Lusophone Africa

International Conference: "Viver as independências: experiências, conflitos e oposições nas sociedades africanas descolonizadas/"Living after independence: experiences, conflicts and oppositions in the decolonized African societies, 1960–1990"

Co-organização de Alexander Keese (Genève), Miguel Bandeira Jerónimo (Coimbra)
e José Silva Évora (Praia)

24 e 25 de Setembro de 2019 Paul, Santo Antão, Cabo Verde.

For several decades, Professor Jerry Bender was a key voice that engaged consistently with academic, policy, and popular audiences on the questions of Angola, broader struggles in southern Africa, and American foreign policy. Perhaps most well-known for his path-breaking book that emerged from his dissertation and is still unparalleled in
many ways, Bender’s subsequent contributions were vast and extensive, and hence not always easy to comprehend. What follows is a preliminary bibliography of his work, including academic papers, contributions to newspapers, and Congressional testimony. This bibliography is incomplete and preliminary, and an online version will be updated (suggestions welcomed).

The principal aim of this chapter is to trace the presence of the post-colonial trauma of Angolan history in the overwhelming novel of José Eduardo Agualusa, The Book of Chameleons. After the long years of a brutal colonial war against the Portuguese in the 1960s, by arriving at the moment of the collapse of the Portuguese Colonial Empire and the independence of the country, Angola had toface a harsh and bloody civil war between 1975 and 2003. Until a certain point the book remains silent about this brutality of the national history, but the trauma enters the text unexpectedly. The novel articulates the uncanny experience that one cannot escape from the trauma, and as Ana Mafalda Leite points out, war inevitably becomes the central theme of contemporary literature in Angola. The strange and exotic novel of José Eduardo Agualua is narrated by a gecko. The narration of the gecko oscillates between dreams, reality, past, and present creating a floating and essentially magical world which tries to exclude the post-colonial trauma of the national history. This magical world collapses when the trauma enters the text. One of the female protagonists, Ángela Lucía literally carries the
wounds of history on her body, the scars of the civil war - needless to say how strongly trauma is related, not just etymologically, but also metaphorically, to the wound. Through the scars, the past, the tragedy of national history, is present on the female body of the post-colonial subject. In this chapter I intend to explore how the individual trauma of the subject presented directly through the scars, is related to the national history of post-colonial Angola, and how the wounds of the body carry the wounds of history. Agualusa - the par excellence lusophone post-colonial writer - inscribes the trauma in a fantastic and oneiric horizon, emphasising that under the layers of the posterior created artificial memories (invented by the protagonist Félix Ventura), hides the sinister reality of history, and despite the exotic and magical atmosphere, no one can escape from the trauma of the past.

Among historical factors leading to state dysfunctionality phenomenon on the African continent, colonial legacy is most often indicated. It is a common perception that colonialism understood not only as colonial rule but also as colonial legacy is the main responsible for today’s African crises of statehood. The study focuses on Luso-African continental states (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau) that have quite a similar historical experience, not only the difficult and long war for independence, but also lack of political stability in the postcolonial period (civil wars, coups d’état, experiments with socialism and one-party system). The article is an attempt to reflect on the hypothesis that the Portuguese colonial legacy can be perceived as a historical factor leading to state dysfunctionality, however its evaluation should be more complex, as from today’s perspective it could bring some benefits that derive most of all from the common official language, similar historical experience and some sense of the Luso-African or Lusophone identity.
The paper is based on the qualitative analysis of the already existing data, critical reading of the literature of the subject, as well as qualitative data gathered during author’s study visits to Portugal, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau.

CONTENTS

:: ARTICLES

Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses
The Portuguese Expeditionary Corps in France (1917-18) and the long shadow of the Peninsular War against Napoleon

Jesús-Ángel Redondo Cardeñoso
Weapons of the Weak in Portugal during the Early 20th Century: the example of the Central Alentejo

Quintino Lopes
Science and diplomacy: the National Education Board and the League of Nations. Portugal in the 1930s

:: BOOK REVIEWS
Fernando Dores Costa
Frank Jacob and Gilmar Visoni-Alonzo. The Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe. A Revision. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. ISBN- 978-1-137-53917-5

Duncan Simpson
Leandro Pereira Gonçalves, Plínio Salgado: Um Católico Integralista entre Portugal e o Brasil (1895-1975). Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2017. ISBN: 978-972-671-398-2

Gisele C. Conceição and Fabiano Bracht
José Pinto de Azeredo. Essays on Some Maladies of Angola (1799). Edited by Timothy Walker. Dartmouth: Tagus Press at UMass Dartmouth, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-933227-69-6

CONTENTS

:: ARTICLES

Maria Cristina Cunha, Paula Pinto Costa & Duarte Babo Marinho
The Preparation of Embassies and the Protocols Followed by Royal Portuguese Ambassadors in the Late Middle Ages

Armando Norte & Rui Miguel Rocha
The Cost of Graduation and Academic Rituals. Material Expressions of Student Life in the Late Middle Ages in Portugal

Hélder Carita
Zenonian Laws on Sea Views and the Image of the City of Lisbon

:: SURVEYS AND DEBATES
Joaquim Romero Magalhães and the Early Modern History of Portugal and its Empire: The testimony of nine historians.

Mafalda Soares da Cunha, Iris Kantor & João Paulo Salvado
Joaquim Romero Magalhães and the Early Modern History of Portugal and its Empire:
A Tribute

Francisco Bethencourt
Joaquim Romero Magalhães: A Testimony

Leonor Freire Costa
Joaquim Romero Magalhães’s Thoughts about Early Modern Portugal

João Carlos Garcia
Joaquim Romero Magalhães and the History of Luso-Brazilian Cartography

Álvaro Garrido
The Role Played by Joaquim Romero Magalhães in the Creation of the Course of Economic and Social History at the University of Coimbra

Tiago C. P. dos Reis Miranda
The CNCDP Years

Pablo Oller Mont Serrath
Joaquim Romero Magalhães: The Writing of History

Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro
What I Learned from Joaquim Romero Magalhães

Fernanda Olival
The Portuguese Inquisition in the Historical Writing of J. Romero Magalhães

Rui Santos
Algarve, the Mediterranean, and the Atlantic

:: BOOK REVIEWS

Fabiano Vilaça dos Santos
Fragoso, João and Nuno Gonçalo Monteiro (org.). Um reino e suas repúblicas no Atlântico. Comunicações políticas entre Portugal, Brasil e Angola nos séculos XVII e XVIII (A Kingdom and its Republics in the Atlantic: Political Communications between Portugal, Brazil, and Angola in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries). Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2017, 475 pp. ISBN: 978-85-200-1269-7.

Tamar Herzog
Hespanha, António Manuel. Filhos da Terra: Identidades Mestiças nos Confins da Expansão Portuguesa. Lisbon, Tinta da China, 2019, 366 pp. ISBN: 9789896714765.

Lusophone African (LA) multinational enterprises (MNEs) are becoming a significant pan-African and global economic force regarding their international presence and influence. However, given the extreme poverty and lack of development in their home markets, many LA enterprises seeking to internationalize lack resources and legitimacy in international markets. Compared to higher income emerging markets, Lusophone enterprises in Africa face more significant challenges in their internationalization efforts. Concomitantly, conducting significant international business (IB) research in these markets to understand these MNEs internationalization strategies can be a very daunting task. The fast-growing rise of social media on the Internet, however, provides an opportunity for IB researchers to examine new phenomena in these markets in innovative ways. Unfortunately, for several reasons, qualitative researchers in IB have not fully embraced this opportunity. This article studies the use of social media in qualitative research in the field of IB. It offers an illustrative case based on qualitative research on internationalization modes of LAMNEs conducted by the authors in Angola and Mozambique using social media to identify and qualify the population sample, as well as interact with subjects and collect data. It discusses some of the challenges of using social media in those regions of Africa and suggests how scholars can design their studies to capitalize on social media and corresponding data as a tool for qualitative research. This article underscores the potential opportunities and challenges inherent in the use of social media in IB-oriented qualitative research, providing recommendations on how qualitative IB researchers can design their studies to capitalize on data generated by social media.

Em São Tomé e Príncipe existem dois teatros populares do ciclo das histórias de Carlos Magno, nomeadamente A Tragédia do Marquês de Mântua e do Imperador Carloto Magno, em São Tomé, e o Auto de Floripes, no Príncipe, apresentado tradicionalmente em 15 de Agosto, Dia de São Lourenço. Ambos os teatros são exemplos emblemáticos da crioulização cultural e do teatro sincrético. O primeiro, mais conhecido por tchiloli, é a manifestação cultural mais divulgada e melhor documentada do arquipélago pois, desde os anos de 1960, apareceram vários livros e trabalhos áudio-visuais sobre esse teatro popular, não apenas em português, mas também em inglês, francês e alemão. A palavra crioula tchiloli é sinónima de teatro e deriva etimologicamente do português tiroliro (pífaro), a flauta transversal que se toca durante o espectáculo. O tchiloli baseia-se num texto escrito por volta de 1540 por Baltazar Dias, um dramaturgo cego, madeirense da escola de Gil Vicente (1465-1536). O seu drama inspira-se em seis romances castelhanos que, por sua vez, derivam do ciclo carolíngio do século XI. Este teatro medieval conta a história de Dom Carloto, filho e herdeiro do imperador Carlos Magno que assassina o seu melhor amigo, Valdevinos, sobrinho do marquês de Mântua, durante uma caçada, porque se apaixonou por Sibila, a esposa de Valdevinos. O crime leva as duas famílias e os seus representantes a debaterem questões de lei, de justiça e de governação. Os temas chave desse drama são a traição e a igualdade perante a lei. O imperador é confrontado com o dilema de escolher entre a raison d'État, o interesse nacional, e o seu amor paternal. Finalmente, o seu filho é condenado à morte e executado na fortaleza imperial. Os grupos do tchiloli, conhecidos na ilha por tragédias, têm cerca de trinta elementos cada um, e pertencem todos a uma determinada localidade de forros (assim se chamam os crioulos nativos de São Tomé). Dentro de certos limites dramatúrgicos, cada tragédia representa uma versão própria da peça. Conforme a tradição medieval, exclusivamente os homens representam todos os papéis, inclusivamente os de mulheres. Além disso, o mesmo actor amador representa sempre a mesma personagem. Os papéis, o guarda-roupa e os textos transmitem-se no seio das famílias. Actualmente existem mais grupos de tchiloli em São Tomé do que antes da independência. Em 1969, havia cinco tragédias , em 1991 existiam nove grupos.

This article argues that Amílcar Cabral adhered to some of the essential
elements of the philosophical discourse of modernity. This
commitment led Cabral to endorse an anti-essentialist, historicized
conception of culture, and this in turn led him to conceive of cultural
liberation in terms of cultural autonomy as opposed to the
preservation of indigenous culture(s). Cabral’s attitude towards
languages is employed as a case study in order to demonstrate how
emphasis on Cabral’s commitment to the philosophical discourse of
modernity can help explain why he could denounce ‘colonialist
culture’, while also defending the PAIGC’s (Partido Africano para a
Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde / African Party for the
Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) use of Portuguese as an
official language. This essay argues that Cabral makes a significant
distinction between foreign influences and foreign domination in the
realm of culture. Cabral conceived of the anti-colonial struggle in the
realm of culture as a struggle against the latter rather than the former

Nationalism in Mozambique was characterised by a plurality of leaders who competed for influence both within and outside FRELIMO. Each of them tried to gain political support at a continental and international level, and, eventually, the leadership that rose to power within FRELIMO by the end of the 1960s and early 1970s prevailed over other components of Mozambican nationalism both on the field of the liberation war and at the diplomatic level. This leadership was highly cosmopolitan and implemented a vibrant diplomacy within the mechanisms of the Cold War worldwide.
FRELIMO was supported by newly independent African governments that were active in promoting the independence of African people still under colonial rule (e.g. Tanzania, Algeria, Zambia), and then by governments from the Eastern bloc of the Cold War as well as by solidarity committees in the West (e.g. USA, Sweden and Nordic countries, UK, Italy). Within these contexts, FRELIMO secured a key political legitimacy as the genuine liberation movement of Mozambique, joined by other movements of the Portuguese colonies, South Africa, Namibia and Southern Rhodesia – and opposed by a rival group of liberation movements from those countries. This status was also recognised among such important international organisations as CONCP, AAPSO, WPC, OAU and, eventually, the UN. Probably, the networks of solidarity with FRELIMO that developed in the West played a key role in the defeat of the Portuguese regime and the independence of Mozambique, since a number of Western European countries were formally allied with Portugal within the NATO alliance.

São Tomé e Príncipe (STP) has not yet extracted a single drop of oil and
is not expected to do so until 2020. Nonetheless, due to its potential oil
wealth the  military coup in the small island-republic in July 2003 attracted a lot of international attention. Many foreign observers had little doubt that oil politics were the cause of the takeover. Some suggested that it was only matter of time before competition for power ahead of the oil rush evolved into political instability. President Fradique de Menezes (2001-11) was cought by surprise by the coup in his country while he was at the 6th Rev. Leon Sullivan Summit in Abuja attended by thirteen African heads of state.
The chairman of the summit, Rev. Andrew Young, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and mayor of Atlanta immediately blamed oil as the cause of the coup. He declared : « I don’t know what happened in São Tomé, but I know nothing happened until someone announced there was plenty of oil »
There is no doubt that the prospect of oil wealth has been in the minds of
all islanders and has created great hopes. The licensing round for the first
nine of the twenty-seven blocks located in the Joint Development Zone (JDZ)
jointly managed with Nigeria was started in April and should be completed
on October 18, 2003. Available seismic data suggested that the offshore blocks
could hold between four and 11 billion barrels of reserves at depths of
between 1,500 and 2,500 metres. The Joint Development Authority (JDA) had set
a minimum signature bonus of $30 million for each block. As part of STP’s
40% of the profits of the JDZ, in 2004 the country expected to get about $100
million in signature bonuses, then twice the size of the annual national budget.
However, while oil certainly played a role in the events, it cannot be considered to be the dominant cause. Such a view would neglect the role of other domestic factors in the genesis of the coup. This article draws attention to both the political developments in STP that formed the background of the coup of July 16, 2003 and the then increasing regional and international importance of the tiny country as an antecipated future oil producer.

This article presents an analysis of the documentary film Dundo, Memória Colonial (‘Dundo, colonial memory’) (2009) by the Portuguese journalist Diana Andringa. In the first section, I will inscribe Andringa’s film within the wider context of filmic geographies of return. Sections two and three address the multifaceted ways in which colonial Dundo is remembered in Portugal by former settlers and in Angola by former African workers as presented by the film. The fourth section of the article analyses a more personal memory of Dundo that is also developed in this film as the director herself spent her childhood in Dundo. I will conclude that Dundo offers fragmented visions of the past that have to be confronted and discussed in a shared Afro-Portuguese filmic framework. As nostalgic and critical ways of remembering the past are confronted in the film, the documentary proposes that remembering the past is always ambivalent and connected to specific politics of history.