularized by Ivanhoe and Gone With the Wind in Britain and the United States, distilling the traditions that defined modernity.

Freyre's signature work, The Masters and the Slaves (1933), explored the mixture of cultures and customs, suggesting that a Portuguese proclivity for "interpenetration" enabled colonizers to settle in and adapt to Brazil's tropical environment by absorbing African and indigenous customs. Gradually Freyre extended this reading of Brazil to apply to all of the Portuguese empire. He defended Portuguese colonialism in Africa, even amid wars for independence. Freyre suggested that Africa was effectively present in Brazil through the influence of slaves and the prevalence of slave culture. What is more, Freyre claimed, Africa was present in Brazilians' homes, brought there by slave servants, cooks, and and wet nurses. And even more intimately, Africa was present in the family through sexual commingling.

Sexual and cultural "interpenetration," in Freyre's terms, infused all Brazilians with Africanness: "All Brazilians, even the fair skinned and blond ones, bear in their soul if not in their body the shadow or at least the hint of indigenous or black ... The direct or remote influence of the African.... It shows in their tenderness, the excessive imitation, in the type of Catholicism that stimulates the senses, in the music, the way of walking, of speaking, in the children's lullabies. In everything that is a true expression of life, practically all of us bear the mark of black influence. From the slave or the nanny who raised us. Who nursed us. Who fed us ... the mulatta ... who initiated us into physical love and gave us, on a coarse cot, the first sensation of being a man." This passage shows a common element of Freyre's writing: when he spoke of Brazilians, Jeffrey Needell argues, he "implicitly meant Brazilians who were white elite males, as driven by their libidos and the sensual ambiance of the tropics to a predatory, unceasing search for penetration."

Freyre's work was as controversial as it was influential. After the 1940s Freyre associated with the Brazilian political right, as the authoritarian leanings evident in The Masters and the Slaves evolved into advocacy of dictatorship in Brazil and support for Salazar's regime in Portugal. Scholarship on Freyre has tended to separate his early work from the "shameless opportunism" of his "lusotropical years," focusing instead on the earlier work's rejection of dominant thought about the racial inferiority of blacks and mulattoes in favor of a rich analysis of cultural difference and patterns of cultural mixture. Yet in his later years, Freyre used the intellectual prominence he had achieved through this earlier work to advocate in favor of Portuguese colonialism.

Freyre's ideas were a Gordian knot for Brazilian policymakers interested in relations with Africa. Freyre helped to popularize the view that African contributions to Brazilian culture and society were positive, thus making the case for developing relations across the Atlantic. But by hierarchically privileging the Portuguese as the catalyst for these relations, Freyre helped to draw the Brazilian government into costly support for Portugal's colonial wars. Supporters of Portugal in Brazil invoked Freyre. Opponents of Portugal did too. And even the small number of black Brazilian militants and exiled radicals who went to African countries would engage in a dialogue with Freyre's ideas. Freyre was so omnipresent that in 1973, when Foreign Minister Mário Gibson Barboza (a research assistant of Freyre in the 1930s) worked to unravel Brazil's association with Portugal and strengthen ties with African countries, his strategy included inviting Freyre to a luncheon at Itamaraty (the foreign ministry) at which the main dish was Apipucos Steak, named after Freyre's home, a restored plantation manor, and the dessert was Casa Grande Quindim, a palm-oil merengue named after Freyre's classic book.

Freyre, Portugal, and Lusotropicalism

On the heels of the success of The Masters and the Slaves and its succeeding volume, The Mansions and the Shanties (1938), the Portuguese government latched onto Gilberto Freyre as a figure who could offer a compelling modern rationale-antiracist and gilded in the language of social science-for its ancient colonial project. In turn, Freyre found a patron in the Portuguese government, and seized upon what he saw in the Portuguese African colonies as a present-day laboratory demonstrating the processes of cultural and racial mixture that he described in colonial Brazil. The relationship would define Freyre's work and his increasingly conservative politics, and it would shape the character of the final decades of Portuguese colonialism.

Portugal had the longest colonial experience in Africa, beginning with a fifteenth-century "seaborne Empire" of trading posts which sent slaves to Brazil and other parts of the Americas. After Brazil's independence in 1822 Portugal's colonial project in Africa languished until the end of the nineteenth century. Few Portuguese settled in the colonies, and when they did they intermixed with local populations because of their small numbers. After European empires demarcated dominions over Africa through the Treaty of Berlin in 1885, Portugal changed its colonial practices and promoted immigration to prevent encroachment by Britain and Belgium.

Portugal stagnated politically and economically through the nineteenth century after Brazilian independence. One of its main exports was people, and these emigrants favored Brazil over the African colonies. Nearly half a million Portuguese settled in Brazil in the nineteenth century, and over a million emigrated there in the twentieth. Political and economic crises in the 1920s triggered a coup that brought António de Oliveira Salazar to power. In 1932 he consolidated his rule into a corporatist dictatorship called the Estado Novo, modeled on Italian fascism. It was similar to Brazil's own Estado Novo, the regime led by Getúlio Vargas: both Estados Novos banished political parties, stifled dissent, and governed through a centralized authoritarian bureaucracy. Brazil's only lasted from 1937 to 1945. Getúlio Vargas, the central political figure in twentieth-century Brazil, was president from 1930 to 1945 and again from 1951 until his suicide in 1954. During this time Vargas reinvented himself and his political style, from liberal reformer to corporatist dictator and finally nationalist populist. By contrast, António Salazar in Portugal ruled over an increasingly sclerotic dictatorship, and Portugal's Estado Novo endured until 1974.

After the Second World War Salazar modified the constitution to classify the colonies as "overseas provinces" of a unified nation, therefore making them not subject to decolonization. Facing growing nationalist militancy and international pressure against its colonial system and its abuses, the government abolished compulsory labor levies among the African populations, while continuing to promote white settlement. As the Portuguese colonial minister Sarmento Rodrigues wrote to Freyre in 1954, "worrying symptoms are arising, not of racism, but of a certain ecclesiastical nativism. We have to strengthen the European element and then peace will be assured." The repressive political environment of Salazarist Portugal did not permit the types of debates over decolonization that took place in other European societies. António Costa Pinto suggests: "Had some of the elements of democratization been present, these would surely have led to a quicker negotiated settlement to the colonial problem."

By the middle of the twentieth century Portugal's wealthiest colony, Angola, exported coffee, diamonds, and oil. It also had the largest white population. The Portuguese census of 1950 showed a population of 4,145,266 in Angola. It was divided between 4,036,687 "indigenous" inhabitants who did not speak Portuguese and were levied to provide forced labor on plantations, in the mines, and in public works; 30,080 "assimilated" inhabitants who spoke Portuguese and held rights generally equivalent to those of colonists; and 78,499 Europeans. By the 1960s, after a decade of intense settlement policies by the Portuguese government, Angola had a white population nearing 500,000 out of a total of 5 million.

The census of 1950 still used the terms "civilized" and "not civilized" to distinguish among its colonial populations. This semantic detail speaks not only to the Portuguese colonial mentality but to the entire logic of Salazar's Estado Novo, which immersed itself in the imagery of the country's golden age of seafaring colonial expansion in all of its Christian, crusading zeal. To outside observers Portugal seemed lost in time. Undersecretary of State George Ball recalled his meeting with Salazar in 1963 to encourage decolonization: "During our talks, history constantly intruded ... Salazar was absorbed by a time dimension quite different from ours; it seemed as though he and his whole country were living in more than one century, and the heroes of the past were still shaping Portuguese policy. That impression was so acute that, after our second day of conversation, my reporting telegram to President Kennedy observed, among other things, that we had been wrong to think of Portugal as under the control of a dictator. It was instead ruled by a triumvirate consisting of Vasco da Gama, Prince Henry the Navigator, and Salazar." Just as Salazar's regime relied on cold war ideology and crusading imagery, it also employed Gilberto Freyre's ideas about race relations to justify colonialism. Salazar's government embraced Freyre's idea that Brazilian racial harmony was a legacy of the Portuguese, using it as evidence that Portugal did not have colonies but rather "overseas provinces," and that these were part of a unified "pluriracial" and "pluricontinental" nation.

Freyre lent intellectual credibility to Salazar's regime, and in turn found in Salazar a symbol of the traditionalist authoritarianism that was central to his worldview. As Needell explains, "Even though Freyre had creatively harnessed recent American social science to a project of creating a vision of traditional society, there is no doubt about his own prejudices. While profoundly 'modern' in his training and his experience of personal and social antitheses, he could not truly sustain a balance and he hungered for the security of the past ... His critical distance is overpowered in his work by his embrace of patriarchy." This relationship began when Freyre was invited to give a series of lectures which he published in 1940 as The World the Portuguese Created. His lectures stressed a dimension of his analysis that would resonate across the Atlantic in coming decades, amounting to an ethnically nationalist political manifesto about the heroic virtues of Portugal. Freyre even remarked that "after Jesus Christ, no one has done more for the spirit of human brotherhood than the Portuguese."

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Hotel Trópico by JERRY DÁVILA Copyright © 2010 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Brazil in the Lusotropical World 11

2 Africa and the Independent Foreign Policy 39

3 "The Lovers of the African Race:" Brazilian Diplomats in Nigeria 64

4 War in Angola, Crisis in Brazil 91

5 Latinité or Fraternité? Senegal, Portugal, and the Brazilian Military Regime 117

6 Gibson Barboza's Trip: "Brazil [Re]discovers Africa" 141

7 Brazil and the Portuguese Revolution 170

8 The Special Representation in Angola, 1975 190

9 Miracle for Sale: Marketing Brazil in Nigeria 221

Epilogue 244

Notes 257

Bibliography 293

Index 307

Editorial Reviews

"[T]his is a solidly researched and colourfully written study, and its broad geographical and thematic scope should appeal to a wide readership both within and beyond the confines of Afro- and Luso-Brazilian studies."--Ori Preuss "Journal of Latin American Studies"

"At a time when Brazil is garnering widespread attention as a global economic and geopolitical power, this book provides an indispensable historical framework to understand the conditions that have led to this status. Africa in fact served as a platform for Brazil to assert itself as an emerging world power in the 1960s. Dávila offers one of the most sophisticated and in-depth analyses of Brazil-Africa relations to date. One of the highlights of his book are the interviews, which capture quite vividly the complicated nexus among affect, culture, race, myth, desire, memory, and foreign policy."--Fernando Arenas "American Historical Review"

"Jerry Dávila's insightful and very well-written book has arrived at an opportune moment. . . . The considerable strengths of Hotel Trópico rest on Dávila's solid prior scholarship on Brazil's race relations, unprecedented access to comparatively recent Brazilian diplomatic and Portuguese governmental archives, extended interviews with key players over five years, and broad institutional and collegial ties in several countries. The research is meticulous and copiously documented, the argumentation is skillful and clear, and the style is lively, detailed and almost novelistic in its narrative."--Wayne A. Selcher "The Americas"

"This book is no standard diplomatic history. It falls within the genre of work--mostly related to the study of US foreign relations--that seeks to show how domestic race relations have left a profound mark on the conduct of foreign policy. . . . [A] well-written and insightful book. . . ."--Philip Chrimes "International Affairs"

"Hotel Trópico is a superb book. It takes on broad themes such as race and imperialism, modifies much of the current knowledge about Brazil's dictatorship, and suggests a reevaluation of that form of government in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Hotel Trópico will be read not only by scholars of Brazil and Latin America but also by those studying Africa, empire, and postcolonialism."--Jeffrey Lesser, author of A Discontented Diaspora: Japanese Brazilians and the Meanings of Ethnic Militancy, 1960-1980

"Jerry Dávila has transformed the history of Brazil's diplomatic initiatives in Africa during the era of decolonization, not only adding depth and fascinating detail to this story but also showing how the pursuit of a special Brazil-Africa relationship both drew upon Brazil's claims to be a 'racially democratic' nation and laid bare the contradictions in those claims."--Barbara Weinstein, author of For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in São Paulo, 1920-1964

From the Publisher

[T]his is a solidly researched and colourfully written study, and its broad geographical and thematic scope should appeal to a wide readership both within and beyond the confines of Afro- and Luso-Brazilian studies.

Journal of Latin American Studies - Ori Preuss

At a time when Brazil is garnering widespread attention as a global economic and geopolitical power, this book provides an indispensable historical framework to understand the conditions that have led to this status. Africa in fact served as a platform for Brazil to assert itself as an emerging world power in the 1960s. Dávila offers one of the most sophisticated and in-depth analyses of Brazil-Africa relations to date. One of the highlights of his book are the interviews, which capture quite vividly the complicated nexus among affect, culture, race, myth, desire, memory, and foreign policy.

American Historical Review - Fernando Arenas

Jerry Dávila's insightful and very well-written book has arrived at an opportune moment. . . . The considerable strengths of Hotel Trópico rest on Dávila's solid prior scholarship on Brazil's race relations, unprecedented access to comparatively recent Brazilian diplomatic and Portuguese governmental archives, extended interviews with key players over five years, and broad institutional and collegial ties in several countries. The research is meticulous and copiously documented, the argumentation is skillful and clear, and the style is lively, detailed and almost novelistic in its narrative.

The Americas - Wayne A. Selcher

This book is no standard diplomatic history. It falls within the genre of work—mostly related to the study of US foreign relations—that seeks to show how domestic race relations have left a profound mark on the conduct of foreign policy. . . . [A] well-written and insightful book. . . .

International Affairs - Philip Chrimes