These and other fieldwork interactions indicate that it would be an overstatement to talk about the consolidation of a new discourse on Africa in Brazil’s diplomatic and policy making circles. Different views on Africa coexist today, and, as all discourse in a Foucauldian sense, they will turn out to be right or wrong on account not of its referentiality and presumed historical accuracy, but of the particular balance of knowledge and power that eventually comes to prevail. It remains to be seen whether, in Brazil, such balance is really tipping or not, and in which direction. What is most likely however is that oscillations and ambivalences will continue to coexist for some time. After all, historically these have been the mark of Brazil’s Africa policy, and there seems to be no clear evidence that, as I remarked in a review of Saraiva’s latest book , they would be coming to a Hegelian “end of history” of sorts during the LulaRousseff administrations. Moreover, even if stripped of much of its racial harmony guise, the grammatical privileging of affinities and culture remains in place. In the case of South-South cooperation, part of this “inertia” – as Kabengele Munanga recently put it in a radio show on affirmative action in Brazil broadcasted to Francophone Africa– might have to do with the selective and closed character of Brazil’s diplomatic body . This is largely true of diplomacy in general, but in Brazil it has come to a point where the Lula administration decided to take proactive measures for opening up Itamaraty to a more diverse pool of social segments.In this sense, then, just as in the global North the narrative of progress “remains largely untouched” in aid organizations even while “tarnished in its native environs” ,grow bag in Brazil the culturalist grammar seems to have a certain sociological and institutional inertia linked to the self-reproduction of its diplomatic body.
Furthermore, in the contemporary re-intensification of Brazil-Africa relations under the rubric of South-South cooperation, certain elements of this discursive grammar might have found a renewed functionality. Assumptions about a shared history and culture come to occupy the not always confortable space of Brazil’s actual historical engagement with Africa, marked by the ambivalences and contradictions described above. Just as the general principles of South-South cooperation provide some glue to an otherwise highly heterogeneous pool of emerging donors , Brazil’s diplomatic discourse unites diverse cooperation initiatives in the absence of a common cooperation policy. Secondly, Brazil’s contemporary rapprochement with Africa involves an unprecedented reach to regions that lie beyond its traditional relational scope, such as the Sahelian band, East and Central Africa, or the Maghreb. The idiom of historical ties and cultural affinities allows Brazilian diplomats and officials to talk about Africa at large based on the country’s more restricted historical experience with certain parts of the African continent, most notably former Portuguese colonies and parts of West Africa. In this sense, it also seeks to lay a fertile ground for the flourishing of a relationship where before there was little of concrete to stand on. Finally, Saraiva hinted at how the ease with which policymakers’ and diplomats’ views were infused with the culturalist grammar might have been allowed by the vacuum of empirically-based knowledge about Africa. Even in Brazilian academia, much of African studies in fact refer to African-Brazilians, while knowledge about Africa has been gained second-hand from Northern literature. Many such knowledge gaps have been addressed to the extent that, in Saraiva’s words written in the mid-nineties, “knowledge about Africa in Brazil is no longer on a par with that of nineteenth century British anthropology” . But the implementation of policies in this direction has been slow, and their reach, limited.
As will be seen in later chapters, in cooperation activities much of the knowledge about African realities has in fact come from the African partners themselves.Indeed, according to my field experience, unfamiliarity with contemporary and historical Africa remains the rule to a large extent; correspondingly, presumed knowledge about imagined Africa remains important. It must be remarked however that the significance and pervasiveness of official discourse is organizationally and socially fragmented: while the culturalist grammar has significant hold in political, intellectual and diplomatic circles, it tends to fade away as one approaches the front line practice of cooperation. In other words, the purification of culture, which is possible and even functional at the level of official discourse, becomes problematic in on-the-ground circumstances where “cultural” elements cannot be easily separated from other domains in which relations between Brazil and Africa have historically played out, as shown in this section. The next will outline some others, based on my field interactions.As remarkable as the frequency of statements on culture during ritual moments performed by diplomatic and other officials was their paucity among those implementing projects and trainings on the ground. During fieldwork, this was rarely a generative topic of conversation with front liners; cultural affinities were not among their top concerns. For the most part, Brazilians were concerned with working with Africans rather than saving Africa or paying back a debt for their cultural contributions to “Brazilian civilization”; in them, I saw very little of the two extremes of romanticizing and racism. Similarly, African partners seemed far more interested in the technical knowledge and material resources that could be imparted by their Brazilian colleagues, or in networking with them for future opportunities, than to learn that capoeira was invented by African slaves,grow bag gardening or that in parts of Brazil palm oil is a common ingredient in the regional cuisine – although they would no doubt appreciate trying it.
In other words, if I wanted to find “culture” at the cooperation front line, I had to literally squeeze it out of my field materials. Like mostly everyone else, before going to Africa most Brazilians have very stereotypical images of the continent and its inhabitants. As I was told by a Brazilian running a farm in Ghana, as we met for lunch one day in the Accra Mall, “When we were looking for people to come work for us, whenever we said Africa, they would laugh. You know, most people in Brazil think they’re going to come here and find only lions, zebras; never that you could be in a restaurant like this, eating a nice salad”. Once there, the cooperantes would carry out their own, informal comparative exercises. Expressions of familiarity were common especially as they travelled around rural areas in West Africa; but these addressed certain contextual elements only, never the entire picture. Thus, while women carrying loads on the head are definitely a common view in rural Brazil, there the child tied on to the back is missing from the picture. Mud houses can be found in many parts of the Brazilian hinterlands, but rarely do they have a round architecture like the ones most often found in the villages in Mali or Burkina Faso. Roadside vendors selling produce, handicrafts and manufactured products under fragile wood and-straw shelters can be found along many stretches of road in Brazil, but their sheer quantity and the intensity of their displacement back and forth in Africa are unmatched. As one moved from rural to urban areas, remarks about difference came more often to the fore: traffic, religious practices, or bodily techniques were favorite topics in informal comparisons. Nothing in Brazilian cities, for instance, like the tro-tros and sotramas that pack the streets of Accra and Bamako , or the profusion of motorcycles in Bamako and Ouagadougou, the lack of protection helmets, and the quantity and quality of cargo they would sometimes carry. While Christian churches were more of a familiar view, Islamic prayer in Mali or Burkina Faso, especially collective outdoor sessions by the street side, would provoke surprise and curiosity. Women would cause amusement in their way of leaning down without bending the knees , of walking swiftly around as if they did not have a load on the head and a baby tied to the back, or in their elaborate way of doing the hair and dressing quite elegantly for daily situations most Brazilians would find unnecessary. For their part, African partners’ impressions on things discourse assigns to the domain of culture did not seem to manifest a previously held, essentialized view on how a Brazilian culture or even a Brazilian race should look like. Partners working in the cotton project, for instance, seemed to have very vague images or conceptions about Brazil prior to their engagement with the project. Many of them had never heard of the kind of work Embrapa did, neither of the existence of the institution itself.
When asked about it, those coming from the only C-4 country on the coast, Benin, mentioned some of the Brazilian names from returnees that could still be found in their country, and told me about the Brazilian soap operas showing on Beninese TV. Indeed, in West Africa Brazilian feuilletons shown in Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso or the Ivory Coast were quite popular. In Bamako, people would tell me about actors and actresses whose names I had never heard before, being four years away from Brazil. Whenever I had the chance to get hold of a TV, I would amuse myself watching Brazilian actors speaking French with each other for an African audience. But by far, the single element that appeared most readily associated with Brazil in all countries I visited was soccer. In Ghana, posters showing Brazilian players were common views in the Accra landscape. In Bamako, rarely a day would go by without me spotting someone wearing the Brazilian team’s yellow jersey. During fieldwork, this was the first topic of conversation with people on the streets and in public transportation as soon as they learned that I was Brazilian, and I lost track of how many times I was asked, “Why didn’t your coach call Ronaldinho Gaúcho to the [2010] World Cup? That man is crazy!” . The image of this player in particular could be easily found on walls, motorcycles and vans all over Bamako. But in a sought-for relationship that has little precedent, these and other elements that circulate in the global mediascape do gain some significance. Moreover, this is neither incidental nor new. Once, a taxi driver in Bamako was thrilled to tell me of the day he saw soccer star Garrincha perform when Botafogo played the Mali team in 1972. Indeed, during the golden years of Brazil-Africa relations, excursions of Brazilian clubs to Africa were a common strategy for diffusing a good image of the country in the African continent. Pelé was a poster boy for Brazilian manufacturers advertising in Nigeria in the seventies , and even today, this player stands as a champion of views on the absence of racial prejudice in Brazil. More recently, elite players from the Brazilian national team went to Haiti as part of Brazil’s PR campaign as it assumed for the first time leadership of a United Nations peacekeeping force in 2004. It is not a small thing to be the top title-holder of the world’s most popular sport, and soccer is a language that is readily understandable all across the global South. I heard this idiom being deployed a number of times in cooperation activities. A cooperante in Brasília once explained to a group of African trainees that he liked “to measure hectares in terms of soccer fields, because it’s a language that everyone knows”. Embrapa itself produced an institutional video, played to African trainees in CECAT and in other cooperation settings,102 whose narrative thread was an analogy between soccer and agricultural development. Narrated in English, it begins with vintage footage of Pelé and Garrincha’s wonders with the ball, which suddenly mutates into a researcher examining a plant in a green field: “It wasn’t of yesterday that we began to do wonders in the fields. In order to improve our agriculture, we used our creativity to dribble our way around our adversaries: setbacks posed by climate and soil”. While showing an animated world map of all countries, North and South, with which Embrapa had scientific or technical cooperation initiatives at the time, it continued with statements like “Embrapa is a great success abroad; it is even greater when playing at home”, or “much to the joy of Brazilian fans, it is playing its part in ensuring the supply of staple foods, energy production and job creation.”