“...our goal is to loosen and remove the hands, the gloved hands of the Queen from around our necks so that we can breathe.”
Jamaican human rights activist, Kay Osborne, on the visit to the Caribbean by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, aka, Will & Kate, March 2022
“Like most twenty-year exiles, he has lost his native country without finding another; but then it is as well to recognize the truth, that an individual country is by no means essential to one’s comfort.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne on expatriate sculptor Hiram Powers, from The French and Italian Notebooks, 1858.
There I was, exiled from my native South Africa for twenty years, betrayed by the England I had thought of as home, but yet to recognise that an individual country wasn’t essential to my comfort.
There I was, fondly imagining that a month or two in Brazil would afford my throat some relief from the grip of the British thumbs and English fingers that for the past four or five years has been suffocating my South African oxygen out of me — my last gasps of Drakensberg sky, Durban sunshine and Gauteng thunder, my last breaths of Cape cool and Free State freedom.
I needed to see and hear the world from the southern hemisphere again, to observe England and my English life from a radically diagonal perspective, not through the British colonial lenses of southern Africa or Australasia that had distorted my perceptions in the first place; not muffled by the infected face-masks of post-colonial English that pollute the world from Hong Kong to the Caymans.
I needed a winter sun to clear my head of England’s summer fog. I needed Joburg’s brightness without Joburg’s whiteness. I needed to be a stranger among strangers. I needed, most of all, to be estranged from my English self.
Mars would have worked; São Paulo was closer.
Brazil is a planet of its own — the world’s fifth biggest country by population, the sixth biggest by area, the eighth biggest by GDP. Fewer than five percent of Brazilians understand English. Fewer can speak it. Fewer still need to.
They see the world the way Russians see the world: Europe and Africa aren't in the middle of it. They aren’t even in the picture. These things matter. Eurocentricity isn’t just a state of mind — it’s a Mercator projection of the world as it isn’t.
I discovered soon enough that Brazilians don’t understand Spanish either. Not even very bad Mexican Spanish. Only the well-educated, the well-travelled, and the expats in Brazil speak English. But they also speak Portuguese, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Japanese and some Polish.
It could just have been the wine. More likely was a combination of the wine and the claustrophobia of being trapped in a language I had recently become too embarrassed to speak in enlightened company. So when one of the expats at the dinner party asked me how I had acquired my native tongue, my monolingual shame lit the touch-paper of my monomaniacal obsession. Before my English manners could intervene, I found myself asking them out loud whether they were as angry about the Portuguese colonisation of Brazil as I was appalled by my British Imperial heritage. I expected to hear (perhaps I wanted to hear) Lusitanian echoes of the indictments I’ve been digging up to damn the arrogance and exceptionalism of Brexit Britain.
The instantaneous silence suggested a very clumsy faux pas. The smiles in their eyes told me I could hardly have been more wrong.
My lesson in Brazilian history started with the starters in 1467. By the time we ran out of wine, words and song it was 1946.
I’ll describe only the amuse-bouche. And only because the consequences of Portugal’s colonisation of Brazil struck me immediately and madly as the way the history of South Africa could have unfolded— or has, perhaps, already unfolded — in a parallel universe not very far from this one.
It’s a South Africa in which, in the year 2022, increasing numbers of both black and white South Africans are electing to self-identify as Brown People, as Bruinmense, as Kleurlinge; in short, as Coloureds.
According to my host, toasting my ignorance with a mind-bendingly aromatic cachaça, the Brazilian transfiguration happened like this: When the British, the French and the Dutch failed to colonise the vast mass of the South American continent by force of arms, the Portuguese colonised it by sex.
“Sex?”
I didn’t quite choke on my bolinho, but I did hear three voices speaking simultaneously in my head: The dumb South African in me was saying, “Hey, what?” The Briton in me was saying, “Steady on, chaps.” And the Englishman in me was saying, “Please be so kind as to spare me the details, but only after you’ve described all of them.”
A black, hard-covered tome of yellowing pages was lying on my desk in the morning: The Masters and the Slaves, A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization by Gilberto Freyre, translated from the Portuguese by Samuel Putnam, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1946.
I came to this passage soon enough:
For the formidable task of colonizing so extensive a tract as Brazil, sixteenth-century Portugal had to avail itself of what man-power was left it after the adventure of India. With such left-overs as these, consisting almost wholly of those who were poor in economic resources, plebeian for the most part, and, in addition of Mozarabic extraction—which mean their racial consciousness was even weaker than that of the fidalgos or of the Portuguese of the north—with such materiel it was hardly possible to establish in America an exclusively white or strictly European regime. A compromise with the native element was imposed by Portuguese colonial policy and was facilitated by circumstances. The lustful inclinations of individuals without family ties and surrounded by Indian women in the nude were to serve powerful reasons of State, by rapidly populating the new land with mestizo offspring. One thing is certain, and that is that the bulk of colonial society throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was founded and developed upon the basis of a widespread and deep-going mixture of races that only the interference of the Jesuit fathers kept from becoming an open libertinism, by regularizing it to a large extent through the sacrament of Christian marriage.
The milieu in which Brazilian life began was one of sexual intoxication.
No sooner had the European leaped ashore than he found his feet slipping among the naked Indian women, and the very fathers of the society of Jesus had to take care not to sink into the carnal mire; for many of the clergy did permit themselves to become contaminated with licentiousness…
Casa-Grande & Senzala, as Gilberto Freyre’s seminal work is titled in Portuguese, goes on to describe in X-rated detail precisely the kind of carnal mire the colonial Jesuits would have been tempted to sink into.
For a white South African who grew trying to navigate his way to sexual maturity between the Scylla of English colonial prurience and the Charybdis of the Afrikaner Calvinist censors, it was a shock to learn not only that the book was first published in 1933, but also that it was prescribed high school reading in Brazil for much of the 20th century.
I was shocked, too, by how many layers of gloss he must have used to varnish over the surely indelible enormity of four centuries of sexual exploitation.
Freyre continues:
Among the Incas, the Aztecs, and the Mayas, the Spaniards hastened the dissolution of native values in their fury to destroy a culture that was either in the stage of semi-civilization or undergoing a molting process, and which to them appeared to be dangerous to Christianity and unfavourable to the easy exploitation of the great mineral wealth to be found there. The English did the same among a more backward folk, in the desire to keep themselves immaculate from sexual and social contact with peoples who were repugnant to them by reason of the difference in color and costume and who evoked before their racial consciousness and their Christian conscience the specter of miscegnation and a dissolute paganism…
The language is naturally, almost comically, offensive to 21st century sensibilities. We don’t and can’t talk about civilization like that anymore. I understand why. But when I was growing up it meant only that you had electric lights instead of candles, you ate with a knife and fork, and you washed your face in warm water instead of cold. Some people were lucky enough to have it and some people weren’t.
But it was the throwaway observation about the “immaculate” English that gave me pause. Loud bells were chiming in my head. They sounded awfully like Big Ben, but filtered through a thick smog hanging over the Thames one late nineteenth century night.
I was so engrossed in Freyre’s story I didn’t see the connection immediately. Before I was done it would come back to haunt me, like a nightmare suddenly remembered while you’re walking the dogs down a pleasant lane in the afternoon sun.
Freyre has his critics. Some, such as Hasenbalg (2005) and (Guimarães, 2009), have challenged what they call Freyre’s “myth of racial democracy” for legitimising social inequalities and/or suffocating a much-needed public debate about racism in Brazil.
Few of them, from what I gathered, had challenged his central thesis. And since his popularity, at least at expat dinner parties, appears to persist, I needed a contemporary source to verify the essence, if not the details, of his account of the sexual conquest of Brazil. I found it in Edward Telles, Professor of Sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA):
In contrast to a family-based colonization in North America, Brazil's Portuguese settlers were primarily male. As a result, they often sought out African, indigenous and mulatto females as mates, and thus miscegenation or race mixture was common. Today, Brazilians often pride themselves on their history of miscegenation and continue to have rates of intermarriage that are far greater than those of the United States.
Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil by Edward Telles won the 2006 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award from the American Sociological Association.
Skipping very delicately over the sanguine surface of Telles’ analysis so as not to disturb the historical horrors that must lurk beneath it (again), it is self-evident from the bewildering variety of facial features and the extraordinary subtlety of the gradations of skin colours of the people you see on the streets of São Paulo that, practically and bureaucratically, apartheid would have been impossible to implement in Brazil.
In the census of 1940, Brazilians were asked to classify themselves as Black, White or Yellow. When a fifth of the population (21.2%) refused to place themselves in any one of the three available colour boxes, the governing authorities classified all the abstainers as pardo, simply meaning grey-brown.
Just two generations later, when grey-brown was offered as a colour option in the census of 2010, the number of Brazilians who self-declared as Pardo (now honoured with a capital P) doubled to 43.13%.
Neymar and Ronaldo are Pardo. So too are many of Brazil’s most famous and popular novelists, poets and musicians.
The increase came only partially due to the continuous process of miscegenation. In the 20th century, a growing number of Brazilians who used to self-report as Black in earlier censuses chose to move to the Pardo category. Also a significant part of the population that used to self-report as White also moved to the Pardo category. This indicates not so much a changing of demographics but an evolution of perceptions and ideologies prevalent at each historical moment, and a growing racial and social awareness. (My italics)
Demétrio Magnoli, the Brazilian sociologist, describes this phenomenon as the pardização ("pardoization") of Brazil.
This is extraordinary, but not only because it is the diametric opposite of the social and political goals of Verwoerd’s policy of “separate development”, i.e. the crystal clear divisions of races and tribes that the implementation of apartheid demanded. It stands also in stark contrast to our lamentably optimistic post-1994 attempt to brand South Africa as “The Rainbow Nation''.
The aspiration of Pardo Brazil is to erase the distinctions between red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet by replacing them, psychologically and socially at least, with a single shade of grey-brown.
Somewhere, somehow, South Africans have to get over that rainbow.
Which is not to say that the shadow cast by Portugal’s colonisation of the country isn’t a long one. Brazil was one of the last of the world’s democracies to abolish slavery (in 1888), and a de facto variety of apartheid inevitably persists in a strong correlation between degrees of socioeconomic status and levels of skin pigmentation in the average Brazilian citizen, even now, in 2022, just as it does in South Africa, the UK, the USA and elsewhere.
Brazilian pride in their “history of miscegenation” is a real, living thing, nevertheless. Nowhere else in my (admittedly limited) experience of the world have I come across groups of men and women who talk as passionately or with such animation about the looks and body-shapes of passing strangers of both sexes as they do about art, music, literature, films and food. You’re as likely to overhear these conversations on Avenida Paulista, São Paulo’s magnificent business and shopping parade, as you are to hear them on the beaches of Paraty or Camburi.
Bust and bottom sizes will be contrasted and compared. The shapes of lips and the cuts of beards, the gaits and postures of young and old, the gloss of skin and the texture of hair, the length of limbs and the strength of chins, the black and the brown, the copper and the gold, the swerves and the curves, the height and the heft, the graces, the faces, the eyes, the thighs, the pose and the clothes, anything goes. Strikingly, too, it’s almost always the positive, seldom the pejorative; usually a subject, almost never an object. It’s as everyday as pastéis and as endlessly fascinating as the country’s cultural complexity. It’s as luxuriant as the foliage, as sensuous as snake skin, as sensual and sinuous as the sexy sibilance of the language. It’s an aesthetic, an art, a snack, a meal, a banquet, an exhibition, a celebration — a moving feast.
It’s a constant shock to all of the senses, mostly to the common one.
These notes will barely have scratched the surface of a subject as vast and as complex as the country itself. They are necessarily superficial because, like my visit, they are necessarily brief.
If I have idealised Brazil beyond the recognition of most Brazilians it has been only to illuminate the intractability of racial divisions in contemporary South Africa by relief.
Now that my thoughts turn back to England and the immaculate English, Gilberto Freyre’s “spectre of miscegenation” returns to haunt me in the shape of Sherlock Holmes. The mystery is how I hadn’t figured it out in 2016 when all the clues were written as large as the billboards that terrified the English into closing their borders and their minds against the virus of Europeanization.
In her brilliant 1998 treatise The Empire Bites Back: Sherlock Holmes as an Imperial Immune System, Laura Otis of Hofstra University confirms with elegant precision Freyre’s casual observation regarding the desire of the English to “…keep themselves immaculate from sexual and social contact with peoples who were repugnant to them by reason of the difference in color and costume.”
(Conan) Doyle's experiences as a doctor in South Africa taught him that the colonies' microbes were his Empire's worst enemy. In 1890, Doyle visited Berlin, where Robert Koch was testing a "cure" for tuberculosis, and in Doyle's subsequent character sketch of Koch, the scientist sounds remarkably like Sherlock Holmes. Based on Doyle's medical instructor Joe Bell, Holmes shares Koch's relentless drive to hunt down and unmask tiny invaders. Imperialism, by the 1880s, had opened Europe to the peoples, cultures, and diseases of the lands it claimed. Holmes plays a defensive role, as an imperial intelligence network to detect foreigners "passing" in British society. The revenge, blackmail, and counterfeiting around which the Holmes stories are built reflect readers' anxieties about infiltration, about punishment for their colonial theft, and about the legitimacy of their own identity in a socio-economic system built on contradictions. Holmes thus responds to conflicting social demands, exposing interlopers who mimic traditional signs of respectability, and protecting "respectable" citizens from the consequences of their colonial crimes.
Elsewhere in his Sherlock Holmes stories we find Conan Doyle describing interlopers from far-flung regions of the Empire as “black fiends” and “little black devils”. In The Sign of the Four we find a villain named Tonga, a native of India’s Andaman Islands, whose brethren are described as…
“...naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small fierce eyes and distorted features… They have always been a terror to shipwrecked crews, braining the survivors with their stone-headed clubs, or shooting them with their poisoned arrows. These massacres are invariably concluded by a cannibal feast.”
Hence the gloved hands.
The Imperial immune system that continues to protect the British establishment from the consequences of their colonial crimes is the same immune system that kept the English immaculate from miscegenation in Brazil, India, the Far East and Africa. It’s the immune system that inspired Cecil John Rhodes to shape the foundational legislation that would create apartheid in the Native Land Act of 1913; that motivated Conan Doyle to use his considerable influence to justify the egregious crime and crimes of the Second Boer War, and to throw his energies behind the Wellington House propaganda campaign to demonise the Germans as a pretext for the First World War.
It’s the immune system that gave us Brexit, and that now, by the nature of its consequences, urges me to miscegenate my English traits with those few I discover to be native to myself.
Casa-Grande e Senzala translates as The Big House and the Quarters, referring to the slave owner's residence, usually on a sugarcane plantation, and to the dwellings of the black working class where they originally worked as slaves, and later as servants.
Which brings me back, in the most painfully embarrassing way, to the grand farmhouses of New Dell and Drakesleigh in old Natal where I grew up, where the servants lived in kayas out the back, and where no black man was ever allowed to cross the thresholds beyond the front or the kitchen doors.
I just loved this chapter, GT. Loved it! Reminds me of 'Melting Pot' (Blue Mink 1968?) I have a mate at the club who's father was coloured. Vaughan went to a 'white school' and did his national service in the late seventies. One of our older members made the huge blunder of asking him the question one day, "Being coloured, how do you feel about racism?" If the octogenarian had been less frail, Vaughan would have given him a resounding klap but instead he spat out his response," Stan,... I'm fucken white, you cunt!"
My friend Brian, who you met at the 'Troyville Hotel' has an aunt who, during a visit to her family in Australia, was given for her birthday a laboratory test that examined her heritage. The results showed that she had a fair and significant mixture of North African and Portugese and a few other interesting genes in the blood sample that she supplied. I reckon the government should make it mandatory for all of us to have the same test, the result of which should be printed and stamped into each citizen's book of life.
Brazil! Wow!!
Brazil ... fascinating! In Italian, 'leopard' is 'gattopardo'... is that the same 'pardo'? Anyway, beautifully thought and crafted Gordon, as ever, so much to think about. Absolutely right that Brexit is an auto-immune response from centuries of deep and class-ridden racism. The biter bitten.