Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World by Pamila Gupta

Author:Pamila Gupta
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Conclusion: Portuguese-ness in post-apartheid South Africa

At the end of our conversation, Laide told me that if she could choose, she would live in Mozambique, ‘for its vibrancy’, she added. It would be a welcome return to her Portuguese roots even as her story made the impossibility of this clear to me. She is now settled in Johannesburg with her South African Afrikaans-speaking partner, owns a home in Melville and makes frequent trips to Cape Town to visit her sisters and brothers, and nieces and nephews who all live there. Francisco, on the other hand, is physically settled in Johannesburg, but less so in other ways. Even as he will always have a fear of moving – staying in the first place he found when he hastily moved north to Johannesburg from Grahamstown after finishing his studies at Rhodes University – he also travels frequently between South Africa, Portugal and Brazil. He has never returned to Angola. For him, ‘Portuguese-ness doesn’t go away’. He even met his Brazilian wife in Lisbon on a work-related trip. Duarte has a more complicated relationship to his Portuguese background. He has South African citizenship now and believes his life is in Johannesburg with his family close by, including six grandchildren. He did go back to Angola for a visit in April 2008, after thirty-three years of being in exile. All he saw was rampant corruption, consumerism and prostitution, he said to me as he shook his head sadly. Even as he blames Angola’s ills of today on Salazar for not allowing the country to develop properly,54 he still misses it. It will always be his country of origin even as he has spent half his life in South Africa.55

Retornados (the returned ones) is the label given to those Portuguese who left for Portugal in the aftermath of the decolonization of its third empire. They have become an expanding area of interest, both nostalgic and academic, as they are positioned in Lisbon as ‘second class citizens’.56 Those Portuguese refugees, however, who left for South Africa in the aftermath of Angola’s decolonization, have been less critically examined, as well as their absorption into a larger Portuguese South African diasporic community.57 Here I am reminded of AbdoolKarim Vakil’s important point to ‘problematize the memories of colonialism of and in the diaspora and for the diaspora’.58

In this concluding section, I want to reflect, however briefly, on this exact point, looking at these three testimonies as a refracted lens onto decolonization in Southern Africa. Firstly, I want to suggest that diasporas are often produced out of unlikely settings, particularly in interstitial spaces like decolonization, ones that have been poorly theorized, at the level of both material effect and emotive affect. As I have shown, decolonization is not only a deeply personalized and politicized historical process (and applicable not only to the Angola case) that can be accessed ethnographically, but it left large crevices in its wake, with certain people (like Laide, Francisco and Duarte) caught (or lost) in those cracks

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