Imperial Culture and Colonial Projects

The Lusophone World from the Fifteen to the Eighteenth Centuries

Diogo Ramada Curto

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781789207071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Beyond the immeasurable political and economic changes it brought, colonial expansion exerted a powerful effect on Portuguese culture. And as this book demonstrates, the imperial culture that emerged over the course of four centuries was hardly a homogeneous whole, as triumphalist literature and other cultural forms mingled with recurrent doubts about the expansionist project. In a series of illuminating case studies, Ramada Curto follows the history and perception of major colonial initiatives while integrating the complex perspectives of participating agents to show how the empire's life and culture were richly inflected by the operations of imperial expansion.

Part I

Language, Literature and the Empire, 1415–1570

What effects did the Portuguese expansion have on the formation of a national literature? This is the question that has caused most concern for successive generations of historians wanting to identify the nation through the construction of a canon of literary texts. Indeed, if one considers the existence of a process that is signalled by the chronicles of Gomes Eanes de Zurara, the dramas of Gil Vicente, the Décadas da Ásia by João de Barros and The Lusiads by Luís de Camões it will be possible to see the enormous impact that the expansion had on the formation of a national literature. However, can this impact be judged to be specific to Portugal? It would seem so if we are to accept the opinion that until the eighteenth century the discovery of new worlds had little influence on European literature as valid.¹ When, for example, François de Belleforest described Asia in his Histoire Universelle du Monde (1572), he based it on ancient texts; books published by the Portuguese – which included, according to the author, many other singular facts on those distant lands – are referred to but for him are not truly incorporated.²

Now, if we move from the hypothesis of specificity in Portuguese literature, this would have to be examined by three questions. The first relates to the relationship that exists between the acts and their written representation. The question is not a new one. Zurara refers to it when he declares: ‘What would the deeds of Rome have been had Titus Livy not written of them!’³ Throughout the sixteenth century, authors repeat the idea of the lack of interest shown by the Portuguese in celebrating their deeds. The same idea is connected to the opposition between arms and the arts, which should be analysed in comparison with other topics. Within the sphere of the different forms of seeing the existing relationship between acts and literary descriptions, Charles Boxer emphasized the disdain constantly shown towards sailors and seamen in comparison with that shown to soldiers.⁴ We need to know what place was occupied by actual arguments over petitions for concession of an honour in the process of representation in writing of the deeds of so many Portuguese. The second question is related to the circulation of literary models, with oscillations of different types and with the phenomena of synchronicity or exclusion that run through these discourses. A far more important question is how often the effects of overseas expansion were compared either with changes caused by the appropriation of the classical and Italian models throughout the sixteenth century, be this with the emergence of a national theatre or epic. A final problem lies in knowing how one can characterize sociologically that literature that is related to overseas expansion. The preoccupation with these social aspects prolongs a revision of the ideas created around the role of the state in the thrust of initiatives related to the expansion, namely the criticisms of the vision of a monopolistic state used by Vitorino Magalhães Godinho.⁵ Thus, among the chivalrous spirit, exchanges among court circles, professional groups or educated government employees, officials and merchants or even the rules of a civic humanism, the meaning of those discourses that are considered to be literary can only be entirely understood if we take into account the different peoples and the several readings that they adopted.

Notes

1. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492–1650; Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery.

2. De Belleforest, L’Histoire Universelle du Monde, fls. 55–55v.

3. De Zurara, Crónica do Conde D. Duarte de Meneses, 42.

4. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415–1825, intr.; Boxer, ‘The Politics of the Discoveries’, 264.

5. Godinho, Os Descobrimentos e a Economia Mundial.

Chapter 1

The Africans in Portugal

Between Presentation and Methods of Communication

The existence of a black population in Portugal is one of the aspects that is emphasized by foreign travellers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nicholas Lanckman de Valckenstein records the presence of Africans when writing about the festivities in Lisbon in celebration of the marriage of D. Leonor, the sister of Afonso V, to the Emperor Frederick III. On 13 October 1451, a group comprising Africans and Moors appeared before the bride-to-be with a dragon, after which they performed dances. Further on was a group from the Canary Islands, who paid homage to the Empress, again with dances, giving her a letter stating: ‘Although we are men from the forests who have come from distant islands across the sea, and have for a short time been dependents of the most serene king of Portugal, we were sent by our chiefs to these nuptial festivities.’ The ceremonies continued with many portrayals of the kingdom. On 14 October, in a display beside the cathedral, there was a celebration of the victories against the Moors, the submission of the Africans and the spreading of the Faith, with expressions of grief at the death of Don Fernando and, nearby, an exhibition of various wild animals. On the 17th of the month, before sunrise, Christians, Moors and men from all parts came singing in their own language and dancing. As the day progressed, an elephant appeared in the square with four trumpeters and four African boys, who handed out oranges to the spectators. Finally, on the 23rd, a new display was given with dancing and the playing of instruments in front of the palace where the Empress was staying. Christians, Moors, Jews and a group Nicholas Lanckman called barbarians, comprising Africans, Moors and men from the interior of the Canaries, all joined together.¹

From 1465 to 1467, the brother of the Queen of Bohemia was received in Braga by Don Afonso V, who presented him with two black slaves and a monkey. The King told him to take them to his own country, where there was none, since in Portugal they were in such abundance that they were sold in the same way as sheep.² Thirty years later, when Jerome Munzer visited Portugal, he recorded the presence of an African population. The Nuremberg doctor, who was received by King John II in Évora, noted the presence at court of many sons of African chiefs, who were educated in Portuguese customs and religion. Their origins were diverse, which can be verified by the different languages as well as by their colour, some being light brown, others black and yet others very dark. They all learned Portuguese and were then used as interpreters in discussions with African kings. According to this particular foreign visitor, the king was seeking the protection of the most important monarchs through these contacts, which were established by interpreters, together with the inevitable gifts, since it was not possible to bring them to submission – and even if it had been, it would not have been useful to have done so. In Lisbon, impressed by the number of black slaves, Munzer noted the difference between those who were light brown and came from the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn and those who were darker, who came from the equatorial areas.³

Throughout the sixteenth century there are successive records of the black population. The Fleming Nicholas Clenardo wrote from Évora in 1535 that slaves were to be found everywhere. In Lisbon, he suggests, their number is greater than that of the rest of the population, and they perform all domestic services. As far as he was concerned, this social integration led to sexual associations between the lords and their female slaves, with resulting children being sold in the market.⁴ Well into the 1570s, Filippo Sassetti divided the inhabitants of Lisbon into three groups: old Christians, new Christians and slaves. The last of these constituted about a fifth of the capital’s population, and the Florentine traveller and merchant emphasizes the diversity of their languages and the fact that the majority is occupied with the transport of products to and from the port.⁵ At the same time, Bartholomé de Villalba y Estaña refers to Lisbon as ‘madre de negros’, these being a vast number of people, some three or four thousand, who lived along the Tagus, pointing out in particular the black women who carried water.⁶ During this time, an Italian visitor on describing Portugal states in laudatory terms that conversion to Catholicism is not only found in the overseas territories but also among those who were taken to Lisbon from Africa and India.⁷

This impression of Portugal given by foreign visitors suggests two types of identity formation. On the one hand, more than a report on an observed reality these records allow us to observe the observer – for example, his astonishment when seeing a number of Africans in Lisbon (about 10 per cent of the population in the middle of the sixteenth century) – in contrast with the situation in other European cities.⁸ On the other hand, the same genre of writing allows one to identify the place occupied by the slaves and, in general, by the black population within Portuguese society in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. On this subject, it is necessary to consider above all a complex framework of social relationships where we find, within the sphere of types of idealization of a peninsular form of society, ceremonial or festive displays of groups of Africans as well as, during the period when Portugal was in dispute with Castile over the possession of the Canaries, inhabitants of the islands.⁹ In addition are the formation of a slave market; the domestic integration of the slaves; the development of sexual exploitation of black women; the formation of a vast number of marginalized and excluded people, with emphasis on the black population; and the attempts, which were perhaps somewhat timid, intent on their conversion to Catholicism.

Within this web of social relations, the signs of marginalization of the Africans remain a constant. In Lisbon, there were protests in 1515 regarding how little if any care was given to the corpses of slaves: they were left out in the open, eaten by dogs, with no religious care afforded them.¹⁰ However, one must accept that many practices of exclusion led to new initiatives and created other forms of social organization. For example, there was an organization of brotherhoods of Africans, many of them dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, which appeared in Lisbon and the Atlantic coast throughout the sixteenth century.¹¹ It is also important to remember the 200 men, the greater number of whom were Africans from the Lisbon coastline, who in 1513 made up the crew of the ships of Diogo Mendes de Vasconcelos in India.¹² And, on the fact that sexual exploitation of female slaves could be eradicated, one should consider the protest at the Funchal council offices in 1546 against those men from abroad, since they all lived with the female slaves, ‘who steal from their masters who keep them in order to clothe themselves and so it is that on this island there are many slaves, men and women, who are clothed’.¹³ So it is within this framework of social relationships that are included the various methods of communication relating to slaves and Africans.

Literary Uses of African Portuguese

The African tongue is found throughout the sixteenth century in literary constructions, and it came to be one of the traditional elements of Portuguese drama. In 1455, on the occasion of the wedding of D. Joana to Henry IV of Castile, the Captain of the Cavalry, Fernão da Silveira wrote a poem, imagining that an African was taking part in the festivities with a dance:

I am the king of the inhabitants of Sierra Leone

I have left my wife in haste

Since we have always served your father,

And many Africans are delighted you are the queen.

These people in this land are very good

They never enjoy themselves, they are always at war,

I don’t even know which dance to do in your land

But shall dance as we do in our land.¹⁴

In this text we can see that, from a social viewpoint, the language spoken by the Africans was used to identify an African king who was being portrayed in a regal ceremony. From a linguistic point of view, we note the generalized use of infinitives, of ‘to me’ (a mim) for ‘I’ and of the verb ‘be’ (estar) for ‘to be’ (ser).¹⁵ As well as the language, the dances represented further means of communication that served to identify the Africans: dances that here are reverential, in celebration of the monarchy but which the Ordenações would later censure.¹⁶

Some years later, Henrique da Mota wrote in verse, in the form of dramatic dialogue, about a barrel of wine that had been spilled. The clergyman, the owner of the barrel, accused a ‘perra de Manicongo’, his slave, of being guilty of this accident. The accusation was based upon the suspicion thrown upon the Africans in 1469 by the town council of Lisbon, which blamed the Africans for the many thefts occurring at the time and of spending the results of their crime in the taverns, where they would drink wine.¹⁷ But Henrique da Mota proved himself to be against this kind of suspicion and portrayed the slave girl as the victim of a flagrant injustice, capable of replying to her master: ‘there is a judge here/and I am going there.’¹⁸ The same linguistic aspects are repeated and, from a social viewpoint, the slave girl is portrayed as knowing the value of her rights and as able to turn to the authority of the judge. Among the passages in African Portuguese known in the dramas of Gil Vicente, we have the play Frágua de Amores, which is set in Évora at the time of another royal festivity, the marriage of D. John III to D. Catarina in 1524. One of the characters is an African slave who demands that Mercury and his forge of Love make him into a white man:

Make me white, I beg of you man,

And let my nose be well-formed,

And give me a thin lip, I ask of you.

My hand is already white.

But I speak the language of Guinea

If I speak as an African,

What point is there in my being white?

If the way I speak is African

And I don’t speak Portuguese,

Why was I shaped by the hammer?¹⁹

With his body transformed, but at the same time retaining his African speech, the same character portrayed by Vicente imagines himself to be the object of revulsion, both by white women and by one of his own, and ends up asking the mythical blacksmith to turn him back to his original colour. With this reversion, in which the character of the African slave appears riveted to his corporal and linguistic traits, we can deduce a moral lesson in defence of a static social order. However, in other plays by Gil Vicente, the social condition of the Africans, who are always identified by the use of the African langua...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I. Language, Literature and the Empire, 1415–1570
• Part II. Written Culture and Practices of Identity, 1570–1697
• Part III. Enlightenment and the Written Word, 1697–1808
• Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Places
• Index of Subjects