The African contribute: an interview of Jean-Yves Loude
The strong African presence in Lisbon in the 16th and 17th centuries dissolved at the end of the 19th century and returned with immigration in the second half of the 20th century. Renewed, it continued. However, settled on a base of discrimination. The Black people who helped build this country still mostly live on the outskirts of the city, destined to an obscene invisibility in the representation of Portuguese society. French ethnologist Jean-Yves Loude returned to the “black city” for a workshop on the figure of Lisbon in literature (you can consult the program here) and insists on counteracting the manipulation of facts that erases the African contribution to the great achievements of the world.
In Lisbon in the Black City (2003) the narrator discovered a city full of signs of this African presence and showed us this privilege as Lisbon residents. His books reveal silenced narratives and reflect on the cultural result of a violent history. With his companion Viviane Lièvre, they chose a life of travel learning about otherness, promoting a dialogue between complementary worldviews that restore some data about the value of Africa in universal history. In a room in the beautiful Belmonte palace that the Tejo gives back to us so much, we revisit a Lisbon populated by slaves, what remained after that, their books, and an ancient revolt against prejudice.
In his book Lisbon in the Black City, we see Lisbon as the most African city in Europe. Are we talking in the past?
Yes, in the past. Currently there are many others (Paris, etc). The mixed-race history of five centuries of coexistence between Africa and Lisbon was a discovery for me. I wanted to conduct research to recover the memory of this heritage.
That presence in the city is very noticeable, but its history is not always visible.
All you have to do is have a ginginha at Largo de S. Domingos. However, in Cais do Sodré there aren’t any traces of the Black women that used to sell mussels there. We can discover testimonies of that presence in paintings, tiles, ceramics, in theatre. When I arrived in Lisbon in the late nineties, the first question I asked my Cape Verdean friends was: “why are there so many Africans in Lisbon?,” and they explained that it had been going on since 1445, with the arrival of slaves. The writer Joaquim Arena took me to a number of “African” places and told me about Professor Didier Lahon’s research on the black confraternities of Nossa Senhora do Rosário and “blacks in the Heart of the Empire” in connection with the exhibition in Jerónimos in 2000.
This inaugurated a work that he said was a police exercise to look for the “ham,” the murdered corpse of a memory.
I didn’t know anything about this constant presence in Lisbon, I read Anne Marie Pascal’s studies on “the character of black people in Portuguese theater in the 18th century”, José Ramos Tinhorão’s book Os Negros em Portugal Uma Presença Silenciosa and other researchers who showed black people not only as arms, but as expressions of daily life, influence on culture, religion, bullfighting and fado. And we spent time in S. Bento, a great symbol of the African presence.
S. Bento where, in the 1950s, Cape Verdean immigrants who came to work in the port settled, and also S. Bento in the 17th century, when D. Manuel ordered the digging of a well to throw the bodies of Africans onto Rua Poço dos Negros.
Exactly. After, I tried to find a literary game to pass on information that crossed literature and anthopology. And the Portuguese language method emerged, linking forbidden lessons and Portuguese memory, revisiting Lisbon showing places beyond the façade of official History. I didn’t want to do an essay, because I believe that academics cannot shake public opinion with these new views of History. I chose a format close to a detective novel, to give a voice to the slaves of yesterday and the new discoverers who are part of the culture.
New discoverers?
Because the Portuguese claimed to be the discoverers of the world, they brought spices and slaves. Africans are and were also the discoverers of our world.
The forbidden lessons criticize the manipulation and whitewashing of History. What interests did the cancellation of the African contribution serve?
The 15th century was a terrible time, maps were burned, information hidden. It was very urgent to prove the superiority of our civilization. In the past, Christian’s slaves were Muslims and Muslim’s slaves were Christians, it was not possible to say, “let’s evangelize Africans, make Black people slaves and baptize them.” In the 15th century, the punishment of Cham, son of Noah, and his descendants was recovered in the Bible. It was decided that Africans were part of the Cham descent and should live a life of suffering to avoid punishment, suffer the Passion of Christ, which allowed them to enter paradise, in the ranks of God.
It was the beginning of the myth of inferiority.
Five centuries is not much in the history of Humanity, but for those who serve this history and who during their lives only obey, it is immense. No one can suffer this any longer.
There are those who relativize European slavery by saying that Africa was already a slaveholder with its own people, in the case of Egypt, the kingdom of Congo…
Of course, in the past, the great African empires had slaves. The significant difference is that their captives did not lose their humanity. A man who lost his freedom in war became a warrior and peasant in peacetime, but the village master had a duty to pay for his marriage and support him. In European slavery, humanity was lost, it was cruel news.
A historian in the Dictionary of the History of Portugal, directed by Joel Serrão, says that the abundance of slaves in Lisbon left vices of lack of productivity, idleness, and lax customs in the Lisbon population. A violent judgment, as Isabel Castro Henriques writes. What remained of this presence of slaves?
At the end of the 18th century, it was forbidden to import more slaves, but they stayed here. The problem with the freedmen was that they had no economic role, and moved to the outskirts, others to prison, many became alcoholics, others were sent to Brazil. It is one of the reasons why Black people disappeared from Lisbon and why love was almost forbidden.
For fear of miscegenation?
There was miscegenation in Portugal, but it was taboo. The Casa da Misericórdia housed many abandoned “mulatto” babies.
Jean-Yves Loude, by Nuno Santos
Despite miscegenation appearing in the harmonious discourse of Lusophony as a reason for the exceptional nature of Portuguese colonialism.
This was in Ultramar, here it was discouraged and prohibited. Even among Black people. They preferred to import more slaves from Africa than keep their children. In the reports I read, there was no wish for the married Black male to regain pride. In Brazil it was also cheaper to import more slaves. In 4 or 5 million, we can double that to eight million Africans, counting the many who died on the crossing. It was a horrible story. We must put an end to Lusotropicalism once and for all, and myths such as cordiality and miscegenation, which are an excuse for not seeing the reality. Portuguese colonialism and slavery were terrible, for example in Brazil and S. Tomé.
But in your books, you establish a dialogue based on what remains of this violent imperialist history, in a need to communicate that comes from the discovery of otherness.
I pursue the vocation of explaining the world in which we live. My wife Viviane Lièvre and I worked as ethnologists in the Himalayas, Pakistan, for 15 years. The first step was to understand the importance of the culture of the Kalash, a people threatened by intolerance and diminished in the history of humanity. With Africa, the Diálogo a preto e branco was the key to the whole story. I was chosen by Cameroonian Kum’a Ndumbe III, who gave me his vision of the continent, telling me: “you will be the bridge.” In Africa it is important to be chosen, you cannot simply point the finger or reveal secrets.
Africans are disadvantaged by the lack of access to sources and knowledge is produced from the outside. Don’t you think the way of creating discourse about Africa is still very unbalanced?
There is still so much to do that we won’t ever be too many. For example, Egypt being removed from the African continent for being considered a white part of Africa is a negligent view. The Semites arrived late in the history of Egypt. Cheick Anta Diop tried to make a linguistic comparison with the Wolof of Senegal, but the Europeans didn’t take it seriously, when there is a whole connection in the language, family structure, in the construction of the myths of both countries.
What has been omitted?
I’m currently working on Brazil, and I’ve started to understand how everything is connected. In 1974, a portrait of the first ancestor of North and South Americans was discovered in Belo Horizonte, a 10,000-year-old Negroid woman named Luzia, found with one hundred other skeletons of Negroid hunters of the same origin. The face was modeled in Manchester and is displayed in Rio de Janeiro without any mention of Africa. They prefer to imagine a crossing of the Pacific rather than “homo-sapiens” from Africa arriving first. They do not accept the abandonment of the Bering Strait hypothesis as the only way to populate the Americas. I am exhausted of this prejudice, there is no construction of the future without reconsidering History.
And there is the episode of the Malian emperor, Abou Bakari, who had already made Atlantic crossings long before Christopher Colombo.
I investigated Arab authors and found the story of Emperor Kankou Moussa who traveled to Mecca in 1324. The Sultan of Cairo asked him how he got the throne, and he replied that the previous emperor did not believe that the Sea of Darkness had no limits and had built a fleet of two thousand boats and left in 1310. Al-Omari Ibn Fadl Allah’s Encyclopedia, “Masalik el Absar fi Mamalik el amsar” was published in 1340. At the University of France, they know of this one-page text but treated it simply as a “legend in the wind of African orality,” despite the text appearing in an encyclopedia.
That is a historical crime. What corroborates this possibility?
It’s a crime for not checking and immediately putting prejudices in place. One cannot think that Africa did nothing before the arrival of Europeans. The sources of the book where I tell this story (Le Roi d’Afrique et la reine mer) were the griots, which come from servants, praisers, bridges between the people and the king, diplomats (each nobleman had his own griot). Some wise Europeans prefer to say that Africans did not have the ability to navigate, instead of checking the natural possibilities of crossing the ocean. There have been cases of Cape Verdean fishermen who got lost and ended up in Brazil, found in Pernambuco. The passage is easy, from Santo Antão to João Pessoa is around three thousand kilometers, and the currents and winds make the journey easier.
How do you achieve a record that rejects both victimization and blame?
I don’t cry or denounce; I just want to show the optimistic result of a terrible History. In France, I would do the same if I were working on our fractured memory about colonization in Algeria or black Africa. I am more interested in valuing the resistance struggles of Black people in Cabo Vede, S. Tomé, and Brazil. If we see what values Brazil: Candomblé, capoeira, carnival, samba, are forms of expression that come from the resistance of Black people and were recovered during the time of Gertúlio Vargas to create a Brazilianness. However, they cut off the black roots so that Brazil entered the concert of modern Nations as a whitened society.
Jean-Yves Loude, by Nuno Santos
Don’t you think that, despite profound ignorance, certain sectors in today’s Brazil already have more respect and interest in knowing their African origins, with the 2003 Law (by the Lula government) that obliges the teaching of African history and Black culture, the movement of Afro-Brazilians?
Slightly because it only refers to intellectuals, ignorance is widespread, there are few teachers trained to teach. And it is based on myths: the African vision passes through Jamaica; reggae is more African than African traditions. There is an idea of how genuine the African past is. I gave many lectures in Brazil where we were well received, there are lots of researchers on Black and African issues but in everyday life this represents nothing. Black people live in ignorance, their role is not valued and the economic situation for the majority remains extremely difficult.
Besides that, it is an extremely racist society.
It was only 20 years ago that it recognized itself as a racist society. Brazil was closed for a long time, until the arrival of the king of Portugal in 1807 there were no roads, schools, companies, books, it was a very paranoid society, foreigners had to reach the mines and the travels were not welcome.
Were the cultural forms of Black resistance a response to a hegemonic power, is this the case of the Tchiloli of S. Tomé?
The master of Casa Grande was bored and afraid of the night, in Cabo Verde he gave his guitars to the subaltern and tell them, “do the batuque,” in S. Tomé “take a play, Carlos Magno, do that and be entertained. us.” We don’t know when it was the first time, but after a century and a half it has been practiced by a barely literate people, in 16th century Portuguese and lasting five and a half hours. When the slave lost his freedom, the cult of his ancestors was taken away from him. In São Tomé, the slaves, at the end of the 19th century, took advantage of their lack of freedom to turn the play, Tchiloli, into a cult of ancestors, without the master of Casa Grande noticed the transformation.
Hence the strength of the ritualistic character.
Yes, it is never said “the actor is doing well” but rather “the extra is created” by an ancestor. They have to invite the dead, it’s almost voodoo: a ritual to treat global society. One of the best works was of Portuguese anthropologist Paulo Valverde (who died of malaria) with an extraordinary book, Máscara, mato e morte, about tchiloli.
Why don’t women enter Tchiloli?
In Shakespeare and Gil Vicente, they don’t either. The primitive text of Tchiloli comes from that time. And at the end of the 19th century, a Black woman did not look good in the theater, and the tradition remained. The strength of the forros culture, practiced in the roças, is incredible.
Are you very emotionally involved with the place you traveled to? For example, the years you worked on Cabo Verde.
Cabo Verde is transversal to all books (including Lisbon’s). I prefer to go there and come back. We need to value this culture; the rain refuses to fall but music and poetry grows and speaks about the world and human reality like no one else. Jorge Barbosa’s words that tell how the Cape Verdean people are the fruit of a brutal wedding between two antagonistic continents, gathered on a lava beach, on the night of the full moon. We have a responsibility to live with these lessons from History, I write to share them with today’s actors.
Didn’t you have any personal connection to Africa?
No. The meeting with Kum’a Ndumbe III, the writer from Cameroon, in my city of Lyon, in the 1970s, was fundamental.
This more neutral look is better, don’t you think? For example, here in Portugal, “returnees” often cannot accept the historical situation, look at the current situation in the African countries they came from without regret, which makes rigor and openness to change impossible.
I have no anger, just the responsibility that was given to me. I am a bridge to this dialogue through someone who raises the issues. I work for my European society because Africa can only improve if the north changes.
Is criticism of the West’s relations with these countries and their instrumentalization present in your books?
The most important thing is to make known the historical connection, the migrations, the current racism, to say that, if today some want to defend the borders, yesterday it was necessary to seek labor from North Africa, which previous generations asked foreigners to rescue from France after the war. We have our responsibility; we cannot have two speeches.
History returns with new configurations to the Europe – Africa – America commercial triangle.
The emergence of our capitalism comes from this triangle. And it represents the beginning of the decline of the western empire: we took all the riches from the ground, and not from the thought, wisdom, or cultures of the people, we forgot that there were many other things to discover. We are going to lose everything because the immense disease of capitalism was not based on the equal exchange of values but on the plundering of other people’s wealth and work power. When we lose influence, history continues with the new capitalists and colonialists, like the Chinese.
How do you see the future of the African countries you know best?
They are progressing in a market economy, what I liked about Cabo Verde is being lost. But we can’t change that. I did my job to pin it, I can’t decide what the water supply will be like, the comfort of the roads, which must be what people prefer. I’m just here to add sources of knowledge.
