Portugal and Africa, and: A persistência da História: Passado e contemporaneidade em Africa (review)

These are two very different collections. One is the republication of a group of short, informed essays drawn from the corpus of work of one of the foremost scholars of Lusophone Africa—David Birmingham. As such it is a nostalgic look back at over three decades of historiography and at how one historian engaged with it. Arranged chronologically, Birmingham's fifteen essays chart the longue durée, pointing to continuities over more than five hundred years of Portuguese involvement in Africa and, particularly, in Angola. Clearly written and witty, Portugal and Africa would appeal as much to a popular as to a scholarly audience. The other is a group of theoretically complex essays by leaders of a new generation of scholars of Lusophone Africa. As such it looks forward, taking historiographical debates in new directions. Carvalho and Pina Cabral's volume focuses narrowly on particular aspects of the histories of colonial and postcolonial Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Mozambique and Angola. However, its overall contribution is very broad, mainly because this is one of few studies to take an interdisciplinary approach that applies ideas from anthropology, literary studies and colonial and post-colonial studies to a focus on Lusophone Africa's past.¹ If there is one similarity between the collections, it is that both remind us of the "persistence of history." As Carvalho and Pina Cabral state in their introduction, "The past has not stopped playing an active part in African societies. . . (15)." What some of the essays do not tell us is just how much of a part Africans themselves played in shaping that past or constructions of it.

Following a long historiographical tradition, the focus of many of the essays in the two volumes is on Portugal's relative weakness in Africa. In 1966, Richard J. Hammond argued the "fragility thesis" most forcefully, describing Portugal on the eve of the late-nineteenth century "Scramble for Africa" as the "Sick Man of Europe."² Militarily and economically feeble compared to Britain, Portugal, Hammond argued, embarked on its colonial crusade not for economic but for nationalistic reasons. As a study of Portuguese policy, Hammond's succeeded admirably. However, like others concerned with the Portuguese-side of Portuguese colonialism,³ Hammond scarcely mentioned Africans, purposefully eschewing what was then a new "Africacentric" approach to the past—one that sought to understand how forces at play within African societies shaped history. This approach has, of course, been championed by a number of scholars, many writing in a social history vain, who since the 1960s have insisted that histories of Africa should include Africans and discuss their initiatives.⁴ One example is a recent study by Joshua B. Forest in which he demonstrates that occurrences in Europe only partly account for Portuguese weakness in Africa. Looking deeply into the structures of societies in Guinea-Bissau, Forrest argues that adaptable, potent and enduring rural social formations remained beyond the control of precolonial, Portuguese colonial and post-colonial state institutions. Lacking legitimacy at the most local of levels, colonial and post-colonial state governments resorted to brutal terror to compel rural compliance. However, terror tactics ultimately failed in the face of determined rural resistance.⁵

If scholars focusing solely on European initiatives silenced Africans decades ago, much scholarship on colonial and post-colonial studies has done the same in more recent years. This is particularly true of writing influenced by Edward Said's study of white, colonial discourse, which, Frederick Cooper notes, "has focused more on stance—on critical examination of the subject position of the scholar and political advocate—than on process, on how the trajectories of a colonizing Europe and a colonized Africa and Asia shaped each other over time." In...