BillOfLanding
10-10-2006, 09:53 AM
Portugal: national pride and imperial
neurosis
By Bernd Reiter
Abstract: Portugal’s journey, from a minor colonising power to a
member of the European Union, transformed its sense of national
belonging and citizenship. African colonial possessions, which under
the Salazar-Caetano regime had been formally incorporated into the
nation as a ruse to offset international criticism of Portugal’s prolonged
imperialism, were later disavowed, along with those Africans who had
become Portuguese citizens under the earlier arrangement. As a result,
Portugal has failed to recognise the existence within its borders of a
black community, its history and its exclusion, which continues to
the present day.
Keywords: assimilation, black, citizenship, colonialism, EU, Freyre,
lusotropicalism, nationalism, Salazar
The study of Portuguese history shows how the needs of elites to define
and disseminate different versions of nationalism have changed over
time. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, at a time when empire was
being dismantled and former colonies were gaining at least nominal
independence, the authoritarian Salazar-Caetano regime needed to
demonstrate to the world, and especially to the United Nations (UN),
that it had no more colonies. International pressure led Portuguese
elites to use all their persuasive power to make the world believe that
Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Guinea were ‘overseas departments’
and, as such, part of a Portuguese ‘pluricontinental nation’.
Hence, during that period, Portuguese nationalism was conceived
and promoted as an all-embracing principle, explicitly open to
Africans, although the rite of passage necessary to join the nation was
highly regulated. After the fall of the Salazar dictatorship in April
1974, and even more so after Portugal joined the European Union
(EU) in 1986, such a wide definition became a liability to the project
of Portuguese modernity; it also contravened the rules laid down by
the EU’s Schengen Treaty of 1990. Thus, it became necessary to
reformulate Portuguese nationalism and restrict it in accordance with
European guidelines. In 1981, the national assembly passed a law shifting
from the principle of ius solis (the granting of citizenship to those
born on Portuguese ‘soil’, which included parts of Africa) to ius sanguinis
(restricting citizenship to those of Portuguese descent). This trajectory mirrors that of other European colonial powers. Britain, for example,
shifted, during the 1960s and 1970s, from extending a common citizenship
across the Commonwealth, with accompanying rights to settle in
the UK, to a system in which citizenship and immigration policies
were embedded in the EU.1
Although the Portuguese constitution of 1976 defined citizenship
explicitly (Article 4), this definition conflicted with a more restrictive
construction of Portuguese nationhood, in which ethnic and cultural
criteria defined who rightfully belonged to the nation. This meant
that, despite citizenship guaranteeing de jure access to basic political
and civil rights, ethnic constructions of nationhood de facto constrained
the exercise of these rights because those considered ‘foreign’
faced discrimination and went unrecognised as citizens in their daily
interactions. This conflict between two organising principles – nationhood
and citizenship – had concrete consequences for those who fell
into one category but not the other, making them foreigners in a
place where they had every right to be.
But just what actions did Portuguese elites take to gradually restrict
prevalent notions of nationhood? And what were the implications of
such restrictions for those falling outside the definition of inherited
nationhood – especially those who were, nevertheless, de facto citizens?
To answer these questions, I carried out research on nationalism and
citizenship rights in Portugal, in Lisbon during 2003, in the course of
which I carried out fifty interviews with black Portuguese citizens
(mostly descendants of immigrants from Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde,
Mozambique and other countries with a history of immigration to
Portugal), leaders of immigrant associations in Lisbon and ethnic
minority political representatives.
That I am a white German meant that white Portuguese citizens
often counted on my acceptance of their racist statements about
Africans, Brazilians and blacks (‘pretos’). Such unrestrained talk conveyed
the extent to which everyday language had incorporated the
social and racial hierarchies of Portuguese society. At the same time,
my skin colour and nationality limited how much I could share in
the experiences of excluded groups, although my speaking Portuguese
with a strong Brazilian accent led many to perceive me negatively, as a
Brazilian immigrant. I encountered many Portuguese in public situations
who cast a suspicious eye on me as soon as I started speaking,
only to abandon this once it became clear that I was not in fact Brazilian,
but German.2 That, in the larger international context, Portugal
itself has often been seen as inferior or junior to other former imperial
powers (such as France and Britain) adds yet another layer of complexity
to this account.
Historical context
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when nationalism as a
concept and organising principle gained hugely in strength, Portugal’s
elites had to cope simultaneously with the loss of their international
influence and the rise of France and Britain in the international
power structure. While Britain and France have more recently evolved
from competing colonial powers into symbols of advanced capitalism
and modernity, Portugal today sees itself as a ‘nation in between’,
occupying an ambivalent position in an international hierarchy that
still bears the imprints of colonialism.3
Although the presence of ethnically and culturally distinct groups is
seen as a relative novelty for Portugal, in fact it has a long history of
non-European and non-white presence, especially in Lisbon. Between
1441 and 1505, some 150,000 Africans were brought to Portugal as
slaves – at a time when the total population was around 1 million 4 –
with their numbers peaking in the sixteenth century.5 In fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century Lisbon, ‘everybody had slaves’,6 which may have
been true up to the nineteenth century.7 In 1761, Portugal outlawed
the importation of African slaves, but slavery remained legal until
1836 and practised until the 1880s.8
Blacks gradually blended into the Portuguese nation through
assimilation and intermixing.9 And Portuguese nationals are still seen
as ‘non-whites’ in some contexts, especially in those countries, like
France, with significant numbers of Portuguese immigrants. Portugal,
as a poor country historically and relatively underdeveloped compared
to its European neighbours, has largely been a country of emigration.
This has exposed many Portuguese to racism and discrimination in
France, Britain, Germany and the US, where they are commonly treated
as just another ethnic minority community from a poor southern
country – an image that is further strengthened by the fact that most
Portuguese emigrants abroad work in badly paid menial jobs.10
Immigration to Portugal from Africa, Latin America, eastern
and western Europe and Asia rose significantly from 1975, when most
African former colonies became independent. Ethnic diversity became
a fundamental part of the urban experience, especially in the major
cities.11 In 1994, it was estimated that 30–50,000 black Portuguese
citizens were living in the country, mostly the children of immigrants
and those from former colonies who obtained citizenship before
1975.12 This ethnic diversity incorporated a range of legal categories,
from those who held full citizenship rights to those with no legal right
to residence. Between these poles lay a continuum of classifications,
with some people holding conditional citizenship rights that were
easily revoked or temporary work permits, some with temporary residency
and asylum seekers.
Commentary 81
Some 350,000 legally resident foreign nationals, as well as an estimated
200,000-plus foreigners without legal status, lived in Portugal
in 2002.13 Almost half of all legally resident foreigners were Africans,
30 per cent were eastern European and 17 per cent Brazilian. Asians
and others accounted for less than 5 per cent. Over half resided in
Lisbon’s metropolitan area in 2002.
Considering Portugal’s past, with its urban African population
reaching back to early colonial times (many worked as domestic
servants in Portuguese households after the end of slavery), it cannot
be claimed that there is anything new about the black presence in
Portugal. The change that occurred after African decolonisation was
not, then, the unprecedented arrival of blacks and ‘foreigners’ in
Portugal. It was, rather, that the long-standing black population
became more visible and more outspoken. The sometimes violent
reaction against this new assertiveness has, then, to be seen not just
as a reaction against the black presence itself, but against its newly
gained attitude. From the 1980s onwards, what had been a traditionally
‘silent’ black presence14 in Portugal began attempting to break out
from racially defined, and extremely limiting, social spaces and hierarchies.
Black and other minority communities began to speak out
against discrimination, call publicly for rights and equality and take
their place in the media, creating, in the process, more than fifty immigrant
associations.15
From lusotropicalism to European modernity
As already stated, until the end of the Salazar regime in 1974, Portugal
had defined itself as a ‘pluricontinental nation’, which included within
itself possessions in Africa and Asia. In order to circumvent possible
sanctions from the UN, the Portuguese state simply transformed its
colonies into ‘overseas departments’ in 1951.16 Before 1974, therefore,
the definition of a Portuguese national was wider than that of a
citizen: although Africans and Asians were, by definition, part of the
Portuguese nation, they did not gain automatic access to Portuguese
citizenship rights. Instead, the Indigenous Code of 1954 laid down
the stages that led from being ‘indigenous’ to becoming ‘civilised’.
It established the achievement of European manners and habits as
the benchmark for gaining access to Portuguese citizenship rights.
In order to justify such a dubious engineering of privilege and
exploitation, a whole ideological apparatus had to be set in motion.
In 1951, then, as international pressure on the Salazar regime mounted
because of its colonial role in Africa, it enlisted the services of Brazilian
sociologist Gilberto Freyre.17 Freyre travelled across Portugal and
parts of its ‘ultramarine’ empire, producing several books that helped
to establish the ideology of ‘Portuguese exceptionalism’. At its heart,
82 Race & Class 47(1)
this consisted of the invention and dissemination of a doctrine of
Portuguese racial cordiality towards Africans. The Portuguese were
supposed to be better than other Europeans at dealing with Africans
and Asians because of being culturally ‘closer’ to their charges than
the more rigid French and English. According to Freyre, this cordiality
came out of the long-standing historical connection between Portugal
and Africa and the intermingling that resulted from geographical
proximity and colonial activity. This was meant to have produced, in
the Portuguese, a cultural hybridity that facilitated the gradual assimilation
of ‘foreign elements’.
In O Mundo que o Portugueˆs Criou (‘The World that the Portuguese
Created’), first published in 1951, Freyre argued that, ‘Portugal, Brazil,
Portuguese Africa and India, Madeira, the Azores, and Cape Verde
today constitute a unity in sentiment and culture’.18 The main cultural
trait that united the Portuguese with their colonial subjects was their
‘cordiality towards the colored races’ and their openness to mixture
and miscegenation. The Portuguese were, according to this argument,
more interracially mixed and influenced by Africa than any other
European colonial power. They were less pure and less unbending
and therefore more understanding and tolerant towards African and
American peoples than British or French colonisers. The Portuguese
had mixed and mingled with ‘the natives’ for so long that they themselves
were unlike any other Europeans.
Freyre’s theory of ‘lusotropicalism’ was useful in the regime’s efforts
to justify its continued possession of overseas colonies through its
invention of a racial/cultural affinity between Portugal and Africa.
But this strategy was not able to appease growing criticism from the
UN and the increasing number of independent African states.
Ironically, it also became a liability once Portugal needed to stress its
affinities with Europe instead of Africa.
In April 1974, following the collapse of authoritarian rule, Portugal
broke with its colonial past and, from then on, directed its ambitions
towards Europe. This re-orientation required the gradual narrowing
down of an expansive conception of nationhood inherited from
colonial times in order to conform to the much more restrictive European
Community paradigm. The first concrete step in such a redefinition
was taken in 1981, when a new law changed the rules of
naturalisation and Portuguese citizenship. Henceforth, Portuguese citizenship
was defined in terms of ancestry and descent. With the enactment
of this law, favouring ius sanguinis over ius solis, Portuguese
citizenship became the privilege of those who could claim Portuguese
descent. At the same time, all those who had acquired legal citizenship
via assimilation or residency before 1981 slipped into a conceptual
limbo; they held citizenship rights without necessarily being of
Portuguese descent.
Common sense would suggest that Portuguese descent is a biological
attribute associated with ethnicity and, more often than not, with
whiteness. With citizenship being based on ethnic identity, non-white
Portuguese citizens entered a zone of exceptionalism and strangeness.
At the same time, this new, more restrictive concept of citizenship
needed to be anchored to the changing notion of nationality, which
was also being delimited and shrunk in various ways – a process to
which the Portuguese state, the media and intellectual elite all contributed.
The end result was that whereas, before 1981, nationality was
defined more widely than citizenship, after the passing of ‘law 37/81’,
not only was citizenship defined more narrowly, but nationality was
defined even more narrowly. Hence, there were now Portuguese citizens
who were no longer part of the nation.
Chasing Europe
Thus, Portuguese nationality today is based on both the attempt to
break with a colonial past and a rather humiliating relationship to
richer and more powerful European countries in which Portuguese
migrants have, for many decades, been treated as second class. From
as early as the sixteenth century, Portugal’s relationship to the rest of
Europe has periodically suffered from its dwindling power and shrinking
international influence. After the Berlin Congress of 1884/85, at
which Portugal lost influence in Africa, and after the resulting British
ultimatum of 1890 which forced Portugal to abandon plans to unite
Angola and Mozambique, Portugal sought to compensate for its
shrinking importance by consolidating Angola, Mozambique and
Guinea as part of its Portuguese empire.19
But after breaking with its imperial project in 1974 and joining
the EU in 1986, Portugal sought a new image that was modern and
European. This urge is omnipresent in contemporary Lisbon. It finds
physical manifestation in architecture, but it also informs commonly
held opinions and attitudes about Portugal and its relation to the rest
of the world.20 Portugal is determined to demonstrate to the world –
and even more to itself – that it is a modern, truly European country
and, as such, abides by the rules of EU membership. An important prerequisite
of this strategy consists of differentiating the country as
clearly as possible from those characterised as backward, uncivilised
and primitive. Because the borders of rightful belonging to the civilised
world are drawn arbitrarily and the Portuguese seem to have a latent
fear of being placed on the ‘wrong’ side, the construction of Portuguese
nationhood is shot through with a palpable collective struggle for
recognition. Hard facts are not necessarily helpful in this process, so
more emphasis is laid on invoking Portugal’s modernity, Europeanness,
whiteness and difference from the non-European world, especially
84 Race & Class 47(1)
its distance from those black Portuguese who were previously part of
the ‘pluricontinental’ nation.
The politics of assimilation
Pre-1974, Portugal had a clear ‘racial project’.21 The indigenato law
code, which regulated indigenous life in continental Africa until
1961, defined indigenous people as ‘those individuals of black race,
or their descendants, who, having been born or habitually lived in
Guinea, in Angola, or in Mozambique, still do not possess the education
and the personal and social manners [ha´bitos] considered necessary
for the plain application of the public and private right of Portuguese
citizens’.22 In order to become assimilated and cease to be indigenous,
thereby gaining access to Portuguese citizenship, Chapter 3 of the Lei
Orgaˆnica do Ultramar Portugueˆs (the indigenous law code) of 1953
defined that one had to be over 18 years old, able to express oneself
correctly in Portuguese, carry on a profession, dress in a proper
European style, wear shoes and eat according to European manners.23
The percentage of Angolans that was allowed, under this indigenato law
code, into the Portuguese nation never exceeded 1 per cent, which
points to the gatekeeping function of this arrangement.24
In effect, assimilated Portuguese citizens had to demonstrate that
they had left their ‘native savagery’ behind.25 This policy consolidated
Portuguese racial superiority and contributed to the establishment of
paternalistic relations between the Portuguese and their colonial subjects
whose cultural merit was to be judged. Accordingly, belonging
to the Portuguese nation was based on arbitrary judgements about
being civilised, and access to civil rights depended on the ability to
assimilate Portuguese values and manners. This system of paternalism
consistently undermined the possibility of equal treatment.
That formal European education was a requirement for joining
the Portuguese nation, but at the same time educational access was
restricted to an absolute minimum, indicates the perverse character
of this policy. In Mozambique, for example, it was only in 1918 that
the first middle school was created. In 1930, of a total of 208 students
studying in this school, 164 were European, twenty-six Indian, seventeen
mixed and only one African.26 The situation in other African
colonies was not much better. No Portuguese colony had an institute
of higher education and, in 1894, only fifteen black Mozambicans
could read Portuguese.27 Although I found no data on the number of
female students, this policy also effectively excluded African women
from ‘becoming civilised’ and acquiring civil rights.
Furthermore, during the colonial era, many Portuguese from the
‘motherland’ were reluctant to settle in the African colonies,28 forcing
the colonial administration to employ natives from one colony to work as overseers and executors of state policies in another. A system of relative
privileges was thereby created with long-lasting influence. Indians
and Cape Verdians were frequently used in this way to create a system
of indirect rule that divided Portuguese colonial subjects by stressing
the differences in their access to power and privilege.29 The social and
racial hierarchies created under this system continued beyond the end
of colonial rule in 1975 and many contemporary Portuguese citizens
are still tied up in them. Solidarity and identification of common interests
among ethnic and racial groups are therefore hampered not only
by differences in legal status, as former state servants hold Portuguese
citizenship, but also by extreme inequalities of power and prestige.
Although sharing similar places of origin and suffering from similar
processes of discrimination, groups are divided between former
coloniser and colonised, the civilised and barbaric, ruler and ruled. In
a modern, market-driven society, where the struggle for relative advantage
and privilege is central to one’s positioning within existing social
hierarchies, being an ex-coloniser is a weighty asset, even able to
partly offset ethnic and racial background.
The Salazar-Caetano regime added another twist to this system,
undermining even further the emergence of solidarity. The acquisition
of citizenship under the colonial system was already more a gift than a
right. However, the Salazar regime’s ideology of ‘lusotropicalism’,
which stated that the Portuguese harmoniously blended in with their
colonial subjects,30 served to camouflage further the target of potential
political activism because it implied that successful assimilation
depended solely on one’s individual merit and that racism did not
exist. Instead of organising and building political power through collective
action, it seemed preferable to disassociate from other stigmatised
individuals and groups and to seek social mobility through cultural
assimilation. The legacy of such a policy, which dominated Portuguese
colonialism until 1974, still poisons intergroup relations today, as the
cleavages created easily translate into contemporary assessments of
‘foreignness’. The assimilationist logic prevails, as foreigners today
can join the nation only if they leave their cultural differences behind
and become Portuguese – the contemporary euphemism for becoming
‘civilised’.
Acquiring Portuguese citizenship is still a privilege that can only be
achieved through the acquisition and display of ‘civilised manners’, if
it is not inherited. Such a policy is, of course, inherently biased and
racist, as it creates a hierarchy of different cultures according to their
proximity to the western European model. Portugal’s own unsure
positioning within the international hierarchy further complicates
this state of affairs, as it leads the Portuguese to place more emphasis
on the gap that supposedly separates them from their former colonies.
This became even more necessary after arguing, during the 1950s–70s,
that the Portuguese were indeed much closer to Africans and Brazilians
than any other European nation. To undo this unfortunate association
and to stress Portugal’s contrasting Europeanness and modernity,
Brazilian and African ‘backwardness’ had to be highlighted after
1974, when Portugal re-oriented its ambitions towards Europe.
On the one hand, national pride, damaged by potentially humiliating
comparisons with richer and more powerful European nations,
demanded the evocation of Portugal’s ‘glorious past’. But distance
from aspects of that past was also required; civilisational, cultural
and political backwardness had to be projected on to the ex-colonies,
leading to a resurgence of white cultural supremacism. The result was
a kind of Portuguese neurosis over its colonial past, which often translated
into an unwillingness to respect those black citizens who were
seemingly most associated with it. This neurosis seemed to dictate
that the Portuguese had to be better, smarter, more civilised and
more modern than any former colony or any representative thereof.
Daily dramas were played out according to this script and the potential
for anxiety and conflict was worsened by the pressure on Portugal to
match up to its ‘modern’, northern European neighbours.
Fabricating Portuguese nationhood
Portugal, as an EU member, has to comply with the directives of EU
immigration policy and has to work as a gatekeeper of ‘Fortress
Europe’. Foreigners must be kept from accessing the entitlements
that come with European citizenship. But the process of labelling
foreigners is by no means an objective and neutral endeavour. And
in the same way that science was responsible for justifying colonial
exploitation through the construction of white merit and black –
especially African – primitiveness during colonial times, science is
now called upon to define who counts as a foreigner, an outsider and
a potential intruder. As a result, Portuguese social science has spawned
an amazing abundance of studies on immigrants and foreigners in
Portugal. At the same time, not surprisingly perhaps, very few studies
have been conducted on ethnic minority communities. In fact, the very
existence of such ethnic minorities was denied by most bureaucrats and
state representatives I interviewed.
The concept of being ‘black Portuguese’, for example, was virtually
unknown, at least in academic circles, and questions about Portugal’s
black community were consistently met with bafflement. Academia
has, in general, chosen to ignore the lives of Portuguese blacks,31
despite their voices becoming louder and louder in recent years.32
Thus, the only officially recognised national minorities in Portugal are
Sintis and Roma, commonly referred to as ‘Ciganos’ (‘Gypsies’).
The absence of research and public reflection about cultural diversity
and ethnic minorities in Portugal is compounded by the fact that
the Statistics Institute and the Service for Foreigners and Borders do
not provide any statistical information on Portuguese ethnic groups.
Instead, all available statistics in Portugal only distinguish by nationality
and avoid any reference to cultural diversity within the category
of ‘Portuguese’. This omission greatly complicates any research in
this area, as no official numbers on the diversity of Portuguese
nationals are available. In addition, the Foundation for Science and
Technology and the Camo˜ es Cultural Institute, which together sponsor
most social research in Portugal, seem unwilling to open up these areas
of study.
All these tendencies suggest that the Portuguese state is still in the
process of shrinking or contracting the ways in which the broader
public should imagine the Portuguese nation. Because of Portugal’s
recent history, in which nationhood was defined in broad terms and
the notion of pluricontinental nationality was so vehemently propagated,
the contraction of this notion towards a narrow ethnic basis
has required a special effort. But it seems that the Portuguese state
has been successful in achieving this goal, as, by the time of my
research, this narrow, ethnicised definition of Portuguese belonging
was already dominant among the broader public. All of the black
people I interviewed told me that white Portuguese citizens treated
them as if they were foreigners, despite their being Portuguese citizens
and, in some cases, being born in Portugal. The remarks of a black
Portuguese citizen who worked as an electric engineer were typical of
many:
I am a citizen but that doesn’t matter. Africans are not valued here.
We helped to build all of this but nobody ever recognises that. I am
a Portuguese citizen but at the same time I am not a Portuguese
citizen. I have all the rights but, at the same time, I have none. I
have even represented Portugal at international events, while I was
a student. But, because of my colour, I am not treated as a citizen.
I constantly experience discrimination at all levels: social, cultural,
economic . . . I compete in the job market against Portuguese classmates
that had worse grades but get the job. Because I come from a
former Portuguese colony, the Portuguese think they are superior . . .
When people tell me to go back to where I am from, I have to laugh
because the Portuguese first came to my country as colonisers. And
they gave me a Portuguese passport because I was born before 1974.
I only came to study, not to steal anything. Portugal should be
ashamed.33
Most of those I interviewed declared that they did not participate in
Portuguese political life, even though they were legally entitled to,
because they ‘still felt like foreigners’, with no ‘roots’ in the country.
It also became evident during my interviews that the pressure on
young blacks to assimilate was extremely pervasive. This produced
two possible responses. Some chose to adhere to an extreme conformism
and downplay their blackness as a way of avoiding potential
conflict. Others were open about their frustration, protesting vociferously
against racist Portugal. This second group tapped into African-
American cultural expression, such as rap, in order to highlight their
difference from white Portugal and voice their concerns.34 No middle
ground seemed possible. It was extremely rare to see mixed couples;
it was rare to encounter truly mixed venues. Even at the university,
to sit with black students during the lunch hour gave me the feeling
that I was at the ‘wrong table’.
Such a state of affairs suggests, then, that the legacy of colonialism
still strongly informs the ways in which Portugal defines national
belonging, binding citizenship to skin colour, ethnicity and cultural
assimilation. Adoption of supposedly superior and more civilised
manners is still a requirement for ‘integration’ or, more accurately,
conditional tolerance. Even those who hold formal citizenship are
treated as aliens if they fail to abide by certain rules. But such treatment
belies Portugal’s claim to adhere to modern, democratic and European
principles.
Bernd Reiter is a senior research associate at the Howard Samuels State Management and Policy Center, New York, and currently teaches at LaGuardia Community
College. This article is based on research carried out in 2003 at the
SOCINOVA Institute, New University of Lisbon, on nationalism and exclusion
in Portugal. His publications include Old and New Frontiers in Education
Reform: confronting exclusion in the democratic tradition (edited with Marilyn
Gittell and Michael Sharpe; New York, Howard Samuels Center Publications,
2005).
References
I want to thank Diego Hidalgo and others at the FRIDE Foundation for their support, as
well as Marilyn Gittell, director of the Howard Samuels State Management and Policy
Center. In addition, I want to thank Margarida Marques, the SOCINOVA team of
researchers and Lenny Markovitz for their support and critical comments.
1 See A. Sivanandan, ‘Race, class and the state: the black experience in Britain’,
Race & Class (Vol. 17, no. 4, Spring 1976).
2 On discrimination against Brazilians in Portugal, see I. Machado and J. Renno, Ja
vi esse Filme . . . : estereotipos no cotidiano de imigrantes Brasileiros no Porto (mimeo,
date unknown); G. A. P. D. Santos, Sabia´ em Portugal: imigrantes Brasileiros e a
imaginac¸ a˜o da nac¸ a˜o na diaspora (Monografia de Conclusa˜ o de Curso, Centro de
Estudos de Migrac¸ o˜ es Internacionais, UNICAMP, 1996).
Commentary 89
3 Y.Le´ onard, ‘A Ideia Colonial, Olhares Cruzados’, in F. Bethencourt and K. Chaudhuri
(eds), Histo´ria da Expansa˜o Portugueˆsa, Vol. 4 (Navarra, Temas e Debates,
2000), p. 524.
4 V. M. Godinho, Estrutura da Antiga Sociedade Portuguesa (Lisbon, Arcadia, 1977),
p. 20.
5 J. R. Tinhora˜ o, Os Negros em Portugal: uma presenc¸ a silenciosa (Lisbon, Caminho,
1988), pp. 80, 82.
6 A. C. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–
1555 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. xi.
7 D. Lahon, O Negro no Corac¸ a˜o do Impe´rio (Lisbon, Luviprint, 1999), p. 51.
8 M. Eaton, ‘Foreign residents and illegal immigrants: os negros em Portugal’, Ethnic
and Racial Studies (Vol. 16, no. 3, July 1993), p. 546.
9 Tinhora˜ o, op. cit.
10 M. Baganha and P. Gois, ‘Migrac¸ o˜ es internacionais de e para Portugal: o que
sabemos e para onde vamos?’, Revista Crı´tica de Cieˆncias Sociais (No. 52/53,
1999), pp. 229–71.
11 Although, in overall terms, Portugal has a foreign population of less than 4 per cent,
which is below the European average, almost 60 per cent of all legal foreign residents
are concentrated in Lisbon’s metropolitan area, giving them strong visibility.
12 F. L. Machado, ‘Luso-Africanos em Portugal: nas margens da etnicidade’, Sociologia:
Problemas e Pra´ticas (No. 16, 1994), p. 115.
13 R. P. Pires, ‘Mudanc¸ as na imigrac¸ a˜ o’, Sociologia: Problemas e Pra´ticas (No. 39,
2002), pp. 151–66; Baganha and Gois, op. cit.
14 ‘A silent presence’ is the subtitle of Tinhora˜ o’s book on the subject.
15 M. Margarida Marques, J. Mapril and N. Dias, Immigrants, Associations and Their
Elites: building a new field of interest representation, unpublished paper (Lisbon,
2003).
16 C. Castelo, O Modo Portugueˆs de Estar no Mundo (Porto, Afrontamento, 1999),
p. 58.
17 Ibid.
18 G. Freyre, O Mundo que o Portugueˆs Criou (Lisbon, Livros do Brasil, 1951), p. 39,
my translation.
19 Le´ onard, op. cit., p. 522.
20 The construction at the city limits of the Oriente-Complex, host to the EXPO 1998,
symbolises this new self-image. Whereas every corner of Lisbon’s city centre reminds
the visitor of its colonial importance, Oriente offers a modern counterpoint, with its
futuristic design and landscaping. The same is true of the two modern bridges over
the Tagus River, both of which are characterised by the prevalence of Bauhaus
aesthetics and functionalism. Younger generations of Lisboetas seem much closer
to Europe than their parents and grandparents and Europe serves as a frame of
reference much more frequently than Brazil, Angola or Mozambique.
21 Racial projects ‘connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the
ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized,
based upon that meaning’, M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the United
States: from the 1960s to the 1990s (New York, Routledge, 1994), p. 56.
22 Quoted in Le´ onard, op. cit., p. 36, my translation.
23 I. C. Henriques, ‘A sociedade colonial em Africa: ideologias, hierarquias, quotidianos’,
in F. Bethencourt and K. Chaudhuri (eds), Histo´ria da Expansa˜o Portugueˆsa,
Vol. 5 (Navarra, Temas e Debates, 2000), p. 225.
24 Le´ onard, op. cit., p. 48.
25 Henriques, op. cit.
26 Le´ onard, op. cit., p. 548.
27 Henriques, op. cit., 266ff.
28 Le´ onard, op. cit., p. 540.
90 Race & Class 47(1)
29 Ibid. ‘Indirect rule’ refers to the practice of dividing colonial subjects into different
groups and co-opting some by giving them privileges. From 1850, when ‘indirect
rule’ became the official doctrine of British colonialism, traditional royal families
were invested with colonial administrative power. The alternative Portuguese
system, which used lighter-skinned mulattos from Cape Verde and Indians from
Goa, Diu and Dama˜ o as colonial administrators in Angola, Mozambique and
Guinea, was no less perverse.
30 Castelo, op. cit.
31 It is noticeable that the studies of blacks in Portugal that do exist have been produced
by Brazilian, American and French scholars, in particular by Charles Boxer,
Martin Eaton, Jose´ Tinhora˜ o, Didier Lahon, Yves Le´ onard, and A.C. Saunders.
32 T. Fradique, Culture Is in the House: o rap em Portugal. a retoria da tolerancia e as
politicas de definic¸ a˜o de produtos Culturais (masters thesis in Anthropology, ISCTE,
1998).
33 Interview conducted on 10 June 2003 in Lisbon, my translation.
34 Fradique, op. cit., speaks of an ‘explosion of rap music’ in Lisbon between 1994 and
1998. My own observation was that African-American-inspired clothing styles and
music were prominent among black Portuguese youth.
Commentary 91
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/
Vera Institute of Justice
Postdoctoral Fellowship
On Race, Crime, and Justice
Applications are now available for this fellowship, which encourages new
scholars of diverse backgrounds to work and publish in this important
field. One fellowship is awarded each year for a two-year residency at the
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within seven years of applying for the fellowship or be completing it by
summer 2006. Applications are due October 21, 2005, with the residency
to start in summer or fall 2006. Details and an application are available
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New York, NY 10279; e-mail: pguthrie@vera.org; fax: 212/941-9407, to
request a brochure and application.
neurosis
By Bernd Reiter
Abstract: Portugal’s journey, from a minor colonising power to a
member of the European Union, transformed its sense of national
belonging and citizenship. African colonial possessions, which under
the Salazar-Caetano regime had been formally incorporated into the
nation as a ruse to offset international criticism of Portugal’s prolonged
imperialism, were later disavowed, along with those Africans who had
become Portuguese citizens under the earlier arrangement. As a result,
Portugal has failed to recognise the existence within its borders of a
black community, its history and its exclusion, which continues to
the present day.
Keywords: assimilation, black, citizenship, colonialism, EU, Freyre,
lusotropicalism, nationalism, Salazar
The study of Portuguese history shows how the needs of elites to define
and disseminate different versions of nationalism have changed over
time. From the 1950s to the early 1970s, at a time when empire was
being dismantled and former colonies were gaining at least nominal
independence, the authoritarian Salazar-Caetano regime needed to
demonstrate to the world, and especially to the United Nations (UN),
that it had no more colonies. International pressure led Portuguese
elites to use all their persuasive power to make the world believe that
Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Guinea were ‘overseas departments’
and, as such, part of a Portuguese ‘pluricontinental nation’.
Hence, during that period, Portuguese nationalism was conceived
and promoted as an all-embracing principle, explicitly open to
Africans, although the rite of passage necessary to join the nation was
highly regulated. After the fall of the Salazar dictatorship in April
1974, and even more so after Portugal joined the European Union
(EU) in 1986, such a wide definition became a liability to the project
of Portuguese modernity; it also contravened the rules laid down by
the EU’s Schengen Treaty of 1990. Thus, it became necessary to
reformulate Portuguese nationalism and restrict it in accordance with
European guidelines. In 1981, the national assembly passed a law shifting
from the principle of ius solis (the granting of citizenship to those
born on Portuguese ‘soil’, which included parts of Africa) to ius sanguinis
(restricting citizenship to those of Portuguese descent). This trajectory mirrors that of other European colonial powers. Britain, for example,
shifted, during the 1960s and 1970s, from extending a common citizenship
across the Commonwealth, with accompanying rights to settle in
the UK, to a system in which citizenship and immigration policies
were embedded in the EU.1
Although the Portuguese constitution of 1976 defined citizenship
explicitly (Article 4), this definition conflicted with a more restrictive
construction of Portuguese nationhood, in which ethnic and cultural
criteria defined who rightfully belonged to the nation. This meant
that, despite citizenship guaranteeing de jure access to basic political
and civil rights, ethnic constructions of nationhood de facto constrained
the exercise of these rights because those considered ‘foreign’
faced discrimination and went unrecognised as citizens in their daily
interactions. This conflict between two organising principles – nationhood
and citizenship – had concrete consequences for those who fell
into one category but not the other, making them foreigners in a
place where they had every right to be.
But just what actions did Portuguese elites take to gradually restrict
prevalent notions of nationhood? And what were the implications of
such restrictions for those falling outside the definition of inherited
nationhood – especially those who were, nevertheless, de facto citizens?
To answer these questions, I carried out research on nationalism and
citizenship rights in Portugal, in Lisbon during 2003, in the course of
which I carried out fifty interviews with black Portuguese citizens
(mostly descendants of immigrants from Brazil, Angola, Cape Verde,
Mozambique and other countries with a history of immigration to
Portugal), leaders of immigrant associations in Lisbon and ethnic
minority political representatives.
That I am a white German meant that white Portuguese citizens
often counted on my acceptance of their racist statements about
Africans, Brazilians and blacks (‘pretos’). Such unrestrained talk conveyed
the extent to which everyday language had incorporated the
social and racial hierarchies of Portuguese society. At the same time,
my skin colour and nationality limited how much I could share in
the experiences of excluded groups, although my speaking Portuguese
with a strong Brazilian accent led many to perceive me negatively, as a
Brazilian immigrant. I encountered many Portuguese in public situations
who cast a suspicious eye on me as soon as I started speaking,
only to abandon this once it became clear that I was not in fact Brazilian,
but German.2 That, in the larger international context, Portugal
itself has often been seen as inferior or junior to other former imperial
powers (such as France and Britain) adds yet another layer of complexity
to this account.
Historical context
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when nationalism as a
concept and organising principle gained hugely in strength, Portugal’s
elites had to cope simultaneously with the loss of their international
influence and the rise of France and Britain in the international
power structure. While Britain and France have more recently evolved
from competing colonial powers into symbols of advanced capitalism
and modernity, Portugal today sees itself as a ‘nation in between’,
occupying an ambivalent position in an international hierarchy that
still bears the imprints of colonialism.3
Although the presence of ethnically and culturally distinct groups is
seen as a relative novelty for Portugal, in fact it has a long history of
non-European and non-white presence, especially in Lisbon. Between
1441 and 1505, some 150,000 Africans were brought to Portugal as
slaves – at a time when the total population was around 1 million 4 –
with their numbers peaking in the sixteenth century.5 In fifteenth- and
sixteenth-century Lisbon, ‘everybody had slaves’,6 which may have
been true up to the nineteenth century.7 In 1761, Portugal outlawed
the importation of African slaves, but slavery remained legal until
1836 and practised until the 1880s.8
Blacks gradually blended into the Portuguese nation through
assimilation and intermixing.9 And Portuguese nationals are still seen
as ‘non-whites’ in some contexts, especially in those countries, like
France, with significant numbers of Portuguese immigrants. Portugal,
as a poor country historically and relatively underdeveloped compared
to its European neighbours, has largely been a country of emigration.
This has exposed many Portuguese to racism and discrimination in
France, Britain, Germany and the US, where they are commonly treated
as just another ethnic minority community from a poor southern
country – an image that is further strengthened by the fact that most
Portuguese emigrants abroad work in badly paid menial jobs.10
Immigration to Portugal from Africa, Latin America, eastern
and western Europe and Asia rose significantly from 1975, when most
African former colonies became independent. Ethnic diversity became
a fundamental part of the urban experience, especially in the major
cities.11 In 1994, it was estimated that 30–50,000 black Portuguese
citizens were living in the country, mostly the children of immigrants
and those from former colonies who obtained citizenship before
1975.12 This ethnic diversity incorporated a range of legal categories,
from those who held full citizenship rights to those with no legal right
to residence. Between these poles lay a continuum of classifications,
with some people holding conditional citizenship rights that were
easily revoked or temporary work permits, some with temporary residency
and asylum seekers.
Commentary 81
Some 350,000 legally resident foreign nationals, as well as an estimated
200,000-plus foreigners without legal status, lived in Portugal
in 2002.13 Almost half of all legally resident foreigners were Africans,
30 per cent were eastern European and 17 per cent Brazilian. Asians
and others accounted for less than 5 per cent. Over half resided in
Lisbon’s metropolitan area in 2002.
Considering Portugal’s past, with its urban African population
reaching back to early colonial times (many worked as domestic
servants in Portuguese households after the end of slavery), it cannot
be claimed that there is anything new about the black presence in
Portugal. The change that occurred after African decolonisation was
not, then, the unprecedented arrival of blacks and ‘foreigners’ in
Portugal. It was, rather, that the long-standing black population
became more visible and more outspoken. The sometimes violent
reaction against this new assertiveness has, then, to be seen not just
as a reaction against the black presence itself, but against its newly
gained attitude. From the 1980s onwards, what had been a traditionally
‘silent’ black presence14 in Portugal began attempting to break out
from racially defined, and extremely limiting, social spaces and hierarchies.
Black and other minority communities began to speak out
against discrimination, call publicly for rights and equality and take
their place in the media, creating, in the process, more than fifty immigrant
associations.15
From lusotropicalism to European modernity
As already stated, until the end of the Salazar regime in 1974, Portugal
had defined itself as a ‘pluricontinental nation’, which included within
itself possessions in Africa and Asia. In order to circumvent possible
sanctions from the UN, the Portuguese state simply transformed its
colonies into ‘overseas departments’ in 1951.16 Before 1974, therefore,
the definition of a Portuguese national was wider than that of a
citizen: although Africans and Asians were, by definition, part of the
Portuguese nation, they did not gain automatic access to Portuguese
citizenship rights. Instead, the Indigenous Code of 1954 laid down
the stages that led from being ‘indigenous’ to becoming ‘civilised’.
It established the achievement of European manners and habits as
the benchmark for gaining access to Portuguese citizenship rights.
In order to justify such a dubious engineering of privilege and
exploitation, a whole ideological apparatus had to be set in motion.
In 1951, then, as international pressure on the Salazar regime mounted
because of its colonial role in Africa, it enlisted the services of Brazilian
sociologist Gilberto Freyre.17 Freyre travelled across Portugal and
parts of its ‘ultramarine’ empire, producing several books that helped
to establish the ideology of ‘Portuguese exceptionalism’. At its heart,
82 Race & Class 47(1)
this consisted of the invention and dissemination of a doctrine of
Portuguese racial cordiality towards Africans. The Portuguese were
supposed to be better than other Europeans at dealing with Africans
and Asians because of being culturally ‘closer’ to their charges than
the more rigid French and English. According to Freyre, this cordiality
came out of the long-standing historical connection between Portugal
and Africa and the intermingling that resulted from geographical
proximity and colonial activity. This was meant to have produced, in
the Portuguese, a cultural hybridity that facilitated the gradual assimilation
of ‘foreign elements’.
In O Mundo que o Portugueˆs Criou (‘The World that the Portuguese
Created’), first published in 1951, Freyre argued that, ‘Portugal, Brazil,
Portuguese Africa and India, Madeira, the Azores, and Cape Verde
today constitute a unity in sentiment and culture’.18 The main cultural
trait that united the Portuguese with their colonial subjects was their
‘cordiality towards the colored races’ and their openness to mixture
and miscegenation. The Portuguese were, according to this argument,
more interracially mixed and influenced by Africa than any other
European colonial power. They were less pure and less unbending
and therefore more understanding and tolerant towards African and
American peoples than British or French colonisers. The Portuguese
had mixed and mingled with ‘the natives’ for so long that they themselves
were unlike any other Europeans.
Freyre’s theory of ‘lusotropicalism’ was useful in the regime’s efforts
to justify its continued possession of overseas colonies through its
invention of a racial/cultural affinity between Portugal and Africa.
But this strategy was not able to appease growing criticism from the
UN and the increasing number of independent African states.
Ironically, it also became a liability once Portugal needed to stress its
affinities with Europe instead of Africa.
In April 1974, following the collapse of authoritarian rule, Portugal
broke with its colonial past and, from then on, directed its ambitions
towards Europe. This re-orientation required the gradual narrowing
down of an expansive conception of nationhood inherited from
colonial times in order to conform to the much more restrictive European
Community paradigm. The first concrete step in such a redefinition
was taken in 1981, when a new law changed the rules of
naturalisation and Portuguese citizenship. Henceforth, Portuguese citizenship
was defined in terms of ancestry and descent. With the enactment
of this law, favouring ius sanguinis over ius solis, Portuguese
citizenship became the privilege of those who could claim Portuguese
descent. At the same time, all those who had acquired legal citizenship
via assimilation or residency before 1981 slipped into a conceptual
limbo; they held citizenship rights without necessarily being of
Portuguese descent.
Common sense would suggest that Portuguese descent is a biological
attribute associated with ethnicity and, more often than not, with
whiteness. With citizenship being based on ethnic identity, non-white
Portuguese citizens entered a zone of exceptionalism and strangeness.
At the same time, this new, more restrictive concept of citizenship
needed to be anchored to the changing notion of nationality, which
was also being delimited and shrunk in various ways – a process to
which the Portuguese state, the media and intellectual elite all contributed.
The end result was that whereas, before 1981, nationality was
defined more widely than citizenship, after the passing of ‘law 37/81’,
not only was citizenship defined more narrowly, but nationality was
defined even more narrowly. Hence, there were now Portuguese citizens
who were no longer part of the nation.
Chasing Europe
Thus, Portuguese nationality today is based on both the attempt to
break with a colonial past and a rather humiliating relationship to
richer and more powerful European countries in which Portuguese
migrants have, for many decades, been treated as second class. From
as early as the sixteenth century, Portugal’s relationship to the rest of
Europe has periodically suffered from its dwindling power and shrinking
international influence. After the Berlin Congress of 1884/85, at
which Portugal lost influence in Africa, and after the resulting British
ultimatum of 1890 which forced Portugal to abandon plans to unite
Angola and Mozambique, Portugal sought to compensate for its
shrinking importance by consolidating Angola, Mozambique and
Guinea as part of its Portuguese empire.19
But after breaking with its imperial project in 1974 and joining
the EU in 1986, Portugal sought a new image that was modern and
European. This urge is omnipresent in contemporary Lisbon. It finds
physical manifestation in architecture, but it also informs commonly
held opinions and attitudes about Portugal and its relation to the rest
of the world.20 Portugal is determined to demonstrate to the world –
and even more to itself – that it is a modern, truly European country
and, as such, abides by the rules of EU membership. An important prerequisite
of this strategy consists of differentiating the country as
clearly as possible from those characterised as backward, uncivilised
and primitive. Because the borders of rightful belonging to the civilised
world are drawn arbitrarily and the Portuguese seem to have a latent
fear of being placed on the ‘wrong’ side, the construction of Portuguese
nationhood is shot through with a palpable collective struggle for
recognition. Hard facts are not necessarily helpful in this process, so
more emphasis is laid on invoking Portugal’s modernity, Europeanness,
whiteness and difference from the non-European world, especially
84 Race & Class 47(1)
its distance from those black Portuguese who were previously part of
the ‘pluricontinental’ nation.
The politics of assimilation
Pre-1974, Portugal had a clear ‘racial project’.21 The indigenato law
code, which regulated indigenous life in continental Africa until
1961, defined indigenous people as ‘those individuals of black race,
or their descendants, who, having been born or habitually lived in
Guinea, in Angola, or in Mozambique, still do not possess the education
and the personal and social manners [ha´bitos] considered necessary
for the plain application of the public and private right of Portuguese
citizens’.22 In order to become assimilated and cease to be indigenous,
thereby gaining access to Portuguese citizenship, Chapter 3 of the Lei
Orgaˆnica do Ultramar Portugueˆs (the indigenous law code) of 1953
defined that one had to be over 18 years old, able to express oneself
correctly in Portuguese, carry on a profession, dress in a proper
European style, wear shoes and eat according to European manners.23
The percentage of Angolans that was allowed, under this indigenato law
code, into the Portuguese nation never exceeded 1 per cent, which
points to the gatekeeping function of this arrangement.24
In effect, assimilated Portuguese citizens had to demonstrate that
they had left their ‘native savagery’ behind.25 This policy consolidated
Portuguese racial superiority and contributed to the establishment of
paternalistic relations between the Portuguese and their colonial subjects
whose cultural merit was to be judged. Accordingly, belonging
to the Portuguese nation was based on arbitrary judgements about
being civilised, and access to civil rights depended on the ability to
assimilate Portuguese values and manners. This system of paternalism
consistently undermined the possibility of equal treatment.
That formal European education was a requirement for joining
the Portuguese nation, but at the same time educational access was
restricted to an absolute minimum, indicates the perverse character
of this policy. In Mozambique, for example, it was only in 1918 that
the first middle school was created. In 1930, of a total of 208 students
studying in this school, 164 were European, twenty-six Indian, seventeen
mixed and only one African.26 The situation in other African
colonies was not much better. No Portuguese colony had an institute
of higher education and, in 1894, only fifteen black Mozambicans
could read Portuguese.27 Although I found no data on the number of
female students, this policy also effectively excluded African women
from ‘becoming civilised’ and acquiring civil rights.
Furthermore, during the colonial era, many Portuguese from the
‘motherland’ were reluctant to settle in the African colonies,28 forcing
the colonial administration to employ natives from one colony to work as overseers and executors of state policies in another. A system of relative
privileges was thereby created with long-lasting influence. Indians
and Cape Verdians were frequently used in this way to create a system
of indirect rule that divided Portuguese colonial subjects by stressing
the differences in their access to power and privilege.29 The social and
racial hierarchies created under this system continued beyond the end
of colonial rule in 1975 and many contemporary Portuguese citizens
are still tied up in them. Solidarity and identification of common interests
among ethnic and racial groups are therefore hampered not only
by differences in legal status, as former state servants hold Portuguese
citizenship, but also by extreme inequalities of power and prestige.
Although sharing similar places of origin and suffering from similar
processes of discrimination, groups are divided between former
coloniser and colonised, the civilised and barbaric, ruler and ruled. In
a modern, market-driven society, where the struggle for relative advantage
and privilege is central to one’s positioning within existing social
hierarchies, being an ex-coloniser is a weighty asset, even able to
partly offset ethnic and racial background.
The Salazar-Caetano regime added another twist to this system,
undermining even further the emergence of solidarity. The acquisition
of citizenship under the colonial system was already more a gift than a
right. However, the Salazar regime’s ideology of ‘lusotropicalism’,
which stated that the Portuguese harmoniously blended in with their
colonial subjects,30 served to camouflage further the target of potential
political activism because it implied that successful assimilation
depended solely on one’s individual merit and that racism did not
exist. Instead of organising and building political power through collective
action, it seemed preferable to disassociate from other stigmatised
individuals and groups and to seek social mobility through cultural
assimilation. The legacy of such a policy, which dominated Portuguese
colonialism until 1974, still poisons intergroup relations today, as the
cleavages created easily translate into contemporary assessments of
‘foreignness’. The assimilationist logic prevails, as foreigners today
can join the nation only if they leave their cultural differences behind
and become Portuguese – the contemporary euphemism for becoming
‘civilised’.
Acquiring Portuguese citizenship is still a privilege that can only be
achieved through the acquisition and display of ‘civilised manners’, if
it is not inherited. Such a policy is, of course, inherently biased and
racist, as it creates a hierarchy of different cultures according to their
proximity to the western European model. Portugal’s own unsure
positioning within the international hierarchy further complicates
this state of affairs, as it leads the Portuguese to place more emphasis
on the gap that supposedly separates them from their former colonies.
This became even more necessary after arguing, during the 1950s–70s,
that the Portuguese were indeed much closer to Africans and Brazilians
than any other European nation. To undo this unfortunate association
and to stress Portugal’s contrasting Europeanness and modernity,
Brazilian and African ‘backwardness’ had to be highlighted after
1974, when Portugal re-oriented its ambitions towards Europe.
On the one hand, national pride, damaged by potentially humiliating
comparisons with richer and more powerful European nations,
demanded the evocation of Portugal’s ‘glorious past’. But distance
from aspects of that past was also required; civilisational, cultural
and political backwardness had to be projected on to the ex-colonies,
leading to a resurgence of white cultural supremacism. The result was
a kind of Portuguese neurosis over its colonial past, which often translated
into an unwillingness to respect those black citizens who were
seemingly most associated with it. This neurosis seemed to dictate
that the Portuguese had to be better, smarter, more civilised and
more modern than any former colony or any representative thereof.
Daily dramas were played out according to this script and the potential
for anxiety and conflict was worsened by the pressure on Portugal to
match up to its ‘modern’, northern European neighbours.
Fabricating Portuguese nationhood
Portugal, as an EU member, has to comply with the directives of EU
immigration policy and has to work as a gatekeeper of ‘Fortress
Europe’. Foreigners must be kept from accessing the entitlements
that come with European citizenship. But the process of labelling
foreigners is by no means an objective and neutral endeavour. And
in the same way that science was responsible for justifying colonial
exploitation through the construction of white merit and black –
especially African – primitiveness during colonial times, science is
now called upon to define who counts as a foreigner, an outsider and
a potential intruder. As a result, Portuguese social science has spawned
an amazing abundance of studies on immigrants and foreigners in
Portugal. At the same time, not surprisingly perhaps, very few studies
have been conducted on ethnic minority communities. In fact, the very
existence of such ethnic minorities was denied by most bureaucrats and
state representatives I interviewed.
The concept of being ‘black Portuguese’, for example, was virtually
unknown, at least in academic circles, and questions about Portugal’s
black community were consistently met with bafflement. Academia
has, in general, chosen to ignore the lives of Portuguese blacks,31
despite their voices becoming louder and louder in recent years.32
Thus, the only officially recognised national minorities in Portugal are
Sintis and Roma, commonly referred to as ‘Ciganos’ (‘Gypsies’).
The absence of research and public reflection about cultural diversity
and ethnic minorities in Portugal is compounded by the fact that
the Statistics Institute and the Service for Foreigners and Borders do
not provide any statistical information on Portuguese ethnic groups.
Instead, all available statistics in Portugal only distinguish by nationality
and avoid any reference to cultural diversity within the category
of ‘Portuguese’. This omission greatly complicates any research in
this area, as no official numbers on the diversity of Portuguese
nationals are available. In addition, the Foundation for Science and
Technology and the Camo˜ es Cultural Institute, which together sponsor
most social research in Portugal, seem unwilling to open up these areas
of study.
All these tendencies suggest that the Portuguese state is still in the
process of shrinking or contracting the ways in which the broader
public should imagine the Portuguese nation. Because of Portugal’s
recent history, in which nationhood was defined in broad terms and
the notion of pluricontinental nationality was so vehemently propagated,
the contraction of this notion towards a narrow ethnic basis
has required a special effort. But it seems that the Portuguese state
has been successful in achieving this goal, as, by the time of my
research, this narrow, ethnicised definition of Portuguese belonging
was already dominant among the broader public. All of the black
people I interviewed told me that white Portuguese citizens treated
them as if they were foreigners, despite their being Portuguese citizens
and, in some cases, being born in Portugal. The remarks of a black
Portuguese citizen who worked as an electric engineer were typical of
many:
I am a citizen but that doesn’t matter. Africans are not valued here.
We helped to build all of this but nobody ever recognises that. I am
a Portuguese citizen but at the same time I am not a Portuguese
citizen. I have all the rights but, at the same time, I have none. I
have even represented Portugal at international events, while I was
a student. But, because of my colour, I am not treated as a citizen.
I constantly experience discrimination at all levels: social, cultural,
economic . . . I compete in the job market against Portuguese classmates
that had worse grades but get the job. Because I come from a
former Portuguese colony, the Portuguese think they are superior . . .
When people tell me to go back to where I am from, I have to laugh
because the Portuguese first came to my country as colonisers. And
they gave me a Portuguese passport because I was born before 1974.
I only came to study, not to steal anything. Portugal should be
ashamed.33
Most of those I interviewed declared that they did not participate in
Portuguese political life, even though they were legally entitled to,
because they ‘still felt like foreigners’, with no ‘roots’ in the country.
It also became evident during my interviews that the pressure on
young blacks to assimilate was extremely pervasive. This produced
two possible responses. Some chose to adhere to an extreme conformism
and downplay their blackness as a way of avoiding potential
conflict. Others were open about their frustration, protesting vociferously
against racist Portugal. This second group tapped into African-
American cultural expression, such as rap, in order to highlight their
difference from white Portugal and voice their concerns.34 No middle
ground seemed possible. It was extremely rare to see mixed couples;
it was rare to encounter truly mixed venues. Even at the university,
to sit with black students during the lunch hour gave me the feeling
that I was at the ‘wrong table’.
Such a state of affairs suggests, then, that the legacy of colonialism
still strongly informs the ways in which Portugal defines national
belonging, binding citizenship to skin colour, ethnicity and cultural
assimilation. Adoption of supposedly superior and more civilised
manners is still a requirement for ‘integration’ or, more accurately,
conditional tolerance. Even those who hold formal citizenship are
treated as aliens if they fail to abide by certain rules. But such treatment
belies Portugal’s claim to adhere to modern, democratic and European
principles.
Bernd Reiter is a senior research associate at the Howard Samuels State Management and Policy Center, New York, and currently teaches at LaGuardia Community
College. This article is based on research carried out in 2003 at the
SOCINOVA Institute, New University of Lisbon, on nationalism and exclusion
in Portugal. His publications include Old and New Frontiers in Education
Reform: confronting exclusion in the democratic tradition (edited with Marilyn
Gittell and Michael Sharpe; New York, Howard Samuels Center Publications,
2005).
References
I want to thank Diego Hidalgo and others at the FRIDE Foundation for their support, as
well as Marilyn Gittell, director of the Howard Samuels State Management and Policy
Center. In addition, I want to thank Margarida Marques, the SOCINOVA team of
researchers and Lenny Markovitz for their support and critical comments.
1 See A. Sivanandan, ‘Race, class and the state: the black experience in Britain’,
Race & Class (Vol. 17, no. 4, Spring 1976).
2 On discrimination against Brazilians in Portugal, see I. Machado and J. Renno, Ja
vi esse Filme . . . : estereotipos no cotidiano de imigrantes Brasileiros no Porto (mimeo,
date unknown); G. A. P. D. Santos, Sabia´ em Portugal: imigrantes Brasileiros e a
imaginac¸ a˜o da nac¸ a˜o na diaspora (Monografia de Conclusa˜ o de Curso, Centro de
Estudos de Migrac¸ o˜ es Internacionais, UNICAMP, 1996).
Commentary 89
3 Y.Le´ onard, ‘A Ideia Colonial, Olhares Cruzados’, in F. Bethencourt and K. Chaudhuri
(eds), Histo´ria da Expansa˜o Portugueˆsa, Vol. 4 (Navarra, Temas e Debates,
2000), p. 524.
4 V. M. Godinho, Estrutura da Antiga Sociedade Portuguesa (Lisbon, Arcadia, 1977),
p. 20.
5 J. R. Tinhora˜ o, Os Negros em Portugal: uma presenc¸ a silenciosa (Lisbon, Caminho,
1988), pp. 80, 82.
6 A. C. Saunders, A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441–
1555 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. xi.
7 D. Lahon, O Negro no Corac¸ a˜o do Impe´rio (Lisbon, Luviprint, 1999), p. 51.
8 M. Eaton, ‘Foreign residents and illegal immigrants: os negros em Portugal’, Ethnic
and Racial Studies (Vol. 16, no. 3, July 1993), p. 546.
9 Tinhora˜ o, op. cit.
10 M. Baganha and P. Gois, ‘Migrac¸ o˜ es internacionais de e para Portugal: o que
sabemos e para onde vamos?’, Revista Crı´tica de Cieˆncias Sociais (No. 52/53,
1999), pp. 229–71.
11 Although, in overall terms, Portugal has a foreign population of less than 4 per cent,
which is below the European average, almost 60 per cent of all legal foreign residents
are concentrated in Lisbon’s metropolitan area, giving them strong visibility.
12 F. L. Machado, ‘Luso-Africanos em Portugal: nas margens da etnicidade’, Sociologia:
Problemas e Pra´ticas (No. 16, 1994), p. 115.
13 R. P. Pires, ‘Mudanc¸ as na imigrac¸ a˜ o’, Sociologia: Problemas e Pra´ticas (No. 39,
2002), pp. 151–66; Baganha and Gois, op. cit.
14 ‘A silent presence’ is the subtitle of Tinhora˜ o’s book on the subject.
15 M. Margarida Marques, J. Mapril and N. Dias, Immigrants, Associations and Their
Elites: building a new field of interest representation, unpublished paper (Lisbon,
2003).
16 C. Castelo, O Modo Portugueˆs de Estar no Mundo (Porto, Afrontamento, 1999),
p. 58.
17 Ibid.
18 G. Freyre, O Mundo que o Portugueˆs Criou (Lisbon, Livros do Brasil, 1951), p. 39,
my translation.
19 Le´ onard, op. cit., p. 522.
20 The construction at the city limits of the Oriente-Complex, host to the EXPO 1998,
symbolises this new self-image. Whereas every corner of Lisbon’s city centre reminds
the visitor of its colonial importance, Oriente offers a modern counterpoint, with its
futuristic design and landscaping. The same is true of the two modern bridges over
the Tagus River, both of which are characterised by the prevalence of Bauhaus
aesthetics and functionalism. Younger generations of Lisboetas seem much closer
to Europe than their parents and grandparents and Europe serves as a frame of
reference much more frequently than Brazil, Angola or Mozambique.
21 Racial projects ‘connect what race means in a particular discursive practice and the
ways in which both social structures and everyday experiences are racially organized,
based upon that meaning’, M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the United
States: from the 1960s to the 1990s (New York, Routledge, 1994), p. 56.
22 Quoted in Le´ onard, op. cit., p. 36, my translation.
23 I. C. Henriques, ‘A sociedade colonial em Africa: ideologias, hierarquias, quotidianos’,
in F. Bethencourt and K. Chaudhuri (eds), Histo´ria da Expansa˜o Portugueˆsa,
Vol. 5 (Navarra, Temas e Debates, 2000), p. 225.
24 Le´ onard, op. cit., p. 48.
25 Henriques, op. cit.
26 Le´ onard, op. cit., p. 548.
27 Henriques, op. cit., 266ff.
28 Le´ onard, op. cit., p. 540.
90 Race & Class 47(1)
29 Ibid. ‘Indirect rule’ refers to the practice of dividing colonial subjects into different
groups and co-opting some by giving them privileges. From 1850, when ‘indirect
rule’ became the official doctrine of British colonialism, traditional royal families
were invested with colonial administrative power. The alternative Portuguese
system, which used lighter-skinned mulattos from Cape Verde and Indians from
Goa, Diu and Dama˜ o as colonial administrators in Angola, Mozambique and
Guinea, was no less perverse.
30 Castelo, op. cit.
31 It is noticeable that the studies of blacks in Portugal that do exist have been produced
by Brazilian, American and French scholars, in particular by Charles Boxer,
Martin Eaton, Jose´ Tinhora˜ o, Didier Lahon, Yves Le´ onard, and A.C. Saunders.
32 T. Fradique, Culture Is in the House: o rap em Portugal. a retoria da tolerancia e as
politicas de definic¸ a˜o de produtos Culturais (masters thesis in Anthropology, ISCTE,
1998).
33 Interview conducted on 10 June 2003 in Lisbon, my translation.
34 Fradique, op. cit., speaks of an ‘explosion of rap music’ in Lisbon between 1994 and
1998. My own observation was that African-American-inspired clothing styles and
music were prominent among black Portuguese youth.
Commentary 91
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/
Vera Institute of Justice
Postdoctoral Fellowship
On Race, Crime, and Justice
Applications are now available for this fellowship, which encourages new
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