Received wisdom has it that if you talk about anything for long enough, it becomes important; even if it does not happen to be true, it can create conditions which then solidify in historical realities. While there may be no weapons of mass destruction in early twenty-first-century Iraq, or copper and silver mines in seventeenth-century Angola, the belief that there are, and the insistent discussion of this belief in hegemonic political discourse, can still shape future dilemmas.
The pattern of Portuguese colonization and decolonization in Africa certainly fits this pattern. Throughout the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–74), Portugal's right to its colonies was predicated on a myth of exceptionalism. The longevity of Portugal's African interactions was said to have created a different relationship between metropole and colony. This was crystallized in the myth of ‘lusotropicalism’, the idea first mooted by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in 1940, which held that Portugal's long history of intermixtures with Islamic populations, and the length of its colonial endeavours, had produced a different and milder variant of colonialism to that of other European countries. This idea was enthusiastically picked up by the Salazar regime in Portugal, and was the principal ideological prop of the last colonial empire in Africa into the 1970s.
While, as Amílcar Cabral wrote in response to the idea of lusotropicalism, the idea of a ‘softer’ colonialism was a myth, it facilitated an ideological superstructure that created a very different pattern of decolonization in the Portuguese colonies, one marked by independence wars and subsequent political frailties. Both intellectually and politically, much of the debate has revolved around exactly how the postcolonial relationship between colony and metropole should now be constituted, and it is in this arena that the book under review makes several important interventions.
The focus of Imperial Migrations is on complicating the understanding of twentieth-century Portuguese imperialism in Africa through the place of diasporic communities in the imperial project. While, as an important introduction by Cahen and Morier-Genoud shows, the myth of Portuguese empire was founded on both exceptionalism and nationalism, the interpellation of diasporic communities within the project of empire undercuts both myths. The reality was that the state in twentieth-century Portugal was weak and ineffective. Faced with this structural weakness, the Portuguese relied both on the mobilization of foreign capital investment, and on the role of small but influential minorities in constructing and stabilizing their empire.
Thus, following an excellent introduction and Edward Alpers' and Molly Ball's bibliographical essay of extraordinary range, the major part of the book is given over to an analysis of these communities. Diasporas within the Portuguese empire were both extensive and varied, and their scope in many ways contributes to the problematic of diaspora studies. Where, for instance, do the many specifically Portuguese diasporas – such as penniless madeirense fishermen in Angola and white evacuees from Angola and Mozambique in South Africa – fit within general descriptors of diasporic form such as those developed by Robin Cohen? How are we to place the Cape Verdeans analysed carefully by Alexander Keese in this book, who were both otherized through the teleological racial theories promoted in Portugal at the time, as Isabel Castro Henriques shows in an excellent chapter, and yet also keen executors of Portuguese imperial policy in Angola and Guinea-Bissau? And how should we view such racial theories in the light of the utilization of Goans as Portuguese consuls in British East Africa, as discussed by Margret Frenz?
Such examples problematize most helpfully those generalizations that are often brought to mind in studies of empire. Forty years after Portugal's decolonization, and fifty years after most other imperial decolonizations in Africa, it remains the case that metropolitan studies of African empires still gravitate towards former colonies in Britain, France and Portugal. Empire had a language, and, in the metropole, the imperial legacy still occludes the multilingualism essential to break down the boundaries thrown up by European empires in Africa. One of the interesting emphases of this book, however, is the tension between the need for this focus in Portugal as opposed to its perception in the former colonies. In a significant chapter, Michel Cahen, who is one of the most important analysts of Portuguese imperialism in Africa at work today, discusses the tension between the neocolonial institution of the CPLP (Community of Portuguese-Language Countries) and the PALOP (African Countries with the Official Language of Portuguese): the former perpetrates the myth that Portuguese colonialism led to the lusitanization of the population, whereas the latter places centre stage the fact that Portuguese is only an ‘official language’ in the former African colonies, thereby recognizing the complexities of history.
In fact, as the examples of the diasporas analysed in this book reveal, Portuguese imperialism in Africa was not advanced by one culture or nation but by many. Diasporas, as Cahen and Morier-Genoud suggest in their introduction, had some scope for autonomy within the imperial sphere. Traditional foci on empires emphasize hegemony, but the role of diasporas, and the autonomy that this reveals, shows a more decentred type of imperialism which is very fitting for the weak country that Portugal was in the twentieth century, in spite of its empire. The role of the empire in building the grandeur of the Portuguese destiny has, as Imperial Migrations shows so excellently, obscured the multiple agencies involved in imperial constructions. Decentring empires involves acknowledging diasporas, and in so doing acknowledging the multiplicities inherent in the project of modernity, both in the past and in the present.
