Race Relations in Brazil from the Perspective of a Brazilian African and an African Brazilian: José Eduardo Agualusa's O Ano em que Zumbi Tomou o Rio and Francisco Maciel's O Primeiro Dia do Ano da Peste

The cultural links between Brazil and the former colonial territories of Portugal in West and Southwest Africa, most notably Angola, are uniquely robust and have only recently been explored by Portuguese and Brazilian historians in the wake of Paul Gilroy's study of the African Atlantic, in which the Lusophone African diasporas are scarcely mentioned.¹ These links, established during the slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, are as alive today in a different contemporary context. It is no surprise, for example, that the independence of Angola in late 1975 after a long colonial war that had helped bring down the Portuguese dictatorship, should have coincided more or less with the beginning of the slow process of "abertura" 'opening' that was to lead to the end of Brazil's military dictatorship and the eventual re-establishment of a parliamentary democracy. Nor is it any coincidence either that Angola's struggle for democracy was to take as long as Brazil's, and many would argue has still not been achieved. A destabilizing war during the 1980s and '90s helped entrench a one-party authoritarian regime, and marred elections in 1992 during a brief lull in the fighting, at virtually the same time that Brazilians demonstrated a newfound democratic power when President Collor de Melo was impeached for corruption, only three years after winning the first mass election since the 1950s.² In Angola, many would claim, as José Eduardo Agualusa does, that the party in power has long become corrupted and somehow forgotten its roots in a democratic tradition of creole struggle for freedom of expression that has its roots in the nineteenth century, and that Agualusa himself exploited as the subject matter for his first work of fiction, A Conjura (1989; The Conspiracy).

Over the same period, and in particular during the 1980s, the black movement in Brazil became more vociferous as the country returned to democratic debate while simultaneously sliding into economic recession, a process that hit African Brazilians especially hard. The emergence of new African literatures in Portuguese, nationalistic and in some cases revolutionary in its message, encouraged many black Brazilian activists and aspiring writers to look to countries like Angola as models of a type of free, black African sovereignty, much as an earlier generation of Afro-Brazilian writers had looked to the example of Negritude in the early 1960s. The assumption among some African Brazilians during the 1980s that the Angolan intelligentsia was somehow a natural ally of the black Brazilian movement was, however, destined to lead to disappointment. The problem had, of course, been summed up with pungent irony by Oswaldo de Camargo in one of his short stories dating from the 1960s, "Esperando o Embaixador" (Waiting for the Ambassador), in which the awaited appearance of the Nigerian Ambassador at the launch of a book of verse by a black Brazilian author does not materialize because, it is explained, he is still on the country estate of the white owner of the apartment where the launch is taking place (Camargo 77–83). It is this aspect of the black movement—the "return" to Africa and the assumption of perceived African values based on skin color that José Eduardo Agualusa, perhaps because he is an Angolan of European extraction, comments on laconically in his controversial novel O Ano em que Zumbi Tomou o Rio (2002; The Year Zumbi Took Rio), but it is not absent either from the novel O Primeiro Dia do Ano da Peste (2001; The First Day of the Year of the Plague), by the African Brazilian writer Francisco Maciel, a novelist who has broken new ground in Afro-Brazilian fiction. In many ways, both these novels approach common issues in slightly different ways: they are set in both Brazil and Africa, they both comment on themes common to postcolonial society in Africa, and they both focus on the race issue in Brazil.

When Agualusa's novel...