13

'Portugal Is in the Sky': Conceptual

Considerations on Communities,
Lusitanity, and Lusophony
Michel Cahen

This contribution is that of a historian rather than a specialist of the liter­

ature on Lusophone culture. It therefore comes as no surprise that this
piece starts by stating that such a culture does not exist. While there are
indeed various cultures that can be described as Lusophone because they
are expressed in the Portuguese language, the fact that they are expressed
in Portuguese does not make them 'sister', or twin, cultures. Furthermore,
does the fact that they use Portuguese make these phenomena specifically
Lusophone? Are the Portuguese Lusophone? Are the French Francophone?
We need to start by looking at the meaning of words. The aim of this piece
is to deconstruct, but necessarily in full, and so partially to deconstruct the
deconstruction itself.
On 17 July 1996, in Lisbon, a new interstate organisation was 'institution­
alised', the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (Comunidades
dos Paises de Lingua Portuguesa, CPLP). This was not merely a technical
meeting between the leaders of states whose official language was Portuguese
but an initiative with weighty ideological content. Incidentally, this was one
reason why the process was so long and drawn out and why it almost failed.
We cannot go into too much detail here,! but we should at least examine the
meaning of the letters C, P, L, and P in the Portuguese acronym. This new
organisation did not call itself an organisation, like the UN, the OAU, or the
OEI, but a community (hence the C); it did not call itself an organisation of
states but of countries (and one early project proposed 'peoples'; hence the
P, for paises); and it did not indicate that its members were countries with
Portuguese as an official language - which was true at least of the seven
founding states, as well as East Timor, which joined them in 2000 - but
instead Portuguese-language countries, as if Portuguese were the language
of the Mozambicans, Angolans, and today, the Timorese (hence the L and
P). Lastly, what was announced was not the creation of the CPLP but its
'institutionalisation', with impassioned speeches from the Portuguese and

297
298 Michel Cahen

Brazilian leaders (although not the Africans) about the fact that the commu
nity had actually existed 'forever' thanks to 'centuries of fraternal bonds' and
that the act of 17 July 1996, merely gave it official form. This discourse was
evidently unacceptable to the Africans and, in striking contrast to its effect
in Portugal, was only of minimal interest to the Brazilian intelligentsia.
So the debate in Africa revolved around the relationship with the former
coloniser's language and the relationship with the former coloniser himself,
but it was above all an intra-African debate on the African social milieus
produced by colonisation. Inevitably, the Creole milieus were accused by
the native movements (by which we should understand 'black', or even
'pro-authenticity') of not really being African because they were integrated
into the CPLP culture. 2 The debate surrounding adhesion to the CPLP was
one that focused on internal issues of power between social groups with
different historical trajectories. Nonetheless, Portugal always stood in the
dock as the accused, while Brazil, which had pretty much the same offi­
cial discourse, was spared. 3 This differing attitudes on the part of PALOP'
towards Portuguese and Brazilian discourse obviously expressed rancor
against the most recent coloniser, as well as a certain southern solidarity
with this other former colony of Portugal. But this solidarity overlooked
the totally different nature of the colonisations: in Africa, the societies were
invaded, exploited, oppressed, and partially acculturated by the coloniser,
but they were maintained as African societies; Brazil, with the exception of
the Indian populations, was a colonial society that acquired its independ­
ence without decolonisation 5 - it was a society maintained as a colony. 6
Brazil could thus join Portugal in its Lusotropicalist discourse? on 'common
origins', while the Africans vehemently rejected this line and pointed the
finger only at Portugal. As we can see, Lusophony is an eminently political
and ideological concept.

Lusitanity, Lusophony, empire

It has been widely observed that a number of colonial concepts have comfort­
ably survived decolonisation, in that what was condemned with Estado Novo
was much more its colonialism, as in policy, than the act of colonisation.

A lively colonial imaginary

The Portuguese imaginary has only been partially decolonised. In the
popular speak of today, it is not uncommon to hear an expression such
as 'a Africa nossa' ('our Africa'). Many Portuguese, including a number of
academics, often use the term Paises africanos de expressiio portuguesa ('African
countries of Portuguese expression') without seeming to have noticed
that these African countries have themselves adopted the term PALOP, a
description that is both neutral and very different since it states that it is
pe<fectly po"lble to me the Pmtugue,;e I•ngmge without the "P""'""
 'Portugal Is in the Sky' 299

being Portuguese: the expression is African. 8 The situation is the same in

France with the poorly named Afrique d'expression fram;aise ('Africa of French
expression'), which has however been more readily accepted thanks to the
backing of Senghor.
Let us take just a few recent examples. We saw the way Lusotropicalist
myths have persisted with the 1998 Universal Exhibition in Lisbon. The
political objective of Expo'98 for the Portuguese government was in itself
very interesting; just 12 years after the country's integration into the
European Union, the idea was to bring millions of tourists from Europe and
elsewhere to the capital and show them that Portugal had truly become a
modern European nation with more to offer than saudade, 9 fado, 10 poetry,
Fatima, 11 and caravels. But the message was soon lost with the choice
of 'oceans' as the underlying theme, which, although attempting (and
managing) to offer a modern portrayal (sustainable development, protec­
tion of the planet, etc.), immediately and inevitably brought to mind a
powerful image of the caravel: the roof of the main Expo hall symbolising
a sail (quite a technical feat, incidentally), the new bridge over the Tagus
(Vasco da Gama), the new train station (Oriente), the street lamps and
paving stones sketching the outline of caravels (Manya 1998), and so on,
not to mention the concomitant existence of the National Commission for
Commemoration of Portuguese Discoveries, as well as anti-Spanish polemic
accusing the burdensome Iberian neighbour of doing yet more damage to
Portugal's expression of exceptionality. However, the Expo commission was
careful not to include a pavilion specially dedicated to the discoveries and,
in so doing, incurred the wrath of a section of the intelligentsia.
But no-one, not even the far left, noticed that a pavilion was missing at
the Expo, one dedicated to slavery and the slave trade. While a Universal
Exhibition in Lisbon could do quite well without a Discoveries pavilion, it
should never, given the government's political objective, have ignored the
question of the slave trade- if for no other reason than to change the image
that Africans have of modern Portugal (Cahen 1998).

Africa nossa, Asia nossa

The colonial imaginary has not only persisted in the mind of the popu­
lace; it can be detected just as widely, although differently, among political
leaders from both the right and the left. This is spectacularly apparent in
Portuguese policy on Angola. Every government - with the semi-exception
of certain periods of the Mario Soares presidency - has in practice almost
unconditionally supported the MPLA political regime, 12 under cover of the
fact that Angola was 'very important to Portugal'. While it is perfectly logical
that African former colonies should be a matter of interest to Portugal, this
importance did not necessarily imply exclusive support for only one of the
political forces present (MPLA against Unita 13) and abandonment of the
Angolan civil society (churches, NGOs) in its efforts to reach a negotiated
300 Michel Calzen

end to the civil war. This 'MPLA = Angola' equation goes back a long way,
to the time when the MFN 4 openly helped the MPLA throw the other two
fronts (FNLN 5 and Unita) out of Luanda. There was obviously a (left-wing)
political bond but probably even more of a cultural and linguistic bond;
the Portuguese soldiers of the MFA were delighted to discover that the
MPLA leaders were like them, that is, having Portuguese as their mother
tongue, from a similar educational background, city dwellers, hostile to
African ethnicities, Third-Worldist, and so on. The MPLA was not perceived
as part of a 'foreign' world by the MFA, unlike the FNLA and Unita with
their discourse on African authenticity and blackness. Despite the massive
tensions surrounding the unilateral proclamation of independence, which
was made solely by the MPLA on 11 November 1975, Lisbon recognised its
government quite soon, on 23 February 1976 - but even then, it was only
the 82nd state to do so, thus heightening the MPLA government's contempt.
Because while Angola was very important to Portugal, Portugal had never
been very important to Angola. The Angolan government had always been
extremely rigid and often scornful towards Portugal, despite Lisbon's increas­
ingly generous concessions (Cahen 2001a; Messiant 1997, 2000, 2004). 16 But
Portugal wanted to stick with Angola, the jewel in the empire's crown, in a
way that it never did with Mozambique or Guinea-Bissau.
Another area in which the lasting legacy of the colonial imaginary can be
measured is the mistrust of French cultural activism in the PALOP. As early
as 1975, France included the PALOP among the African countries covered
by its then Cooperation Ministry, 17 which usually included only former
French colonies. Paris was clearly showing that it wished to annex the
former Portuguese colonies and include them in the Francophone world,
and the whole process was embellished with discourse as grandiloquent
as it was abstract about the necessary solidarity between 'Latinophone'
countries. Additionally, the material means at France's disposal to build
the magnificent cultural center of Maputo and the activism of the more
modest one in Bissau aroused anxiety and jealousy. And yet the French
threat was largely baseless. If one language was a threat to Portuguese in
Mozambique, it was English. Meanwhile, in Guinea-Bissau, the inexorable
progress made by the French language, owing to the geopolitical context
and the country's adhesion to Francophony, did not automatically mean
that Portuguese was in decline; indeed, Portuguese was a founding language
in Guinea-Bissau, while French was merely one instrument among others.
And it was not the Portuguese cultural centre that was burned down by
the crowd in the war of 1998- it was the French one. The problem is thus
largely imaginary; somehow, the cultural activity of France has always
been seen as somewhat invasive in a part of Africa which is not part of
Paris but of Lisbon.
A third example is the tremendous mobilisation of the Portuguese nation
in a show of solidarity with the Timorese people during the Indonesian
 'Portugal Is in the Sky' 301

militia massacres following the referendum of 30 August 1999. This extra­

ordinary movement (which went largely unnoticed outside Portugal and,
when all is said and done, was incomprehensible to the rest of the world)
was the result of a unification of the Portuguese nation due to the excep­
tional conjunction of three distinct, even opposing, historical trends. First,
the Indonesian massacres rekindled the Portuguese national(ist) tradition,
which recalled the shame of 7 December 1975, when Portuguese troops
withdrew without combat against the Djakarta military offensive. 18 Second
was the (often Christian) anticolonialist tradition; the Portuguese people
were in favour of this end of decolonisation in their former empire. Third,
and conversely, there was the Portuguese imperial and colonial tradition;
a Portuguese territory of Asia was being invaded. They had to help the
Timorese - Catholics, no less- who for years now, 'a noite, rezavam as escon­
didas em portugues' ('had hidden away at night to pray in Portuguese'). In
the historical contradiction between coloniser and colonised, 19 Indonesia
had emerged as a stranger in the 'usual conflict' between the two trad­
itional partners, perpetrating a war against the 'identity of the conflict' and
thus allowing the symbolic reunification of the old enemies against the
intruder (Cahen 2001c, p. 129). From the Partido Popular (People's Party 20 )
to the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Bloc 21 ), the entire Portuguese nation came
together on this issue.
Meanwhile, the third Angolan civil war was producing 800,000 casualties,
more than 20 times the Timor number. Nobody (apart from a few Publico
journalists) got excited about it, at least not to the extent of developing a
mass solidarity movement. The problem was that the Portuguese nation was
divided on the Angola issue and could therefore not speak to itself in the
same way as with Timor. It could not really bring Angola into the Portuguese
national imaginary, whereas it had no trouble doing so with Timor.
Lastly, we should mention the use and misuse of some fine expressions (or
even book titles) by great writers, often taken out of context. While 0 mundo
que o portugues criou (The world that the Portuguese created, Freyre 1940) is
unequivocally a founder of Brazilian Lusotropicalism and more generally
typical of the ideology of the 'discoveries' (relating to worlds created and
'invented' by the coloniser by negating the very existence of the societies
conquered), and while the same can be said of still common expressions
such as Portugal deu novas mundos ao mundo (Portugal gave new worlds to the
world), what about the very famous declaration by Fernando Pessoa, Minha
patria e a lingua portuguesa (My homeland is the Portuguese language), the
meaning of which is almost completely turned on its head in its current
(mis)use? It is worth quoting the passage almost in full:

I don't have any political or social sentiment. Rather, in a sense, I have

a patriotic feeling. My homeland is the Portuguese language. It wouldn't
grieve me if Portugal were invaded or taken over, because this wouldn't
302 Michel Cahen

bother me, personally. However, I abhor, with real hatred - and this is
the only hatred I feel - not those who write poorly in Portuguese, not
those who don't understand syntax, not those who write with simplified
spelling, but rather I hate the page that is written poorly by an indi­
vidual; moreover, I hate incorrect syntax - which is akin to people who
have been beaten up - and I hate spelling that has no graphical accents,
which is similar to the straight spit that infuriates me, regardless of who
is spitting. (Pessoa 1999)

Thus, the writer's declaration of love for his language, stating that he lives
in and for this language, totally disconnected from a territory or a national
identity, has been stripped of its meaning in countless speeches, articles,
and, as below, blogs:

My homeland is the Portuguese language. Portuguese is one of the

most widely spoken languages on the planet. It is spoken by more
than two hundred million people throughout the world. Eight countries
have Portuguese as their national language: Portugal, Brazil, Angola,
Mozambique, Guinea, Timor, Cape Verde, Sao Tome and Principe.
Portuguese is also spoken in various regions throughout the world, such
as Galicia (Spain), Casamance (Senegal), Goa (India), Macao (China),
etc. Portuguese-language countries created a community, the CPLP
[Community of Portuguese-Language Countries], which represents
an entirely common identity. [ ... ] The Portuguese language is a home­
land and a common identity for many people spread across the world.
[my emphasesj2 2

The lyricism of our bloggers merely neglects the Kristangs of Malacca

(Malaysia) (Fernandis 2000), the Burghers of Sri Lanka (Jayasuriya 2000,
2005), the 'true Portuguese' of Bengal (Caixeiro 2000), the prayers recited in
16th-century Portuguese in Sulawesi and on the Isle of Flowers (Indonesia),
all actual traces of an ancient colonial history that, nonetheless, do not
constitute Portuguese, or even Lusophone, communities at all.
The fine expression thus becomes empire. 'My homeland is the Portuguese
language' for a particular writer is reversed and becomes 'The Portuguese
language is a shared homeland' for the most diverse peoples. Of course we will
not deny that the common use of a language is a shared characteristic, but
contemporary Lusotropicalist discourse popularises the idea that countries
using the Portuguese language have a shared homeland, which is naturally
a little bit Portuguese. It is also significant that the common language is
referred to as 'national' (rather than 'official'), that Creole (Casamance) is
confused with Portuguese, 23 and that the most hackneyed myths about the
Portuguese language in Goa 24 and Macao are reused without the slightes
sense of doubt about the Lusophony of Mozambique and Angola.
 'Portugal Is in the Sky' 303

Social levels of language

Lusophony (in the same way as Francophony, of course) is a single blanket
term that smothers some extremely different social realities and incompa­
rable social statuses.
Language can be maternal or affective, that is, identity forming and
founding. For example, for the majority of French, Quebecois (still known
as French Canadians not so long ago) and Belgian Walloons (whose commu­
nity is called French, not Francophone), the French language is a strong
identity marker. It makes little sense to call them Francophone, as this
would mean they are able to hear French (in the rather Portuguese sense
of the word: entender). Of course they hear and understand it, but it is also
their identity forming language.
This is not the case of conquered peoples that have kept their national
languages. The new language is therefore either second or foreign. It is second
in situations where it is not the mother tongue but nor is it felt to be foreign.
This is the case of extensively Creole-speaking countries such as Cape
Verde and Sao Tome and Principe; no one speaks Portuguese in Cape Verde
(not even ministers, except when they sit in council), but thanks to Kriol,
everyone can understand Portuguese. This is not the case in Mozambique;
in the census of 1997, 6.51 per cent of Mozambicans had Portuguese as their
mother tongue (7.0% in urban areas, 2% in the country), 8.8 per cent had
Portuguese as the 'language most commonly spoken in the home' (26.1%
in urban areas, 1.4% in the country) and lastly 39.6 per cent considered
Portuguese as a language that they understood (without further details
about the level of comprehension) (72.4% in urban areas and 25.4% in the
country) (INE 1997). Obviously, unlike Kriol, the Bantu languages are of no
help in understanding Portuguese, which is a foreign language for the vast
majority (91.2%) of the population.
In such cases the language is an instrument, one which probably has
identity-forming effects, especially in the long term, but which does not
found the identity of social groups on a given territory. A large number
of Senegalese are true Francophones since they understand and can speak
French; a large number of Angolans, particularly in Luanda, are true
Lusophones for the same reasons. But they are still Wolof, Toucouleur, Peul,
or Mbundu, Bacongo, and Ovimbundu.
These countries should not build the same socioeducational and socio­
linguistic policies for populations that have such varied relationships with
the colonial language. In particular, literacy learned directly in the colonial
language can produce disastrous psycho-pedagogical results and can be one
of the factors behind high failure rates at school. Children need to learn to
read and write in their affective language, not in a foreign language. The
diversity of African languages is often put forward as an argument in favour
of a single language, but this is a technocratic argument corresponding to
the interests of the elite. However, there is no need for these languages to
304 Michel Cahen

be perfectly standardised and 'grammaticalised' for literacy to begin - espe­

cially as in most cases there are missionary materials available (dictionaries,
lexicons, grammars) which, although old and imperfect, can still be used.
But the argument also holds for the cooperation policies of former colonial
powers; are the substantial sums allocated to disseminating the Portuguese
(or French) language spent in the interest of the populations for whom the
'cooperation' is conducted? This policy is all the more counterproductive in
that it has been proven time and time again that starting literacy learning
in the affective language leads to better acquisition of the colonial language.
The question is actually social (privilege of an elite) and ideological (the very
idea of the nation and modernity). Many countries (including Mozambique
and, more recently, Cape Verde) have passed laws allowing schooling to
start in African languages. Aside from the fact that these languages are
not always the mother tongue of the children themselves (as is the case of
Kiswahili in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda), these laws are often improp­
erly or inadequately applied or suffer from the fact that, for lack of polit­
ical will, the financial means are not allocated and there is no long-term
teacher-training effort. Parents then come to see the learning of the mother
tongue as detrimental to the interests of their children - as was also the
case in France with the patois spoken by our grandparents- and themselves
identify with the colonial language. The very legitimate aspiration to social
progress is assimilated with a certain postcolonial modernity. In the space
of three generations a language can disappear, although the situations are
highly diversified. 25
More generally, language cooperation policies that do not take account
of the diversity of the language's social status are a case of old cultural
imperialism, sometimes with the best intentions. For example, around
Christmastime 1999, shortly after the drama in East Timor, the Commission
for Support in Transition to East Timor, a Portuguese interministerial
body, 26 conducted a major fundraising campaign- with the sweet little face
of a Timorese child on the prospectus, which bore the slogan 'Neste Natal,
contribua para que os meninos de Timor aprendam a (alar portugues' ('This
Christmas, please contribute so that the children of Timor can learn to
speak Portuguese'). Where did the 'learn to speak Portuguese' come from?
In Africa the issue of language is very closely linked to the imaginary of
the nation under construction. In a situation where the historical processes
of identification are weakened by the non-socially promoting nature of the
states, which are situated on the periphery of capitalism, 27 language is at the
heart of a paradigm of authoritarian modernisation. This is by no means
a case of a gradual process whereby ethnicities, although a long way from
disappearing, nonetheless merge into a pan-identity of anterior identities, a
nation of nations, in rather the same way that the British identity is a pan-
nation of the English, Scottish, and Welsh nations. In Mozambique, Guinea,
and so on, will Portuguese be the language of national unity (which is a
 'Portugal Is in the Sky' 305

nonpeaceful concept in exactly the same way one might say that English
will be the language of European unification), or will it be one language
among others, learned by pupils who are already literate in their mother
tongue? The model applied in the PALOP followed the first rationale to
the detriment of the second; the 'new man' had to speak Portuguese, build
concrete tower blocks, have no ethnic group, and promote state farms with a
high level of fixed capital. Socialism was accused, of course, but well before
that there was the idea of the modern nation, European-style and, in the
case of the PALOP, Jacobin-style; today the state farms have been privatised
and the telephones are mobile, but the technocratic development model
has barely changed and is not based on boosting the farming economy,
crafts, and small industry, all of which are able to generate resources in the
country itself. The paternalistic and authoritarian idea of 'modernising the
people' in order to forge a nation -that is, by negating the African societies
that were historically present in the border areas divided by colonisation ­
easily survived the so-called fall of Marxism. This shows that this was not
a consequence; on the contrary, Marxism was a contextual instrument in
subaltern Westernisation by the elite in these countries, the instrument of
their 'nationism' (desire for a nation).

The Portuguese legacy - a linguistic legacy?

As far as I know, there is little in the way of long-term studies on the reasons
why, after five centuries of colonisation, the Portuguese language has barely
gained a foothold in certain territories, while after much shorter periods, it
has survived, creolised, or even grown in others. Why does no one speak
Portuguese in Goa; why was Portuguese barely used even in the time of
Portuguese occupation? It is very possible that Goa was more Lusophone
in the 18th and 19th centuries than in the 20th century. It is possible that
the gradual economic decline of the Estado da fndia 28 encouraged a large
proportion of its elite to emigrate to Bombay or elsewhere in British India,
especially as the British were looking to recruit these Indians, who could use
the Latin alphabet. This explains why Goans (generally not Lusophone 29 )
were to be found throughout the British colonial administration in East
Africa and why from re-emigration to re-emigration there have always been
numerous, long-lasting Goan communities in London and Canada, while in
Portugal they have disappeared through integration. But the premise holds
true: the Portuguese language was not socially useful to these Goans in
their professional activity or for their identity-forming cohesion.
The same can probably be said of Macao, a city in which the Portuguese
language has never been more than a thin veneer. But what about Malacca,
which was Portuguese only from 1511 to 1641 and was conquered by a troop
of around a thousand Portuguese soldiers (or mercenaries serving Portugal)
and a few hundred Chinese under the orders of Afonso de Albuquerque?
306 Michel Cahen

How can it be that a Portuguese settlement remained and that Papia Kristang
(Portuguese Creole) survived until the first half of the 20th century? There
is every reason to believe that professional (fishing community), religious
(Catholic) and linguistic (Portuguese-based Creole) identification was at the
root of the social cohesion of this very small group. 30
As for Timor, there is not the slightest doubt that the Indonesian inva­
sion did the Portuguese language a huge favour. Not only did the Timorese
government declare Portuguese to be the official language (in 2002, along
with Tetum, one of the local languages) as an independence tool against
Indonesia and Australia, but the Catholicism I Portuguese language complex
was undeniably a driver of cultural and social resistance against Indonesian
oppression and the spread of Bahasa (Javanese) (Hattori, Gomes, Ajo, and
Belo 2005; Hull 1998). But is it a legacy? Portuguese is not spoken much in
Timor today, but still a lot more often than it was in 1975. There has been
an expansion of the language of Camoes owing to its social and political
utility; it is the language of the Catholic Church and the main instrument
of civil resistance.
Whether the language expands, declines, or disappears, what always
comes back is not the linguistic aspect but the social utility criterion. Quite
clearly, Portuguese was of no use to the Goans in upholding their social
identity, which already included the Indo-Iranian language Konkani and
then, as migrations came and went, English. Portuguese did not cement
the Goans' economic and professional status, and the lethargic situation
of Salazarist Goa (Begue 2006) did not change things. However, while no
one speaks Portuguese in Goa, not even the Catholic archbishop, there
are other Portuguese legacies on every street corner: people's names, the
architecture, Roman law, a higher percentage of Catholics than elsewhere
in India, and alcohol consumption. In addition, there is a certain anti­
English sentiment - a feeling of irritation towards the New Delhi Indians,
who are all too keen to consider that the Goans have remained excessively
Portuguese without wondering whether they themselves have remained
somewhat 'English', as Portuguese is strongly felt to be a colonial language,
while English is not.
In Bengali villages, the claim to 'Portugality' or Christianity (which are
often linked) obviously serves to maintain cohesion among village commu­
nities with a distant Portuguese political ancestry - probably villages
founded by descendants of Asian mercenaries working for the Portuguese
in the 16th and 17th centuries (Caixeiro 2000). Yet these Bengalis are not
distinguishable from other Indians in terms of language or religious rites
(there are many Christians in Bengal). The same was probably not true of
the Sri-Lankan Burghers, for whom the Creole language was linked to their
Christianity in an otherwise Sinhalese and Tamil world. However, their
demographic weakness was such that the process of their assimilation/
disappearance is almost complete today (there are still a few dozen people
 'Portugal Is in the Sky' 307

with Luso-Sri Lankan Creole as their main language). When, in 1999, Ivo
Carneiro de Sousa visited the communities of the Isle of Flowers (Indonesia),
where prayers were still recited in a 16th-century Portuguese they no longer
understood, the inhabitants were alarmed because they thought he was an
inspector coming to check that they had remained 'true Portuguese', which
they clearly were not. When asked the question 'Where is Portugal?' they
were unable to supply an answer. An elderly man from a community near
Djakarta gave a nice reply: 'Portugal is in the sky. 131
Lastly, let us mention those 'forgotten Lusophonies', the Agudas of Benin,
Togo, and the Niger Delta. The Afro-Brazilian communities in this zone,
descendants of slave traders who came over from Brazil (most notably Bahia)
or of slaves themselves who came back to Africa in the 19th century, have not
spoken Portuguese for decades, have in some cases even converted to Islam
(although only a minority), and made a point of supporting the govern­
ment against Salazar during the Fort of Sao Joao Baptista de Ajuda affair. 32
Nonetheless, the Afro-Brazilianity of the Agudas, with their own special
religious parades, their Portuguese names, a certain level of endogamy, a
rich architectural past, and a number of transatlantic trips to visit their
Brazilian cousins, clearly serves to ensure the imaginary cohesion of this
social milieu, only without the language.
In more directly political terms, we should also point out the legacy of the
Portuguese national imaginary. Portuguese may be the mother tongue of
only a tiny minority of Mozambicans today, but the idea of the nation as it
was conveyed by the Marxist-Leninist Frelimo and in certain respects today
by the neoliberal Frelimo, with the state as the main actor of the economy,
the homogenous identity of the people, the single official language, union
corporatism, the hypertrophied civil service, and so on, is all very Portuguese,
not to say Salazarist. This is quite a sizeable national legacy.
Religious, legal, imaginary, and national legacies - in our deconstruc­
tion efforts here, we are not attempting to deny or even to minimise
the legacies, but they are nonetheless more a case of Lusotopia than
Lusophony. The concept of Lusotopia was first put forward in 1992 by the
French geographer Louis Marrou to describe all the spaces and commu­
nities which, irrespective of their past and present languages, have been
more or less forged or fashioned by the history of Portuguese expan­
sion. Naturally, the same can be said of the former French and English
domains. But there is a specific Portuguese feature here, namely, a colo­
nial domain that is more markedly ancient and that spatially grew larger
more quickly3 3 than those of the other European powers, a long devel­
opment and a slow decline from the first colonial age, which produced
more social milieus linked with this particular period of colonisation. 34
Lusotopia is thus more resonant than Francotopia or Anglotopia. But for
all that, it does not provide the outline of an identity-forming or even
linguistic space.
308 Michel Cahen

What Lusophony cannot be and can be

A purely linguistic view of the question results in the definition of a commu­
nity according to a single identity marker, despite the fact that there are
many others, and additionally without any concern for the social statuses
of the language (maternal-affective, second, foreign). It more or less boils
down to considering that contemporary Lusophony is nothing more than
the end result of a historical process of dilatation of Lusitanity. In other
words, it is merely a continuation of the imperial imaginary, albeit without
colonialism as a policy but with colonisation as a sociocultural accultura­
tion phenomenon.
This inclination, which we already noted in the phrase 'African coun­
tries of Portuguese expression', is an integral part of a Portuguese nation­
alist tendency which glorifies Lusophony in order to make up for the small
size of the 'mainland rectangle', all the more so as integration into the
European Union since 1986 has emphasised this smallness. Owing to its
history, so profoundly rooted in the national imaginary, Portugal, unlike
Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, and Norway (4,640,219 inhabitants on 1
January 2006), is incapable of 'being peacefully small'. The expansion is
no longer military, of course, but Portugality still needs a predefined, reas­
suring space upon which to project itself: Lusophony. lt is an avatar of the
old Lusotropicalist tendency, according to which the Portuguese people had
the innate, hereditary gift of harmonious acclimatisation to other peoples,
usually in the Tropics. The question that this imaginary never asks itself (it
is true that imaginaries rarely ask themselves questions) is how the 'other
Lusophones' feel about the Portuguese way. And yet one only needs to study
the reactions in African countries to the creation of the CPLP 35 to see that
all this is merely perceived as Portuguese old hat and that it does not help
stabilise a healthy relationship with a country that, like it or not, has had its
importance in the history of the new African states.
Lusophony was very interestingly defined by Eduardo Louren~o as a
'specific area of intersection with other identities'; it is indeed defined by
a shared specificity, namely, the language, but this specificity is delimited
and relative (according to the social statuses of the language). In the era
of globalised merchandising, the fact that language has itself become a
commodity through privatised media is a not insignificant factor. 36 But it
is still only one factor. The Louren~o definition corresponds even better to
Lusotopia: if absolutely no one either speaks or understands Portuguese on
the Planalto Maconde (in Mozambique), in the New Conquests (Goa), in
Macao, or on some of the Bissagos Islands (Guinea-Bissau), even the 'specific
area of intersection' is no longer defined relative to the language.
Although the facile compilation of statistics on inhabitants of coun­
tries with Portuguese as the official language (rather than actual speakers)
pmdum ma,lve eno" in te<m' of the numbe< of Lu,ophone,, it '' "ill tme
 'Portugal Is in the Sky' 309

that the majority of these inhabitants have at least a smattering of Portuguese.

Furthermore, the other identity markers discussed earlier produce a certain
identity-based feeling, with or without the language. Otherwise, why would
the Mozambicans support the Portuguese or Brazilian football team during
the World Cup? But this is what could be called a 'light identity', one which,
moreover, is modulated according to social milieu. All else being equal,
it could be compared with what used to be the Soviet identity. The USSR
was never defined by its leaders as a nation (or even a nation of nations)
but as the 'homeland of socialism', in which there were dozens of nations.
People from the USSR felt first and foremost Russian, Armenian, Ukrainian,
Chukchi, and so on, but they also had that Soviet light identity. Lusophony,
Francophony, and even Anglophony (although in the latter case, the fact
that it has an economic hegemony makes the question more complex) could
all fall into the category of light identity.
As for the political leaders of the PALOP, who did not share the gran­
diloquent Luso-Brazilian discourse on 'shared origins' and 'centuries of
conviviality', there is not the slightest doubt that for them the CPLP was
just one political tool among others. Angola refused to join as long as Mario
Soares was president, 37 Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, and Sao Tome became
members after first joining Francophony, and Mozambique after joining the
Commonwealth (Cahen 200la).
Lusophony is therefore most certainly not a cultural area but instead a
specific postcolonial space, a 'relative space'. This in no way prevents it from
working with, for example, the expansion of neo-Pentecostalism or priority
being given to Brazilians when shops take on staff (in Porto for example)
because, according to the Lusotropicalist myth, 'Brazilians smile' (Machado
2004). Of course, there are cultures within Lusophony but not at the global
level of a Lusophone cultural community, unless this is reduced to just
Portugal and Brazil.
All of the above naturally also applies to Hispanophony, Francophony,
and Anglophony. However, in the Portuguese case the imaginary has been
heightened by the frailty of mainland Portugal, which is incapable of
forming a neocolonial 'backyard' of the French type (there is no 'LusAfrica',
no Portuguese version of 'Fran~Afrique'). Angola and Mozambique do not
view Portugal as a home country. 38 This absence of a neocolonial backyard
is a good thing and may lead to a new type of North-South relationship.
But for now, it merely feeds the Portuguese government's anxiety as other,
better-financed powers encroach upon Africa nossa. And yet it is the absence
of a LusAfrica which allows us to say that the Portuguese language has been
decolonised; Portuguese languages are indeed used from Timor to Brazil via
Maputo and Minho, but there is not a common linguistic homeland outside
minuscule social milieus, which are globally 'Afro-Luso-Brazilian'.
The light identity of Lusophony, that supra-identity bolstered by the
merchandising of language, is highlighted by people when it is in their
310 Michel Cahen

interest to do so; this is the case with Brazilians or Cape Verdeans who immi­
grate to Portugal (often considering it to be a step towards 'real Europe').
Conversely, we can but observe the total absence, long-term, of any bonds or
even convergences between the Brazilian Americans, Portuguese Americans,
and Cape Verdean Americans (formerly 'brown Portuguese') of the United
States. In France, Belgium, and Holland, countries where there are many
Portuguese, Cape Verdean, and Brazilian communities, rarely do they get
together, and there is no sense of a pan-community. Perhaps in Portugal
there is a certain complicity, particularly musical, between Cape Verdeans
and Brazilians.
Lastly, there is the generational factor. There is no doubt that the
Portuguese youth of today seem to be more detached from the 'caravels'
than their grandparents were in the Salazar era or even their parents at the
time of the Carnation Revolution, the Third-Worldism of which fitted in
perfectly with a modernised Lusotropicalism - Portugal could now have an
'exceptional relationship' with Africa, because with fascism dead, Portugal's
smallness would always prevent it from being imperialist. However, it is not
certain that the Portuguese firms based in Africa were more philanthropic
than their French, American, or Brazilian counterparts. Nonetheless, this
discernable distancing from the caravels by young people in Portugal has
not yet led to a sea change in discourse on Africa or in the Portuguese gran­
diose rhetoric.
The light identity that is Lusophony is typical of the fluid situations
that some people describe as postmodern. It does exist, but only rela­
tively and contextually, and is profoundly affected by the persistence
of history (Carvalho and Cabral 2004) in the heterogeneous spaces in
which it has lasted. That is why it cannot be 'reified' into a unified human
community.

Notes
* A previous French-language version of this article was published in Cahen 2007.
Some amendments have been made to the text with a view to this publication,
up to April 2011. My thanks go to A.-M. Binet and Presses Universitaires de
Bordeaux for their authorisation to publish this later version.
1. In particular, see Leonard 1995 and 1998 and Cahen 1997.
2. It was far more complicated in reality, as certain Creole milieus were strongly
anti-Portuguese. See Cahen 2001a. On the history of Creole milieus in Angola,
see in particular Messiant 2006.
3. On the Brazilian imaginary in Angola, see Santi! 2006.
4. PALOP is the Portuguese acronym for 'Portuguese-speaking African Countries'.
In Portuguese, the acronym stands for Paises Africanos de Lingual Oficial
Portuguesa, which literally means 'African countries with Portuguese as their
official language'.
5. When the Portuguese regent Pedro (later Emperor Pedro I) refused to go back to
Portugal, declaring, 'Fico' (I stay), his statement was paradoxically emblematic of
 'Portugal Is in the Sky' 311

this desire for independence without decolonisation: a native does not say 'Fico',
because the idea of leaving does not even cross his mind, even to refute it.
6. Colonisation generates entire societies (not only classes) and there is nothing
shocking about observing that even the black slaves of Brazil are part of the world
of the Portuguese coloniser rather than that of the indigenous colonised people;
they are the most exploited class in colonisation, but are exploited within the
colonisation, and not as an outside society invaded by the coloniser. This also
explains why there have been relatively few Indian/Black uprisings. Nowadays
Brazilians descended from European migrants are not descendants of colonised
people but of colonisers; and black Brazilians are descendants of slaves integrated
by force into the coloniser's world, not the colonised world.
7. It is not possible in this article to describe the Lusotropicalist constellation.
What we call Lusotropicalism is mainly neo-Lusotropicalism as it appeared in
the 1950s, when Salazar retrieved the theorisations of Gilberto Freyre, with
his full agreement. But while (and however open to criticism it might be) the
original Lusotropicalism of Freyre in the 1930s made interbreeding and inte­
gration in the Tropics the basis for a new civilisation, the later Lusotropicalism
made interbreeding a step towards 'whitening' and Westernisation. Lusophony
understood as a dilatation of Lusitanity is clearly part of this late Lusotropicalism
(see below).
8. On the paradoxical nationalism of the anticolonial fronts that did more for
the Portuguese language than the coloniser had in five centuries, see Cahen
2001b.
9. The sweetness (or pleasure) of nostalgia.
10. Popular music, probably of slave origin.
11. A place of pilgrimage in memory of the anti-Bolshevik appearances of the Virgin
Mary in 1917.
12. MPLA (People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola) one of the Angolan
anticolonialist fronts, which came into power in 1975 in a one-party regime,
then, from 1991, became an ultrahegemonic and endemically corrupted party
system.
13. Unita (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), an anticoloni­
alist group that survived the MPLA counteroffensive and the Cuban troops in
1975-76 and became the main armed opponent to the regime, initially with the
support of Maoist China and then white South Africa. Since its military defeat
in january 2002 and the Luena Agreements, Unita has become a legal political
party.
14. MFA (Movement of the Armed Forces [previously the Movement of Captains]),
responsible for the military coup which triggered the Carnation Revolution on
25 April 1974.
15. FNLA (National Liberation Front of Angola), the oldest Angolan anticolonialist
front, responsible for the major uprising of 1961, backed by the Mobutu regime
in Zaire and then by the USA. However, the FNLA did not survive the MPLA
counteroffensive and the Cuban troops. It still exists today but as a minor oppos­
ition party.
16. The first two of Messiant's articles have been republished in Messiant 2008, pp.
131-174 and 175-199.
17. The French Cooperation Ministry is now part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The two ministries had very different traditions, the first being 'populated' by
former colonial-era staff and the second by diplomats.
312 Michel Cahen

18. Although the Portuguese were unanimous in 1999, this does not mean that
the country was unanimous in 1975 in defending the independence of Timor.
General Costa Gomes, for example, had always imagined that Timor should be
returned to Indonesia, as Goa had been returned to India in 1961.
19. We should not forget the very difficult and bloody conquest of East Timor by the
Portuguese (Pelissier 2000) and the repression of the 1959 uprising.
20. Portuguese right-wing party.
21. Coalition of small far-left parties.
22. Taken at random from the countless sites and blogs, the Lusitania Portugal
blog can be described as somewhat caricatured. But while this is true in many
aspects (glorification of Portuguese history, etc.), its linguistic paragraphs do
not detract from the usual Luso-linguistic ideological landscape in Portugal:
http://grou ps.msn.com/smkq6tklbkrpsggg51116n9287/am inhaptriaalnguapo­
tuguesa.msnw
23. In 2004, there were around 1,700 people with Guinean Creole as their mother
tongue in Casamance, or 0.28% of the Casamance population and 0.016% of
the Senegalese population. About 20,000 Senegalese had French as their mother
tongue, or 0.188% of the population. French is still a foreign language spoken by
15% to 20% of Senegalese men and barely 2o/o of Senegalese women. It remains
the mother tongue of a tiny elite, probably because 55% of young Senegalese live
in rural areas, and very few of them go to school (source: http://www.tlfq.ulaval.
ca/axl/afrique/senegal.htm).
24. We should remember that the last Portuguese census in Goa (1960), before the
Indian military intervention, produced around 1% of Goans with Portuguese
as their mother tongue or the language most commonly spoken in the home.
Nowadays no one speaks Portuguese in Goa, although the colonial legacy can
be seen in many other features (Portuguese surnames, architecture, Roman law,
percentage of Catholics, alcohol consumption, etc.).
25. Certain African languages such as Wolof, Lingala, and Kiswahili are expanding
despite the prevalence of colonial languages.
26. Comissariado para o Apoio a Transifao em Timor-Leste, http://www.comissario­
timor.gov.pt/entrada/home.asp
27. In French history, for example, the fact that people from Alsace and northern
Lorraine, who have a German culture, identify with France is due in large part to
the legacy of the French Revolution: it was better for them to be citizens of the
French Republic than subjects of the king of Prussia. A state bringing economic,
social, and cultural progress will obviously have greater 'agglutinating power'
than a predator state.
28. Official colonial name for Goa, whose capital is Panjim.
29. Not Lusophone in Goa, these emigres had no reason to be Lusophone in British
Africa. These Goans did however have a certain knowledge of Portuguese, and
they maintained their Portuguese nationality. Portugal used them for decades,
up to the 1960s, to staff its consulates and vice-consulates in British East Africa
(Zanzibar, Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Pemba, and so on) with vice-consuls and
honorary consuls. The professional diplomats were only in Nairobi and Salisbury.
See Margret Frenz's chapter in this book.
30. In 1999, I asked Gerard Fernandis, a Kristang intellectual, whether he thought his
tiny community could survive. He was sure of himself on this question because,
he said, 'Government understood it's good for tourism ....'.
31. Conversation with the author.
 'Portugal Is in the Sky' 313

32. Benin (formerly Dahomey) became a French colony in 1892, with the fort of
Sao ]oao Baptista de Ajuda remaining as a minuscule Portuguese property,
totally surrounded by French territory and containing just one inhabitant, the
administrator. When Dahomey won independence on August 1, 1960, the new
government demanded that the fort be handed back. Salazar refused, ordering
the administrator to set the fort on fire before the Benin troops could inter­
vene (which he did not do, apparently). A compromise would certainly have
been possible, making the fort an extraterritorial pocket under the responsi­
bility of the Portuguese embassy. But Salazar would not hear of this, while the
Benin government wanted to test the loyalty of the Agudas. Portugal recognised
the annexation in 1985, allowing the start of restoration work by the Calouste
Gulbenkian Foundation. On the Agudas, see Yai 1997, Guran 2000, Amos 2007.
33. Although this is not comparable to the 'effective conquest of territories' of the
late-19th-century imperialist phase.
34. To specify: this fairly wide-scale production of social milieus related to the
first age of colonisation does not mean that interbreeding was more prevalent
in Portuguese colonisation overall than in the others. Some of these milieus
could be totally Asian or Bantu. Also, if there was one colonial period when
interbreeding was low key, it was the contemporary colonisation period, where
the main priority was 'whitening' the colonies. The unrivalled interbreeding
of Lusotropicalist myth was above all that of slavery. The Portuguese influ­
ence as regards the production of Creoles, by contrast, cannot be limited to
the Portuguese territories. First, there are territories that were Portuguese that
kept Creole (such as Fa d'Ambu, Annobon Island, attached to 'Hispanophone'
Equatorial Guinea). But territories that were never Portuguese are also concerned.
For example, Papiamento de Korsou, the main language of Curat;:ao, is based on
African languages, Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese, even though the island was
not a Portuguese colony.
35. Or even resistance among a part of the Timorese youth to the Portugalisation
of education. This youth, although anti-Indonesian, experienced the period of
linguistic Javanisation.
36. It also produces religious vectors. For example, while the neo-Pentecostal
churches are of North American origin, those that set up massively in Brazil
(lgreja unida do reino de Deus, etc.) more easily 'leaped' to Angola, Mozambique,
Portugal, and the Lusophone diasporas in Paris than in non-Lusophone areas.
37. Because of his supposed support for Unita.
38. This is perhaps less true of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau and does not prevent
the Angolan oil nomenklatura from shopping in the luxury stores of Lisbon.

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