Hotel Trópico: Brazil and the Challenge of African Decolonization, 1950-1980 (review)

Jerry Dávila's insightful and very well-written book has arrived at an opportune moment. Brazil is coming to be recognized internationally as an emerging global power, while within Brazil the cultural debate is still alive as to whether the country has finally gotten over its inferiority complex (complexo de vira-lata) and has ceased being afraid of its own shadow (desassombro). Hotel Trópico is a meticulously researched reconstruction and analysis of the origins, ironies, contradictions, incongruities, dilemmas, successes, and failures of Brazil's first serious attempts to set up ongoing relationships with developing countries outside the Western Hemisphere. Written with a decided slant toward the Brazilian perspective, this study of foreign policy decision-making, with a 30-year scope and an epilogue, reveals the great degree to which relations with Africa were always conditioned mainly by evolving Brazilian elite perceptions and debates about Brazil and its role in the world. These contextual elements included Brazil's own race relations (especially sociologist Gilberto Freyre's theses of "racial democracy," "lusotropicalism," and "new Brazils in Africa"), group rivalries in Brazil, domestic political ideologies and events, and questions of dependence/subjugation versus independence in relations with colonialist Portugal and the United States.

As diverse Brazilian governments calculated what was at stake in African decolonization and early independence, as well as the pros and cons of opportunities for Brazil in newly-independent Africa, they were also engaging in an early form of "nation-branding," attempting to identify the elements of Brazil's national values, cultural identity, and economy that could be differentiated, manipulated, and deployed to create a favorable and competitive international image for the country. The resulting message was a varying mixture of references to Portuguese, Western, Latin American, Latin, and African cultural heritages and affinities and to images of international pacifism, anti-hegemony, tranquil race relations (in implicit contrast to the United States and South Africa), and "tropical industrialization," blended in different degrees depending upon the audience and the political moment in Brazil, Africa, and the world. As the author states, "Brazilians used Africa to imagine Brazil" (p.76), but Brazil was not a major concern to the African worldview at any moment, despite enthusiastic Brazilian headlines about "conquering Africa" with "new advances."

The considerable strengths of Hotel Trópico rest on Dávila's solid prior scholarship on Brazil's race relations, unprecedented access to comparatively recent Brazilian diplomatic and Portuguese governmental archives, extended interviews with key players over five years, and broad institutional and collegial ties in several countries. The research is meticulous and copiously documented, the argumentation is skillful and clear, and the style is lively, detailed and almost novelistic in its narrative. There are photographs of key persons and moments and tidbits or quotes about personal and group ambitions and rivalries, working relationships, incongruities, awkward intercultural episodes, aspirations versus realities, reflections on the superficiality and naiveté of past ideological stances, and explanations by key actors on how they first got interested in Africa and what that continent meant to them as they promoted Brazil's Africa ties.

Some elements of the 1950 to 1980 period stand out in Dávila's treatment of the phases in the two regions' relations. The pro-Portuguese lobby in Rio de Janeiro and the government in Lisbon were very successful in prolonging Brazilian support for Portuguese colonialism, or at least in encouraging abstention in the United Nations. Very few Brazilians were involved in the openings to Africa, in either the government or society, and almost all of them were white elites based in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Brasília. Many of the precepts underlying the openings to Africa, and the resistance to them in Brazil, were symbolic, ideological, illusory, and based on stereotypes and scant mutual information and comprehension. The few black Brazilians who visited Africa discovered there how Brazilian they were, and that race is not culture. African diplomats...