Lusophone Africa: beyond independence (review)

This book sets out to draw on globalization and post-colonial studies in analysing Lusophone Africa. There is much about these countries that would appear to defeat the purpose of looking at them as a coherent conceptual entity. To begin with, nature has not been fair to all of them. Angola and São Tomé and Príncipe have oil; Cape Verde is a largely dry archipelago with a seemingly industrious population that appears to have made the best of remittances from its migrants and tourism; Mozambique is, as far as natural resources and size are concerned, richer than Guinea-Bissau but poorer than Angola. Moreover, their post-colonial political fortunes are disparate. These different political paths in the aftermath of independence do not seem to suggest any obvious link back to their common colonial past that would help account for the differences. It is against this background that Fernando Arenas’s book should be read.

Drawing from three extremely rich case studies of Cape Verdean music, Lusophone African cinema and Angolan literature, the author seeks to demonstrate the existence of a ‘Lusophone transatlantic matrix’ consisting of these African countries, Portugal and Brazil. The matrix purportedly documents a particular experience of the global. The book is quite successful in conveying a sense of the uniqueness of this experience. Its emphasis on cultural media and, in particular, on the vibrant scenes of music, cinema and literature are a welcome reminder of the diversity that is constitutive of Africa. The emphasis also corrects a neglect that Portuguese-speaking African countries have suffered from as they jockey for attention in the shadow of their more visible Francophone and Anglophone counterparts. The idea of a ‘Lusophone transatlantic matrix’ rests on a reading of intellectual attempts in the countries concerned to interpret their fateful historical encounter in ways that justify a commitment to a shared destiny. While Fernando Arenas takes care to draw attention to the role of African countries in shaping the nature of this commitment, he does not appear to deny the fact that Brazil and Portugal have set the intellectual terms of this matrix. There is, therefore, a sense in which whatever African countries can contribute in setting up the matrix seems to have been determined by others beforehand.

This raises a critical issue that is central to the evaluation of the author’s claim, according to which the analysis might be informed by globalization and post-colonial perspectives. In the book the global is loosely defined as the interconnected nature of relations among countries in the world. This obtains under the influence of the forces set free by the expansion of capital and its search for the regulation and ordering of societies in ways that secure its reproduction. Whatever the exact nature of the global may be, the author suggests that the process through which it constituted itself over time yielded structural and ideological conditions that would enable newly independent countries to live up to the promise of nationalist politics. The post-colonial, in its turn, is defined as a critical engagement with the history that made the imaginaries underlying nation building in these countries possible. Since, however, the post-independence trajectory of most African countries has been one of crisis, disasters and wars, coupled with the corruption of African political elites and their indifference to the suffering of their fellow-countrymen, Fernando Arenas seems to suggest that post-colonialism as a critical perspective has increasingly come to amount to a strained justification of the failure of African countries to join the rest of the world in enjoying the benefits of a life in freedom and prosperity. There is something appealing about this argument, as it invites readers to engage seriously with Africa on its own terms. But then again, this might be an effect of the underlying definitions of the global and the post-colonial. While the former draws attention to interconnectedness without any particular emphasis on the extent to which such structures, brought...