Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography 9781350043657, 9781350043671, 9781350043640

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Map List
Acknowledgements
1. Studying decolonization
Prelude
Introduction
Writing about decolonization
Portuguese (de)colonization: Three conditions
Textual and visual landscapes
2. Entangling decolonizations: Goa, Mozambique and Angola
Introduction
Goa, Mozambique and Angola: Portuguese decolonization in India and Africa,1961-1975
Goa
Mozambique
Angola
Decolonization of the third empire
3. Emigrating Goans
Introduction
Indian Ocean ethnographies
Imperial connections: Goa and Mozambique
Empire builders, agency and the spirit of the times (1920s)
Goan decolonization, resistance and neocolonialism (1950s–1960s)
Mozambican independence, chaos and dreams (1975)
Conclusion
4. Goans going fishing
Introduction
Indian Ocean fishing
Goans going fishing
Literary and photographic interventions: text and image Couto and Rangel
(Ethnographic) notes on a ritual
Taking the ferry
Waiting for the wind
Performing the Catholic mass
Blessing the boats
Eating prawns
5. Dispossessing things
Introduction
Writing about decolonization
Thinking about things
Ricardo Rangel: ‘The departure of the colonialists’
Carlos Garçaõ: ‘We must take care’
Ryszard Kapuściński: ‘We were imprisoned in a besieged city’
Conclusion: On the postcolony
6. Driving from Angola to South Africa
Introduction
Decolonization as a diasporic port of entry
Exile or saying goodbye
Refugees, toilets and ‘second class citizenship’
Conclusion: Portuguese-ness in post-apartheid South Africa
7. Renovating in Beira
Introduction
On ruination
On Beira
On renovation
(Landscapes of) leisure
The Ferroviário swimming pool
The Novocine movie theatre
The Grande Hotel
The Riviera cafe
An aerial viewpoint
Reflecting: From Mozambique to Goa
Notes
Bibliography
Interviews
Index

Citation preview

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World History and Ethnography Pamila Gupta

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Pamila Gupta, 2019 Pamila Gupta has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: ‘Initiation of the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire’, 1961. Reprinted by permission from the Centro de Documentação e Formação Fotográfica, Maputo. Mozambique. (© Ricardo Rangel) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: 978-1-3500-4365-7 PB: 978-1-3501-7472-6 ePDF: 978-1-3500-4364-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-4366-4

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

for Juan

Contents List of Figures Map List Acknowledgements

ix

1

1

2

3

4

Studying decolonization Prelude Introduction Writing about decolonization Portuguese (de)colonization: Three conditions Textual and visual landscapes

x xi

1 1 3 10 14

Entangling decolonizations: Goa, Mozambique and Angola Introduction Goa, Mozambique and Angola: Portuguese decolonization in India and Africa, 1961–1975 Goa Mozambique Angola Decolonization of the third empire

21

Emigrating Goans Introduction Indian Ocean ethnographies Imperial connections: Goa and Mozambique Empire builders, agency and the spirit of the times (1920s) Goan decolonization, resistance and neocolonialism (1950s–1960s) Mozambican independence, chaos and dreams (1975) Conclusion

35

Goans going fishing Introduction Indian Ocean fishing Goans going fishing Literary and photographic interventions: text and image Couto and Rangel

55

21 23 23 27 30 32

35 37 39 44 47 50 53

55 57 58 61

viii

5

6

7

Contents

(Ethnographic) notes on a ritual Taking the ferry Waiting for the wind Performing the Catholic mass Blessing the boats Eating prawns

67

Dispossessing things Introduction Writing about decolonization Thinking about things Ricardo Rangel: ‘The departure of the colonialists’ Carlos Garçaõ: ‘We must take care’ Ryszard Kapuściński: ‘We were imprisoned in a besieged city’ Conclusion: On the postcolony

81

67 69 74 76 77

81 83 85 87 94 99 106

Driving from Angola to South Africa Introduction Decolonization as a diasporic port of entry Exile or saying goodbye Refugees, toilets and ‘second class citizenship’ Conclusion: Portuguese-ness in post-apartheid South Africa

109

Renovating in Beira Introduction On ruination On Beira On renovation (Landscapes of) leisure The Ferroviário swimming pool The Novocine movie theatre The Grande Hotel The Riviera cafe An aerial viewpoint

127

109 111 113 116 124

127 129 131 133 135 135 137 139 141 143

Reflecting: From Mozambique to Goa

145

Notes Bibliography Interviews Index

148 202 217 219

List of Figures 2.1 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 7.1

Ricardo Rangel, 1961 Ricardo Rangel, image 1, Catembe series, 1970–73 Ricardo Rangel, image 2, Catembe series, 1970–73 Ricardo Rangel, image 3, Catembe series, 1970–73 Ricardo Rangel, image 4, Catembe series, 1970–73 Ricardo Rangel, image 5, Catembe series, 1970–73 Ricardo Rangel, image 6, Catembe series, 1970–73 Ricardo Rangel, image 7, Catembe series, 1970–73 Ricardo Rangel, image 8, Catembe series, 1970–73 Ricardo Rangel, image 9, Catembe series, 1970–73 Ricardo Rangel, image 10, Catembe series, 1970–73 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 1, 1975 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 2, 1975 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 3, 1975 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 4, 1975 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 5, 1975 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 6, 1975 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 7, 1975 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 8, 1975 Ricardo Rangel, postcard of Beira

21 68 69 72 72 73 73 75 76 77 79 89 90 90 91 92 92 93 94 144

Map List Map 1 The Indian Ocean. Credit: Tamsyn Adams

xiii

Acknowledgements This book was conceived in the moment that I first saw a photograph by Ricardo Rangel, the one that graces the cover of this book. His photograph accessed what I was trying to think and write about – decolonization as a way to connect India and Southern Africa historically and ethnographically. This book has been in the making over the last ten years; different versions of essays were written along the way. I always had the idea that these essays were connecting ‘slender threads’ across the Indian Ocean, to use the words of Engseng Ho. An earlier version of Chapter 3 was published as ‘The Disquieting of History: Portuguese (De)colonization and Goan Migration in the Indian Ocean’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 44, no. 1 (2009): 19–47. Copyright © 2009 (SAGE). Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. DOI: https://doi. org/10.1177/0021909608098675. An earlier version of Chapter 4 was published as ‘Some (Not so) Lost Aquatic Traditions: Goans Going Fishing in the Indian Ocean’, Interventions 16, no. 6 (2014): 854–76. An earlier version of Chapter 5 was published as ‘Decolonization and (Dis) Possession in Lusophone Africa’, in The State and Mobility in Africa, edited by Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel Quirk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 169–93. Copyright @ 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press. An earlier version of Chapter 6 was published as ‘“Going for a Sunday Drive”: Angolan Decolonization, Learning Whiteness and the Portuguese Diaspora of South Africa’, in Narrating the Portuguese Diaspora: Piecing Things Together, edited by Francisco Fagundes, Irene M.F. Blayer, Teresa F.A. Alves and Teresa Cid (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 135–52. Parts of Chapter 6 are also derived from ‘Departures of Decolonization: Interstitial Spaces, Ordinary Affect, and Landscapes of Victimhood in Southern Africa’. In Histories of Victimhood, edited by Steffen Jensen and Henrik Ronsbo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 198–217. Copyright @2014 University of Pennsylvania Press. NRF Rated Researcher funds enabled my April 2016 trip to Beira, Mozambique. WISER and RINC funds generously provided for multiple trips to Maputo and Catembe between 2007 and 2011.

xii

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my anonymous reviewers at Bloomsbury Press for their productive comments in revising this book manuscript, Caroline Jeannerat for her brilliant editorial work in helping turn this manuscript into a book and my patient and persevering editor Emma Goode at Bloomsbury. I would like to thank Richard Rottenburg at the Martin-Luther University in Halle-Wittenberg, Germany, and my Mercator fellowship during 1 April to 15 June 2016 in Halle, Germany, which provided precious time and a lovely space to write Chapter 7 and present an early draft of this chapter to the LOST reading group. I would like to thank the late Ricardo Rangel, whom I was fortunate enough to meet in Maputo in 2008. I would also like to thank the Centro de Documentação e Formação Fotográfica in Maputo, Mozambique, for granting copyright permission (dated 26 April 2017) to reproduce his beautiful images throughout this book. I want to thank WiSER for providing such a nurturing environment and vibrant corridor in which to develop this book: Keith Breckenridge, Catherine Burns, Najibha Deshmukh, Adila Deshmukh, Sarah Duff, Shireen Hassim, Jon Hyslop, Jonathan Klaaren, Hlonipha Mokoena, Irma du Plessis and Deborah Posel. A special thank you to Sarah Nuttall for her unwavering support and Achille Mbembe for his invaluable insights. Additional thanks go to Ronit Frenkel and Julia Hornberger for their encouragement and friendship over the last ten years. I thank Isabel Hofmeyr for always sharpening my Indian Ocean scholarship and Euclides Gonçalves for being a reader of my work and reminding me what is important in Mozambique. I thank Padma for her patience when Mama goes off to work and Juan for pushing me to dwell inside photographs. I am grateful to all those persons who shared their stories of migration and opened their homes to me in Maputo, Catembe and Johannesburg, especially Diogo, Délia, Rui and Teresa. I would also like to thank several Mozambique specialists who have shaped this project along the way: Vanessa Dantas e Sá, Paolo Israel, Pedro Machado, Pedro Pombal and Caio Simões de Araújo. I devote this book to the late memory of Ricardo Rangel whose photographs started me on this project and Michael Pearson for his enduring mentorship.

Map 1 The Indian Ocean. Credit: Tamsyn Adams.

C hapte r 1

Studying decolonization

Prelude At the book launch of his first African edition of On the Postcolony in 2015, Achille Mbembe asked the telling question, ‘Has decolonization pushed [studies of] postcolonialism out?’1 I start this chapter with Mbembe’s provocation as a way to suggest that scholars located in South Africa and the larger Global South, at a moment of deep uncertainties and new antagonisms – particularly in light of the recent Rhodes Must Fall campaign at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2015 and the Fees Must Fall campaign taking place at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) since 2016 – are rethinking decolonization itself and how to go about transforming certain spaces, not only those of the university. Did we jump too quickly into the global condition of postcoloniality? Did we, along the way, somehow sidestep the processes of decolonization that took place prior to this shift? And are we now seeing a reverse trend (a backwards move), one that looks at decolonization as setting the conditions of possibility for postcoloniality? Possibly, we need to take up Mbembe’s sustained critique and dwell on, or rather spend some time in this interim space. And perhaps there is an urgency to do so as we increasingly distance ourselves from these historical configurations that were anything but homogenous across time and space. This book is one such attempt.

Introduction Almost ten years ago, after I first moved to Johannesburg, a South African friend recounted to me his travels on a motorbike through Mozambique in the early 1990s. One of the stories that made an impression on him came

2

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

from a Mozambican man he befriended along the way who, in a passing comment, made reference to the Portuguese colonial legacy of poor plumbing in Mozambique. When pressed further, he informed my friend that many Portuguese families, upon leaving Maputo in 1975 in the aftermath of Mozambican independence, poured concrete down their toilets, almost as a last colonial act, to ensure that these could never be used again, certainly not by their Mozambican counterparts.2 At the time, I found the story deeply disturbing yet fascinating, for it showcased many of the aspects of decolonization that I was beginning to conceptualize: that with the end of colonialism comes optimism, frustration and uncertainty simultaneously; how personal things can be read to understand colonialism as an individual form of possession and its fallout (decolonization), one of dispossession; the stakes involved for those departing and the resentments they carry when being forced to leave a place called home; the shifting moral political landscape that comes with decolonization and an inability to articulate colonial loss for some; and finally, a focus on who and what remains, less as a form of failure or ruin but of potentiality. Thus, I recount this traveller’s tale to suggest some of my larger interests and investments in this book that connects India and Southern Africa historically and ethnographically via the Indian Ocean through the analytic of ‘decolonization’ and the category of experience. By locating its politics in the personal, in everyday moments and acts, this story also illuminates certain aspects of decolonization that have yet to be researched and that, in some sense, point to its unresolved affective qualities (of messiness, trauma, loss and resilience) that are part of postcoloniality itself. In the following chapter, I suggest that it is these kinds of analytic entry points accompanied by rich ethnographic details that have the potential to shed light on the long-term consequences of decolonization. Specifically, I approach decolonization as a historical event and ethnographic moment; attend to the experience of the transfer of state power; and focus on decolonization as involving the mobility of people, ideas and things, and with an emphasis on migration and diaspora. By way of organization, I address three different topics in this introductory chapter: first, I look at writings on and about decolonization as well as my own intervention in this area of scholarship; second, I set up three conditions of Portuguese colonialism which directly shape how we write about its decolonization processes; and lastly, I provide a conceptual outline of the book entitled Textual and Visual Landscapes.

Studying decolonization

3

Writing about decolonization Prasenjit Duara begins his 2004 edited volume, fittingly entitled Decolonization, Perspectives from Now and Then, with two critical caveats: From a historian’s perspective, decolonization was one of the most important political developments of the twentieth century because it turned the world into a stage of history … [It] refers to the process whereby colonial powers transferred institutional and legal control over their territories and dependencies to indigenously based, formally sovereign, nation-states. The political search for independence often began during the inter-war years and fructified within fifteen year of the end of World War II in 1945.3

Yet, as the lessons of history have proven, it was far from a smooth transition; rather, there were difficulties built into this widespread ‘process’ that took place largely in the aftermath of the Second World War, and that have begun to be raised as a critical area of enquiry over the last fifteen years. It is these difficulties that I am interested in exploring in this book, specifically in relation to decolonization in Portuguese India and Southern Africa. Linking India and Africa through decolonization itself is a crucial move that complicates our often unilinear, one-nation perspective on decolonization. It is important to recognize, as Duara points out, that ‘decolonization represented not only the transference of legal sovereignty, but a movement for moral justice and political solidarity against imperialism. It thus refers both to the anti-imperialist political movement and to an emancipatory ideology which sought or claimed to liberate the nation and humanity itself ’.4 It was out of these structural shifts in governmentality that the focus on the ideological aspects of decolonization became historically possible and emerged in the foundational writings of figures such as Frantz Fanon, who was fighting (and furiously writing) against the French in Algeria, and Amilcar Cabral, who was doing much the same against the Portuguese in Cape Verde and Guinea Bissau throughout the 1960s. It is Fanon who famously writes in his essay ‘Algeria Unveiled’ that ‘colonialism must accept the fact that things happen without its control, without its direction’.5 And it is Cabral who writes in 1969: ‘The Africans of the Portuguese colonies will destroy Portuguese colonialism. It may be the last colonial regime to go, just as it is the last in terms of technical and economic development, and the last to respect the Rights of Man. But its days are surely numbered.’6 I mention Fanon and Cabral here because they are two well-known political figures among many who raised the issue of the profound

4

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

psychological effects of colonialism and who endure as philosophical figures and writers who are integral to decolonization studies. Most students of colonial history, including myself, grew up reading Kenyan novelist and theorist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s famously titled and damning critique of colonialism’s effect on language, Decolonizing the Mind,7 a treatise very much influenced by the writings of Fanon and his The Wretched of the Earth, in particular.8 Here I return to Duara’s earlier comments concerning decolonization’s doubling effect as a movement and an ideology that in some sense continues to make it a difficult and unsettling subject of study. Yet it also makes it a compelling topic: the fact that these threads are so deeply intertwined suggests that there is so much more about the material and ideological complexities faced at the end of empire that need to be considered. Very briefly, then, I want to outline some of my thoughts with regard to treating decolonization as a subject and object of analysis. More generally, the critical project of postcolonial studies has been one of ‘deconstructing Master narratives, unsettling binaries and admitting marginalized knowledges’.9 These studies have looked to the strengths and vulnerabilities of colonialism and its attendant colonial subjectivities, the political and economic effects of colonialism as a postcolonial condition, the continued cultural links between metropole and colony in the aftermath of empire and, finally, the difficulty of giving voice to those silenced by colonialism itself.10 Interestingly, or perhaps paradoxically, many of these studies have tended to overlook the crucial link or rather historical step that transformed colonies into postcolonies: that is, the physical act of decolonization itself. I will take up its work-a-day quality in later discussions, including the particularities involved in packing up one’s things of everyday life and fitting them into a plane, car or crate, depending on the context; the act of readying oneself for travel to an often unknown second or third destination; or equally difficult, making the decision to stay put. Instead, European ‘decolonization’ has often been rendered an undifferentiated act that occurred in almost the same way in various parts of the world and as largely taking place in the aftermath of the Second World War. As well, the cultural distinctiveness of specific decolonization contexts is often negated in favour of studying the more sweeping experience of postcolonialism, one focused on the story of the colonized taking over, as an enduring political and historical condition, and one that steps over or brushes aside decolonization. Jane Jacobs argues quite persuasively for this position that decolonization is the ‘least meaningful signifier of what might be thought of as postcoloniality’.11

Studying decolonization

5

Decolonization has often been viewed as an unproblematic given, an insignificant signifier in the transition from colony to postcolony. As Achille Mbembe argues, it was a foundational moment that was not only based on an ideal of ‘universal human emancipation’12 but it fundamentally reshaped peoples and states of the West and, I would argue, in relation to and in the Global South itself. I suggest that it is only in the more recent past, as we increasingly distance ourselves historically from certain decolonization events and moments, and with the understanding of decolonization as a globalized practice underwriting its own study, that it becomes a possible focus of research in its own right. I am invested in looking closely at how decolonization has been recorded, archived, historicized, theorized and experienced, as conditioning postcoloniality itself. I also want to make the case that postcolonial studies needs to take into account certain enduring affective qualities not often associated with decolonization. Historian Raymond Betts points out that the word ‘decolonization’ entered the lexicon in the 1930s but did not attain popularity until thirty years later, that is, only when the concept had been put into practice. He emphasizes the difficulty of conceptualizing ‘decolonization’: It is an awkward and inelegant word, therefore, in a way, appropriate to the subject it attempts to describe. Unlike the phrase ‘end of empire’ which has a certain poetic economy suggesting a grand and sweeping occurrence, ‘decolonization’ is work-a-day, rather like other ‘de’ prefixed words that denote cleansing changes.13

Furthermore, Betts rightly identifies that, Decolonization was … a clutch of fitful activities and events, played out in conference rooms, acted out in protests mounted in city streets, fought over in jungles and mountains. Its results pleased no one. It was too hastily done for some, too slowly carried out for others, too incomplete in effect for most. The subject is historically loose-ended; there is no end to discussion of it.14

Writing about decolonization as a political and material reality suggests that it was less than smooth and complicated, occurring in a wide variety of legal settings throughout the world, at very different moments in time and with very real consequences; it altered the livelihoods of all those involved, not only of those directly in the service of the colonial state. That it included the movement of people and things also reminds us of the work-a-day physical quality that Betts gestures to in the above quote and that I take up in a sustained manner in this book. In other words, circumstances changed dramatically, in both good and bad ways, and overnight. We need to interrogate the universality of the event of decolonization in order to look to its particularities, the manner by which it

6

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

happened, as involving certain kinds of mobilities, as a moment of both closure and possibility, and as directly shaping the postcoloniality of a place. However, as historian Fred Cooper suggests, there are still difficulties in tracing distinct patterns of decolonization due to the teleology of the subject matter: Patterns of decolonization are particularly difficult to unravel because we know the end point: the emergence of the independent state from colonial rule. It is tempting to read the history of the period from 1945 to 1960 [1975 in this case] as the inevitable triumph of nationalism and to see in each social movement taking placing within a colony – be it by peasants, by women, by workers, or by religious groups – another piece to be integrated into the coming together of the nation. What is lost in such a reading are the ways in which different groups within colonies mobilized for concrete ends and used as well as opposed the institutions of the colonial state and the niches opened up in the clash of new and old structures. Whether such efforts fed into the attempts of nationalist parties to build anti-colonial coalitions needs to be investigated, not assumed.15

Thus, rather than assume that certain concrete coalitions between old and new took place in a space opened up by the end of colonialism, we must examine each case carefully for what these alliances and networks looked like on the ground, especially for those communities who did not fit so easily under the label of colonizer or colonized; caught in between, they had to make choices about whether or not to stay or go during decolonization. Precisely because they open up the unexplored niches that Cooper gestures to, my focus is on the diasporic Goans who were left out of Mozambique’s nationalist success story and the minority Portuguese Angolans who decided to move to South Africa rather than return to Lisbon after decolonization. Both communities have untold accounts that are showcased in this book. My point here is to help shift the focus away from the story of decolonization that features colonizers and their fate and offer a sympathetic and nuanced reading of several minority diasporic communities. Putting Betts and Cooper together, they contribute a first set of foundational blocks for positioning decolonization as part of postcolonial studies, rather than lying outside its purview. Neither could the conceptualization of decolonization itself even have begun to take place without the foundational writings of Fanon, Cabral and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o nor the conceptual frameworks provided by Achille Mbembe, Prasenjit Duara and Jane Jacobs, all briefly outlined here.

Studying decolonization

7

It is the premise of decolonization that I want to take on fully here, thus contributing to and building on a second body of scholarship, one produced more recently, over the last fifteen years. This set of foundational studies has taken on the topic of decolonization as a scholarly subject of enquiry in its own right and asks a set of questions that move beyond the act of the transfer of power and that place greater emphasis on cultures and comparisons of decolonization. There are a number of theoretical developments that have had a particular influence on shaping this new field of study. First, I point to the seminal ‘International Seminar on Decolonization’, which was hosted by the National History Center in Washington, DC, between 2006 and 2015,16 with an exclusive focus on the theme of decolonization in the twentieth century. It was a series that, according to Sudhir Pillarisetti, ‘may be said – without exaggeration – to have helped build the field of decolonization history’ by training fifteen scholars every summer over ten years, thus producing a cadre of 150 experts on decolonization working in a variety of settings.17 Next, I point to a recent roundtable on decolonization by the American History Association that, no doubt, is a direct result of the International Seminar series and the scholars it trained. In her introduction to the proceedings of the roundtable, historian Farina Mir identifies a recent ‘intellectual vigor’ in the field of decolonization studies, suggesting that the seven pieces included provide a ‘useful and stimulating introduction to the field’ at the same time that they reflect ‘the new spirit in scholarship on decolonization, which questions rather than assumes what it means, and interrogates its histories in diverse settings and through varied lenses’.18 She argues that this body of recent scholarship on decolonization has moved away from a narrow focus on the transfer of power, which ‘was limiting it to an event and tying it to a moment’.19 Instead, this new work shows the difficulty of defining decolonization and opens it up for deeper historical analysis.20 Mir cites numerous articles, readers, companions and edited collections on the topic that have been produced during the prolific ten-year period from 2006 to 201521; they have taken on varied themes, such as the ‘imperialism of decolonization’,22 the perspective of decolonization as ongoing, and the role of the historian in excavating histories of decolonization as part of the process of decolonization itself.23 She urges historians to ‘look for new archives that can tell different histories of decolonization, and to read old archives with fresh approaches’.24 As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang persuasively remind us, ‘decolonization is not an “and”. It is an elsewhere’.25 Lastly, I turn to a recent collection edited by Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle entitled Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices,

8

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

1945–70 and identify three critical points they make. The authors suggest that ‘rather than see the moment of constitutional handover as a date after which decolonisation is complete and scholarship begins or ends, we conceptualize this particular period as a global “decolonising moment” from which to spin out temporally and geographically, highlighting the diverse but often interconnected cultures through which decolonisation was practiced, experienced, represented and wrought’.26 Even as they suggest that with the writing of new imperial histories, ‘this challenge is being met’,27 it is still a crucial first step to move away from ‘why decolonisation happened’,28 to look more closely at the ‘distinctive cultures of decolonisation … what … they uncover about the complexities of the “end of empire” as a process’ in a variety of case studies.29 Second, Craggs and Wintle emphasize the importance of bringing a comparative analytic to decolonization studies, even as ‘the wider historiographical trend of placing the bounded nation at the heart of decolonisation studies persists’.30 This intervention is directly tied to my own work across India and Africa. Comparison ‘between places, and between different creative outputs’31 helps to reveal the ‘comparative character of cultures of decolonisation (and of decolonisation itself)’32 as well as the ‘transnational geographies of decolonisation’.33 Third, the volume editors open up the archive to include ‘cultural productions and practices’34 such as images and texts, two objects that I also take up in my analysis of the ‘composition of decolonisation’35 for the Portuguese case. Lastly, Craggs and Wintle suggest a hopeful way forward, one that ‘allows us to make our own comparisons between different places and a variety of cultural forms as they were experienced and operated in the processes of decolonisation’.36 The idea of looking at ‘experience’, and placing it in a comparative setting across nation states and within regions, is exactly what I have set out to do with my ethnographic case study approach and my focus on the Indian Ocean world.37 Interestingly, I was working on very similar themes to the ones developed concurrently by the ‘International Seminar on Decolonization’, the AHR Roundtable and Craggs and Wintle’s edited Cultures of Decolonisation collection. This suggests the timeliness of certain scholarly enquiries (such as decolonization) and my own contribution (an added layer perhaps) to this second set of literatures which have been seminal for taking decolonization out of the strict realm of constitutional historical studies while at the same time embracing interdisciplinary methods and concepts, themes that I take up more directly in subsequent chapters of this book. I want to end this section on ‘Writing about decolonization’ by pointing to two specific works that approach decolonization in innovative ways, one

Studying decolonization

9

methodological and the other conceptual, both tying directly into my own framework for studying Portuguese decolonization across the Indian Ocean. The first is the work of anthropologist Veena Das who has traced out the violence that ensued with Partition after the British quit India in 1947. She writes: ‘Decolonization in South Asia was accompanied by the creation of artificial states, and these were accompanied by unprecedented collective violence. The communal riots during Partition have, in this sense, been called the birthmark of the new nations of India and Pakistan.’38 She identifies Partition as a ‘critical event’ in India’s history, a space in time where the individual and the collective must be equally taken into account and cannot be overlooked as anything but integral to the shift from colony to something ‘post’. She also shows through detailed ethnography and a focus on personal voices of pain that India’s aftermath very much still carries residues of this violence in the every day. Hers is an important point for showing how the manner of decolonization – its enforced artificiality and extreme violence in the South Asia case – can give rise to affective qualities of trauma and loss that remain unresolved in postcolonial India and Pakistan today. They in turn birth new events and moments still tied to decolonization, like the Ayodhya dispute in 1992 or the Gujarat riots in 2002, for example. In other words, Das provides a productive anthropological framework for studying decolonization that very much echoes my own. She writes: The essays in this book have a double location. They identify certain critical moments in the history of contemporary India, and these moments are then redescribed within the framework of anthropological knowledge. In the process, it is not so much that new anthropological objects are created as that old concepts, being asked to inhabit unfamiliar spaces, acquire a new kind of life. 39

This is what I am trying to do with the term ‘decolonization’ itself. The second work is that of historian Chris Lee who examines the first largescale demonstration of Afro-Asian solidarity amid colonial independence, namely the Bandung conference of 1955, held in Bandung, Indonesia. This remarkable event saw representatives of twenty-nine new Asian and African nations come together in a conference that ‘aimed to express solidarity against imperialism and racism and promote economic and cultural cooperation among these nations’.40 It prepared the way for the founding of the Non-aligned Movement in 1961 in which Third World nations avowed their distance from both the United States and the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War. Even as its failure or success as a movement can be debated, the idea of the

10

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

‘Bandung spirit’ endures. With the volume Making a World after Empire, Lee has gathered together an important collection of essays written by a range of scholars on Bandung and its ‘political afterlives’, as he calls them.41 He presents Bandung as a ‘historical moment and site generative of intersecting vantage points and their storied outcomes’.42 Lee’s understanding of Bandung and decolonization studies as generative of something else forges a new direction within this area of study. He suggests that since decolonization ‘presents a problem of narrative and analysis’, it should be approached as a situated process … [one] that requires attention to local case studies as well as broader patterns of event and meaning across space and time. Rather than simply signaling a linear, diplomatic transfer of power from colonial to postcolonial status, decolonization equally constitutes a complex dialectical intersection of competing views and claims over colonial pasts, transitional presents, and inchoate futures.43

Lee suggests that revisiting such moments of decolonization ‘presents an opportunity for recapturing the senses of optimism, frustration, and uncertainty that characterized such occasions’.44 His focus on the emotive or affective aspects of decolonization is a critical area that I engage with in my own writings on this topic. In addition, by bringing together Asia and Africa in one analytic space, Lee shifts our thinking beyond the singular postcoloniality of a nation, suggesting that decolonization processes were historically connected and forged across oceanic spaces. The careful scholarship of Das and Lee helps to frame my approach to looking at decolonization not only as a historical event but also as a series of mutually constituting ethnographic moments, in which politics is located in the personal and the every day, and where the histories of Portuguese India and Portuguese Africa are connected across the Indian Ocean. In their fine-grained analyses, Das and Lee demonstrate certain aspects of theory and method that I combine here; Das writes on India, Lee about Africa; Das adopts an ethnographic approach, Lee a more historical one. I now turn from these multiple approaches to writing on the topic of decolonization to differentiate Portuguese decolonization.

Portuguese (de)colonization: Three conditions Crucial to understanding the complexities of decolonization in India and Southern Africa is a discussion of Portuguese decolonization. Betts introduces the characteristics of Portuguese colonialism in this manner:

Studying decolonization

11

There is a sort of overarching historical irony in the fact that Portugal was both the first and the last European colonial nation, first picking up coastal territory in Africa in the late 15th century and only relinquishing its hold in 1975 when Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Angola gained their independence.45

In this section, I propose three conditions of the Portuguese case, suggesting that these interrelated characteristics shape how we understand and go about studying Portuguese colonialism and its concomitant, Portuguese decolonization. I also demonstrate that certain conditions shape the study of Portuguese colonialism in specific historiographical ways; that is, they have consequences for understanding the connections (historical and ethnographic) between Goa, Mozambique, Angola and South Africa through the analytic of decolonization. First, the colonies in the Portuguese case were more integrally connected historically, economically, politically and culturally because of the particular, far-flung character of the Portuguese empire that spanned Asia, Africa and the Americas and that endured in the face of waning power and over the longue durée. Out of this close connection developed what I call the uniquely itinerant quality of Portuguese colonialism that endured through decolonization, and continues today in the postcolonial context, to produce a larger Portuguese world. Not only were Portuguese colonial officials and Catholic missionaries found to be frequently moving between colonies, but colonial subjects were also very much on the move as a response to colonial integration, oppression and conversion. Both groups – those in power and those dispossessed of power – were relocating in the hope of improved colonial conditions and increased economic opportunities.46 In other words, colonial interdependence through migration was part and parcel of the survival of the Portuguese colonial enterprise over the longue durée, a point that Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen take up in a sustained manner in their recent edited collection, Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World. They write: This book aims to show that the making of the third Portuguese empire has not only been the work of heroes and satraps, of politicians, bishops, military, and rich businessmen, but also the work of communities and diasporas, including the ones of ‘petty whites’ and ‘petty Asians’. These latter men and women had a role, whether we like it or not, in the making of the Portuguese empire and in the formation of a possible Lusophone world today. If, as we have seen, some authors have argued that Portugal developed a relatively weak empire, it is also true that, because of this, Portugal relied heavily on diasporic emigrated groups to create and maintain its empire. Counterintuitively, the historiography

12

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World has underestimated and understudied these communities. Their consideration should make a significant contribution to our understanding of the making, maintenance and end of the Portuguese empire.47

Theirs is an important intervention that has directly shaped my own work. It shows that the twinned histories of diaspora and imperialism need to be taken seriously (for the African colonies just as for the others).48 It shapes not only colonialism but also what happens at its end, during decolonization, and in its aftermath in a form of ‘deterritorialized postcolonialism’,49 a term suggested by sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, whose important work I take up in my next condition. The second historical condition stems directly from the first. I suggest that there are particular nationalist ideologies and rivalries that underwrite the study of Portuguese colonialism as that of a ‘lesser’ colonial power that, in turn, shapes its historiography, including how we write about its decolonization processes. Specifically, the Portuguese are often labelled the ‘kaffirs’ of Europe due to their complicated history with Spain, their perceived intermediary racial status and their marginalized role in relation to the rest of the continent.50 These factors were further solidified in and through colonialism, particularly starting in the late seventeenth century when Portuguese imperial power was rapidly supplanted by that of the British, French and Dutch. Moreover, during their ascendancy to power, these ‘newer’ colonial powers conveniently held up the Portuguese as a lesson to be learned from ‘miscegenation’ and ‘religious conversion’ often cited as the principle reasons for their rapid colonial downfall,51 as the nineteenth-century travel writings of Sir Richard Burton clearly demonstrate. Neither is this bias an isolated one: it rather reflects a long-standing Anglophone historiographical trend,52 evidenced for example in the writings of British historian Charles Boxer, whose prolific writings on the Portuguese in India we are indebted to even as they continue to ideologically shape the direction of studies of Portuguese colonialism.53 Nor is this Anglophone perspective without a past: it has everything to do with a long-standing history of Anglo-Portuguese relations, relations premised on Portugal’s economic, political and ideological dependence on the British through ties and treaties.54 This is a point taken up and developed in quite dramatic form by sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who goes so far as to suggest that Portuguese colonialism was a form of ‘subaltern colonialism’,55 an argument that must be viewed with caution and that echoes, in another guise, the theory of Lusotropicalismo, which I discuss as a third condition for studying Portuguese decolonization.56 Thus, even as Portuguese colonialism was distinct from later forms of colonialism, it is equally

Studying decolonization

13

comparable to them. Fortunately, a new generation of scholars, many of them located in a variety of (Portuguese) decolonized locations, has been correcting this Anglophone bias.57 This historiographical prejudice, one that underwrites a certain characterization of Portuguese colonialism, was further enhanced by the fact that, in the aftermath of the Second World War when the bulk of the European colonies was being dismantled, the Portuguese firmly held onto their colonies: in the case of Goa, they held on until 1961 when this colonial enclave was forcibly integrated into the Indian nation state; in Portuguese Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé), they held on until 1975, only letting go in the wake of the collapse of the Salazar dictatorship and the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, which led to the transition to democracy.58 This endurance, or rather the lateness of its decolonization processes (with Macao’s decolonization in 1999 remaining the most astounding example), was conveniently held up by the other colonial powers as further evidence of the ‘backward’ or ‘anachronistic’ character of Portuguese colonialism. Thus, not only did the Portuguese tenaciously hold onto their colonies for a variety of complex reasons – historical, cultural, economic and political all at the same time – but I suggest that these reasons remain largely understudied precisely because the lateness of Portuguese decolonization was deemed unreasonable and thus not worthy of study. Instead, a focus on the ‘obsessive’ nature of the Portuguese to hold onto their colonies for purely nationalist reasons59 has often developed, reaffirming once again a lack of historicity associated with Portuguese decolonization that, in turn, detracts from its critical analysis as a subject in its own right. The third and last historical condition (again, building on the previous two) was the development of a discourse of Portuguese exceptionalism, one that was used to sustain Portuguese colonialism in the face of imminent decolonization. During the aftermath of the Second World War and European decolonization, Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar conveniently renamed all the Portuguese colonies ‘overseas provinces’,60 using the force of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural difference’ – based on commonalities of language and religion – to argue that there no longer existed colonial subjects in the Portuguese empire, but rather full citizens with equal rights that were part of Portugal’s embodied sense of self – his infamous ‘one nation theory’.61 Here Salazar turned to the social sciences to solidify his case, using the writings of Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre to suggest that Portuguese colonialism had always been a more benign form when compared to other cases of colonialism. Freyre’s theory of Lusotropicalismo

14

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

suggested that there was no clear divide between colonizer and colonized in the Portuguese case since the history of Portuguese colonialism had been less one of coercion and miscegenation and more one of adaption and harmonious racial mixing.62 Salazar’s discursive efforts focused on an idea of exceptionalism that proved to be surprisingly successful at deflecting the accusation that Portugal was in an ethical dilemma for maintaining colonies in the second half of the twentieth century. However, the end for Salazar and Portugal was foreshadowed in 1954 when the United Nations issued a statement that condemned all forms of colonialism, in ‘all its manifestations’.63 It would only be a matter of time before Portugal’s colonies would reach their demise, as they indeed did in the period between 1961 and 1975. Elizabeth Buettner points out that this move returns us full circle back to Salazar and his one nation theory, buttressed by Lusotropicalismo: ‘the metropolitan revolution that brought decolonization in its wake ironically lent support to the longstanding assertion that metropolitan and overseas Portugal under the Estado Novo were inseparable parts of a whole. As Norrie MacQueen observes, Freyre’s theory “confirmed the ‘indivisibility’ of the empire – though in the context of dissolution rather than perpetuation”’.64 Despite it being false (or rather true in its negation), its weight carried through a powerful idea of Portugal’s cultural difference from other forms of colonialism, as one more benign and less exploitative. In other words, just as it successfully prolonged Portuguese colonialism itself, it also equally contributed to its demise, and impacted the writing of its past.65 The three interrelated conditions discussed in this section are deeply rooted in the history, historiography and nationalism of Portuguese colonialism even as they show a lack of exceptionalism, thus confirming its ability to be compared to other European empires.66 I suggest that we take these conditions fully into account when looking at the complex decolonization processes of the Portuguese world67 across the Indian Ocean, geographically linking India with Southern Africa.

Textual and visual landscapes There is a photo by Ricardo Rangel, Mozambique’s most illustrious photojournalist, that reveals a most remarkable moment in history: it is of the day of 19 December 1961, when people living in Lourenço Marques (present-day Maputo) read the public decree announcing the quiet end of Portuguese colonialism in

Studying decolonization

15

Goa (India) after 450 years of rule. That Mozambique was also a Portuguese colony at the time the photograph was taken is not lost, neither on the viewer of the image nor the reader of the decree. It is this same powerful photograph that graces the cover of this book and opens Chapter 2. From the first moment of seeing this photograph, it struck me as perfectly showing ideas of decolonization as developing ‘trans-imperially’, and how reading publics ‘consistently compared their own situations to those elsewhere in the world’, fashioning alternative futures for themselves in the process.68 What was going on in the minds of this group of Mozambicans as they learned of Goa’s demise and its integration into a burgeoning Indian nation state only fourteen years after its own independence from British colonial rule? How much did this moment make them think ahead to anticipate Mozambique’s decolonization? It is the representational details suggested in Rangel’s image that intrigue me, which open up the possibility of thinking and writing about decolonization from a different vantage point. For the purposes of this book, I am interested in reading the medium of photography (and Rangel’s images) in ethnographic and creative ways. I draw on them not as forms of evidence or historical truth claims but in order to enter inside their frames and to ‘open a wider lens onto the world’,69 as sites where history and anthropology are played out.70 As Elizabeth Edwards argues, ‘photography can communicate about culture, people’s lives, experiences and beliefs, not at the level of surface description but as visual metaphor’.71 I harness photography’s ambivalences and ‘incisive possibilities’, that is, its ‘potential to question, to arouse curiosity, tell in different voices or see in different eyes’.72 I am equally invested in positioning Rangel as a historical figure working in certain spaces and places and under certain political conditions (where access or privilege was sometimes allowed, other times denied by the colonial censors), wherein he brought his ethnographic sensibilities to bear on the events and moments he chose to act upon and on the photographs he produced. It is here that my conversation with and impressions of Rangel in April 2008, when I first met him at the Centro de Documentação e Formação Fotográfica in Maputo, will play a role. Writing on Rangel, Patricia Hayes observes that ‘in the sense of the term aesthetic as a state of feeling, then it is not simply the boundaries of the sayable and visible that are being stretched by Rangel, but the boundaries of affect’.73 I also argue that there is a sense of urgency required when viewing decolonization through an ethnographic lens, given the rapidity with which we are distancing ourselves from these disquieting moments in history, with all their unanticipated effects and affects for those living through very distinct processes of decolonization.

16

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

This book is an experiment of sorts74 that comes out of my earlier work, a historical ethnography of Portuguese colonialism in Goa.75 As I moved from being a US-trained scholar of historical anthropology to one of interdisciplinary studies at WiSER in South Africa and started to see the larger Portuguese colonial world beyond India, I began to see Goa through the refracted lens of Mozambique and vice versa. The Indian Ocean is what connects these two locations, an ocean that experienced so many movements (of people, things and ideas) across time and space.76 This set of seven chapters are the product of that refraction, a process of reverberation that I kept seeing, and that indelibly shaped the way (with regard to both form and content) in which I wanted to write about postcolonial Goa (and India), Mozambique, Angola (and Southern Africa more generally) as entangled historical experiences. My study of decolonization is framed by five interconnected approaches, a description of which rounds off this introductory chapter. Through a discussion of these approaches, I provide brief summaries of the chapters of this book. First, I approach the study of decolonization as simultaneously a historical event and an ethnographic moment, accessed through different eyewitness accounts (written, oral and visual) of the experience of the transfer of state power. It is a way of trying to engage the state and state processes ethnographically, one that follows the innovative work of Thomas Blom Hansen and Finn Stepputat.77 For some Goans caught up in these monumental changes, it was a double process of decolonization, first Goa in 1961 and then Mozambique in 1975. Here I understand decolonization less as a smooth political transition and rather as one that was messy and complicated for those in colonial power, those disavowed of it and those who were caught in between. I also argue that the manner of a place’s decolonization – that is, its very conditions of possibility – shapes the contours of its postcolonial landscape. This first chapter, entitled ‘Studying decolonization’, has dwelt upon the topic of decolonization, providing an overview of the extant literature as well as carving out my own interventions in this area of scholarship and what I call the three conditions for the Portuguese case. It was precisely the integration of Portuguese Goa by force into a larger independent Indian nation state, itself a former British colony, which foresaw the movement of so many Goans to East Africa in search of continuing a certain way of being in the world. That Portuguese Mozambique had been ruled indirectly from Goa up until the mid-eighteenth century is also what made these global Goans move. Finally, that Mozambican and Angolan processes of decolonization took place six months apart and were directly tied to what was happening in Lisbon is also part of the story. My second

Studying decolonization

17

chapter, entitled ‘Entangling Decolonizations: Goa, Mozambique and Angola’, tackles these interlinkages head-on, discussing the historical particulars of these three Portuguese cases of decolonization. I open up and detail processes of decolonization for Goa and India, Mozambique and Angola, outlining a variety of factors, internal, external and entangled. In my historical overview, I suggest a way forward to write about India and Southern Africa as historically and ethnographically enmeshed. Secondly, I am interested in focusing on the materiality of decolonization, one that involves the massive movement of people, ideas and things across vast oceanic and territorial spaces in a heightened manner and rapid time frame. I bring in ethnographic details of infrastructure and experience to tell these stories of the work-a-day quality of decolonization, following Betts. We must remember that for Goa, decolonization was unexpected and dramatic, and took place over a period of a few weeks, whereas for Mozambique and Angola, it stretched over a six-month time frame. This is one of the most overlooked traits of decolonization – the sheer physicality of colonial demise and the amount of stuff that got moved. It is also a paradox given that the ‘de’ of decolonization etymologically denotes a removal of sorts. Often this transfer of power employed ships, caravans, cars and planes, troops and crates to get people and things out. For the case of Mozambique, some 450,000 white Portuguese were given six months to depart. In Angola, some 350,000 white Portuguese were granted the same ultimatum to depart their former colonial homes for the metropole (where they would be labelled retornados and treated as second-class citizens). Some 70,000-odd Portuguese soldiers (an incredible number in my mind) were also conscripted to help get them out. It is here that colonialism reveals how much it was in fact a history of possession, with decolonization showing its fallout, namely a painful process of dispossession, not only for those (Portuguese) formerly in power. This topic of dispossession is taken up more fully in Chapter 5, entitled ‘Dispossessing Things’, and Chapter 6, entitled ‘Driving from Angola to South Africa’. However, decolonization also produced innovative postcolonial processes of renovation of those material urban infrastructures built exclusively by and for a colonial population, a topic explored in Chapter 7, entitled ‘Renovation in Beira’. It is on an experience of hope that I choose to end my study, as opposed to despair. My third area of research looks at the trauma of decolonization (both singly and doubly experienced for many), as something that has largely not been allowed to be articulated as a form of loss, not only for those in power but especially for those ethnic minorities caught between matrices of new and

18

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

old power that I showcase in this book. Chapter 3, entitled ‘Emigrating Goans’, Chapter 4, entitled ‘Goans going fishing’, and Chapter 6, entitled ‘Driving from Angola to South Africa’, showcase three distinct minority communities (two Goan, one Portuguese) in more historical and ethnographic detail. Trauma takes on a variety of forms, and for some I found that it was best articulated through a discourse on things – for memory, colonial nostalgia and longing often cohere in material objects – the intimacies of politics located in the personal and personalized, a point discussed in more depth in Chapter 5. Fourthly, this project of decolonization is one of writing postnational narratives that takes its cue from the analytic work of this book. All of the chapters reflect deeply intertwined histories, ones that link Goa not only to Mozambique across the ‘slender threads’ of the Indian Ocean78 but also to Portugal and Southern African regional histories, involving Mozambique, Angola, South Africa and annexed Namibia. Decolonization becomes an entry port for bringing different governmentalities (colonial, national, apartheid) into one field of analysis, particularly since it involved the circulation of people and things across territorial borders and oceanic waters. My historiographic interest lies in exposing historical and ethnographic connectivities (of people, things and choices made) within Southern Africa – an area that still requires much more attention and critical analysis. In as much as I can oppose writing linear histories of colonial independence, this book suggests a productive way forward to writing postnational histories and ethnographies. Decolonization here becomes the impetus for migration and diaspora-making, a swirling world of mobilities in so many directions79: Goa to Mozambique, Mozambique to Portugal, Mozambique to Goa, Mozambique to South Africa, Angola to South Africa. My fifth (and last) area of intervention is to open up the kinds of source materials we use to access narratives of decolonization, and as different forms of seeing, thinking and writing about history. It is here that I juxtapose what I consider the visual, the lyrical and the visceral. Themed sets of photographs taken by Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel feature in Chapters 2, 4, 5 and 7 of the book and work to provide a visual landscape of Portuguese decolonization taking place in Mozambique. Following Rui Assubuji and Patricia Hayes, I ask what happens when we think about ‘photographs as history’.80 I rely on Rangel’s incredible imagery (and imaginary) to suggest the contours of individual lives and subjectivities on the cusp of colonial independence. In parallel with Rangel’s photos, I explore two sets of lyrical narratives for the rich details they provide of Portuguese decolonization in Mozambique and Angola: novelist Mia Couto provides evocative passages on certain aspects of Mozambican society

Studying decolonization

19

(Chapters 3, 4 and 7), and Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński provides searing descriptions of Luanda during its last days of colonialism (Chapters 5 and 6). Biographical details of Rangel, Couto and Kapuściński are detailed in subsequent chapters (Chapters 4 and 5) where I rely on their images and texts to carve out intimate stories of decolonization. I also draw on ethnography for the manner in which it allows me to access decolonization viscerally, that is, at the level of the individual, and to locate politics in the personal. Here I feature life histories of Goan Mozambicans and participant observation in Mozambique in Chapters 3 and 4, the testimony of Mozambican South African Carlos Garçaõ in Chapter 5, life histories with Portuguese Angolans who moved to South Africa in Chapter 6, and participant observation in Beira in Chapter 7. These visual, lyrical and visceral source materials do not sit easily side by side: they rub up against each other in a way that suggests the larger point that decolonization was not smooth and always complicated, particularly when seen from the perspective of those caught up in (and having little say in) these larger colonial state processes. Here I am invested in exploring politics, following Patricia Hayes, as a ‘form of experience’,81 through the photographs of Rangel, the thick descriptions of Couto and Kapuściński, and my own ethnographic observations and conversations with individuals caught up in experiences of decolonization. In rethinking the matrices for the Portuguese case of decolonization between Goa and Mozambique (and Southern Africa more generally), I look closely at the implications of taking on an ethnographic approach, one that I argue opens up a set of distinct research possibilities and understandings. In the end, I hope to have produced an archive, not of empire, but rather of its end, that which is easily lost or forgotten in the transition period between empire and its post. As the book will showcase, I am interested more generally in rethinking the condition of postcoloniality through the analytic of decolonization. Material processes of decolonization occurred in a wide variety of places throughout the world with very real and long-term consequences that are still felt today and that dramatically altered the livelihoods of those who had to make difficult life choices about where to live (and die in some sense) in an undefined future, in response to larger historical shifts that were not of their own choosing. The study of decolonization also holds within it much potential for rethinking the ‘tensions of empire’ evoked so powerfully by Cooper and Stoler exact twenty years ago, for exploring ethnographically the ties that continue to bind multiple metropole(s) and multiple colony(s) together in unsettling and unexpected ways,82 and suggests in some sense the ongoing reality that was the ‘imperialism

20

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

of decolonization’.83 It is yet another form of ‘entanglement’ in the way that Sarah Nuttall describes for post-apartheid South Africa.84 While we cannot possibly know how these processes (of reversing the slow violence of colonialism)85 take place during decolonization, as they differ for each person and location, this book is an attempt to open up a way of understanding the effects of colonialism at the level of individual introspection, which in turn exposes a whole set of new registers and articulations. In more than one sense, my work is invested in understanding the devastating power of (colonial) affect for those persons caught in the throes of its material demise, in its inchoateness. These are all themes that have been gently swept to the sidelines of the story of decolonization the world over. Mine is one small contribution.

C hapte r 2

Entangling decolonizations: Goa, Mozambique and Angola

Introduction I begin this second chapter with a remarkable photograph taken by Ricardo Rangel (Figure 2.1), one that also graces the cover of my book. I have chosen this image because it thematically links Goa to Mozambique and opens up the topic of Portuguese decolonization in India and Southern Africa, the subject of this chapter. In this image, Rangel captures the weight of the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire with one click of his shutter. The date is 19 December 1961. From the first moment of seeing this photograph, I knew that I wanted to write about and through it.1

Figure 2.1 Ricardo Rangel, ‘Initiation of the Collapse of the Portuguese Colonial Empire’, 1961. Placard in Lourenço Marques indicating the annexation of Goa by India (photographer’s caption, translation from Portuguese). Reprinted by permission from the Centro de Documentação e Formação Fotográfica, Maputo. Mozambique.

22

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

The photograph is of a group of mostly white Portuguese men in Lourenço Marques but, looking carefully, I can see several Goans and black Mozambicans interspersed among them. The men, clustered around a public placard posted to a glass wall, are absorbed in reading the sign’s proclamation scribbled in handwritten Portuguese: that Goa has been lost by the Portuguese and annexed by the recently independent Indian government. I hone in on the ethnographic details of this photograph. I ‘see’ a sea of faces, craned necks and starched shirt collars. Fading in the distance is a blurred state of oblivion – a lack of depth of field, a filmed moment of overexposure. I fathom looks of concern transmitted through peering eyes (and, in turn, eyeglasses and sunglasses) focused on the placard. As the writing is in reverse for me as a viewer, it seems that the photograph has been taken from the inside of a building through its glass front – perhaps from the preferred seat in a favoured café? Did Rangel happen to be there sipping a cup of coffee when the scene unfolded in front of his eyes? Or did he somehow know to be there at that moment? These speculative thoughts cross my mind, making me wish I could have sat down with Rangel again, before his death in 2009.2 My questions beg more questions. Where are the women in this significant public gathering and historic moment? Will they only hear about it later that evening from their fathers and husbands, or perhaps via the radio’s evening news? Are they not privy to this important colonial information – a moment that, though taking place across the Indian Ocean, was to have repercussions in Mozambique fourteen years later and in the other Portuguese colonies in Africa as well? That Rangel invites viewers to share in ‘reading’ this historical moment (‘reading’ as another form of seeing) makes me feel that much more is implicated in its heavy matter. Rangel’s words come to my mind – ‘Assim, eles escrevem e eu tiro fotos. A minha forma de expresser os meus sentimentos é sobre as imagens, não é sobre o texto’ (‘Others write, and I take photographs. My form of expression for my feelings is through images, not through words’)3 – and I feel compelled to use my words to write through his image. Rangel’s image acts as a framing device for this chapter: it opens up the larger history of Portuguese decolonization in India and Southern Africa and gestures to a connected Indian Ocean world. I then zoom in on the particulars of the decolonization processes that took place in Goa, Mozambique and Angola in order to show their entanglements4 with each other through time and space, an entanglement reinforced as well by Rangel’s prescient caption (‘the initiation of the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire’) which suggests that Goa’s decolonization was the beginning of the end of colonialism for Portuguese

Entangling decolonizations

23

Africa. This discussion provides the necessary historical backdrop for subsequent ethnographic chapters.

Goa, Mozambique and Angola: Portuguese decolonization in India and Africa, 1961–1975 In this section, I provide a brief overview of the histories and historiographies of Portuguese decolonization that took place in three different settings on two continents – Goa in India, and Mozambique and Angola in Africa – and over a defined period of time – 1961 and 1975. This approach stems from my distinctive interdisciplinary approach to studying decolonization (history and ethnography) that I outlined in Chapter 1. I show how each of the three cases, despite differing historical specificities which I outline here, can be better understood if we understand them as entangled with one another. In line with how Rangel’s photograph emphasizes Indian Ocean reverberations, Goa’s decolonization in 1961 marked and contributed to the beginning of the end of Portuguese decolonization in Africa in 1975. The history of British colonialism in India also features here for Goa’s fight for independence was integrally connected to processes of decolonization taking place on the Indian subcontinent.

Goa Goa, alongside the Portuguese territories of Damão and Diu on the Indian subcontinent, achieved independence from Portuguese colonial rule on the historic date of 19 December 1961. It was on this day that Portuguese troops laid down their firearms in the face of Indian troops sent in by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to liberate Goa in an effort to solve what was well known in the international context as the ‘Goa Problem’.5 The case of Goa’s decolonization was complicated by the fact that, since 1947, it was geographically surrounded by a newly independent Indian nation-state that had also experienced the violence of Partition that led to the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. For this reason, we have to return, however briefly, to British decolonization in India to better understand the unique Goa case, and in order to see how intertwined their decolonization processes in fact were. The Indian National Congress, formed in 1885 in the aftermath of the Mutiny of 1859 that saw the shift from British East India Company rule to Crown Rule,

24

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

aimed to promote the idea of an independent India capable of self-rule.6 What started as a small group of Bengali militants fighting for a separate state grew into a large political platform with political leaders, feminists, artists and intellectuals agitating against British colonialism on Indian soil. Early independence personalities such as Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal, Subhas Chandra Bose and Aurobindo Ghose all figured prominently in what early on was called the Swadeshi (‘self-sufficiency’) movement, a campaign to make Indians less reliant on imported British goods.7 By the 1920s, it was Mahatma Gandhi who, having brought his ‘experiments with truth’ from South Africa to India, had become the figurehead of the movement, based on nonviolence, civil disobedience and hind swaraj (‘self-rule’).8 It steadily agitated against an increasingly militant colonial state that was becoming increasingly hollow.9 Despite his clear sense of India’s steady march towards independence (much like his famous Salt March to Gujarat), his views on the question of Goa’s colonial future were inconsistent and conflicted, which in turn suggests that he fully understood neither what was going on in Goa itself nor its history of oppression under the Portuguese, compared to his knowledge of what was happening in British India.10 Amid Britain’s involvement in the Second World War (which included the conscription of Indian soldiers on the side of the British), the ‘Quit India’ campaign was launched by Gandhi in 1942; it was a movement to push the British to leave India on its own accord.11 By 1947, the Indian Independence Act had been successfully passed. It was, however, opposed by Gandhi because it effectively created two independent states, India (under Jawaharlal Nehru) with a Hindu majority and Pakistan (under Muhammad Ali Jinnah) with a Muslim citizenry.12 No one predicted the violence that would ensue and that saw an estimated 500,000 Indians dead on both sides of the border: it is a ‘critical event’, one that Veena Das argues continues to shape postcolonial India today in multitudes of ways (see Chapter 1). The historical processes that led to the independence of British India also implicated Portugal and its long-standing colonial possessions on the Indian subcontinent, specifically Goa, Damão and Diu.13 The longue durée history of Portuguese rule in Goa was marked by a continuous line of small-scale uprisings against the colonial state alongside an estimated total of fourteen larger state revolts over a 200-year period.14 In 1900, Luís de Menezes Bragança founded O Heraldo, the first Goa-based Portuguese-language newspaper that was critical of the colonial state,15 and that helped fuel an oppositional politics in Goa. This sentiment was also nurtured by the end of the Portuguese monarchy

Entangling decolonizations

25

in 1910 when many Goans hoped that Portugal would follow a dictate of selfdetermination for its Indian territories; unfortunately, it was to no avail. The creation of the Goa National Congress by Tristão de Bragança Cunha in 1928 marked the official beginning of a Goan independence movement.16 His campaign began very much in the mid of India’s campaign for self-rule. It was closely modelled on the Indian National Congress, and involved Goans from both inside and outside of Goa itself, partly because of the strict censorship and propaganda by the Portuguese state and partly because so many Goans were, in fact, living outside of Goa itself. This is an aspect that is very much tied to the uniquely itinerant quality of the Portuguese colonizing experience (discussed in Chapter 1). It was the Goa National Congress that brought these Goans together (Mumbai was the base for many based outside of Goa) to fight for one common cause, the end of Portuguese colonial rule on Indian soil. However, by 1930, Portugal’s institutionalization of the Acto Colonial led to further state repressions and the limitation of the freedom of speech, effectively restricting political meetings and rallies in all colonies, including and especially in Goa.17 The 1940s witnessed a surge in organization around Goa’s independence, partly due to the Indian National Congress’s success in agitating against the British. Goa’s independence movement gained the most momentum during this period. By 1945, in an attempt to gain popular support, Nehru organized a rally in Margão, a city in south Goa, in which he demanded freedom of expression and of association for all Indians, claiming that Goa was a part of ‘Mother India’.18 Salazar responded by saying that ‘if geographically Goa is Indian, then socially, religiously, and culturally it is European’.19 By 1946, when the Portuguese arrested Bragança Cunha for insurrection against the state, the end was in sight for British India. Yet increasingly repressive actions by the Portuguese continued, including the controversial arrest and detention of Indian freedom fighter Ram Manohar Lohia in Goa that attracted international attention and saw the Goa case tabled at the United Nations.20 Despite Goa’s worsening political restrictions, India’s independence in 1947 had a significant ideological impact on Goans for many now saw the real possibility of the end of (their own) empire. In the decade that followed India’s independence from colonial rule, the larger historical circumstances in India and Portugal shifted to such an extent that Indian Prime Minister Nehru was no longer interested in continuing diplomatic negotiations to resolve the ‘Goa Problem’.21 By 1954, peaceful negotiations led France to pull out of Pondicherry, its colony on Indian soil.22 The economic blockade of Portugal that India implemented in 1954 in the wake of France’s withdrawal greatly affected Goa’s economy, leading to an increase

26

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

both in emigrations abroad and in resentments on the part of many (Catholic) Goans towards the Indian Union.23 In 1951, Salazar implemented his ‘one-nation theory’ whereby Goa was considered an ‘overseas province’ of Portugal: that is, he mobilized a form of neocolonialism in the face of growing opposition at both international and local levels.24 Goa’s independence movement continued to expand as it agitated against Portuguese colonial rule, mobilizing members of India’s (including Goa’s) public through speeches, demonstrations, rallies, publications and small acts of Gandhian-influenced satyagraha.25 In 1958, Prime Minister Nehru committed himself to protecting Goa’s autonomy and all fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution of India, including freedom of religion and worship, if Goa were successfully incorporated into the Indian Union.26 Salazar responded that Portugal would not negotiate ‘over a territory it viewed as an integral part of its country’.27 By early December 1961, when Nehru decided to station troops along India’s border with Goa, one newspaper reported that ‘Mr. Nehru today warned that India could no longer tolerate the actions of the Portuguese authorities in Goa and would have to take adequate steps to give them an effective reply … India has been waiting patiently for over 13 years to settle the issue of Goa peacefully through negotiations.’28 As the ‘storm clouds of war hovered over Goa’29 amid the escalating tensions between Salazar and Nehru and their competing ideas of nationhood,30 the fateful day of 18 December saw the entry of the Indian Army into Portuguese India. In a campaign named ‘Operation Vijay’, Nehru instructed the troops to ‘liberate’ Goa.31 One day later, on 19 December, Portuguese military officers laid down their arms and accepted defeat. After 450 years of Portuguese colonial rule, Goa had achieved colonial independence. Yet this was not equal to self-rule: Goa was now officially integrated into the Indian nation-state, a decision that not all Goans agreed with in the aftermath of their empire. The step revived the act of migration of many Goans to Mozambique, continuing a longer historical pattern. That Goans had little choice in the matter of Goa’s integration into India given its geographical location within the borders of India32 only attunes us to the reasons behind their circuits of mobility during this transitional period. I take up these ethnographic details in relation to two distinct Goan communities in Chapters 3 and 4. Fittingly, it was only in 1974, after its own revolution and transition to democracy, that Portugal renewed diplomatic ties with India (including Goa).33 For the period from 1961 to 1974, it had considered Goa’s independence an ‘illegal invasion’ or annexation and all Goans born before 1961 as refugees. This is a perfect example of the generative quality of decolonization that I gestured to in Chapter 1 with the work of Christopher Lee, for many Goans

Entangling decolonizations

27

today have access to Portuguese citizenship (or are actively obtaining it) precisely because they have proof, in the form of birth certificates, that their parents were living in Goa at the time of its decolonization. Even as Goa’s decolonization process was distinct in its history and geography, it was very much connected to what was happening across the Indian Ocean in Portuguese Africa (Mozambique and Angola). The year 1961 marks not only Goa’s independence from Portuguese colonial rule but also the start of the colonial wars in Angola,34 which in turn helped generate independence movements in Mozambique in 1962 and Guinea-Bissau from 1963 onwards. All of these struggles would continue for little over a decade until independence was achieved in these former Portuguese colonies in the mid-1970s. Next I provide a brief overview of the decolonization processes in Mozambique and Angola, and the changing historical circumstances that led to their respective liberations. In much the same manner that Goa’s independence was imbricated in India’s, Angola’s was very much connected to Mozambique’s as well as to what was happening in Portugal itself. Angola’s decolonization followed a mere six months later, an intertwined process I approach from an ethnographic position in Chapters 5 and 6.

Mozambique Mozambique achieved its independence from Portuguese colonial rule on 25 June 1975.35 Two days earlier, FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique) freedom fighter Samora Machel had arrived victorious in the capital city of Lourenço Marques to become president of the People’s Republic of Mozambique.36 Its independence had been hard-won. Ten years of guerrilla warfare had ravaged a country that had been a Portuguese colonial outpost since 1498 when Vasco da Gama arrived on its shores en route to India, and that, by 1606, was named Capitania de Moçambique e Sofala.37 Mozambique was considered part of what is labelled Portugal’s ‘third empire’, which includes Angola, Guinea-Bissau and the Atlantic archipelagos of Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe. This third empire is generally considered the ‘weakest’ of Portugal’s empires as Portugal’s African territories had always been put in the service of its stronger first (South and Southeast Asia in the sixteenth century) and second (Brazil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) empires.38 Up until the nineteenth century, most African ports were utilized by Portuguese traders as supply points on sea routes to elsewhere. However, as Portugal’s first empire in Goa dwindled in power and its second achieved independence (Brazil in 1822), its African outposts (such

28

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

as Ilha de Mozambique in the north) took on increased economic and political significance. The Portuguese turned towards capital investment in its interior regions, with Mozambique’s colonial borders roughly defined between the 1880s and 1890s and with it the naming of ‘Portuguese East Africa’.39 With the Berlin conference of 1885 and the so-called ‘scramble for Africa’ between competing imperial powers – including the British, French, German and Portuguese – these borders were further consolidated.40 The establishment of Lourenço Marques as its showcase capital city in 1898, replacing Ilha de Mozambique in the north, saw the beginnings of a real colonial presence built up over the next fifty years involving investments in infrastructure and African workers, as well as the cultivation of a sizeable white colonial population.41 Starting in the 1930s, the consolidation of the territory finally took place with the revocation of the concessions to foreign capital, crown rule taking over chartered companies, such as the Mozambique Company (Companhia de Moçambique) which had been financed by German, British and South African investment and had previously overseen the territories of Manica and Sofala.42 In the same way that the passing of the Acto Colonial of 1930 greatly affected Goa’s attempts at establishing an independence movement within its own borders, it made its African colonies (including Mozambique) more central to Salazar’s mission to claim for Portugal the status of world power. As historian Norrie MacQueen writes, ‘Africa lay at the heart of the corporatist nationalism of the Estado Novo. It was to be both a symbol and a tangible asset around which the nation could be mobilized to face an uncertain future.’43 Interestingly, after the Second World War, Mozambique’s colonial profile shifted dramatically. First, Salazar designated, through the passing of a constitutional amendment in 1951, that all of its colonies (including Goa, Mozambique and Angola) were now ‘overseas provinces’ in order to get out of the ethical dilemma of still holding onto its colonial empire in the wake of a generalized international context of European decolonization.44 Each province was supposedly given increased autonomy even as it was an integral part of ‘one state, single and indivisible’.45 The irony, of course, writes historian António de Figueiredo, is that ‘Salazar, who for all his dedicated nationalism and supposed wisdom had never even taken the trouble, or the risk, of ever visiting the overseas provinces was really governing an empire of his own imagination’.46 This same post-1945 period was also marked by a flood of Portuguese immigrants seeking improved livelihoods in its African colonies (specifically Angola and Mozambique, as opposed to Brazil or Latin America which had been favoured in earlier periods). Portugal, with an imperial economy largely undamaged by

Entangling decolonizations

29

the Second World War, had invested large sums of capital in its African colonies and focused its energies on mineral extraction (coal in Mozambique and iron in Angola).47 According to Norrie MacQueen, between 1950 and 1968, the white minority population of Mozambique quadrupled from 50,000 to 200,000 persons, out of a staggering total population of 8.5 million.48 This, in turn, suggests how much the oppressive Portuguese state required and relied on colonial migration to maintain power. FRELIMO was formed in Dar es Salaam, in neighbouring Tanzania, on 25 June 1962.49 It was created during a conference by several Mozambican political figures who, having been forced into exile, decided to merge various existing nationalist groups, including the Mozambican African National Union, National African Union of Independent Mozambique and the National Democratic Union of Mozambique, which had all formed two years earlier.50 In 1963, FRELIMO set up headquarters in Dar es Salaam under the leadership of Eduardo Mondlane, an American-educated Mozambican sociologist, and began calling for independence from Portugal.51 After two unsuccessful years of seeking a peaceful solution through discussion and negotiation, backed both financially and ideologically by the Soviet Union, Mondlane turned to a campaign of armed struggle in order to end Portuguese colonialism in his home country.52 Initially an approximate 7,000 Mozambican combatants were countered by a Portuguese military force that grew from an estimated 8,000 to 24,000 troops between 1964 and 1967.53 Another 23,000 local African soldiers were recruited for the Portuguese cause during this same period.54 Two years later, in early 1969, Mondlane was assassinated, most likely by the Portuguese secret police (PIDE) and against the backdrop of a series of internal power struggles among the FRELIMO’s leadership, including a student revolt in Dar es Salaam.55 Meanwhile there was increasing international pressure from the United Nations to move for Portuguese decolonization in Africa. The period between 1970 and 1974 was one of tactical strategies under hard line FRELIMO figures Samora Machel and Marcelino dos Santos, offensives and counteroffensives by both sides and the loss of many lives, including an estimated 300 Mozambican villagers, accused of sheltering FRELIMO guerrillas and killed by Portuguese soldiers in what is known as the Wiriyamu Massacre.56 Even as the Portuguese army generally held the upper hand throughout the extended conflict, various factors contributed to the putting in place of a ceasefire on 7 September 1974: reports in the metropole of the mistreatment of Mozambique’s indigenous population at the hands of colonial troops, a growing Communist movement in Portugal that had a direct influence on those leading Lisbon’s imminent

30

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

military coup, and mounting pressure by the international community over the protracted nature and direction of the Portuguese colonial wars.57 Mozambique had finally gained its independence but only in the wake of the collapse of the Salazar dictatorship (including his death in 1970) and the coup d’état in Portugal on 25 April 1974, details to which I will return after I provide a brief summary of Angola’s connected process of decolonization.

Angola Angola achieved its independence from Portuguese colonial rule on 11 November 1975, approximately six months after Mozambique.58 Angola’s decolonization process was by far the most complex of the Portuguese colonies. Its record of protracted violence was tied to multiple factors, thus making it difficult to assess.59 In the 1960s, Angola was also the richest of the Portuguese colonies (based on diamonds, oil reserves, coffee, cotton and maize) and had the greatest number of white colonialists at the time of decolonization.60 This suggests that the stakes were high for all those involved. The ‘Angolan War of Independence’ (1961–1975) started out as an uprising against cotton cultivation that was enforced by the colonial government. As historian David Birmingham writes, ‘the anti-colonial war was triggered off by the very peasants whom Salazar had idealized for their malleability and whose powerlessness he had been able to exploit’.61 Starting out as an isolated event in the central highlands of the country, the uprising developed into a multi-faction struggle for the future control over a richly resourced nation that had been exploited by the Portuguese over five centuries.62 By the middle of the nineteenth century, Angola constituted the second largest European settler colony in Africa, with a white population of around 2,000 persons that consisted of soldiers, traders, administrators and degredados (exiled criminals from Portugal).63 As colonial investments grew, its white settler Portuguese population steadily increased from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century64 but would only intensify in the period between 1955 and 1968.65 Nor would its black population ever constitute less than 95 per cent of the Angolan population, a figure that suggests that power throughout its colonial period was always in the hands of an oppressive concentrated white minority.66 The struggle for liberation in the case of Angola was not one of colonizer versus colonized but it rather involved three political parties, each with differing histories, regional interests within the country and international backings (and access to different kinds of weapons) over the period from 1961 to 1975. These

Entangling decolonizations

31

parties included the FNLA, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola, led by Holden Roberto and backed by the United States and Zaire67; MPLA, the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, led by Agostinho Neto and backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba68; and UNITA, the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, led by Jonas Savimbi and backed by several Western powers and South Africa.69 For the next fourteen years, Portuguese armed and security forces waged a counter-insurgency campaign against these armed groups dispersed across the sparsely populated Angolan countryside, with atrocities committed by all forces involved in the protracted war of independence.70 Despite the profound divergences between the FNLA, MPLA and UNITA – fighting over a fourteen-year period to take over power from the colonial administration – they all agreed in January 1975 to sign the Alvor Agreement in Portugal to prepare the ground for independence in November. However, the agreement was short-lived as former MPLA nationalist leader António Agostinho Neto took up the Presidency as soon as his party secured the capital of Luanda.71 Historian Didier Péclard writes: The Alvor agreement was a very complex mechanism. Designed in a very tense political context, where none of the three movements seemed to generally envisage any power sharing, it did not make illusion for long, and a few months after it had been signed, the question was no longer whether or not violence was going to break out again, but when.72

During this period of political transition to independence and the signing of a second treaty, the Nakuru Agreement, in late June in Kenya, a power struggle and armed conflict quickly broke out. By July, the ‘battle for Luanda’, as it was called, had begun between these three nationalist groups.73 The MPL A solicited support from Cuba, and UNITA sought help from neighbouring South Africa. It turned into a protracted border war with South Africa and a stage for the Cold War (with Cuba, the Soviet Union and the United States providing military assistance). The war involved violent internal dynamics and massive foreign intervention between 1975 and 2002, saw over 500,000 deaths and produced over 1 million internally displaced persons.74 It would also prompt the mass exodus of its white Portuguese population.75 Elizabeth Buettner shows that the Portuguese Africa case was one of the most dramatic, affecting the largest number of persons of all European decolonization processes: Given that Portugal’s population did not then exceed 9 million, retornados from Africa formed, relatively speaking, the most numerically significant influx of all

32

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World decolonization migrations into Europe, causing the resident population to grow by 5–10 percent. What is more … Portugal’s decolonization influx occurred in a very short space of time, with much of it compressed into little over one year.76

Hers is an important point that puts the Portuguese case into a larger perspective on European decolonization, and that also shows its particularities of heightened activity, speed and sheer numbers. It is a difficult subject that I take on ethnographically (and as linked to the liberations of both Angola and Mozambique) in Chapters 5 and 6.

Decolonization of the third empire The so-called ‘Carnation Revolution’77 of 25 April 1974 saw the overthrow of Portugal’s Prime Minister Marcello Caetano and the end of the Estado Novo, alongside the realization that Portugal could no longer maintain its military presence (and pressure) in its African colonies (Mozambique, Angola, GuineaBissau, Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe). With the changes in Portugal itself, a more general shift in the political climate had occurred, one that favoured the transfer of power to the liberation movements.78 Meanwhile, the signing of the Lusaka Accord allowed for the unconditional transfer of power to the nationalists in Mozambique: FRELIMO leader Samora Machel readied himself for his victorious march into Lourenço Marques to take over as the country’s first president, a historical moment captured on film by none other than Ricardo Rangel, whose themed photographs are featured throughout this book. Six months later, the new president of Angola, António Agostinho Neto, would do the same victorious march into Luanda. Both men would soon, however, lose their lives in the aftermath and violence of civil war that erupted in both countries (Mozambique, 1977–1992; Angola, 1975–2002). Machel died in a mysterious plane crash in 1986, most likely involving RENAMO forces,79 and Neto passed away in 1979 while undergoing cancer surgery in a Moscow hospital as a bloody and violent civil war was taking place in his homeland.80 These stories are not told in this book. Historian António Costa Pinto makes a compelling argument that precisely because Portugal’s transition to democracy in 1974 was integrally linked to the decolonization of its multiple colonies, it enabled Portugal to forget the trauma of decolonization quickly as it looked instead at building a democratic society.81 He suggests that a shift in governmentality – from the Salazar dictatorship (1932–1968) and the authoritarian Estado Novo (until 1974) to a democracy

Entangling decolonizations

33

seeking integration into a European Economic Community (EEC)82 – effectively disabled Portugal’s reflective and retrospective capacity to deal with the consequences of its history of colonial participation in India and Africa. While I am in agreement with his idea of a post-imperial amnesia of sorts, I would also like to add that the historical entanglements of Goa, Mozambique and Angola persisted by way of the retornados that had arrived back in Portugal in large numbers. They were a constant reminder of the experience of trauma, loss and messiness of decolonization that had taken place over a period of fourteen years (1961–1975) and across two continents (India and Africa) and which remained unresolved for many. Their accounts are not featured here; instead, I return to the idea of entanglements in a Southern Africa context in subsequent chapters by focusing my ethnographic lens on several minority diaspora communities who chose a different path, not returning to Portugal in the aftermath of empire.

C hapte r 3

Emigrating Goans

Introduction The Goan (diasporic) community of Lourenço Marques (present-day Maputo) occupied both littoral spaces and positions within Portuguese Mozambique. Their migration consisted of three distinct waves within the Indian Ocean: from Portuguese India (Goa) to Mozambique in the 1920s in a search for economic betterment; next from Goa to Mozambique in the 1950s and early 1960s, the period that foresaw the beginning of the end of Goa’s decolonization; and lastly, emigration from Lourenço Marques as a direct response to Portuguese decolonization in 1975. During all three of these phases of (potential) migration, Goan elites held a floating position, one viewed with uncertainty by both colonizer and colonized, within the hierarchy of Portuguese Mozambican society. They, in turn, were able to embrace and adapt to changing colonial contexts precisely because their precarity was both reinforced and attenuated by history, culture and power. During the first phase (1920s), it was considered one’s colonial duty as a ‘good’ Portuguese citizen to emigrate from Goa to help out in the ‘Africa cause’. This was largely a male phenomenon – with many of the Goan men who answered the call having been trained medical doctors. Very few Goan women took on this risk. It was a journey that allowed Goans to take full advantage of the instabilities of colonial rule and its ‘ambiguities of difference’,1 such that they were ‘almost’ transformed from colonial subjects to colonial officers as a result of migration. During the second phase (1950s–1960s), many Goans chose emigration to another Portuguese colony in the face of Goa’s imminent decolonization and absorption into a culturally different Indian nation-state; here interestingly, migration was largely a female practice, many as the wivesto-be of Goans already settled in Mozambique. In the last phase (1975), many Goans chose to leave or, rather, were persuasively persuaded to leave Lourenço

36

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Marques by outgoing colonial officials so as to help prove Portugal’s point that independent Mozambique would devolve into ‘chaos’; that is, Africans were incapable of ruling themselves without a colonial administration that employed Goans in key positions of authority. That the majority of Goans did leave was seen as a source of betrayal by the newly independent Mozambican government; and yet it was this same government that had simultaneously pushed for the departure of all Asians, including Goans. Some Goans, however, chose to stay in postcolonial Mozambique and remain today as part of a ‘society of the absent’,2 in Engseng Ho’s apt term. He explains: ‘We may call the diaspora “the society of the absent” as a convenience and a theoretical position because in it, discourses of mobility appear as both cause and effect and are inseparable from diasporic life, saturating its internal social space.’3 This chapter takes up the topic of Goan migration to Mozambique. Similar to later chapters in this book, I adopt an ethnographic and life history approach in order to access this distinct phase of migration and to offer different Goan imaginaries of Portuguese Mozambique.4 I first provide a brief overview of and intervene in three Indian Ocean areas of scholarship that have been influential in shaping how I approach this community historically and ethnographically. In the second section, entitled ‘Imperial connections’, I trace the Goan presence in Mozambique over the longue durée: it works as a historical backdrop for showcasing the Goans of Maputo today and for entering their lives and worlds. Third, I look at the ‘longings and belongings’ of many different individual Goans living in the context of postcolonial Maputo, recounting their testimonies that attest and give voice to the different phases of migration: the 1920s, the 1950s–1960s and the post-1975 period. This discussion also illustrates the fragility and resilience of this dynamic community, created out of the itinerant quality that characterized Portuguese colonialism more generally, as shown in Chapter 1. I conclude by briefly alluding to the next generation of Goans living in Maputo, suggesting both their continuing sense of uncertainty in the face of a changing Mozambican postcoloniality and the ways in which they are very much following patterns of ‘local cosmopolitanisms’ practised by their ancestors, some of whom experienced not only migration from one Portuguese colony to another but two different moments of decolonization, Goa (1961) and Mozambique (1975). This (next) generation of Goans is both deeply attached to Mozambique and, looking elsewhere, the analytics of diaspora and mobility that motivated their parents also circumscribing them, both for movement to new and old spaces and, in the process, creating new kinds of postcolonial subjectivities.

Emigrating Goans

37

Indian Ocean ethnographies In this chapter, I am invested in exploring not only ‘landscapes of the sea’ and history-making in (and not of) the Indian Ocean, to follow historian Michael Pearson,5 but also how degrees and experiences of ‘otherness’ of a specific group of colonized individuals shifted in the act of migration from one Portuguese colony to another via the Indian Ocean – in this case between Goa and Mozambique during three different historical phases.6 It was historian Sugata Bose who invigorated studies of (colonial) migration and diasporic living within the Indian Ocean arena (in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) among a wide range of scholars and from varying disciplinary perspectives.7 Here I point to the recent work of two scholars whose works have been integral to the way I conceive of Goan Mozambican subjectivities. I first follow historian Thomas Metcalf who, in his book entitled Imperial Connections, makes a compelling argument for looking at ‘webs of empire’. Too often, he asserts, the history of a colony is written in isolation from its colonial neighbours – a historiography often also inscribed in state archives – while, in fact, there was much movement in multiple directions (and by both colonizer and colonized, often bypassing imperial centres).8 Taking into account horizontal movements between colonies (and not just vertical movements between metropole and a singular colony) thus allows us a window onto these alternative and lesser-known colonial narratives, experiences, practices and subjectivities. As Metcalf argues for the case of connecting British India and British Africa through migration within the Indian Ocean during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, individual Indians caught up in this colonial matrix were able to imagine new identities for themselves in African contexts: they conceived of themselves not merely as colonial subjects but as ‘imperial citizens’,9 an important distinction that allowed them the possibility of living outside the confines of more rigid colonial categories of hierarchy. Metcalf ’s call to look more closely at ‘imperial connections’ across the Indian Ocean forms a starting point for looking at Portuguese colonialism as operating in this same oceanic arena, as producing its own set of ‘imperial citizens’ and during a wider time frame (from the sixteenth to the twentieth century). That the Portuguese case is very different from the British one (both spatially and temporally) makes it an even more complex and interesting study. It is also productive to turn to the writings of anthropologist Engseng Ho who has developed the idea of ‘local cosmopolitans’ relative to a lesser-known

38

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

and older diasporic community in the Indian Ocean, the Hadrami. Specifically, I suggest that some of his theoretical and methodological tools are applicable to the Goan case in Mozambique. The analytical import of Ho’s idea of ‘local cosmopolitans’ is situated in his very definition of them as ‘persons who, while imbedded in local relations, also maintain connections with distant places. They thus articulate a relation between different geographical scales’.10 Ho sets up a useful analytic for looking at diasporic communities not only diachronically (as for the Hadramis and the Goans of Mozambique)11 but also as less strictly defined by attachments to a homeland vs a host country. Local cosmopolitans escape this binary: they are motivated by travel and mobility, interpolating minimally between at least two different contexts and remaining ‘itinerant across the oceanic space’.12 In other words, they are deeply local and transnational at the same time, without necessarily being in conflict over these ‘structures of feelings’.13 Ho’s ideas are pertinent to the case at hand for, through the course of conducting fieldwork in Maputo, it became increasingly evident to me that many of the Goans I interviewed were not only the product of a significant amount of mobility between Goa, Portugal and Mozambique, but some had very little anxiety over being Goan, Indian, African, Mozambican and Portuguese. Instead, they embraced all and none of these categories, many without an issue. Ho also expands the corpus of source materials to access narratives of historically dispersed diasporic communities. Instead of relying solely on archival materials, which are in any way scant for the Hadramis, he turns to other source materials such as gravestones, textiles, biographies, genealogies, legal documents, poetry, novels and prayers.14 While not all of these source materials are available for the Mozambique case, Ho’s research fruitfully suggests the potential of accessing stories of migration in more creative and, perhaps, personalized ways. For more own case study, I have chosen ‘life histories’ as an entry point for accessing the experiences of Goan migration to Mozambique, including biographical narratives15; the latter approach enabled me to meet Délia Maciel who herself is engaged in writing her own life history as a Goan immigrant to Mozambique.16 Finally, Ho layers the historiographic with an ethnographic mode, adopting the perspectives of people now living in a specific place to access the history of its diasporic imaginings.17 More pointedly, he asks the all-important question: how do individuals become conscripted into the long-term project of place-making?18 My response is one of developing an analytic of ‘local cosmopolitans’ in relation to the very different history and context of the Goan community of Maputo.

Emigrating Goans

39

Imperial connections: Goa and Mozambique Portugal’s colonial history is one of multiple migrations in a multitude of directions over the longue durée. What these multidirectional migrations suggest are the particular historical conditions of the Portuguese colonizing experience that I discussed in more detail in my introduction. They point to an itinerant quality associated with a long history of emigration, for both those in power and those subjected to colonial rule: ‘The practice of ambivalence, interdependence, and hybridity was a necessity of the Portuguese colonial relation.’19 This section engages in a dialogue with both the problems and the possibilities of connecting Goa and Mozambique through their shared Portuguese pasts. The first problem that presents itself is that of the historical complexity of each of these two foci: how does one reconcile the seemingly disparate and disjointed histories of Portuguese colonialism in Goa and Mozambique that took place at very different historical moments, under specific historical, economic and political conditions, and with distinct postcolonial consequences? Here I argue for the potential of using Goan migration – it was a direct consequence of the itinerant quality that characterized Portuguese colonialism itself – as a key analytic for establishing the ‘imperial connections’ between Goa and Mozambique. However, in order to fully understand the history and scope of Goan migration to colonial Mozambique, the archive must be expanded to include a variety of source materials, including not only those from history but also those from literature and sociology, for the different insights into the lived experiences of colonialism each of them offers. This section offers an exploratory look at some of these sources, materials that suggest moments and kinds of connectivities between Goa and Mozambique. There are few extant historical studies dedicated solely to Goans in Mozambique.20 However, by casting a wider net, one is able to find valuable sources that speak to the complexities of Goan migration at a more experiential and intimate level. Firstly, the histories of Goa and Mozambique were always intertwined throughout the era of Portuguese colonialism. Very early on the trade in wood, tea, coffee, spices and cinnamon travelled a regular circuit between Goa, Mozambique and Lisbon, thus ensuring long-standing political, economic, social and cultural ties between the three places.21 Portuguese archival records from the sixteenth century suggest the presence of at least one Goan in Mozambique as early as 1560.22 Moreover, according to historian Sharmila Karnik, these early Goan emigrants – mostly traders, sailors, fishermen, clerks and mercenaries – ‘consolidated the administrative and bureaucratic machinery

40

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

of Portugal in Mozambique’.23 Historians Anders Ehnmark and Per Wästberg argue that Mozambique’s colonial survival during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was dependent on Goan migration: Mozambique in the 18th C, just as in Goa, witnessed the beginning of its own decay. With Brazil now the centre of the Portuguese empire, Mozambique was one huge colonial failure. Had it not been for an immigration of Indians and Catholic Goans from India during the first half of the 19th C, a great part of the country must certainly have been given up for lost. The Portuguese interestingly, called these Indians the ‘Jews of Africa’.24

These authors suggest both the importance of Goan immigration for strengthening a weak colonial state (between 1800 and 1850) and that the sociological category ‘Goan’ occupied a curious place within the Portuguese colonial order of things in terms of race, religion and class. Here one must take into account a typical pattern among Goan immigrant families in Mozambique, starting in the late eighteenth century, by which, according to historian Naresh Fernandes, the first son would become a priest, the second a doctor and the third would emigrate to Portuguese Africa to seek his fortune.25 More generally, an incentive to move to Portuguese Africa was often a motivating factor for Goan migration: individuals were ensured economic stability by their role as prazeiros supported by the colonial structure in Africa.26 This system of prazos or ‘leased properties’ had been initiated in 1675 as part of Portugal’s expansion into the interior of Mozambique. However, a lack of available (Portuguese) women for marriage and, starting in the eighteenth century, the general withdrawal of Portuguese settlers from Mozambique, considered as ‘unfavourable land’, saw the immigration of Goans into the colony to fill this particular niche and their practice of intermarriage with the Portuguese, forming a community of prazeiros.27 Thus, in some historical cases, Goans were considered on par with their Portuguese counterparts: historian Jeanne Marie Penvenne demonstrates that this was the case for José Aniceto da Silva, a Goan postal director and colonial administrator in nineteenth-century Mozambique28 while historian Sharmila Karnik affirms this same positionality for Manuel Antonio de Sousa, a Goan who crushed a nineteenth-century Mozambican revolt on the part of the Portuguese.29 Sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos points to several Portuguese settlers in Mozambique who freely chose to intermarry with Goans over their Mozambican counterparts, thus ensuring the ‘Goan’ a status closer to that of the colonizer.30 However, we must also recognize that the mobility allowed to individual Goans during the colonial

Emigrating Goans

41

period was often the exception to the rule and in some sense complicated the racial order of things. Penvenne offers a detailed treatment of the system of racial classification that was in operation in colonial Mozambique, suggesting that the indigenato system was a rigid one that created and marked differences between black and white, even as some Africans were granted assimilado status into civilized Portuguese colonial society.31 In other words, the presence of Goans consistently complicated racial categories constructed by the colonial state which they were able to harness for their own mobility. Other Goans were able to move relatively quickly up the ranks within the Portuguese colonial hierarchy in late nineteenth-century Mozambique; yet they still faced a colonial glass ceiling. Historian Cristiana Bastos writes of an elite circle of Goan medical practitioners who were selected to migrate to Mozambique based on the (colonial) ideology that ‘tropical doctors were best suited to treat tropical diseases among tropical peoples in tropical places’.32 Since the inception in 1847 of the Goa Medical School, a prestigious centre for the teaching and learning of medicine, all of its directors had been of Portuguese origin.33 However, when Rafael Pereira was appointed its first Goan director in the 1880s, he urged other doctors of Goan or ‘tropical’ origin to immigrate to Portuguese Africa to help out with the larger Africa cause.34 As Bastos shows in her case study of two of these Goan doctors – Arthur Gama and Germano Correia – who immigrated to the tropics of Mozambique during the late nineteenth century, these diasporic Goans occupied a peculiar position within the colonial hierarchy in Mozambique: Like the many Indo-Portuguese who served as colonial officers and doctors, Gama and Correia occupied an ambiguous, floating position in the hierarchies they described. Invited to participate in the inner circles of power and ideological formation, they were at the same time excluded from those circles as secondclass citizens. As a group, they epitomized a feature of Portuguese colonialism: the production and segregation of particular groups that were allocated a key role in the colonial administration and at the same time banned from its upper echelons. Goan physicians illustrate the complex mutual constitution of colonizers and colonized, as the latter embrace the colonizers’ political project and refine its ideology while serving as subordinate ‘colonials’, producing and reproducing from their limbo the racialized views of the world needed to govern empire.35

Bastos gets at the liminal position of Goans within the Portuguese colonial hierarchy operating in Mozambique. In occupying an ‘ambiguous floating position’, they were both invited into the inner circles of power and purposely kept

42

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

out. At the same time, they themselves promoted the ideology of colonialism by performing as subordinate colonials and being part of its apparatus of colonial governmentality. Bastos’s study is thus extremely relevant for she provides a sense of (some of) the factors that had motivated immigration, ones not necessarily exclusive to its medical doctors. Perhaps these Goans, physicians and others, can be interpreted as ‘colonial handmaidens’ of a larger Portuguese system.36 Addressing a later period of Goan migration to Mozambique, historian Fatima da Silva Gracias suggests that the Portuguese government did not stop the flow of Goan migration to its African colonies in the early twentieth century, but rather encouraged it by way of financial assistance through its Christian organizations.37 While historians Allen and Barbara Isaacman refer to these same Goans in Mozambique as ‘transfrontiersmen’,38 historian Rochelle Pinto fittingly refers to twentieth-century Goans in colonial Mozambique as ‘creolized elites’.39 However, in the less populous rural regions of Mozambique, Goans easily adapted themselves to their environment, choosing to settle down, adopt African customs and intermarry with Mozambicans.40 Together, these differing historical accounts suggest that there was always a relational quality (and one of degree) caught between black and white that characterized the Goan in colonial Mozambique. As Rochelle Pinto astutely points out, ‘blackness remained the knowable, fixed, and unchanging quantity against which the hybridity of other groups could be plotted … The Goan official had carved out a racial space that allowed him to mediate between his identity as an Asiatic and as a vehicle of empire’.41 Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen argue in their introduction to Imperial Migrations that it was certain ‘exemplary groups [such as the Goans] which the Portuguese used to demonstrate that social mobility was possible for nonwhites and to show that Lusotropicalism was a reality’.42 As sociologist Rita Ferreira explains, the category of ‘Goan’ in Portuguese Mozambique is further complicated by the fact that it was broken into the subcategories of Hindu Goan, Indo-Muslim Goan and Catholic Goan,43 each of which had a distinct class and occupational status within the colonial order of things. More generally, the Hindu Goan occupied the position of importer/ exporter, the Indo-Muslim specialized in long-distance commerce, and the Catholic one, ‘benefiting from the rights similar to those of the Europeans’, dominated in the clergy and the army, in public administration and in private activities.44 Thus, when looking at the position of the Goan during Mozambique’s colonial history, one must also look at the complicated history of racial hierarchies that existed between the Portuguese, the Goan (Christian, Hindu and Muslim), the Indian (Hindu and Muslim) and the native Mozambican, the hierarchies

Emigrating Goans

43

themselves always unstable, changing temporally, contextually and according to whose perspective,45 and which played itself out both during colonialism, and which continued, albeit in slightly modified forms, in colonialism’s aftermath. In other words, during the history of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique, Goans were alternately labelled ‘white’ or ‘less than white’, but rarely ‘black’. These labels had serious consequences in the immediate aftermath of Portuguese decolonization in 1975 when, according to historian Ronald Chilcote, Portuguese colonial officials began to categorize Goans as ‘Asians’, together with Indians and Chinese, just at the time when many were forcibly expelled from Mozambique.46 Here I would argue that all of these differing contextual labels have shaped the Goan community in Mozambique through its shared history of imperial connections and as a long-standing diasporic community with multiple and layered identities.47 If we turn, however briefly, to the sociological literature on Goans in the postcolonial context, we see that Goans are understudied precisely because they are so well integrated into Mozambican society. This stands in contrast to the Goan diasporas in the United States, Canada and the UK, where there exists a wider disjuncture between the homeland and the host country,48 or those in (East) Africa where similar forms of marginalization are present, though for a different set of reasons.49 Contemporary studies of Goan diasporas are thus complicated by the fact that, in many cases, Goans are lumped together with other communities into a ‘stranger communities’ category or as ‘the hyphen between Africans and Europeans’,50 a pattern already found in the colonial literature. Sociologist Jessica Kuper makes a case for the uniqueness and separateness of the Goan community living in 1970s Uganda, arguing that its members, largely working-class clerks, cooks and tailors, regarded themselves as ‘culturally European’ rather than Indian.51 They also tended to see themselves as different from all other ‘Asians’. As a result, they largely kept to themselves within Ugandan society and maintained strong ties with Goa.52 More recently, we see the ethnographic work of Marta Vilar Rosales on memories, material culture and consumption practices of a present-day transnational, immigrant Goan community in Portugal that shares a three-generations-long migration history in Portuguese Mozambique and a relationship with all three sites – Goa, Mozambique and Portugal.53 Lastly, if one looks further afield to literature, to fiction written from both Mozambican and Goan perspectives, we might get a better sense of some of the complex identity issues that were at play for Goans in colonial Mozambique. For example, in the writings of Mia Couto, whose prose is featured throughout

44

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

this book, we get a very different picture of the Goan as a distinct character in the Mozambican context, not only one that has language, religious and cultural commonalities with his Mozambican counterparts but also one that sets himself apart as defiantly as the character Ascolino do Perpétuo Socorro does in one of Couto’s stories.54 Interestingly, it is Socorro who finds himself attached to his ‘Indo-Portuguese’ identity even as he is settled in Mozambique and who, in a crusade to gain Goa back, angrily blames Indian Prime Minister Nehru for Goa’s fall in 1961. He likens Goa’s loss to that of a divorce between a Portuguese viceroy and his Goan spouse, an image that returns us full circle to the colonial period and the presence of the liminal Goan character. Writings like Couto’s raise issues of displacement, identity and diaspora while suggesting that some Goans in Mozambique were marked by their very ‘Goan-ness’, while others – never getting over the loss of Goa to India in 1961 – chose to emigrate to what was then still a Portuguese colony. Another group of Goans, already living in Mozambique, would soon be persuaded to leave by the outgoing Portuguese colonial government just fourteen years later. Lastly, some Goans envisioned Mozambique as a place of temporary migration, one that, however, was not easily forgotten upon their return to Goa.55 In other words, Goans were on the move to Mozambique, at different points in time, and motivated by different reasons that had everything to do with culture, politics, language and religion.

Empire builders, agency and the spirit of the times (1920s) I first met Teresa, an anthropologist herself, on a sunny afternoon in Maputo in March 2007. After meeting outside a well-marked popular grocery store, we walked to her sixth-floor flat where, surrounded by books and with her newborn daughter sleeping in a back room, she recounted for me the history of her father’s migration to Mozambique from Goa.56 It was very much a conversation shaped by our training in anthropology that made our exchange more a sharing of life histories than a classical interview. Teresa’s father had been part of the wave of Goan doctors who had come to work and live in Mozambique in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in 1900 in Loutilim, Goa, to a Catholic Brahmin Portuguese-speaking family, he had first chosen to go to Portugal to continue his studies in medicine, in 1920. After qualifying as a doctor there,57 he had worked in the north of the country before deciding to continue his studies in Paris. Shortly after marrying a French woman, he arrived in Mozambique in 1928 to take up a prestigious medical post in Inhambane; according to Teresa, he was

Emigrating Goans

45

this region’s first doctor. After his wife’s sudden death five years later, he returned to Portugal to take up a post there. By the 1950s, however, he found the ‘Salazar culture’ so intolerable that he returned to Mozambique, Teresa recounted, together with his new Portuguese wife. He created a life for himself in Lourenço Marques, working as a medical doctor and with a family of five children. Even though he did not feel part of Lourenço Marques’s ‘Goan community’, her father regularly went to the Goa Club on Sundays to play chess.58 I met Fernandes in his sunny, plant-filled apartment, also located in one of the nondescript cement towers that characterize Maputo, but on the other side of town from Teresa. Here he lived with his two children and his Portuguese Mozambican wife. Over coffee, he recalled how his Goan father came to Mozambique in 1927 as a twenty-year-old.59 He was part of the colonial drive, the so-called ‘spirit of the times’ during which a large wave of Goan men came to seek their fortunes and improve their economic situation by way of Africa. While many of these Goans were trained medical doctors, Fernandes’s father had come to work as a prazeiro on one of the landed estates located in the interior of Mozambique, just as had the fathers of Raul, Cesar and Filipe, three other Goan Mozambicans I met on this same visit to Maputo.60 This group of Goans was different from the privileged upper-class (and caste) Goans whom Teresa’s father had intermingled with; instead, they were of a largely middle-class standing, practising Catholics, both Portuguese- and Konkani-speaking, and with much closer familial ties with Goa. While Fernandes’s and Filipe’s fathers followed the typical diasporic practice of returning to Goa to find a wife after having established themselves in Mozambique,61 Raul’s father had married the daughter of a close family friend who was also of Goan origin; not coincidently, their respective families had known each other in Goa prior to emigration. Cesar’s father, even as he returned to Goa on a regular basis – a practice also not uncommon for diasporic members – met and married a Mozambican-born Goan from Beira. Interestingly, Filipe’s father had chosen to return to Goa upon retirement; the year was 1960, one year before Goa’s decolonization.62 However, as Filipe openly recounted, finding a (suitable) wife was never as straightforward a process as described for the men who sought wives in Goa: in the period between arrival in Mozambique and their return to Goa to get married, many of these men had lived with African Mozambican women in relationships of concubinage, often producing children in the process. Typically, however, neither these women nor their children were acknowledged after the men returned to Mozambique, Goan wife in tow. This was just one of the many ways of ‘making empire respectable’, to quote Ann Stoler.63

46

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

The story of Sandra’s mother is, perhaps, an unusual one.64 Sandra herself, now in her eighties, has difficulties moving about, so I went to interview her in the family home that she shares with her daughter, Goan son-in-law and their children in a prosperous, tree-lined avenue in Maputo, not far from Fernandes’s house. Interestingly, when Sandra’s African mother was four, her family was taken to Goa by the wealthy Goan family for which Sandra’s grandmother was working as family servant. After living in Goa for twenty years, Sandra’s mother returned to Mozambique at the age of twenty-four (roughly in the 1920s). She first married an African man who had also lived in Goa as a child of servants; Sandra recalled that it was their mutual love of the Konkani language they had learnt in Goa and their shared experiences as Africans in Goa that brought them together. However, the marriage did not last long, and the couple did not have any children.65 Sandra’s mother next met and married a Goan man, Sandra’s father. Despite the fact that she had never visited Goa during her lifetime and had seen Lisbon but once, Sandra grew up speaking Konkani and Portuguese, and learning all the proper Goan dishes such as sorpatel,66 Goan family recipes that had been passed down to her by her (African) mother. She herself married the son of a mixed African and Portuguese couple. Their daughter Carla is now married to Raul, whose father had also emigrated from Goa to Mozambique in the 1920s. Where Teresa’s life history demonstrates the proximity to Portuguese whiteness, Sandra’s life history reflects the other end of the spectrum, that of African blackness, suggesting that there is no way to clearly categorize these histories of movement and mobility between Goa and Mozambique during the colonial period. At the same time, I believe that the life histories of the Goan Mozambicans I spoke to – Teresa, Fernandes, Raul, Cesar, Filipe and Sandra – all reflect the complicated diasporic histories that were created out of Portuguese colonization as well as the differing ties that individuals could maintain between Goa, Portugal and Mozambique. Just as I would argue that Ho’s analytic of the ‘local cosmopolitan’ is a productive one for characterizing the Goan diaspora in Portuguese Mozambique, I would also reinforce Bastos’s point that these Goans occupied ‘ambiguous floating positions’ within the colonial hierarchy that had the potential to go either way, as the cases of Filipe’s father (who retired to Goa) and Sandra (who remained in Mozambique) suggest. That many Goan men of this generation chose to marry Goan women reinforces Bastos’s point that this same ‘floating position also risked being ranked lower than the members of his ethnic group considered proper’67, hence the practice of abandoning one’s African concubine and illegitimate children by the wayside in order to continue ‘making empire

Emigrating Goans

47

respectable’ through sexual unions and reproduction exclusively with Goans.68 Thus, even as the majority of the Goan men in Mozambique were working in the service of the state – they had been ‘invited to build an empire’, in the words of Fernandes – their respective individual ideological positionings within the empire were perhaps less clearly demarcated. I take up this point in the next section in which I look at the second generation of Goan Mozambicans, many of whom arrived during the period of Goa’s decolonization.

Goan decolonization, resistance and neocolonialism (1950s–1960s) The period between the 1950s and 1960s continued the trend of Goan migration to Mozambique from the 1920s. Many came as the ‘wives’ and ‘children’ of Goans already settled in Mozambique – as was the case for Filipe who was fourteen when he and his mother came to Mozambique in 1954 to join his elderly father who had arrived thirty years earlier, returning to Goa in 1939 for one year where he met and married his mother and produced his only son. That husband and wife lived apart for the next fourteen years, with frequent visits across the Indian Ocean, is also part of the story.69 Others arrived in the port city of Lourenço Marques for ideological reasons that had everything to do with Portuguese decolonization in Goa. In the period after India’s independence from British colonial rule in 1947 and its violent partition into the Indian and Pakistani nation-states, the ‘Goa question’ continued to loom on the horizon (as I have shown in Chapter 2): where the French had Pondicherry, the Portuguese had Goa, Daman and Diu, functioning as ‘colonial enclaves’ amid the new Indian state. Newly elected Indian Prime Minister Nehru put the ‘Goa question’ on a backburner in the early years of independence in order to deal with what was considered the more pressing issue of the bloody aftermath of Partition. It was in 1954, with the peaceful and voluntary removal of the French from Pondicherry, that Goa’s colonial future emerged as a pressing issue, both within India and on the international scene (see Chapter 2). From 1954 onwards until Portugal’s forced removal from Goa in 1961 – a moment still regarded as an ‘invasion’ by many embittered Portuguese and Goans alike70 – a number of Goans, foreseeing that Goa would become part of India, chose to emigrate to one of the other Portuguese colonies for reasons of culture, politics, language and religion. Thus, while many Goans located both inside and outside of Goa had very strong political views regarding Goa’s future, vehemently refusing to believe that it

48

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

could ever be integrated into India, others – especially those living in Goa at the time – saw this as a real likelihood and chose emigration as a direct response or form of action.71 Délia’s life reflects this tumultuous period in Goa’s history. Many of my other Goan informants considered her a real source on ‘all things Goan’ and advised me to meet her.72 An elderly lady who had just turned eighty years old, she agreed to meet me at her home in the early evening, shortly after her afternoon nap.73 As she recounted the story of her life, I realized that she was connecting ‘slender threads across the ocean’, following Engseng Ho,74 when she wrote her own life story, Fragmentos da Minha Vida (Fragments of My Life).75 As we sat at her Indo-Portuguese-styled wooden dining table, sipping coffee,76 Délia emphasized the extreme importance she felt for recording this unwritten history in order to give future generations of Goan Mozambicans a better sense of ‘community’.77 She herself was born in Goa in 1927 in a small aldeia (village) where her parents had been teachers in a Portuguese-speaking primary school. At this point in our interview, she recounted an incident from her childhood that had indelibly marked her and that made an impression on me too. One day, when she was no older than ten at the time, she was walking through the streets of Panjim, the capital of Portuguese India at the time, with her parents. As they passed a group of people, she innocently started to join them, raising her right arm and imitating the others crying out ‘Jai Hind’ (Victory to India), the popular slogan that captured the hearts and minds of most Gandhian-inspired Indians fighting for self-rule. Only much later did she understand that it had been a demonstration protesting against British colonial rule in India. Instead of joining in, Délia’s parents slapped her, saying that her actions would get all of them into trouble if she did not stop participating immediately. I found her story remarkable, both at the time of its telling and now, as an ‘ethnographic trace’: it suggests not only the palpable tensions that were in the air surrounding Indian independence but shows the extent to which Goa was affected by these tumultuous happenings. Délia’s story signifies, on the one hand, the ways in which Goans as a group were deeply divided (and sometimes ambivalent) in their state loyalties (Portugal vs India) and, on the other, the ways in which British India’s future was so surprisingly closely monitored by the Portuguese, as perhaps setting a precedent for its own. Similar points and positionings were echoed in the testimonies of other Goan Mozambicans, to be discussed later. Délia’s story recounts the innocence of a child and the inculcation of moral values by parents. By 1954, the situation had worsened in Goa, at least for those who supported Portugal’s continued colonial hold. Délia, now a young

Emigrating Goans

49

woman, decided to follow in the footsteps of her two elder brothers – one of whom had been trained as a doctor at the Goa Medical School – by immigrating to Mozambique. She arrived by boat in the port city of Lourenço Marques at the age of twenty-six, a degree in nursing in hand.78 By 1960, on the eve of ‘Goa’s independence’,79 she had met and married a Goan Mozambican, born in Mozambique and in the business of banking, a popular middle-class profession among Goans of Lourenço Marques.80 Délia and her husband eventually set up house in Lourenço Marques and had four daughters. She next recounted memories of Goans being ‘poorly treated’ by the Portuguese in Mozambique, although she could not recall a particular incident for me. At this point, Délia paused in her life history and mentioned that if she had been single at the time of Goa’s liberation, she would have definitely returned to her homeland, since her parents and her ties remained with Goa and less so with Mozambique.81 This last detail is a telling one for it suggests migration both as a form of neocolonialism and as a (complicated) form of resistance, even if in the latter case it was not put into practice. The story of Sílvia, who, like Délia, came to Mozambique as a young woman, will by now be a familiar one.82 However, there are ethnographic traces which also open up a different set of Goan genealogies and ideologies. Sílvia was twenty-seven when she first arrived in Mozambique. The year was 1964, three years after Goa’s integration into the Indian nation-state. She remarked to me as we were sitting in her painting-filled living room that she remembered Goa’s independence very well, calling it a ‘tragic’ event. While she never clearly stated her reasons for leaving Goa, I got the sense that what she considered the tragedy of decolonization had much to do with her choice to emigrate.83 After one year of living in the north of Mozambique, she left for Portugal, where she attended art school in Lisbon and met and married one of Mozambique’s most famous Goan Mozambicans–physicist, journalist, diplomat, freedom fighter and politician Aquino de Bragança.84 They produced three sons, were involved in Mozambique’s independence movement and continued to live between Portugal and Mozambique. As Sílvia recounted her life story, she indicated that she was busy researching and writing the biography of her husband.85 She considers herself a ‘citizen of the world’ with deep attachments to three continents: India, Africa and Europe.86 I ended my interview with this ‘local cosmopolitan’ with a tour of her apartment-cum-art gallery, Sílvia telling me an alternative life history through her paintings.87 My interviews with both Délia and Sílvia suggest that one’s politics changes with regard to not only contexts and life experiences but also one’s maturity.

50

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Both their testimonies suggest that the cultural effects of colonization do not simply end with physical decolonization; instead, they live on and give birth to overlapping and sometimes contradictory practices (migration) and ideologies (neocolonialism) in the postcolonial, sometimes even within one individual.88 I also spoke with Carla, Délia’s daughter, whom I met quite by accident when she arrived home as I was leaving her mother’s apartment. Newly arrived from the United States after having completed a PhD in Linguistics, she had come ‘home’ for a visit, her future plans still uncertain.89 We ended up speaking informally for a short time, comparing experiences of living in the United States, discussing the advantages (and disadvantages) of the American PhD system and what it was like returning to Maputo after living in the United States for such a long time. Like mother, like daughter for Carla was also a historian in her own right, giving me insights into the path of her ancestors and migration to Mozambique more generally. As she pointed out to me, the 1950s when her mother came to Mozambique also witnessed the arrival of a large number of Portuguese ‘peasants’ (her word choice) in the African colonies (Mozambique and Angola) as part of a wider, state-sponsored campaign to enlarge the number of ‘white’ Europeans living in Portugal’s overseas colonies. That they were simultaneously escaping (post–Second World War) poverty and dictatorial Salazarism only reinforced the potential of the African colonies as sites for immigration and improved living conditions.90 Interestingly, such had been the case for the parents of (Portuguese Mozambican) Maria, who is married to the same Fernandes of earlier discussions and who will come up again in my next section on Mozambican independence.91 That the majority of these ‘peasants’ were illiterate in comparison to the large number of highly educated and skilled Goan immigrants was not lost on the Portuguese colonial administration of Mozambique.92 They, in turn, purposely kept individual Goans apart, isolating them upon arrival in order to prevent the development of a politicized Goan community that could potentially resist colonialism and allow Mozambique to go the way of Goa.93

Mozambican independence, chaos and dreams (1975) ‘It was chaos but we had such dreams.’94 That is the way Fernandes described the tumultuous events surrounding Mozambique’s independence from Portuguese colonial rule in 1975. We were sitting in his apartment, talking over a cup a coffee, his Portuguese Mozambican wife, Maria, by his side. They both described how it felt, as young Mozambicans barely twenty years old at the time, to get

Emigrating Goans

51

caught up in the politics of independence. They remembered feeling like they had a purpose, a reason for staying, although for Maria it had been a more difficult choice to make given that the rest of her family had chosen to immigrate to Portugal as a direct result of decolonization. For Fernandes, the decision to stay had been far easier as the majority of his family had remained in Maputo after independence. In describing his positionality within Mozambican society both today and in the past, he poignantly described how he continues to feel ‘Portuguese without a concept of race’.95 Perhaps Fernandes and Maria together, in some sense, represent a hopeful postcolonial Mozambique with all its complicated histories of migration.96 For other Goans living in Mozambique, the choice to stay or leave was one informed less by politics but rather by age. As many of the Goans from this ‘society of the absent’97 – including Fernandes – informed me, those who left consisted largely of elderly Goans, the majority of them leaving Lourenço Marques to retire (and in some sense die) in Portugal, a country and culture that for some was just as familiar as Mozambique had been but for others was less so. Interestingly, and this was a point confirmed by many informants, fewer Goans chose to return to their so-called ‘homeland’, but perhaps this makes sense given that some were even further displaced from it than Portugal. Délia was one of the many Goans who chose to stay in Mozambique in the aftermath of 1975. She described the situation acutely, suggesting that those who left did so out of ‘fear’, whereas those who stayed (including herself) made the decision out of ‘strength’ and commitment to deal with the unknown and the ‘new’ Mozambique. Even as Délia perhaps oversimplified the decision to stay or go by eliding age, class, race and gender politics, thus by removing these crucial factors from the decisionmaking process,98 the pride with which she made this declaration suggests the resoluteness of many Goans who committed themselves to life in postcolonial Mozambique. Interestingly, one of the very same brothers whose path as a young woman she had followed by emigrating from Goa in the 1950s decided – not only for reasons having to do with seeking employment but also being desirous of staying within a Lusophone colonial world – to emigrate from Mozambique to nearby Angola in early 1975, repeating, once again, the pattern of migration as a response to decolonization – even as this country would soon experience its own chaotic decolonization from Portuguese colonial rule.99 I wish I had thought to ask Délia at the time what had happened to her brother and his family after immigrating to Luanda. Other Goan Mozambicans, including Raul of earlier descriptions, explained that the divide between who stayed and who left had everything to do with

52

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

race and class patterns of marriage. Simply put, if you were Goan and married to a Portuguese, then you undoubtedly left. If you were a Goan married to an African Mozambican, you more than likely stayed. Raul made this statement based on his own life experience for he, a Mozambican-born Goan, and his wife, who was of mixed Portuguese, African and Goan parentage, had actively decided to stay in Lourenço Marques (Maputo) for these very ideological and practical reasons.100 Here it is important to reinforce sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s point that the operation of class politics (and their racial configurations) in postcolonial societies is a topic that needs more research.101 The same Fernandes of earlier discussions echoed Raul’s point, suggesting that decolonization created even more serious cleavages within families, again based on marriage patterns102: more often than not, older generations would choose to emigrate, leaving behind the next generation of Goan Mozambicans; however, in some extreme cases, Goan parents would leave, cutting all ties with their host country and purposely not recognizing the (impending) marriages of their children to African Mozambicans. According to my informants, this cutting of ties also happened among siblings.103 In other words, ‘race’ was always a fraught (generational) category for Goans caught between Portuguese and African Mozambicans. Of course, these generalizations do not necessarily hold up for all Goans: as the experiences of Goan Mozambican Fernandes and his Portuguese Mozambican wife, and of Cesar and his Portuguese wife, attest, politics trumped race in their decision to stay in Lourenço Marques (Maputo) after decolonization.104 And a case like that of Teresa’s parents is interesting as it suggests that ideological divides could exist within families, even between husband and wife. With Mozambican independence in 1975, it had been Teresa’s elderly Goan father who had wanted to return the family to Portugal, whereas her much younger Portuguese mother had wanted to stay in Mozambique out of a political commitment to seeing through the country’s political transition. In the end, as Teresa recounted, her father died in Maputo not long after, ‘a sad and broken man’ who had lost all his fortunes with Mozambican nationalization.105 Teresa’s mother quietly returned to Portugal after the start of Mozambique’s civil war and still lives there today.106 Of course, other Goans, like Sílvia, chose to live in Mozambique out of a political commitment to liberation. While she had been living in Portugal at the time of Mozambique’s decolonization, she returned to Maputo with her family in 1983. Just as Sílvia’s apartment was a museum to her art, it was also a shrine to her famous late husband Aquino who had died for the cause and thus for postindependence Mozambique.107

Emigrating Goans

53

Lastly, it is important to contextualize all these migrations within the context of Mozambique’s political situation on the eve of decolonization. Here I suggest that Goans occupied a ‘floating position’, to use Cristiana Bastos’s words: caught between the outgoing Portuguese colonial administration and the incoming Mozambican government. On the one side, Goans were never forcibly told to leave by the Portuguese but were given incentives to immigrate to Portugal,108 in much the same way that they had earlier been motivated to move to Portuguese Africa in a bid to help out the colonial cause. Just as they felt embittered on the eve of Goa’s decolonization, so too were they on the eve of Mozambique’s.109 On the African side, the newly elected government claimed that Goans (like other minority groups) did not have a place in postcolonial Mozambique. It stated that it saw each Goan emigration to Portugal as confirmation of their betrayal of Mozambique and collusion (as a group) with the former Portuguese colonial government.110 In some sense, the Goans were used as pawns in a large game of chess, each side claiming them as their own or at the very least as closely aligned with them, and with the details of each move eventually lost in the political struggles of decolonization and postcolonial transition. It is appropriate to end this section with Ho’s argument that the inability to situate oneself within a new postcolonial state was not isolated to the cases of the Hadrami or the Goans. Rather, it was a worldwide phenomenon: In the aftermath of decolonization, the identification of the new states with single nations made the creole, transnational commitments of diasporic communities untenable. The new, independent nation-states broke the diasporas straddling them into two: citizens and aliens.111

In other words, individual members of these creole, transnational diasporic communities the world over – like the littoral Goans showcased here – had to make difficult choices, choices that had everything to do with history, culture and power.112

Conclusion If we think about diaspora at its etymological level as a ‘scattering of seed’,113 then the Goans of Mozambique are one such example. They scattered their seed(s) in multiple directions (Mozambique, Goa, Portugal) and at different moments in time (1920s, 1950s–1960s, post-1975), creating diasporic communities with numerous ties elsewhere (Goa, India, Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, the United

54

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

States, etc.) along the way. By employing Thomas Metcalf ’s concept of ‘webs of empire’ and Engseng Ho’s analytic of ‘local cosmopolitanism’ to understand the Goan diaspora of Lourenço Marques (Maputo) as part of a larger Indian Ocean narrative, we can access Goans’ complicated life histories and changing ambiguous identities of race and class, and rethink colonial and postcolonial migrations as they are tied to interconnected decolonization experiences,114 the larger focus of this book. For the next generation of Goan Mozambicans, however, it will be a very different story, albeit one of both continuity and change. Thus, while some of the children of this generation of Goan Mozambicans, born after independence, are following in the footsteps of their ancestors by emigrating to Portugal,115 others are renewing attachments to old places (Goa and Portugal),116 or creating attachments to new places (South Africa, the UK, Brazil and Macau).117 Still other ‘local cosmopolitans’ are choosing to remain in Maputo, embracing their Goan-ness, Portuguese-ness and Mozambican-ness simultaneously.118

C hapte r 4

Goans going fishing

Introduction Each man’s boat is in his heart.1 I went to Catembe, Mozambique, in 2009 in the hope of finding a lost pocket of artisanal Goan fishermen. Instead, I discovered a thriving community of Goan fishermen directly engaged in large-scale commercial fishing for export, mostly of prawns, quietly investing their wealth both inside and outside Mozambique. I visited this Indian Ocean port city for the Catholic feast day of São Pedro (29 June), patron saint of fishermen the world over, in the hope of getting a better sense of the multiple meanings this immigrant group attach to religious festivities such as this one. I found Goan Mozambicans using the occasion both to pay homage to their ancestors who had crossed the Indian Ocean from Goa to arrive at the then-thriving Portuguese colonial capital of Lourenço Marques (present-day Maputo) three generations earlier and to bless the coming fishing season upon which their economic survival dearly depends. This chapter showcases a very different Goan community from the one presented in Chapter 3, even as both followed the same path of out-migration from Goa to Mozambique in the late 1800s.2 As with the city Goans, I approach this diaspora ethnographically, only less through a biographical lens but rather through participant-observation of a religious event. Specifically, I engage with the materiality and religiosity of a lesser-known and much smaller littoral community of Goan fisherfolk. Even as they are located only a six-minute ferry ride across the Maputo Bay in Catembe, they are in some senses a world away from those urban Goans. This particular fishing community very strongly interpolates between three spaces – Goa, Mozambique and Portugal – at the same time as it connects ‘slender threads across the Indian Ocean’, in the words of Engseng Ho,3 and maintains a strong sense of social cohesion as a community.4

56

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Diaspora making, much like for the case of the Goans of Maputo, very much represents the material and affective complexities of Portuguese colonialism and decolonization in the Indian Ocean, only here it takes up a different way of being Goan in Mozambique. My focus here is on the role of rituals in enhancing community as well as diasporic ties, a form of ‘communitas’5 in recreating sensual and bodily experiences and memories,6 and finally, in representing idealized notions of Goan popular culture through essentialized cultural traits such as food, language and religion, all to be passed onto subsequent generations of Goan Mozambicans. In June 2009, exactly ten years after I had gone to Goa to research São Francisco Xavier,7 I found myself going to Catembe in search of São Pedro. I had heard from various people living in Mozambique that there was a well-established but small Goan fishing community here. I was intrigued, particularly since I had previously done research on elite Goans living in Maputo – showcased in a previous chapter – many of them were first- and second-generation migrants, bankers and doctors by profession mostly. It was also when I saw the beautiful yet disquieting black-and-white photographs that the late Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel had taken of this impoverished community during the early 1970s – families living in bare-boned makeshift shacks built on stilts, the Maputo skyline a constant backdrop – that perhaps made me want to get a sense of this very different and stark Goan diasporic experience in Mozambique, both in regard to generational shifts and by way of what is perhaps most intimate to them: fishing. In a manner parallel to the way that Rangel’s photographs are infused with the social realities of these fishermen’s littoral lives towards the end of Portuguese colonialism, so too Mia Couto’s deeply visceral descriptions of the figure of the Mozambican fisherman that opened this chapter act as a way to enter into this distinct social worlding. I also want to understand fishing as a rite of passage and in its multiple affective registers. Neither do I mention Rangel or Couto merely in passing nor for purely anecdotal reasons. Rather, I will revisit the theme of literature and photography (text and image) as forms of postcolonial intervention in carving out oceanic geographies and will continue to weave evocative images from both creators throughout my ethnographic sections in order to provide a more nuanced way to approach and understand fishing, not merely as an economic livelihood but, more importantly, as a way of being in the world for these Goan Mozambicans, generations of fishing folk, past and present, living on the edge of the Indian Ocean. It is a place that Isabel Hofmeyr reminds us is one of the ‘oldest archives in the world’, a place of ‘deep history’ and multiple intersections (colonialism, imperialism, decolonization,

Goans going fishing

57

Third Worldism and the Cold War) wherein both nostalgic dreams and failed utopias sit side by side.8

Indian Ocean fishing The land is burdened with laws, orders and disorders. The sea has no ruler. But be careful, son, people don’t live on the ocean. Even your father who was always at sea: the home where his spirit has come to rest is on dry land.9

Before I turn to a discussion of the contemporary lives of these Goan fishermen of Catembe and their ritual celebration of the feast day of São Pedro, I would like to situate them within the setting of the Indian Ocean, an aquatic terrain that sometimes acts as a legal space and a geography that lends itself to the formation (and interrogation) of distinct economies and cultures. Thus, on the one hand, the Indian Ocean serves as a regulatory space; on the other, it is also an imagined (and imaginative) one wherein ideas of law, governance and geography are constantly revisited and revised in relation to real lives. It was Hugo Grotius who in 1608 first published his infamous treatise entitled ‘Mare Liberum’ in which he argued that the seas could not be possessed and that freedom of navigation and exploitation of the high seas, including its seemingly limitless resources, could not be interfered with, occupied or appropriated by any one person or entity.10 More recent debates concerning the Indian Ocean and fishing rights are both subsumed under larger arenas of oceanic rights discourse while having their own historical and economic particularities and contours. In thinking about the ‘idea’ of the Indian Ocean, it must be remembered that it is people, not water, that created a ‘recognizable Indian Ocean that historians [and I would add anthropologists], can study’.11 Thus, while it has been reported that currently more than 75 per cent of the world’s fish stocks have been fully exploited or over-exploited, the Indian Ocean is under-sourced in comparison.12 As Michael Pearson argues, it is precisely because warm oceans produce fewer fish than cold ones – the warmth of the water keeps phytoplankton production low13 – that the Indian Ocean was underutilized over the longue durée. Estimates suggest that the Indian Ocean contains 20 per cent of the world’s ocean area and 30 per cent of its population but has produced only approximately 5 per cent of the total world catch (as, for example, for the year 1975),14 when its potential yield is significantly higher. Also, that the most productive parts of the Indian Ocean are located in the extreme south and thus far from the major state

58

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

players in this oceanic region is also another important factor that shapes the nature of its continued under-exploitation with regard to fishing. In 1971, the twenty-four littoral states of the Indian Ocean ‘regional theatre’ agreed to a United Nations General Assembly resolution that the Indian Ocean be a zone of peace with regard to strategic interests.15 There are also a number of regional and subregional entities that regulate aquatic legal matters within the Indian Ocean world. Specifically, the Regional Seas Programme (under the auspices of the UN Environment Programme) encourages treaties and action plans to protect marine environments, while the Indian Ocean Fishery Commission (IOFC) monitors fishery resources, both deep-sea industrial fishing and local artisanal fishing. There even exist specialized interest groups, such as the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission.16 For the case at hand, Mozambique is currently included in the Eastern African region designated by the United Nations in 1985 and is a member of the IOFC.17 That it also has one of the most important prawn fisheries (along with Tanzania) in the Indian Ocean18 makes it a serious contender in the large-scale industrial exportation that has developed as a result.19 Since the 1990s, however, the world fishing industry has found itself in dire straits.20 One last measure – in many ways a return to Grotius’s idea of Mare Liberum – has been an attempt to adopt a more internationalized approach to thinking of and managing the world’s oceans as an ‘international public trusteeship’21 that is ruled by modern conservation principles and ethics by and for a global good, that is, one where the ocean is understood responsibly as the ‘common heritage of mankind’.22 Thus, what has been termed ‘the tragedy of the commons’, as humans continue to deplete natural resources around the world, has very real lived consequences. Currently, only two of the world’s fifteen major fishing regions have increasing catches.23 Remarkably, it is the western and eastern Indian Ocean zones that hold this potential.24 This points to the high stakes that this industry involves for fishermen and fishing industries like those in Catembe who live on the edge of the Indian Ocean overlooking a rare sea of promise, piety and prosperity in a disparaging aquatic world of dwindling natural resources.

Goans going fishing Do you see, Kindzu? [character of a black Mozambican]. My homeland lies on the other side. It’s right where the sun goes down. And he passed this thought on to me: we coastal people weren’t the inhabitants

Goans going fishing

59

of a continent but of an ocean. Surendra and I shared the same country: the Indian Ocean. It was as if in that immense sea, the threads of history untangled, ancient balls of thread where our blood had mingled together. That was why we lingered there to worship the sea: our common ancestors were there, floating without frontiers. We are of the same race, Kindzu: we are Indicans!25

The Goan fishermen of Catembe are a small, thriving Catholic community that lives on and by the water, the tradition of fishing passed down from one generation to another. More than one hundred years earlier, their forefathers had travelled by steamboat from another Portuguese colony (Goa) located across the Indian Ocean to arrive in what was then called Portuguese East Africa, with the hope of starting over and improving their lives even as their mainstay remained fishing. With the end of Portuguese colonialism in 1975 and in the face of a strong ‘Portuguese Indian legacy’ left over by a shared history of trade and labour since the fifteenth century,26 many of these Goans chose to stay in the new Mozambique, reinforcing the fact that the small strip of land located across the bay from Maputo was indeed home.27 Their diasporic imaginings, in turn, provide an interesting case study for better understanding the wide range of postcolonialisms currently operating in the Indian Ocean beyond the strict and narrow confines of anti-colonial nationalism.28 Thus, even as the individual reasons for mobility and movement will never be fully known in the Catembe case, there was, however, an economic imperative that underlay this larger migration pattern. Specifically, this fishing community is the product of a mass migration out of Portuguese India that occurred in the late 1800s due to its rapidly declining colonial status. One segment of its converted Roman Catholic population moved to nearby British India (and some then onto British East Africa, a topic that in itself needs to be researched more thoroughly).29 Another segment travelled further afield to Portuguese Mozambique, precisely because it was easily accessible by way of the Indian Ocean but mostly for reasons of language, culture and religion, a topic I have addressed in Chapter 3. One group of Goans settled in the port city of Beira, a second in (central) Inhambane Province and, finally, a third in Lourenço Marques, the then-bustling capital of Portuguese Mozambique.30 This last group of immigrants included a steady stream of fishermen who decided to settle down on a small sliver of land across the bay in Catembe, precisely because of its ideal location abreast of the water. Here they made a quiet life for themselves – engaged in small-scale artisanal fishing until the mid-twentieth century; their greatest assets were their accumulated knowledge about ‘fish, fish

60

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

habits, waves, currents, and stars’ that, through generations of learning by doing, they handed down to the next generation of Goan fishing folk.31 It was only after colonial independence (1975) and in the aftermath of civil war (1980–92) that the larger Goan community of Mozambique dwindled in numbers, as many decided to return to either Goa or Portugal, depending on (historical) familial ties, economic livelihoods and postcolonial politics, themes explored in other chapters. Yet many Goans chose to remain in what Ho refers to as the ‘society of the absent’,32 precisely because they now identified themselves as Mozambican. Many of the Catembe Goan fishermen whose lives I glimpsed ever so briefly on these visits were motivated to stay by these same ideological reasons and by the fact that they benefited directly from Mozambique’s expanding prawn industry in the face of decolonization. With dramatic advances in fishing technology from the 1960s onwards, including the use of nylon nets over cotton or coir ones, the switch to boats with inboard motors and, finally, the adoption of freezing technologies which allowed for large-scale exportation to Japan, Europe and North America,33 small-scale artisanal fishing in Mozambique was rapidly replaced with a large-scale prawn industry that was mostly owned and managed by Portuguese companies and often with foreign investment.34 What had once been used as a fertilizer in India – prawns – now became a highly prized commodity (with ‘pink gold’ prawns achieving the highest commodity value among them) in a relatively new industry, earning high export prices on the global market.35 With this transformation came dramatic changes for those dependent on artisanal fishing for their livelihoods. Goan crew members were favoured employees on these Portuguese trawlers precisely because they had historically been seen as the ‘hyphen between Europeans and Africans’36; prawn farming provided them the potential to earn much higher wages than was possible through local fishing.37 This development follows the earlier pattern, outlined by Michael Pearson for Indian Ocean fishing during the colonial period, where traditional fishermen were often undermined by Western intrusion and colonial ownership.38 At the end of colonization in 1975, many Portuguese owners left Mozambique and bequeathed their trawlers to their favoured crew members, the Goans.39 Once again, this second period very much follows an Indian Ocean pattern of fishing rights outlined by Pearson that often took place in the wake of decolonization and independence wherein indigenous enterprise was explicitly promoted.40 Recent years have seen a slow return of Goans from Portugal to Catembe, motivated both by economic and ideological41 reasons as well as by the fact that Catembe port still acts as a ‘hinge’ to connect different maritime

Goans going fishing

61

areas,42 with much potential for growth. Yet their movements also follow exactly what Pearson sets out as the three broad periods in the modern history of Indian Ocean fishing: the colonial, the period of decolonization and the postcolonial. These Goan fishing folk are currently experiencing the third phase, that of the last twenty years, when an increasingly integrated world economy has impacted in a deleterious fashion on their nascent industry.43 Yet despite these harsh circumstances, they continue to work as fishermen and aspire to more for themselves. The Catembe Goan community I witnessed in 2009 is a vibrant one, numbering approximately one hundred families. As a diasporic minority group within Mozambique, its members are very dependent on one another, retaining and renewing their sense of cultural and community ties through the feast day celebration of São Pedro. The annual event functions at another important level too, for the community members are just as dependent on the Indian Ocean for their livelihoods. Here ritual works to enhance community governmental structures such that its members are able to cooperate in their working lives as fishermen, stay linked to larger regulatory bodies (such as the IOFC), and follow strict rules and hierarchies at sea. The fishermen have to carry over values of trust, reciprocity, friendship and competence from life to work,44 and these values have to be renewed, in order to both ensure the safety and security of all crew and enhance the chances of a high(er) prawn yield, each time a vessel quietly slips out into the Indian Ocean. In other words, Catholic feast day rituals are crucial for both promoting and maintaining shared sentiments among members of this close-knit community.

Literary and photographic interventions: text and image Couto and Rangel The sea: why did I seek comfort in it when up until then its waters had offered me only suffering? Perhaps there, in the midst of such an extensive drought, the sea was the source that brought and took away my dreams.45

In previous sections, I have discussed how the Goan fishermen of Catembe are in some sense the product of deep historical geographies operating in the Indian Ocean. At the same time, Goan culture (and its representation to themselves and others) also defines them in the everydayness of their littoral lives. However, since culture itself continues to be an elusive category to comprehend, let alone through one single medium, I want to turn, however briefly, to the power of

62

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

text and image combined as an ‘expressive’ form of cultural intervention46 in the worldings of specific oceanic geographies. Here I have particular Mozambican texts and images in mind: the prose of Mia Couto and the photographs of Ricardo Rangel capture or ‘intervene’, in some sense, in the complex culture of these Goan fishermen, by way of suggesting that inchoate dreams, imaginaries and harsh realities can sit side by side. The much-acclaimed Mozambican author Mia Couto is known mostly for his novels. It is his thoughtful and disquieting way of understanding the lives of Mozambique’s fishermen that I want to focus on here. I juxtapose his compelling descriptions with the beautiful yet stark blackand-white images that celebrated Mozambican photographer Ricardo Rangel took of the Goan fishing community of Catembe at the eve of decolonization in the 1970s, an eyewitness to their waning days as artisanal fishing folk. While Couto and Rangel are both well-known postcolonial figures in Mozambican society, each also reflects Mozambican society in all its cultural complexities. I not only briefly introduce each of them here but also draw on them to varying degrees in additional chapters of the book (Couto in Chapters 3, 4 and 7; Rangel in Chapters 2, 4, 5 and 7). Couto, born in 1955 in Beira to Portuguese settler parents, came of age in the shadow of decolonization and civil war. He grew up on the streets of Mozambique’s second largest city (his descriptions of the city of his birth are featured in Chapter 7), moved to Maputo to study medicine, joined FRELIMO and became a journalist shortly after independence. He returned to his studies twelve years after leaving them, completing a degree in ecology from Eduardo Mondlane University in 1989 before becoming a lecturer at the same university and opening up an ecological consulting agency soon thereafter.47 Even as he remained committed to both journalism and environmental work, writing political and social commentary for local and international newspapers, it was his fiction that has garnered attention, won him prestigious writing prizes and fashioned him into Mozambique’s foremost prose writer. Couto is the prolific author of ten novels, short stories and some poetry, with his most famous works – Vozes Anoitecidas (1986), Cada Homem é uma Raça (1990), Terra Sonambula (1992) and A Varanda do Frangipani (1996) – translated into numerous languages from Portuguese. As a writer in search of the ‘ambiguity of identity’,48 he has been famously described as a European with an African voice.49 It is his ability to capture the lives of ordinary Mozambican men and women that makes his prose so seductively compelling. By ‘shifting the axes of the world’50 along the way, his words suggest the power of literature and language to access culture as well as the social imaginary of a modern nation

Goans going fishing

63

state in a state of becoming. That his protagonists are generally the marginal of Mozambican society – fishermen are featured just as widows, orphans just as cowherds – shows his ability to provide a ‘complex yet unsentimental view of those caught in the grip of poverty’.51 As Patrick Chabal writes, Couto’s characters are ‘uncannily familiar, they appear plausible but are as magical or fantastic as fairy tales. They are rooted in everyday life but they tap the Mozambican African collective unconscious’.52 For Couto, life is full of despair, particularly in a wartorn country like Mozambique that is very much imbedded in the process of constructing itself as a modern, postcolonial state. However, it is through the act of writing (and by engaging literary tools such as irony and humour) that he rejects total hopelessness, suggesting instead that where there is dreaming, there is freedom.53 Yet it is Couto’s recurring theme of linking dreams to water that works to ‘restore the flow between the unconscious and conscious realms of his characters’.54 For Couto, like many Portuguese writers before him, the sea is history, for both Mozambique’s blood and dreams flow through it.55 At the same time, the sea intimates a ‘store for dreams amidst an unpalatable reality’.56 This postcolonial writer repeatedly draws on the symbolism of water to suggest that ‘the deep’ is both a cultural universal – a repository of human mythological and historical experience – and, at the same time, particular to Lusophone Africa.57 Water is everywhere, without beginning or end, just as writing is: both are defined by ‘ambiguity over definiteness, liquidity over rigidity’.58 Thus, according to Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘through an exploration of the absurd complexities of postcolonial life, [Couto’s stories] offer us novel configurations of the beautiful and the ugly’.59 Some of Couto’s critics would argue that his place within the canon of Mozambique’s literary tradition is not without controversy. While lauding many aspects of Couto’s writing, Philip Rothwell argues that Couto has ‘become the representative of an incipient African national culture for a predominately Western audience’.60 He suggests that Couto’s readership and thus intended audience is largely from outside Mozambique, a fact that can be interpreted in multiple ways. The Angolan writer Sousa Jamba suggests that ‘although Couto often invokes the horrors of the war which gripped his country from 1975 to 1992, [he] ignores the complex reasons behind the atrocities’.61 Others, in contrast, would say that Couto’s prestige in Europe has opened up a space for other Mozambicans to have their work published.62 More recently, Sean Rogers forcefully argues that ‘writing is a form of magic that is closely tied to [Couto’s] notion of the dream’63 and that the act of writing can actively be involved in the ‘attempted building of a better Mozambique’.64 In other words,

64

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Couto’s work is ‘more than just a response to a deeply troubled Mozambican history, it is a response to the manner in which this history has been previously written’.65 Ricardo Rangel offers a photographic version of the beautiful and the ugly of Mozambique-ness as they sit uneasily side by side.66 Born in 1924 in Lourenço Marques to parents of mixed Greek, African and Chinese descent, he was raised in a generation where Portuguese colonial racism was the norm.67 Rangel slowly moved up the ranks to become the nation’s leading photojournalist with work spanning over six decades (1950–2009). He was the first ‘coloured’ photographer to be employed by many of Mozambique’s major newspapers in Lourenço Marques (Notícias de Tarde, Notícias, A Tribuna) and Beira (Voz Africana, Diário de Mocambique, Notícias de Beira), before founding a political weekly magazine called Tempo in 1970 together with four other photojournalists. Tempo was Mozambique’s first magazine to include colour images and the only publication that stood in opposition to the propaganda of the Portuguese colonial state. A jazz enthusiast,68 Rangel has contributed some of Mozambique’s most iconic images – of high colonial society, prostitutes on the streets of Beira, interracial dancing between South African men and black Mozambican women at nightclubs, the first pictures of Samora Machel on his momentous march into then-Lourenço Marques to take up the presidency in 1975 – even as many of his colonial-era photos were banned or destroyed by the Portuguese censors.69 Bronwyn Law-Viljoen argues that ‘Rangel’s photography was deliberately rooted in his home country – in whose cultural life he played a pivotal role. It is this commitment to a particular place that gives Rangel’s work its emotional depth and its political and human importance.’70 Photography historian Patricia Hayes notes that ‘according to Luis Bernardo Honwana [Mozambican writer and Rangel’s friend and biographer] Ricardo Rangel’s photographs brought the attention of the censor to the potential of the image itself, as opposed to text, for the first time’.71 I believe that the visual depth of Rangel’s photographs lies in his uncanny ability to confound that which is in front of him: his lens potentially upends Portuguese colonialism in a disquieting manner. Rangel must also be viewed as a historical figure working in certain spaces and places and under certain political conditions – in which access or privilege was sometimes allowed and at other times denied by the colonial censors – wherein he brought his ethnographic sensibilities to bear on the events he chose to act upon and the photographs he chose to produce. As Hayes puts it: ‘in the sense of the term aesthetic as a state of feeling, then it is not simply the boundaries of the sayable and visible that are being stretched by Rangel,

Goans going fishing

65

but the boundaries of affect’.72 José Luís Cabaço writes: ‘[Rangel’s] portrait of colonialism is eternal because, in the image of the injustices perpetrated by that inhumane and cruel regime … [he] show[s] us the inhumanity and cruelty of all unjust regimes.’73 More generally, Rangel’s photographs hold the potential for future generations of Mozambicans to look critically at Portuguese colonialism. This theme of affect will flow through all subsequent chapters that feature Rangel’s photographs. I first met Rangel in November 2008 at the Centro de Documentação e Formação Fotográfica, the small photography centre in downtown Maputo established by the postcolonial state to promote the art and practice of photography in Mozambique through exhibits, workshops and symposia.74 As one of its founding members, Rangel was appointed to run this thriving centre in 1983.75 Six months earlier, in April 2008, I had stumbled across a small exhibit of his images, titled Photographs by Ricardo Rangel and Mauro Pinto, shown in the Afronova Gallery in Newtown, the arts precinct of Johannesburg – the city in which I live and work. From the few iconic images of his that were on display, I sensed that there was more to be seen and so went in search of this famous photographer whom I had never heard of before and whose images made such an impression on me. Numerous emails and phone calls later, I found myself sitting across from Rangel, surrounded by stacks of boxes of Ilford-manufactured photographic paper, asking him about his life in photography.76 We spoke briefly about my new research project in Mozambique after having worked extensively in another former Portuguese colony, Goa (India), and my interest in making connections between these two seemingly disparate Lusophone worlds. The slight figure with the piercing black eyes and mop of grey hair in front of me was initially reserved, polite and short with his responses to my many questions. Eventually, I sensed a change in his body language as he began to take an interest in what I was trying to describe, albeit in an inchoate manner. We slowly wove a dialectical conversation around history, colonialism and photography. This was politics as a form of interpersonal experience taking place between two people invested in how to think and write about Mozambique’s past, a conversation not about looking but rather about ways of seeing,77 where his images suggest how I want to write through visuality to access historical understanding from his positionality as an insider, from the innards of colonialism. It is a conversation that resonates with Hayes’s description of Rangel’s photographs: ‘By stretching the picture to include what is uncomfortable, he was stretching the emotions of those who looked.’78

66

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

When I mentioned several themes of photographs that I was particularly interested in, Rangel told me to come back the next day while he did some digging around in his photographic archives. What he showed me on my next visit was a remarkable set of photographs that he had taken in the early 1970s of the Goan Catembe fishermen, a quiet community that lived on the other side of the bay from Lourenço Marques, accessible at the time only by ferry.79 My position and positionality in viewing these photographs invoke for me Ariella Azoulay’s powerful concept of the ‘civil contract of photography’, wherein the photographer, photographed subject and viewer become ethically and inextricably bound in specific moments of layered envisioning.80 I came away with a sense of my own responsibility towards what I was seeing and what was possible for me to say and write about Rangel’s images. It is the hint of what lies beneath the surface of the Indian Ocean, hidden from view – of the seemingly ordinary moments in the lives of a very ordinary group of fishermen – that Rangel captures in his images of the Catembe Goan fishermen.81 Da Silva’s description of Rangel is a fitting one: This poet of images, by retaining his/our time, shortens the distance between the observer and the observed, or makes it disappear. In this illumination of lives he shows us that when that distance is broken, the other is us, and so we cannot judge it, but rather understand it, and above all love it in the due human and spiritual dimension beyond the black and white of the photographic paper.82

That Rangel’s second wife had been part Goan herself might have played a role in piquing his interest in this small diasporic community on the other side of the Lourenço Marques Bay. Hayes, who interviewed Rangel over an extended period during his lifetime, has commented on several occasions that Rangel saw himself as occupying a similar stratum in Mozambican society as the Goans, one between the white Portuguese and the black Africans.83 Was it perhaps a mirrored sense of self that he saw in this tight-knit community of Goans that motivated him to visit Catembe one day, his camera by his side? As Elizabeth Edwards argues, ‘there are components of culture which require a more evocative, multidimensional, even ambiguous expression than the realist paradigm permits. Photography looks deeply into the nature of things’.84 It is not only the photographer’s politics in capturing these images on film that shows the cultural complexities of such littoral lives, it is also his choice of lighting, settings and personalities. The power of his images lies in his ability to capture intimacies: the curl of a fisherman’s moustache, a grin, the deep look of hunger in the eyes of a child, the beauty of a fishing net undulating in the wind. It is moments, inscribed

Goans going fishing

67

by Rangel on film, that ‘say something that hasn’t been said’.85 And similar to Couto whose prose I hear echoing in the background as yet another form of ‘lyrical expressiveness’,86 Rangel’s photographs maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. Both Couto’s words and Rangel’s images ‘work like memory, crisscrossed by dreams and detours’87 and intervene to suggest the contours of individual lives, experiences and beliefs. Thus, in the following sections, I explore the culture of these fishing folk through three distinct mediums: Couto’s evocative descriptions, my own ethnographic ruminations on the feast day of São Pedro and, finally, Rangel’s photographs, in that very order, so as to unravel the deeper meanings and metaphors of cultural being for these Goan fishermen. These three forms of the ‘expressive’ then connect present generations of fishermen to past ones and to the (important) figure of the fisherman in Mozambican society more generally. Together, the intertwining of the lyrical (Couto), the visceral (ethnography) and the visual (Rangel) offers a powerful lens onto the working lives of these Goan fishermen who reside very much on the edge of the Indian Ocean, looking not only outward across the horizon but also to the hinterland, that is, to a rapidly changing Mozambican society.

(Ethnographic) notes on a ritual Taking the ferry Every time I take to a boat, I am visited by questions which don’t belong to earthbound doubts: is a wave a piece of surplus sea water? Or is it that the sea doesn’t know its place? And the creatures of the water, do they shed tears? And if so, how does a fish’s sadness drain away?88

I find myself crossing the Maputo bay by ferry on a sunny June winter’s day, a motley crew of people on board. As I watch a wealthy Capetonian family take photographs of Maputo’s rapidly receding skyline, I also take in the rest of my seaboard companions: two Chinese labourers in paint-splattered clothing, an Indian diasporic couple, tourists from the UK or Australia (I am not sure which) seemingly visiting Mozambique for the first time, a Goan mother (whom I jokingly refer to as ‘Madam’ and whom, unbeknownst to me at the time, I would continue to see over the next two days) and her three children piled into the back of an SUV, an African childminder in tow and, finally, several locals on their way to work. It strikes me that this microcosm of sociality on board represents the new Mozambique – postcolonial, post-independence, post-socialist and post-war.

68

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

My mind begins to drift over the lull of the motorized engine, in tune with the waves that slap the sides of the ramshackle ferry boat, reflecting both on how far I have travelled since my fieldwork in Goa in 2000 and on what had made these Goan fishermen travel so far in search of their livelihoods, by way of the Indian Ocean, more than one hundred years earlier. Was it purely the romance and exoticism of seaboard travel? Surely the ocean was more dystopic in reality, a place of hardship and extremes of life and death, for these working fishermen. Or was it the idea of having no choice but to accept an untimely fate as a ‘mariner of dry land’, or of ‘unliquid exile’, as Mia Couto describes for his fictional character, a blind Mozambican fisherman by the name of Maneca Mazembe?89 Is this, then, what motivated these Goan fishermen to search for other liquid opportunities elsewhere? As the ferryboat docks at the small port of Catembe twenty minutes later, I suddenly remember Diogo. Earlier the Capetonian father had asked me if I knew of a good restaurant to eat – he didn’t want a tourist place, he had said; he wanted something local, ‘more authentic’.90 I couldn’t help but wonder why he thought that, of all the persons on board, I would be the one to know of such a place. It wasn’t until we docked that I remembered this former Goan fisherman. I rushed over to the Capetonian family as they were getting ready to disembark, smiled and said that I knew the perfect place: Diogo’s, the best prawns in town. The aesthetic details of the two following images suggest the contours of the daily rhythms of the Goan fisherfolk as seen through Rangel’s social lens. The first image is taken from the ferry docks of Lourenço Marques looking towards Catembe, where a set of wooden houses on stilts is on view (Figure 4.1). There

Figure 4.1 Ricardo Rangel, Catembe series 1.

Goans going fishing

69

Figure 4.2 Ricardo Rangel, Catembe series 2.

is a row of them – I count eleven inside the frame. The makeshift buildings are probably home for these fishermen, their resting place after a long day of fishing the Indian Ocean. The second photograph is taken in the opposite direction, looking from these makeshift homes towards the Lourenço Marques skyline with its impressive array of high-rise buildings. A laundry line of billowing clothes carries a suggestion of the kinds of families living inside (Figure 4.2).

Waiting for the wind Are you in trouble friend? The fisherman replied: The wind isn’t working. Someone on deck laughed, and he believing he hadn’t explained properly, corrected himself: It’s the wind that isn’t providing much today.91

I had met Diogo on my previous visit to Catembe in November 2008. He had generously taken me on a short drive through Catembe, telling me about his own family’s history. A third-generation Goan Mozambican, he was head of the Goan Catembe Fisherman’s Society, a community-based organization similar to many others found throughout the (fishing) world that look after the rights and obligations of local fishermen.92 We had also casually talked about Ricardo Rangel’s photographs of his forefathers, for I had just met the engaging photographer the day before at his centre in downtown Maputo. As we scanned through some of Rangel’s images – the photographer had generously allowed me to take quick snaps of them with my digital camera – Diogo told me what had happened to some of the fishermen featured in them. Most of them were

70

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

familiar to him, and, as he reminisced, he commented on how one had died after a long and full life at the sea and another had returned to Portugal at the end of colonialism. He laughed when he told me that he was in fact married to the granddaughter of a third one.93 We ended my tour of Catembe, appropriately enough, at the restaurant his father had started and named after his son. I indulged in his now famous prawns and talked to his daughter who had just returned from studying tourism in London.94 It is six months later, and Diogo assures me over the phone that the feast of São Pedro would indeed be taking place this year on June 29. I arrive in Catembe one day early, as he had suggested, and I am immediately shown to the Club Goesa, as it is called.95 It is a building located very close to the port, with evocative images of the sea painted on its interior walls, seashells and seahorses depicted in hues of turquoise blue and seaweed green, to echo the colours of the nearby ocean. The next few hours are a blur of faces, names and food. I nibble on a Goan prawn curry and rice, an all-familiar staple to me by now. It has been casually laid out on a table for everyone to help themselves. I speak with Miguel, Sebastião, Diogo and Pedro about their fishing lives that have traversed Goa, Mozambique and Portugal many times over, commercial prawn fishing being the mainstay of all these husbands and fathers. While Miguel had quietly worked his way up and now owns a fleet of fifteen boats, Pedro is a more recent member of the fold. He was born in Goa, raised first in Mozambique and, after independence, in Portugal, and is newly returned to Catembe, a yearning for the sensual memories of his Mozambican childhood in tow.96 While I get a real sense that more than just a few of the fishermen I encounter are doing quite well financially, I observe that part of the postcolonial (and post-war) discourse in Mozambique, and understandably so, is to keep one’s wealth a private matter – it is interior as opposed to the exterior spaces that tend to reflect the richness (not only in a material sense) of their fishing lives. Diogo tells me how the feast of São Pedro is a very important celebration for them, as they are carrying on a tradition of venerating saints that is linked to specific villages back home, even if this same practice has been mostly lost in Goa today.97 Yet Pedro immediately corrects him, saying that it is still celebrated in Vasco and Margao, two port cities in Goa. Perhaps this ritualized activity has thus not completely disappeared, even as it takes place on a smaller scale in its original homeland. I realize in that moment that I am perhaps not the only one romanticizing Goa and its lost aquatic traditions: fishing is on one level a livelihood for these men; it is also a means for reconnecting with their

Goans going fishing

71

Goan past(s), less as something finished but rather as something ongoing. Each time they sensorially and corporeally engage in rituals tied to fishing, they also enfold that past into the present moment, for themselves and for future generations of Goan Mozambicans.98 By partaking in the romanticization of their own livelihoods – it is part and parcel of what keeps them continuing this tradition of their forefathers – fishing is very much kept alive which, in turn, motivates them to pass its (valued and valuable) rites of passage on to their children, future generations of fishing folk. Meanwhile, in the background I see wives and mothers talking, laughing and cooking together in the industrialsized kitchen, marking a strict gendered division of labour that is often found in fishing communities like this one.99 While the smells of freshly cooked dishes waft across the table, children play out front, occasionally coming in for short breaks, which invariably include sampling some of the food laid out for all of us to indulge in. The next morning is a crisp and sunny but windless day. I find myself once again near the Club Goesa house, only this time outside, impatient as everyone else. The crowd grows with each passing hour. We are anxiously awaiting the wind, for it to come and for the boats to turn the corner of the port in order to make their yearly voyage to the Catembe docks. Here they are to be festooned for the maritime parade later on in the day as part of the festivities of São Pedro. It is a bad omen, I think, not only for myself but for Diogo, for the people of Catembe and for the coming fishing season, the nonevent of the ritual just as significant for them.100 However, as Diogo assures me over the next three hours, the wind will come, buttressing the boats in the process. As people bustle about, coming and going, and each returns dressed in his or her Sunday best, I cannot but help thinking that something surely is about to happen. These images are intimate portraits of four different Goan personalities. An elderly man looks weathered from a life at sea (Figure 4.3), and another sports a wildly styled curled moustache as he sits on a veranda, laundry behind him once again billowing in the wind (Figure 4.4). A third one holds the end of a tangled fishing line and is at the water’s edge, seemingly turning his head towards Rangel’s camera lens (Figure 4.5). Yet another is taking a stroll carrying a large fish in one hand with supplies balanced on his opposite shoulder (Figure 4.6). All four men hold Rangel’s steady gaze. Photographs of framed pictures of family members, wooden houses on stilts in the distance and the Lourenço Marques skyline act as props to help set the scenes.

72

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Figure 4.3 Ricardo Rangel, Catembe series 3.

Figure 4.4 Ricardo Rangel, Catembe series 4.

Goans going fishing

Figure 4.5 Ricardo Rangel, Catembe series 5.

Figure 4.6 Ricardo Rangel, Catembe series 6.

73

74

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Performing the Catholic mass And with such liquid steps, he [the blind fisherman] appeared to be seeking the wholeness of his face among the many generations of waves.101

We had now moved our windless vigil to a point further down the beach, directly outside a building that was busily being transformed into a churchcum-banquet hall, all in one. My attention is no longer on the aged, retired boats that are pulled up on the sandy beach, dotting the landscape in front of me against the Maputo’s skyline. Instead, it is focused on a band of uniformed musicians, growing larger in size and sound as its members make their way towards us, still waiting. They are wearing maroon- and cream-coloured uniforms decorated with brass buttons, and thick black Wellington boots on their feet. They are playing a range of musical instruments – I can see trombones, saxophones and horns. As they take a break between musical performances, I find out that they are members of a Catholic religious order based in Maputo, the Os Cavalos de Virgem (Horses of the Virgin) as they are called in Portuguese. They have been paid out of the coffers of the Catembe Goan Fishermen’s Society to perform at the feast of São Pedro. They travelled to Catembe by ferry from Maputo, their instruments starboard. The musicians start up again as a small trickle of boats finally appears on the bay, negotiating the corner of the port. From where I stand, I am able to count six boats in total – maybe there is hope after all. Diogo suddenly appears from nowhere, a large decorated wreath of fresh flowers taking up the space of the boot of his pick-up truck. He smiles and shows me the T-shirt he is wearing underneath his blue button-down shirt: it features a photo decal of his grandson, born appropriately enough on São Pedro’s day exactly one year ago. We soon take our seats inside the hall – the place has been transformed from a large but sparse shack into a full-blown temporary church, religious accoutrements included. An altar dedicated to São Pedro has been set up, the rows of blue and white plastic chairs are fully occupied, and printed photocopies of the sermons have been handed out, an image of São Pedro himself adorning the cover. Carefully laid out on a white tablecloth-covered table are four items: a plate of cooked prawns, a bottle of Portuguese red wine, a bowl of fruits and a plate of Indian samosas – these food items representing a uniquely Goan culture in material form. Behind this table are seated the most prestigious members of Catembe’s fishing society, Diogo in the lead position. What follows is an hour-long Catholic mass,102 officiated by two Goan priests, during which the food items are carefully carried up

Goans going fishing

75

to the altar by important members of the community. Hymns are sung in both Portuguese and Konkani (a Goan local language). One priest invokes the nearby waters to safeguard the community, reminding his audience that ‘we are all on the same boat, living on the ocean’. A blessing for the coming fishing season is then performed, while everyone prays silently, eyes closed. The ceremony ends with the calling out of the names of all those Goans of the community who had died, generations of them, from the long dead to the newly dead. I count at least sixty names being read out. We then quietly file out of the makeshift church hall as the music band resumes its position and starts playing again. The seventh photograph (Figure 4.7) in this series on Catembe is a long panoramic view of wooden homes – I can see the outlines of their balconies and windows, and the wiring that brings them electricity. A dirt road leads off into the distance. A wooden cross is the central feature of the eighth photograph (Figure 4.8): perhaps a monument to a fallen fisherman, maybe he died at sea? The cross is surrounded by overgrown weeds – it does not seem to have been carefully maintained by those whose loved one is buried underneath. I see the now-familiar backdrop of Lourenço Marques, the whiteness of its buildings standing in contrast to the blackness of the cross.

Figure 4.7 Ricardo Rangel, Catembe series 7.

76

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Figure 4.8 Ricardo Rangel, Catembe series 8.

Blessing the boats The boat I travelled in had been blessed according to the usual ceremonies, and I had named it after my father: Taímo. Before its maiden voyage, I had regaled everybody with food and drink, and people had celebrated on top of the boat, as tradition demanded.103

We are a sizeable group by now, numbering close to seventy as we walk in a procession towards the much decorated boats that are now docked at the port, impatiently waiting for us to board. Diogo and the other men of the community carry the wreath dedicated to São Pedro, while the rest of us straggle behind. Once we reach the port, it is a mad scramble to fit onto the moored boats, many of them named after other male saints in the Catholic pantheon: St Anthony, St Mark, even a St Francis Xavier!104 Earlier Diogo assured me that he would save a space for me on the main vessel on which the dedication ceremony would take place. Once the procession of boats is out on the bay, the celebrations begin. The mood has now shifted from solemn to quite festive. I am offered a stiff drink, an abundant supply of Indian samosas is passed around and the musicians take up their instruments. As soon as we reach a middle point in the waters of the bay, we drop anchor and the wreath dedicated to São Pedro is quietly

Goans going fishing

77

Figure 4.9 Ricardo Rangel, Catembe series 9.

slipped into the water as a visiting Catholic priest from Argentina is given the honour of officiating the ceremony. The annual ceremony of blessing the boats is soon reaching its end. We partake in a moment of silence as we watch the wreath silently drift away – it will no doubt be caught in the waves and find a watery grave. Once again, São Pedro has given his consecration for what Couto describes as a ‘generous sea’ and a fruitful coming year of ‘fat and silvery’ fish.105 We head back towards Catembe, more drinks at hand, a little quieter now as we watch some of the boats playfully compete with each other to arrive first back at the port. The ninth image is one of two favourites from this series, for it hints at the daily cycles of a Goan fisherman in Catembe: the early morning light is rising in the distance and fishing nets are undulating in the wind, about to be cast out to sea in preparation for the day’s catch (Figure 4.9). The background is dotted with barebone fishing boats near the shore, waiting for their turn to go out. Again, a hazy Lourenço Marques forms the backdrop.

Eating prawns I took a deep breath as I gazed at the wide expanse of blue. That was my meal of peace and quiet. If only I could be granted the favour of being able to taste such languor.106

78

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

We returned to the place whence we had come, enlivened by the smells and textures of the ocean, only now the church has been transformed into a magnificent food hall. Plates heaped with prawns, and more prawns – boiled, fried, battered, in all sizes and varieties – had been beautifully laid out on the table alongside rice, vegetables and more samosas. A large group of Goan wives and mothers had stayed behind during the maritime procession to prepare this abundance.107 As I stand in line to fill my plate, I see that everyone appears more relaxed, ready to share in conversation and food. Diogo is laughing as he speaks with some of the musicians as they too wait in line, all of us eyeing the heaping platters of food. Children are running about, and young mothers are preparing plates for the elderly members of the community. I eat prawn after prawn, savouring each one. I overhear two elderly women sitting in the corner, dressed in black and lace, speaking quietly in Konkani, and eating bebinca,108 a speciality dessert from Goa that I had slowly come to appreciate when living there ten years earlier. I remember that it is a food typically served at special occasions as it is labour-intensive to make, or at least it was back in the old days. The image immediately takes me back to my time in Goa, when I would see groups of Goan widows, dressed in Catholic black, congregating at the end of a meal or church service, sharing a quiet conversation while lingering over the last spoonful of dessert.109 It strikes me then that it is through food and drink, that is, tastes and smells – prawns, rice, samosas, bebinca and red wine, in this case – that bodily memories are being recreated in order to pass them down onto future generations of Goan Mozambicans.110 These ritual acts, which also include certain signifiers of cultural authenticity (here food, dress, religion and language), then are central to connecting memory to cultural and social reproduction in the face of multiple experiences – that of migration, separation and reunion, and of strain (physical, financial and emotional). Thus, it was not only a knowledge of fishing that their ancestors had carried with them when crossing the Indian Ocean. It is aquatic traditions like the feast of São Pedro that unify this continually diasporic and dynamic community,111 that serve to remind its members not only of where they had come from and how far they had travelled, but also of where they were going and what they felt along the way. Perhaps it is also the one day in the year that allows them to step out of their regulatory (and regulating) lives as fishermen: a moment to reckon hope with despair, to reconcile past, present and future, a day specially designed for rest and solace. In the way that ‘cod, God, country and family’ are symbolically unified for the Portuguese cod fishermen of New England, as anthropologist Sally Cole describes them, it is ‘prawn, God, country and family’ that are being represented here.112

Goans going fishing

79

As day turns to night and we sit in a circle sipping freshly made steaming-hot chá,113 a young Goan Mozambican woman named Diana gives a slide presentation on her recent trip to India, including Goa, a visit that had been sponsored by a Goa-based organization that aims to bring diasporic Goans together not only to experience Goa first-hand and celebrate their own distinct heritage but also for them to exchange their diverse stories of globalized Goan-ness.114 The evening ends with a small prayer and the lighting of candles at the altar of São Pedro. As I bend down to light my own candle, I cannot help but think that my romance with the Indian Ocean and its Goan fishing folk has not faded away; rather, it has added layers, textures and nuances and is still very much alive for many others beside me, writers (Mia Couto), photographers (Ricardo Rangel) and fishermen (Diogo) alike. For us fishing is more than a profession but instead very much a way of being in the world. As I quietly walk back to my hotel in the dark and the flickering lights of the church building slowly recede into the background, I am reminded once again of Couto’s words, this time from the short story entitled ‘Waves Writing Stories’: ‘On the waves, a thousand stories are written. Of the sort that lull children throughout the world to sleep.’115 The second of my two favourite Rangel photographs is the last one in the series. It is taken from the inside of one of the makeshift homes on stilts (Figure 4.10). Two doll-like babies crawl on the floor; it seems that one has only

Figure 4.10 Ricardo Rangel, Catembe series 10.

80

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

recently learned to sit up. Another slightly older toddler leans against the legs of a woman, most likely her mother, whose appearance is washed out by the incoming sunlight. A man sits on a bed (perhaps the father of the children?); another man’s legs and feet (including a set of polished shoes) are partly visible on the left side of the frame. Or is he the father and husband whom I keep wanting to identify? It is a fragile moment of a family caught in a moment of living. In this photograph, Rangel says so much, not only about the life cycles of this fishing community living on the edge of the Indian Ocean but also about their sense of place, identity and home at a time when Mozambique was about to witness its own internal colonial demise.

C hapte r 5

Dispossessing things

Introduction As I have suggested in previous chapters, European decolonization was always a messy affair, both for those in power and those dispossessed of it. Very often, it resulted in the mass migration of a large portion of the colonial population, suddenly and abruptly. In this fifth chapter, I approach the twined last days, in 1975, of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique and Angola from the perspective of those who witnessed it on the ground. Here I build upon my conceptualization of decolonization as a series of overlapping ethnographic moments, suggesting that (in this case) its postcolonial dissonances reverberated across multiple oceans (Indian and Atlantic) and national boundaries (Mozambique, Angola, South Africa and Portugal) amid acts of ordinary affect on the part of its outgoing citizens, many with little choice in the matter. I focus on small physical acts of departure recorded by three participant observers (two in Lourenço Marques, one in Luanda), their emphasis on things highly significant. My interest in the materiality of these objects will suggest much about (colonial) loss, entitlement and respectability that are as much a part of the processes of decolonization. Our first eyewitness1 is the late Mozambican photojournalist Ricardo Rangel, whose images featured in previous chapters (Chapters 2 and 4). Just as he captured the Goan fishing community of Catembe on the cusp of decolonization, he also visually documented the last days of Portuguese colonial rule in the Mozambican capital city of Lourenço Marques (presentday Maputo). Included in this series are startling images of Portuguese citizens packing up house and home, with their most prized possessions in hand. It is his photographs that stand as testimony: the group of heavily armed, uniformed Portuguese soldiers stationed at the port city’s docks to ensure law and order among Portugal’s citizenry amid the chaos of decolonization;

82

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

the Portuguese Dona with her hair hastily tied up in a scarf, trying to decide which things are respectable enough for living in the metropole and, by implication, which are not; or cranes loading cars and boxes onto massive freight ships that are being readied to cross the Indian and Atlantic Oceans en route to Portugal. Our second eyewitness is Carlos Garçaõ.2 His is a vivid account, recorded in 1988 by oral historian Suzanne Gordon in Johannesburg. His sense of Mozambique’s impending lawlessness compelled him to leave the country during its last colonial days for apartheid South Africa. His casual descriptions tell of disquieting moments when a neighbour decides to destroy the plumbing of a house on the way out, or to pour cement down a private well, ensuring that no one else could possess what was once his alone – a sense of entitlement visible in these small territorial acts. But it is also Carlos’s disavowal of these feats in a reflective moment that give hope for postcolonial reparation and resistance. Our last eyewitness is the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński,3 who was reporting from Angola’s capital city of Luanda on the eve of its decolonization in June 1975, a historical process and ethnographic moment not only distinct from but also very much connected to what had happened in Mozambique, on the opposite, eastern side of Africa six months earlier. I read his evocative account, not one without controversy, as suggestive of a parallel process that had taken place in Lourenço Marques. Thus, it is his analogous description that stays with the reader – of the rotting garbage, the packs of starving stray dogs, the heaping piles of discarded objects that confront him as he makes his way through a deserted and desolate city; it is his long-winded description of a floating ‘city of crates’ that makes its way towards an unsuspecting Lisbon that suggests a ripple effect across oceanic terrains. Together these three complex testimonies (each contextualized in the following sections) complicate how we view decolonization from both a theoretical and a methodological standpoint: less as a brief and simple space in the ostensibly seamless transition from colony to something post and more as moments of ‘thick-description’4; a place where concepts of law and governance are translated across troubled land(s) and water(s); a site where one’s possessions come to stand in for idealized notions of entitlement, class and respectability, and resistance upon departure; and, finally, a location where individuals face new and unexpected forms of citizenry and belonging in the act of crossing the Indian and Atlantic oceans.

Dispossessing things

83

Writing about decolonization I have elaborated on the itinerant quality of Portuguese colonialism more generally in Chapter 2, suggesting that there was much movement over the longue durée by both colonizer and colonized between colonial outposts. Specifically, that the Portuguese colonial state was historically a highly mobile one also shaped the manner by which this pattern continued in its period of decolonization, with large numbers of its colonial population leaving not only for the metropole but also for other locations, just as the case of Carlos Garçaõ will demonstrate for South Africa. Moreover, I have also suggested that the lateness of Portuguese decolonization, particularly in Africa, and the perception of Portuguese ‘slowness or backwardness’ at not initiating the decolonization process sooner were both factors that shaped its contours in the postcolonial. Other features included not following the lead of other European powers in realizing that colonialism was no longer ethically acceptable in the new global world order of things and not appreciating decolonization as the next logical step in a moral shift in landscape. Thus, while the bulk of British and French Africa experienced decolonization processes throughout the 1960s, Portuguese Africa (Portugal’s ‘third empire’, as it was called)5 was dismantled only in 1975. As I have discussed in Chapter 2, this was due to multiple circumstances, including the ‘wars of liberation’ that were building up in Angola and Mozambique throughout the 1960s.6 Even as decolonization came about for these two colonies largely as a result of liberal changes in government that took place in Portugal, rather than as an agreedupon transfer of power negotiated peacefully, the backdrop of armed struggle (between colonizer and colonized) played a significant role in shaping the end of the colonial period and setting up Lourenço Marques and Luanda as chaotic and disruptive spaces.7 This particular historical context, in turn, both serves as a reminder that colonialism was, at a fundamental level, a form of possession8 and intimates the complicated politics of decolonization in Portuguese Africa, particularly the resoluteness of the state and its citizens who were caught up in the ‘sea change of empire’9 to hold onto their things in the face of sudden dispossession. The Portuguese colonial state in the face of decolonization is characterized here as highly mobile and largely absent, as will become evident in eyewitness accounts that speak to the day-to-day politics of dismantling a well-worn state apparatus. Thus, even as Portugal functioned at a minimum level of governmentality, concerned with what Foucault calls the ‘conduct of conduct’,10

84

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

maintaining a moral obligation to get its citizens out as safely, orderly and quickly as possible, it was also already a colonial state poised to leave, its departure as sudden and abrupt as its process of decolonization. It is these circumstances, I suggest, that help us to understand how Mozambique and Angola’s ‘Portuguese’11 citizens were given immediate ‘refugee’ status and told to pack up their things.12 Interestingly, the Portuguese military, a large number of conscripted soldiers already stationed in both Angola and Mozambique due to the ongoing wars of liberation detailed in Chapter 2, functioned as representatives of sorts of this colonial state on the move.13 They will also come up in the heightened eyewitness narratives of ‘white flight’, as upholding law and order (but also abusing their power) in the face of colonialism’s sudden demise and in the production of a community of retornados (the returned ones).14 Less the focus of this chapter is the other side of the coin of Portuguese decolonization – that of African independence, that of the exciting and momentous rebirths of Mozambique and Angola as independent sovereign powers in their own right. That is another story, one that, for example, celebrates the victorious arrival of President Samora Machel in Lourenço Marques on June 23, 197515 and that was captured on film by the same Ricardo Rangel under discussion in several chapters, including this one. Yet it is not one told here.16 It is remarkable that, in a matter of a few weeks in the lead-up to Mozambique’s transition to independence that the outgoing colonial government scheduled for June 1975, approximately 160,000–250,000 Portuguese white settlers left. The majority of these retornados departed for the metropole,17 while some chose to migrate to South Africa or Brazil.18 The spectre of fear and lawlessness that they experienced every day in the mid of armed struggle between colonial forces and nationalist ones also haunted them in the wake of the colony’s impending decolonization; they were compelled to dramatically change their lives, for better or for worse. Only a few months after Mozambique’s decolonization – a transfer of power scheduled for November 1975 – 95 per cent of Angola’s Portuguese population also packed up their bags,19 ships, planes and caravans all awaiting them.20 It was experiences of ongoing despair that drove them to depart hastily and abruptly, but not without their most prized possessions in hand to represent and remind them of what they had left behind, and in the face of an uncertain and unknowable future. What this chapter takes up, in a manner similar to others in this book, is an engagement with the concept of ‘decolonization’ in order to suggest a rethinking of its matrices and in order to view this historical process through an ethnographic approach. The discussion relies on several accounts (visual, oral

Dispossessing things

85

and written) of the last days of colonialism in Mozambique to look at the ways certain individuals made sense (and sensibility) of the chaos of decolonization, at the level of material effect and emotive affect, carving out a future (one of respectability and entitlement) while using one’s possessions to stand in for so much more as they crossed land and water in search of new ways of governance, citizenship, belonging and being. The narrative thickness of this chapter comes from my focus on material objects as standing in for so much more about the play and presence of power. As Orhan Pamuk reminds us: ‘the power of things inheres in the memories they gather up inside them, and also in the vicissitudes of our imagination, and our memory’.21

Thinking about things In writing about decolonization, I am interested in thinking about discourses of colonial loss as articulated in the intense relationship between people and their possessions. At one level, this chapter is inspired by Arjun Appadurai’s attempt to look at the ‘social life of things’,22 wherein objects become the focal point for tracing historical landscapes. I am also interested in looking at how memory, nostalgia and longing cohere in objects, something that Susan Stewart has written about from a textured and poetic stance.23 Finally, my focus on people’s possessions (particularly what items they choose to take with them versus what they leave behind) is a way to look at ethnographically rich moments of ‘ordinary affect’, following Kathleen Stewart24: Ordinary affects are public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they’re also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of. They give circuits and flows the forms of a life. They can be experienced as a pleasure and a shock, as an empty pause or a dragging undertow, as a sensibility that snaps into place or a profound disorientation. They can be funny, perturbing or traumatic. Rooted not in fixed conditions of possibility but in the actual lines of potential that a something coming together calls to mind and sets in motion, they can be seen as both the pressure points of events or banalities suffered and the trajectories that forces might take if they were to go unchecked … The question they beg is … where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance.25

That people are attached to their things as they cross geographies, inhabit different spaces and create new homes is nothing new; rather, I am invested in

86

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

suggesting the ways in which we can ‘read’ things to understand decolonization at an individual level of dispossession. Even as the objects I look at may be of value (both monetary and personal) to their owners or not – some of them taking on the role of souvenirs, or ‘memory objects’, while others less so – it is the range of things I am interested in here that intimates so much about the reactions of individual persons and their inability to articulate colonial (and hence national) loss amid a shifting moral postcolonial landscape that was not necessarily of their choosing. I have purposely selected three distinct personalized experiences – each bearing witness to the entangled relationships of people and things – precisely because they serve as a window onto Portuguese decolonization in Southern Africa.26 Yet these accounts cannot in any way be seen as impartial;27 I have rather chosen them precisely because of their varying degrees of attachment to what was taking place in front of them. For Ricardo Rangel, it is the story of the independence of Mozambique that unfolds in front of his camera lens, a moment that needs to be visually recorded for his fellow countrymen. For Carlos Garçaõ, it is a reflection on difficult choices made in the past, during a time of duress with a young family in tow, not only about whether to stay in Portuguese Mozambique or to go but also about where to relocate to. It is also an account recorded in apartheid South Africa of 1988 for a white audience. Finally, for Ryszard Kapuściński, a visiting Polish journalist to Luanda in the late summer of 1975, it is a dramatic story, little known beyond the colony, that he witnesses and feels compelled to expose to an international audience. I have also chosen these three parallel narratives for their ethnographic richness and depth. Just as in earlier chapters, they take the form of three different mediums – visual, oral and written, respectively – which in turn suggests once again the multiple registers we can potentially use to access the experience of decolonization. However, we must realize that a photograph taken by Rangel is no less innocent a medium than any other; it is just as complicit in a particular political context as is a personal reflection by Garçaõ or a description noted by Kapuściński. In other words, each witness sees, states or writes from an imbedded (and often prejudiced) subject position, a point that will be taken up in more depth when I look at each individual’s experiences and articulations. Lastly, I have selected these three accounts precisely because they have been produced from three different locations (Mozambique, South Africa and Angola). My historiographic interest lies in exposing historical and ethnographic connectivities (of people and things and choices made) within Southern Africa – an area that still requires much more attention and critical

Dispossessing things

87

analysis – as opposed to writing linear histories of colonial independence, thus suggesting one potential way forward to writing postnational narratives.28 My emphasis of looking at people’s intimate relationship to their things as they face colonial loss and dispossession is also another way to look at national pride as deeply implicated in colonialism, particular to the Portuguese case. In other words, we need to return to Jane Jacob’s point that decolonization is the least meaningful signifier of postcoloniality. Hers is a note of caution that needs to be taken into account to better understand how deeply the propaganda of the Salazar state conflated colonialism with nationalism29: entitlement and belonging were one and the same for its citizens, particularly for those located overseas who maintained a life of colonial comfort at the expense of those Africans who cleaned their houses, raised their children and drove their cars.30 The end of colonialism and the adoption of a liberal government acted in some senses to undermine everything that the Portuguese nation state stood for. So when faced with little choice but to leave Lourenço Marques or Luanda on the eve of their respective independences, the stakes were high in these acts of migration to an unfamiliar place. Here a discourse on things stands in for so much more – a sense of personhood, respectability and class positioning very much present alongside feelings of insecurity, anger and resentment; a palpable fear of falling on hard times, like that experienced by the many Africans in their employment; an emotion that was perhaps not so far off the mark. All they were asking for was a stable sense of being in the world, at a time when everything that was familiar to them was falling apart and driving them to leave their homes (for some, the only ones they knew) for elsewhere. Thus, if we allow decolonization to sit in the uncomfortable and confused space between colonialism and its aftermath, instead of sidestepping it in our urgency to move to the condition (and hope) of postcoloniality, then we can perhaps access those confused and vulnerable sentiments of people and their things as a way to better understand intimate subjectivities in a shifting political and moral landscape that is still so little understood.

Ricardo Rangel: ‘The departure of the colonialists’ In this section, I turn to the first of our three eyewitnesses who experienced firsthand the last days of colonialism in Mozambique and Angola. My intention with these three accounts is to look at decolonization as an ethnographic moment, both its materiality and intimacy intertwined in the relationship between

88

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

people and their things. I first turn to the now-familiar late Ricardo Rangel (1924–11 June 2009), who is Mozambique’s most well-known photographer and photojournalist, subject to much critical commentary before I met him, and whose images are featured throughout this book. My focus is a remarkable set of photographs he took during the last days of colonialism, in the period of the mass exodus of the capital city’s Portuguese population. I (want to) imagine Rangel staying up all night wandering the streets and back alleys of Lourenço Marques in 1975 in order to be able to take these photographs during unprecedented times and strict censors. It was the story of the independence of his nation that was unfolding in front of his camera lens, a story that needed to be told to his Mozambican counterparts – and that I have been motivated to write about. His images remind me that colonialism is first and foremost an act of possession and its undoing one of dispossession. Visually, this set of photographs allows me a way of entering into and understanding a historical event, one of disintegration. Part of the durability of this set of images, for me, lies in the way they point to the underbelly of Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique. Rangel gestures towards what was at stake for those in power through a focus on details – peoples’ personal possessions in the face of colonial withdrawal. It is a form of archival and ethnographic dialogue taking place between Rangel and me, in and through his images. It is to those remarkable images that I now turn, images that Rangel showed me when I visited him in Maputo in April 2008 and to which I could not remain indifferent but have to attest, just as L. B. Honwana did: Initially the motive for most of the [Rangel] photographs shown here is trivial. A well-known figure in the urban landscape, a gesture, an episode in the street which everybody might walk past without even noticing. But after the treatment given to them by Ricardo Rangel, they become powerful artistic achievements, human documents and social statements, to which nobody remains indifferent.31

One of the first black-and-white images Rangel shows me is of a group of Portuguese soldiers helping to load things onto what looks like a shipping container (Figure 5.1). The men look quite young in their army uniforms and berets. They are in a line, hoisting what looks like a chair and some bags onto the container – one man looks like he is smiling. It is June 1975. This image features in Rangel’s series entitled ‘Fleeing Settlers’. A second image is entitled ‘Soldados Portugueses de Regresso 1975’ (‘Returning Portuguese soldiers’, 1975). This is Rangel’s own title, scribbled hastily onto the contact sheet that includes a reprint of this image. The photograph shows what

Dispossessing things

89

Figure 5.1 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 1.

looks like a long line of people with airport trolleys, many of them evidently soldiers from their uniforms, waiting patiently to board a plane, most likely to Lisbon. Their trolleys are filled with things – I see the outline of a musical instrument, perhaps a guitar. I see a man waiting outside the central line, with a briefcase in hand. It almost looks like a normal flight, except for the piles of things on the trolleys (Figure 5.2). A third image, and this is one of my favourites from Rangel’s series on fleeing settlers, is that of a Portuguese woman (Figure 5.3). I speculate that she has quite some class standing, surrounded as she is by her things – I notice a set of fancy dining room chairs in particular. Alongside is a huge roll of brown packing paper in what looks like a warehouse clearly in a state of disarray. The woman is

90

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Figure 5.2 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 2.

Figure 5.3 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 3.

Dispossessing things

91

surveying her possessions, a hastily tied scarf protecting her hair from the dust of the place. A middle-aged black man whose face is not visible (his back is turned to the viewer) is loading her precious items – what looks like a bed mattress covered in protective plastic – into a large crate. For me, this particular photograph – of a woman surrounded by her packed things – is a metonym for decolonization itself. The next set of images takes us to the docks of Lourenço Marques. We see a port city readying itself for movement – massive cranes, trucks loaded with crates and a huge container ship are visible in the first of them (Figure 5.4). A lone male figure in the foreground gives us a full sense of the scale and height of the cranes. Parked cars, alongside a loaded truck, and a hastily built wooden crate are showcased in the second (Figure 5.5). A busy cityscape is featured in the background, suggesting the proximity of the port and a place on the go. Subsequent images show crates ready to be shipped. Large lettering (Figure 5.6) displays the volume on one such crate (1.12 m3), alongside the owner’s name and a written plea ‘não leves mais já chega o que roubaste obrigado cidadão’ (‘do not take anymore, you have stolen enough, thank you citizen’). It is an accusatory and quite remarkable statement that intimates a (rare) black Mozambican’s written plea of protest against the many things that the white Portuguese colonialists

Figure 5.4 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 4.

92

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Figure 5.5 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 5.

Figure 5.6 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 6.

Dispossessing things

93

were taking with them upon departure. I see a range of Portuguese names – Teixeira, Gloria, W. Soares, Leixões, Mendes – on various other crates piled up around the port docks (Figure 5.7), their most precious things no doubt securely packed inside.32 The last image (Figure 5.8) that Rangel shows me from his archive is a telling one: an empty street, with but a lone person walking towards the viewer, a handpainted graffiti label ‘Rua dos desertores’ (‘the street of those who deserted [us]’) on a wall below a fence (perhaps belonging to a house?). Rangel’s caption is significant: ‘Fuga dos colonos’ (‘the flight of the colonialists’). This closing photo suggests the spectre of decolonization as a process of emptying out (of people, of things, of ideologies). It also shows both its utopic and dystopic elements that shape the everyday and make some people choose to leave for particular destinations, certain things in hand (and which will prove to be markers of a rich past in an unknown future tense), while others less fortunate (with regard to class and race) are not given that same choices in the aftermath of Portuguese colonialism’s demise. It is the hint of the chaos bubbling underneath the facade of the seemingly orderly fashion of these moments of colonial departure that Rangel

Figure 5.7 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 7.

94

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Figure 5.8 Ricardo Rangel, Independence series 8.

captures in his images that stays with me and no doubt with others.33 It is the subtle questioning of the smoothness of decolonization that the state wants to project that he so beautifully undermines with his (ethnographic) attention to detail. It is both Rangel’s politics in taking these photos that shows the complexities of colonial rule for those departing white elites who are experiencing it firsthand, and his choice of certain disquieting themes (soldiers, crates and things, individuals, names), handwritten captions, the choice in lighting, etc., that capture what Elizabeth Edwards considers the ‘expressive’ in photography.34 It is the visual and the visceral that together suggest a moment (here two weeks in length), much wider in depth (and filled with both despair and hope but with a sense that life continues) and more ideologically complex than we could have possibly imagined having not witnessed it ourselves.

Carlos Garçaõ: ‘We must take care’ Just as Ricardo Rangel bore witness to and documented the last days of colonial rule in Mozambique through his photographs, Carlos Garçaõ was one of those individuals caught up in the chaos that was decolonization. Approximately ten

Dispossessing things

95

years later, South African historian Suzanne Gordon recorded his life history. It was published in the volume Under the Harrow: Lives of White South Africans Today35 as one story in a larger research project on whites living in apartheid South Africa. Gordon’s first book, entitled A Talent for Tomorrow,36 consists of a series of interviews she conducted with black household servants (cooks, gardeners, maids and nannies) in South Africa in the early 1980s. This at once ‘absorbing and moving document’37 provided the ideal base for her next project, one that in many ways was a more difficult subject matter to take on amid worldwide condemnation of South Africa’s apartheid government. Yet she was enabled by her insider status.38 In his foreword to Under the Harrow, Christopher Hope writes: If one of the things she [Gordon] achieves in her record of the testimonies of black servants is the revelation that they observe their white masters and mistresses with a sharpness tinged with pity as much as anger, then her safari through white South Africa reveals a wide range of attitudes and political beliefs. Those she meets are at once better and worse than the stereotypes suggest. The people who tell their stories … are not all bigots or heroes or the ugly South Africans now passing into folklore. And where they express views whether bizarre, brave, comic or tragic, they reveal themselves to be strange in ways not portrayed in the easy caricatures of white South Africans. For the people who speak to Mrs. Gordon, be they familiar or frightening, are nobody but themselves.39

Suzanne herself was raised in the 1920s and 1930s in what she describes as a ‘comfortable middle-class home in the outer northern suburbs of white Johannesburg’.40 Her political awakening to the apartheid racism she was surrounded by took place over time and was in response to her English-speaking family, her marriage to a Jewish South African, her enrolment at Wits University as a young mother of four children, the premature death of her husband, her position as a teacher in an Indian school and, finally, her work for the South African Institute for Race Relations, including setting up her own initiative, the Domestic Workers and Employment Project (DWEP).41 Lastly, it is Gordon’s straightforward interview style that allows these stories of whiteness to be told in the full words of her interviewees in a refreshing, yet sometimes harrowing, manner. As Christopher Hope writes: If Suzanne Gordon’s record of the lives of black servants was a difficult venture requiring tact, skill and a most sensitive degree of judgement, her task in persuading white South Africans to feel sufficiently relaxed to confide in her is still more remarkable. Her method leaves little room for interventions or for colouring the responses of those she meets. Apart from a few brief remarks by

96

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World which the speaker is placed within his or her context, the respondent is the centre of each story. Beneath her unobtrusive scrutiny her subjects reveal themselves to be a threatened species and it is indicative of her gift for imaginative sympathy for people irrespective of their official designations that she has enabled Afrikaans farmers, a Portuguese immigrant, a Jewish businessman, anglicized Afrikaners and English nationalists to speak openly and freely of themselves.42

Even as Carlos’s life history was recorded by Gordon some twenty-nine years ago, and within an apartheid context to boot,43 it carries much ethnographic value precisely because it provides yet another window onto the experience of Portuguese decolonization, from a very different perspective and political landscape. Carlos’s account helps to illustrate that Portuguese colonial and military officials were able to exercise considerable control over mobility at particular spatial locations – caravans, roadblocks, military camps and border posts – which served as key sites for the concentration and configuration of state power. However, in ‘reading’ his testimony from a contemporary moment, I am fully aware of the (retrospective and biased) context in which some of his comments were made.44 Carlos was born in Lisbon in 1939 to a Portuguese colonial family (his grandfather having been a judge in Portugal, Angola and Mozambique). When he was a young child, his family immigrated to Mozambique, where his father supervised the building of the railway in northern Mozambique. Carlos enlisted in the colonial army and served for three years before getting a position working for the Reserve Bank of Mozambique in Tete (northern Mozambique). He married young and had four children in quick succession, enjoying family life and working at the nearby bank. In Tete, he began to see the activities of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) and the impending dangers these implied. He describes his decision to take his family and leave, despite the bank bonus for living in what was declared a war area: ‘We started to have some problems with our children; they were beginning to dream about the war and the landmines. We were living under pressure. Then I told my wife, “it’s time to move”. It was a really bad time.’45 He and his family made their way with a car full of their things from their house in Tete to the military camp on the outskirts of Lourenço Marques under escort by Portuguese military men. At this time, some 70,000 Portuguese troops were stationed throughout the country. He describes the scene: Two or three military trucks led, then about five civilian cars, then an armoured car and more civilian cars. We travelled cautiously. There was a lot of bush lining the road … I can remember the soldiers – they were a special contingent of whites from Portugal – laughing and talking to the civilians whenever we

Dispossessing things

97

stopped, creating a good spirit. They were without shirts and brown like Indians … We left about one o’clock with heavier support because the bush in this part was thicket. We were attacked and the soldiers started firing the mortars into the bush; again I saw nothing, just heard the shooting from the bush. The convoy stopped and the soldiers surrounded us to keep us safe. Later some of them collected watermelons and cucumbers that were growing near the road and gave them to us to keep us happy and we set off again.46

Upon their arrival in Lourenço Marques, Carlos was able to secure employment at a bank. Yet a year later, he decided to uproot his family again, due to continuous outbreaks of violence and rioting that he witnessed on a daily basis.47 He could no longer see a future for himself or his family in Mozambique and decided it was time to leave for good. Describing the sense of fear and lawlessness he saw engulfing the privileged white Portuguese community that he was part of, he says: ‘The courts are not courts anymore. There are no lawyers; people with four years, or sometimes only two years of primary school become judges … it was a law of the bush … the air was charged with fear.’48 These acts of violence and feelings of fear that Carlos experienced implicated both sides of the armed struggle equally (black and white), even if he chose not to represent it that way in his testimony. Carlos and his wife Elena reached South Africa in January 1975, bringing along their two younger children, Pedro and Sergio. Following a typical pattern of migration that split up large families, his parents had taken his two older children to Lisbon. The Garçaõs arrived with little, telling the South African authorities upon entry that Carlos was sick, ‘in need of a doctor’.49 Instead, he immediately started looking for a job and, he adds, ‘any job’.50 The family took up residence in two rooms at the back of a house, what had most likely previously been the black domestic workers’ quarters.51 After working in a steel factory and as a barman when there was little other employment available (and he hadn’t yet received his full work permit),52 Carlos eventually found a job – interestingly, through someone he had worked with in Mozambique. It was employment as a trade union worker, helping to enable Mozambican labourers in South Africa to send food to their families in Mozambique.53 He describes how it was through living in Johannesburg that he got to know the Mozambicans living there, and ‘it was a surprise’.54 Carlos was also taken aback by the conservatism of the Portuguese diaspora in South Africa: ‘the Portuguese community think the blacks want to take over our houses, our schools, our salaries, our cars, our jobs’.55 Carlos goes on to describe how he discovered much later that many of the people who were now his friends and colleagues in Johannesburg had

98

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

‘sabotaged machinery at their work places’ or ‘poured cement down drainage pipes in building’ on the eve of their departure from Lourenço Marques.56 He describes how, in Johannesburg, ‘I met people who told me how they had broken the machines where they worked and removed crucial parts’.57 Even as Carlos expresses his shock by this kind of behaviour, it also reveals that on the eve of decolonization, the focus for some outgoing Portuguese was on not allowing the next generation of black Mozambicans inherit the things they had left behind. They underwent decolonization hastily and not without obvious bitterness or regret over losing what they considered rightfully theirs. At the end of the interview (recorded between 1985 and 1988 against the background of an ensuing civil war in Mozambique that was only to end in 1992), Carlos reflects on the messy state of affairs in Mozambique, siding neither with FRELIMO nor with the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO), instead stating that ‘there are no free people in Mozambique, no free radio, no free papers. We cannot talk … We must do something, but we must take care how we do it. We must take care’.58 Carlos’s oral narrative of the last days of Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique, like that of Rangel’s visual documentation, is one of disquietudes. His account highlights both the lawfulness and lawlessness of decolonization – its attempts at organization and security rubbing against the chaos of an outgoing government managing the movement of a dense population in a matter of weeks. Yet his ethnographic description also tells us much more about decolonization: about the marked presence of the Portuguese military during the end of colonial rule; about the itinerant nature of Portuguese colonial families, with members moving between outposts and divided under the duress of decolonization; about individuals choosing to destroy infrastructure (pipes, drains, machines) on the way out, preventing their use by their would-be inheritors – with things standing in as the remnants of the civilizing process that is colonialism; about trying to negotiate the South African apartheid legal system, including its race rules, as a newly arrived immigrant slightly less-than-white but hopefully still white enough; about the lowering of one’s class standing in the act of navigating between colonial and apartheid governmentalities; about using one’s colonial and diasporic connections to get ahead in the new setting, at the expense of others less fortunate; about the difficulties of adjusting to a new homeland amid trying times, both on a personal and a political level; and, finally, about freedom amid personal choice, Carlos’s politics very much reflected in his idea of ‘taking care’.

Dispossessing things

99

Ryszard Kapuściński: ‘We were imprisoned in a besieged city’ In this section, I turn to the eyewitness account of Ryszard Kapuściński, the renowned late Polish journalist who was in the capital city of Luanda (Angola) on the eve of its decolonization, a historical process that followed on the heels of Mozambique’s colonial independence. As a window onto what took place during the last days of colonial rule in Angola, Kapuściński’s account is a reflection of what had happened on the eastern side of Africa only five months earlier, echoing and reverberating across time and space. It also reveals the ways in which colonial capitals and port cities such as Luanda (or Lourenço Marques) served as dense spatial concentrations (and transfer points) of power and state portability at the end of colonialism. Kapuściński’s narrative, entitled Another Day of Life, is very much an ethnographic account of those last three months when the city of Luanda literally and metaphorically packed itself up and prepared to leave alongside the last of its white ‘Portuguese’ community.59 However, before delving into his text, we must first briefly introduce Kapuściński so that we can contextualize and problematize the narrative and intended audience for his Angola book. Born in Pinsk, Poland (present-day Belarus) in 1932, he experienced the destruction of the Second World War as a child and became a member of the Communist Party in 1954. He was appointed to the Polish Press Agency in 1964 as its only foreign correspondent, responsible for coverage of fifty countries. During his twenty-year service, he travelled the world, reporting on wars, coups and revolutions in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. A journalist, poet and photographer, Kapuściński is most well known for his highly stylized foreign dispatches, written in a genre he labelled during a 2001 interview as ‘literary reportage’60. This form involved a very particular set of narrative techniques: dense imagery alongside deep psychological portraits of characters whom he met along the way. His book The Emperor (1978) chronicles the decline of Haile Selassie’s regime in Ethiopia and was hailed by critics for his ability to synthesize political history into a highly personalized story. He experienced continued success with subsequent books: The Shah of Shahs (1982) about the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran; Imperium (1992) which focused on his now-familiar theme of ‘the last days’, in this case those of the Soviet Union. Yet his memorable portrayals, in particular his images of Africa, have also been met with scepticism, with some critics suggesting that he blurred the line between fact and fiction in his reportage.61 Shortly after his death due to illness in 2007, less flattering biographical facts emerged – that Kapuściński had in fact been in the employment of the Polish Secret Service between 1965 and

100

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

1977; that he reported on several of his journalist colleagues; that he had relied on misinformation and exaggeration in his journalism, inventing many petty details to illustrate what he considered a larger truth; and that he was a protoracist, Orientalist and colonialist in his stance towards native populations.62 As a Polish journalist who had lived through and survived the Second World War, the bleakness of war and exodus were no doubt familiar themes that followed him wherever he travelled. Kapuściński’s text in Another Day of Life is more of a personal account ‘about being alone and lost’ as Ana Balona de Oliveira suggests.63 It is also a point the journalist himself admits to in his foreword. Thus, his ‘reading’ of the ‘last days’ of Luanda on the eve of its decolonization is not one of an innocent bystander; rather, I will suggest, he experienced the city very much through his own sense of displacement as a European white male. His intended audience is an international (Western) reading public, and he feels compelled to describe what is happening – to bear witness – unbeknownst to his readers halfway across the world.64 In his foreword to Another Day of Life, he captivates his readers with his compulsion for adventure and living life on the edge: This is a very personal book, about being alone and lost. In [the] summer 1975 my boss – at the time I was a correspondent for a press agency – said, ‘This is your last chance to get to Angola. How about it?’ I always answer yes in such situations … The war these parties waged among themselves was sloppy, dogged and cruel. Everyone was everyone’s enemy, and no one was sure who would meet death. At whose hands, when and where. And why. All those who could were fleeing Angola. I was bent on going there. In Lisbon I convinced the crew of one of the last Portuguese military aircraft flying to Angola to take me along. More precisely, I begged them to take me. The next morning I saw from the window of our descending plane a motionless white patch surrounded by the sun. It was Luanda.65

Another Day of Life – its title suggestive of both the ordinary and extraordinariness of decolonization – is on one level a romanticized view of the tragedy of decolonization and, on the other, a searing portrait of a people having to leave their homes suddenly and of the chaos that ensues. As Ana Balona de Oliveira suggests, Kapuściński’s account is ‘far from an accurate historiographical account of events, and more of a poetic description of the journalist’s remembrance of his own difficult and intense experience of isolation, fear and despair’.66 By all accounts, and in the face of his many racialized (if not outright racist) statements in the text, I maintain that it is an evocative eyewitness description that can be recuperated with caution and judiciously mined for its ethnographic details.

Dispossessing things

101

After having just arrived in the city and looking down on the chaos of the street below from his hotel room in downtown Luanda, he writes: ‘Everyone was fighting a private war, everybody was on his own.’67 The summer of 1975 was very ‘hot’, three months before Angola’s scheduled independence in November.68 He finds himself holed up in the Tivoli hotel alongside a cast of grasping and greedy Portuguese characters, all waiting to leave Angola. Two elderly people were sitting in the next room, Don Silva, a diamond merchant, and his wife, Dona Esmeralda, who was dying of cancer: Despite the overwhelming heat, Don Silva always dressed in warm clothes. He had strings of diamonds sewn into the pleats of his suit. Once, in a flush of good humour when it seemed that the FNLA [National Front for the Liberation of Angola]69 was already at the entrance to the hotel, he showed me a handful of transparent stones that looked like fragments of crushed glass. They were diamonds. Around the hotel it was said that Don Silva carried half a million dollars on his person. The old man’s heart was torn. He wanted to escape with his riches, but Dona Esmeralda’s illness tied him down. He was afraid that if he didn’t leave immediately someone would report him, and his treasure would be taken away. He never went out in the street. He even wanted to install extra locks, but all the locksmiths had left and there wasn’t a soul in Luanda who could do the job.70

Across the hallway stayed a young couple, Arturo and Maria. They too were waiting to leave. He writes: He was a colonial official and she was a silent blonde, calm, with misty, carnal eyes. They were waiting to leave, but first they had to exchange their Angolan money for Portuguese, and that took weeks because the lines at the banks stretched endlessly.71

Kapuściński creates a vivid (even if stereotyped) cast of characters caught up in the last days of colonialism: sparse descriptions of diamonds, money, greed and bank lines offer up disturbing psychological profiles of two Portuguese couples – Silva and Esmeralda, Arturo and Maria – even as his sexism pervades his description of this last woman. The journalist goes on to describe the sad state of affairs inside the hotel itself: The whole Tivoli Hotel was packed to the transoms and resembled our [Polish] train stations right after the war: jammed with people by turns excited and apathetic, with stacks of shabby bundles tied together with string. It smelled bad everywhere, sour, and a sticky, choking sultriness filled the building. People were sweating from heat and from fear. There was an apocalyptic mood, an

102

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

expectation of destruction. Somebody brought word that they were going to bomb the city in the night. Somebody else had learned that in their quarters the blacks were sharpening knives and wanted to try them on Portuguese throats. The uprising was to explode at any moment.72

Kapuściński’s portrait from inside the Tivoli hotel is telling; he not only paints a picture of the smell of fear that pervaded the space of the hotel, with people using their last reserves of energy to hold onto their bundles of things, but also suggests that seemingly simple acts, like protecting one’s most valued commodities or changing currency, became more complicated in a situation from which the rules of colonial law have been suspended and armed struggle is out in the open. At the same time, this clinging to what a person perceives to be one’s own rightful property also points to a way of managing loss and despair in the face of uncertainty, a point familiar to him from his own experiences of war-torn Poland and that he references here as a point of comparison and compassion. That Dona Esmeralda is dying (of cancer) during all this chaos serves only as a reminder of the slow death of the city that was to be her last home. Yet Kapuściński also chooses to neglect what is happening outside the hotel, to the country itself and to its previously colonized black African inhabitants. Once Kapuściński leaves the hotel to walk around the city, he finds Luanda to be in a state of disarray. The journalist describes the lawlessness pervading the atmosphere, wherein ‘gangs from PIDE [Portuguese secret police] were prowling the city … they acted with impunity … and they wanted to get even for everything, for the revolution in Portugal, for the loss of Angola, for their shattered careers’.73 He interviews one man in the street who says: ‘If only I could get out this minute. And never lay eyes on it again. I put in forty years of work here. The sweat of my damn brow. Who will give it back to me now? Do you think anybody can start life all over again?’74 A soldier tells him, ‘They’ve [the black Angolans] taken everything from us.’75 Another man assesses his own situation: ‘I’ve lived here for twenty-eight years and I can tell you something about this country. Do you know what I had to show for it in the end? An old taxi that I left sitting in the street’.76 Even as Kapuściński himself takes note that the lawlessness that pervades the city is in fact perpetrated by PIDE officers in everyday encounters with black Angolans, his informants choose to blame the latter group for the poor state of affairs. These bitter discourses of resentment and racism, of having lost out at the end of colonialism, point to the way in which many white Portuguese saw decolonization as a tragic incident in which they played no part but were mere innocent bystanders

Dispossessing things

103

just trying to make a decent living for themselves and their families. But they do not ask the hard question of whose expense they were allowed a certain standard of living. Reflecting on the death of the city of Luanda, in much the same way that Dona Esmeralda was dying a slow death in her hotel room at the Tivoli, he writes: Luanda was not dying the way our Polish cities died in the last war. There were no air raids, there was no ‘pacification’, no destruction of district after district. There were no cemeteries in the streets and squares. I don’t remember a single fire. The city was dying the way an oasis dies when the well runs dry: it became empty, fell into inanition, passed into oblivion. But that agony would come later; for the moment there was feverish movement everywhere. Everybody was in a hurry, everybody was clearing out. Everyone was trying to catch the next plane to Europe, to America, to anywhere. Portuguese from all over Angola converged on Luanda. Caravans of automobiles loaded down with people and baggage arrived from the most distant corners of the country. The men were unshaven, the women tousled and rumpled, the children dirty and sleepy.77

At the airport, baggage (both physical and psychological) is everywhere. Once again, Poland becomes a pivotal point of reference that perhaps allows him a more empathetic reading of the situation unfolding before his eyes. The scene is surreal: People are sitting on bundles covered with plastic because it is drizzling. They are meditating, pondering everything. In this abandoned crew that has been vegetating here for weeks, the spark of revolt sometimes flashes. Women beat up the soldiers designated to maintain order, and men try to hijack a plane to let the world know what despair they’ve been driven to. Nobody knows when they will fly out or in what direction. A cosmic mess prevails … So the strongest board the plane and the women with children throw themselves on the tarmac, under the wheels, so the pilot can’t taxi. The army arrives, throws the men off, orders the women aboard, and the women walk up the steps in triumph, like a victorious unit entering a newly conquered city … No criterion won general approbation. The despondent crowd swarmed around each plane, and hours passed before they could work out who finally got a seat. They have to carry half a million refugees across an air bridge to the other side of the world.78

‘All they wanted was to get out with their lives and to take their possessions,’ he laments,79 as if they were not asking for very much when in fact what they desired was too far weighted down with the burden of colonial history, and that could only take place at the expense of black Angolans, a topic that this Polish journalist pointedly neglects.

104

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

As Kapuściński walks among the city’s streets, he finds debris of all sorts everywhere, the remnants of a once bustling city jammed into every crevice and corner. The city no longer has any policemen, firemen or garbage men; so too the barbers, repairmen, mail carriers and concierges are gone, for ‘they have all left with the last of the planes’.80 He crosses paths with piles of rotting garbage and packs of pet dogs, abandoned by their previous owners, eating the last of the canned food offered by the few remaining Portuguese soldiers. Finally, Kapuściński arrives at the port to find that Luanda has been transformed into a wooden ‘city of crates’: Everybody was busy building crates. Mountains of boards and plywood were brought in. The price of hammers and nails soared. Crates were the main topic of conversation – how to build them, what was the best thing to reinforce them with. Self-proclaimed experts, crate specialists, homegrown architects of cratery, masters of crate styles, crate schools, and crate fashions appeared. Inside the Luanda of concrete and bricks a new wooden city began to rise. The streets I walked through resembled a great building site. I stumbled over discarded planks; nails sticking out of beams ripped my shirt. Some crates were as big as vacation cottages, because a hierarchy in crate status had suddenly come into being. … Crates belonging to millionaires were impressive: beamed and lined with sailcloth, they had solid, elegant walls made of the most expensive grades of tropical wood, with the rings and knots cut and polished like antiques. Into these crates went whole salons and bedrooms, sofas, tables, wardrobes, kitchens and refrigerators, commodes and armchairs, pictures, carpets, chandeliers, porcelain, bedclothes and linen, clothing, tapestries and vases, even artificial flowers (I saw them with my own eyes), all the monstrous and inexhaustible junk that clutters every middle-class home. Into them went figurines, seashells, glass balls, flower bowls, stuffed lizards, a metal miniature of the cathedral of Milan brought back from Italy, letters! – letters and photographs, wedding pictures in gilt frames … everything, and I mean everything … birds, peanuts, the vacuum and the nutcracker have to be squeezed in, too, that’s all there is to it, they have to be, and they are, so that all we leave behind are the bare floors, the naked walls, en déshabille. The house’s striptease goes all the way, right down to the curtain rods – and all that remains is to lock the door and stop along the boulevard en route to the airport and throw the key in the ocean.81

I quote Kapuściński at such length in order to suggest how revealing his richly layered narrative is for its attention to ethnographic detail – in showing how ordinary citizens took decisions into their own hands when faced with decolonization, by transforming the city of Luanda into one big shipping container full of European goods; in suggesting the societal hierarchies that

Dispossessing things

105

pervaded even the packing of one’s things; in demonstrating the agency of ordinary citizens to desist leaving their fortunes behind; in highlighting the classed sensibilities of what was chosen for the long and uncertain journey ahead; in showing how things (letters, photographs, wedding albums) in moments of duress and transition stand in for so much more; and, finally, in suggesting that colonialism was about a sense of deeply entrenched ownership such that after its demise, nothing (except for some bare floors, naked walls and maybe a few curtain rods) would be left behind for its would-be successors. Like a good anthropologist, Kapuściński is so transfixed by what he sees at the port that he spends hours upon hours watching, observing, taking notes about the transformation of the city into something else, quite unbelievable from what it once was: The building of the wooden city, the city of crates, goes on day after day, from dawn to twilight. Everyone works … The enthusiasm of the adults infects the children. They too build crates, for their dolls and toys. Packing takes place under cover of night. It’s better that way, when no one’s keeping track of who puts in how much and what … So by night, in the thickest darkness, we transfer the contents … to the inside of the wooden city. People stopped thinking in terms of houses and apartments and discussed only crates. Instead of saying, ‘I’ve got to see what’s at home’, they said, ‘I’ve got to go check my crate’. By now that was the only thing that interested them, the only thing they cared about … Nowhere else in the world had I seen such a city, and I may never see anything like it again. It existed for months, and then it suddenly began disappearing. Or rather, quarter after quarter, it was taken on trucks to the port. Now it was spread out at the very edge of the sea, illuminated at night by harbour lanterns and the glare of lights on anchored ships … But afterwards … the wooden city sailed away on the ocean. It was carried off by a great flotilla with which, after several hours, it disappeared below the horizon. This happened suddenly, as if a pirate fleet had sailed into the port, seized a priceless treasure, and escaped to sea with it.82

Perhaps the Portuguese community’s obsession with crates (as containers for their things) and crate-building served as a therapeutic way of dealing with the trauma, loss and messiness of decolonization, that is, of leaving their homes behind as they crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Kapuściński’s thick description of this wooden city setting sail from Luanda can easily be paired with Rangel’s photographs of crates piled up at the docks of Lourenço Marques. I imagine these two ships – both loaded with colonialism’s things – crossing different oceans but meeting up at their final destination in the port of Lisbon.83

106

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

There is one last(ing) image of the floating city of Luanda that is not easy to forget in the words of our Polish journalist: I don’t know if there had ever been an instance of a whole city sailing across the ocean, but that is exactly what happened. The city sailed out into the world, in search of its inhabitants. These were the former residents of Angola, the Portuguese, who had scattered throughout Europe and America. … Somewhere on the ocean the partition of the city occurred and one section, the largest sailed to Lisbon, the second to Rio de Janeiro, and the third to Cape Town.84

Kapuściński’s vivid and visceral descriptions of Luanda as a city of crates are not easily forgotten. Nor can they be read uncritically. Rather I point to several themes that emerge from his account of the now-familiar theme of the ‘last days’ of colonialism and in the face of an ongoing armed struggle between PIDE and Angolan nationalists: of chaos, disorder and fear and a heightened military presence; of waiting (in hotels, at banks, in airports, at ports); of people and their things; of race, racism, class and whiteness; of feelings of fear, jealousy and envy, all intertwined; of the dying of a city and the removal of municipal services. All suggest the complexities of leaving a place (and what happens to it) during decolonization. Thus, on the one hand, Kapuściński’s testimony points to the (obvious) processes of ruination that colonialism projects85 onto its aftermaths. On the other hand, and this is a crucial point, his account is a window onto the creative potentialities already built into (but perhaps lying dormant in) the demise of colonialism, such that these refugees chose not to leave quietly with the political transition but instead found ingenious ways to take what they considered rightfully theirs with them. In this remarkable case, (colonial) dispossession is countered with a form of imaginative possession as a way to endure and move on with life. Our journalist also is witness to the unfolding of a highly mobile colonial state during a period of transition; this in turn suggests that as much as these Portuguese colonialists feared an unknown future, they also were witness to a dangerous present where the threat came less from an undefined black Other but rather from the disintegration of a community no longer bound together by its white privilege; this would prove to be the biggest challenge they would face.

Conclusion: On the postcolony86 There is an ethnographic moment, the intimacies of a conversation, that still stays with me, more than ten years later. During the fall of 1998 – interestingly,

Dispossessing things

107

the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese Descobrimentos (Discoveries) – I was on an American-funded Fulbright fellowship to conduct archival research in Lisbon.87 I had befriended a Portuguese researcher named Ana whom I occasionally met socially and who was also the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to read for a PhD in botany in the United States. One evening, sharing a bottle of good Portuguese wine, our conversation turned to her family history, and she casually slipped in a comment of how her mother had never really recovered after ‘we lost’ Mozambique. She went on to describe how her mother had never reclaimed a sense of her wealth and entitlement after moving to Lisbon as a refugee, having had to leave behind all of her beautiful things. At the time, her phrasing struck me as odd, archaic and perhaps no more than the mutterings of an old woman. Now, of course, I see her statement (as well as the invocation of the royal ‘we’ by a daughter who did not experience the event) in a different light, as a way to comprehend the magnitude not only of the sentiments of both mother and daughter but also of the psychic trauma of a nation still in the throes of bereavement, such that it was transferred uncritically from one generation to another.88 Her statement was not unusual in any way: it was echoed by others who, like Ana’s mother, had been caught up in the last days of colonialism in Portuguese Africa. The phrase signified not only the turmoil and upheaval of decolonization – such that a woman had not recovered from it some twenty years later – but also how much the material process of dismantling an empire formed individuals at the level of personal affect, the mother’s possessions standing in for deep and profound colonial loss that in many ways she could only articulate through a discourse on things.

C hapte r 6

Driving from Angola to South Africa

Introduction With Portuguese colonial rule in Angola coming to a (scheduled) end in November 1975, the majority of its Portuguese population departed in a matter of a few weeks, making difficult choices about where to relocate and start over again. This chapter picks up directly where Chapter 5 left us – at the start of decolonization when a majority of Portuguese Angolans returned to Lisbon with crates full of their possessions. This chapter tells of another migration experience: that of a number of Portuguese Angolans and Portuguese Mozambicans who, for a variety of personal and political reasons, settled in a geographically closer location, (apartheid) South Africa. As a practical worka-day matter that was part of decolonization itself (following Betts once again, discussed in my introduction), driving to what was a neighbouring country may have seemed like a reasonable or less unsettling option than flying to Lisbon. My focus here is on those from Angola, significantly smaller in number than the migrants from Mozambique to South Africa, but with comparable experiences. This chapter, similar to the previous ones, employs an analytic of decolonization and an ethnographic life history approach to reveal largely unmapped histories and experiences of Portuguese migration from Angola to South Africa, during Angola’s post-independence era. That these largely elite Portuguese immigrants left so dramatically suggests, on the one hand, the devastation of decolonization in Portuguese Africa and their own identification as ‘Portuguese’. On the other hand, the fact that some of them chose to resettle in apartheid South Africa and not to return to their homeland (Portugal) suggests their desire to remain in Southern Africa and maintain their privileged identification as (white) ‘Africans’. As well, for some, Portugal was more an imaginary homeland than an originary one, with Lisbon equally an unknown destination as was Johannesburg. I narrate the experiences of multiple individuals caught up in the complicated

110

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

politics of race, class and culture that were interpolated, on a daily basis, between two distinct governmentalities – colonialism and apartheid. That they often idealized in our interviews their pre-independence Angolan experiences in the act of migration to South Africa suggests a form of nostalgia that elides the harsh realities and history of race and racism in colonial Angola and reinforces the point made by Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen that ‘empires were also imagined entities’.1 That they often told me how they had to ‘learn how to be white’ in South Africa also suggests the difficulties some diasporic members experienced as ‘not quite white enough’ living under an apartheid state. Lastly, that different diasporic members constantly had to negotiate differing forms of whiteness (and by implication racism and class prejudice) makes this case study that much more relevant for understanding colonial and apartheid politics from a different vantage point. Their immigration stories can also be read as another form of decolonization as dispossession (to pick up on the theme of Chapter 5) – that of the privileged whiteness they had previously experienced in Angola. Even as it was a nonmaterial loss in some sense (as compared to the household goods of Chapter 5), it manifested itself materially, as a reminder of the everyday creature comforts of colonialism that they no longer had access to, and thus becomes part of the discourse of romanticization on that colonial past. ‘We left as if we were going for a Sunday drive’ is what Laide told me in a very quiet voice and in between uncomfortable silences over coffee at a restaurant in the trendy neighbourhood of Melville in Johannesburg’s northern suburbs.2 She had been fourteen years old at the time. Her father, a relatively wealthy businessman and coffee plantation owner, had immigrated to Angola from Portugal only eleven years earlier. He had foreseen the end of colonialism and had earlier secured property in Cape Town in case of such an event. When independence was announced, the move had been quietly planned amid the ‘chaos’ that the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński witnessed and wrote about in Another Day of Life (1987) and whose vivid descriptions are featured in my previous chapter. This chapter takes up testimonies of such eyewitnesses like Laide alongside other Portuguese voices and experiences to give a sense of the fractured nature of this diasporic movement as its members settled into the disquieting spaces of apartheid South Africa from the equally fractured colonial and racialized structure of Angola. I attend to the reflections as well as the gaps and silences in their testimonies, including memories of the harsh realities of trying to leave a former colony with only what would fit into one’s car, having to make that long drive via southern Angola into Namibia, including indeterminate stays in refugee camps along the way, to arrive in South

Driving from Angola to South Africa

111

Africa. Many did not know if this strange country was simply a temporary refuge until things settled back to normal during Angola’s transition from colony to postcolony, in the awkward in-between space that is called ‘decolonization’, after which one could return ‘home’ to Portuguese Angola; or if, in fact, they would have to remain in South Africa always with a sense of (colonial) loss.

Decolonization as a diasporic port of entry Just as mobility and diaspora-making were integral to Portugal’s ‘third empire’, centred on Africa, it was also the case in the decolonization period. John Darwin states: But decolonisation was not simply a matter of state building and its fallout. Nor was it primarily an economic transformation in which the business interests of outsiders were now closely regulated or expropriated completely by new postcolonial regimes. For decolonization must also be seen as a cultural, linguistic and intellectual upheaval of global importance. In this respect, too, decolonisation and diaspora were closely entwined.3

In other words, decolonization both continued older patterns of migration established under colonialism, but also sparked new ones. This chapter, like others in this book, is about the entanglement of decolonization and diaspora through a case study approach. It is also about those who, in some sense, were caught in the interstitial spaces of the power struggles that came to define decolonization more generally. However, it is also a story of hardship, about leaving one’s home, suddenly and abruptly, and the coping mechanisms adopted (and adapted) along the way. Here I look at the narratives of several Portuguese Angolans who, in the period of decolonization, decided to cross through Namibia to enter apartheid South Africa and start over again. In some sense, these persons were invisible victims of both colonial and apartheid governmentalities (and considered ‘refugees’ by both the Portuguese and South Africans), in the former case because of their white elite status and the latter, despite their whiteness. The Portuguese community that found a new living space in apartheid South Africa had to cope with both these two distinct governmentalities and, due to circumstance, was caught between larger patterns of migration to reside in a lesser-known side of history. I employ three oral accounts of the last days of colonialism in Angola that I recorded in 2008 in Johannesburg in order to explore the ways individuals made

112

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

sense (and sensibility) of the chaos of Portuguese decolonization and integration into apartheid South Africa.4 I approach and discuss their dramatic portrayals of departure (from Angola) and arrival (in South Africa) thematically as a way to better understand the experience of decolonization through moments of ‘ordinary affect’.5 That the three individuals who told these accounts went from having everything in (a middle-class) colonial life to close to nothing in a matter of weeks, and had to make difficult choices in the face of a new political context, is what makes this case study compelling. The chapter focuses on unexpected settings and in-between spaces (like decolonization); on distinct coping strategies, including that of adopting a stance of victimhood in order to be accepted into certain governmentalities (like apartheid); and on uncomfortable affects in everyday conversation of minority communities (like the Portuguese South African case presented here).6 It is important to recognize that many of Portuguese Angolans were doubly diasporic by the time I conducted life histories with them in Johannesburg, South Africa. Similar to the Goan Mozambicans featured in previous chapters, they had to make difficult life choices in the face of impending decolonization, having already moved once from Portugal to Angola. Yet different from the Goan Mozambicans – who decided to remain and thus resisted the move to become doubly diasporic – these Angolans decided to start over again in a new and unknown place, but one that was located on the African continent. This chapter then narrates a different pattern of mobility to the Goan elites and fishermen detailed in Chapters 3 and 4. Moreover, Angola features more prominently than Portugal in these accounts. Specifically, my informants viewed the ‘Portugueseness’ of their community very much through the lens of living in Angola, a pattern which, following the work of Caroline Brettell, shows the strength of diaspora in this case as displacing the Portuguese nation as the originator of such a community.7 This is an important point for showing how much these Portuguese immigrants identified as Angolans first and foremost and that they were firmly rooted in being African and staying on African soil. The collecting of life histories for this particular case is critically important as they attest and give shape to events and occurrences that have left no visible written records, except for these ‘ethnographic traces’, and particularly when faced, as I was, with the mortality of individuals who are the keepers of unrecorded memories. This approach has considerable analytical value: a focus on persons and personalities through the category of experience, grounded in specific contexts, has the potential to provide a nuanced view of migration and diaspora as well as a window onto larger patterns of culture, history and power. Moreover,

Driving from Angola to South Africa

113

a focus on the narrative shape of these life stories helps us understand the power of ‘ordinary affects’, following Kathleen Stewart, whose writings on affect I have relied on in previous chapters. It is that which transforms simple conversational articulations and intimacies into ‘shifting assemblages of practices and practical knowledge … They happen in modes of attention, attachment, and agency’.8 Ordinary affects are also those moments of reconciliation between the past and present, of duress and stability, that constantly shape present understandings through the indelible marks (and markers) of the past. Thus, I look for presences and absences in the testimonies of these Portuguese Angolans as a way to access the multiple sources of their (dis)quietude in making the transition from colonial Angola to apartheid South Africa, as well as the structural inequalities that they left behind (under colonialism) and the ones newly adopted (under apartheid). In the few weeks leading up to Angola’s transition to independence in November 1975, approximately 95 per cent of its Portuguese citizens left for elsewhere.9 Once again, trauma, loss and the messiness of decolonization acted as driving forces for them to depart hastily and abruptly. The late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński captured these moments of affect in his memoir and eyewitness account, Another Day of Life, already featured in Chapter 5, focusing in particular on the Portuguese Angolans who decided to move back to Portugal. Here I tell a different story of affect, that of those Portuguese10 who chose (for a range of reasons) to stay in Africa, moving into South Africa.11

Exile or saying goodbye Laide remembers the day that they decided to pack up their things and leave Angola.12 It was on a Sunday, two days after her cousin had ‘disappeared’ without a trace, that her father decided it was no longer safe for the family to remain living on the coffee plantation he owned on the outskirts of the small town of Novas Boas in Angola’s interior. He had brought his family to Angola from Portugal when Laide was only three years old in the hopes of a better future for them all. Now, eleven years later, he determined that their future lay in South Africa. As Laide recounted, her father had been very optimistic about Angola’s future at the time of independence. That was the reason why he waited almost two years, up to 1977, to make the difficult decision to emigrate to South Africa. He changed his mind only when he felt that he had little choice given the dangerous political conditions of staying, what her father perceived (and she described to me) as the ‘guerrilla tactics’ of postcolonial Angolan society: the

114

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

new government’s increasing hatred towards whites and the looming possibility of being embroiled in civil war. It is important to remember the larger historical context in which Laide’s father made these comments. Gerald Bender describes the migration from Angola in the following manner: ‘This massive white exodus [from Angola] … removed as many as a quarter of a million Portuguese from the country, the majority of whom had deeply ingrained racist predispositions and whose livelihood had directly or indirectly depended on the exploitation of Africans’.13 As a wealthy landholding elite Portuguese Angolan14 who followed politics closely, Laide’s father had already prepared for such a possibility, having used his life savings to secure a property in Cape Town. That fateful Sunday morning, she, her younger brother and her two sisters were told to each to pack a suitcase. Laide’s older brother was studying in Lisbon at the time, so the concern now was on getting the rest of the family out of Angola into the safety of South Africa. Since they owned property in Cape Town, her family was spared from having to stay in South African–monitored refugee camps set up along the Namibian-Angolan border.15 Instead, they went for a very long ‘Sunday drive’, as Laide described it, arriving in Cape Town to start their Portuguese diasporic lives once again.16 Francisco’s family was less fortunate than Laide’s: they left Angola in 1975 under very different economic circumstances.17 At our meeting in October 2008 over a beer at a bustling cafe in the suburbs of Johannesburg, Francisco admitted to me that his very real fear of moving today is directly tied to the trauma he experienced as a young child leaving Angola. In an earlier interview conducted six months before, he had recounted to me his family’s arduous and extended journey from Luanda, where he had been born, to South Africa when he was only thirteen years old. He remembers how, as a young boy, ‘leaving Angola’ had been a familiar topic of Luandan dinner party conversation. At the time, the choice of where to go boiled down to three places: Portugal, South Africa or Canada. High-class Portuguese families were indeed flown out of Luanda, heading directly for Lisbon, on the eve of decolonization.18 His family, however, did not have that kind of social standing, he remarked. His father, himself the son of Portuguese immigrants to Angola,19 had trained as a botanist and packed up most of their Land Rover with books and equipment that would enable him to continue his line of work, the profession upon which this family of six relied on for its survival. Francisco recounted the experience of leaving Angola by sketching a map of Southern Angola on a blank piece of paper hastily torn from my notebook, naming places – such as Lobito, Bengela, Huambo, Lubango or Calueque – where they journeyed, still largely unfamiliar to me at the time.

Driving from Angola to South Africa

115

He described the long convoy of between twenty and fifty cars that made its way to the Namibian border. He remembers that their convoy was one of the last to be officially escorted out of Angola by the Portuguese government. They made their way to Namibia where they crossed the border with relative ease. Arriving in Windhoek, his father secured work as a botanist at the Namibian Plant Institute and they lived there for the next four years, before finally settling in what was then the Eastern Transvaal of South Africa (now Mpumalanga). Duarte’s story of leaving Angola post-1975 echoes Francisco’s,20 only it is told from the perspective of a 42-year-old father. Together with his Portuguese immigrant wife and two young daughters, he made the long drive from Luanda, crossing into Namibia where they had to stay in various refugee camps before being allowed to proceed to South Africa. For our interview, I had driven around in an unfamiliar Johannesburg suburb for over an hour, having gotten lost several times despite Duarte’s excellent telephonic directions. Finally, I arrived at the retirement home where he resided. His townhouse was impeccably ordered with numerous family photos surrounding us as we spoke, including one of his recently deceased wife. Duarte was born in Angola in 1933 to Portuguese immigrant parents. His father had arrived there in the 1920s to work on the railroads, and his mother’s family traced its routes to Portuguese Madeira, arriving in Angola in 1884. Since there had been little opportunity in Angola for higher education, Duarte had gone to Portugal at the age of twenty to pursue a degree in law. It was there that he met his future Portuguese wife, who returned to Luanda with him three years later after he had earned his degree. Not wanting to work for the colonial government, he chose instead to work in the mining industry to support his then-growing family.21 The decision to leave Angola in 1975 had been an easy one for him for reasons of economics and politics; at the time he considered it a temporary absence. His parents had chosen to return to Lisbon: after sixty years of living in Angola, his father was ‘too tired’, he explained, to start over again. He still remembers the day that Agostinho Neto, Angola’s then first president of the newly established coalition government, made the statement that ‘all the colonialists must go and leave the goodness for Angolans’.22 He then recounted how he and his wife had packed up their two cars, leaving most of their prized possessions behind, expecting to be back in six months. Each drove one car, accompanied by one of their daughters. Only one road was open for the very long caravan of cars, which he estimated to be over 800 in total. Duarte remembers seeing that the Portuguese soldiers, commissioned to escort them out of Angola into the safety of Namibia, had largely abandoned their posts.

116

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

As a result, it took them three days to cross the border. In Namibia, they were forced to move from one refugee camp to the next over a two-month period before they were finally allowed entry into South Africa. They first arrived in the small mining town of Cullinan northwest of Pretoria and then moved to the Johannesburg suburb of Lindhaven, where its Portuguese immigrant–run Catholic church helped them to start their lives over again, as refugees.23 The testimonies of Laide, Francisco and Duarte not only describe how each family made the momentous decision to leave Angola post-independence for reasons of politics, economics and family but also act as a window onto how decolonization operated on the ground and had profound regional effects.24 That some Portuguese families were expressly flown out from Luanda to Lisbon on the eve of Angolan independence, while the less fortunate ones had to pack up their cars with the bare minimum of their belongings and drive for days to reach the safe haven of South Africa, reveals much about the cultural specificities and transnational, racialized, and classed politics of decolonization, which involved the governments of South Africa, its annexed territory of Namibia and Angola.

Refugees, toilets and ‘second class citizenship’ During our interview over coffee, Laide recalled how Angola never had an apartheid structure like South Africa. She ‘grew up with all races’, she said. Her best friend had been black, and even though Angola had been a Portuguese colony, there had always been a shared sense of ‘equality’. So it was with great shock and surprise upon her family’s arrival in Cape Town that they ‘had to learn to be white’, as she put it. They were told how to ‘live as white’ by government officials and were ‘indoctrinated’ into ‘whiteness’ through a system of ‘do’s and don’ts’. Thus, in one’s everyday life, one had to navigate one’s whiteness, a point that Deborah Posel reinforces in her sociological study of apartheid: The looseness with which the Population Registration Act [in apartheid South Africa] defined racial categories – allowing for both appearance and social habits as criteria – gave maximum flexibility to these self-preserving powers of racial communities. On the one hand, the law was concerned to protect people socially accepted and ‘known’ to be ‘white’ from being classified coloured if they had a ‘darkish complexion’. And on the other hand, the law also allowed white communities to query the racial credentials of people whom they considered to be coloured on the basis of their appearance, even if in other social circles they had become accepted as white.25

Driving from Angola to South Africa

117

Laide then proceeded to recount several rather remarkable incidents that still stand out in my mind as I record them here and very much give ethnographic instance to Posel’s argument. In one example, Laide and her mother had been travelling by bus in downtown Cape Town. A heavily pregnant black woman boarded the bus soon thereafter, and Laide’s mother proceeded to offer her seat to her. The driver of the bus promptly stopped the bus and kicked all three of them off, the black woman for sitting in the part of the bus reserved for white people, and Laide and her mother for aiding a black woman to sit in a restricted area. Laide and her mother then helped the woman to the closest nearby hospital. A second incident involved her sister frequenting a public toilet one unremarkable afternoon in downtown Cape Town. She was slightly darkerskinned than Laide; pointing to me, Laide said that her sister was, in fact, closer to my skin colour. She recalled how on this occasion, her sister was kicked out of the white public toilets by the black cleaning staff as they refused to believe that she was entitled to use the privileged facilities. ‘They were just doing their job,’ Laide commented. The end result, however, was that her sister always carried an identity card on her person, in case she was ever forced to prove her whiteness again. A third incident involved her brother who married his black South African girlfriend in 1982. They could not have a public celebration in Cape Town after their secret wedding in Switzerland as it was still barred under the rules of the South African Immorality Amendment Act (1950). While many of their neighbours in the wealthy suburb of Constantia knew about the illicit marriage, none ever said anything to the authorities. Yet neither did they acknowledge it openly to Laide’s family. This was how money and class empowerment operated during apartheid, she said. Every morning, she recalled without any sense of bitterness or dismay, her sister-in-law Valerie would get into the back of her husband’s car and hide beneath a blanket to be driven to the designated ‘black areas’ where members of her family lived and where she would spend her time behaving like how a ‘black’ South African was supposed to. In the evening she would return to Constantia the same way as she had left. Family outings, including one to see a visiting circus, involved Valerie sitting in designated black areas with her mixed race children, while the rest of the family sat in the better-placed white areas. Remarkably, Laide’s brother and Valerie are still married, despite the hardships they endured at the height of apartheid. After telling me about these small incidents which so clearly shaped her sense of self growing up in Cape Town, Laide remarked that she had forgotten or at least buried many of those stories way inside and was surprised

118

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

that they were finally coming out; it was a rare moment of reflection, perhaps a moment of ‘ordinary affect’. Laide’s account raises several important issues relating to how whiteness operated in Angola as a Portuguese colony as well as her representation of it from the perspective of having immigrated to South Africa. First, when she talks about her openness to racial difference when living in Luanda, including her one black friend, she seems to be tapping into the discourse of Lusotropicalismo, which Salazar had employed to prolong colonial exploitation, using the theory created by sociologist Gilberto Freyre to suggest that Portuguese colonialism was a benign form based on the harmonious mixing of the races.26 In some sense, she constructs her own whiteness on this premise and suggests that she carried it with her when she moved to South Africa. Second, in suggesting that Angola was a less racialized space than South Africa, she is being nostalgic for a past that was not real for, as Gerald Bender has shown, colonialism in Angola was rigid, hierarchical and based on the exploitation of blacks; nor was there much contact between black and white in urban settings such as Luanda where she was raised: identity, status and racial positionality within colonial structures were designed to bind and fix people in everyday ways.27 Laide has chosen to construct Angola’s whiteness in a better light than South Africa’s, a justification in some sense for where she came from and where she had ended up. ‘Structures of feeling’28 diasporic were not always just about racial politics, however. Class was always also a contributing factor. Laide recounted that, as a child in Cape Town, she had brought home a friend from school, a Portuguese boy by the name of Luis Freitas. The boy’s parents had immigrated to South Africa from Portuguese Madeira,29 and his family came from a working-class background. Laide remembers how he was always made to feel different at school, as an outcast, and how she had befriended him partly out of sympathy. Her mother was also a class snob and rejected social contact with Luis’s mother, referring to her as having a ‘fish and chips’ shop mentality.30 Laide explained that she always felt in between or outside communities: at the same time that she refused to sing the South African national anthem at school, she didn’t feel part of the Portuguese community in Cape Town. More generally, she added, Portuguese Angolans in South Africa were made to feel like ‘second class citizens’,31 a point that will be echoed in the testimony of Francisco to whom I now turn. Francisco’s experience as a Portuguese refugee, first in Namibia and then in South Africa, was very different from Laide’s. Only late in our conversation did he reveal the manner in which his family’s crossing of the Angolan border into Namibia had been marked by racialized politics. His account transformed what

Driving from Angola to South Africa

119

had initially been described to me as a relatively easy movement between two countries into a journey of uncertainty and anxiety. His grandfather’s brother, being ‘slightly darker in skin colour’ than the rest of the extended family, had hidden under several blankets in the back of the car in an attempt to hide himself from the South African officials monitoring the porous border zone when they crossed. Fortunately, as Francisco described it, they were never found out and were allowed into Namibia with refugee status. Ironically, he said, the Portuguese were not the only refugees in Windhoek: there was also a large East German (GDR) refugee community living there, a combined product of the Second World War and Namibia’s history as a former German colony, before its annexation to South Africa. Francisco remembers attending a special government school, alongside his brothers and sisters, set up especially for Portuguese refugees. There it was compulsory for all students to learn both Afrikaans and English and attend Bible study classes. Francisco drily commented how the South African government was making them culturally South African before they were even allowed to technically enter the country. His descriptions also suggest that whiteness had to be learned, performed and socialized at certain moments (and on the spot), precisely when Portuguese Angolans were not seen as white enough by South African officials: these cultural practices gave them access to the borders of whiteness, which then allowed them to be labelled sufficiently white by the apartheid state. In other words, apartheid immigration officers did not consider Portuguese Angolan refugees like Francisco – or Duarte, who also had to live in camps over a two-month period, an experience not recounted to me during our interview – as the most ideal candidates for white South Africa.32 It was not only their Catholic Southern European background that was considered problematic for a strictly Protestant country but their status as not quite white enough, evidenced by a wide variety of skin tones, no doubt deterred their full integration into South African society. Instead the apartheid state considered it necessary to inculcate certain values in spite of their whiteness, and hence imposed the camps for them to learn a specific kind of (Protestant and Northern European) whiteness. More often than not it was the Portuguese welfare societies, attached to Catholic dioceses in cities such as Cape Town or Johannesburg, that acted as sponsors for newly arrived Portuguese refugees from the ex-colonies, as Duarte noted in his previous testimony and confirmed in the work of historian Clive Glaser.33 However, Francisco continued, it was those same officials who, while indoctrinating white South African-ness, often closed their eyes to the range

120

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

of ‘Portuguese’ skin tones they encountered in the camps and classrooms in Namibia: they were unable to deal with or account for the obvious blurring of boundaries within apartheid’s highly rigid racialized categories and structures. This mirrors an experience that certain members of the Coloured communities of South Africa encountered during the late 1960s. In a fascinating study, Graham Watson explores how complicated race operated on the ground for those labelled neither white nor black. He shows how certain lighter-skinned members of a Cape Coloured community, based on a situational logic, managed to ‘leap frog’ over their own elite members to be accepted into the lower rungs of the larger white community.34 It was never a smooth or easily defined process; rather, Coloured individuals adopted certain tactics of ‘ad-hoc-ery’35 to pass for white among this same white community (some of whose members were also racially ambiguous); that is, both the dominant group and those in question were vulnerable at some level and knew as much.36 Cross-cutting loyalties were thus based on socio-economic status rather than skin colour37 and worked to benefit both groups – ‘the whites and would be whites were a team’, in Watson’s words.38 While the Portuguese case is no doubt different, it operated by a similar logic. Watson’s study shows how complicated race was during apartheid for groups caught between black and white, such as the Portuguese Angolans under analysis here. On the one hand, they needed to be declared white upon entry just as much as apartheid officials needed them to be allowed into South Africa as whites. On the other hand, they were given the arduous task of proving their whiteness, not only through the experience of the refugee camps but also in their daily encounters with other whites. After four years of living in Windhoek, Francisco’s family immigrated to South Africa, this time without looking back. By this time they were feeling like ‘second class citizens’ – interestingly Francisco here employs the same term of classed citizenship that Laide had on occasion. They had waited to see if Angola would be rescued (by the Portuguese, the Germans or even the South Africans, all rumours Francisco remembers circulating at the time) and return to colonial normalcy, but now they gave up on their hopes. Francisco and Laide’s repeated discourses of second (and third) class citizenry circulated in multiple directions: while the white apartheid government labelled Portuguese Angolans in South Africa as ‘second class’, they in turn labelled Portuguese Mozambican South Africans as ‘third class’, and the same happened in reverse. Thus, the idea of classes of citizenship operating within an apartheid structure is an intriguing one that needs to be explored further in relation to its distinct Portuguese African diasporic members. It says as much about Portuguese colonial society

Driving from Angola to South Africa

121

(and distinctions between colonies) as it does about South African apartheid society, including power relations between and among its more recent immigrant groups.39 Francisco ruminated on the fact that, for his Portuguese refugee family, race and class operated in complicated, overlapping and often unexpected ways. At the same time that he and his siblings were taunted with epithets such as ‘sea kaffirs’ or ‘poras’40 from Angola on the playground at school in Johannesburg, his family considered themselves to be elites of a certain class standing. Specifically, class operated as a cultural category for Francisco’s family in that they considered themselves far distanced from the ‘Madeiran shopkeeper types’ they encountered on a daily basis in the Eastern Transvaal. Francisco is not alone in using tactics of deferral to those ‘pora’ lower than him on the social rung of Portuguese immigrants living in South Africa.41 As Steffen Jensen has shown in an ethnographic study of the experiences of Coloured gangs and youths living on public housing estates outside Cape Town,42 racial stereotypes are often applied by members with a higher status to members with a lower status within the same community, as for example to the Coloureds living on the ‘other side’ of town or in the worst neighbourhoods. Thus, distinctions of race are talked about in terms of class and vice versa.43 It is one of the many ‘spatial strategies and tactics’44 adopted by gang members of the Coloured community and acts to restore dignity to what is perceived as humiliation at the level of everyday practices.45 As was the case with Watson’s study of Coloureds in the Cape, where problems of race were elided with those of class, Jensen’s ethnography shows how race and class are elided with problems of religion and culture such that respectability is produced through bodily performance.46 Thus, for Francisco, it is possible that he restored his own dignity as a child by distinguishing himself from those Portuguese Madeirans who, smelling like ‘fish and chips’, sat next to him every day at school. Perhaps Laide’s mother did the same by refusing to allow her daughter’s Madeiran schoolmate to come over after school to play. However, Francisco also recalled that the image of the highly educated Portuguese Angolan was lost on most of his friends growing up. To them, he was Portuguese, hence working class and poor. At some point, he stopped trying to counter this image, which in turn shows the persistence of stereotyping more generally, as well as how deeply they play out in people’s perceptions of themselves. Life in South Africa was also a huge adjustment for Duarte. Like Laide and Francisco, he had to learn ‘whiteness’ upon arrival in South Africa. But he had to support a young family as well. He first had to learn how to speak English for, when he was granted entry with refugee status, he spoke Portuguese and some

122

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

French, a detail which, when combined with certain other biographical details such as his overseas study in Portugal and degree in law, suggests his family’s former elite status in Angola and the harder times (and lower-class rung) that he now occupied as an immigrant in Johannesburg. Duarte found temporary work in a brewery company in an administrative capacity – filling in for someone who had left Johannesburg to help fight in the South African army in Angola. He also drove a truck and worked in a mine part-time while studying English at a technical college at night. Duarte had to keep renewing his family’s refugee status on a monthly basis, only receiving permanent residency in 1978. While he did not want to stay in South Africa, he felt he had little choice to move elsewhere. Nor had he wanted to return to Portugal since he had spent his whole life in Africa. He had initially wanted to emigrate to Brazil or Australia but saw the impossibility of either option given his difficult position as head of a young family, trying to start out. He and his wife thus settled into the idea of making South Africa their home. He trained in computers while his wife knitted sweaters which they sold at country fairs on weekends to supplement his meagre income. Duarte saw apartheid as a ‘shocking system’. He came from what he described as a ‘rainbow family’ which included many relatives of different skin tones, even a socially accepted marriage between a white Portuguese uncle and a black Brazilian aunt. Duarte was not particularly integrated into the Portuguese community of Johannesburg while raising his two young daughters. The English company he worked at had many Portuguese technicians as colleagues, and yet he usually preferred the company of black Angolans. Not that he had anything against his fellow countrymen, he just felt more comfortable with the Angolans, he said. He recounted numerous awkward incidents, including a visit to a ‘whites only’ beach in Plettenburg Bay where other beachgoers stared at him but where he was allowed to stay despite his olive complexion. He told me how he could not be bothered to follow the apartheid toilet codes of conduct at work. He would often use the ‘Asian’ toilets simply because they were more conveniently located for him. Yet he would often get into trouble with his English boss for not upholding apartheid standards in the work environment. Duarte always sees himself as an African man at heart. He disliked not only apartheid but also colonialism and at the age of 14 had written a story to that effect. He criticized the Portuguese colonial administration in defence of his father who, at the time, was a journalist working for the local Angolan newspaper Voz da Plano Alto. When his principled father refused to censor some of his own writings despite demands from the colonial administration to do so, the whole family had suffered the consequences. His father was not only denied a promotion but was

Driving from Angola to South Africa

123

refused a salary for six months, which from the perspective of a young teenager served as a lesson in life.47 In some sense, Duarte’s difficulties of fitting in, both within the Portuguese community and within Johannesburg’s larger white society, are not surprising, given the strict policing that immigrant groups generally place on their newest members to uphold certain standards. The fact that he preferred the company of other Angolans at the workplace was lost neither on his English employers nor on his fellow countrymen, who were themselves trying to uphold certain (apartheid) standards, and thus had consequences on his family’s daily life and integration into society. Perhaps we can better understand Duarte’s actions at the time as one way of countering the racism that he both experienced and was surrounded by on a day-to-day basis living in Johannesburg. However, Duarte’s immigrant experience also reflects the new, post-1994 South Africa, where the state has found it difficult to talk in terms of complex multicultural identities and where race has been reduced to black and white, with groups like the Portuguese or the Coloured community viewed through a lens of negative stereotyping, all the while being considered structurally insignificant to South African society – even as this is not correct. The Portuguese are a thriving community, a fact that I have witnessed on numerous occasions, not only by attending a Catholic service in Portuguese at St Anthony’s in Mayfair but also during the Portuguese annual festival of Lusitoland, while eating prawns at Restaurant Parreirinha and pasteis de nata at Café Belem, buying fresh fish at Rio Douro and, finally, reading the Johannesburg-based Portuguese-language newspaper O Século.48 Matthew Jacobson has stated that ‘and so [the] history of whiteness and its fluidity is very much a history of power and its disposition. But there is a second dimension: race is not just a conception; it is also a perception. The problem is not merely how races are comprehended, but how they are seen’.49 The testimonies of Laide, Francisco and Duarte not only attest to the resilience of individual Portuguese diasporic members from Angola to start over again in South Africa, despite numerous hardships along the way, but they also reveal how much the experience of (and romanticization of) Portuguese colonialism and their positionality (and perception) as whites there becomes a pivotal and comparative point for making sense of their new lives and for understanding apartheid South Africa. Moreover, ‘ethnographic traces’, such as segregated toilets, varying skin tones and ‘white beaches’, all point to the complicated politics of whiteness that these individuals had to perform on a daily basis living in South Africa. That the (apartheid) project of inculcating whiteness (learning to be white) was also a project of inculcating racism and class prejudice was not lost on my informants.

124

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Race and class as markers of identity in this context were just as much about ‘appearance’ as they were about social habits, behaviours, attitudes and values.50 If racism is ‘fundamentally a theory of history’,51 and the idea of ‘race’ resides not in nature but in politics and culture52 and operates as a form of ‘discretionary judgment’53 by both subject and object in the quotidian, then perhaps we can use these diasporic life portraits as a lens onto the intertwined political, classed and racialized histories of Angola, Namibia and South Africa.

Conclusion: Portuguese-ness in post-apartheid South Africa At the end of our conversation, Laide told me that if she could choose, she would live in Mozambique, ‘for its vibrancy’, she added. It would be a welcome return to her Portuguese roots even as her story made the impossibility of this clear to me. She is now settled in Johannesburg with her South African Afrikaans-speaking partner, owns a home in Melville and makes frequent trips to Cape Town to visit her sisters and brothers, and nieces and nephews who all live there. Francisco, on the other hand, is physically settled in Johannesburg, but less so in other ways. Even as he will always have a fear of moving – staying in the first place he found when he hastily moved north to Johannesburg from Grahamstown after finishing his studies at Rhodes University – he also travels frequently between South Africa, Portugal and Brazil. He has never returned to Angola. For him, ‘Portuguese-ness doesn’t go away’. He even met his Brazilian wife in Lisbon on a work-related trip. Duarte has a more complicated relationship to his Portuguese background. He has South African citizenship now and believes his life is in Johannesburg with his family close by, including six grandchildren. He did go back to Angola for a visit in April 2008, after thirty-three years of being in exile. All he saw was rampant corruption, consumerism and prostitution, he said to me as he shook his head sadly. Even as he blames Angola’s ills of today on Salazar for not allowing the country to develop properly,54 he still misses it. It will always be his country of origin even as he has spent half his life in South Africa.55 Retornados (the returned ones) is the label given to those Portuguese who left for Portugal in the aftermath of the decolonization of its third empire. They have become an expanding area of interest, both nostalgic and academic, as they are positioned in Lisbon as ‘second class citizens’.56 Those Portuguese refugees, however, who left for South Africa in the aftermath of Angola’s decolonization, have been less critically examined, as well as their absorption into a larger Portuguese South African diasporic community.57 Here I am reminded of

Driving from Angola to South Africa

125

AbdoolKarim Vakil’s important point to ‘problematize the memories of colonialism of and in the diaspora and for the diaspora’.58 In this concluding section, I want to reflect, however briefly, on this exact point, looking at these three testimonies as a refracted lens onto decolonization in Southern Africa. Firstly, I want to suggest that diasporas are often produced out of unlikely settings, particularly in interstitial spaces like decolonization, ones that have been poorly theorized, at the level of both material effect and emotive affect. As I have shown, decolonization is not only a deeply personalized and politicized historical process (and applicable not only to the Angola case) that can be accessed ethnographically, but it left large crevices in its wake, with certain people (like Laide, Francisco and Duarte) caught (or lost) in those cracks in the spaces of history forgotten by many and in the transition between different governmentalities (here, colonial and apartheid). Perhaps then the phrase ‘end of empire’ is best suited for the winners, specifically those who left for the metropole (Portugal in this case), while ‘decolonization’ is a more fitting work-a-day category, following Raymond Betts,59 to describe those left behind in its wake and those who emigrated to lesser-valued (second- or third-classed) sites such as South Africa. Secondly, I want to emphasize the coping strategies of certain diasporic members: the kinds of entitlements that take place alongside (colonial) dispossession, how they are articulated in relation to loss and, finally, how they are reproduced at the expense of others more or less fortunate than themselves. The idea of complicity arises here, for even as Laide, Francisco and Duarte never articulated themselves as ‘victims’ to me in the strict sense of the word, they each adopted a stance of ‘victimhood’ (Francisco by the far the strongest) as a way to cope with and be allowed into and accepted as members of a whitesanctioned apartheid society. That they also articulated their ‘colonial guilt’ as a somewhat romanticized version of Portuguese colonialism (as ‘less’ racist) suggests its use (and abuse) as a form of justification for learning anew apartheid racism and for having no choice but to inculcate its values in order to be allowed into this confining society. This, in turn, tells us something about the nature of victimhood and from a slightly different vantage point. It suggests the forms of (colonial, apartheid, classed, racialized and gendered) violence perpetuated as these individuals navigated between two distinct and oppressive forms of governmentality that produced very real victims. Thirdly, I want to return to the power of affect, following Kathleen Stewart whose writings I have relied on in this chapter and others in the book. It arises as a form of understanding and reconciliation in the aftermath of such experiences

126

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

of dramatic displacement and deterritorialization as decolonization. When Laide talks about her experience of leaving Angola as ‘going for a Sunday drive’, she is talking about a certain kind of loss that she struggles to articulate. For Francisco, it is in particular the experience of the refugee camps in Namibia, before crossing the border into South Africa, that scarred him and fuels his present-day fear of ever leaving Johannesburg. And for Duarte, the humanitarian sympathy that he extended towards other Angolans while working and living in post-apartheid Johannesburg acts as moments of ‘ordinary affect’. Not only do such (ethnographic) traces suggest the ways in which the past continues to be an absent presence for many diasporic members, but they point to the sometimes intertwined nature of loss and complicity during decolonization, as well as its recuperation in the every day. ‘The Portuguese imaginary has only been partially decolonized,’ as Michel Cahen has aptly stated.60

C hapte r 7

Renovating in Beira

Introduction A city isn’t a place. It is the frame of a life. A frame in search of a portrait, that’s what I see when I revisit my place of birth [Beira] … What I see again is a time, what I hear is the speech of that time. A dialect called memory, in a nation called childhood.1

There is an image I hold in my mind of a young girl, perhaps around twelve years old, wearing a 1970s-style bathing suit, blue in colour with a yellow trim and modest in its design, which includes a matching yellow cap, poised to dive into an Olympic-sized swimming pool, one that appears to have been built circa the style of her bathing costume. The pool is dilapidated in its appearance but is one that is well maintained with sparkling blue water luring her (and me) to dive in. It is 2009 and the place is Beira, Mozambique, and I am a first-time visitor to this unfamiliar city.2 Consider this image in its full perspective, the same length as the city’s pool, one of a handful built in Portuguese Mozambique. What can it tell us about colonial urban planning, including sites of leisure and their histories of racialized restrictions? What position do swimming pools inhabit today in postcolonial African cities such as Beira? What does it say about tourism in a (Portuguese) colonial city that was once the centre of the East African corridor and that served as an access point and holiday destination for neighbouring (British) Malawi and Rhodesia? What will it reveal about living amid decolonization today for young Mozambican girls like the one I encountered – how much does she ‘live it without thinking it?’ to quote South African writer and theorist, Njabulo Ndebele?3 As well, how much do these urban sites detail particular forms of renovation that take place on a daily basis to occupy such leisured spaces that in the past were formally built and reserved for white colonial elites – specifically in this case, Portuguese citizens, British Rhodesian sugar plantation managers who were stationed in Beira at the time, and (white) tourists, and their families?

128

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

I pose these questions to continue thinking about decolonization as an historical event and ethnographic moment, an analytic that runs throughout the chapters of the book, only this time I situate it for a different set of actors. Rather than focusing on Indian Ocean minority diaspora communities such as the Goans of Mozambique (Chapters 3 and 4), the Portuguese Angolans of South Africa (Chapter 6) or those colonialists in power who left on the first planes out of Lourenço Marques and Luanda (Chapter 5), I focus on those persons who remain at the end of colonialism and for whom Mozambique is their only known home. I take up Mozambican writer Mia Couto’s lyrical evocations on Beira,4 the city of his childhood – his prose opening each narrative section – as a way to combine the lyrical with the visceral in a manner similar to my earlier chapter on Goan fishing in Catembe. I shift my focus from people back onto things as a form of possession and as standing in for so much more materially and metaphorically, a theme that also featured in Chapter 5. I do so in order to think about those physical infrastructures built by colonialism and then left behind at its end, at the exodus of those in power, to see how they have been creatively adapted to new uses, repurposed by Africans today. My intervention here is to think once again about decolonization as dispossession; however, I want to also extend this point to suggest postcoloniality as an active form of repossession. I purposely end this book with a case study that continues the theme of the messiness of decolonization with regard to its work-a-day materialities but less so that of its attendant trauma and loss since both were experienced by only certain elite and minority populations; instead, I want to focus on those persons for whom decolonization was less an upheaval of sorts (of things) to suggest continuity, change and innovation in Mozambique today. In this chapter, I chart a set of ruminations (defined here as forms of musings or contemplations) by looking at four sites of leisure (and mobility) in present-day Beira, precisely because they were built at the height of its tourism aspirations (1950s–1970s). They serve as reminders of that colonial past but now actively repositioned in a largely non-tourist postcolonial ‘reluctant’ African city of today, a point made by Mozambican architect José Forjaz5: the Ferroviário swimming pool mentioned earlier, the Novocine movie theatre, the Grande Hotel and, lastly, the Riviera cafe. My analysis will suggest that these particular sites afford a window onto Beira’s condition of postcoloniality (and the simultaneity of its conditions of colonialism, socialism and war) through the creative ability of its African inhabitants to take specific urban infrastructures left behind by its Portuguese colonial possessors, in the wake of Mozambique’s

Renovating in Beira

129

rapid decolonization in 1975, and adapt them to their own strategic and innovative purposes. I view these places not as sites of (postcolonial) loss but rather focus on ‘what [actively] remains’ in the here and now.6 Somehow it was the image of the poised young girl on the diving board that prompted me to ponder how individuals inhabit architectural spaces left over from the past: how does it make them imagine themselves and their place in larger social worldings, including their affective ties with past, present and future? This chapter is also an attempt to take up Ann Stoler’s poignant suggestion to ‘think with ruins of empire’ and ruination, less as a form of melancholia onto a romanticized colonial past but rather as a critical lens – attuned to the ‘visible and visceral’7 – or, as I consider here, a productive form of rumination onto distinct forms of renovation linked very much to the politics of decolonization and the (African) present.

On ruination Beira, which proclaimed itself ‘the city of the future’, in the end, appeared not to want to be a city.8

The idea of thinking with ruins is not necessarily a new one. Rather I am suggesting that a proliferation of old and new ways of approaching ruination (so thinking not only with but also in and about ruins)9 and as applied to understudied locations and sites (here ones of privilege or leisure specifically) potentially offers much by way of analysis.10 For Walter Benjamin, ruins are a ‘meditation on ambivalence’,11 while Svetlana Boym points out that ‘ruin’ literally means ‘collapse’ and that ruins ‘give us a shock of vanishing materiality’.12 Stoler’s distinctly anthropological approach to studying ruins is also helpful: ‘ruination weaves its way back through racialized hierarchies and the concerted aphasias on which privileges depend’.13 We must ‘emphasize less the artifacts of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime [and should rather] attend to their reappropriations and strategic and active positioning[s]’,14 viewing the individuals living among ruination today as ‘adept bricoleurs’.15 As anthropologists, we have the potential of opening up ‘wider social topographies’ and beginning the hard work of carving out the ‘material and social afterlife of structures, sensibilities, and things’.16 Stoler rightly points out that these ‘effects reside in the corroded hollows of landscapes, in the gutted infrastructures of segregated cityscapes and in the microecologies of matter and mind’.17

130

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Thinking with ruins evokes the multiple temporalities that people live in on a daily basis. Isabel Hofmeyr reminds us that ‘playing with ruins is a rather gleeful project’;18 we must understand that social time is not linear; rather, it accumulates for all of us at different moments and in different dimensions.19 Further, she suggests that the idea or condition of postcoloniality is rather a restrictive one, since we must be mindful of the fact that we are always living in a period of imperialism alongside additional temporalities wherein proliferations of pasts are ‘dipped into’ to think about multiple presents and futures, both real and imagined. João de Pina-Cabral makes a similar (and equally intriguing) argument in the context of Mozambique, choosing the contemplative space of a residential park located in downtown Maputo to collect three contemporary stories of the park’s patron and namesake, Dona Berta. He looks at her fascinating (re)figurations (simultaneously colonial and postcolonial in turn) which serve as an apt reminder of both Mozambique’s rich colonial history of urban planning (when this ‘neatly kept and punctilious garden was occupied by mostly black nannies and white babies’) and its residence today by largely poor blacks in a ‘relatively unkempt and ageing garden’.20 As Pina-Cabral points out, these historical conditions of possibility are ‘processually’ related to each other.21 Thus, leisured sites such as Dona Berta’s park operate as potential spaces where not only multiple temporalities but also multiple stories congeal and are rooted in a key analytic of experience. Echoing Hofmeyr, Pina-Cabral writes: ‘But in fact, social time is seldom linear. The past and present are constantly being re-mixed into conglomerates of experience, where each component element becomes largely indissociable from the others. The past and the present constantly visit each other in experience.’22 This point is also taken up in the recent work of Karl Schlögel, who provocatively suggests that history should be more carefully read through its particular geographies, its physical spaces and places.23 For the case of Mozambique then, its inhabitants live in a built environment and experience social time in ways that are simultaneously colonial (1498–1975), post-independent (1975–), socialist (1977–1989) and, lest we forget its more recent past, torn by civil war (1977–1992), each to varying degrees. Elsewhere I have argued for the productive force of contemplating colonial nostalgia and ruins by tourist industries and tourists alike in the context of a UNESCO world heritage site on Ilha de Mozambique.24 Here I take a slightly different tack by looking at processes of renovation in relation to specific urban (and leisured) infrastructures in present-day postcolonial Beira. Taking a cue, then, from Pina-Cabral’s Mozambican ethnographic example cited earlier, I look

Renovating in Beira

131

more closely at formerly colonial urban infrastructures (such as swimming pools, cinemas, hotels and cafes) that were specifically built during a tourism boom from the 1950s to the 1970s.25 That they were left largely in a state of disrepair following independence and reinhabited by different historical actors through periods of independence, socialism and civil war – their resilience in other words – is what interests me in this chapter. I also weave into my narrative comments and observations made by two former Beira residents, one an architect named José Forjaz and another a long-time archivist at the Mozambique National Archives named António Sopa, whom I interviewed in Maputo in 2010. That decolonization, as a concomitant to independence, included the rapid outgoing migration of a large portion of its dispossessed Portuguese colonial inhabitants is a historical and material process I have detailed for the city of Lourenço Marques in Chapter 5. Here I am invested in looking at Beira, a very different place from present-day Maputo, and how certain spaces function today as active sites and forms of play or leisure through processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization or, as anthropologist Danny Hoffman aptly describes for the case of Sierra Leone, of ‘decoding and recoding’.26

On Beira I speak of my Beira, the little city where I was born, located in the centre of Mozambique, on the left bank of the River Pungué. Beira is a place that was stolen from the waters of an estuary, lined with mud and mangroves. A liquid city, on a ground that flows. So much so that when speaking of it, I call it my native water.27

Beira, a city whose Portuguese name literally means ‘edge’, was a minor colonial port until the 1890s, always in the pale shadow of its rival capital city of Lourenço Marques.28 Historian Andrew MacDonald describes it as ‘a hot and unhealthy single-street outpost on the Mozambican coast, largely cut off from the international communications and a minor pawn in imperial rivalries’.29 In 1891, land concessions were given to the Companhia de Moçambique, a royal trading company (financed largely by German, British and South African money) that took over the administration of the provinces of Manica and Sofala. The latter included Beira, a place that was slow to qualify as a city, a status granted only in 1907.30 However, from 1917 onwards, the city ‘underwent a modernization [and tourism] drive’31 as the Portuguese saw an opportunity to attract discerning white settlers in the area to its undeveloped coastline. It was still a city of wooden

132

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

houses during the 1920s, a historical detail mentioned by archivist António Sopa whom I met at a cafe in downtown Maputo in July 2010. By the 1930s, Beira’s first hotels were being constructed, the first named the Lisboa (1925), followed by the Savoy (1930) and Hotel Central (1955).32 Colonial officials soon realized Beira’s potential and invested in building a port and railway in order to develop it into a ‘tourist dream city’ that aspired to ‘lure visitors from neighbouring British Malawi and Rhodesia from the 1950s onward’.33 Faced with a dearth of modern buildings to house, feed and entertain these consumers, many Portuguese architects saw the potential of the colonies as sites for experimentation,34 a ‘colonial lab’ of sorts,35 and took up commissions to design the new downtown Beira, a historical detail mentioned by both José Forjaz and António Sopa.36 By 1942, the Portuguese crown had formally taken over Beira’s administration from Company rule; a new railway system was completed in 1966 in order to facilitate easy transportation between Portuguese Africa and British East Africa. This act also signalled the arrival of large numbers of Rhodesians in Beira to work as managers for the British-owned Fábrica de Açúcar, which also employed large numbers of Portuguese businessmen at lower ranks.37 Beira’s port was ideally located at the edge of the Indian Ocean for sending large cargo shipments to Europe. José Forjaz posits that even as it was marginalized from the rest of Mozambique, Beira was always regionally significant, a pivot point that connected the countries of the (East) African corridor (Malawi, Rhodesia and Zambia, and Zaire to a limited extent). It was also a city with enduring ‘structural problems’ tied to its tropical climate, topography and drainage system, Forjaz tells me. This was the era (1950s–1970s) when Beira’s urban infrastructure – not only its railway station and airport but also its swimming pools, cinemas, hotels and cafes – was constructed. Beira, like other colonial cities during this time frame, became a site to fulfil the modernist aspirations of the Art Deco movement, streamlined technology and industrial motifs inserted into crevices and corners as a sign of Beira’s coming into being, its worldliness.38 It was a tourist industry invested in catering to travelling businessmen from Portugal as well as from other Portuguese colonies, British manufacturers based in Beira and their visiting families, and wealthy British, South African and Rhodesian tourists, very often arriving via Union Castle cruise liner ships, a topic I have explored elsewhere.39 However, that Beira’s tourist aspirations were not fully realized, as its wealthy patrons never arrived in the numbers planned for, makes it that much more interesting to study as a city today, including what remains in the aftermath of this tourism bubble. Instead it was a more modest, middle-class tourist phenomenon that took place between the 1950s

Renovating in Beira

133

and 1970s, with visiting families attracted to a range of second-tier hotels located in and around Beira’s coastal shoreline. One result of this miscalculation was the foreclosure of many of the port city’s high-end tourist hotspots, including the Grande Hotel, even prior to independence in 1975, a point I will take up in a later section. The end of colonialism and the beginning of the civil war led to the exodus of the majority of Beira’s white Portuguese population – a process detailed in Chapter 5 – and the closing or abandonment of many of these iconic buildings that had defined the city’s tourism landscape. According to António Sopa, the civil war destroyed Beira’s cement and rubber industries; they never fully recovered. It was a ‘difficult city to live in’, he adds. Similar to novelist Mia Couto, Sopa left his childhood home for Lourenço Marques during this painful period in Mozambique’s history. He now considers Beira to be a cidade morto (a dead city), a point I am sympathetic to but also want to counter through my ruminations on renovation.40 Today Beira is Mozambique’s second largest city after Maputo – with a population estimated close to 600,000 persons, it is quietly thriving.

On renovation In spite of everything, a map puts us at ease: there is the city [Beira], the second biggest in Mozambique. That’s where concrete, iron, asphalt, the usual vestments of an urban space, were instated.41

Following Achille Mbembe, we must write against an African postcolonial legacy that is one of duress as we take into account that every African city is changing, rapidly and dramatically at that.42 It is productive to engage African cities as they exist, what William Bissell describes as ‘embracing and drawing upon those elements that actually make city life worth living: the improvisational, the unknown capacity to surprise, the other unpredictable arts of the everyday’.43 Thus, a city’s problems should be viewed less strictly as such – as Bissell does for Stone Town, Zanzibar – and more as inherent to its aesthetic features, as sources of strength, resourcefulness and (individual and collective) ingenuity. We must take care to adopt a more ‘hopeful’ approach, following Steven Jackson, viewing places with a ‘deep wonder and appreciation for the ongoing activities by which stability (such as it is) is maintained, the subtle arts of repair … and are confronted above all by the … creativity, and sheer magnitude of the work represented in the ongoing maintenance and reproduction of established order’.44

134

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

We can also take a cue from the work of Bettina Malcomess and Dorothy Kreutzfeldt who show how new developers in Johannesburg (since the mid2000s) have chosen not to rebuild the city but rather to renovate that which is already there.45 There is much work to be done on and in African cities in the face of these ethnographic possibilities. Finally, we must remember that it is people who drive these forces of creativity in cities the world over, individuals who carry with them ‘urban imaginaries’, following Andreas Huyssen,46 including the girl at the pool who endearingly captured my attention. Meanwhile, Huyssen’s concept provides a useful way of entering Beira in relation to its multiple residents who inhabit and utilize its colonial-era buildings on a daily basis. Here I am invested in studying the ‘leisured spaces’47 that make up this port city and give it a sense of place today – its swimming pools, movie theatres, hotels and cafes. Often these sites, particularly when located in African cities, do not get studied sufficiently precisely because they function less as places of bare life (and work) but rather of play, pleasure and publics. They can also be understood as experiences of transit (both real and imagined) and as embodying aesthetics and the sensorial – ‘[infra]structures of feeling’, following Brian Larkin.48 I have purposely chosen sites that were built in Beira during the tapered end of this period of heightened activity (in terms of both construction and tourism) and with a particular white colonial public in mind. That these leisured spaces remain – but in a city that has lost its tourism drive in the wake of decolonization, socialism and war – and are actively ‘domesticated’ for use49 is what I find compelling, worthy of study. Beira is a city where what is available, or what has endured (its ‘corners, window gratings, and banisters’, according to Italo Calvino),50 is taken up for purposeful and creative use by Beira’s African residents on a daily basis. These features – or what I focus on here: tiles, colours and fixtures51 – in turn tell us something, perhaps, about this city’s enduring sense of self, its city-ness today. I have chosen the idea of ‘renovation’ to think through what is happening at these deeply historical leisured sites in rapidly expanding African cities, Beira as well as many others. If we take the idea of renovation at its basic level of definition, we can see that it conveys two different practices and sensibilities: one is ‘to restore to a former better state (as by cleaning, repairing or rebuilding)’; the second is ‘to restore to life, vigor, or activity: revive’.52 I want to suggest that the dual meanings of renovation are very much being put to use in Beira today, its urban infrastructures layered sites of ruination, repair and revival, all going on at the same time. Following Steven Jackson, I start from a point of ‘resilience’.53 Tied to this material layering is a methodology that includes multiple visits (as

Renovating in Beira

135

layers) to the same place at different historical moments. My two visits to Beira, in 2009 and 2016 respectively, focus on pools, movie theatres, hotels and cafes as integral to the city as a living, working and breathing space. These sites are being renovated over time in interesting and unpredictable ways, details that my ethnographic ruminations will showcase. I focus on different forms of renovation taking place seven years apart, both those that are more hopeful and those that are less so, more despondent perhaps, but as directly tied to the conditions of possibility of certain historical moments. Renovation then becomes the theory for approaching Beira’s postcolonial urban landscape or, as José Forjaz described it to me, ‘the possibility of a city from inside the city’. I look to those residents who sensorially engage with and embody it in their daily habitus. At a recent Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism conference on the future(s) of nature, Akbar Abbas provoked the audience to think about material objects as a ‘form of landscape’;54 then why not do so with swimming pools, movie houses, hotels and cafes? Following Anna Tsing, can we think of landscapes less as ‘backdrops for historical action’ but rather as ‘themselves active’?55 In following sections, I introduce a site and its distinct forms of renovation amid ruination, based on my two ethnographic visits to Beira in 2009 and 2016. Each place acts as a window onto certain aspects of Beira’s history and its layered contemporary features, old and new, and past, present and future sitting aside one another.

(Landscapes of) leisure Beira always had difficulty organizing its space in the colonial manner … it was difficult to expel Africa from the place. The settlers would like to have pushed the Africans far away. But the blacks invariably remained there, on the other side of the street.56

The Ferroviário swimming pool Swimming pools evoke fond memories of idyllic days during my childhood in the 1970s, of hot American summers spent lazing around and doing laps, and eating homemade sandwiches of peanut butter and jelly. This all comes back to me on my first visit to Beira in April 2009. It is my first day here; I am walking its streets, the pavement hot and dusty when I see its municipal pool from a distance. I immediately feel drawn to it for I can see patches of blue in the gaps

136

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

of the wooden boards of the makeshift fence that surrounds it. I can also see its imposing and weathered diving boards from across the crowded street. Upon entering its grounds, I find a fully functioning Olympic-sized swimming pool, the aforementioned girl poised to dive in. Lessons are taking place – the coach blows his whistle at a young boy who is not listening to his instructions. I see renovation at work in both senses of repair and revive – the old wire hanging baskets, rusted but still very much in use, swinging as they hold the personalized items (flip-flops, towels, goggles) of the swimmers nearby. I see a brand-new set of blue Styrofoam kickboards at the pool’s edge. I walk through the 1970s brown-and-green tiled female changing area and find two teenage girls giggling as they change into their swimsuits. I jump in, taking note of the old plastic lane dividers still in use, and go for a leisured swim. It is only on my second visit to Beira, in February 2016, that I think to ask more questions about this leisured space. I am hot from my walk and ask the person on duty if I can enter the pool – it is crowded with a group swimming lesson underway. I am told to come back on the weekend during the allotted time when it is open (and the cost is free) to the public. I learn from the two male lifeguards on duty that the Ferroviário swimming pool was named after the adjoining Ferroviário social club that had opened its Art Deco inlaid wooden doors in 1924 to its elite Portuguese members. They debate the pool’s opening date, the one telling me that it was during the late 1960s and the other saying that it was inaugurated in 1974. The second lifeguard seems more certain of himself. That would have been on the eve of decolonization. I wonder what happened in the interim between then and now if its doors had remained open during Mozambique’s socialist period but then closed amid the civil war years. I learn that Beira’s first Olympic-sized pool was not, in fact, its municipal pool but rather the one built in 1954 on the grounds of the Grande Hotel, which was available to guests as well as to all white Portuguese citizens and their families living in Beira.57 Even after the hotel was shut down prematurely in 1963, its pool remained open to Beira’s colonial residents. I also visit Piscina Goro, a 1960s colonial-era Olympic-sized swimming pool that is located across the city, closer to the beach, and that is in pristine condition: I see a fechado (closed) sign across the front gate. I talk to the caretaker on the premises; he tells me that it is no longer open to the public (and hasn’t been for the last five months) because they have run out of cleaning fluids; nor is there a plan to get additional supplies in the near future. I save my last day in Beira for a visit to Clube Náutico, a swimming pool complex that was built in the late 1950s, located outside the city limits, directly on the beach; it also has a restaurant next door.58 I see that the

Renovating in Beira

137

swimming pool is in prime condition despite it being empty. Black-and-white photo displays of carefree, smiling white Portuguese social groups in 1950s-style swimming outfits line the walls of the restaurant; its prime viewing seats fill up rapidly with locals and tourists as the sun slides over the horizon. Returning my tourist gaze onto the Ferroviário swimming pool, I am pleased to see that, in postcolonial Beira, swimming pools are no longer ‘contested waters’,59 segregated spaces where divisions between black and white are strictly adhered to. Instead, times have shifted, colonial-era pools still very much in use. I see green- and brown-coloured tiles and rusty hanging wire baskets amid a group of young girls and boys, jumping, laughing and shrieking and swimming with ease.

The Novocine movie theatre One cannot miss the Novocine movie theatre as one walks the city streets of Beira, for it is centrally located on Rua António Enes. Its marquee has raised yellow lettering with blue sides and is enormous; a smaller set of black letters on a white board advertises the latest feature film on show. It is April 2009. I walk up the front steps of the Art Deco façade and see that Transporter 3 (2008), a French action film starring Jason Statham, is playing with daily screenings at 3.00, 6.00 and 9.00 pm. I am between movie showings. I step inside the nearempty marble lobby and once again see renovation hard at work; remnants of an earlier era are put to productive use – its gilded box office and old popcorn maker are both fully operational. I peek inside the theatre and see row upon row of red cherry leather seats. I am reminded of the materiality of movie halls that Brian Larkin writes about for Nigeria and the fact that they operate as ‘translocal spaces, sites of anonymity that open up the world in some sense’.60 I see cinema’s ‘enchantment’61 hard at work in this moment. The manager, a middle-aged woman whose name I forget to ask at the time, comes forward and asks me if she can help me with something. She takes me on a quick tour, saying that the cinema house was one of several built in Beira in the 1950s and that in its heyday it was packed full every night.62 I easily imagine a crowd of Portuguese families, all dressed up, eating popcorn and watching the latest feature film brought over from the United States and with Portuguese subtitles. She tells me that, post-independence, there is no longer a culture of cinema. She seems melancholic about this last point. They removed several rows of the red leather seats, she quietly adds. They were never near full capacity on any given night and thus they no longer needed these seats. She does not allow

138

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

me to take any photographs inside. I leave quietly with the intention to come back to watch Transporter 3 another evening. I return to the Novocine movie theatre in February 2016 and see the same oversized, raised yellow-and-blue letters on its marquee, only they look more weathered this time around, edges of peeling blue paint clearly visible. Neither a film title nor screening times are on display. Instead, I see the words Auditório Municipal (municipal auditorium) located in small lettering directly below the name of the cinema hall. I talk to Apingar, the caretaker on duty.63 He tells me that the Novocine was shut down in 2010 as a functioning movie theatre open to the public. That year, its Portuguese owners returned to Portugal, upon which it was taken over by the Beira city municipality which reopened it soon thereafter as a cultural centre open to all sorts of activities. It has a different feel now, seven years later, more open to the city and its inhabitants perhaps. I see the same signs of its now-faded glory, its geometrically designed wooden ticket counter still intact but no longer in use. I glance at a printed notice for karate lessons twice a week taped to the wall inside the lobby. On my way out, Apingar excitedly informs me that the Novocine will soon be closed once again, for about a year, while it undergoes a full renovation. It will be restored to its original purpose as a movie theatre once again with plans for a fancy cafe to be built next door. I leave hopeful that people will return to the practice of going to the movies, not only here in Beira but more generally and that the Novocine will become a thriving social space once again, only for a different set of Beira residents this time around. As I continue to wander the streets of Beira, I seek out its other colonialera cinema halls. My hotel, appropriately named VIP Inn Beira, is located on the same street, Luís Inácio Rua, as the white- and blue-trim Olympia cinema hall that was built in 1955, a date confirmed in an old postcard image included in Felipe Branquinho’s beautiful short film on Beira.64 The Olympia is now a Pentecostal church. I peek inside and see that the old movie seats have been removed; instead I see rows of perfectly lined alternating blue and white plastic chairs with fresh flowers displayed on a table in the front, a makeshift podium nearby. I return at 6.00 pm for evening mass; the church is half-full as the priest delivers his sermon. The cafe next door with its pine green and white block print flooring – more than likely it had once been attached to the lobby of the theatre but is now closed off – is full of people, eating, drinking and talking. I walk past the imposing Ciné Nacional with its oval-shaped dome standing out on Avenida Poder Popular. Its Art Deco features are intact even as it appears permanently shut; I peek inside the gilded edge glass doors into a dimly lit foyer where I

Renovating in Beira

139

see two pool tables side by side, carefully covered with separate cloths. I learn that, at one point, there used to be an Indian curry restaurant called Restaurante Nacional housed inside; it was still in operation when Lonely Planet travel writer Mary Fitzpatrick visited Beira in 2007.65 If we think about the naming of these three movie houses – Novocine, Olympia and Nacional – and imagine them as ‘encoding imperial splendor into the spectacle promised by the experience of cinema’, following Larkin,66 then we might have a glimpse of the function these cinema halls had during Portuguese colonial times. We can also invoke their names once again in the here and now, that is, at a much later historical moment, to consider that Beira’s movie theatres have experienced colonialism, socialism and war in the interim. Did its residents seek solace in ‘going to the movies’ during times of war? Perhaps then we might be more mindful of the layers of renovation amid the ruination that has taken place during this sixty-odd-year period – that is their resilience – and that are in active use by a diverse group of residents, cinema lovers as well as karate players and churchgoers.

The Grande Hotel The first time I see the Grande Hotel in 2009, I stand in awe, for it is architecturally imposing: I immediately sense its grandeur back in the day, its name evoking exactly that sense of splendour it once inhabited. It is a fitting example of one of the forgotten masterpieces of African modernism that Oliver Wainwright writes about.67 However, the many historic photographs of the hotel I have viewed online have not prepared me for the bare-bones open-air structure that is in front of me.68 I walk inside and look at what once was the foyer with sweeping balustrades on each side.69 A mix of clothing – children’s underwear, men’s pants and faded capulanas – are drying on temporary lines strung between structural posts. I am surrounded by a refugee squatter camp of men, women and children, eating, drinking and sleeping inside the cavity of what was once a luxury hotel of 116 rooms, where attention to detail included a personal operator for each elevator.70 It has a lively atmosphere despite the dire circumstances: one man is using a balcony to dry fish; another has a makeshift tuck shop of basic produce – tomatoes and a few onions, some of which are innovatively grown in the cracks of the hotel roof.71 Whole families have claimed stairwells as homes and built temporary shelters with concrete blocks, woven reed and timber.72 Children are laughing and playing in the background and along the edges of an Olympicsized swimming pool, now turned into a bathing facility. Many of the residents I

140

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

see today arrived from 1981 onwards in the wake of Mozambique’s civil war and have stayed on, with nowhere else to go.73 Additional waves of migrants continue to arrive in a country that is slowly recovering from years of violence, war and poverty. I know and understand that renovation is hard at work to transform this hotel74 into homes, but I find the scene of deep impoverishment before me hard to see and walk away.75 On my second visit to Beira seven years later, I return to the hotel grounds and find it much unchanged from my previous visit. I am less shocked this time around. I take a few photographs and walk away once again. When I first asked architect José Forjaz about the Grande Hotel, he described it to me as a huge ‘wedding cake that was good for nothing’. In 1954, the Companhia Mozambique had commissioned Portuguese architect Francisco de Castro to build a luxury hotel with an Olympic-sized swimming pool overlooking the Indian Ocean.76 It opened its Art Deco–styled doors in 1955, only to close them in 1963. During this eight-year period, it never realized the wealthy clientele it had hoped for and eventually closed for business due to a continuing loss of profits against a background of construction costs that had been three times the initial budget.77 However, the hotel was still available for hosting large events and conferences, while its swimming pool was used to train Mozambique’s Olympic swimming team and remained open to a Portuguese swimming public, white by implication.78 It was then abandoned at the end of colonialism, like so many other buildings throughout the city. However, after independence and during Mozambique’s overlapping periods of socialism (1977–1989) and civil war (1977–1992), it found a new purpose and gained a set of new residents: it was strategically employed as a military base for FRELIMO soldiers who slept in the guest rooms and bathed in its luxury bathrooms, the pool bar becoming their headquarters and the basement a prison for their enemies of state.79 At one level, the layered ruination and repurposing of the Grande Hotel over this fifty-year period is an example of creative yet disturbing (and not ‘failed’) renovation hard at work. At another level, it points to something more extreme – to what anthropologist Danny Hoffman suggests for Sierra Leone, which is particular to the modern hotel: Hotels are the creations of empires … now that global capital has entered its own imperial phase, the hotel space is where contests over the monopoly on legitimate violence enter the cash nexus of globalization. The hotel is also the domicile of the nomad … it is a space of deterritorialization – understood not as the erasure of place but as one half of the process of decoding and recoding … a space of production without limits.80

Renovating in Beira

141

Something new is emerging inside this concave, hallowed structure that was once a luxury hotel. Architectural writer Emma Hall – she visited the Grande Hotel in 2014 – provocatively suggests that ‘people are able to understand and alter the buildings [of the Grande Hotel] in a completely new way, unencumbered by any nostalgia or reverence’.81 She describes the hotel as shifting successfully from a formal building to a ‘concrete landscape’ to be ‘freely used and torn up’.82 Following Hall, it is relevant to understand the Grande Hotel’s newest residents as less burdened by Beira’s colonial past (in the way that many of us are, including myself), but instead are able to embrace its potentiality, its remaining infrastructural elements hard at work for active repurposing. Perhaps the reading of hotels (by Hoffman and Hall) is not so distant from Beira’s hotel landscape that I experienced on these two different visits in 2009 and 2016. It is during my second stay that I discover that several new hotels have been built over the course of those seven years. This includes the VIP Inn Beira, a new Mozambique-owned business-style hotel where I am staying and which is doing comfortably well. There is also the newly built (as of 2013) Hotel Golden Peacock, a Chinese-financed five-star hotel complex which includes a casino, disco, multiple conference rooms and an artificial lake overlooking the Indian Ocean.83 Perhaps it is the Chinese, and no longer the Portuguese, who are set to become Beira’s latest (imperial) investors.

The Riviera cafe The Riviera cafe is located on an ideal corner off the main Praça de Município in downtown Beira. I am immediately drawn to it on my first visit in 2009 and sit down on one of its French-styled wicker chairs at an outdoor table. I order um galão (milky coffee) and a pastel de nata (cream pastry) and spend a leisurely afternoon. I notice that it is full at this time, a mixed crowd of young Mozambican hipsters and ageing Portuguese men. I return the next day, only this time in the morning, and see the same group of old Portuguese men hanging out, smoking, talking and drinking coffee. I overhear snatches of their conversation, mostly about local politics and certain public figures. Over the next few days, I continue to stop by the cafe on my way elsewhere and see that it caters largely to an expatriate Portuguese clientele, mostly made up of men. It is a place where political deals are brokered and memories are reminisced over – I see and feel it happening. I learn that, in fact, large numbers of Portuguese are returning to their former colonies (and specifically the African ones); it is a form of reverse migration that is a recent phenomenon (since the end of 2008 and the

142

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

global financial crisis) and is a direct result of the lack of growth in Portugal’s recession-riddled stagnant economy and an exponential capitalist investment in Angola and Mozambique.84 Africa is once again the land of opportunity, a position it held before, only during colonial times. Perhaps the irony of the situation is not lost on those Portuguese who are arriving anew and making Beira their home. Snippets of an earlier conversation with Samuel Azevedo, the Beira railways manager, come back to me: it was he who first mentioned to me that this group of colonial returnees also included many Portuguese expatriates who had previously been employed at the nearby Rhodesian-owned Fábrica de Açúcar and who had left at the first signs of civil war, only to return once the situation improved.85 They had arrived with memories and experiences of a very different colonial city in tow and would frequent this particular cafe, Samuel said. It was as if they had been impatiently waiting in Lisbon, ready to return as soon as the economic situation had improved, he says. Perhaps over the years, the Riviera cafe had become an estranged home of sorts – a prized public spot in the praça (square) to watch the world go by during increasingly insecure times and that had accumulated layers of colonialism, independence, socialism and war, adding (for better or for worse) to its landscape in the process. I can see from the zigzagged black-and-white tiled features inside the cafe that it was most likely built during the 1960s, its history very much tied to Beira’s past – as a Portuguese colony where a culture of cafes was part of everyday life; as a site of sugar and coffee production for export; as a last RENAMO holdout during the civil war;86 and, finally, as a space for experimental architecture and tourist consumption. I learn from a fellow customer that the Riviera has survived Café Minerva, a similarly styled Art Deco cafe that had been built during roughly the same era and that had been located diagonally across the praça. Only the name has survived, its old lettering repurposed to announce the appliance store currently housed inside. When I return to the Riviera cafe in February 2016 with the intention of interviewing the Portuguese owner about the history of this leisured space and to follow up on all the questions I did not think to ask on my first visit, I find that it is not open for business. I peer inside, hoping that perhaps I have arrived on the one day of the week it is closed, as restaurants typically are. I recognize the French-styled wicker chairs neatly stacked up in one corner and a pile of industrial equipment in another. I notice a small handwritten note taped to the front of the glass door that says that it is currently under renovation. I chat with two guys loitering outside who tell me that I will miss its grand opening in

Renovating in Beira

143

two weeks’ time. That it is undergoing the very process of renovation that I am attempting to write about is not lost on me as I walk away.

An aerial viewpoint Nowadays, the urban spirit has only partially become woven into the first generation of Mozambicans born and brought up in cities. This process of appropriation by the city is still going on. And it will take various generations.87

If I were to add another layer to Beira’s landscapes of leisure discussed in this chapter, it would be the Aeroporto Internacional da Beira, located on the outskirts of the city. Built in 1967, it has all the requisite modernist features of the colonial era – elaborate tile work in brown- and orange-coloured hues, elegant light fixtures and geometrically lettered signs that are all very much in use today. Mozambique’s national carrier Linhas Aéreas de Moçambique (LAM), starting in the late 1940s, brought passengers from near and afar to experience the tourist dream city in the making.88 The same could be said in the here and now. The airport is bustling with a range of people – Mozambican businessmen, Portuguese expats, international tourists and Chinese workers – all coming and going, more so in 2016 than when I first visited Beira in 2009. Beira’s airport, like the Ferroviário swimming pool, the Novocine movie theatre, the Grande Hotel and the Riviera cafe are all part of a wider complex of leisured infrastructures built during Portuguese colonialism specifically for white expatriate recreation, a point also made by Larkin for Nigeria’s cinema halls and hotels.89 And similar to Hoffman’s Brookfields Hotel in Sierra Leone, these sites have been actively ‘decoded and recoded’90 by Beira’s residents (old and young, white and black, male and female) and put to work to define the city’s postcolonial landscape, one where colonialism, independence, decolonization, socialism and war are all part of its embodied experiences and where multiple pasts, presents and futures cohere. I want to end my ruminations on renovation in Beira by turning to a postcard that I found one day in the Maputo postal office in 2010, a place where I wandered in after my interview with architect José Forjaz (see Figure 7.1). The postcard is of Beira and features many of the tourist attractions under discussion here. It is a bit worn at the edges, its image slightly overexposed. It looks like a photograph that was taken in 1970s, but I am not sure. I turn it over and see that it is credited to Ricardo Rangel, the famed Mozambican photographer who is also featured throughout this book on histories and ethnographies of decolonization in Southern Africa. The next day I show the postcard to António Sopa and ask

144

Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World

Figure 7.1 Ricardo Rangel, postcard of Beira.

him about it. He tells me that very few of Rangel’s images became postcards and that this rare one is most likely from the 1980s, during the height of the civil war, and taken perhaps from the upper floors of one of Beira’s taller buildings, hence its distancing from what was happening on the ground. As a souvenir for visiting tourists, the postcard belies Beira’s multiple pasts at the same time that it gestures to its potential presents and futures as a city whose landscape is filled with swimming pools, movie theatres, hotels and cafes.

Reflecting: From Mozambique to Goa

This book is about mobility and connectivity, reverberation and refraction. It came about as the result of my own movements between Goa, Mozambique and South Africa over a twelve-year period (2005–2017). It is an attempt to think Southern Africa from a globalized regional perspective that crosses national borders and boundaries, physically and emotionally. It is a way to rethink history and ethnography in the Indian Ocean at a very different historical moment than the one that guided my first work on Goa (The Relic State), which was very much about the entanglements of a metropole (Portugal) with one colony (Goa) over the longue durée and through the lens of embodiment and ritual. My project on Portuguese decolonization was conceived as a book from the start. I found Ricardo Rangel’s images and Mia Couto’s prose along the way and incorporated them into ways of writing and seeing. I had previously researched Goa’s decolonization – it was a traumatic event for all those involved and is still very much part of Goa’s discourse on itself. This became the basis for my interest in focusing on Mozambique’s decolonization that took place fourteen years later and under a very different set of historical conditions. I wanted to open up decolonization for study, not merely as a temporary point caught between colonialism and its postcolonialism. Instead, I decided to dwell in this interim space, opening it up for ethnographic, visual and textual analysis, and as offering a way to approach mobility across India and Africa, and within Southern Africa through the category of experience. I always understood Goa’s decolonization as tied to Mozambique’s decolonization. Yet historiography often treated them as separate events. I sought to find a way to connect them, through the movement of people, ideas and things. I wrote one chapter, already thinking of the next that would follow. I wanted to trace an unlikely journey from Goa to Mozambique and then reroute myself by way of Southern Africa. I sought to explore the ties that bind metropole (Portugal) and multiple colonies (Goa, Mozambique) and

146

Reflecting: From Mozambique to Goa

third spaces (Angola, Namibia and South Africa) together in uncomfortable, unsettling and unexpected ways during colonialism’s dismantling. It is those shifts – material and ideological – which transformed colonies into something post that are relevant here. Thus, my emphasis has been less on studying decolonization at the macro level of political transition but is rather on looking at its more understudied elements, as a deeply material yet intimate moment wherein certain individuals interpellated larger state processes and experienced messiness, trauma, loss and resilience along the way. Decolonization was also a historical process by which persons and things increasingly stood in for each other as certain individuals experienced profound personal loss, with the fear of starting over looming ahead. Adopting such a nuanced perspective potentially helps us to understand the multiple and sometimes contradictory experiences of decolonization from those minority diaspora communities showcased here. We must look at decolonization as both a struggle over ownership and self-hood in a period of dramatic transition, and that remains unresolved and ongoing as part and parcel of postcoloniality. We also need to look at the manner of decolonization – its conditions of possibility – as fundamentally shaping the postcolonial contours of a place. In the last body chapter of this book, I returned full circle to contemporary Mozambique as a way to approach decolonization from the perspective of those people, ideas and things that actively remain in its aftermath and are put to creative use. I want to end my reflections by returning to Goa whence I started – and by way of the Indian Ocean and a novel I first read during fieldwork in Goa in 1999, which made an impression on me – and return to now. I have my copy in front of me and have reread it in the interim, my experiences of Mozambique and Southern Africa shifting the way I perceive the author’s prose. I also return to Goa in order to suggest that just as much as Goa figures in Mozambique’ postcolonial sensibility – an aspect I have explored in this book – the reverse process is equally true even as I have not taken it up here – that of Mozambique’s role in shaping Goa’s contemporary landscape. Instead I gesture to this process by way of a fictional account and as a way to open possible future directions of research. In his book entitled Tivolem, author Victor Rangel-Ribeiro tells the story of Marie-Santana who chooses to return to the village of Tivolem, her ancestral home in Goa after living for twenty-three years in Portuguese Mozambique. It is the early 1930s, a time when ‘decolonization’ had entered the lexicon but was not yet an idealogy, practice or event (as Betts reminds us, and whose writings I have relied on throughout my book). Rangel-Ribeiro writes:

Reflecting: From Mozambique to Goa

147

Marie-Santana stood at the rail of the main deck, her scarf fluttering in the wind, as the Lilavati, still a good half hour from the fort, plowed past the Baga headland at a brisk eighteen knots, sending a foaming wake skimming over eight-foot breakers toward the Pirate’s Well at the foot of the bluff, and the white-sand beach beyond … [She] wished here parents were with her now, going home. In her mid-thirties, and on this trip, she felt more orphaned than when they had died in Mozambique, in Portuguese Africa, within months of each other eight years ago, leaving her there alone. She had buried them in accordance with her mother’s wishes, side by side in Quelimane’s Catholic cemetery by the River of Good Omen. Coming home like this, even coming home to Granny, was itself a wrench; it was she who was leaving them behind, abandoning them. The thought that she could no longer visit their graves, bringing flowers and prayers and love, filled her eyes with tears. A flurry among her fellow passengers finally snapped her out of her reverie … Around her Marie-Santana heard the familiar sounds of English and Portuguese interspersed with the babble of more ancient tongues – Konkani, Marathi, even the elegant Hindi of the north. Already the dock and customs shed, gaily festooned with welcoming red, green, and yellow bunting, were drawing closer. Gathering up her rolled-up bedding, and keeping her one larger steamer trunk in view, she prepared to debark.1

It is her positionality as a member of the Goan diaspora, and an ‘imperial citizen’, and with a certain ‘society of the absent’ in mind that compels her, as she crosses the Indian Ocean, to dip into these experiences that connect Goa and India, Mozambique and Southern Africa, past, present and future.

Notes Chapter 1 1

The launch took place at WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, on 11 June 2015 to inaugurate the South African edition with Wits University Press of Mbembe’s much celebrated and translated book, first published by the University of California Press in 2001. 2 Sean Christie, ‘The Great Unblocking of Beira’, Mail and Guardian, 19 March 2010. https://mg.co.za/article/2010-03-19-the-great-unblocking-of-beira, accessed 14 June 2017. In 2010, journalist Sean Christie goes in search of this rumour in Beira and finds little to substantiate it beyond a few isolated incidents during the last days of Portuguese colonial rule in Mozambique. The rumour rather points to the manner in which the departing Portuguese are represented in the postcolonial period, which, in turn, says much about decolonization as a physical act and ideological moment. 3 Prasenjit Duara, ed., Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1–2. 4 Ibid., 2. 5 Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria Unveiled’, in A Dying Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), 63. 6 Amilcar Cabral, ‘Portuguese Colonial Domination’, in Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings, comp. and ed. Maurice Taonezvi and Abebe Zegeye, trans. Michael Wolfers (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2007), 65. 7 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: Heinemann, 1986). 8 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963). 9 Jane M. Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (London: Routledge, 1996), 29. 10 For writings that developed out of this productive field of research, see the works of Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997); Nicolas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference

Notes

11 12

13 14 15

16

17

18

19 20 21

149

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and of course the prolific subaltern studies collective from India. Jacobs, Edges of Empire, 22. Achille Mbembe, ‘First Night with Fanon: Property, Wealth and Racial Nationalism after Decolonisation’, Public lecture, Sawyer Seminar Series, WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 29 March 2010. Raymond Betts, Decolonization (London: Routledge, 1998), 1. Ibid. Frederick Cooper, ‘The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. by Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997), 406, emphasis mine. ‘International Seminar on Decolonization,’ National History Center, Washington, DC, 2006–2015, http://nationalhistorycenter.org/about/program-descriptions/ international-seminar-on-decolonization-2/, accessed 4 May 2017. Sudhir Pillarisetti, ‘Imperial Ends: Deconstructing Decolonization and the Archives of Empire’, AHA Today, 1 July 2015, http://blog.historians.org/2015/07/ decolonization/, accessed 18 January 2016. The seminar series was founded by William R. Louis, director of the National History Center, in 2006 and draws on people like Dane Kennedy, Philippa Levine, Jason Parker and Marilyn Young for its multi-institutional faculty group. Funded by Andrew M. Mellon Foundation and sponsored by the American Historical Association and the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, each summer, these seminars brought together fifteen US and international scholars, each researching various aspects of decolonization in different geographical regions, to Washington, DC, for four weeks. Pillarisetti also points out that these new decolonization studies are rooted in rethinking civil rights and feminist history in relation to schools of thought discussed in subsequent sections. Farina Mir, ‘Introduction’, Special theme ‘AHR Roundtable, The Archives of Decolonization’, American Historical Review 120, no. 3 (2015): 846. I thank the author for directing me to this roundtable discussion. She points to the impact over the last twenty years of cultural history, postcolonial studies, subaltern studies and new imperial histories as reinvigorating decolonization studies. Ibid., 844. Ibid. Ibid., 846. For example, Mir points to James D. Le Sueur, The Decolonization Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003); Dietmar Rothermund, The Routledge Companion to Decolonization (New York: Routledge 2006); A. G. Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonization’, Past and Present 200, no. 1 (2008): 211–47; Martin Thomas, Bob Moore and L. J. Butler, The Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial Nation States, 1918–1975 (London: Bloomsbury, 2008); Todd Shephard, Voices of

150

22

23 24 25

26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

Notes Decolonization: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2015), as well as several regional edited collections. Here I point to the important article by William R. Louis and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’, in The Decolonization Reader, ed. James D. Le Sueur (New York: Routledge, 2003), 49–79. Louis was also one of the pioneers who developed the ‘International Seminars on Decolonization’. Mir, ‘Introduction’, 851. Ibid. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’, Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 36. They write: ‘Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools’ (Tuck and Yang, ‘Decolonizing’, 1). Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle, ‘Reframing Cultures of Decolonisation’, in Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945–70, ed. Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 4. Their focus is similar to Mir’s in that they want to move beyond thinking of decolonization as the moment of constitutional change. Ibid., 5. Ibid. Ibid., 4. Case studies take on such diverse locations and cultures as Britain, Cambodia, France, Ghana, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia, Mali, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), South Africa, Tanzania, Trinidad, Uganda, the United States and Vietnam. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 17, emphasis mine. Ibid., 6. As do Craggs and Wintle, I also point to the important and recent work of Elizabeth Buettner, who has focused on ‘the lived experiences of decolonisation of a wide range of subjects’ – empire employees, families, settlers and repatriates in a variety of decolonized settings, including Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal. See her important book, Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). I take up her work in a later section of this chapter. Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 58.

Notes

151

39 Das, Critical Events, 1, emphasis mine. 40 Duara, Decolonization, 3. 41 Christopher J. Lee, Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010). 42 Ibid., 3. 43 Ibid., 7–8. 44 Ibid., 8. 45 Betts, Decolonization, 29. 46 To get a sense of the itinerant quality of the Portuguese colonizing process, see, for example, Prakashchandra P. Shirodkar, ed., Goa: Cultural Trends (Panaji: Casa Packmaster, 1998); Teotónio R. De Souza, ed., Discoveries, Missionary Expansion and Asian Cultures (New Delhi: Concept, 1994). 47 Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen, ‘Introduction: Portugal, Empire, and Migration – Was There Ever an Autonomous Social Imperial Space?’ in Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, ed. Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 8. I take up many of their finer points in later chapters and apply many of their ideas to both Portuguese India and Africa. 48 Ibid., 12. Morier-Genoud and Cahen ask the following important question: ‘What we need to ask is not just whether there were diasporas in the Portuguese empire and what kind of diasporas existed, but also which kind of diaspora or community had what kind of relations with the Portuguese empire’ (ibid., emphasis theirs). 49 Boaventura De Sousa Santos, ‘Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Inter-Identity’, Luso-Brazilian Review 39, no. 2 (2002): 37. Here I stress the political economy of graduate studies, with its nation state focus, that makes it extremely difficult to study cases of colonialism that do not map onto distinct postcolonial nation states. It is starting to change as more comparative work is being undertaken and increased funding becomes available for taking on multi-sited ethnography and globalized history. 50 For extended discussion of these factors, see Santos, ‘Between Prospero and Caliban’, 29. 51 See my article, ‘A Voyage of Convalescence: Richard Burton and the Imperial Ills of Portuguese India’, South African Historical Journal 61, no. 4 (2009): 802–16. 52 Santos, ‘Between Prospero and Caliban’, 22–4. 53 Ibid., 12. For an expanded discussion of this point, see also my paper ‘Charles Boxer as Archive, Intellectuals, Hegemony, and the State’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropology Association, San Francisco, November 1996. 54 See Celsa Pinto, Trade and Finance in Portuguese India: A Study of the Portuguese Country Trade, 1770–1840 (New Delhi: Concept, 1994).

152

Notes

55 Santos, ‘Between Prospero and Caliban’, 9. 56 Here it is important to raise the issue that by calling the Portuguese case a form of subaltern colonialism, can we consider Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s writings as an intellectual insubstantiation of Lusotropicalismo? In other words, I want to approach his ideas with caution, as marking or reaffirming the exceptionalism of Portuguese colonialism which I want to write against and is a critique echoed in the work of Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen who develop a sustained argument against Santos and his idea of subaltern colonialism. See their joint introduction to Imperial Migrations, 3–6. 57 In the last twenty-five years, a counter narrative to this Anglophone historiographical bias has been in the process of development, one that comes from Portuguese scholars as well as from scholars located in a variety of (Portuguese) decolonized contexts. Authors of revisionist writings on Portuguese Goa history include (but are not limited to) Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Cristina Osswald, Teotónio de Souza, Raghu Trichur and Rowena Robinson. 58 The historical specificities of the Goa, Mozambique and Angola cases are outlined briefly in Chapter 2 and discussed in more depth in later chapters of the book. 59 For such a bias, albeit in a limited form, see Michael Harsgor, ‘Aftereffects of an “Exemplary Decolonization”’, Journal of Contemporary History 15, no. 1 (1980): 144. 60 With regard to the Goa case, see Silvia M. De Mendonça-Noronha, ‘The Economic Scene in Goa, 1926–1961’, in Goa through the Ages: Volume II – An Economic History, ed. Teotónio De Souza (New Delhi: Concept, 1987), 263. 61 Historian Pratima Kamat discusses the impact Salazar’s ‘one nation theory’ had on Goan independence in Farar Far (Crossfire): Local Resistance to Colonial Hegemony in Goa, 1510–1912 (Panaji: Institute Menezes Bragança, 1999), 283–4. 62 Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1956). In 1952, Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre went on a tour of the Portuguese territories in Asia and Africa and wrote up his findings, which included a discussion of the Portuguese as non-racist and as the best kind of colonizers since there existed little hatred between colonizer and colonized. The theory of Lusotropicalismo, as it came to be known, was developed from these findings and was seized on by Salazar as scientific proof that Portuguese colonialism was ‘good to think’. Freyre’s impact on the perceptions of Portuguese colonialism, past, present and future, cannot be underestimated. 63 George Martelli, ‘The Issues Internationalized’, in Portuguese Africa: A Handbook, ed. David Abshire and Michael Samuels (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969), 375. 64 Buettner, Europe after Empire, 192. 65 Perhaps this point returns us full circle to the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos and his calling of the Portuguese as a subaltern form of colonialism. See his ‘Between Prospero and Caliban’, 9.

Notes

153

66 As Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen point out, the Portuguese empire was not any different from other empires and still belongs in the ‘family of modern European imperialism’. See their ‘Introduction’, 7. 67 Ibid., 25, n. 24. I follow Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen in using the term ‘Portuguese’ world over a Lusophone one. In their introduction, they ask: ‘Can we speak of a Lusophone or Portuguese-speaking world? At best it is problematic. We decided therefore to use “Portuguese World”. This is relevant because during the third Portuguese Empire (1885–1975), the empire constituted a “Portuguese world”, at least politically. The term may sound a little outdated, but it is more precise and adequate – it is therefore better to talk of a Portuguese world during empire than to read back into the past a problematic Lusophone one’ (25, n. 24). 68 Once again, I gained many insights from Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle’s excellent ‘Introduction’ to their edited collection, 17. 69 Carolyn Ellis, Tony E. Adams and Arthur P. Bochner. ‘Autoethnography: An Overview’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12, no. 1 (2011): 1–12. 70 I am here following the seminal work of Elizabeth Edwards on the intersections of photography and anthropology: The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). 71 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Beyond the Boundary: A Consideration of the Expressive in Photography and Anthropology’, in Rethinking Visual Anthropology, ed. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 58. For this book, I am particularly indebted to her notion of the ‘expressive’ in photography. 72 Ibid., 54. 73 Patricia Hayes, ‘Port City and Desire: Ricardo Rangel’s Photographs of Lourenço Marques, Mozambique (1950–60s)’, unpublished paper (2009), 10. 74 The idea of experiment also comes from a point that Achille Mbembe made at the launch of the South African edition of On the Postcolony. Writing, he said, is ‘less about being right or wrong’, but about approaching old topics in new ways (Mbembe, ‘Introductory Comments’). 75 Gupta, The Relic State. 76 It is to the Indian Ocean as an area of scholarship that I am very much indebted to for the way I think about Goa and Mozambique in a relation manner. My work has been influenced in particular by the works of Sugata Bose, Engseng Ho, Thomas Metcalf, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson, the latter two in particular when we worked together on an edited volume. See Pamila Gupta, Isabel Hofmeyr and Michael Pearson, eds, Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010); Isabel Hofmeyr, The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004); Isabel Hofmeyr, Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013); Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2003); Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the

154

77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84 85

Notes Age of Global Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2006); Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2007). Thomas B. Hansen and Finn Stepputat, eds, States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 29. Once again, I am very much indebted to Morier-Genoud and Cahen’s excellent ‘Introduction’. Rui Assubuji and Patricia Hayes, ‘The Political Sublime: Reading Kok Nam, Mozambican Photographer (1939–2012)’, Kronos 39, no. 1 (2013): 66–111. I take their core question, one that is focused on Mozambican photographer Kok Nam, and explore its possibilities with Rangel. Hayes, ‘Port City and Desire’. Cooper and Stoler, Tensions of Empire. Louis and Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’. Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand, 2009). Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

Chapter 2 1 2 3

4 5

6 7 8

I used this image to open an essay on Gandhi’s views on Goa’s decolonization; see ‘Gandhi and the Goa Question’, Public Culture 23, no. 2 (2011): 321–30. I take up Rangel’s life and work in more depth in Chapter 4. Interview with Ricardo Rangel by Patricia Hayes and Farzanah Badsha in Maputo 2005, in Ricardo Rangel: insubmisso e Generoso, ed. Luis Bernardo Honwana, Textos Calane Da Silva, Drew Thompson, Luís B. Honwana, Mota Lopes, Nelson Saúte and Patricia Hayes (Maputo: Marimbique, 2014), 78. My use of the word ‘entanglement’ follows the work of Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid. Shantishree Pandit, ‘The Parliament and Foreign Policy in India: Its Policy Towards Goa (1952–1961)’, in Socioeconomic Aspects of Portuguese Colonialism in Goa: 19th and 20th Centuries, ed. B.S. Shastry (Belgaum: Yarbal, 1990), 176. Sumit Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947 (Madras: Macmillan India, 1983), 65–100. Ibid. Judith Brown, Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 209–31.

Notes 9

10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

26 27 28 29 30

155

See Nicholas Dirks’s argument for an increasing hollowness of the British in India in The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). Gupta, ‘Gandhi and the Goa Question’, 321–30. Brown, Modern India, 317–59. Ibid. Arnoldo Gonçalves, ‘Macau, Timor and Portuguese India in the Context of Portugal’s Recent Decolonization’, in The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization, ed. Stewart Lloyd-Jones and António Costa Pinto (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003), 56. For an overview, see Kamat, Farar Far (Crossfire). See Pia de Menezes Rodrigues, ‘Interactive Relationship between Goa and Bombay Journalism’, in Goa’s External Relations, ed. P. P. Shirodkar (Panjim: Prabhakar Bide, 1992), 96. Kamat, Farar Far, 279–90. Hugh Kay, Salazar and Modern Portugal (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1970), 212–214. Gonçalves, ‘Macau, Timor and Portuguese India’, 56. Ibid. Sushila S. Mendes, ‘Dr. Lohia and Goa’s Freedom Struggle’, in Essays in Goan History, ed. Teotónio R. De Souza (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1989), 179. See Pandit, ‘The Parliament’, 176. Ibid. De Mendonça-Noronha, ‘The Economic Scene of Goa, 1926–1961’, 263. Ibid. See also António de Oliveira Salazar, ‘Portugal, Goa e a União Indiana’, Noticias do Estado da Índia, No. 137 (Lisboa: Secretariado Nacional de Informação, 1956), 7. Due to the political repression in Goa, the centre of Goa’s independence movement was based in Bombay. The mouthpiece of the Goa Liberation Council was the Goan Tribune, which had been established in 1956. See Rodrigues, ‘Interactive Relationship’, 99. Arthur Rubinoff, The Construction of a Political Community: Integration and Identity in Goa (New Delhi: Sage, 1998), 42. Ibid. The Statesman, 2 December 1961 (English-language Indian newspaper based in Delhi and Calcutta). Rajan Narayan, Goencho Saib: The Life and Mission of St. Francis Xavier (Panjim: Tata Press, 1994), 58–9. Nehru is ascribing to Partha Chatterjee’s idea of a modern nation-state, whereas Salazar is advocating a case for the exceptionalism of Goa. See Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments.

156

Notes

31 For additional details on Operation Vijay, see P. P. Shirodkar, Goa’s Struggle for Freedom (Panjim: Mrs Sulabha Shirodkar, 1999), 77–9. 32 Ibid. Daman (near Bombay) and Diu (Gujarat), two other Portuguese enclaves located inside the borders of the Indian nation-state, were liberated alongside Goa. 33 Goncalves, ‘Macau, Timor and Portuguese India’, 57. 34 Richard A. H. Robinson, ‘The Influence of Overseas Issues in Portugal’s Transition to Democracy’, in The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization, ed. Stewart Lloyd-Jones and António Costa Pinto (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003), 3. 35 Norrie MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire (Harlow : Longman, 1997), 152. 36 Ibid. 37 Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique (London: C. Hurst, 1995), 1–27. 38 William Gervase Clarence-Smith, The Third Portuguese Empire, 1825–1975: A Study in Economic Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 1–21. 39 Ibid., 81–115. 40 Newitt, A History of Mozambique, 317–55. 41 Ibid., 356–85, 445–81. For an excellent overview of this period from a labour perspective, also see Jeanne Marie Penvenne’s classic work, African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877–1962 (London: Heinemann, 1994), 28–43. 42 Ibid., 386–444. Also see Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Mozambique: From Colonialism to Revolution, 1900–1982 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983). 43 MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 9. 44 Ibid., 11. This was also a direct attempt to circumvent United Nations criticism of Portugal’s colonial empire during a larger era of widespread European decolonization. 45 Ibid. 46 António De Figueiredo, ‘The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the EU’, in The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization, ed. Stewart Lloyd-Jones and António Costa Pinto (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003), 132. 47 MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 10. 48 Ibid. 49 Merle Bowen, The State against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 45–62. For excellent historical overviews of FRELIMO, see Michel Cahen, Mozambique, la révolution implosée – études sur 12 ans d indépendence (1975– 1987) (Paris: L Harmattan, 1987); Michel Cahen, Les Bandits. Un Historien au Mozambique 1994 (Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 2002); and Luís De Brito, ‘Le FRELIMO et la construction de l’État national au Mozambique: Le sens de la reference au marxisme (1962–1983)’ (PhD thesis, Université de Paris, Paris, 1991), 8.

Notes 50 51 52 53

54 55

56

57

58

59

60 61 62

63 64

157

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Borges Coelho and João Paulo, ‘African Troops in the Portuguese Colonial Army, 1961–1974: Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique’, Portuguese Studies Review 10, no. 1 (2002): 129–50. Ibid. See Georgi Derluguian, ‘The Social Origins of Good and Bad Governance: Reinterpreting the 1968 Schism in Frelimo’, in Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, ed. Eric Morier-Genoud (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 79–102. Bowen, The State against the Peasantry, 45–62. See Mustafa Dhada’s extensive fieldwork and writings on this topic in ‘The Wiriyamu Massacre of 1972: Its Context, Genesis, and Revelation’, History in Africa 40, no. 1 (2013): 45–75. See Patrick Chabal, ‘End of Empire’, in A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa, ed. P. Chabal with David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest, Malyn Newitt, Gerhard Seibert and Elisa S. Andrade (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 3–28. See also Malyn Newitt, ‘Mozambique’, in A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa, ed. P. Chabal with David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest, Malyn Newitt, Gerhard Seibert and Elisa S. Andrade (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 185–235. David Birmingham, ‘Angola’, in A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa, ed. P. Chabal with David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest, Malyn Newitt, Gerhard Seibert and Elisa S. Andrade (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), 147. António Costa Pinto, ‘The Transition to Democracy and Portugal’s Decolonization’, in The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization, ed. Stewart LloydJones and António Costa Pinto (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003), 27. Pinto, ‘The Transition to Democracy’, 27. Birmingham, ‘Angola’, 139. Lawrence Henderson’s classic study, Angola: Five Centuries of Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 40–5, for a good historical overview of Portuguese colonialism in Angola; see also Gerald Bender, Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1978). Despite Portugal’s territorial claims to Angola, its control over much of its interior regions was minimal throughout its colonial period. The Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 fixed Portuguese Angola’s colonial borders, with many details finalized in the 1920s. Bender, Angola under the Portuguese, 46. This invaluable sociological study offers a sustained discussion of the history of whiteness in colonial Angola. Bender, Angola under the Portuguese, xxvii.

158

Notes

65 MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 10. He writes that between 1955 and 1968, the white population of Angola tripled from 100,000 to 300,000, out of a total population of 5.5 million persons. 66 Bender, Angola under the Portuguese, 22. 67 The FNLA was created in 1957 as Union of the Populations of Northern Angola (UPNA), before changing its name to Union of the Populations of Angola (UPA) one year later. Its leader, Holden Roberto, was a descendant of the old Kongo Royal House. It became the FNLA in 1962 after merging with another party and assumed a pro-American, anti-Soviet Union stance. It was supported by the Bakongo ethnic group of Northern Angola and the Congo. See Didier Péclard, ‘UNITA and the Moral Economy of Exclusion in Angola, 1966–1977’, in Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, ed. Eric Morier-Genoud (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 153, n. 8. 68 The oldest of the three nationalist movements in Angola, the MPLA was founded in 1960 with the merging of the Party of the United Struggle for Africans in Angola (PLUA) and the Angolan Communist Party (PCA). It was a party of leftwing politicians, involving mixed race and white members of the urban elite and intelligentsia. It was led by Agostinho Neto and Viriato da Cruz, both Portugaleducated urban intellectuals. It was supported by the Ambundu and other ethnic groups of the Luanda, Bengoa, Cuanza Norte, Cuanza Sul and Mallange Districts. It received external support from the Soviet Union and Cuba, including Soviet weapons, and had a special armed wing called the People’s Army of Liberation of Angola (EPLA). See Péclard, ‘UNITA and the Moral Economy’, 153, n. 8. 69 UNITA was created in 1966 by Jonas Savimbi, who broke away from the FNLA after he accused Holden Roberto of being complicit with the United States and following an imperial policy. Savimbi was a member of the Ovimbundu tribe of Central and Southern Angola, the son of an Evangelical pastor, and studied medicine in Portugal but did not graduate. See Péclard, ‘UNITA and the Moral Economy’, 153, n. 8. 70 Portuguese military strength stood at 60,000 troops in 1974 of which 40 per cent were locally recruited Africans. See MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 158. For recent overviews of the wars of liberation in Portuguese Africa, see Birmingham, ‘Angola’, 137–84; W. S. Van Der Waals, Portugal’s War in Angola, 1961–1974 (Pretoria: Protea, 2011); Al J. Venter, Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa: Lisbon’s Three Wars in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea 1961–74 (Solihull: Helion, 2013); René Pélissier and Douglas Wheeler, História de Angola, trans. Pedro Serras Pereira and Paula Almeida (Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2011); A. Fernandes, Segredos da descolonização de Angola (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2013); Dalita C. Mateus, and Álvaro Mateus, Angola 61 Guerra Colonial: causas e consequências (Lisboa: Texto Editores, 2011); Leonor Figueiredo, Ficheiros secretos da descolonização de Angola (Lisboa: Alêtheia Editores, 2009).

Notes

159

71 Birmingham, ‘Angola’, 137–55. 72 Péclard, ‘UNITA and the Moral Economy’, 149–74. 73 For a concise summary of the Alvor and Nakuru Agreements, see Ana Balona De Oliveira, ‘Decolonization in, of and through the Archival “Moving Images” of Artistic Practice’, Comunicação e Sociedade 29 (2016): 133. See also Birmingham, ‘Angola’, 137–55. 74 For historical overviews of the Angolan civil war, see Fernando Andresen Guimarães, The Origins of the Angolan Civil War: Foreign Intervention and Domestic Political Conflict, 1961–76 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002); Patrick Chabal and Nuno Vidal, eds, Angola: The Weight of History (London: Hurst, 2008); W. M. James, A Political History of the Civil War in Angola, 1974–1990 (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2011); Justin Pearce, Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola, 1975–2002 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). 75 The estimated figures vary widely, but most recent approximations suggest that 500,000 Portuguese left Angola and Mozambique (combined) for Lisbon, while an unspecified number left for Brazil, South Africa, Australia and Canada. See Claudia Castelo, ‘Colonial Migration to Angola and Mozambique’, in Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, ed. Eric MorierGenoud and Michel Cahen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 124, n. 17. Elizabeth Buettner offers the figures of between 500,000 and 800,000 for Angola and Mozambique and elsewhere and include over 500,000 settlers and in addition to 200,000 troops returning home. At least 25,000–35,000 were either mestiços or Africans, who were the spouses or children of persons born in Portugal. See her Europe after Empire, 236. Gerald Bender offers figures of 60,000 Portuguese fleeing before June 1975 and estimates that between May 1 and 31 October 1975, 235,315 refugees were airlifted out of Angola. See his Angola under the Portuguese. António Costa Pinto writes that the mass exodus of Portuguese civilians, in January 1975, saw around 50,000 Portuguese flee Angola, and by the summer of that year, an air bridge was established to evacuate the remaining colonialists, which was more than 200,000 colonialists. See his ‘The Transition to Democracy’, 29. 76 See Buettner, Europe after Empire, 242–3. 77 The coup is popularly known as the ‘Carnation Revolution’ after the carnation flowers that Lisbon’s public placed in the muzzles of the rifles and on the uniforms of the army officers who had led the coup as a sign and symbol of peace. See David Birmingham, A Concise History of Portugal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 184. 78 Pinto, ‘The Transition to Democracy’, 34. 79 In Mozambique, the Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO) emerged after independence, supported by South Africa and anti-communist Rhodesia, to counter the Communist-backed FRELIMO government. The civil war between FRELIMO and RENAMO forces lasted from 1977 until 1992. See Newitt,

160

Notes

‘Mozambique’; Cahen, Mozambique, la révolution implosée; Michel Cahen, Les Bandits. Un historien au Mozambique 1994 (Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 2002); Alex Vines. RENAMO: Terrorism in Mozambique (London: James Currey, 1991). 80 Birmingham, ‘Angola’, 155. 81 Pinto, ‘The Transition to Democracy’, 17–19. 82 Figueiredo, ‘The Empire Is Dead’, 138–43. Similarly, Elizabeth Buettner writes, ‘democracy, decolonization and the road to European integration went hand in hand, a process most Portuguese endorsed wholeheartedly’. See her Europe after Empire, 209.

Chapter 3 1

2 3 4

Ann L. Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Ann L. Stoler and Frederick Cooper (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997), 4. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2006), 19. Ibid. Much of the data presented here comes from interviews and the recording of life histories with a multitude of Goans living in Maputo, during the month of March 2007. The interviews were conducted in Portuguese and/or English depending on the interviewee’s language skills. I undertook all translations from Portuguese to English. This chapter is restricted to (middle- and upper-class) Goans of Maputo and does not include the Goan fishing community of Catembe (which features in a later chapter) or the Goan community of Beira, both of which are also sizeable and have very different (classed) histories. In the capital itself, I found a social network of Goans, many of whom were interrelated through marriage. Invariably, each person I interviewed would ask whom else I had interviewed and would supply me with a few additional names. Others would call their relatives right then to set up an interview on my behalf. In a sense, they guided whom I would speak to – that is, they determined who was an appropriate ‘Goan’ to interview. Most of these interviews took place in public spaces – restaurants and hotel lobbies – or inside people’s homes. Most of the Goans I interviewed were passionate about the subject at hand and had very strong viewpoints about the Goan community and its disparities; the Goan’s in-between status between colonizer and colonized; colonial racism, leftist politics, generational ideological shifts; and finally the Goan’s identification as ‘being Portuguese but without a concept of race’ as one informant described it. I

Notes

161

thank them for their generosity and candidness. I have changed the names of my informants to protect their privacy, excepting public and published figures whose names I provide in full. 5 On the topic of studying ‘landscapes of the sea’, see Michael Pearson, ‘Studying the Indian Ocean World: Problems and Opportunities’, in Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World, ed. Himanshu P. Ray and Edward A. Alpers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 16. On the topic of history-making in the ocean, see Michael Pearson, ‘Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems’, Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 367. 6 The Goans of Mozambique are an interesting case that points to the particularities of the Portuguese colonial case. In the anthropology of empire literature, older studies largely focused on creole elites (or mestizo communities) who are of mixed parentage (typically the product of a European father and colonized mother). Only rarely did the literature deal with examples of colonial elites who were migrants from another colonial context under the same colonial power and whose positionality shifts dramatically in this new context, as is the case with Goan Mozambicans. One early exception is the work of Elizabeth Tonkin who studied the elite Indian settler community in Kenya and how it was integrated below the English but above Africans in the British colonial structures. See her ‘Settlers and the Elites in Kenya and Liberia’, in Elite Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Cris Shore and Stephen Nugent (London: Routledge, 2002), 129–44. 7 Sugata Bose reconceptualized the Indian Ocean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through the imbrication of economy, politics and culture. See his A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Recent scholars working on the Indian Ocean are invested in looking at how connections and arenas of interaction in the Indian Ocean continue in a post-maritime age (post1750), taking off from earlier studies like those of K. N. Chaudhuri (1985) and Ashin Das Gupta (1987) and looking for new ways to conceptualize the Indian Ocean and in relation to the movement of people within an intra-imperial world. While there is a sustained history of scholarship looking at Asians in Africa, I point to two important new studies: Sana Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), and, closer to my own work and taken up in further sections of this chapter, Margret Frenz, Community, Memory and Migration in a Globalizing World: The Goan Experience, c. 1890–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 8 Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920, 9. 9 Ibid., 2. The shift from ‘colonial subject’ to ‘imperial citizen’ opened up a whole new world of possibilities and of different kinds of positionalities within rigid colonial hierarchies, as with the Goan Mozambique case. 10 Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 31.

162

Notes

11 While the Hadramis (a transnational Muslim group with roots in Yemen and Saudi Arabia) have a much longer diasporic history within the Indian Ocean than the Goans of Mozambique, I still suggest the applicability of Ho’s analytical points in this case. I am perhaps moving some of Ho’s ideas in a different direction than he had in mind. 12 Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 189. 13 Raymond Williams, ‘Structures of Feeling’, in Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35. 14 Ho, The Graves of Tarim, xxiii. 15 I strongly believe that the nature of available documentation reveals much about the subject at hand: the fact that a life history approach became the best way to access information about the Goans of Maputo parallels the nature of this historically mobile and dispersed community and its lack of historical and archival records. Thus, the collection of life histories suggests the potential of locating ‘ethnographic traces’ for accessing very intangible histories. Moreover, I have also found prose and poetry, another form of ‘ethnographic trace’ to be a useful way to access the experiences of this diasporic group: the prose of Mia Couto, the poems of Rui de Noronha (who interestingly was a relative to one of my informants), Veigo Coutinho, and now Délia Maciel, a Goan Mozambican poet and ‘organic intellectual’ in the Gramscian sense of the term who also became one of my informants. 16 In some sense, meeting and interviewing Délia proved the success of the life history approach. 17 Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 62. 18 Ibid. 19 Boaventura De Sousa Santos, ‘Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Inter-Identity’, Luso-Brazilian Review 39, no. 2 (2002): 16. 20 One exception is Cyril Hromnik’s unpublished history thesis, written forty years ago, entitled ‘Goa and Mozambique: The Participation of Goans in Portuguese Enterprise in the Rios de Cuama, 1501–1752’, Syracuse University, New York, USA (1977). While Margret Frenz discusses the history of Goan migration to Portuguese Mozambique, the thrust of her book is on Goan emigration to British East Africa – Kenya, Uganda, Zanzibar and Tanganyika – and then onto Canada and the UK. See her Community, Memory and Migration, 47–91. 21 Sharmila Karnik, ‘Goans in Mozambique’, Africa Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1998): 95. 22 Ibid., 97. 23 Ibid., 99. 24 Anders Ehnmark and Per Wästberg, Angola and Mozambique: The Case against Portugal, trans. Paul Britten-Austin (London: Pall Mall Press, 1963), 113–14. 25 Naresh Fernandes, ‘Tomb Raider: Looking for St. Francis Xavier’, in Reflected in Water, Writings on Goa, ed. Jerry Pinto (New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2006),

Notes

26

27 28

29 30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42

163

77. This colonial practice was confirmed to me on a visit to a living history museum that had recreated the history of an established nineteenth-century Portuguese Goan family: according to the tour guide, the first son of this family went into law, the second into medicine, the third joined the priesthood and the fourth left for Portuguese Africa (in Candolim, Goa, January 2007). Unfortunately, the museum project was short-lived: when I visited Goa again in 2013 to conduct fieldwork, it had been boarded up. Manfred Prinz, ‘Intercultural Links between Goa and Mozambique in Their Colonial and Contemporary History: Literary Mozambiquean Traces’, in Goa and Portugal: Their Cultural Links, ed. Charles J. Borges and Helmut Feldmann (New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1997), 112–13. Prinz, ‘Intercultural Links’, 113. Jeanne Marie Penvenne, ‘João dos Santos Albasini (1876–1922): The Contradictions of Politics and Identity in Colonial Mozambique’, Journal of African History 37, no. 3 (1996): 426. Karnik, ‘Goans in Mozambique’, 102. Santos, ‘Between Prospero and Caliban’, 25. See Marie Penvenne, African Workers and Colonial Racism, 62–77. Cristiana Bastos, ‘Race, Medicine, and the Late Portuguese Empire: The Role of Goan Colonial Physicians’, Journal of Romance Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): 27. Ibid., 26. According to Bastos, the Goa Medical School was started in 1842, recognized by the Portuguese colonial authorities in 1847 and closed in 1961 with the demise of Portuguese control in Goa. Bastos notes that it was in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference (1884–85), when the Portuguese developed an active Africanist colonial policy, that ‘the Goan doctors acquired a visibility on the map and in the ideological project of Portuguese colonialism’. Bastos, ‘Race, Medicine’, 7. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 26. Fatima Da Silva Gracias, ‘Goans Away from Goa, Migration to the Middle East’, Lusotopie (2000): 426. Assistance was provided to move to the Portuguese African colonies by way of the Santa Casa da Misercordia de Goa. Isaacman and Isaacman, quoted in Rochelle Pinto, ‘Race and Imperial Loss: Accounts of East Africa in Goa’, South African Historical Journal 57 (2007): 90. Ibid. This same point is echoed by Manfred Prinz, ‘Intercultural Links’, 116. Karnik, ‘Goans in Mozambique’, 105. Interestingly, when Goan men visited Goa with their African wives in tow, these wives of Goan men would contemptuously be called ‘kaffirs’ by their Goan in-laws. Pinto, ‘Race and Imperial Loss’, 90. Morier-Genoud and Cahen, ‘Introduction: Portugal, Empire, and Migration – Was There Ever an Autonomous Social Imperial Space?’ 22. See also Margret Frenz,

164

43 44 45

46

47 48

49 50

51

52 53

54

Notes ‘Representing the Portuguese Empire: Goan Consuls in British East Africa, c. 1910– 1963’, in Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, ed. Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 193–212. I have a longer engagement with their ideas in Chapter 1. Rita Ferreira, quoted in Prinz, ‘Intercultural Links’, 117. Ibid. Prinz, ‘Intercultural Links’, 118. Interestingly, the author mentions that in the Mozambique case, Christian Goans were perceived as white by the black Africans, while Hindu and Muslim Goans were considered Indian. That these categories do not necessarily match those of the Portuguese colonial administration is significant, and requires further study. Ronald Chilcote, Portuguese Africa (Edgewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1967), 108. According to the author, several thousand Goans were expelled from the approximate 12,000 Asians in Mozambique which was comprised of Catholic Goan traders, Banya Hindus and Chinese immigrants. Teotónio R. De Souza, ‘Is There One Goan Identity, Several or None?’ Lusotopie (2000), 487–95. Michel Cahen, Déjanirah Couto, Peter R. De Souza, Louis Marrou and Alito Siqueira, ‘Introduction: Issues of Asian Portuguese-Speaking Spaces and Lusotopias’, Lusotopie (2000): 138. Margret Frenz leaves out the Goan Mozambicans from her excellent study, Community, Memory and Migration, exactly for its integration into the host society. Jessica Kuper, ‘“Goan” and “Asian” in Uganda: An Analysis of Racial Identity and Cultural Categories’, in Strangers in African Societies, ed. William A. Shack and Elliott P. Skinner (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1979), 243. Jessica Kuper, ‘The Goan Community in Kampala’, in Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on the Ugandan Asians, ed. Michael Twaddle (London: The Athlone Press, 1975), 58. Ibid. See Marta Vilar Rosales, ‘Objects, Scents and Tastes from a Distant Home: Goan Life Experiences in Africa’, Two Homelands 20 (2009): 153–66; Marta Vilar Rosales, ‘My Umbilical Cord to Goa: Food, Colonialism and Transnational Goan Life Experiences’, Food and Foodways 20 (2012): 233–56; Marta Vilar Rosales, As Coisas Da Casa – Cultura Material, Migrações E Memórias Familiares (Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2015). Mia Couto, ‘How Ascolino Do Perpetuo Socorro Lost His Spouse’, in Voices Made Night, trans. David Brookshaw (Johannesburg: Heinemann International, 1990), 29, 34–5, 37. I thank Dan Ojwang from the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) for pointing out the relevance of this story and character for my research on Goans in Mozambique.

Notes

165

55 The idea that Portuguese Mozambique was a place for temporary migrations not only plays itself out in some of Rangel-Ribeiro’s stories, but is also found in the historical record and in online sources. See Gracias, ‘Goans Away from Goa’, 425; see also Goanet, ‘Goa News’, http://www.goanet.org. 56 Interview with Teresa de Noronha, 22 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. 57 Instead of going directly to Mozambique to start up a medical practice, Teresa’s father had chosen to undergo further training in the metropole first. Anthropologist Cristiana Bastos mentions that this was another typical route for Goa-trained medical doctors to get out of India and perhaps work in Portugal. However, a colonial measure required these doctors to retrain in order to qualify to work in the metropole, as was the case for Teresa’s father. See Bastos, ‘Race, Medicine’, 30. 58 Goan or Indo-Portuguese clubs were mentioned frequently in my conversations with Goans. My interviewees described them as having been very popular as places of sociality for Goans under Portuguese colonialism, which were then disbanded with Mozambican independence. The role of these Goan social clubs for reproducing a sense of community was crucial. See Frenz, Community, Memory and Migration, 137–55. 59 Interview with Fernandes, 19 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. 60 Here I suggest a genealogical approach to writing the history of diasporas such as the Goan one in Maputo, less in Engseng Ho’s sense of diasporic members producing and writing their own genealogies, but rather in accessing informants through a genealogical approach. I met Raul and Filipe through Fernandes, as their families knew each other and were part of a larger social network. Interview with Raul, 21 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique; Interview with Filipe, 20 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. 61 Here I am reminded of Ho’s point for the Hadrami that while women were required to return to their origins in a genealogical sense, in and through marriage, sons were encouraged to return in a geographical sense as part of the journey of education and inculcation of moral virtues. See Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 223. 62 Here I point to the relevance of Engseng Ho’s comment about the importance of where one dies, as opposed to where one is born, in diasporic identity constructions. Filipe’s father chose to retire, and in a sense die, back in Goa. See Ho, Graves of Tarim, 3. 63 Ann Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures’, American Ethnologist 16, no. 3 (1989): 635. 64 I met Sandra through Raul, once again a genealogical approach was used to locate informants. Raul, a historian in his own right, recognized that hers was an unusual case that should be documented. Interview with Sandra, 22 March 2007, in Maputo, Mozambique.

166

Notes

65 It was unclear as to whether the husband had died or the couple divorced. 66 Sorpatel, a dish of spicy pork curry served over rice, is one of the most typically ‘Goan’ specialties. It serves as a defining identity marker for Goa’s Catholic cuisine. For a discussion of food and the making of Goan diasporic memories, see Vilar Rosales, ‘My Umbilical Cord to Goa’. 67 Bastos, ‘Race, Medicine’, 32. At least this was the case for ‘lusodescente’ and Goan doctor, Germano Correia. I would also apply his concern to other Goan Mozambicans living in colonial times. 68 Stoler, ‘Making Empire Respectable’, 635–7. 69 Filipe interview, 20 March 2007 in Maputo, Mozambique. I already mentioned this migration trend in my earlier section on the 1920s; again, this practice was about making empire respectable. 70 This was evidenced in numerous conversations I had during fieldwork and archival research in both Portugal (in 1998) and Goa (in 1999). In the context of the research conducted among Goan Mozambicans of Maputo for this book, Carlos expressed this same response of embittered and impassioned defiance, a response that also came up regarding Mozambique’s 1975 independence, even as its decolonization was a very different process (see next section). Carlos, 23 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. 71 Of course there were many Goans, Hindu and Catholic, who embraced Goa’s integration into India. There was a large Goan diaspora in Bombay at this time from which the roots of the Goan independence movement stemmed. To this day, Goa’s decolonization is a contentious issue among Goans in Goa, India and its multiple diasporas (see Chapter 2). 72 I met Délia upon the particular insistence of Ana who supplied me with her phone number and address, an illustration of the genealogical approach I used to meeting contacts. 73 Interview with Délia Maciel, 21 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. 74 Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 29. 75 Délia das Dores Ataide Lobo Maciel, Fragmentos da Minha Vida (Maputo: Imprensa Universitária, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, 2003). I thank Délia for her generosity in lending me her book to make a photocopy of it. Her manuscript also includes some of her poems, another form of history writing identified by Ho. See his The Graves of Tarim, xxiii. 76 See the work of Marta Vilar Rosales on the role of home furnishings that stand in for Goan-ness, in the same way that Délia’s Indo-Portuguese dining table meant so much to her as she told me the story of having it shipped from Goa. See Vilar Rosale, As Coisas Da Casa. 77 Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 94. Here, following Ho, I want to suggest the ability of texts such as Délia’s life history, including its poems, to harness mobility for the purpose of morality.

Notes

167

78 At this point, Délia broke her narrative to tell me that her mother had also intended to come to Maputo but had in the end decided to remain in Goa, feeling too old and nervous about starting over again in Mozambique. 79 Goans refer to 1961 as either the year of Goa’s ‘liberation’ or its ‘invasion’ by the Indian government, depending on their ideological positioning and on the fact that Goa only became a Union Territory of India and not an independent nation. I prefer to use the more ideologically neutral term of ‘independence’ to suggest its decolonization from Portuguese colonial rule. 80 See Ho’s point on women’s genealogical origins and men’s geographical ones. Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 223. Where medicine had been a popular profession among the Goan migrants of the 1920s, banking was a popular profession among the Mozambican-born Goans of this next generation, coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s. 81 Délia’s migration to Mozambique in 1954 can be viewed as supporting neocolonialism, itself a form of postcoloniality. Yet by indicating her interest in returning to Goa after its ‘liberation’ (her word choice), she was actually supporting Goa’s newly found independence and integration into the Indian nation-state and resisted the continuation of Portugal’s colonial hold. 82 Interview with Sílvia do Rosário da Silveira Bragança, 22 March 2007, in Maputo, Mozambique. What started out as a very formal interview became increasingly more informal as it progressed. 83 Once again, I suggest that we cannot forget forms of neocolonialism that are part and parcel of postcoloniality. See Santos, ‘Between Prospero and Caliban’, 16. 84 Aquino de Bragança died tragically in the plane crash that also killed Samora Machel in 1986. 85 Sílvia Bragança, Aquino de Bragança. Batalhas ganhas, sonhos a continuar (Maputo: Ndjira, 2009). 86 It is interesting that on the subject of Goa’s ‘invasion’ (her word choice) Sílvia aligned herself with its Portuguese colonizers but was simultaneously a staunch defender of India though in a different context. While living in Portugal, she had been identified as being Indian; her response had been to defend India, saying that it had an older civilization than Portugal itself. Similarly, she was also a staunch defender of Mozambique’s independence from Portuguese colonial rule. In other words, her statements were in some instances ideologically inconsistent (both proand anti-Portuguese), suggesting the complexity of the issues at hand, particularly the exceptional case of Goa. 87 Sílvia would tell me when and where a particular piece was painted and what her motivating theme was at the time. In some sense, her paintings marked and told the story of her own biography and its significant moments. Once again, I am

168

88

89

90 91

92

93

94 95

96

Notes reminded of Engseng Ho’s point to open the types of source materials to access history; here I offer paintings. See his The Graves of Tarim, xxiii. As Anne McClintock has pointed out, cultural decolonization does not simply happen with the end of colonialism. Anne McClintock, referenced in Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 33. This was a point that she had addressed in her dissertation. Carla’s positionality, between Mozambique and the United States, points to the mobility of the next generation of Goan Mozambicans, a topic I address more explicitly in my conclusion. Interview with Carla Maciel, 21 March 2007. Carla Maciel, ‘Bantu Oral Narratives in the Training of EFL Teachers in Mozambique’ (PhD thesis, Illinois State University, Normal, 2007). Ibid. It was also during the 1950s that a large number of Portuguese emigrants arrived in South Africa, some via the colonies, others directly from Portugal. Interview with Fernandes and his wife Maria, 19 March 2007 in Maputo, Mozambique. See also Clive Glaser, ‘Portuguese Immigrant History in Twentieth Century South Africa: A Preliminary Overview’, African Historical Review 42, no. 2 (2010): 61–83. Here it is important to remember that individual Goans did experience forms of racism, as Cesar recounted for me. Growing up between the late 1950s and early 1960s, he was one of the best students in his school yet never received any of the annual school prizes since these, as he recalled, were reserved for the Portuguese students. Interview with Carla Maciel, 21 March 2007 in Maputo, Mozambique. Maciel, ‘Bantu Oral Narratives’. That the Goan community managed to create close ties despite Portuguese attempts to prevent them suggests their vibrancy and agency. Interview with Fernandes and Maria, 19 March 2007 in Maputo, Mozambique. This idea of feeling Portuguese ‘without a concept of race’ is an interesting choice of words and must be probed further as it might describe the situation for many Goans like Fernandes. Gilberto Freyre’s idealized notion of Portuguese race relations through the theory of Lusotropicalismo might be a helpful starting point for this. I am also reminded of Engseng Ho’s point that ‘local cosmopolitans’ are able to access a range of nations because they carry names that circulate beyond that particular one. This is indeed the case for Goan Mozambicans who are not marked by their Goan names and thus can comfortably fit in Mozambique, Goa, Portugal and even Brazil. See Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 190. Both Fernandes and Maria stated that they had decided to stay in Maputo after decolonization for reasons of ‘love’ as they had just met in 1975. However, like many other Goans I met, they now face the future with uncertainty, as they both keep changing their minds about whether or not to stay or go. They have purposely sent their three children to South Africa for schooling to escape what they describe as the poor conditions of living in Maputo.

Notes 97

98

99

100 101 102 103 104 105

106

169

Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 19. Again, following Ho, I refer to these diasporic Goans as the ‘society of the absent’ because those who left are consistently a point of reference for those who chose to stay. One has to take into account each individual Goan’s life history and relationship to Mozambique, including one’s class, gender and racial position within the colonial structure, as well as marriage and reproduction patterns. The majority of these middle class Goans like Délia’s husband were in the banking business, which was not completely transformed after decolonization, whereas for the higher classes of medical doctors like Teresa’s and Cesar’s fathers, to work as a medical doctor in postcolonial Mozambique was a very different kind of practice – hence the bitterness of Teresa’s father that I discussed in a previous section. Interview with Teresa de Noronha, 22 March 2007, in Maputo, Mozambique. Délia’s brother was not the only one to follow this pattern of migration from Mozambique to Angola. According to Ana van Eck (herself a Portuguese Angolan and a former Portuguese language teacher at Wits University), there was a small exodus of Goans from Mozambique to Angola, joining the already established Goan community in Luanda. Interview with Raul and Carla, 21 March 2007, in Maputo, Mozambique. Santos, ‘Between Prospero and Caliban’, 16. Interview with Fernandes, 19 March 2007 in Maputo, Mozambique. Teresa of earlier discussions explained that this had happened in her very own family. Interview with Teresa, 22 March 2007 in Maputo, Mozambique. Interview with Cesar, 20 March 2007 in Maputo, Mozambique. Interview with Teresa, 22 March 2007 in Maputo, Mozambique. According to Teresa, her father, an extremely wealthy man at the time of decolonization, lost all his properties with nationalization. Similarly, the Goan clubs that he had frequented were also closed down; there was no longer an allocated space for Goan sociality. As Ho reminds us for the story of migrants, what is important is not where you were born but where you die. For Teresa’s father, Mozambique had not been where he wanted to be buried as it had not been a meaningful place for him within his larger life history. See Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 3. Interview with Teresa, 22 May 2007 in Maputo, Mozambique. Teresa herself reflects as much this history of ‘local cosmopolitanism’, having been raised in Mozambique but with frequent visits abroad growing up. She has memories of experiencing racism at the exclusive Portuguese school she attended as a young girl. As an adult, she lived a long time in Paris, married a Portuguese and returned to Maputo to live. She frequently travels to Portugal to see her mother and one of her brothers. Teresa feels no ties with Goa since she has never been there. Another one of her sisters also lives in Mozambique and frequently travels to Portugal as well.

170

Notes

107 Interview with Sílvia do Rosário da Silveira, 22 March 2007 in Maputo, Mozambique. 108 This was just like the Goans of Goa who had been given incentives post-1961 to emigrate to Portugal. Anthropologist Caroline Brettell takes up their story in ‘Portugal’s First Post-Colonials: Citizenship, Identity, and the Repatriation of Goans’, Portuguese Studies Review 15, no. 2 (2007/2008): 1–28. 109 These were all points made to me by different Goan informants. I have combined them in one narrative for simplification. Interviews with Cesar, Raul, Filipe and Fernandes, March 2007, Maputo. 110 This suggests a disjuncture between theory and practice. In theory, the Mozambican government wanted all non-Africans, including Goans, to leave. In practice, however, it wanted Goans to stay to show their commitment to Mozambique and to allay their suspicions that Goans had always been secretly, even if not openly, aligned with the Portuguese throughout Mozambique’s colonial history. These points were also raised in my interviews with Goans in Maputo: Sílvia do Rosário da Silveira, Teresa de Noronha, Carla Maciel, Délia Maciel, March 2007, Maputo. For a comparable example of the complicated position of Goans in Uganda, see Kuper, ‘“Goan” and “Asian” in Uganda’, 243. 111 Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 305. 112 Another comparable case study to the Goans is that of the Maltese Algerians who interpolated three spaces: Malta, Algeria and France in the aftermath of Algeria’s decolonization in 1962. See Andrea Smith, Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in Algeria and France (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006). 113 Ibid., xxiii. 114 Ibid., 314. Here I take up what Ho writes of the Hadrami diaspora and apply it to the Goan Mozambican case. He writes: ‘We can view the internal politics of diasporic Hadramis in each period as a landscape of places that closed or opened up to different categories of persons, as internal divisions became intertwined with external rivalries.’ 115 Herein postcolonial circuits of travel reinforce the colonial history of Mozambique. 116 Many of these Goan Mozambicans are visiting Goa and Portugal to re-establish ties with ancestral homes and long-lost relatives and through new forms of travel and experience such as heritage tourism. 117 In my interviews with Goan Mozambicans, these were the country names that came up as places that their children were either moving to or already living in. 118 There has recently been a revival in celebrating one’s diasporic Goan-ness through events such as ‘Goa Day’, which takes place annually on 20 August in Maputo and coincides with other ‘Goa Days’ which are celebrated throughout the Goan diaspora (the United States, the UK, Portugal and Brazil). It is also reinforced

Notes

171

through active online Goan communities throughout the world. For example, see Goan Voice, ‘Newsletter’, November 2016, http://www.goanvoice.ca/ accessed on 3 June 2017.

Chapter 4 1 2

3 4

5 6

Mia Couto, ‘The Blind Fisherman’, in Every Man Is a Race, trans. David Brookshaw (Oxford: Heinemann, 1994), 51. The information gathered for this chapter is based on two visits to Catembe (November 2008 and June 2009). Diogo, one of the more prosperous prawn fishermen and leader of the community, generously introduced me to the community of fishing folk during my first visit and invited me to return the following June to take part in the feast day celebration of São Pedro. During both visits I stayed at a nearby guesthouse in Catembe in order to get a better sense of the rhythms of port life and the fishing industry. I also conducted life histories and interviews with the Goan fishermen in Portuguese and gathered additional information based on numerous conversations with members of the community (male, female, young, old) as well as participant observation during the feast day celebration (29 June). I deliberately chose to use my own ethnographic voice and reflections as one form of postcolonial intervention in the oceanic geographies even as the oral testimonies and life experiences of my informants directly shaped my own telling of their stories. I thank the numerous Goans in Catembe for their generosity and candidness in speaking with me. In some cases, I have changed their names for the purposes of this chapter. I also make a distinction between the Maputo Goans showcased in Chapter 3 and the Catembe Goans showcased here as they were the products of very different waves of migration with regard to class and profession. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2006), 29. Here I would argue that profession (fishing), religion (Catholicism) and language (Portuguese) all do the work to strengthen the social cohesion of this small and tight-knit community. The social cohesion of the Goans of Maputo, in turn, is less strong but still maintained via language and religion and the role of clubs, churches and schools. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969). As Nadia Serematakis argues in an evocative study of Greece, nostalgia is less a yearning for a lost past but rather a reactivation of the past through sensory and bodily experiences in the present, bringing the past into the present. These

172

7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Notes moments are central to connecting memory to cultural reproduction. Nadia C. Serematakis, ‘The Memory of the Senses: Historical Perception, Commensal Exchange, and Modernity’, in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994 (New York: Routledge, 1994), 214–29. My PhD research (Columbia University, Department of Anthropology, 2004) was on the history of the corporeal expositions of São Francisco Xavier in Goa as a way to trace changing relations (both material and affective) between the Estado da Índia and the Society of Jesus. See my book The Relic State: St Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014). Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘The Indian Ocean as a Cold War Arena’, paper presented at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 30 September 2009. Mia Couto, ‘A Time When the World Was as Young as We Were’, in Sleepwalking Land, trans. David Brookshaw (Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 1992), 26. Rosemary Rayfuse and Robin M. Warner, ‘Securing a Sustainable Future for the Oceans beyond National Jurisdiction: The Legal Basis for an Integrated CrossSectoral Regime for High Seas Governance for the 21st Century’, International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law 23, no. 3 (2008): 399. Michael Pearson, The Indian Ocean (New York: Routledge, 2003), 27. Rayfuse and Warner, ‘Securing a Sustainable Future’, 401. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 266. Ibid., 267. Ted L. McDorman, ‘Extended Jurisdiction and Ocean Resource Conflict in the Indian Ocean’, International Journal of Estuarine and Coastal Law 3, no. 3 (1988): 211, 215. Rayfuse and Warner, ‘Securing a Sustainable Future’, 419. McDorman, ‘Extended Jurisdiction’, 216. Ibid., 213. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 270. Ibid., 269. Rayfuse and Warner, ‘Securing a Sustainable Future’, 399. Ibid., 405. Ibid. Ibid. Couto, ‘A Time When the World Was as Young as We Were’, 18. Patrick Chabal, with Moema Parente Augel, David Brookshaw, Ana Mafalda Leite and Caroline Shaw, Post-colonial Literature of Lusophone Africa (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996), 15–16. It is important to recognize the complexity of the shared history between India and Mozambique. Not only was there a steady stream of Portuguese Indians (Goans) who migrated to Mozambique from the fifteenth century onwards (I outlined in Chapter 2), but starting in the

Notes

27

28 29

30

31 32 33

173

twentieth century, there was a history of non-Portuguese Indians who migrated to East Africa, including to Mozambique, arriving as labourers but often specializing in trade. By the 1970s, they were a powerful group that controlled most of the colony’s trade. Thus, the differences between these two Indian groups were important for Mozambique’s development, for often each group was defined in relation to the other. Catembe (‘place of the Tembe’) is a district on the southern side of Maputo Bay, accessible only by ferry from Maputo (or overland drive via Ponta do Ouro which is a popular holiday destination for South Africans located across the border in Mozambique). Historically its remoteness and lack of access kept it a small sleepy village of fishing and tourism. Things will change very soon when the new Maputo-Catembe 3K suspension bridge (the largest in Africa) will be completed in the coming years; it is currently behind schedule as its completion was initially scheduled for 2017. It was still under construction when I visited Maputo in May 2017. Catembe will become an access point for getting across the bay, and its urban infrastructure will be fully developed alongside the opening of the bridge. See WCN Editorial Team, ‘The Maputo-Catembe Bridge: “The Longest Suspension Bridge in Africa”’, WorldConstruction Network, 13 January 2017, http://www. worldconstructionnetwork.com/features/the-maputo-catembe-bridge-the-longestsuspension-bridge-in-africa (accessed 4 June 2017). Hofmeyr, ‘The Indian Ocean as a Cold War Arena’. In some sense, this migration pattern complicates Thomas Metcalf ’s model of British imperial connections across the Indian Ocean, between India and East Africa, in the late nineteenth century, because it saw the horizontal movement of Portuguese colonial subjects between the imperial worlds of Portuguese India and British Africa. See Metcalf ’s Imperial Connections. The widespread pattern of migration from Goa to Mozambique (an example that possibly follows Metcalf by suggesting migration within an intracolonial world, only in this case a Portuguese one) decreased throughout the first half of the twentieth century as more Goans started moving to British East Africa. See Margret Frenz, ‘Global Goans: Migration Movements and Identity in a Historical Perspective’, Lusotopie XV, no. 1 (2008): 186. See also her recent well-researched study of global Goans on the move the world over: Community, Memory and Migration in a Globalizing World. Frenz, ‘Global Goans’, 191. Interestingly, the Instituto Goano was established in Lourenço Marques as early as 1905, as a social space for newly arrived Goan immigrants. By the late 1910s, the Goans in this city had established themselves as a community, carving out a particular economic, social and political niche for themselves. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 268. Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 19. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 268.

174 34 35 36 37

38 39

40 41

42 43

44

45 46

47

Notes Chabal et al., Post-colonial Literature, 16. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 269. Kuper, ‘“Goan” and “Asian” in Uganda’, 243. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 269. However, the transition had long-term economic and environmental costs, with the increasing replacement of local goods with imported gear (e.g. petrol, nylon, fibreglass) and the devastation of fish stocks caused by the use of smaller mesh nets which scoop up marine life indiscriminately. Ibid., 266. Here I confine my discussion to those Goan fishermen of Catembe who chose to stay in the aftermath of decolonization and civil war. That they inherited these trawlers from the Portuguese was a point that came up several times in my interviews with the Catembe Goans, 28 and 29 June 2009. Ibid. Pedro, one of the fishermen I interviewed on this visit, told me that it was his romanticized memories of his childhood growing up in Catembe that drew him back to this place after leaving as a young boy with his parents for Lisbon with the end of Portuguese colonial rule in 1975. He had returned at the age of 30, he said, ‘to give it a try.’ Interview Pedro, 28 June 2009, Catembe, Mozambique. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 31. Ibid., 266. Pearson defines the first colonial period as one when traditional fishermen were undermined by Western intrusion (and colonial ownership) and the second period, of decolonization, as one when indigenous enterprise was promoted, and lastly, the third period which is characterized by a dwindling supply of stock, and which the Catembe Goan fishermen are currently experiencing. The present case study of the Goan fishermen of Catembe reflects these three periods, their chance at ownership (of trawlers) having shifted their motivations and having given them the potential for a real livelihood based on prawn fishing. Fredrik Barth, ‘The Analytical Importance of Transaction’, in Models of Social Organization, Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper no. 23 (London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 1966), 5–11. Mia Couto, ‘Return to Matimati’, in Sleepwalking Land, trans. David Brookshaw (Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 1992), 108. Following Elizabeth Edwards, photographs are both ‘visual metaphor’ and ‘lyrical expression’, capable of unravelling the deeper meanings and metaphors of cultural being. I would like to submit prose as another form of cultural intervention alongside photography. See her influential piece, entitled ‘Beyond the Boundary’, 58–60. My summary comes from the excellent work of Sean Rogers. See his ‘Tracing Elusive Wars: Reading War in Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land, Under the Frangipani

Notes

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67

175

and The Last Flight of the Flamingo’, African Studies 76, no. 2 (2017): 281–92. I thank Sean for sharing an early draft of this article with me. Chabal et al., Post-colonial Literature, 71. Ibid., 83. Hofmeyr, ‘Seeing the Familiar’, 386. Ibid., 389. Chabal et al., Post-colonial Literature, 78. Ibid., 89. Phillip Rothwell, A Postmodern Nationalist: Truth, Orality, and Gender in the Work of Mia Couto (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 92. Ibid., 129. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 92. Ibid., 100. Hofmeyr, ‘Seeing the Familiar’, 390. Rothwell, A Postmodern Nationalist, 17. Sousa Jamba, ‘Out of Lusophone Africa’, Times Literary Supplement, 4933 (1997): 29. Joáo Cosme, ‘Appropriating Mia Couto: Language, Identity and “Lusofonia”’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 84, no. 4 (2007): 437. Rogers, ‘Tracing Elusive Wars’, 291. Ibid. Ibid., 283. A play on Nuttall’s influential book, Beautiful/Ugly. My discussion of Rangel comes from two very brief meetings I was fortunate to have with him in Maputo on 27 and 28 November 2008 and with his widow Beatrice on 30 June 2009, three weeks after his death on 11 June 2009. I had initially planned a research trip in order to conduct and record a more substantive interview with Rangel for the last week of June 2009, only to find out prior to my trip of his sudden passing. Rangel was raised by his African grandmother in the impoverished suburbs surrounding Lourenço Marques, visiting his parents who were living in the outlying provinces. José Luís Cabaço, in his dedication to Rangel entitled ‘To Ricardo Rangel on his 80th Birthday’, describes Rangel’s early exposure to photography: Talent embellished the work of Ricardo Rangel, which honours Mozambique, and of which Mozambique is proud. Who would have believed that the respected citizen we are honouring today obtained his first (and ephemeral) camera by swapping it for a hundred-year-old watch that he pilfered from his grandfather? The camera obviously was returned, but the young Ricardo kept the passion he had developed for photography. See Rangel, Pão nosso de cada noite, 135.

176 68

69

70 71 72 73 74 75

76

77

78 79

Notes Patricia Hayes, ‘Port City and Desire: Ricardo Rangel’s Photographs of Lourenço Marques, Mozambique (1950s–60s)’, unpublished paper, 2009. Hayes suggests that jazz was a defining aesthetic of Rangel’s photography. I thank Patricia Hayes for her willingness to share her unpublished piece on Rangel with me, which greatly helped in thinking about Rangel’s photographs and the writing of this chapter. The power of Rangel’s images lies in his ability to capture intimacies, those between sexual partners, men and women, black and white. Like Couto, he captures the fine line between hope and despair. Law-Viljoen, ‘Ricardo Rangel’, 111. Hayes, ‘Port City and Desire’, 6. Ibid., 10. José Luís Cabaço cited in Rangel, Pão nosso de cada noite, 135. The Centro de Documentação e Formação Fotográfica based in Maputo houses Rangel’s entire photographic archive. It is currently digitizing all of his images. Drew Thompson, ‘Bearing Witness to War: The Photographic Archive at Mozambique’s National Photography School, 1982–1992’ (unpublished paper, 2012). For a summary of Rangel’s life history and photography projects, see Rangel, Pão Nosso de Cada Noite; Luìs B. Honwana, ed., Ricardo Rangel: insubmisso e generoso, Textos C. Da Silva, D. Thompson, M. Lopes, N. Saúte and P. Hayes (Maputo: Marimbique, 2014); Bruno Z’Graggen and Grant Lee Neuenburg, eds, Iluminando vidas: Ricardo Rangel and the Mozambican Photography: Ricardo Rangel e a fotografia Moçambicana (Berlin: Christoph Merian Verlag 2002); José Craveirinha and Mia Couto, Ricardo Rangel, Fotógrafo de Moçambique / Photographe du Mozambique (Coédition) Centre Culturel Franco-Mozambicain (Maputo/Paris: Editions Findakly, 1994); and Patricia Hayes, ‘Ricardo Rangel’, public lecture presented at the Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg, South Africa, 19 June 2009, shortly after Rangel’s death. See http://www.marketphotoworkshop.co.za/ PROJECTS/PastProjects/2009/PublicdiscussionRicardoRangel/ (accessed 15 November 2010). Here I think about seeing as being a critical act, as opposed to looking. I adopt this analytic of seeing from John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972) and, more directly, from José Luís Cabaço who writes: ‘When I began to “see”, in the sense that Patraquim [Luis Carlos, a Mozambican poet and journalist living in Lisbon, a contemporary of Rangel] uses the word, your photography, I discovered how aesthetics, information, message and feeling merge in the highest form of artistic expression. That is, when art gives you the contemporary projected onto the timeless.’ José Luís Cabaço cited in Rangel, Pão nosso de cada noite, 36. Hayes, ‘Port City and Desire’, 13. The ferry was still in operation in 2009, but plans were just starting to be made to build a highway to connect Catembe to downtown Maputo. Since then, the

Notes

80 81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

91 92

93 94

95

177

building of a massive three-kilometre suspension bridge is well under way and close to completion. See WCN Editorial team, ‘The Maputo-Catembe Bridge: “The Longest Suspension Bridge in Africa”’, WorldConstruction Network, 13 January 2017, http://www.worldconstructionnetwork.com/features/the-maputo-catembebridge-the-longest-suspension-bridge-in-africa (accessed 4 June 2017). Ariella Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008). Once again, it is certain moments that Rangel captured on film that say so much and act as a form of cultural intervention in social worldings created out of oceanic geographies. Da Silva cited in Rangel, Pão nosso de cada noite, 133. Hayes, ‘Port City and Desire’, 3. Edwards, ‘Beyond the Boundary’, 54. Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, photographs by Jean Mohr (New York Pantheon Books, 1986), 4. Edwards, ‘Beyond the Boundary’, 58. Amitava Kumar, Passport Photos (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2000), 47. Mia Couto, ‘Fisherman on Departure, Hero on Arrival’, in Every Man Is a Race, trans. David Brookshaw (Oxford: Heinemann, 1994), 114. Couto, ‘The Blind Fisherman’, 53–4. The idea of authenticity is important here, as the tourist wanted to experience a clear cultural signifier; that is, food that could easily and overtly represent Goan Mozambican ‘culture’ in an essentialized form. I will elaborate more fully on this point in a later section of this chapter. Couto, ‘Fisherman on Departure’, 114. Fisherman societies are commonplace the world over. For an extended discussion of Portuguese cod-fishing societies in New England, see Sally Cole, ‘Cod, God, Country and Family: The Portuguese Newfoundland Cod Fishery’, Maritime Anthropological Studies 3, no. 1 (1990): 1–29. Interview with Diogo, 29 November 2008. Once again, photography acts as a layered form of cultural intervention. There is a very extensive Goan community living in London. Many Goans move there via Portugal by first having a Portuguese passport which they then later exchange into the highly prized European Union passport. Prior to the end of colonialism and the civil war, there were three Goan cultural clubs in Maputo and Catembe: Club Goesa, Club Indo-Portuguesa and an unnamed third one, as my informants recalled. They competed for membership and were active centres for sociality, religiosity and cultural reproduction. After the war, and because of dwindling membership, two of the clubs amalgamated into Club Goesa. This information is based on numerous discussions I had with Goan Mozambicans in Maputo in 2007 and in Catembe in 2009. Sociologist

178

Notes

Margaret Frenz has argued that the ‘club’, the ‘school’ and the ‘church’ were key sites for social and cultural reproduction for itinerant Goans scattered along the East African coast. Historically, the club served as community centre and social welfare institution for those in need, creating a much-needed community space and identity for Goans in the face of the larger Portuguese colonial society. See Frenz, ‘Global Goans’, 193. 96 Sebastião mentioned to me in passing that many of the Hindus from India who had migrated to Mozambique before independence stayed and bought up many of the properties that were abandoned due to the war. In the post-war era, they were doing well from renting out these properties. Catholic Goans, in contrast, who had left for Portugal at independence, returned after the war in a less economically advantageous position. In some sense, the fraught relations between Catholic Goans and non-Portuguese Indians in Mozambique were carried over into the postcolonial and post-war space of Mozambique; fishermen like Sebastião perceived and represented it this way to me. However, I got the sense that more than just a few of the Goan fishermen I met were doing quite well financially, particularly those who had inherited trawlers from previous Portuguese owners at the end of colonialism. 97 Historically in Goa, fishing boats were named after saints, and the owners and crew would make annual offerings to the relevant saint on his or her feast day. See Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 40–1. It was a practice that was carried over to Portuguese East Africa in the act of migration, particularly as it reinforced links with villages back in Goa that venerated the same patron saints. See Frenz, ‘Global Goans’, 192. 98 See Seremetakis, ‘The Memory of the Senses’, 214–29. 99 Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 41. 100 Just as important for ritual analysis as an event is the significance of the nonevent. In other words, if the wind had not picked up (a nonevent), the Catembe community would still have realized the feast of São Pedro but perhaps in a different manner, resisting the idea that it was controlled by anyone but themselves. See Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as Social Fact’, in Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, ed. Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1991), 213–38. 101 Couto, ‘The Blind Fisherman’, 57. 102 Catholic Sermon Catembe, Mozambique, 29 June 2009. Each year the Goan fishermen of Catembe also celebrate and venerate Nossa Merced on 1 and 2 March. Interestingly, Goan Mozambicans are widely known for celebrating the Catholic calendar, something that is less popular with other Catholics in Mozambique. Thus, Catholic feast day celebrations are generally associated with Goans and serve as markers of their distinct ‘Goan-ness’ in a larger Mozambique.

Notes

179

103 Mia Couto, ‘A Hollow in the Ceiling of the World’, in Sleepwalking Land, trans. David Brookshaw (Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 1992), 38. 104 I had finally found a boat named after Xavier, the much-loved saint for diasporic Goans the world over, including in Mozambique. The only additional reference I found to Xavier in Catembe happened by chance. On 27 June 2009, I went to the famous Greek-run restaurant in Maputo, Costa del Sol, and met the owner, Emmanuel Petrakakis. He told me the story of how he visited Old Goa for Xavier’s decennial exposition in 2004, which I too had attended, and brought back rocks blessed by Xavier for the Goan Catembe community to place in its church. I later asked Miguel, one of the Goan Catembe fishermen, about the whereabouts of these rocks: he answered that they were in his house and he kept meaning to place them on the shrine of São Pedro. 105 Couto, ‘The Blind Fisherman’, 52. He writes: ‘After many false starts, at last, the fish arrived. Fat and silvery. In fact: has anyone ever seen a skinny fish? Never. The sea is more generous than the earth.’ 106 Couto, ‘Fisherman on Departure’, 114. 107 Essentially a fishing family links land and sea, with the woman on the former, the man on the latter. See Pearson, The Indian Ocean, 41. In this ceremony as well, the gendered division of labour is clearly marked and is an important part of continuing these Goan traditions. 108 Bebinca is a Goan speciality dessert of Indian jaggery, eggs and cream, caramelized over a low flame over many hours until it reaches a flan-like consistency. It is served cold. 109 As Nadia Serematakis suggests, this indulgence in past memories is a way of bringing these into the present moment in a powerfully visceral way. See Serematakis, ‘The Memory of the Senses’, 214–29. 110 Ibid., 214–19. 111 This community was ever-changing, many of the younger generations choosing a variety of places for migration: nearby Maputo, London or Paris. This point came up various times in my conversations with different generational members of the Goan Catembe fishermen. 112 Cole, ‘Cod, God, Country and Family’, 1–29. 113 Chá is the Portuguese word for ‘tea’, derived from the Hindi word chai, once again showing the deep historical connections between Lusophone India and Africa. 114 ‘World Goa Day’ was created by a Goan Londoner in 1999 as a way to mark a day (20 August) on which Goans globally would come together in solidarity. The day honours the history, language, music and cultural heritage and traditions of Goa. See Frenz, ‘Global Goans’, 201. 115 Mia Couto, ‘Waves Writing Stories’, in Sleepwalking Land, trans. David Brookshaw (Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 1992), 205.

180

Notes

Chapter 5 1

In using the word ‘eyewitness’ to describe each participant observer, I do not mean to imply that their accounts are impartial but rather that they were each caught up, to varying degrees, with what was happening in front of them. I will elaborate on the complicated contexts for each eyewitness case. 2 Suzanne Gordon, ‘Carlos Garçaõ’, in Under the Harrow: Lives of White South Africans Today (London: Heinemann, 1988), 27–44. 3 Ryszard Kapuściński, Another Day of Life, trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand (London: Penguin Books, 1987). 4 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–32. 5 MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 1–4. Portugal’s ‘first’ empire was based in Asia in the sixteenth century, its ‘second’ based in Brazil in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and its ‘third’ in Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (which consisted of the territories of Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe). 6 Ibid., 17–52. 7 Ibid., 64–88. 8 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–15, 149–78. 9 I borrow this phrase from Raymond Betts who uses it as the title for his chapter 2. Raymond Betts, Decolonization (London: Routledge, 1998), 19. 10 Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 87–104. 11 The category of ‘Portuguese’ in relation to whiteness needs to be interrogated and requires in-depth critical analysis. I must qualify that I am here dealing largely with the white Portuguese community that left from Mozambique and Angola, even as there were Goan Indians as well as black Mozambicans who were granted refugee status and guaranteed placement on flights out of Lourenço Marques and Luanda on the eves of these decolonizations. It was a complicated process by which certain individuals (with certain race and class backgrounds) were given refugee status while others were not. Decolonization also triggered a range of responses, for and against it. 12 The estimated figures vary widely but most recent approximations by Claudia Castelo suggest that half a million Portuguese left Angola and Mozambique (combined) for Lisbon, while an unspecified number left for Brazil, South Africa, Australia and Canada. See Castelo, ‘Colonial Migration to Angola and Mozambique’, 124 and n. 17. Elizabeth Buettner suggests a figure of 500,000–800,000 for Angola and Mozambique and elsewhere, made up of about 500,000 settlers and about

Notes

13

14

15 16

181

200,000 troops. At least 25,000–35,000 were either mestiços or African spouses and children of Portuguese citizens. Buettner also points out that these retornados from Africa formed the most numerically significant influx of persons of all decolonization migrations in Europe, causing the resident population of Portugal (which was estimated at 9 million at the time) to grow by 5–10 per cent. Portugal’s decolonization influx also occurred in a very short space and time with much of it compressed into little over one year. See Buettner, Europe after Empire, 242. MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 211–12. Here I am interested in conceptualizing the Portuguese colonial state less as a failed African state but rather as a highly mobile one. I would like to thank Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran for inviting me to participate in the workshop ‘Theorizing the State and Mobility in Africa Conference’, Maputo, Mozambique, August 2010, and for their critical and insightful comments on a very early draft of this chapter. There is an expanding literature on the retornados, as those persons who emigrated from the ex-colonies to Portugal are called, including the experiences of the soldiers who were stationed overseas, many of whom created photo albums documenting their experiences. The irony for the colonial settlers is that many were returning to a homeland they had never experienced, which made their integration into Portuguese society much more difficult and painful. See, for example, R. Pena Pires. Os retornados: um estudo sociografico (Lisboa: Instituto Estudos para o Desenvolvimento, 1987). For more in-depth ethnographic analysis on the retornados in Portugal, see the excellent work of Stephen C. Lubkemann, ‘The Moral Economy of Portuguese Postcolonial Return’, Diaspora 11, no. 2 (2002): 199; also his ‘Race, Class, and Kin in the Negotiation of “Internal Strangerhood” among Portuguese Retornados, 1975–2000’, in Europe’s Invisible Migrants, ed. A. L. Smith (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 75–93. Also, see the following website which hosts a variety of materials and memorabilia tied to the retornados: http://memoria-africa.ua.pt/ (accessed 13 August 2010). The stories of the difficulties that these retornados experienced upon their return migration to Lisbon, including discrimination as refugees ‘tainted’ by their African histories, will be touched on in Chapter 6. MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 152. Again, my focus is on the colonials (not colonized), as more than 99 per cent of the colonials left Mozambique and Angola in the wake of decolonization. See MorierGenoud and Cahen, ‘Introduction: Portugal, Empire, and Migrations – Was There Ever an Autonomous Social Imperial Space?’ 16. My focus is not on those stories of Mozambican and Angolan postcoloniality and their attendant subjectivities – another book would be required to study the migration of colonized people within Southern Africa. Rather this chapter is an exploration of the transitional in-between space of decolonization as part of the unfolding story of Portuguese postcoloniality.

182

Notes

17 The figure of 250,000 is derived from the estimate of 500,000 for the combined populations of Mozambique and Angola estimated as having departed the colonies on the eve of decolonization. See Castelo, ‘Colonial Migration to Angola and Mozambique’, 124, n. 17. António Costa Pinto gives the figure of 160,000 retornados to Portugal from Mozambique rather. See Pinto, ‘The Transition to Democracy and Portugal’s Decolonization’, 26. 18 It is complicated to understand who chose to go where and for what reasons, and who was given a higher status for migration to the metropole versus other places as well as how they were received in these host countries. After Lisbon, popular second choices for migration were South Africa (for both Portuguese Mozambicans and Portuguese Angolans) and Brazil (for Portuguese Angolans). Other popular choices were the United States, Canada and New Zealand, according to the various individuals I interviewed on this topic in Johannesburg in 2008. These stories will be narrated in Chapter 6. 19 Kapuściński, Another Day of Life, 35. 20 It must be reinforced here that Mozambique and Angola were two very different yet interrelated cases of Portuguese decolonization (Angola following Mozambique only five months later), each taking place under dramatically different contexts. The conditions for the exodus of Angola’s majority Portuguese population were much more dire, tensions between Europeans and Africans tenser and more racially fraught than in Mozambique, as the impending civil war was readily apparent. See MacQueen, The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa, 158–204. 21 Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, trans. Maureen Freely (London: Faber and Faber, 2009), 45. 22 Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–63. 23 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 3–36. 24 Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 1–7. 25 Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 2–3. 26 Here I am interested in looking at how Mozambique, Angola and South Africa have deeply intertwined histories, rather than looking at each of their (nationalist, colonial, apartheid) histories in isolation. Decolonization is an interesting approach for bringing them into one field of analysis, since it involved the circulation of people and things across territorial borders and oceanic waters. 27 I consider all of the narrators as ‘eyewitnesses’ because they experienced decolonization first-hand, even as I am not implying that they were impartial in their viewpoints. In all three cases here, the narrators were not disinterested observers but rather very attached to what they were caught up in, albeit to varying degrees. Their narratives were also intended for very different audiences.

Notes

183

28 In suggesting ways to write beyond the nation, I am also referring to the ‘Writing Post National Narratives: Other Geographies, Other Times’ conference I was involved in, hosted by Dilip Menon at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1–3 November 2010. 29 Jacobs, Edge of Empire, 22. This point was only reinforced by Salazar’s convenient renaming of Portugal’s remaining colonies as ‘overseas provinces’, an argument he used to get Portugal out of the unpopular position of still maintaining colonies in a global era of decolonization. According to this label, Portugal’s colonized subjects now purportedly held equal rights as full citizens of Portugal. Salazar’s ‘one nation theory’ could only hold ideological favour for so long. For a discussion of how this political manoeuvre delayed decolonization in the Goa case, see Kamat, Farar Far (Crossfire), 283–4. 30 There is an expanding literature on the role of Portuguese state propaganda in shaping press censorship and education in the empire. It produced many colonial subjects (both Portuguese and not) wholly uncritical of the state; for some nationalist fervour was synonymous with support of the colonial regime. See, for example, José Marques Guimarães, A política ‘educativa’ do colonialismo português em África: da I República ao Estado Novo (1910–1974) (Porto: Profedições, 2006). 31 L. B. Honwana cited in Ricardo Rangel, Pão nosso de cada noite: Our Nightly Bread (Maputo: Marimbique, 2004), 138. 32 As much as my focus is on colonial possessions as standing in for a larger process of decolonization, those things that were left behind (or did not fit) must also be considered as standing in for so much more about the other layered effects of decolonization. 33 Once again, it is moments of intimacy that Rangel captures on film that say so much: quiet glimpses of people behind the scenes (like the faceless man hoisting the mattress into the Portuguese madam’s crate), the desperation of a handwritten plea on the side of a crate, or Rangel’s own scribbled notes on a contact sheet. 34 Edwards, ‘Beyond the Boundary’, 58–60. As I have suggested in Chapter 4, photographs are both ‘visual metaphor’ and ‘lyrical expression’, capable of unravelling the deeper meanings and metaphors of cultural being. 35 Gordon, ‘Carlos Garçaõ’, 27–44. In this section, I am summarizing from Gordon’s oral interview with Carlos Garçaõ. It must be noted that his interview was recorded thirteen years after his arrival in South Africa and during Apartheid governmentality; this makes the rereading of his testimony some twenty-two years later a more complicated and careful process. 36 Suzanne Gordon, A Talent for Tomorrow (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985). 37 As described by Christopher Hope, in his foreword to Gordon’s book, Under the Harrow, xi.

184

Notes

38 An interesting comparison could be made with Vincent Crapanzano’s portrayal of white South Africans in his book Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (New York: Random House, 1985). That he was an outsider to South African society and that his book was published just as Gordon was conducting her interviews is significant. She makes no reference to Crapanzano’s work in her own. 39 Hope, in the foreword to Gordon, Under the Harrow, xiii. 40 Gordon, Under the Harrow, 2. 41 Ibid., 3. 42 Ibid., xiv. 43 Noticeably absent in Carlos’s testimony are examples of racism (against black South Africans) that he must have witnessed on a day-to-day basis living in apartheid Johannesburg, as well as the fact that, as a white person, he benefited from this discriminatory system. Even as Carlos sometimes romanticizes Portuguese colonialism (and is overly critical of decolonization) in retelling his life history and as a way to justify his migration to South Africa, his account can still be ‘read’ for its first-hand account of Mozambican decolonization. 44 His is an account that is deeply imbedded in the times in which he lived. While it is unclear from his testimony why he chose South Africa over Portugal for himself and his family, one conceivable reason could be the already well-established Portuguese diasporic community in South Africa, a large first wave of migration (from the mainland and Madeira) having taken place in the middle of the eighteenth century. There is a growing literature on the Portuguese community of South Africa that I am beginning to research myself, and that I reference in Chapter 6. For a good start, see Glaser, ‘Portuguese Immigrant History in Twentieth Century South Africa’, 61–83. 45 Gordon, Under the Harrow, 34. 46 Ibid., 35. Even while it does not come up in Carlos’s testimony, there were reported cases of abuse by soldiers against civilians. Nor did the many soldiers conscripted to serve in the colonies necessarily wholly support the colonial regime; instead there was much dissension among them, depending on their personal experiences. I thus want to avoid stereotyping the many soldiers who were involved in the decolonization process in Mozambique and Angola. I thank Filipa Ribeiro da Silva for pointing out these historical nuances to me. Personal communication, Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, at the ‘Theorizing the State and Mobility in Africa’ workshop, 1–4 August 2010, Maputo, Mozambique. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., 36. 49 Ibid., 37. 50 Ibid. Considering that he was white, young and healthy, it was, of course, much easier for Carlos to find a job than for a black person. In some sense, everything he

Notes

51

52

53

54 55 56

185

gained in South Africa was at the expense of (South African) blacks who were less fortunate than himself. The irony here is that Carlos left Mozambique during its decolonization for fear of what independence would bring in relation to racial tensions, and now he and his family were living in the back of a white man’s house, in the quarters reserved for blacks under an apartheid regime. It is likely that this raised concerns for Carlos at the time, concerns over his social standing and a fear of falling in class status as he moved from an elite colonial situation to the status of a refugee (albeit a white one), taking on menial jobs (such as working in a bar) under an apartheid regime. It is interesting how Carlos’s whiteness is used to navigate two different governmentalities with very different unexpected outcomes. Carlos recounts how, after numerous applications to remain in South Africa and even after going to the expense of hiring a lawyer, he and his family were called in for an inspection (in order to determine that they were not Coloured, he notes). It was only through the intervention of the Portuguese vice-consul in Pretoria that Carlos was given a permit to stay in the country – interestingly, it is his ‘Portuguese-ness’ and his colonial connections that allow him and his family residency under an apartheid regime. The irony is that the kind of job in South Africa Carlos attained, after leaving Mozambique, was to send things back to Mozambique via the Mozambican immigrant miners living in South Africa (a feeding scheme of sorts). This, in turn, suggests the continued (historical) connectivities between Mozambique and South Africa as well as the power of political processes to cohere in things. In post-apartheid Johannesburg today, I have noticed the development of an interesting postcolonial relationship where members of the Portuguese community employ Mozambicans to serve an exclusively Portuguese-speaking clientele at their restaurants, sporting clubs, etc. Gordon, Under the Harrow, 38. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 36. There are numerous rumours (some of which I have heard myself) that the Portuguese destroyed the plumbing of Mozambique upon their colonial departure. Thus, on one level, Carlos’s statements are familiar. Rather than investigating the truthfulness of this action, I find it interesting that this rumour abounds (commonly so in South Africa), particularly for what it says about the Portuguese as ‘bad’ colonialists in comparison, for example, to the British who, of course, have ties with South Africa’s own colonial past. Carlos’s statements are also interesting for thinking about what happens to the idea behind the thing when the thing itself (e.g. the toilet and the drain) is spoiled: the act of destroying objects can perhaps be read as an attempt to destroy the idea of colonial loss as an inevitable consequence of decolonization. As well, the act of destruction can be read as an

186

57

58 59

60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68 69

Notes assertion of agency (and an act of resistance) in response to a political process (decolonization) over which they had little determination but which had profound effects on their lives. This was just one small way of getting even, of balancing state power. I thank Eric Allina for suggesting this textured reading of the destruction of things at the ‘Theorizing the State and Mobility in Africa’ workshop, Maputo, Mozambique, 1–4 August 2010. For an interesting discussion of (myth of) the destruction of toilets in Mozambique during decolonization, see Sean Christie, ‘The Great Unblocking of Beira’, 19 March 2010, http://www.mg.co.za/printformat/ single/2010-03-19-the-great-unblocking-of-beira (accessed on 4 June 2016). Ibid. Carlos also remembers that there were many unopened boxes of brand-new equipment left behind in the office where he worked. This may suggest that some Portuguese colonalists delayed learning how to use new technology sent from the metropole, as well as their hasty departure during decolonization that they left these boxes unopened. Ibid., 43, emphasis mine. Of course the ensuing civil war in Angola compelled most people to leave due to the dangerous circumstances. What was happening in Angola was both distinct from what was going on in Mozambique with regard to historical context, but the processes of decolonization were parallel in many regards, including the mass exodus of the majority of the Portuguese citizens living there, only it was on a much larger scale in Angola. As well, many Portuguese Angolans chose to immigrate to Brazil, a popular choice that suggests the nation state’s Atlantic oceanic connectivities as compared to Mozambique’s Indian Ocean connectivities with India. Robert Mackey, ‘Fact, Fiction, and Kapuscinski’, New York Times Blog, 8 March 2001. Ibid. ‘Polish Chronicler of Third World Kapuscinski Dies’, International Herald Tribune, 23 January 2007. See de Oliveira, ‘Decolonization in, of and through the Archival “Moving Images”, of Artistic Practice’, 134. Like my interpretation of Ricardo Rangel’s photographs and Carlos Garçaõ’s recorded life history, I here offer a careful and complicated reading of Kapuściński’s text, one that contextualizes his portrait of the last days of colonialism in Luanda. Kapuściński, Another Day of Life, foreword. Oliveira, ‘Decolonization in, of and through’, 134. Kapuściński, Another Day of Life, 8. Ibid., 135. This history is outlined in Chapter 2: the political parties involved in the Angolan fight for independence included the National Front for the Liberation of Angola

Notes

70 71 72

73

74 75

76 77

78 79 80 81 82 83

84

187

(FNLA), led by Holden Roberto and backed by Western powers and Zaire; the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), led by Agostinho Neto and backed by the Soviet Union and Cuba; and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), led by Jonas Savimbi and backed by Western powers and South Africa. Kapuściński, Another Day of Life, 4–5. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 6. Again, the racial tensions between black and white were much more charged (and violent) in the Angolan case due to its specific historical context, including its ongoing civil war. Ibid., 7. Here the journalist is alluding to the abuse of power by the PIDE, the police officers’ sense of frustration for what had happened at the level of state politics in which they had no say, but which now determined their individual livelihoods, and their collective desire for getting even by punishing the colonized population for this. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 17. The trauma that the soldiers themselves experienced while stationed overseas during the colonial wars is only just starting to be researched, including the opening up of the archives that hold many of the photo albums that were given to each of the soldiers in order to document their overseas tours. A Portuguese friend once mentioned that two of her brothers served in Angola in the 1970s and are still scarred from the experience (akin to the Vietnam vet syndrome) and rarely talk about it with other family members. Ibid. Ibid., 10. His description of the caravan of cars is reminiscent of accounts that I heard during interviews conducted with several Portuguese Angolans who emigrated to South Africa during decolonization, and that I take up in Chapter 6. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 23–6. Ibid., 13–15. Ibid., 16–17. See Ângela Ferreira’s fascinating ‘Messy Colonialism, Wild Decolonisation’ exhibition (2015) that portrays the unclaimed crates languishing at the base of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos after they arrived from Luanda and Lourenço Marques. Ferreira, solo exhibition at the Zona Maco Art Fair, Mexico City, Mexico and Open Plan exhibition at the SP-Arte – São Paulo International Art Festival, http:// angelaferreira.info/?p=206. I thank Ângela personally for sharing her artwork with me and for our continuing conversations. Ibid., 18–19.

188

Notes

85 See Ann L. Stoler, ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination’, Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 191–219; Nicholas Dirks, ed., In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 86 My subtitle pays homage to Achille Membe’s book of the same name and whose scholarship has influenced me greatly. In many ways, this chapter has taken a ruminative stance towards thinking and writing about Portuguese postcoloniality and its processes of decolonization in Lusophone Africa. 87 The timing of my Fulbright fellowship was striking. On the one hand, the fellowship I received was an attempt to fund scholars like me to look more critically at Portugal’s colonial past. On the other hand, the 500-year celebrations to mark Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India – which included the recreation of a Portuguese colonial pavilion on the grounds of its World Expo 98 site – was structured as a commemoration of colonial glory, not of its demise. In some ways, this suggested a nation’s denial of its colonial loss. 88 Ana’s comments also point to how the retornados were received and often treated poorly in Portugal, never escaping the trauma of being refugees from the colonies.

Chapter 6 1 2 3

4 5 6

7

Morier-Genoud and Cahen, ‘Introduction: Portugal, Empire and Migration – Was There Ever an Autonomous Social Imperial Space?’ 19. Interview with Laide, 11 March 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. John Darwin, ‘Conclusion: Decolonisation and Diaspora’, in Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, ed. Eric MorierGenoud and Michel Cahen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 317. I focus on three accounts, chosen out of a larger study, as they reflect the concerns and themes for this chapter. Stewart, Ordinary Affects. Until recently, the Portuguese South African diaspora was an understudied diaspora. For an excellent overview of extant literature on differing Portuguese diasporas the world over, see Edward Alpers with Molly Ball, ‘“Portuguese” Diasporas: A Survey of the Scholarly Literature’, in Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, ed. Eric Morier Genoud and Edward Alpers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 31–71. See the excellent work by Caroline Brettell on the strength of diaspora and its relations to the host country, through a case study approach. See Brettell, Anthropology and Migration: Essays on Transnationalism, Ethnicity and Identity (New York: Altamira Press, 2003).

Notes 8 9

10

11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

189

Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 1–2. The estimated figures vary widely, but most recent approximations suggest that half a million Portuguese in total left Angola and Mozambique for Lisbon, while an unspecified number left for Brazil, South Africa, Australia and Canada. Claudia Castelo offers this figure of half a million, along with a statistic that 35 per cent of the whites living in Portugal’s African colonies had been born there. See Castelo, ‘Colonial Migration to Angola and Mozambique: Constraints and Illusions’, 124, n. 17. See also Bender, Angola under the Portuguese, 236. He offers figures of 60,000 Portuguese fleeing Angola before June 1975 and estimates that between 1 May and 31 October 1975, 235,315 refugees were airlifted out of Angola. The category of ‘Portuguese’ is a complex one, particularly from a historical perspective of racialized and classed categories operating within a Portuguese colonial setting such as Angola. I am restricting my discussion within the scope of this chapter to white Portuguese on the eve of their departure from Angola for South Africa, even as the Portuguese who were given safe and prioritized passage out of Luanda included Goan Indians as well as black Angolans. Thus, it was a complicated matrix involving class and race politics of who was allowed to leave or not. I follow Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen in my preferred usage of ‘Portuguese’ over Lusophone to name this imperial diasporic community. MorierGenoud and Cahen, ‘Introduction’, 25, n. 24. Also see Chapter 1. According to official immigration figures, 4,000 former Angolan colonials (as compared to 30,000 former Mozambican colonials) settled permanently in South Africa between 1974 and 1980. McDuling, cited in Clive Glaser, ‘The Making of a Portuguese Community in South Africa, 1900–1994’ in Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, ed. Eric MorierGenoud and Michel Cahen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 223. Glaser points out that these numbers are highly likely to be underestimated as many of the migrants did not register with the Portuguese consulate during these years of chaotic transition. Interview with Laide. Bender, Angola under the Portuguese, 236. Ibid., 96–131. Namibia had been annexed by South Africa after the First World War and only gained its independence from South Africa in 1990. At the time her father saw South Africa as a temporary haven, for he always hoped that the family would emigrate to New Zealand which he saw as promising better opportunities than South Africa. Interviews with Francisco, 22 April 2008 and 14 October 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. High-class families tended to be those of government employees or of prosperous landowners, such as Laide’s family. Francisco’s family was of lower to middle-class

190

19

20 21

22

23

24

25 26

27

Notes standing that had followed an older Portuguese migration pattern to the colonies as a means of achieving social mobility. Many of these Portuguese were involved in small commercial enterprises in urban Luanda. See Bender, Angola under the Portuguese, 224–37. Some of Francisco’s family members had also come to Angola via Brazil, while it had been his grandparents who had originally come to Angola from Portugal. No exact year of their arrival was offered. Interview with Duarte, 11 September 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. Interestingly, Duarte comes from a working-class family background and moved up the colonial class ladder by obtaining a law degree in Lisbon. He then chose to work in the mining industry in Luanda (I am unclear whether he worked at a management level, given his degree). Even as he clearly could have been a higherranked government employee, he chose against it because of its premise on colonial exploitation. In some sense, Duarte complicates the narrative of the white Angolan who was oblivious to the colonial context in which he lived and worked, someone whose politics are located elsewhere. This type of Portuguese Angolan is not accounted for in Bender’s otherwise detailed and excellent study, Angola under the Portuguese. Gerald Bender echoes this statement of the damaging effects of the Portuguese on Angolan society: ‘In the long run, therefore, it may be beneficial to start almost from scratch, to reorient the economy and government services to better serve the more than 90 per cent of the population who had either been exploited or neglected by the colonial system’. See his Angola under the Portuguese, 237. Portuguese Catholic churches established by earlier Madeiran immigrants became havens for refugees from the colonies, offering them temporary food and housing. See Glaser, ‘Portuguese Immigrant History in Twentieth Century South Africa’, 72. We know very little about this historical process in ethnographic terms, a point I elaborate on throughout this book. Chapter 2 offers a brief summary of the historical facts of the process. Deborah Posel, ‘Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in TwentiethCentury South Africa’, African Studies Review 44, no. 2 (2001): 108. For a brief summary of a much more complex theory that did not work in practice, see Castelo, ‘Colonial Migration’, 125. She writes: ‘Lusotropicalismo is a theory developed by Brazilian social scientist Gilberto Freyre (1990–1987) according to which the Portuguese would have a special ability to relate to people from the Tropics, through biological and cultural cross-breeding as well as through their ethnic past halfway between Europe and Africa.’ See Gerald Bender and his damning critique, backed up by detailed figures and statistics, of the implorable way that white people lived in colonial Angola in Angola under the Portuguese, 199–237.

Notes

191

28 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 29 Portuguese Madeirans began to migrate to South Africa in the late 1880s and continued until the 1970s. They make up the largest portion of the Portuguese community currently living in Johannesburg. See Glaser, ‘Portuguese Immigrant History’, 62. His estimate for the Portuguese community in Johannesburg (for the 1990s) is between 400,000 and 500,000. Also see http://www.saweb.co.za/epa/info. html accessed on 3 June 2017, a website for all things ‘Portuguese’ in Johannesburg. More generally, there are certain areas in Southern Johannesburg that are known historically for their pockets of Portuguese communities – ‘Little Portugal’ as it is called – Rosettenville, Troyville, Turfontein, La Rochelle, Regents Park; even as many of the older migrants have moved out (while newer African refugees have moved in), they have stayed in a larger Southern suburbs of Johannesburg. See Glaser, ‘The Making of a Portuguese Community’. For another excellent overview, see Victor Pereira Da Rosa and Salvato Trigo, ‘Islands in a Segregated Land: Portuguese in South Africa’, in Portuguese Migration in Global Perspective, ed. David Higgs (Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1990), 182–99. 30 Clive Glaser has noted the classed differences between these waves of Portuguese migrants (impoverished Madeiran farmers from the late 1880s until the 1970s, skilled artisans from the mainland from the 1940s to the 1980s and educated landholders or businessmen from the ex-colonies from 1975 onwards). See Glaser, ‘Portuguese Immigrant History’, 68–70. Portuguese stereotypes of Madeirans were very much tied to island mentalities: those from the mainland tended to look down on people from the island. In this case then, Laide’s mother maintained her childhood stereotype of Madeiran Portuguese even after her migration to South Africa. 31 Conversations with Portuguese Angolan South Africans revealed that they were often labelled ‘second class’; to them, however, Portuguese Mozambicans in South Africa were even worse off, being labelled ‘third class citizens’. Some Portuguese Mozambican South Africans also told me the converse story, saying that Portuguese Angolan’s had been worse off in South Africa. Castelo writes:

The settlers in Angola viewed themselves as entrepreneurial people, selfmade men capable of facing adversity and deprivation to attain their goals, while the settlers in Mozambique tended to create a self-image of distinction in social and economic matters … In addition, the image that each community projected of itself was built in opposition to the image that it made and disseminated of the other community. Thus, the Portuguese in Angola saw themselves as more tolerant on racial issues as opposed to the blatantly racist conceptions and practices they saw in the Portuguese in Mozambique (generalising the racial relations environment

192

Notes of southern and central Mozambique to the entire colony). The Portuguese in Mozambique, on the other hand, stressed their superiority over the Portuguese in Angola in educational and socioprofessional terms.

32

33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40

See Castelo, ‘Colonial Migration’, 123. What she writes is fascinating and suggests that the idea of ‘classes’ of citizenship needs to be explored further in relation to the Portuguese African diaspora and power relations between these different migrant communities. In the instance of Portuguese Mozambicans and Angolans, the apartheid state felt sympathetic to ‘whites fleeing black rule’ and offered camps for them to stay in. It did not realize the high numbers that would arrive in South Africa, seeking refuge and a permanent home. See Glaser, ‘Portuguese Immigrant History’, 72. Ibid. Graham Watson, Passing for White: A Study of Racial Assimilation in a South African School (London: Tavistock Publications, 1970), 24. Ibid., 55. Ibid., According to Watson, the task of the pass-white was to present himself to members of the white group in such a manner that the whites could not be altogether sure he was of Coloured origin. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 55. Interestingly, another one of my Portuguese Angolan interviewees put forth the compelling argument that since Mozambicans received colonial independence from the Portuguese six months prior to Angola, its Portuguese citizens were better treated in South Africa in the immediate aftermath of their migration. They, however, abused their privileges as ‘refugees’ so that when Portuguese Angolans began to arrive in South Africa, they were poorly treated. This could perhaps explain the appalling conditions under which Francisco’s family was forced to stay in refugee camps in Namibia for an extended period. Interview Luis, 13 March 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. This argument suggests that the Mozambican and Angolan decolonization experiences were in fact tied together, requiring them to be studied relationally, particularly with regard to their treatment as immigrants in South Africa. These labels are very much tied into how the Portuguese Madeiran community was perceived in apartheid South Africa, as a poor working-class immigrant community. See Glaser, ‘Portuguese Immigrant Community’. ‘Sea-kaffirs’ was a racial/ethnic slur, referring to the fact that these immigrants had arrived from Angola via the sea and that they were ‘kaffirs’ or at least had some African (and by implication black) blood in them. More generally, the etymology of ‘kaffir’ has a long and complicated historical genealogy in the context of Southern Africa. ‘Pora’ stands for a Portuguese person and is also a Portuguese swear word (no

Notes

41

42 43 44 45 46 47

48

193

exact translation of the word is available), likened to calling an Afrikaans person a Dutchman. For an interesting play on words, see ‘Sonia’s No Ordinary Pora Chick’ by Fiona Chisholm on the Tonight website, posted on 17 January 2006, http://www. tonight.co.za/ (accessed on 27 February 2008). There is a larger history of ethnic slurs regarding the Portuguese diasporic community in which these particular (Portuguese African) slurs need to be contextualized. See the unpublished paper by George Monteiro, ‘Portingale to “Portugee”, the Genesis and History of an Ethnic Slur’ at ‘Narrating the Portuguese Diaspora (1928–2008): International Conference on Storytelling’ (University of Lisbon, Portugal, 23–25 October), jointly organized by Teresa Alves, Irene Maria Blayer, Teresa Cid and Francisco Cota Fagundes, and at which I presented an early draft of this chapter. Clive Glaser, ‘White but Illegal: Undocumented Madeiran Immigration to South Africa, 1920s–1970s’, Immigrants and Minorities 31, no. 1 (2013): 74–98. There is now an expanding literature on the Portuguese South African diasporic group which is complicated by the fact of the three strands of migration that make up this community. See Glaser, ‘The Making of a Portuguese Community’, 213–38. Glaser also goes so far to question how much of a community the Portuguese are in South Africa given their class and education differences, and perceptions among the three strands. See Glaser, ‘Portuguese Immigrant History’, 74–5. Stephen Jensen, Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town (Oxford: James Curry, 2008). Ibid., 57. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 7–10. Ibid., 67. Interview with Lara, Duarte’s daughter, 5 July 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. Lara confirmed how the discourse of Lusotropicalismo functioned as a convenience for Portuguese Angolans in South African. In these narratives, typical representations of immigration to South Africa from the colonies include that life was great back in the colonies, that they were not racist there and treated Angolan blacks well, that they had to learn whiteness in South Africa, and that they were appalled by the way black people were treated in apartheid South Africa. She says that none of that is really true, but rather a convenient fiction employed to talk about and account for living and adjusting to the apartheid structure of South Africa, and is commonly employed by both men and women alike. On 13 June 2009, I went on a Portuguese tour of Johannesburg with my Portuguese South African friend Victor de Andrade who opened my eyes to a thriving community: we visited churches, cafes, sporting events and even a traditional Portuguese dance performance that was taking place in a local park. I cannot thank him enough for his generosity in showing me ‘all things Portuguese’ in Johannesburg. See my forthcoming article on the contemporary Portuguese

194

49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

57 58

Notes diaspora of South Africa: Pamila Gupta, ‘Blue Johannesburg’ in Planned Violence: Post/colonial Urban Infrastructures, Literature and Culture, ed. Elleke Boehmer and Dom Davies (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9. Posel, ‘Race as Common Sense’, 103. Following Alexander Saxton, Matthew Frye Jacobson writes: ‘It is a theory of who is who, of who belongs and who does not, of who deserves what and who is capable of what. By looking at racial categories and their fluidity over time, we glimpse the competing theories of history which inform the society and define its internal struggles.’ Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 6. Ibid., 9. Posel, ‘Race as Common Sense’, 91. Bender’s book, Angola under the Portuguese, is an indictment of the systematic exploitation of black Angolans under the Portuguese. Sadly, Duarte passed away in 2011. For a recent personalized memoir that was a literary controversy, see Isabela Figueiredo, Notebook of Colonial Memories, trans. Anna M. Klobucka and Phillip Rothwell (Dartmouth: Luso-Asio-Afro-Brazilian Studies and Theory, 2015), originally published in Portuguese in 2009. See also for a fascinating case study of a Goan diasporic migrant who moves to Portugal post-1961 as a retornado, Brettell, ‘Portugal’s First Post-Colonials: Citizenship, Identity, and the Repatriation of Goans’, 1–28. João, a Portuguese Mozambican who emigrated from Mozambique to Portugal with his family in 1975, described how his family was treated as ‘second class citizens’ there. The treatment they received as refugees was parallel to apartheid, he felt. He was labelled the ‘Mozambican kid’ in school and always had to work harder to prove himself. His life has forever been marked by his Africanness. As his family never felt like they fit in Lisbon society, they immigrated to South Africa in 1991. Interview with João, 6 August 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. João’s story shows that Portuguese colonial diasporas were still in circuit long after, and as a result of, decolonization, returning from the metropole to Africa, with places like South Africa a more realistic option in the face of Angola’s ongoing civil war. As the global economy has suffered from the post-2008 recession, a more recent move has seen many of these former colonials moving back from Portugal to Mozambique and Angola. See Nastasya Tay, ‘Portugal’s Migrants Hope for New Life in Old African Colony’, The Guardian, 22 December 2011. I take this up in more depth in Chapter 7. For an excellent historical overview of the Portuguese Angolan community in South Africa, see Glaser, ‘The Making of a Portuguese Community’. AbdoolKarim Vakil, ‘Mundo Pretuguês: Colonial and Postcolonial Diasporic Dis/ articulations’, in Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the

Notes

195

Portuguese World, ed. Eric Morier Genoud and Edward Alpers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 290. 59 Betts, Decolonization. 60 Michel Cahen, ‘“Portugal Is in the Sky”: Conceptual Considerations on Communities, Lusitanity and Lusophony’, in Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, ed. Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), 298.

Chapter 7 1 2

3

4 5

6

7

Mia Couto, ‘Waters of My Beginning’, in Pensativities: Essays, trans. David Brookshaw (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2015), 73. I first conducted fieldwork in Beira, Mozambique, during April 2009, with followup interviews in July 2010 with two Beira experts, José Forjaz, an architect, and António Sopa, an archivist, both now based in Maputo. I then returned to Beira in February 2016 for a second stint of fieldwork at these same sites. I would like to thank Richard Rottenburg, Andrea Behrends and their colleagues and students at the LOST Colloquium at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Martin-Luther-Universität, Halle-Wittenberg, in April–June 2016, for their invaluable insights and suggestions for revising a first draft of this chapter. Njabulo Ndebele, ‘To Be or Not to Be, No Longer at Ease’, keynote address presented ‘Texts, Modes and Repertoires of Living in and Beyond the Shadows of Apartheid’, 40th annual conference of the African Literature Association conference (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 9 April 2014). See Chapter 4 for a longer engagement with Mia Couto’s life and works, which can be carried over to contextualize my use of his writings here. José Forjaz, ‘Contribution to the Conference on African Architecture’, paper presented at the Annual Conference on African Architecture, Kwame Nkruma University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, June 2007 (http://abahlali. org/files/AAT_Forjaz_paper.doc), 2. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds, Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2002), 5. Part of why I am interested in what ‘remains’ in this chapter and in my larger book is a response or countermove to the larger discourse that the Portuguese purposely destroyed technology (rumours of infrastructural sabotage) on the way out of their colonies so that there would not be any leftovers for their would-be inheritors. On rumours of cement being poured down toilets by outgoing Portuguese in Mozambique in the wake of decolonization, see Christie, ‘The Great Unblocking of Beira’. Stoler, ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination’, 196.

196 8 9

10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

Notes Couto, ‘Waters of My Beginning’, 74. Georg Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 262–6; Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: NLB, 1977); Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Dirks, In Near Ruins; Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Boston: MIT Press, 2002). I am less invested in labelling or questioning whether or not these places in Beira function as sites of ruination. Rather I work through ideas of ruination to develop an analytic of renovation. Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, 177–8. Svetlana Boym, ‘Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins’, Atlas of Transformation, 2011, http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/ruinophilia/ ruinophilia-appreciation-of-ruins-svetlana-boym.html (accessed 20 April 2016). Stoler, ‘Imperial Debris’, 209. Ibid., 196. Ibid., 194. Ibid., 194–5. Ibid., 194. Isabel Hofmeyr, ‘The Indian Ocean as Cold War Arena’, paper presented at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 30 September 2009. See Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Bruno Latour, ‘Trains of Thought: The Fifth Dimension of Time and Its Fabrication’, in Thinking Time: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Time, ed. Anne-Nelly Perret-Clermont, with Jean-Paul Bronckart, August Flammer, Sophie Lambolez, Denis Miéville, Jean-François Perret and Walter J. Perrig (Göttingen: Hogrefe and Hupher, 2005), 173–87. João De Pina-Cabral, ‘Dona Berta’s Garden: Reaching across the Colonial Boundary’, Etnográfica 6, no. 1 (2002): 86. Ibid., 88. Ibid., 87. Karl Schlögel, In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics, trans. Gerrit Jackson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Pamila Gupta, ‘Romancing the Colonial on Ilha de Mozambique’, in Emotion in Motion: Tourism, Affect and Transformation, ed. David Picard and Mike Robinson (London: Ashgate Publishers, 2012), 247–66.

Notes

197

25 Emma Hall describes Beira as a ‘city made very much for another people, a city which still carries this memory of the vacant owners’. See Emma Hall, ‘Once a Colonial Hotel, Now an Inhabited Ruin’, Failed Architecture, 10 April 2014, http:// www.failedarchitecture.com/once-a-colonial-hotel-now-an-inhabited-ruin/ (accessed 19 March 2016). 26 Danny Hoffman, ‘The Brookfields Hotel (Freetown, Sierra Leone)’, Public Culture 17, no. 1 (2005): 57. 27 Couto, ‘Waters of My Beginning’, 73. 28 Couto, ‘Waters of My Beginning’, 74. The distance between Beira and Maputo is approximately 720 kilometres. 29 Andrew MacDonald, ‘The Dançarinas of Lourenço Marques and Beira: Merrymaking, Women Travellers and South Africa’s Eastern Border, 1920s–1940s’, paper presented at the NRF Programme in Local Histories and Present Realities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 3 October 2012. Mia Couto notes in his short story ‘Waters of My Beginning’ that Beira was named after an obscure Portuguese nobleman, the Prince of Beira. 30 Allen F. Isaacman and Barbara Isaacman, Mozambique: From Colonialism to Revolution, 1900–1982 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983), 36. 31 MacDonald, ‘The Dançarinas of Lourenço Marques’, 26. 32 See Felipe Branquinho’s mesmerizing film consisting of old photograph stills of Beira’s construction and it includes several photographs of its hotels. Branquinho, ‘Beira’, film, YouTube, 9:50 min, uploaded 20 June 2007 by Branquinho999, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iae6_nKi4C8 (accessed 20 April 2016). 33 MacDonald, ‘The Dançarinas of Lourenço Marques’, 25–6. 34 Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler observe this in other colonial contexts as well. See Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, eds, Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997). 35 Anna Tostões, ed., Modern Architecture in Africa: Angola and Mozambique (Lisbon: ICIST Técnico, 2013). 36 Interview José Forjaz, 28 July 2010, Maputo, Mozambique; interview António Sopa, 29 July 2010, Maputo, Mozambique. 37 This detail was mentioned to me by Samuel Azevedo, a railway manager at the Caminhos de Ferro de Moçambique which was designed in 1966 by the same architect Francisco Castro who built the Grande Hotel. I interviewed Samuel (seventy years old) on my first visit to Beira on 23 April 2009; he was insightful on a variety of topics related to the history of Beira as he had lived in the city for more than forty years. He often repeated the comment that the Portuguese in Beira were the most racist towards blacks because they were living in a city that had a large English population which managed the sugar factory. According to him, the Portuguese in Beira were in competition with them, always vying for British approval of themselves as (just as) good colonizers, a discourse that I have written

198

38

39

40

41 42 43 44

45 46

Notes about elsewhere. See my piece, ‘Goa Dourada, the Internal Exotic in South Asia: Discourses of Colonialism and Tourism’, in South Asia and Its Others: Reading the ‘Exotic’, ed. V. G. Julie Rajan and Atreyee Phukan (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 123–48. It was Samuel who mentioned that it was these same Portuguese businessmen who returned to Beira after the war and would hang out in the Riviera cafe to reminisce about the old days. Art Deco was an international design movement from the 1920s through the 1940s, enduring longer in the colonies. Its inspiration was technological modernity, commerce and speed and drew on a variety of themes: archaeology, the machine age, aviation and the skyscraper; it used streamlined images, repetition, symmetry and geometry, and employed lacquer, inlaid wood, aluminium and stainless steel in its architectural detailing. ‘Art Deco’, Encyclopedia of Art History, http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/artdeco.htm (accessed 15 April 2016). Pamila Gupta, ‘Consuming the Coast: Mid-Century Communications of Port Tourism in the Southern African Indian Ocean’, Comunicação, Mídia e Consumo 12, no. 35 (2015): 149–70. Sopa’s impression of Beira as a ‘dead city’ has everything to do with its postindependence positionality; during the years of armed struggle, FRELIMO had very little presence in Beira, and upon decolonization, it approached the city uncertainly. See David Hedges and Colin Darch, ‘Political Rhetoric in the Transition to Mozambican Independence: Samora Machel in Beira, June 1975,’ Kronos 39, no. 1 (November 2013): 32–65. I would suggest that Beira’s condition of postcoloniality is very much tied to its specific history of decolonization (which is a larger argument being made in this book), including rivalries between FRELIMO and RENAMO, with Beira considered a stronghold for the latter. This means that there was less post-independence investment by Mozambique’s ruling party of FRELIMO in Beira’s infrastructural development. The sense of Beira being left aside by politics makes it that much more interesting for studying acts of renovation. Couto, ‘The Water of My Beginnings’, 73. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2001). William Bissell, Urban Design, Chaos and Colonial Power in Zanzibar (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011), 334. Steven J. Jackson, ‘Rethinking Repair’, in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014), 222. Bettina Malcomess and Dorothy Kreutzfeldt, Not No Place: Johannesburg; Fragments of Space and Time (Auckland Park: Fanele, 2013), 135. Andreas Huyssen, Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

Notes

199

47 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel In Contemporary Societies (London: Sage Publications, 1990). 48 Brian Larkin, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 333. 49 Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2007). 50 Italo Calvino, quoted in Bissell, Urban Design, Chaos, 7. 51 In a parallel manner and echoing my own argument, Emma Hall points out that these examples of high modernism lining all of Mozambique’s major cities still retain ‘almost all of their original features, from furniture, fittings and switches’. Hall, ‘Once a Colonial Hotel’. 52 Merriam-Webster, ‘Renovate’, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ renovate (accessed 27 September 2017). 53 Jackson, ‘Rethinking Repair’, 222. 54 Ackbar Abbas, ‘History in the Faking’, paper presented at the Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism, WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 24 July 2010, http://jwtc.org.za/the_workshop/ programme_2010.htm (accessed 2 August 2016). 55 Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 152. 56 Couto, ‘Water of My Beginnings’, 75. 57 Messynessy, ‘Living in the Art Deco Ruins of the Grande Hotel, Africa’, Messy Nessy, 22 May 2013, http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/05/22/anywhere-but-here-thegrande-hotel-of-mozambique/ (accessed 16 April 2016). 58 ‘Restaurante Clube Nautico’, http://www.restaurantnautico.com/ (accessed 27 April 2017). 59 Jeff Wiltse, Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 60 Brian Larkin, ‘The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria’, in Media Worlds, Anthropology on New Terrain, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2002), 324. 61 Ibid., 328. 62 Interview, unnamed manager, Novocine, 25 April 2009, Beira, Mozambique. 63 Interview, Apingar (caretaker), Novecine, 18 February 2016. Beira, Mozambique. 64 See Branquinho’s film Beira. 65 Mary Fitzpatrick, Mozambique. Lonely Planet Guidebook, 2nd edn. (London: Lonely Planet Publications, 2007). 66 Larkin, ‘The Materiality of Cinema Theatres’, 326. 67 Oliver Wainwright, ‘The Forgotten Masterpieces of African Modernism’, The Guardian, 1 March 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/01/ african-modernist-architecture (accessed 19 March 2016).

200

Notes

68 Perhaps this is in contrast to Emma Hall who describes her experience as ‘ruin lust’: she describes being ‘seduced by the familiarity of modernism transformed so beautifully by nature’ in the case of the Grande Hotel. Hall, ‘Once a Colonial Hotel’. 69 Emma Hall describes the staircase as comparable to the one in the film, Gone with the Wind. ‘Once a Colonial Hotel’. 70 Messynessy, ‘Living in the Art Deco Ruins’. 71 Hall, ‘Once a Colonial Hotel’. 72 Ibid. Hall estimates about 2,500 squatters inside the hotel for the year 2014. 73 Refugees first arrived in 1981 in the wake of Mozambique’s civil war after Zimbabwe’s newly independent leader, Robert Mugabe, took advantage of the war and set up Beira as a neutral zone for international trade by land-locked Zimbabwe, with people fleeing the violence following soon thereafter. ‘The Grande Hotel of Beira, Mozambique’, 21 May 2013, Sometimes Interesting, http://sometimesinteresting.com/2013/05/21/the-grande-hotel-of-beira-mozambique/ (accessed 22 April 2016). 74 Hall, ‘Once a Colonial Hotel’. 75 In some sense, the Grande Hotel has been ‘over’-represented in its transition from luxury hotel to squatter camp. See Brazilian filmmaker Licínio Azevedo’s awardwinning documentary film on the Grande Hotel Beira, entitled Hóspedes da Noite (Night Lodgers), DVD video, fifty-two minutes (Lisboa: Marfilmes, 2007); and Belgium filmmaker Lotte Stoops’s Grande Hotel: Beira, Mozambique, DVD video, seventy minutes (Amsterdam: Mokum Filmdistributie, 2010). It has also been famously photographed by South African photographer Guy Tillim. 76 Hall, ‘Once a Colonial Hotel’. Castro also designed Beira’s train station. 77 Messynessy, ‘Living in the Art Deco Ruins’. 78 Ibid. It was only reopened twice in the period before the end of colonialism, once for a visiting group of US Congressmen and another for a political wedding that demanded a venue large enough to house two hundred guests. 79 Ibid. For a history of Mozambique, see Isaacman and Isaacman, Mozambique, as well as my earlier overview in Chapter 2. 80 Hoffman, ‘The Brookfields Hotel’, 56. 81 Hall, ‘Once a Colonial Hotel’. 82 Ibid. 83 Estimated costs of the Golden Peacock are at $150 million. See ‘Hotel in Beira, Mozambique, Built with Chinese Capital’, MacauHub, 26 December 2013, http:// www.macauhub.com.mo/en/2013/12/26/hotel-in-beira-mozambique-built-withchinese-capital/ (accessed 18 April 2016). 84 Palash Ghosh, ‘Portuguese in Mozambique: A Study of Reverse Migration’, International Business Times, 21 February 2012, http://www.ibtimes.com/ portuguese-mozambique-story-reverse-migration-214108 (accessed 20 April 2016).

Notes

85 86

87 88

89 90

201

See also Nastasya Tay, ‘Portugal’s Migrants Hope for New Life in Old African Colony’, The Guardian, 22 December 2011. Interview, Samuel Azevedo, 23 April 2009, Beira, Mozambique. Post-independence, when FRELIMO closed the Beira corridor as part of the embargo of Southern Rhodesia in 1976, the city suffered as a result. As compared to FRELIMO, RENAMO had a stronger base among the Ndau ethnic group, whose members were located in and around Beira. All of these various factors contributed to the fact that Beira saw little post-1992 reconstruction or investment. As well, the emergence of a third political party, the MDM (Movimento Democrático de Moçambique) in 2009 to challenge FRELIMO in Beira has meant that the city continues to be viewed as in opposition to FRELIMO which, in turn, prevents it from receiving new infrastructural investments. I thank one of my anonymous reviewers for pointing out the reasons behind Beira’s tenuous positionality today. Couto, ‘Waters of My Beginning’, 77. The airline was established by the Portuguese colonial government in August 1936 as a charter carrier named Direcção de Exploração de Transportes Aéreos and was renamed LAM in 1980 following a reorganization. In April 1938, the eight-hourlong domestic Lourenço Marques–Inhambane–Beira–Quelimane coastal route was opened. A Beira–Salisbury (present-day Harare) route was launched in February 1947 with scheduled services to Durban and Madagascar also starting at the end of that year. In November 1965, a service linking Beira with Lourenço Marques was launched. LAM, ‘Company History’, LAM Mozambique Airlines, http://www.lam. co.mz/en/About-LAM/Company-History (accessed 20 April 2016). Larkin, ‘The Materiality of Cinema Theatres’, 324. Hoffman, ‘The Brookfields Hotel’, 57.

Reflecting: From Mozambique to Goa 1 Victor Rangel-Ribeiro, Tivolem (Panjim: Milkweed Editions, 1998), 5–7.

Bibliography Ackbar Abbas. ‘History in the Faking’. Paper presented at the Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism, WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 24 July 2010, http://jwtc.org.za/the_workshop/programme_2010.htm (accessed 2 August 2016). Aiyar, Sana. Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Alpers, Edward, and Molly Ball. ‘“Portuguese” Diasporas: A Survey of the Scholarly Literature’. In Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, edited by Eric Morier Genoud and Edward Alpers, 31–71. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Amin, Shahid. Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura, 1922–1992. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. ‘Art Deco’. Encyclopedia of Art History. http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/ art-deco.htm (accessed 15 April 2016). Assubuji, Rui, and Patricia Hayes. ‘The Political Sublime: Reading Kok Nam, Mozambican Photographer (1939–2012)’. Kronos 39, no. 1 (2013): 66–111. Azoulay, Ariella. The Civil Contract of Photography. New York: Zone Books, 2008. Azevedo, Licínio. ‘Hóspedes da Noite’ (Night Lodgers). DVD video, 52 minutes. Lisboa: Marfilme, 2007. Barth, Fredrik. ‘The Analytical Importance of Transaction’. In Models of Social Organization. Royal Anthropological Institute Occasional Paper no. 23, 5–11. London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 1966. Bastos, Cristiana. ‘Race, Medicine and the Late Portuguese Empire: The Role of Goan Colonial Physicians’. Journal of Romance Studies 5, no. 1 (2005): 23–35. Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Bender, Gerald. Angola under the Portuguese: The Myth and the Reality. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1978. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: NLB, 1977. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972. Betts, Raymond. Decolonization. London: Routledge, 1998. Birmingham, David. ‘Angola’. In A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa, edited by Patrick Chabal with David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest, Malyn Newitt, Gerhard Seibert, and Elisa S. Andrade, 137–84. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.

Bibliography

203

Birmingham, David. A Concise History of Portugal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Bissell, William C. Urban Design, Chaos and Colonial Power in Zanzibar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Bowen, Merle. The State against the Peasantry: Rural Struggles in Colonial and Postcolonial Mozambique. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Boym, Svetlana. ‘Ruinophilia: Appreciation of Ruins’. Atlas of Transformation, 2011. http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/r/ ruinophilia/ruinophilia-appreciation-of-ruins-svetlana-boym.html (accessed 20 April 2016). Bragança, Sílvia. Aquino de Bragança. Batalhas ganhas, sonhos a continuar. Maputo: Ndjira, 2009. Branquinho, Felipe. ‘Beira’, film, YouTube, 9:50 min, uploaded 20 June 2007 by Branquinho999, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iae6_nKi4C8 (accessed 20 April 2016). Brettell, Caroline B. Anthropology and Migration: Essays on Transnationalism, Ethnicity and Identity. New York: Altamira Press, 2003. Brettell, Caroline B. ‘Portugal’s First Post-Colonials: Citizenship, Identity, and the Repatriation of Goans’. Portuguese Studies Review 15, no. 2 (2007/2008): 1–28. Brito, Luís de. ‘Le FRELIMO et la construction de l’État national au Mozambique: Le sens de la reference au marxisme (1962–1983)’. PhD thesis, Université de Paris, Paris, 1991. Brown, Judith. Modern India: The Origins of an Asian Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Buettner, Elizabeth. Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Cabral, Amilcar. ‘Portuguese Colonial Domination’. In Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings, compiled by PAIGC, translated by Michael Wolfers, 17–27. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979. Cahen, Michel. Les Bandits. Un historien au Mozambique 1994. Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 2002. Cahen, Michel. Mozambique, la révolution implosée – études sur 12 ans d’indépendence (1975–1987). Paris: L’Harmattan, 1987. Cahen, Michel. ‘“Portugal” Is in the Sky: Conceptual Considerations on Communities, Lusitanity, and Lusophony’. In Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, edited by Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen, 297–315. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

204

Bibliography

Cahen, Michel, Déjanirah Couto, Peter R. Desouza, Louis Marrou, and Alito Siqueira. ‘Introduction: Issues of Asian Portuguese-Speaking Spaces and Lusotopias’. Lusotopie (2000): 137–58. Carrington, William J., and Pedro J. F. De Lima. ‘The Impact of 1970s Repatriates from Africa on the Portuguese Labor Market’. ILR Review 49, no. 2 (1996): 330–47. Castelo, Claudia. ‘Colonial Migration to Angola and Mozambique’. In Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, edited by Eric MorierGenoud and Michel Cahen, 107–28. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Chabal, Patrick. ‘The End of Empire’. In A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa, edited by Patrick Chabal with David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest, Malyn Newitt, Gerhard Seibert and Elisa S. Andrade, 3–28. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Chabal, Patrick, with Moema Parente Augel, David Brookshaw, Ana Mafalda Leite, and Caroline Shaw. Post-colonial Literature of Lusophone Africa. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996. Chabal, Patrick, and Nuno Vidal, eds. Angola: The Weight of History. London: Hurst, 2008. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Chaudhuri, K. N. Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Chilcote, Ronald. Portuguese Africa. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967. Chisholm, Fiona. ‘Sonia’s No Ordinary Pora Chick’. Tonight, 17 January 2006. http:// www.tonight.co.za/ (accessed 27 February 2008). Christie, Sean. ‘The Great Unblocking of Beira’. Mail and Guardian, 19 March 2010. http://mg.co.za/article/2010-03-19-the-great-unblocking-of-beira (accessed 4 June 2010). Clarence-Smith, William Gervase. The Third Portuguese Empire, 1825–1975: A Study in Economic Imperialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. Coelho, Borges, and João Paulo. ‘African Troops in the Portuguese Colonial Army, 1961–1974: Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique’. Portuguese Studies Review 10, no. 1 (2002): 129–50. Cole, Sally C. ‘Cod, God, Country and Family: The Portuguese Newfoundland Cod Fishery’. Maritime Anthropological Studies 3, no. 1 (1990): 1–29. Cooper, Frederick. ‘The Dialectics of Decolonization: Nationalism and Labor Movements in Postwar French Africa’. In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Frederick Cooper and Ann L. Stoler, 406–35. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997. Cooper, Frederick, and Ann L. Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997.

Bibliography

205

Cosme, Joáo. ‘Appropriating Mia Couto: Language, Identity and “Lusofonia”’. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 84, no. 4 (2007): 435–52. Couto, Mia. ‘The Blind Fisherman’. In Every Man Is a Race, translated by David Brookshaw, 51–7. Oxford: Heinemann, 1994. Couto, Mia. Cada Homem é uma raça: estorias. Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1990. Couto, Mia. ‘Fisherman on Departure, Hero on Arrival’. In Every Man Is a Race, translated by David Brookshaw, 114–16. Oxford: Heinemann, 1994. Couto, Mia. ‘A Hollow in the Ceiling of the World’. In Sleepwalking Land, translated by David Brookshaw, 35–43. Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 1992. Couto, Mia. ‘How Ascolino Do Perpetuo Socorro Lost His Spouse’. In Voices Made Night, translated by David Brookshaw, 29–37. Johannesburg: Heinemann International, 1990. Couto, Mia. ‘Return to Matimati’. In Sleepwalking Land, translated by David Brookshaw, 104–26. Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 1992. Couto, Mia. Terra Sonâmbula. Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1992. Couto, Mia. ‘A Time When the World Was as Young as We Were’. In Sleepwalking Land, translated by David Brookshaw, 7–27. Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 1992. Couto, Mia. A Varanda do Frangipani. Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1996. Couto, Mia. Vozes Anoitecidas: Contos. 3rd edn. Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 1987. Couto, Mia. ‘Waters of My Beginning’. In Pensativities: Selected Essays, translated by David Brookshaw, 73–80. Windsor: Biblioasis, 2015. Couto, Mia. ‘Waves Writing Stories’. In Sleepwalking Land, translated by David Brookshaw, 203–5. Lisbon: Editorial Caminho, 1992. Craggs, Ruth, and Claire Wintle. ‘Introduction: Reframing Cultures of Decolonisation’. In Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945–70, edited by Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle, 1–28. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Crapanzano, Vincent. ‘The Life History in Anthropological Fieldwork’. Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 2, no. 2–3 (1977): 3–7. Crapanzano, Vincent. Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Crapanzano, Vincent. Waiting: The Whites of South Africa. New York: Random House, 1985. Craveirinha, José, and Mia Couto. Ricardo Rangel, Fotógrafo de Moçambique/ Photographe du Mozambique (Coédition) Centre Culturel Franco-Mozambicain. Maputo: Editions Findakly, 1994. Darwin, John. ‘Conclusion: Decolonisation and Diaspora’. In Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, edited by Eric MorierGenoud and Michel Cahen, 316–26. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Das, Veena. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. Das Gupta, Ashin, and Michael N. Pearson, eds. India and the Indian Ocean: 1500– 1800. Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1987.

206

Bibliography

Derluguian, Georgi. ‘The Social Origins of Good and Bad Governance: Re-interpreting the 1968 Schism in Frelimo’. In Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, edited by Eric Morier-Genoud, 79–102. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Dhada, Mustafa. ‘The Wiriyamu Massacre of 1972: Its Context, Genesis, and Revelation’. Africa 40, no. 1 (2013): 45–75. Dirks, Nicholas B. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Dirks, Nicholas B. The Hollow Crown: Ethnohistory of an Indian Kingdom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Dirks, Nicholas B., ed. In Near Ruins: Cultural Theory at the End of the Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Dirks, Nicholas B. ‘Ritual and Resistance: Subversion as a Social Fact’. In Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, edited by Douglas Haynes and Gyan Prakash, 213–38. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1991. Duara, Prasenjit, ed. Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then. New York: Routledge, 2004. Edwards, Elizabeth. ‘Beyond the Boundary: A Consideration of the Expressive in Photography and Anthropology’. In Rethinking Visual Anthropology, edited by Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy, 53–80. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999. Edwards, Elizabeth. The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Ehnmark, Anders, and Per Wästberg. Angola and Mozambique: The Case against Portugal. Translated by Paul Britten-Austin. London: Pall Mall Press, 1963. Ellis, Carolyn, Tony E. Adams, and Arthur P. Bochner. ‘Autoethnography: An Overview’. Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12, no. 1, Art. 10 (2011): 1–12. Eng, David L., and David Kazanjian, eds. Loss: The Politics of Mourning. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2002. Fanon, Frantz. ‘Algeria Unveiled’. In A Dying Colonialism. Translated by Haakon Chevalier, 35–67. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Fernandes, A. Segredos da descolonização de Angola. Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2013. Fernandes, Naresh. ‘Tomb Raider: Looking for St Francis Xavier’. In Reflected in Water: Writings on Goa, edited by Jerry Pinto, 73–84. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2006. Ferreira, Ângela. ‘Messy Colonialism, Wild Decolonization’. Solo exhibition at the Zona Maco Art Fair, Mexico City, Mexico and Open Plan exhibition at the SP-Arte – São Paulo International Art Festival, 2015. http://angelaferreira.info/?p=206/https:// issuu.com/sp-arte/docs/sparte2015-issuu-cat Figueiredo, António de. ‘The Empire Is Dead, Long Live the EU’. In The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization, edited by Stewart Lloyd-Jones and António Costa Pinto, 127–44. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003.

Bibliography

207

Figueiredo, Isabela. Notebook of Colonial Memories. Translated by Anna M. Klobucka and Phillip Rothwell. From the Caderno de Memóris Coloniais. Dartmouth: LusoAsio-Afro-Brazilian Studies and Theory, 2015. Figueiredo, L. Ficheiros secretos da descolonização de Angola. Lisboa: Alêtheia Editores, 2009. Fitzpatrick, Mary. Mozambique. Lonely Planet Guidebook. 2nd edn. London: Lonely Planet Publications, 2007. Forjaz, José. ‘Contribution to the Conference on African Architecture’. Paper presented at the Annual Conference on African Architecture, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, June 2007. http://abahlali.org/files/ AAT_Forjaz_paper.doc Foucault, Michel. ‘Governmentality’. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Frenz, Margret. Community, Memory and Migration in a Globalizing World: The Goan Experience, c. 1890–1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Frenz, Margret. ‘Global Goans: Migration Movements and Identity in a Historical Perspective’. Lusotopie XV, no. 1 (2008): 183–202. Frenz, Margret. ‘Representing the Portuguese Empire: Goan Consuls in British East Africa, c. 1910–1963’. In Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, edited by Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen, 193–212. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Freyre, Gilberto. The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. Translated by Samuel Putnam. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1956. Gandhi, Mahatma. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XLII, October 1929–February 1930. New Delhi: The Publications Divisions, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India and Navajivan Trust, 1970. Gandhi, Mahatma. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume LXXXIV, April 14, 1946–July 15, 1946. New Delhi: The Publications Divisions, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India and Navajivan Trust, 1981. Gandhi, Mahatma. The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume LXXXV, July 16, 1946–October 20, 1946. New Delhi: The Publications Divisions, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India and Navajivan Trust, 1982. Gandhi, M.K. Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, edited by Anthony J. Parel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Ghosh, Palash. ‘Portuguese in Mozambique: A Study of Reverse Migration’. International Business Times, 21 February 2012. http://www.ibtimes.com/ portuguese-mozambique-story-reverse-migration-214108 (accessed 20 April 2016).

208

Bibliography

Glaser, Clive. ‘The Making of a Portuguese Community in South Africa, 1900–1994’. In Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, edited by Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen, 213–38. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Glaser, Clive. ‘Portuguese Immigrant History in Twentieth Century South Africa: A Preliminary Overview’. African Historical Review 42, no. 2 (2010): 61–83. Glaser, Clive. ‘White but Illegal: Undocumented Madeiran Immigration to South Africa, 1920s–1970s’. Immigrants and Minorities 31, no. 1 (2013): 74–98. Goanet. ‘Goa News’. http://www.goanet.org/(accessed 5 June 2017). Goan Voice. ‘Newsletter’. November 2016. http://www.goanvoice.ca /(accessed 3 June 2017). Gonçalves, Arnoldo. ‘Macao, Timor and Portuguese India in the Context of Portugal’s Recent Decolonization’. In The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization, edited by Stewart Lloyd-Jones and António Costa Pinto, 53–66. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003. Gordon, Suzanne. A Talent for Tomorrow. Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1985. Gordon, Suzanne. Under the Harrow: Lives of White South Africans Today. London: Heinemann, 1988. Gracias, Fatima da Silva. “Goans Away from Goa: Migration to the Middle East’. Lusotopie (2000): 423–32. ‘The Grande Hotel of Beira, Mozambique’, 21 May 2013, Sometimes Interesting, http:// sometimes-interesting.com/2013/05/21/the-grande-hotel-of-beira-mozambique /(accessed 22 April 2016). Guimarães, Fernando Andresen. The Origins of the Angolan Civil War: Foreign Intervention and Domestic Political Conflict. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Guimarães, José Marques. A política ‘educativa’ do colonialismo português em África: da I República ao Estado Novo (1910–1974). Porto: Profedições, 2006. Gupta, Pamila. ‘Blue Johannesburg’. In Planned Violence: Post/Colonial Urban Infrastructures, Literature and Culture, edited by Elleke Boehmer and Dom Davies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming (2018). Gupta, Pamila. ‘Charles Boxes as Archive, Intellectuals, Hegemony, and the State’. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, November 1996. Gupta, Pamila. ‘Consuming the Coast: Mid-century Communications of Port Tourism in the Southern African Indian Ocean’. Comunicação, Midia e Consumo 12, no. 35 (2015): 149–70. Gupta, Pamila. ‘Gandhi and the Goa Question’. Public Culture 23, no. 2 (2011): 321–30. Gupta, Pamila. ‘Goa Dourada, the Internal Exotic in South Asia: Discourses of Colonialism and Tourism’. In South Asia and Its Others: Reading the ‘Exotic’, edited by V. G. Julie Rajan and Atreyee Phukan, 123–48. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2009. Gupta, Pamila. The Relic State: St Francis Xavier and the Politics of Ritual in Portuguese India. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.

Bibliography

209

Gupta, Pamila. ‘Romancing the Colonial on Ilha de Mozambique’. In Emotion in Motion: Tourism, Affect and Transformation, edited by David Picard and Mike Robinson, 247–66. London: Ashgate Publishers, 2012. Gupta, Pamila. ‘A Voyage of Convalescence: Richard Burton and the Imperial Ills of Portuguese India’. South African Historical Journal 61, no. 4 (2009): 802–16. Gupta, Pamila, Isabel Hofmeyr, and Michael Pearson, eds. Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean. Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010. Hall, Emma. ‘Once a Colonial Hotel, Now an Inhabited Ruin’. Failed Architecture, 10 April 2014. https://www.failedarchitecture.com/once-a-colonial-hotel-now-aninhabited-ruin/ (accessed 24 March 2016). Hansen, Thomas B., and Finn Stepputat, eds. States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Harsgor, Michael. ‘Aftereffects of an “Exemplary Decolonization”’. Journal of Contemporary History 15, no. 1 (1980): 143–67. Hayes, Patricia. ‘Port City and Desire: Ricardo Rangel’s Photographs of Lourenço Marques, Mozambique (1950s–60s)’. Unpublished paper, 2009. Hayes, Patricia. ‘Ricardo Rangel’. Public lecture presented at the Market Photo Workshop, Johannesburg, South Africa, 19 June 2009. http:// www.marketphotoworkshop.co.za/PROJECTS/PastProjects/2009/ PublicdiscussionRicardoRangel/ (accessed 15 November 2010). Hedges, David, and Colin Darch. ‘Political Rhetoric in the Transition to Mozambican Independence: Samora Machel in Beira, June 1975’. Kronos 39, no. 1 (2013): 32–65. Henderson, Lawrence. Angola: Five Centuries of Conflict. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. Ho, Engseng. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2006. Hoffman, Danny. ‘The Brookfields Hotel (Freetown, Sierra Leone)’. Public Culture 17, no. 1 (2005): 55–74. Hofmeyr, Isabel. Gandhi’s Printing Press: Experiments in Slow Reading. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Hofmeyr, Isabel. ‘The Indian Ocean as Cold War Arena’. Paper presented at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 30 September 2009. Hofmeyr, Isabel. ‘Indian Ocean Lives and Letters’. English in Africa 35, no. 1 (2008): 11–25. Hofmeyr, Isabel. The Portable Bunyan: A Transnational History of The Pilgrim’s Progress. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004. Hofmeyr, Isabel. ‘Seeing the Familiar: Notes on Mia Couto’. In Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics, edited by Sarah Nuttall, 384–91. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Honwana, Luis Bernardo, ed. Ricardo Rangel: insubmisso e generoso. Textos C. Da Silva, D. Thompson, Luís B. Honwana, M. Lopes, N. Saúte and P. Hayes. Maputo: Marimbique, 2014.

210

Bibliography

‘Hotel in Beira, Mozambique, built with Chinese capital’. MacauHub, 26 December 2013. https://macauhub.com.mo/2013/12/26/hotel-in-beira-mozambique-builtwith-chinese-capital/ Hromnik, Cyril. ‘Goa and Mozambique: The Participation of Goans in Portuguese Enterprise in the Rios de Cuama, 1501–1752’. PhD thesis, Syracuse University, New York, 1977. Huyssen, Andreas. Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. Isaacman, Allen F., and Barbara Isaacman. Mozambique: From Colonialism to Revolution, 1900–1982. Boulder: Westview Press, 1983. Jackon, Steven J. ‘Rethinking Repair’. In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society, edited by Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski and Kirsten Foot, 221–40. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014. Jacobs, Jane M. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City. London: Routledge, 1996. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998. Jamba, Sousa. ‘Out of Lusophone Africa: The Situation of Writers in Angola and Mozambique’. Times Literary Supplement 4933 (17 October 1997). James, W. M. A Political History of the Civil War in Angola, 1974–1990. New Jersey : Transaction, 2011. Jensen, Steffen. Gangs, Politics and Dignity in Cape Town. Oxford: James Curry, 2008. Kamat, Pratima. Farar Far (Crossfire): Local Resistance to Colonial Hegemony in Goa, 1510–1912. Panaji: Institute Menezes Bragança, 1999. Kapuściński, Ryszard. Another Day of Life. Translated by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. London: Penguin Books, 1987. Karnik, Sharmila. ‘Goans in Mozambique’. Africa Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1998): 96–118. Kay, Hugh. Salazar and Modern Portugal. New York: Hawthorn Books. 1970. Kumar, Amitava. Passport Photos. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2000. Kuper, Jessica. ‘“Goan” and “Asian” in Uganda: An Analysis of Racial Identity and Cultural Categories’. In Strangers in African Societies, edited by William A. Shack and Elliott P. Skinner, 243–60. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1979. Kuper, Jessica. ‘The Goan Community in Kampala’. In Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on the Ugandan Asians, edited by Michael Twaddle, 53–69. London: Athlone Press, 1975. LAM. ‘Company History’. LAM Mozambique Airlines. http://www.lam.co.mz/en/ About-LAM/Company-History (accessed 20 April 2016). Larkin, Brian. ‘The Materiality of Cinema Theaters in Northern Nigeria’, In Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod and Brian Larkin, 319–36. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2002. Larkin, Brian. ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’. Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 327–43. Latour, Bruno. ‘Trains of Thought: The Fifth Dimension of Time and Its Fabrication’. In Thinking Time: A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Time, edited by Anne-Nelly Perret-

Bibliography

211

Clermont with Jean-Paul Bronckart, August Flammer, Sophie Lambolez, Denis Miéville, Jean-François Perret and Walter J. Perrig, 173–87. Göttingen: Hogrefe and Hupher, 2005. Law-Viljoen, Bronwyn. ‘Ricardo Rangel: Introduction’. Aperture 213 (2013): 111. Leal, L. Breve história dos portugueses na África do Sul. Weternskaplike bydraes van die PU vir CHO: Reeks A, Geesteswetenskappe no. 27. Potchefstroom: Potchefstroomse Universiteit vir Christelike Hoër Onderwys, 1977. Lee, Christopher J. Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. Le Sueur, James D. The Decolonization Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003. Louis, William R., and Ronald Robinson. ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’. In The Decolonization Reader, edited by James D. Le Sueur, 49–79. New York: Routledge, 2003. Lubkemann, Stephen C. ‘The Moral Economy of Portuguese Postcolonial Return’. Diaspora 11, no. 2 (2002): 189–213. Lubkemann, Stephen C. ‘Race, Class, and Kin in the Negotiation of “Internal Strangerhood” among Portuguese Retornados, 1975–2000’. In Europe’s Invisible Migrants, edited by Andrea L. Smith, 75–93. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003. MacDonald, Andrew. ‘The Dançarinas of Lourenço Marques and Beira: Merry-making, Women Travellers and South Africa’s Eastern Border, 1920s–1940s’. Paper presented at the NRF Programme in Local Histories and Present Realities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 3 October 2012. Maciel, Carla. ‘Bantu Oral Narratives in the Training of EFL Teachers in Mozambique’. PhD thesis, Illinois State University, Normal, 2007. Maciel, Délia das Dores Ataide Lobo. Fragmentos da Minha Vida. Maputo: Imprensa Universitária, Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, 2003. Mackey, Robert. ‘Fact, Fiction, and Kapuscinski’. New York Times Blog, 8 March 2010. https://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/08/fact-fiction-and-kapuscinski/ MacQueen, Norrie. The Decolonization of Portuguese Africa: Metropolitan Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire. London: Longman, 1997. Malcomess, Bettina, and Dorothy Kreutzfeldt. Not No Place: Johannesburg; Fragments of Space and Time. Auckland Park: Fanele, 2013. Martelli, George. ‘The Issues Internationalized’. In Portuguese Africa: A Handbook, edited by David M. Abshire and Michael A. Samuels, 367–88. London: Pall Mall Press, 1969. Mateus, Dalita C., and Álvaro Mateus. Angola 61: Guerra Colonial, causas e consequências. Lisboa: Texto Editores, 2011. Maxwell, Kenneth. Naked Tropics: Essays on Empire and Other Rogues. New York: Routledge, 2003. Mbembe, Achille. ‘First Night with Fanon: Property, Wealth and Racial Nationalism after Decolonisation’. Public lecture, Sawyer Seminar Series, WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 29 March 2010.

212

Bibliography

Mbembe, Achille. ‘Introductory Comments’. Paper presented at the launch of the first African edition of his book, On the Postcolony (Wits University Press, 2015), at WiSER, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 11 June 2015. Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2015. McDorman, Ted L. ‘Extended Jurisdiction and Ocean Resource Conflict in the Indian Ocean’. International Journal of Estuarine and Coastal Law 3, no. 3 (1988): 208–34. Mehta, Uday. Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth Century British Liberal Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Mendes, Sushila S. ‘Dr. Lohia and Goa’s Freedom Struggle’. In Essays in Goan History, edited by Teotónio R. De Souza, 173–84. New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1989. Mendonça-Noronha, Silvia M. ‘The Economic Scene in Goa, 1926–1961’. In Goa through the Ages: Volume II – An Economic History, edited by Teotónio De Souza, 263–96. New Delhi: Concept, 1987. Merriam-Webster. ‘Renovate’. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/renovate (accessed 27 September 2017). Messynessy. ‘Living in the Art Deco Ruins of the Grande Hotel, Africa’. Messy Nessy, 22 May 2013. http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/05/22/anywhere-but-here-thegrande-hotel-of-mozambique/ (accessed 16 April 2016). Metcalf, Thomas. Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2007. Mir, Farina. ‘Introduction’. American Historical Review 120, no. 2 (2015): 844–51. Monteiro, George. ‘Portingale to “Portugee”, the Genesis and History of an Ethnic Slur’. Paper presented at the ‘Narrating the Portuguese Diaspora (1928–2008): International Conference on Storytelling’, University of Lisbon, Portugal, 23–5 October 2008, convened by Teresa Alves, Irene M. F. Blayer, Teresa Cid and Francisco Fagundes. Morier-Genoud, Eric, and Michel Cahen. ‘Introduction: Portugal, Empire, and Migration – Was There Ever an Autonomous Social Imperial Space?’ In Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, edited by Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen, 1–28. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Mukherjee, Rudrangshu, ed. The Gandhi Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Narayan, Rajan. Goencho Saib: The Life and Mission of St. Francis Xavier. Panjim: Tata Press, 1994. National History Center. ‘International Seminar on Decolonization’. National History Center. http://nationalhistorycenter.org/about/program-descriptions/internationalseminar-on-decolonization-2/ (accessed 4 May 2017). Ndebele, Njabulo. ‘To Be or Not to Be, No Longer at Ease’. Keynote address presented at the ‘Texts, Modes and Repertoires of Living in and Beyond the Shadows of Apartheid’, 40th annual conference of the African Literature Association conference. University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, 9 April 2014. Newitt, Malyn. A History of Mozambique. London: C. Hurst, 1995.

Bibliography

213

Newitt, Malyn. ‘Mozambique’. In A History of Postcolonial Lusophone Africa, edited by Patrick Chabal with David Birmingham, Joshua Forrest, Malyn Newitt, Gerhard Seibert, and Elisa Silva Andrade, 185–235. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Nuttall, Sarah. Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009. Oliveira, Ana Balona de. ‘Decolonization in, of and through the Archival “Moving Images” of Artistic Practice’. Comunicação e Sociedade 29 (2016): 131–52. Osswald, Cristina. Written in Stone: Jesuit Buildings in Goa and Their Artistic and Architectural Features. Panjim: Goa, 1556, 2013. Pamuk, Orhan. The Museum of Innocence. Translated by Maureen Freely. London: Faber and Faber, 2009. Pandit, Shantishree. ‘The Parliament and Foreign Policy in India: Its Policy towards Goa (1952–1961)’. In Socioeconomic Aspects of Portuguese Colonialism in Goa: 19th and 20th Centuries, edited by B. S. Shastry. Belgaum: Yarbal, 1990. Pearse, Justin. Political Identity and Conflict in Central Angola, 1975–2002. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pearson, Michael N. The Indian Ocean. New York: Routledge, 2003. Pearson, Michael N. ‘Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problems’. Journal of World History 17, no. 4 (2006): 353–73. Pearson, Michael N. ‘Studying the Indian Ocean World: Problems and Opportunities’. In Cross Currents and Community Networks: The History of the Indian Ocean World, edited by Himanshu P. Ray, and Edward A. Alpers, 15–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Péclard, Didier. ‘UNITA and the Moral Economy of Exclusion in Angola, 1966–1977’. In Sure Road? Nationalisms in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, edited by Eric Morier-Genoud, 149–76. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pélissier, René, and Douglas Wheeler. História de Angola. Translated by Pedro Serras Pereira and Paula Almeida. Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2011. Penvenne, Jeanne Marie. African Workers and Colonial Racism: Mozambican Strategies and Struggles in Lourenço Marques, 1877–1962. London: Heinemann, 1994. Penvenne, Jeanne Marie. ‘João dos Santos Albasini (1876–1922): The Contradictions of Politics and Identity in Colonial Mozambique’, Journal of African History 37, no. 3 (1996), 419–64. Pereira, Maria Victória, ed. Pathways of Feeling: Stories Told by Portuguese Women in Africa. Johannesburg: Portuguese Women’s League in South Africa, 2008. Pereira Da Rosa, Victor, and Salvato Trigo. ‘Islands in a Segregated Land: Portuguese in South Africa’. In Portuguese Migration in Global Perspective, edited by David Higgs, 182–99. Toronto: Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1990. Pillarisetti, Sudhir. ‘Imperial Ends: Deconstructing Decolonization and the Archives of Empire’. AHA Today, 1 July 2015. http://blog.historians.org/2015/07/decolonization/

214

Bibliography

Pina-Cabral, João de. ‘Dona Berta’s Garden: Reaching across the Colonial Boundary’, Etnográfica 6, no. 1 (2002): 77–91. Pinto, António Costa. ‘The Transition to Democracy and Portugal’s Decolonization’. In The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization, edited by Stewart LloydJones and António Costa Pinto, 17–36. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003. Pinto, Celsa. Trade and Finance in Portuguese India: A Study of the Portuguese Country Trade, 1770–1840. New Delhi: Concept, 1994. Pinto, Rochelle. ‘Race and Imperial Loss: Accounts of East Africa in Goa’. South African Historical Journal 57, no. 1 (2007), 82–92. Pires, R. Pena. Os retornados: um estudo sociografico. Lisboa: Instituto Estudos para o Desenvolvimento, 1987. ‘Polish Chronicler of Third World Kapuscinski Dies’. International Herald Tribune, 24 January 2007. http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-kapuscinski-obituary/polishchronicler-of-third-world-kapuscinski-dies-idUKL2315042620070123 Posel, Deborah. ‘Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth-Century South Africa’. African Studies Review 44, no. 2 (2001): 87–113. Prestholdt, Jeremy. Domesticating the World: African Consumerism and the Genealogies of Globalization. Berkeley : University of California Press, 2007. Prinz, Manfred F. ‘Intercultural Links between Goa and Mozambique in Their Colonial and Contemporary History: Literary Mozambiquean Traces’. In Goa and Portugal: Their Cultural Links, edited by Charles J. Borges and Helmut Feldmann, 111–27. New Delhi: Concept Publishing, 1997. Ramusack, Barbara. The Indian Princes and Their States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Rangel, Ricardo. Pão nosso de cada noite: Our Nightly Bread. Maputo: Marimbique, 2004. Rangel-Ribeiro, Victor. Tivolem. Panjim: Milkweed Editions, 1998. Rayfuse, Rosemary, and Robin M. Warner. ‘Securing a Sustainable Future for the Oceans beyond National Jurisdiction: The Legal Basis for an Integrated CrossSectoral Regime for High Seas Governance for the 21st Century’. International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law 23, no. 3 (2008): 399–421. Robinson, Richard A. H. ‘The Influence of Overseas Issues in Portugal’s Transition to Democracy’. In The Last Empire: Thirty Years of Portuguese Decolonization, edited by Stewart Lloyd-Jones and António Costa Pinto. Bristol: Intellect Books, 2003. Rodrigues, Pia de Menezes. ‘Interactive Relationship between Goa and Bombay Journalism’. In Goa’s External Relations, edited by P. P. Shirodkar, 90–101. Panjim: Rajhauns Vitaran, 1992. Rogers, Sean A. ‘Tracing Elusive Wars: Reading War in Mia Couto’s Sleepwalking Land, Under the Frangipani and The Last Flight of the Flamingo’. African Studies 76, no. 2 (2017): 281–92. Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.

Bibliography

215

Rothermund, Dietmar. The Routledge Companion to Decolonization. New York: Routledge, 2006. Rothwell, Phillip. A Postmodern Nationalist: Truth, Orality, and Gender in the Work of Mia Couto. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004. Rubinoff, Arthur. The Construction of a Political Community: Integration and Identity in Goa. New Delhi: Sage 1998. Said, Edward. After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives. Photographs by Jean Mohr. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. ‘Between Prospero and Caliban: Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and Inter-Identity’. Luso-Brazilian Review 39, no. 2 (2002): 9–43. Sarkar, Sumit. Modern India: 1885–1947. Madras: Macmillan India, 1983. Schlögel, Karl. In Space We Read Time: On the History of Civilization and Geopolitics. Translated by Gerrit Jackson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Seed, Patricia. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492– 1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Seremetakis, C. Nadia. ‘The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Transitory’. In The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, edited by C. Nadia Seremetakis, 1–18. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Seremetakis, C. Nadia. ‘The Memory of the Senses: Historical Perception, Commensal Exchange and Modernity’. In Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990– 1994, edited by Lucien Taylor, 214–29. New York: Routledge, 1994. Shephard, Todd. Voices of Decolonization: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2015. Shirodkar, Prakashchandra P., ed. Goa: Cultural Trends. Panaji: Casa Packmaster, 1998. Shirodkar, Prakashchandra P. Goa’s Struggle for Freedom. Panjim: Mrs Sulabha Shirodkar, 1999. Simmel, Georg. ‘The Ruin’. In Essays on Sociology, Philosophy, and Aesthetics, edited by Kurt H. Wolff, 262–6. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Smith, Andrea. Colonial Memory and Postcolonial Europe: Maltese Settlers in Algeria and France. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Souza, Roldão Anton de. What about Goa? Lisbon: Tip. Silvas, 1957. Souza, Teotónio R. de, ed. Discoveries, Missionary Expansion and Asian Cultures. New Delhi: Concept, 1994. Souza, Teotónio R. de. ‘Is There One Goan Identity, Several or None?’ Lusotopie (2000): 487–95. SP-Arte/2015. SP-Arte: Feira Internacional de Arte de São Paulo/São Paulo International Art Fair. [Catalogue]. Textos Marcelo Rezende, Oliver Basciano, Luciana Pareja Norbiato; apresentação Fernanda Feitosa. São Paulo: SP-Arto, 2015. https://issuu.com/sp-arte/docs/sparte2015-issuu-cat The Statesman (Delhi/Calcutta), 2 December 1961. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

216

Bibliography

Stewart, Kathleen. A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Stoler, Ann L. ‘Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination’. Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 191–219. Stoler, Ann L. ‘Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures’. American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 634–60. Stoler, Ann L., and Frederick Cooper, eds. ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’. In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, edited by Ann L. Stoler and Frederick Cooper, edited 1–56. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997. Stoops, Lotte. ‘Grande Hotel’. DVD video, 70 minutes. Amsterdam: Mokum Filmdistributie, 2010. Tay, Nastasya. ‘Portugal’s Migrants Hope for New Life in Old African Colony’. The Guardian, 22 December 2011. Tazzo, Debora. ‘People in Transition between Africa and Europe: Cultural, Social, and Economical Aspects of Portuguese Immigration into South Africa from 1926 to 1975’. Honours thesis, Department of History, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2005. Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ Wa. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann, 1986. Thomas, Martin, Bob Moore, and L. J. Butler. The Crises of Empire: Decolonization and Europe’s Imperial Nation States, 1918–1975. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Thompson, Drew. ‘Bearing Witness to War: The Photographic Archive at Mozambique’s National Photography School, 1982–1992’. Unpublished paper, 2012. Tonkin, Elizabeth. ‘Settlers and Their Elites in Kenya and Liberia’. In Elite Cultures: Anthropological Perspectives, edited by Cris Shore and Stephen Nugent, 129–44. London: Routledge, 2002. Tostões, Ana C. dos Santos, ed. Modern Architecture in Africa: Angola and Mozambique. Lisbon: ICIST Técnico, 2013. Tsing, Anna L. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. ‘Decolonization is not a metaphor’. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. Urry, J. The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies. London: Sage, 1990. Vakil, AbdoolKarim. ‘Mundo Pretuguês: Colonial and Postcolonial Diasporic Dis/ articulations’. In Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuguese World, edited by Eric Morier Genoud and Edward Alpers, 286–96. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Bibliography

217

Van der Waals, W. S. Portugal’s War in Angola, 1961–1974. Pretoria: Protea Book House, 2011. Veer, Peter van der. ‘Introduction: The Diasporic Imagination’. In Nation and Migration: The Politics of Space in the South Asian Diaspora, edited by Peter van der Veer, 1–16. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995. Venter, Al J. Portugal’s Guerrilla Wars in Africa: Lisbon’s Three Wars in Angola, Mozambique and Portuguese Guinea, 1961–74. Solihull: Helion, 2013. Vilar Rosales, Marta. As Coisas Da Casa – Cultura Material, Migrações E Memórias Familiares. Lisboa: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2015. Vilar Rosales, Marta. ‘My Umbilical Cord to Goa: Food, Colonialism and Transnational Goan Life Experiences’. Food and Foodways 20, no. 3–4 (2012): 233–56. Vilar Rosales, Marta. ‘Objects, Scents and Tastes from a Distant Home: Goan Life Experiences in Africa’. Two Homelands 20 (2009): 153–66. Vines, Alex. RENAMO: Terrorism in Mozambique. London: James Currey, 1991. Wainwright, Oliver. ‘The Forgotten Masterpieces of African Modernism’. The Guardian, 1 March 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/mar/01/africanmodernist-architecture (accessed March 19, 2016). Watson, Graham. Passing for White: A Study of Racial Assimilation in a South African School. London: Tavistock Publications, 1970. WCN Editorial Team. ‘The Maputo-Catembe Bridge: “The Longest Suspension Bridge in Africa”’. WorldConstruction Network, 13 January 2017. http://www. worldconstructionnetwork.com/features/the-maputo-catembe-bridge-the-longestsuspension-bridge-in-africa (accessed 4 June 2017). Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Williams, Raymond. ‘Structures of Feeling’. In Marxism and Literature, 128–35. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Wiltse, Jeff. Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Z’Graggen, Bruno, and Grant Lee Neuenburg, eds. Iluminando vidas: Ricardo Rangel and the Mozambican Photography: Ricardo Rangel e a fotografia Moçambicana. Berlin: Christoph Merian Verlag, 2002.

Interviews Ana van Eck, 7 March 2007, Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa. António Sopa, 29 July 2010, Maputo, Mozambique. Apingar (caretaker), Novecine, 18 February 2016, Beira, Mozambique. Beatrice Rangel, 30 June 2009, Maputo, Mozambique. Carla Maciel, 21 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. Carlos, 23 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. Cesar, 20 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique.

218

Bibliography

Délia Maciel, 21 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. Diogo, 29 November 2008 in Catembe, Mozambique. Duarte, 11 September 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. Fernandes, 19 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. Filipe, 20 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. Francisco, 22 April 2008 and 14 October 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. João, 6 August 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. José Forjaz, 28 July 2010, Maputo, Mozambique. Laide, 11 March 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. Lara (Duarte’s daughter), 5 July 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. Luis, 13 March 2008, Johannesburg, South Africa. Manager (unnamed), Novocine, 25 April 2009, Beira, Mozambique. Maria, 19 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. Pedro, 28 June 2009, Catembe, Mozambique. Raul, 21 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. Raul and Carla, 21 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. Ricardo Rangel, 27 and 28 November 2008, Maputo, Mozambique. Samuel Azevedo, 23 April 2009, Beira, Mozambique. Sandra, 22 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. Sílvia do Rosário da Silveira Bragança, 22 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. Teresa de Noronha, 22 March 2007, Maputo, Mozambique. Victor de Andrade, 13 June 2009, Johannesburg, South Africa.

Index Abbas, Akbar 135, 199 Acto Colonial 25, 28 affect theory 15, 20, 65, 81, 85, 107, 112–13, 118, 125–6 Africa 3, 8, 10–11, 22–3, 28–31, 33, 45, 49, 82–3, 99, 111, 113, 122, 142, 145, 147 African cities 127, 133–4 colonies 12, 28–9, 32, 42, 50 independence 84 Mozambicans 45, 52 Afrikaans 96, 119, 192–3 Afro-Asian solidarity 9 Afronova Gallery 65 airport(s) 103–4, 106, 132, 143. See also Beira; Luanda Algeria 3, 170 Alvor Agreement 31 Americas 11, 99 ancestors 36, 50, 54–5, 78 Anglophone 12–13 Angola 16–18, 21–3, 27–33, 50–1, 99–103, 109–25 decolonization 27, 30, 124 independence 109, 116 Mozambique and 28, 32, 83–4, 96, 142 population 30, 84 South Africa and 11 Angolans 112, 115, 122–3, 126 anthropologists 9, 37, 44, 57, 105, 129, 131, 140, 165, 170 anthropology 15, 44 Apartheid 18, 96, 98, 109–13, 116–17, 120, 122–3, 125. See also South Africa Appadurai, Arjun 85, 182 archives 7, 37, 56, 66, 131, 187 Argentina 77 armed struggle 29, 83–4, 97, 102, 106, 198 army 26, 29, 42, 88, 96, 103, 122, 157–9 Art Deco movement 132, 136–8, 140 Asia 9–10, 99

Asians 11, 36, 43, 122 Assubuji, Rui 18, 154 Atlantic Ocean 82, 105 audiences 63, 75, 86, 99–100, 135, 182 Australia 67, 122, 159, 180, 189 Azevedo, Samuel 142, 197 Azoulay, Ariella 66, 177 Balona, de Oliveira, Ana 100 Bandung conference 9–10 banks 96–7, 101, 106 Bastos, Cristiana 41–2, 46, 53, 163, 165, 166 beach 74, 122, 136, 147 Beira 17, 19, 45, 59, 62, 64, 127–9, 131–44 Aeroporto Internacional da Beira 143 A Tribuna 64 Auditório Municipal 138 Ciné Nacional 138 Clube Náutico 136 Ferroviário swimming pool 128, 135–7, 143 Grande Hotel 128, 133, 136, 139–41, 143 Linhas Aéreas de Moçambique (LAM) 143 Novocine movie theatre 128, 137–9, 143 Olympia movie theatre 138 Piscina Goro 136 Riviera cafe 128, 141–3 Voz Africana 64 Bender, Gerald 114, 118, 157, 190, 194 Benjamin, Walter 129 Berlin conference of 1885 28 Betts, Raymond 5–6, 10, 17, 109, 125, 146, 180 Birmingham, David 30, 157 Bissell, William 133, 198 boats 49, 55, 60, 67, 70–1, 74–7 Bombay 155, 166 Bose, Sugata 37, 153, 161

220

Index

Boxer, Charles 12 Boym, Svetlana 129, 196 Bragança, Aquino de 49 Bragança, Luís de Menezes 24 Bragança, Sílvia 49–50 Branquinho, Felipe 138 Brazil 27–8, 40, 54, 84, 122, 124, 159, 180, 182, 186, 189, 190 Brettell, Caroline 112, 188 British colonialism 15–16, 23–4, 47–8 India 24–5, 37, 48, 59 Buettner, Elizabeth 14, 31, 150, 159, 160, 180–1 Cabaço, José Luís 65, 175, 176 Cabral, Amilcar 3, 148 cafes 22, 114, 131–2, 134–5, 138, 141–2, 144. See also Beira Cahen, Michel 11, 42, 110, 126, 151, 152, 163, 164, 189, 195 Calvino, Italo 134 Canada 43, 114, 159, 162, 180, 182, 189 Cape Town 110, 114, 116–19, 121, 124 University of Cape Town (UCT) 1 Capitania de Moçambique e Sofala 27 caravans 17, 84, 96, 103, 115, 187 Carnation Revolution 13, 32, 159 cars 4, 17, 82, 87, 91, 96–7, 110, 115–17, 119, 187 Castro, Francisco de 140, 197 Catembe 55–62, 66, 68–71, 74–5, 77, 81, 128, 177–9 ferry 66–8, 74 Catholicism/Catholic 11, 26, 40, 42, 44, 55, 74, 76–8, 119 altar 74–5, 79 churches 74, 78, 138 orders 74 Centro de Documentação e Formação Fotográfica 15, 21, 65, 176 Chabal, Patrick 63, 172 Chilcote, Ronald 43, 164 cinemas 131–2, 137–9, 143. See also movie theatres; Beira citizens 13, 17, 41, 53, 81, 83–4, 87, 91, 104–5, 113, 118, 120, 124, 127 citizenship 85, 116, 120, 170, 191–2, 194 second class 116–23

civil war 32, 60, 62, 130–1, 133, 140, 142, 144 class 40, 51, 54, 82, 93, 106, 110, 118, 120–1, 124 Cold War 9, 31, 57, 196 Cole, Sally 78 colonial independence 9, 18, 26, 60, 87, 99, 192 colonialism 2–4, 12–14, 19–20, 36, 39, 42–3, 65, 83–5, 87–8, 98–9, 105–6, 110–11, 128, 142–3 colonies 4–6, 9, 11, 13, 25, 37, 82–4, 86, 110–11 colonizers 6, 14, 30, 35, 37, 40–1, 83 Coloured communities 120–1, 123 Communist Party 99 communitas 56 community 6, 11–12, 35–6, 40, 43, 75–6, 78, 112 Companhia Mozambique 28, 131, 140 Cooper, Fred 6, 19 Couto, Mia 18–19, 43–4, 56, 61–4, 67–8, 77, 79, 128, 133, 145 Cada Homem é uma Raça 62 Kindzu (character) 58–9 lyrical theme 18, 67, 128 Socorro, Ascolino do Perpétuo (character) 44 Surendra (character) 59 Terra Sonambula 62 Varanda do Frangipani, A 62 Vozes Anoitecidas 62 Craggs, Ruth 7–8, 150 crates 4, 17, 82, 91, 93–4, 104–6, 109, 183, 187 cultures 7–8, 13, 15, 35, 43–5, 47, 51, 53, 56–7, 59, 61–3, 66–7, 74, 110, 112, 121, 124, 137, 142 Cunha, Tristão de Bragança 25 Daman 23–4, 47 Darwin, John 111, 188 Das, Veena 9, 10, 24, 150 decolonization 1–20, 51–3, 81–7, 93–4, 98–100, 109–12, 124–6, 128–9, 145–6. See also retornados of Angola 109–14, 116, 124–6 eve of 53, 62, 98, 114, 136 of Goa 22–3, 35, 45, 47, 53, 145

Index history of 6, 9, 14, 17, 22–4, 33, 37–9, 42–4, 59, 110, 123, 130, 142 history and ethnography 3–4, 9, 12, 14–15, 17–18 of India 8–10, 12, 15–17, 21, 23–7, 33, 47–9, 145, 147 messiness of 33, 105, 113, 128 of Mozambique 13–19, 26–30, 35–47, 49–53, 60–5, 80–6, 96–8, 130–3, 145–8 processes of 1–2, 7, 10, 12–13, 17, 22–3, 27, 83–4 upheaval 107, 111, 128 deterritorialization 126, 131, 140 diaspora 6, 11–12, 33, 36, 38, 53, 55–6, 66, 98, 111–12, 125, 128, 146 dispossession 2, 17, 83, 86–8, 106, 110, 125, 128 relationship of people and things 86–8 Diu 23–4, 47, 156 docks 68, 71, 76, 81, 91, 93, 105, 147 doctors 35, 40–2, 44–5, 49, 56, 97, 163, 165, 166, 169 driving 17–18, 87, 109 Duara, Prasenjit 3–4, 6, 148 Edwards, Elizabeth 15, 66, 94, 153, 174 Ehnmark, Anders 40, 162 elites 35, 42, 94, 112, 121, 127 emigration 26, 35, 39, 45, 48, 53, 20 empire 4–5, 8, 10–11, 19, 25–8, 32–3, 41–2, 54, 125 end of 5, 8, 125 first 27–8 second 27–8, 40 third 27, 32–3, 83, 111, 124 employment 51, 87, 97, 99 entanglement, theory of 20, 22, 33, 111, 145 entitlement 81–2, 85, 87, 107, 125 Estado Novo 14, 28, 32, 183 ethnography 9, 16, 19, 23, 67, 121, 143, 145 Europe 12–13, 28, 31–2, 49, 60, 63, 81, 99, 103–4, 106, 132 European Economic Community (EEC) 33 Europeans 42–3, 60 everyday life 4, 63, 116, 142

221

exile 29–30, 68, 113–16, 124 degredados 30 exodus 31, 88, 100, 114, 128, 133, 159, 169, 182, 186 Fanon, Frantz 3–4, 6 fear 51, 84, 87, 97, 100–2, 106, 114, 124, 126, 146, 185 feminists 24, 149 Fernandes, Naresh 40, 45–7, 50–2 Ferreira, Rita 42, 187 Figueiredo, António de 28, 156, 160 financial crisis, global 142 fishermen 39, 55, 58–63, 66–70, 74, 78–9, 112. See also Catembe fishing 55–9, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69–71, 73, 75, 77–9 aquatic traditions 70, 78 Indian Ocean 57–8 Fitzpatrick, Mary 139, 199 FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) 31, 101, 158, 186–7 Forjaz, José 128, 131–2, 135, 140, 143, 195 Foucault, Michel 83, 180 France 25, 150, 170 Francisco 114–16, 118–21, 123–6 FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique)() 27, 29, 32, 62, 96, 98, 106, 140, 156, 159, 198, 201 French 3, 12, 28, 44, 47, 83, 122, 137, 141–2, 149 Frenz, Margret 162, 164, 173, 177–8 Freyre, Gilberto 13–14, 118, 152, 168 Gama, Vasco da 27, 188 Gandhi, Mahatma 24, 55 non-violence 24 Garçaõ, Carlos 19, 82–3, 86, 94, 97, 183, 186 German 28, 119, 131 Ghose, Aurobindo 24 Glaser, Clive 119, 168, 184, 189, 191, 193 globalization 140 Global South 1, 5 Goa 15–18, 21–8, 35–6, 38–40, 43–51, 53–6, 70, 78–9, 145–7 annexation by India 21, 26 decolonization 22–3, 35, 45, 47, 53, 145 Goa National Congress 25

222

Index

independence movement 25–7, 49 Operation Vijay 26 Goan community 38, 43–7, 50, 54–5, 60–1, 74, 147 Club Goesa 70–1 speciality dishes 46 bebinca 78 sorpatel 46 O Heraldo (newspaper) 24 Goan doctors Correia, Germano 41 Gama, Arthur 41 Pereira, Rafael 41 Goan Mozambicans 19, 37, 45–9, 51, 55–6, 112 Goan-ness 44, 54 Gordon, Suzanne 82, 95–6 Domestic Workers and Employment Project (DWEP) 95 Talent for Tomorrow, A 95 Under the Harrow: Lives of White South Africans Today 95 governmentalities 3, 18, 32, 83, 98, 110–12, 125, 185 Gracias, Fatima da Silva 42, 163 Great Britain 24 Grotius, Hugo 57, 58 Guinea-Bissau 11, 27, 32, 180 Hadramis 38, 53, 162, 170 Hall, Emma 141, 197, 199, 200 Hansen, Thomas Blom 16, 154 Hayes, Patricia 15, 18–19, 64, 66, 153, 154, 176 hierarchies 35, 37, 41–2, 61, 104, 129 Ho, Engseng 36–7, 48, 54–5 ‘local cosmopolitans’ 37–8, 46, 49, 54 ‘society of the absent’ 36, 51, 60, 147 Hoffman, Danny 131, 140, 143 Hofmeyr, Isabel 56, 63, 130, 153, 172, 196 Honwana, Luis Bernardo 64, 88, 183 hotels 79, 101–3, 106, 128, 131–6, 138–41, 143–4. See also Beira; Luanda Huyssen, Andreas 134, 198 ideologies 4, 41–2, 49–50, 93 Ilha de Mozambique 28, 130 immigrants 28, 50, 59, 109, 112, 114, 121–6 immigration 40, 42, 50, 110, 119 imperialism 3, 9, 12, 19, 56, 130, 156

India 8–10, 12, 15–17, 21, 23–7, 33, 47–9, 145, 147 Ayodhya dispute 9 Gujarat 9, 24 hind swaraj (‘self-rule’) 24 Independence Act 24 independence movements 24–7 Indian National Congress 23, 25 ‘Jai Hind’ (Victory to India) slogan 48 nation state 13, 15, 26, 35, 49 and Pakistani nation-state 47 Quit India campaign 24 and Southern Africa 2, 10, 17, 21 Swadeshi movement 24 Indian Ocean 9–10, 14, 37–8, 55–9, 61, 66–9, 78–80, 140–1, 145–7 Indian Ocean fishing Indian Ocean Fishery Commission (IOFC) 58, 61 Regional Seas Programme 58 Indians 24–5, 38, 40, 42–3, 81, 97 infrastructure 17, 28, 98, 128–32, 134, 143, 173 swimming pools, cinemas, hotels, cafes 131–2 inhabitants 58, 106, 130–1, 138 interviews 46, 48–9, 95, 98–9, 102, 114–16, 119 Isaacman, Allen and Barbara 42, 197 Jackson, Steven 133–4, 198 Jacobs, Jane 4, 6, 87, 183 Jacobson, Matthew 123, 194 Jamba, Sousa 63, 175 Japan 60 Jinnah, Muhammad Ali 24 Johannesburg 97–8, 109, 111–12, 114, 119, 121–4 Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism 135 journalism 62, 100 journalists 19, 49, 62, 82, 86, 99–103, 106, 110, 113, 122 Kapuściński, Ryszard 19, 86, 99, 101–2, 104–5 Another Day of Life 99–100, 110, 113 visceral themes 106 Karnik, Sharmila 39–40, 163 Konkani 45–6, 75, 78, 147

Index Kreutzfeldt, Dorothy 134, 198 Kuper, Jessica 43, 164 Larkin, Brian 134, 137, 139, 143, 199 lawlessness 82, 84, 97–8, 102 laws 57, 81–2, 84, 97, 115–16, 122 Law-Viljoen, Bronwyn 64 Lee, Christopher 9–10, 26 Making a World after Empire 10 legal geographies 3, 5, 57–8 liberation 27, 30, 32, 52, 83–4 life histories 19, 36, 38, 44, 46, 49, 54, 95, 109, 112, 160, 162, 166, 169, 171, 176, 184, 186 Lisbon 46, 49, 96–7, 105–7, 109, 114–16, 124 livelihoods 5, 19, 28, 56, 60–1, 68, 70–1, 114, 174, 187 Lohia, Ram Manohar 25, 155 Lourenço Marques 14, 21–2, 27–8, 32, 35, 45, 47, 49, 51, 52, 54–5, 59, 64, 66, 68–9, 71, 75, 77, 81–4, 87–8, 91, 96–9, 105, 128, 131, 133, 180, 187, 197, 201. See also Maputo Luanda 19, 31–2, 51, 81–3, 86–7, 99–106, 114–16, 118, 128 airport(s) 103–4, 106 taxi(s) 102–3 Tivoli Hotel 101–3 toilets 2, 116–17, 123 Lusaka Accord 32 Lusophone 11, 51, 63, 65, 153, 179 Lusotropicalismo 12–14, 118, 168, 190, 193 MacDonald, Andrew 131, 197 Machel, Samora 27, 29, 32, 64, 84, 198 Maciel, Délia 38, 162, 166, 170 MacQueen, Norrie 14, 28–9, 156, 158, 180, 181 Malcomess, Bettina 134, 198 Maputo 14–15, 35–6, 38, 44–6, 50–2, 54– 6, 65, 69, 130–2. See also Lourenço Marques Mbembe, Achille 1, 5–6, 133, 148, 149, 153 Metcalf, Thomas 37, 54, 173 metropole 4, 17, 19, 29, 37, 82–4, 125, 145, 182, 186, 194 migration 2, 11, 18, 26, 29, 32, 35–40, 42–5, 47–51, 53–5, 59, 78, 81, 87, 97, 109–12, 114, 131, 141

223

military 11, 30–2, 96, 106, 140 Mir, Farina 7, 149, 150 mobility 2, 6, 18, 26, 36, 38, 40–2, 46, 59, 96, 111–12, 145, 153–4, 166, 168, 171, 181, 184, 186, 189–90 Mondlane, Eduardo 29, 62 Morier-Genoud, Eric 11, 42, 110, 151–3, 159, 163–4, 181, 188, 189, 195 movie theatres 128, 134–5, 137–9, 143–4. See also cinemas; Beira Mozambican 2, 15, 29, 38, 40, 42, 44, 60, 63, 65, 88, 97, 143 independence 50–3 newspapers 64 society 18, 43, 51, 62–3, 66–7 Mozambican African National Union 29 Mozambique 13–19, 26–30, 35–47, 49–53, 60–5, 80–6, 96–8, 130–3, 145–8 and Angola 17–18, 21–3, 27–8, 33, 50, 84, 87 decolonization 15, 52, 84, 145 People’s Republic of Mozambique 27 South Africa and 145–7 MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) 31, 186–7 Nakuru Agreements 31, 159 Namibia 18, 110–11, 114–16, 118–20, 124, 126, 146 annexation by South Africa 119 National African Union of Independent Mozambique 29 National Democratic Union of Mozambique 29 National Front 31, 101, 186–7 National History Center (Washington, DC) 7, 149 nationalism 6, 14, 28, 58–9, 87, 149 Ndebele, Njabulo 127 Nehru, Jawaharlal 24–6, 44, 47, 155 neocolonialism 26, 47, 49–50, 167 Neto, António Agostinho 31–2, 115, 158, 186–7 Non-aligned Movement 9 Noronha, Teresa de 44–6, 52 Nuttall, Sarah 20, 154, 175 Pakistan 9, 23–4 Pal, Bipin Chandra 24

224

Index

Pamuk, Orhan 85, 182 Pearson, Michael 37, 57, 60–1, 153, 161, 174, 178, 179 Péclard, Didier 31, 158 Penvenne, Jeanne Marie 40, 41, 156, 163 photographer 65–6, 69, 79, 88, 99 photographs 15, 18–19, 21–2, 62, 64, 66–7, 75, 80–1, 86, 88, 104–5, 138, 140, 143 photography 15, 56, 64–6, 94 photojournalists 14, 64, 81, 88 PIDE 29, 102, 106 Pillarisetti, Sudhir 7, 149 Pina-Cabral, João de 130 Pinto, António Costa 28, 32 Pinto, Rochelle 42 Poland 99, 102–3 Pondicherry 25, 47 Portugal 11–14, 1, 24–33, 36, 38–40, 43– 55, 60, 70, 81–3, 96, 102, 109–15, 122, 124–5, 132, 138, 145 Portuguese. See also decolonization Africa 10, 13, 27, 31, 40–1, 83, 107, 109 Angolans 6, 19, 109, 111–13, 119–21 citizens 27, 35, 81, 113, 127 colonialism 2–3, 10–14, 16, 37, 39, 41, 56, 59, 65, 118, 123, 125 immigrants 28, 96, 112, 114, 121 India 3, 26, 35, 48, 59 Mozambique 16, 35–6, 42–3, 46, 59, 86, 109, 127, 146 refugees 118–19, 121, 124 retornados 17, 31, 33, 84, 124 soldiers 17, 29, 88, 104, 115 South African 112, 124 whites 43, 114, 116, 123, 137 Posel, Deborah 116–17, 190 prawns 55, 58, 60–1, 68, 70, 74, 77–8, 123, 171 prazeiros 40, 45 race 41, 51–2, 54, 110, 116, 118, 120–1, 123–4, 127 and class 121, 124 racism 9, 64, 95, 102, 106, 110, 123–5, 160, 168, 169, 184 Rai, Lala Lajpat 24 Rangel-Ribeiro, Victor 146, 165

Rangel, Ricardo 14, 18, 21, 62, 64–5, 68–9, 72–3, 75–7, 79, 84, 86–94, 143–5 visual themes 18, 98 Raul 45–6, 51–2, 165 religion 13, 26, 40, 44, 47, 56, 59, 78, 121 RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana) 32, 98, 142, 159–60, 198, 201 renovation 17, 127, 129–30, 133–8, 140, 142–3 repair 133–4, 136 Reserve Bank of Mozambique 96 restaurants 68, 70, 110, 136–7, 142 retornados 17, 31, 33, 84, 124. See also Portuguese ritual 56–7, 61, 66–7, 70–1, 78, 145 Roberto, Holden 31, 158, 187 Rosales, Marta Vilar 43 Rothwell, Philip 63 ruination 106, 129, 134–5, 139–40 Salazar de Oliveira, António 13–14, 25–6, 28, 30, 32, 45, 50, 87, 118, 124 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa 12, 40, 52, 151, 162 Savimbi, Jonas 31, 158, 186–7 Schlögel, Karl 130, 196 Second World War 3–4, 13, 24, 28–9, 50, 99–100 Selassie, Haile 99 ships 17, 82, 84, 105, 132 Sierra Leone 131, 140, 143 Silva, José Aniceto da 40 socialism 128, 131, 134, 139–40, 142–3 soldiers 17, 24, 29–30, 81, 84, 88–9, 94, 96–7, 103–4, 115, 140 Sopa, António 131–3, 143–4, 195, 198 Sousa, Manuel Antonio de 40 South Africa 1, 6, 11, 16–20, 24, 31, 54, 81–4, 86, 95, 97, 109–26, 128, 145 Apartheid 82, 86, 95, 109–13, 116 Fees Must Fall campaign 1 Immortality Amendment Act 117 Rhodes Must Fall campaign 1 Rhodes University 124 whiteness 95–6, 116, 120, 123 Wits University 1, 95 Southern Africa 2–3, 10, 14, 16–19, 21–2, 33, 86, 109, 125, 143, 145–7

Index Soviet Union 9, 29, 31, 99 Spain 12 Steffen, Jensen 121 Stepputat, Finn 16, 154 Stewart, Kathleen 85, 113, 125, 196 Stewart, Susan 85 Stoler, Ann 19, 45, 129, 148, 160, 165, 188, 197 stories 1–2, 4, 16–17, 32, 38, 44, 46–9, 62–3, 79, 84, 86, 88, 95–6, 110–11, 113, 117, 122, 124, 130 swimming pools 127–8, 131–2, 134–7, 139–40, 143–4 Clube Náutico 136 Ferroviário 128, 135–7, 143 Piscina Goro 136 Switzerland 117 Tanzania 29, 58 textual landscapes 14–20 Thiong’o, Ngũgĩ wa 4, 6, 148 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 24 toilets 2, 116–17, 123 tourism 70, 127–8, 131–2, 134 tourists 67, 127, 130, 132, 137, 143–4 trauma 2, 9, 17–18, 32–3, 85, 105, 107, 113–14, 128, 146 treaties 12, 31, 57–8 troops 17, 23, 26, 29, 96 trucks 74, 91, 96, 105, 122 Tsing, Anna 135, 199 Tuck, Eve 7, 150

225

Uganda 43, 150, 162, 170 UNESCO 130 UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) 31, 186–7 United Nations 14, 25, 29, 58 United States 9, 31, 43, 50, 107, 137 Vakil, AbdoolKarim 125 violence 9, 23–4, 30–2, 97, 125, 140 visual landscapes 14–20 Wainwright, Oliver 139, 199 war 26, 31, 63, 96, 99–101, 128, 134, 139–40 Watson, Graham 120 Windhoek 115, 119–20 Wintle, Claire 7–8 Wits University 1, 95. See also South Africa women 6, 11, 22, 40, 45, 62, 103, 139 World War II 3. See also Second World War Xavier, São Francisco 56 Yang, K. Wayne 7, 150 Zaire 31, 132, 186–7 Zambia 132 Zanzibar 133, 162, 198