The Retornados and Their “Roots” in Angola. A Generational Perspective on the Colonial Past and the Postcolonial Present

Abstract

Chapter 4: The retornados and their "roots" in Angola. A generational perspective on the colonial past and the post-colonial present A sketch of the field of investigation, Lisbon, May 2013 This year, the Africa Festival, including a celebration of Africa Day, is being commemorated in Portugal throughout the whole month of May.24 May, in Lisbon, at the Teatro do Bairro: I am watching a performance called The Last Message of Amílcar Cabral to the people of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde. Some images from documentary films depicting the Portuguese presence in Africa are being projected in a very dark room. Pictures of a family of Portuguese settlers living in a hut are repeated over and over again-they are lost in the depths of Africa. A message is vigorously hammered home for several minutes by one of the performers, a Cape Verdean who describes himself as a political activist: "Decolonise your minds! Decolonise your minds! Decolonise your minds!" The few spectators are young: a dozen people, including a couple comprising a child of retornados and a young Portuguese-Angolan woman.25 May, Rossio Square: The Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries, the CPLP, is being celebrated by several hundred people and by associations of migrants from Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, São Tomé, Angola and Mozambique, as well as some Portuguese families of retornados: they are all dancing. On the sidelines of this celebration of an Africa that is simultaneously "authentic" and "Lusophone", a group of young Afro-descendant activists are denouncing the neo-colonialist ideology of Lusophony and racism in Portugal. 1 This research, which was initiated as part of the FCT postdoctoral project "Legados contemporâneos do colonialismo na sociedade portuguesa pelo prisma das migraçoes" (SFRH/BPD/72232/2010), is part of a larger project, "Disrupted Histories, Recovered Past" (2016)(2017)(2018)(2019), jointly developed by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Care for the Future section (Swindon, UK), and the Laboratoire d'excellence (Labex), "Passés dans le Présent" section (Université de Nanterre), directed by Sian Sullivan (Bath Spa University) and Michèle Baussant (CNRS). 2 Quoting Gerald Bender (1978), Lubkemann suggests that 30% of the European population in Angola extends back more than one generation (2003, 79). The number of "retornados of African descent" who arrived in Portugal between 1975 and 1981 has been estimated at between 25,000 and 35,000 (Baganha and Gois 1998-1999, 260): "a figure possibly amplified if we consider the fact that many of those of mixed racial descent would be likely to be classified as 'black' at least in terms of the way they would be treated in everyday interaction within Portuguese society" (Lubkemann 2003, 89). This category of "retornados of African descent" is problematic because it refers to socio-historical realities of (de)colonization which are diverse.