Narrating the Past/Perpetuating Violence:
The Afterlives of Colonialism in Two Heritage Sites in Cape Verde and Portugal
Sofia Lovegrove Student number: 12232483 MA Thesis in Heritage and Memory Studies Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Ihab Saloul Second Reader: Dr. Tamara van Kessel Word Count: 26,027 22 December 2020
Cover photographs (from top left, clockwise): screenshot of The Garden by Vasco Araújo; the Monument to the Discoveries in Lisbon (photo by the author, 2018); screenshot of Perpetual Circle by César Schofield Cardoso; the former concentration camp of Tarrafal (photo: Wim Reijnierse, 2020). Acknowledgements
This thesis wouldn’t have been possible if it weren’t for the support I received from many different sides. First of all, I would like to thank my thesis supervisor, Prof. Ihab Saloul, for his support and honest critique. Aware of my ambitions and trusting my abilities, he has encouraged me to challenge myself and to step out of my intellectual comfort zone from the moment I started the Masters programme, for which I am truly grateful. I am very grateful to Dr. Tamara van Kessel, my second reader and the coordinator of the programme, whose inquisitive mind and passion for learning and exchanging knowledge has inspired me throughout my studies. The many stimulating discussions we had throughout the programme and during my thesis process were invaluable. I would also like to thank my dear family and friends in the Netherlands, Portugal and the UK, who supported me with their encouraging words and actions, and with their confidence in me and my work. They endured my emotional and physical strain at times, and my occasional absences, aware of what this thesis (and the Masters programme) meant to me. A special shout out to my mum Stephanie, for pruning my English, and to my friend Zeno, who painstakingly read my early chapters and gave such valuable and sometimes harsh (but necessary!) critique. I am also grateful for the support of my colleague Veysel Yuce from DutchCulture, and his flexibility towards my several “holidays” to work on my thesis, not always at the most convenient of times, yet crucial for my research process. Being me, I could not go without mentioning my two cats, Noussa and Amadi, who, in times of pandemic and working from home, kept me company most of the way. Last but certainly not least, I would like to thank Tobias, whose endless patience and unconditional support made this thesis possible (again). To him, I dedicate this work.
Table of Contents
Introduction ...... 5
Historical and Mnemonic Backgrounds ...... 13
Cape Verde: (Re)covering colonial narratives of exceptionality ...... 13
Portugal: Between changing and unchanging narratives of the past ...... 15
The former incarceration site of Tarrafal: (Re)covering colonial narratives ...... 18
Historical background: The lives of the incarceration site of Tarrafal ...... 18
The Museum of Resistance: A transnational site of memory and collaboration ...... 20
The “virtual tour” of Tarrafal: Showing victimhood, telling resistance ...... 23
“Perpetual Cycle”: (Re)appearing memories, alternative realities ...... 33
Conclusion ...... 37
The Tropical Botanic Garden: Between re-emerging and aphasic memories ...... 40
Historical background: The garden as a layered landscape of violence ...... 40
From Colonial to “Tropical” Garden: Repressing memories of violence ...... 45
“Garden with history": Showing the other in 1940, telling violence in 2020 ...... 50
Conclusion ...... 56
Conclusion: Narrating the past, perpetuating violence ...... 60
Bibliography ...... 64
Literature ...... 64
Online resources and newspaper articles ...... 72
2
White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Toni Morrison, Beloved
It annihilated my very thought processes to imagine how anyone could make a better world when you reproduced the very things that in this one cause so much pain and anxiety to so many, when you recreated the forms that were so reprehensible. Tsitsi Dangarembga, The Book of Not
3
4 Introduction
I start this thesis with two epigraphs that reflect and connect several topics explored in my research. At the core of Toni Morrison’s quote is the idea of the hierarchical and violent contrast between white or light and black or dark, referring to the racial structures of power imposed by colonialism, a central topic of this thesis. I view the “jungle” as a metaphor for the allegedly uncivilised character of the colonised “other”, a perception that endures today in the contemporary othering and exclusion of dark bodies. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s words refer to the idea of imagination, in this case, the way the (colonial) past is imagined or perceived in the present. My thesis centres around contemporary practices of imagination or representation and how these, in Dangarembga’s words, can work to reproduce and recreate particular power structures and ways of knowing and doing that stem from the very past that is being imagined. The historical structures of power that worked to imposed difference during colonial times, reproduced today through contemporary practices of representation, are at the core of my research, and are particularly well reflected in Morrison’s and Dangarembga’s works. Discussions about how countries remember their colonial pasts, and calls to change dominant narratives about these histories, have been growing in former European colonial powers.1 This shift - developing around the 1990s and increasing exponentially in recent years (as seen in the recent Black Lives Matter protests)2 - has involved critical reflections and engagements with these pasts, based on a realisation of the unequal power structures in which knowledge is produced, and of the impact of these pasts on the present in a myriad of forms (Allen, 2019; Modest, 2020; Van Huis, 2019). The way the colonial past has been dealt with in former colonised countries, on the other hand, seems to have followed different processes. Generally speaking, the immediate post-independence period was usually marked by a quest for self-representation and a rejection of colonial-era narratives (Marschall, 2008: 347-349). With time, however, narratives often shift, a process informed by when and how countries gained independence, by their particular experiences of colonialism, and by their continued (or not) relationship with the former colonial power (idem). In this thesis, I explore and compare how two countries with long-lasting, deeply entangled yet unequal histories of colonialism - Portugal and Cape Verde - remember their colonial pasts today. In Portugal, a growing willingness to address the injustices of the colonial past and their contemporary
1 This, in turn, should be contextualised within a broader change in how (especially Western) societies relate to the past: from a celebratory emphasis on past triumphs, to a reflective effort to come to terms with negative legacies of the past. This development, registered in the last few decades, has witnessed the increasing acknowledgement of painful and shameful events of countries’ histories, which has often involved turning places, sites and institutions connected to those histories into “heritage sites” and “memorial museums” (e.g. Ashworth, 2008; González-Ruibal & Hall, 2015; Logan & Reeves, 2009; Macdonald, 2016; Siyi, 2020; Sodaro, 2018). 2 A recent and visible example of this shift was the toppling and defacing of statues representing problematic narratives about colonial figures and events during the Black Lives Matter protests that spread around the world in 2020, reignited by the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 in the United States (e.g. Bromwich, 2020). These protests have, in turn, stemmed from and reinforced the impetus for a further and deeper investigation of countries’ and cities’ involvement in colonialism and slavery (e.g. Illien, 2020).
5 implications lives alongside a persistent narrative that sees this past in a Eurocentric and positive light, eliding its many histories of violence (Jerónimo, 2015: 33-39; Rosas, 2018: 9-12). In Cape Verde, during the period leading up to and following independence in 1975, an anti-colonial sentiment, marked by a distancing from Portugal, a cultural and political approximation to Africa, and the centrality of the liberation struggle, characterised dominant narratives about the past. However, since the 1990s and especially the 2000s, a move towards more neoliberal and Western-oriented politics has been accompanied by a cultural reconnection to Portugal (and Europe more generally) and a silencing of the country’s colonial past (Cardina & Rodrigues, 2020). In this thesis, I examine how the colonial past lives on today in both countries in the way in which it is remembered and represented at two heritage sites, with the aim of contributing to ongoing discussions about the need to recognise the colonial past as a central element of Western modernity and address its impact on the present (Cardina & Martins, 2018: 13). I do this by analysing the narratives (re)produced at two national heritage sites in Cape Verde and Portugal associated with episodes of colonial violence, given that due to its symbolic and frequently affective character, “heritage is often the tangible focal point and barometer of how ex-colonisers and ex-colonialists assess colonial spaces, artefacts and empire more generally” (Marschall, 2008: 348). The site in Cape Verde is the former incarceration site of Tarrafal, built in 1936 by the Estado Novo or New State, Portugal’s fascist-leaning dictatorship that lasted from 1933 to 1974, mainly under the rule of António de Oliveira Salazar. Initially created for Portuguese anti-fascists, it later received political prisoners linked to anti-colonial movements from Cape Verde, Angola and Guinea Bissau. Conservation and musealisation efforts have been taking place there since the late 1990s with the involvement of the Portuguese state, and today its Museum of Resistance is the most visited museum in Cape Verde (Lusa, 2020). The site in Portugal is the Tropical Botanic Garden of Belém, a former colonial garden, aimed at supporting agricultural and botanical research in Portugal’s African colonies in the twentieth century (Castela, 2010: 82). For a few months in 1940, it housed the Colonial Section of the Estado Novo’s Exposition of the Portuguese World, which included a display of human individuals from Portugal’s colonies (Sapega, 2008: 22). Today, this site is a public garden located in the so-called Monumental Area of Belém, a neighbourhood of Lisbon, and since 2019, it has been undergoing large-scale renovation. I examine the official narratives (re)produced at both these sites, and unofficial narratives engendered by artists who offer alternative readings about them and the memories they embody. My thesis is guided by the following question: how do memory narratives articulated in and about national heritage sites reflect the afterlives of colonialism in Cape Verde and in Portugal today? My research lies at the intersection of cultural heritage and memory studies, since it explores the politics of cultural memory at work in two heritage sites. As Caitlin DeSilvey eloquently wrote, “we live in a world dense with things left behind by those who came before us, but we only single out some of these things for our attention and care”, because they are seen as “mnemonic devices” that allow us
6 to remember and recall aspects of the past for contemporary purposes (2017: 3). My thesis focuses on collective cultural memories, i.e., representations of past experiences articulated, represented and exchanged between people through cultural media (such as museums, heritage sites, films, etc.) (Rigney, 2005: 15). Both the garden and the former prison were singled out by governmental agencies for their mnemonic potential and categorised as “national heritage”. For that reason, they have been invested with a sense of collective memory, for which I view them as (re)producing official national narratives about the past. As Stuart Hall argued, drawing on Benedict Anderson’s idea of “imagined communities”, “national heritage” is a powerful source and vehicle of cultural meanings about the past that serve to bind the individual members of national communities under an allegedly shared national identity (Hall, 1999: 4-5). However, these narratives of national identity based on allegedly shared pasts are characterised by their selective and biased character, given the fact that they are often constructed to be, as Aleida Assmann puts it, “identity-enhancing and self-celebrating” (2014: 553). The European colonial past, involving a great deal of violence towards non-Europeans, has often been downplayed or downright silenced in official narratives, because it does not fit (and even challenges) national self-celebrating narratives. For Hall, the problem with official narratives and national heritage that claims to be of and for everyone, is that its discursive articulation is intended for a perceived culturally homogenous society and therefore those who do not see themselves represented in these narratives are automatically excluded (1999: 6). Central to my thesis is thus the idea that what societies choose to remember collectively, through which media, by whom and for whom, plays a central role in constructing and reproducing notions of belonging and non-belonging. By examining official narratives (re)produced at national heritage sites I am able gain an insight into what and who is seen as belonging to the nation, and through which mnemonic devices. This is an urgent line of inquiry when focusing on Europe, given the changing and increasingly diverse character of postcolonial European societies which derives, to a great extent, from the colonial past itself (Buettner, 2016: 417-425). In former colonised nations, this is an equally important topic since official narratives are usually deeply connected to the colonial past and the decolonisation period (Marschall, 2008: 355-356). Miguel Cardina and Bruno Sena Martins describe collective memory practices in these contexts as somewhat contradicting, given the way anti-colonial struggles often informed the creation of imagined communities in the newly independent states, that stemmed from colonial rule (2019: 117). Furthermore, these societies are often characterised by a heterogenous population, as is the case of Cape Verde (Fiddian, 2000: 10), where one can assume an equally heterogenous engagement with the past exists. I view the two heritage sites and the narratives produced in and about them as “afterlives” of the colonial past, a central concept in my research for allowing me to work through two interconnected
7 phenomena.3 First, the way things from past are brought back to life in the present through selective heritage and memory practices, seen for instance in the acts of restoration, musealisation and interpretation. In this sense, both Tarrafal and the Tropical Botanic Garden represent remains of the past which were deemed important to preserve, thus allowing them to live on in the present. Secondly, and mainly, the manner in which the colonial past continues to inform practices of representation in the present, such as heritage and memory practices, which in turn stem from political and epistemological power structures inherited from these pasts. In Saidiya Hartman’s words, “[t]he past is neither inert nor given. The stories we tell about what happened then, the correspondences we discern between today and times past, and the ethical and political stakes of these stories redound in the present” (2007: 133). My understanding of the enduring effects of colonialism is to a great extent informed by “decolonial” thinking or “decoloniality”, a school of thought that shares many similarities with postcolonial theory (Bhambra, 2014). Decoloniality emerged in what we now call Latin America as a critique of the self-proclaimed universality and superiority of Western knowledge and culture, an epistemic hegemony which is seen at the basis of and as reinforced by centuries of Western imperialism (Quijano, 2007). Aníbal Quijano articulated the concept of “coloniality of power” to describe the structures of control and power that emerged during the so-called modern period and that enabled the emergence of Western hegemony (2007: 168-178). These structures, according to Quijano, operate on the political, social and economic levels (the remit of geopolitics), and on the level of epistemology (the remit of knowledge production) (idem). They derive their legitimation from the narrative of modernity, characterised by ideas of progress and development, with Europe as its point of origination, and by celebrating Western civilisation’s alleged achievements while obscuring its “darker side”, i.e., coloniality (Mignolo, 2011: 2-3; Mignolo, 2018: 107). In other words, decolonial thinking argues that the contemporary (neoliberal) world order and power structures, as well as enduring ideas about the superiority of Western civilisation, justified and were reinforced by centuries of European colonialism. At the core of decoloniality is thus the idea that there is no modernity without coloniality, i.e., there is no modernity without colonial violence (Mignolo, 2018: 105-109). A central mission of decoloniality is to render visible the power structures inherent to the production of knowledge from a Western standpoint, through “a consideration of what that geopolitics enables to be known and how it is to be known” (Bhambra, 2014: 118). In my thesis, and through the concept of afterlife, I aim to grasp how
3 Many important works - both academic and literary - have addressed the ways in which the colonial past continues to live on today in a myriad of forms, such as racism and social inequalities, both in former colonised and coloniser nations. I include here some works which have informed and inspired much of my thinking about the “afterlives” of colonialism: Buettner, E. (2016). Europe After Empire. Decolonization, Society, and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Coates, T.-H. (2015). Between the World and Me. London: The Text Publishing Company; Henriques, J. G. (2016). Racismo em Português. O Lado Esquecido do Colonialismo. Lisboa: Tinta-da-China; Hartman, S. (2007). Lose your Mother. A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. NY: Farrar, Straus and Girous; Mignolo, W. & Walsh, C. (2018). On Decoloniality. Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham & London: Duke University Press; Morrison, T. (2006). Beloved. NY: Everyman’s Library; and Wekker, G. (2016). White Innocence. Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
8 the colonial past endures in Portugal and Cape Verde, by exploring what kind of knowledges are perpetuated in the way these pasts are told or narrated, and by reflecting on the contemporary political and ethical stakes of this narration. My research is based on visual and textual narrative analysis, an approach that draws on insights from different disciplines and sub-disciplines, such as decoloniality, narrative theory, which in turn derives from literary studies (Bal, 2002: 11), and cultural studies. Informed by literary theory, I consider questions of presentation - who speaks, who speaks what language, who speaks with what authority, who speaks to and for whom - in order to examine the effect of the narrative (Culler, 2011: 88). I view narrative as a form of representation, for which I draw on Stuart Hall’s understanding that representation “refers to the practice of producing and circulating meaning through language” (2003: 1). Language is itself a system of representation that, through signs and symbols (written word, images, objects, etc.), allows humans to construct meanings and transmit them to others (idem). The language I examine to understand the narratives produced in and about the garden and the former prison focuses mainly on texts presented on signboards (located in situ and on digital and online media of communication), images and exhibited objects (such as photographs and maps) and artworks, and on the relation between these forms of representation and the physical space in which they are located. To produce narratives and to discursively attach them to certain objects, is thus a way of representing the past and attributing meanings to it and the objects that past is seen to embody in a rather authoritative way. These narratives, central to the practices of heritage and memory, are important because they help articulate notions of collective identities, and consequently, ideas of belonging and non-belonging. This thesis follows a comparative approach that operates on several levels. First, I compare the contexts of the former coloniser and one of its former colonies, where colonialism was experienced and is remembered differently. Through this comparison, I aim to counter the tendency that grew since 1975 whereby the entangled histories of Portugal and its former colonies have resisted comparison, thus disabling what might become a deeper understanding of these pasts (Cardina & Martins, 2019: 130). Secondly, I compare the narratives produced at two heritage sites that embody different forms of violence and fulfil contrasting contemporary functions (González-Ruibal & Hall, 2015: 150). Whereas Tarrafal was created for and witnessed overt political and physical forms of violence that are still visible in its material remains, the garden existed before it became associated with violent practices, which were characterised by their subtle character, leaving no explicit traces. Today, the former prison is a musealised site aimed at transmitting memories of the past, whereas the second site is a public garden, used mainly for leisure activities and scientific research. With this comparison, I consider the extent to which the character of these sites and of the violence they were implicated in play a role in the narratives constructed. Thirdly, although I focus mainly on official narratives, I will contrast these with unofficial narratives. This difference is loosely informed by Rodney Harrison’s distinction between official and unofficial heritage (2013). The former refer to those narratives (re)produced through professional and state sanctioned heritage and remembrance practices (conservation, memorialisation, etc.) within
9 institutions (such as museums) and in the public sphere (commemorations, street names, etc.). While official heritage narratives often stem from legislation, such as National Heritage charters, unofficial or alternative narratives are located outside the official or dominant narrative, and are not recognised by particular legislation (Harrison, 2013: 14). Unofficial narratives frequently work to contest the totalising claims of official narratives, and are often driven by marginalised or new groups in society, whose demands for (narrative) change are intertwined with claims for recognition (Van Huis et al., 2019: 5), leading to a “democratisation” of dominant narratives (Hall, 1999: 7). Ann Rigney argues that public remembrance shifts in line with social frameworks within which historical identity is conceived, since “the sense of sharing memories, of having a past in common, is arguably a precondition for the emergence of such groups in the first place” (2005: 23). In the case of postcolonial European countries, for instance, ethnic minorities from former colonies and their descendants, Europeans who once lived in former colonies and veterans of the decolonisation-era conflicts are often particularly vocal about the need to change official narratives (Buettner, 2016: 424). Hence “the identification of new groups seems to go hand in glove with the production of ‘counter-memory’ that challenges dominant views of the past”, and bring new memories into circulation (Rigney, 2005: 23-24). The creation of counter-memories is, however, not exclusively the remit of “new groups”, nor is it a European-specific phenomenon, and can occur in the context of an increasing critique of European Enlightenment’s idea of “universal knowledge” (i.e., the totalising claim to single knowledge), alongside a “rising cultural relativism which is part of the growing de-centring of the West and western- oriented or Eurocentric grand-narratives” (Hall, 1999: 7). For Hall, these two developments mark a significant change in the way Western and non-Western societies relate to “heritage” and the past more generally. This contesting, decentring and delinking from Western narratives and epistemologies, and an engagement in critically “re-constituting” different forms of knowledge and practices are central to decoloniality (Mignolo, 2018: 120-121). I argue thus that narratives that contest and offer ways of thinking and doing otherwise, should be seen as deriving from and feeding into decolonial practices that aim to contest Western epistemologies’ claims to truth. Heritage sites connected to historical violence often bring up feelings of pain and/or shame and mean different things for different people, depending on how individuals and groups relate to those histories, for that reason, they often reveal dissonances regarding the narratives they (re)produce (Logan & Reeves, 2009: 3).4 By comparing official and unofficial narratives, I aim to examine these dissonances and thus the differing ways in which particular pasts are remembered in the Cape Verdean and Portuguese societies today. My research is necessarily delimited by choices made regarding the methodology, as presented above, and the scope of analysis, based on two case studies and particular sources. Firstly, my research
4 “Dissonance”, to follow Graham, Ashworth and Turnbridge’s well-known definition, refers to a condition of “discordance or lack of agreement and consistency as to the meaning of heritage” or, I would add, representations of the past (2002: 24), since “all heritage by being someone’s, must disinherit someone else” (idem: 240).
10 centres around an understanding of heritage that stems from Western genealogies of thought (Harrison, 2013: 23). “[A]lthough we can probably assume all human societies have some form of relationship with objects, places and practices to which they attribute significance in terms of understanding the past and its relationship with the present” (idem), in focusing on (national) heritage, I do not examine other forms and locations of engagement with the past that are equally or perhaps more relevant in a non- European society such as Cape Verde. Nonetheless, given the focus of my research on the afterlives of colonialism, a Western-informed approach to engaging with the past seems to me a relevant choice. Secondly, in giving primacy to official narrative production, my examinations of unofficial narratives are less extensive, focusing on two examples of alternative representations of the histories and memories these sites embody. Thirdly, by focusing on the narratives produced by particular actors and through specific cultural media, my research excludes a consideration for the readers or viewers of these narratives, as well as a more in-depth exploration of the affective hold of material culture, and posthumanist theories developed within the “material turn” in the humanities (e.g. Ireland & Lydon, 2016). Besides methodological and theoretical delimitations, and as Farhana Sultana argues, it is essential to be aware of one’s positionality, since it moulds one’s interpretations and the knowledge produced in the act of researching and writing (2007). While I attempt to do so throughout my research, it would be false to state that my condition as a white, female, and relatively privileged European, my experiences and Western-oriented worldviews, and the emotions that the topics addressed in this thesis conjure in me, did not influence my analysis and ultimately, my arguments. Furthermore, my research was partly limited by the difficulty to access sources by Cape Verdean scholars, and one of my objects of analysis, given the travel restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Added to my more extensive knowledge of the Portuguese context, these constraints certainly had an impact on my analysis of the Cape Verdean context. Given these delimitations, I would like to emphasise that this thesis represents but one possible reading of the issues, objects and contexts examined. This thesis is structured into three main chapters and a conclusion that brings back and further reflects on the main arguments put forward in previous chapters. The first chapter examines the development of memory traditions in Cape Verde and Portugal about their (colonial) pasts since 1974, the year that marked the end of Portuguese colonialism and of the Estado Novo regime, and how these have changed (or not) over time. This chapter identifies and explains the contrasting ways in which mnemonic traditions have developed in both countries, and serves as a background against which my reflections and the arguments I put forward in the following two chapters should be understood. The second and third chapters constitute the main part of this thesis, wherein I examine the narratives produced respectively in the former prison of Tarrafal in Cape Verde and in the Tropical Botanic Garden in Belém, Portugal. In both chapters, I start with a brief historical background about these two sites, while elucidating why I perceive them as sites of colonial violence. Throughout both chapters, and
11 given the comparative nature of my thesis, I reflect on how these sites, and the narratives produced in and about them, differ (or not) and why that might be the case. The second chapter focuses on Tarrafal, which I view as a transnational memorial site museum. In this chapter, I introduce the analytical concept of the “epistemic authority” (Bal, 1996), central to my narrative analysis in this and the following chapter. Today this site is simultaneously the Museum of Resistance and the national heritage site of the (ex-)Concentration Camp of Tarrafal (IPC, 2020a). I analyse the official narratives produced by the National Institute of Cultural Heritage, as seen in its musealisation efforts. Considering I was unable to visit the site in person, I focus my analysis mainly on a virtual tour created by this institute in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic to allow the site to be visited from a distance. As I will argue in this chapter, the current two official names of Tarrafal point to the dominant official narratives imposed on the site today - resistance and victimhood. As an unofficial narrative, I examine the video artwork Perpetual Cycle, created by Cape Verdean artist César Schofield Cardoso and exhibited at Tarrafal in 2017. My examination of these two objects, a virtual tour and an artwork, reveal that the official narratives are ridden with dissonances which involve the reproduction of colonial-era epistemologies. The third chapter focuses on the Tropical Botanic Garden, which I view as a layered landscape of violence. I analyse the dominant narrative articulated through the recent and ongoing renovation project, and more specifically through the new online and on site signboard system, developed by the National Museum of History and Science (MUHNAC), the official entity responsible for managing the site. The artwork The Garden, created in 2005 by Portuguese artist Vasco Araújo, and exhibited in different locations in Portugal (Araújo, 2016) constitutes the object through which I explore other possible readings of the meaning of this site today. Contrasting with my analysis of Tarrafal, I argue that the official narratives produced at this site are characterised by contrasting and to some extent contradicting approaches to engaging with the colonial histories of violence this site is implicated in. Taken together, my analysis of two tangible sites and the official and unofficial narratives produced about the pasts that created them, represents an attempt to explore the afterlives of colonialism at work in cultural heritage and memory practices in Portugal and Cape Verde today. With my research, I hope to contribute to scholarly and public discussions about the need to recognise the colonial past as a central element of Western modernity, which continues to inform ways of doing, thinking and being, not only in Europe but also in former colonised spaces. In bringing together not only a former colonial power but also a former colonial context, I emphasise the ubiquitousness of the afterlives of colonialism today.
12 Historical and Mnemonic Backgrounds
Cape Verde: (Re)covering colonial narratives of exceptionality
The history of Cape Verde is deeply entangled with Portugal’s colonial project, since the ten islands that make up the island nation were uninhabited until mid-fifteenth century when the Portuguese settled them (Sarmento, 2009: 525-526). Its population derives from a mix of Europeans and Africans from the Guinea Coast, brought to the islands as enslaved people (Andrade, 2002: 264-265). With limited natural resources and a semi-arid climate, the importance of Cape Verde stemmed from its geographic location, which the Portuguese made use of as a “base of invasion and of dispossession of the African continent”, and as a key site for the transatlantic trade in enslaved people (Lima, 2020). From the seventeenth century onwards, this trade shifted towards present-day Guinea Bissau, causing Cape Verde to lose its strategic position and to the white elites to leave. This enabled some of those born on the islands, (allegedly) culturally and racially closer to the Portuguese, to occupy positions in the administration of the islands, leading to the emergence of a “Creole” elite and a system of racial hierarchy whereby a lighter skin colour placed individuals on a higher rank. These Cape Verdeans were also often assigned intermediary roles as administrators in other colonies (Henriques, 2016: 106). This racial differentiation was reinforced under the Estado Novo, during which Cape Verdeans were not subjected to the “Indigenous Statute” that was imposed on the populations of Guinea Bissau, Angola and Mozambique (Cardina & Rodrigues, 2020: 10, footnote 2). This colonial history dictated the development of a narrative - which endures today - whereby Cape Verdeans, particularly the lighter- skinned elite, tend to see themselves as “special” kinds of Africans, for their cultural and racial proximity to Europe. For some, however, the lighter skin of many Cape Verdeans, constitutes a reminder of the violent impact of colonialism on the country (Rodrigues, 2016: 107). The independence of Cape Verde on 5 July 1975 is intertwined with the history of the Portuguese Estado Novo: this regime ended on 25 April 1974 with a coup d’état in Lisbon (known as the Carnation Revolution), following more than ten years of colonial/liberation wars in the African colonies. Known in Portugal as the “colonial war” or wars,5 the conflict that took place between 1961 and 1974 in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau, and affecting also many Cape Verdeans, is known in these countries as “liberation struggles” or “war of independence” (Cardina & Martins, 2018: 16). In the years preluding and following independence, a narrative of heroic national resistance developed in Cape Verde, and political legitimacy and symbolic recognition were granted to those who participated in the liberation struggle, with the anti-colonial leader Amílcar Cabral as the key figure
5 In more conservative circles it is sometimes also called Guerra do Ultramar (or Overseas War), which refers to the term used by the Estado Novo itself (Cardina & Martins, 2018: 16).
13 (Cardina & Rodrigues, 2020: 3).6 The memories of the fight against the Portuguese became central in the articulation of narratives of nation formation and national identity, and of “the return of Cape Verde to ‘Africa’, which would materialize through a project of binational unity with Guinea-Bissau” (idem). The PAIGC (African party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), that ruled both countries until 1980, promoted a “re-Africanization” as a means of social and cultural emancipation and as political tool (Nolasco, 2019: 96). As Sabine Marschall has shown, this seizing of self-representation and move away from the former coloniser is common in many formerly colonised countries after independence (2008: 347). Official memory practices, however, started changing in the 1990s: in 1991, the first multiparty elections took place, leading to a political transition towards a more neoliberal philosophy on the part of the new governmental elites (Cardina & Rodrigues: 2020: 4). This political and economic shift was accompanied by the emergence of a discourse founded on the concept of “crioulidade” (creoleness), which, reproducing colonial-era discourses of racial hierarchy, operated as a mechanism towards upward mobility and the whitening of Cape Verde’s elite (Nolasco, 2019: 95-97). The gradual (re)approximation to Europe manifested itself on the level of representation, whereby the neoliberal, creole elites actively fostered the disqualification of the liberation struggle as the “origins narrative” and gradually erased the centrality of anticolonial heritage and the cultural connection to Africa. The narrative of resistance continues to be regarded as part of national heritage given the international recognition it has received, and since the elites now in power derived their symbolic capital to some extent from this struggle. However, it has become side-lined in favour of a Western-oriented narrative that highlights cultural and historical continuities with the colonial past. This was made particularly evident by the change of national symbols (such as the national anthem) and the return of statues and street names representing colonial-era figures (Cardina & Rodrigues: 2020: 5-10). These political/economic and corresponding mnemonic shifts have been working to “reconfigure the place of Cape Verde in the world, but also with(in) itself” (Cardina & Rodrigues, 2020: 10) in the context of a rise of tourism and the expansion of markets (Nolasco, 2019: 96). These developments coincide (at least chronologically) with political developments that started in the mid- 1980s in Portugal, whereby a great deal of diplomatic effort was put in motion to set up a forum of Portuguese-speaking nations, in the hope it could serve as a vehicle for the diffusion of Portuguese influence. The result of these efforts to create a kind of “geolinguistic empire”, to borrow Pedro Aires Oliveira’s term, resulted in the creation of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CLPL) in 1996 (2017: 16), still active today. Given the structural and economic weakness of the former metropole, according to Oliveira, this could hardly be characterised as a “neocolonial” initiative. Nonetheless, it has managed to support Portugal’s postcolonial reapproximation to its former colonies,
6 Although Cape Verde was not one of the “battle grounds” of the colonial/liberation wars, many Cape Verdeans were involved in these struggles, particularly in Guinea Bissau (Cardina & Rodrigues, 2020: 3).
14 particularly in Africa (idem). Cape Verde, perhaps unsurprisingly, was one of the founding members (CPLP, 2020). This turn to an “anti-anticolonial” discourse has dominated especially since the 2000s, when the colonial discourse of Cape Verdean exceptionality gained fresh new impetus with a reinvigorated emphasis on the 1930s Claridade movement and aspects of Cape Verdean identity that were seen as deriving from a cultural and historical connection to Portugal, encapsulated in the idea of crioulidade (Cardina & Rodrigues, 2020: 5-10). The Claridade movement “sought to find its roots in a crioulidade, which it considered to be the essence of “Cape Verdeanity” and in which the African is diluted in the European, thereby mitigating the violence that produced this racial mixing as a result of the forced relationship between white colonists and their slaves” (Nolasco, 2019: 97). This development has been working to elide centuries-old histories of colonial violence, while legitimising and normalising the system of racial hierarchy inherited from colonialism that endures today (Rodrigues, 2016: 114-116). This political and epistemological approximation to Portugal and the West in general, is increasingly criticised for the way it denies the violence of colonialism upon which the alleged creole identity of Cape Verde is was based (Lima, 2020.). In a recent article, Alexssandro Robalo describes what is institutionally and discursively happening in Cape Verde today as a “whitewashing” of the country’s history, memory, imagination, tangible and intangible heritage, whereby the memory of slavery and colonialism are silenced by the political and intellectual elite in an attempt to prevent them from negatively affecting the country’s relationship with Portugal and Europe more generally (Robalo, 2020).
Portugal: Between changing and unchanging narratives of the past
The Portuguese colonial project was one of the longest and most problematic: one but needs to think of country’s leading role in Transatlantic slavery; of the violent “campaigns of pacification” that led to the effective occupation of the former colonies at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century; and of the widespread use of forced labour until 1974 (Jerónimo, 2015: 33-39). However, and as many have argued, the dominant and official narrative in Portugal about national identity and the past is characterised by its Eurocentrism and a denial of colonial violence (e.g., Rosas, 2018: 9-12; Buettner, 2016: 190-191). According to Cardina and Martins, there are several factors related to the specificities of the Portuguese colonial project and the circumstances which led to its end which together help understand the politics of silence at work in Portugal. First, the narrative of the “Discoveries”, i.e., the maritime explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which led the Portuguese to “discover” parts of the world (Cardina & Martins, 2019: 118-119), has for long been at the core of Portuguese collective identity, and was significantly reinforced by the Estado Novo (Sapega, 2008). Secondly, the development of the ideology of “lusotropicalism” (Portuguese tropicalism) in the twentieth century, which defined Portuguese
15 colonisation as something more benign when compared to the colonialism of other European powers. This ideology, which became the almost official narrative of the Estado Novo, was used to describe an allegedly innate and specifically Portuguese predisposition to colour-blindness and “miscegenation” in the “tropics” (Cardina & Martins, 2019: 119-120).7 Thirdly, the Estado Novo received relatively limited opposition in Portugal regarding its colonial rule. Rather, opposition was relatively late and was mostly to the colonial/liberation wars rather than to colonialism itself (idem: 120). Fourth, the colonial war and its significant impact was, while it was happening, concealed in Portugal by the regime: for instance, the arrival of dead and wounded soldiers was hidden from the public, contributing to a lack of knowledge and/or interest amongst populations even after 1974 (idem: 121). Fifth, the process that established democracy in Portugal was deeply intertwined with the colonial war, since the group of military men (known as the Armed Forces Movement) who led the Carnation Revolution in 1974 were former soldiers of the Forças Armadas (Armed Forces) fighting in the colonies. This had a significant impact on public debate: “the fact that the democratic and postcolonial political order was founded with a very strong contribution from the army, necessarily immersed in many of the unspeakable events of the war” meant there was little will to condemn the war after 1974 (idem: 122, my translation). Sixth, thousands of Portuguese living in the African colonies (mainly Angola and Mozambique) were forced to return to Portugal (becoming known as “retornados” or returnees), and the way the government prioritised their re-integration and the negative impact of their return on Portuguese society, contributed to a sustained unwillingness to critically address the war and colonialism itself (idem). Finally, the fact that the war took place far away from Portugal also had an impact on the way in which this event was remembered (idem: 122-123). Although silence dominates dominant narratives in Portugal about the colonial past and the colonial war, since the 1990s, and increasingly since the 2000s, artists, writers, scholars, and others have been critically addressing these histories, and particularly the colonial war (Allen, 2019; Cardina & Martins, 2019: 124).8 According to Irène dos Santos, from the 2010s onwards, memory seems to have become a public issue in Portugal. Dos Santos argues that the post-1974 generation has been
7 The development of the ideology of “lusotropicalism” to interpret Portuguese colonialism, was developed by the Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre. This narrative characterised the Portuguese as being colour-blind, with an innate capacity to mix with others cultures and adapt. It was a narrative that was strongly embraced by the regime and Portuguese elites in the 1950s, and it had a very visible expression in popular culture in the last decades of the dictatorship. Furthermore, this perspective was used internationally by the Portuguese authorities to legitimise colonialism and to resist international pressure towards granting independence to the colonies (Cardina & Martins, 2019: 119). Although this ideology does not manifest itself explicitly today, the idea of Portugal’s “historical exceptionality” is very much alive and fuels forms of “banal nationalism” (Billig, 1995) through discursive and representational mechanisms that elide the violence of the colonial past and the colonial/liberation wars (Cardina & Martins, 2019: 119-120). 8 For instance, the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra has been carrying out several original research projects that focus on the memories of Portugal’s colonial wars (and other European colonial histories). An example is the ongoing project “Memoirs. Children Of Empires and European Postmemories”. Outside academia, documentaries and biographic accounts for more or less broad publics have been proliferating about the colonial war. The website of the Bloco de Esquerda (Left Block) political party recently compiled a list of films, documentaries and literature on the Colonial Wars that demonstrates this proliferation (Carneiro, 2019).
16 claiming and demanding “a new relationship of Portuguese society with its recent past”, revealing a change in the meaning and the use of memory towards “a category of social and political practice mobilised by the individuals and groups we observe” in society (2019: 2). Hélia Santos adds that, in the past four or five years, the creation of a number of associations of young people of colour, such as Djass (Association of Afrodescendants) in 2016 and INMUNE (Institute of the Black Woman in Portugal) in 2018, have been creating space within the dominantly white public sphere and demanding that Portuguese society reflects on its narratives about the past and national identity (idem). The epitome of this development can be seen as Djass’ project to build a memorial to the victims of slavery, which won the Municipality of Lisbon’s Participative Budget competition in 2017/2018. Its construction was planned for this year, but has been delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic (Djass, 2019).
17 The former incarceration site of Tarrafal: (Re)covering colonial narratives
Historical background: The lives of the incarceration site of Tarrafal
In this chapter, I answer the first part of my research question: how do memory narratives articulated in and about Tarrafal reflect the afterlives of colonialism in Cape Verde today? To do this, I examine the official narratives produced at the former incarceration site, articulated and transmitted through a virtual tour of the Museum of Resistance created this year. Considering that “museums, monuments, archives, and the concept of conserving heritage for its intrinsic values and as ideologically motivated public- memory practice were introduced to Africa through colonialism” (Marschall, 2008: 356), the act of transforming this former colonial prison into a National Heritage site and a museum can be seen as an afterlife of colonialism, for the way it applies Western epistemologies and practices to engagements with the past. In this chapter, I examine closely how the official narratives produced at this site through these conservation and musealisation practices might further reflect the enduring effects of colonialism in present-day Cape Verde. I view Tarrafal as a transnational memorial site museum, since it constitutes a musealised space located inside a historical site of violence, and because the memories articulated there speak to social groups and are informed by frames of remembrance and mnemonic traditions located beyond the borders of the nation-state. I argue that the official narrative produced at Tarrafal, characterised by the dominance of the resistance and victimhood tropes, is ridden with silences and dissonances, and involves the reproduction of colonial-era epistemologies which stem mainly from its location in Cape Verde and from the transnational collaborative efforts (namely the involvement of the Portuguese government) to preserve particular memories that this site is seen to embody. Furthermore, I examine an alternative reading of the meanings of this site through the artwork of Cape Verdean artist César Schofield Cardoso, exhibited inside Tarrafal in 2017. Cardoso’s Perpetual Cycle, in critically engaging with the official narrative produced there and broader contemporary representations of history and identity in Cape Verde, while offering other narrative possibilities, adds important layers to my understanding of the ways in which the country’s colonial past lives on in Tarrafal (and the country) today. Tarrafal is located near Chão Bom, on the island of Santiago and it had three phases of use. It was created in 1936 by the Estado Novo as a “penal colony”, for Portuguese political prisoners, in the context of the regime’s first major repression wave in Portugal (Caldeira et al., 2016: 83).9 This
9 Although it was created as a “penal colony”, many authors writing about its first phase seem to more frequently use the term “concentration camp” (e.g. Brito, 2018). This might be because archival materials use both “penal colony” and “concentration camp” to refer to this former prison, however, further research would be required for me to fully understand the choices behind these terminologies. I opt for the term (former) “incarceration site” or “prison” to distance myself from the potential connotations of particular designations.
18 authoritarian regime imprisoned opposition in Portugal and its colonies, in prisons often administrated by the state police, created in 1933 as PVDE (Surveillance and State Defence Police), and after 1945 renamed as PIDE (International and State Defence Police), which came to be infamously known for its secret police services (Mateus, 2004: 23-24). During its first phase of use, however, Tarrafal seems to have been run by the Ministry of Justice (Caldeira, 2010: 34). Tarrafal is known as the “camp of slow death”, in reference to the poor medical care and living conditions, which were enforced as punishment (Caldeira et al., 2016: 82-89). By 1954, when it was forced to close due to mounting international pressure, 340 Portuguese political prisoners had done time at Tarrafal (Lopes, 2012: 13) and 32 passed away (Rosas, 2018: 67). According to Alfredo Caldeira, Tarrafal also received a few Spanish men who fought in the Civil War against Franco (2010: 25). The PIDE was formally established in the Portuguese African colonies in 1957, due to the growing threat of decolonisation, evident in the anti-colonial sentiment that was spreading across the colonies (Mateus, 2011: 27-29). The few studies available about the PIDE in this context show that it was even more violent than in Portugal, often resorting to torture and forced labour (Mateus, 2011: 107; Rosas, 2018: 55-60).10 Furthermore, it was an important element of the colonial system, providing information to the Portuguese Armed Forces during the colonial/liberation wars. It was in this context that Tarrafal reopened in 1961 as the Labour Camp of Chão Bom to imprison those accused of having connections to anti-colonial liberation movements (Brito, 2018: 279). 107 Angolans, 109 Guineans and 20 Cape Verdeans went through this camp until it closed in May 1974, when the prisoners were released. Four men (from Angola and Guinea Bissau) passed away during this phase (Brito, 2018: 280), but as Cape Verdean historian José Vicente Lopes has pointed out, all prisoners, from the first and second phases, suffered significant health and mental problems due to poor living conditions and violent treatment, which endured long after their imprisonment (2012: 205). According to Fernando Rosas, Tarrafal, the Estado Novo prison that received the most international attention for its cruelty, was in fact an “upgrade” in relation to the violence that took place in the many other colonial prisons, as well as informal sites of imprisonment, torture and forced labour, located across Portugal’s twentieth century colonial domains in Africa and Asia (2018: 67). A third, lesser-known period of use took place between May 1974 and July 1975. According to Lopes, the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974 triggered a heated dispute between the PAIGC and its local opponents, the UPICV11 and the UDC,12 to take control of the country (2012: 183). Whereas the PAIGC aimed at immediate independence and political unity with Guinea Bissau, other groups hoped to maintain some connection to Portugal, and were generally against the PAIGC’s communist
10 The work of the PIDE in the former Portuguese colonies in Africa is still a largely unexplored topic, an important exception being the study of Dalila Mateus (Rosas, 2018: 55). The topic of colonial incarceration is an equally understudied topic in the context of the Portuguese former colonies (Havik, 2019). 11 Union for the Independence of Cape Verde. 12 Democratic Union of Cape Verde.
19 stance. The PAIGC, however, was the political group that amassed more popular support, due to its success during the conflict against Portugal, and the popularity of Amílcar Cabral. These rivalries led the PAIGC to reopen Tarrafal in December 1974 to imprison its opponents, those suspected of having been involved with the Estado Novo and those opposed to independence. This imprisonment at Tarrafal and other locations was supported by the Portuguese transitional forces, and often took place in dubious circumstances (idem). Oliveira argues that even in Cape Verde, which didn’t directly witness armed conflict, “treatment dispensed to dissidents suspected of having “collaborated” with the colonial regime was harsh” (2017: 4). Most of the prisoners were released from Tarrafal by May 1975, and in July the prison closed permanently and the buildings were used for some time for other purposes, such as a centre for military instruction (Lopes, 2012: 186, 193). According to Cardoso, the period between 1974 and 1979 represents a difficult time in the history of the country, due to political instability and partial resistance to independence, which led to violence against those regarded as enemies by the PAIGC (Anjos, 2020). Many of those involved are still alive today, contributing, according to Cardoso, to a “black hole” or a generalised amnesia regarding this period and the third phase of use of Tarrafal. Since 2000, this former prison has received increasing attention for the painful memories it embodies. Today it is the Museum of Resistance, inaugurated in 2000, and the heritage site of the (ex-)Concentration Camp of Tarrafal (IPC, 2020a). Cardoso’s views add layers to the afterlives of sites such as Tarrafal, shedding light on the selective remembering and convenient forgetting of particular episodes of violence connected to this site, and on how narratives about the past can be (mis)used by various actors in moments of power change.
The Museum of Resistance: A transnational site of memory and collaboration
Regarding the first meaning of the concept of afterlife of colonialism, the former incarceration site has been brought back to life particularly since the 2000s, through several stages of musealisation and restoration work. In 2004, Tarrafal was added to UNESCO’s Tentative List of World Heritage Sites as the (ex-)Concentration Camp of Tarrafal (Sarmento, 2009: 533). In 2006, it was recognised by the Cape Verdean government as National Heritage (Lusa, 2006), managed by the Institute of Cultural Heritage (or IPC). The IPC is a governmental agency in charge of “identifying, inventorying, researching, safeguarding, defending and disseminating the values of culture, the tangible and intangible heritage stock of the Cape Verdean people” (IPC, 2020c, my translation). As a World Heritage contender, and given the universal claim of the Convention (Smith, 2006: 99), the Cape Verdean government claims that this is a site of relevance to all.13 As a National Heritage site, the IPC implies that Tarrafal is a site
13 By using the terms “World Heritage” and “Outstanding Universal Value”, the UNESCO World Heritage convention implies that there is such a thing as a common understanding of what heritage is, and that there is such a thing as a heritage that belongs to and is valued by everyone. Its claim to “universality” is one of the main critiques towards the Convention which, as Laurajane Smith argues, is deeply rooted in the European cultural and intellectual tradition (2006: 99).
20 of importance for and as representing all Cape Verdeans. These claims, and their social and political stakes, are examined in detail below. My analysis focuses mainly on what can be seen at the site since 2016, the latest musealisation phase. Due to the impact of Covid-19, museums and heritage sites around the world were forced to close and many offer(ed) virtual tours to their visitors (e.g. Feinstein, 2020). In this context, the IPC developed an online tour of Tarrafal through the Momento360 platform, consisting essentially of a series of 360-degree photographs, with small windows with information and additional photographs that allow the viewer to have access to selected details (Momento360, 2020). Not having been able to visit the site, this initiative constitutes the main object through which I examine the official narratives produced at Tarrafal. As a selection based on the selective official narrative presented at the site itself, the virtual tour sheds light on what are considered the most important stories to tell and objects to show. Because much of the museum display is missing from this virtual tour, however, I partly disobey it by making use of Google Maps photographs taken by visitors in 2019 and 2020, and information shared by a personal contact who visited Tarrafal in early 2020. The site consists of a large rectangular wall, inside which are located several original buildings (Sarmento, 2009: 533) (fig. 1). The heritage site/museum is accessed through a gated entrance, on payment of a small entrance fee (IPC, 2020a). The prison complex used to encompass other buildings and support structures outside these walls, such as the residences for the chief and the guards. According to Patti Anahory, after the closure of Tarrafal as a prison, these structures were ceded to locals as living spaces, and although intended as temporary, neglect by the authorities means they are still living there today. However, they do not seem to be involved (nor taken into consideration) regarding the work to preserve and musealise this site (Anjos, 2020).
Figure 1. An aerial view of the former incarceration site of Tarrafal (source: Google Maps, https://goo.gl/maps/ED4PMqUQgdQ3jKNh7).
21 The Museum of Resistance underwent three phases of work. The first was inaugurated in 2000 with the support of the Portuguese government, and included one exhibition room, where visitors could find information about the 1936-1954 phase of Tarrafal (Sarmento, 2009: 534). This first phase, and particularly the Portuguese involvement, seems to have set the tone for the further development of the official narratives in the following years. Indeed, in 2007, the Portuguese government announced it would again provide financial support to renovate Tarrafal and improve its museum, in an effort to contribute to the preservation of the “memory of resistance” (Sarmento, 2009: 535). The second phase of the museum was inaugurated in 2009, in the context of an international symposium that was organised at Tarrafal, funded by the Cape Verdean government, and Portuguese and Cape Verdean foundations.14 According to the IPC, this second phase involved the creation of an additional exhibition space about the second phase of use of Tarrafal, which seems to correspond to what can be seen at the site today. The third phase of work on the museum, completed in 2016, seems to have involved only the creation of a circuit that guides visitors around the site (IPC, 2020a). Tarrafal has been studied by many researchers, especially Portuguese and Cape Verdean historians (see, for instance, Carneiro, 2020). The memory of those imprisoned there has been, to borrow Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney’s concepts (2009), mediated and remediated across time, space, and a multitude of cultural media (documentaries, exhibitions, memorials, etc.), especially in Portugal, Cape Verde and Angola (Brito, 2018: 279-282). It has thus become something akin to Pierre Nora’s concept of “site of memory”, i.e. a relatively stable point of reference for individuals and communities recalling a shared past (Erll & Rigney, 2009: 1). Given that it represents a point of reference for individuals and communities across borders, and because it integrates mnemonic traditions to be found elsewhere, Tarrafal could be seen as a site of “transnational memory”. According to Chiara de Cesari and Ann Rigney, this concept captures the way memories that refer to particular locations circulate across national borders, for their resonance in different contexts. This analytical framework encourages the study of collective remembrance beyond the scope of the nation-state, to capture the multi-layered, multi-sited and multi-directional dynamics of memory (2014: 4). Because my object of analysis is the physical site of Tarrafal, I examine how the narratives articulated here have been informed and influenced by memory traditions and narratives located elsewhere, in and outside Cape Verde. That the memories Tarrafal embodies are relevant and have circulated transnationally can be seen in the collaborative efforts to preserve and present this site to the public. Besides supporting the creation and development of the museum, in 2019, Portugal announced it would support Cape Verde’s application to UNESCO’s World Heritage List (Lusa, 19 November 2019), following Angola (Angob,
14 Namely, the Mário Soares Foundation and the Amílcar Cabral Foundation (Portuguese and Cape Verdean foundations named after two prominent symbols of fascist and colonial resistance respectively). This symposium took place on the 35th anniversary of the liberation of the African prisoners in 1974, and it counted with the attendance of “survivors” of the camp from Cape Verde, Angola and Guinea Bissau, as well as one Portuguese survivor, historians, and representatives of different political groups and civic movements (Caldeira, 2010: 5).
22 2018), and including also cooperation with Mozambique and Guinea Bissau (Governo de Cabo Verde, 2020). Restoration of the site’s physical structures is currently underway, carried out by the Portuguese company Vilancelos (Lusa, 17 September 2020). João Sarmento argues that the involvement of the Portuguese government in the preservation of the memory of resistance in Tarrafal in the 2000s was out of tune with the approach “at home” to these memories. In Portugal, an activist group named Do Not Erase Memory was created in 2005 following acts of protests against the erasure of the memory of resistance against the Estado Novo, through the conversion of places and buildings in Lisbon and Porto to new purposes (Sarmento, 2009: 535). It was only through the efforts of this and other civic groups that these memories started emerging and being preserved, eventually contributing to the creation in 2015 of the Museum of Aljube - Resistance and Freedom, inside a former prison in Lisbon (Caldeira et al., 2016: 5), and after 2017, of a second Museum of Resistance inside the Fortress of Peniche (Museu Nacional Resistência e Liberdade, 2020). The contrast between the way the Portuguese government approached the memory of resistance in Cape Verde and at home seems to indicate that its involvement in Tarrafal was motivated by factors beyond a mere concern for the preservation of memory. Furthermore, chronologically speaking, the collaborations at Tarrafal coincide with the shift in Cape Verde towards a (political, economic and cultural) re-approximation to Portugal, as well as with the first few years of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries, created by Portugal in 1996. As several scholars have observed, the use of heritage to cultivate relationships between countries, stimulated by different interests (be they diplomatic, economic, cultural, political or other) is a common occurrence (Kersel & Luke, 2015), and it seems to be the case also at Tarrafal.
The “virtual tour” of Tarrafal: Showing victimhood, telling resistance
I argue that the acts of creating a display and presenting information about the past, based on existing material remains, represent a claim to truth with political and social implications. My arguments draw on the work of Amy Sodaro (2018) and Patrizia Violi (2012) on memorial museums and Mieke Bal’s concept of “epistemic authority” (1996). The Museum of Resistance of Tarrafal should be seen as a “memorial museum” for the way it focusses on past violence and human rights abuses (Sodaro, 2018). According to Sodaro, these types of museums are part of a relatively new approach to remembering and teaching the past (addressed in the Introduction), and the growing “trend” of “dark tourism”,15 seen in the increasing number of concentration camps and prisons that have become tourism sites and “places of consumption” in recent years (2018: 3, 531-532). This too seems to be the case in Tarrafal: considering its history, several Cape Verdean ministers of Culture have advocated turning Tarrafal into a “space of education” (RTC, 2015) and an “international site of dialogue for peace” (Lusa, 2 March
15 “Dark tourism” follows the seminal work on this topic by J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley written in 2000 with the title “Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster”, which was followed by many more studies on this topic.
23 2020). Violi makes a distinction between memorial museums created from scratch and those created on actual sites of trauma, which she terms “trauma site museums”, the latter being the case of Tarrafal. According to the author, “trauma sites exist factually as material testimonies of the violence and horror that took place there”, and the fact of their existence (much like all heritage sites) “implies a precise choice on the part of post-conflict societies regarding which traces of the past ought to be preserved” (2012: 37-38). Besides dealing with memories of violence, sites such as Tarrafal stand as tangible evidence of that violence which, in turn, serves to legitimise the representations of said violence. Working through this particular concept of museum allows me to draw meanings about the site from connections made between particular representations and the existing material remains. To understand how these connections operate, I draw on Mieke Bal’s idea of the “epistemic authority”. Bal argues that the act of exhibiting functions as a discursive mechanism that says “look” (at an object), “that’s how it is” (1996: 2-3). If the “look” element of a display involves the presence of an exposed object, the “that’s how it is” aspect implies the authority of the person who knows and tells, with the objects working to reaffirm this discursive authority. This gesture is what Ball has called an act of epistemic authority (idem). Thinking of displays in these terms reveals the discursive character of museums and heritage sites, a discourse which Bal characterises as “affirmative, demonstrative, and authoritative” (idem). Although these spaces necessarily (re)produce selective narratives, it is the invisibility of the epistemic authority that reveals one of the greatest powers and dangers of exhibition spaces, i.e., their claims of truth (idem). These claims, as I argued above, have implications for the way that, in establishing what to tell, they establish who to represent. Considering Tarrafal as a national heritage site, I examine who belongs to the “Cape Verdean people”, and as a transnational memory site, I explore how this site intersects with frames of remembrance beyond the nation-state.
Figure 2. Screenshot of Momento360 - Museum of Resistance, showing the first 360-degree photograph (source: Momento360, 2020).
24 Having dissected the theoretical framework, I now turn to the virtual tour, which starts in front of the entrance to Tarrafal (fig. 2, above). The first information shared by the tour’s epistemic authority frames the history of the site between 1936 and 1974, during which it first received “340 antifascists”, and later around “230 anticolonialists”. It states that “the Tarrafal Concentration Camp represents a symbol of resistance against the regime of Salazar, and a site of painful memory”, and that this is “a site of memory and knowledge about the anti-fascist fight and the independence of the Portuguese colonies in Africa”. Google Maps photographs show that the information plaque on site presents essentially the same information, but emphasises the violent and fascist character of Estado Novo, by likening it to other European twentieth century fascist regimes, particularly Nazi Germany (fig. 3).
L to R: Figure 3: Information plaque at the entrance to the site (photo: Rui Semitela Morais, March 2019, Google Maps). Figure 4: Screenshot of Momento360 - Museum of Resistance (source: Momento360, 2020).
The information presented at the entrance - virtually and in situ - ignores the (meanings of the) experiences of others who went through Tarrafal, such as Cape Verdeans imprisoned there during the second phase due to petty crime, or individuals from other contexts (such as Spain, Poland or Timor) (Lopes, 2012: 13, 115), by choosing not to represent them. Furthermore, by framing the history of this site between 1936 and 1974, the narrative transmits the idea that the Portuguese were the trailblazers of resistance. Yet resistance in Cape Verde and other former colonies against colonialism occurred well before the 1960s, and even before the Estado Novo (Oliveira, 2017: 4): take, for instance, the
25 euphemistically named “campaigns of pacification” of the Portuguese in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Africa, deemed necessary because of resistance to colonialisation (Rosas, 2018: 11); or more recent rebellions such as the Revolt of Nhô Ambrose in Cape Verde in 1934.16 One might argue that these histories are not relevant to Tarrafal, since they took place geographically and chronologically elsewhere. However, as the national and sole Museum of Resistance in the country, I argue that this would be the ideal location to address these other memories of resistance, which might resonate with Cape Verdeans more than the histories of anti-fascist resistance. Furthermore, the 1936- 1974 frame also works to silence the third phase of use of Tarrafal, denying that this other form of resistance, against the PAIGC and independence itself, existed. Histories such as these would trouble the narratives at this national heritage site aimed at representing a sense of a shared national past, since they would reveal that particularly this period in the history of the country was not shared equally nor peacefully amongst Cape Verdeans, potentially enabling the very legitimacy of the PAIGC (and individuals who still derive legitimacy from it) to be questioned. While the signposts on site provide information in Portuguese, English and French (a clear indication that the IPC expects international visitors), the virtual tour is only in Portuguese, indicating that it is meant mainly for Cape Verdeans, Portuguese people and possibly others from former Portuguese colonies. No information, on site or online, is provided in Cape Verdean Kriolu (Creole), the native language of many Cape Verdeans. This language is viewed by some as symbolising emancipation and resistance, and many today choose to speak only Kriolu, as an act of rejection of the language of the former coloniser (Rodrigues, 2016: 105). The choice of languages used on site and in the virtual tour, and particularly the choice to not include Kriolu, can be seen as an act of exclusion towards many in Cape Verde today, for whom Portuguese is not the language of choice or of knowledge. Once virtually inside the walls of Tarrafal, the first object pointed at by the epistemic authority is a railway track preserved in situ. Moving further inside, one sees two rectangular and parallel buildings forming a corridor that guides the visitor further inward. In the virtual tour, information plaques are shown on the walls of the buildings, two of which describe the first two phases of use of Tarrafal. This corridor leads to a small building, the Posto de Socorros (infirmary) (fig. 5, below), where one is told about the appalling medical assistance provided. This gesture - “look at this building, this is where people suffered” - reinforces and legitimises a victimhood narrative that is reproduced throughout the site and through its physical elements. Beside this building stands a memorial to “those who gave their life here for freedom”, with the names, countries of origin and dates of death of prisoners of the
16 This revolt was propelled by the harsh living conditions in Cape Verde, derived from increasing economic difficulties associated with droughts (a relatively frequent phenomenon in the country), leading many to go hungry. This stimulated what was called a “march of hunger” on 7 June 1934 in the city of Mindelo, in the island of São Vicente, which was violently repressed by the colonial authorities. The event has acquired a strong symbolic charge, celebrated in Cape as a symbol of resistance against Portuguese colonial rule (Mateus & Mateus, 2016: 17-33).
26 first and second phases (fig. 4, above), pointing at the transnational character of the experiences of trauma that this site embodies, and of the remembrance mechanisms applied to remember them.
Figure 5. Screenshot of Momento360 - Museum of Resistance, showing the Enfermaria or infirmary (source: Momento360, 2020).
The next 360-degree photograph shows the library that prisoners could use yet whose content, the virtual tour explains, was censored, given the oppressive nature of the Estado Novo. This and the next images point to the former cells where the Angolan, Guinean and Cape Verdean political prisoners were held separately. There is no mention of the Portuguese cells, which might relate to uncertainty regarding their exact location or the fact that prisoners lived in different structures and buildings which were added at different moments (Sousa, 2019: 26). It is inside these former cells that the displays of the museum can be found, which include large posters with text and photographs of the former prisoners of the second phase of use of Tarrafal (fig. 6, below). Information shared with me by Wim Reijnierse, who visited Tarrafal in early 2020, indicates that the museum is characterised by scarce objects and information boards, focused only on the first two phases of the site’s history.17 Photographs on Google Maps offer significantly more visual information about the exhibition spaces than the virtual tour, and corroborate Reijnierse´s impression. These show that there is at least one photograph of a Portuguese prisoner (fig. 7, below), and a few sparse objects in mostly empty rooms, such as a mandolin and a uniform that belonged to Portuguese prisoners, and two military helmets, one belonging to Portuguese troops and another to Angolan troops (figs. 8 to 10, below).
17 Wim Reijnierse, personal communication on 25 March 2020.
27
Figure 6. Screenshot of Momento360 - Museum of Resistance, showing the cell of the Angolan political prisoners (source: Momento360, 2020).
The photographs, especially those of the former prisoners, serve to encourage empathy and identification from the visitors (Sodaro, 2018: 25), and to strengthen the truth and believability of the narrative (Siyi, 2020: 59). Displaying objects of former prisoners, such as the uniform and the mandolin, plays a similar role, and is a common museological trope in memorial (site) museums. Besides rendering the visitors’ experience more immediate and visceral (Sodaro, 2018: 25), these objects - and especially the prison uniform - also serve as material evidence of the victims’ traumatic experiences (Siyi, 2020: 59). The helmets, on the other hand, work to illustrate and legitimise the narrative of resistance, through the way they produce a visual and material connection between the African men represented in the photographs and their experience of armed resistance against the Estado Novo. As opposed to the other objects, the helmets were not objects that were once used on site since they refer to the experiences of the prisoners before and because of which they were imprisoned. The information plaques about the helmets do not specifically state that these were used during the colonial/liberation wars, serving therefore only as indirect references to these events. The choice to display them works, together with the texts on the online and on site information boards, to articulate and legitimise the resistance narrative which might otherwise not be sufficiently tangible or believable for the visitors.
28
From top left clock: Figure 7. Display including photograph of a Portuguese prisoner (source: Francisco Cardoso, July 2019, Google Maps). Figure 8. Helmet used by Angolan troops (source: Hedder Jorge Ramos Rendall, October 2019, Google Maps). Figure 9. A mandolin (source: Marta Rufino dos Reis Rosa, March 2020, Google Maps). Figure 10. A uniform of a Portuguese prisoner (source. Francisco Cardoso, July 2019, Google Maps).
The virtual tour points at several other buildings where violence took place and suffering was experienced, once again to reinforce the narrative of victimhood. These range from everyday spaces such as the kitchen, where “the crockery was left on the dusty floor, and was often used and reused without being washed”, to the “disciplinary cell” known as the “Holandinha”, the successor to the “frigideira”18 as an instrument of punishment and torture. According to Lopes, the Holandinha was named by men who had been imprisoned at Tarrafal for petty crime, and who more often than the political prisoners would be sent to this cell. The name alludes to Holland, which was then seen as the “El Dorado” of Cape Verdean emigrants (2012: 115). Rather than using this structure to address these histories, the Holandinha is used to strengthen, rather inaccurately, the narrative of victimhood of the political prisoners. Emigration and petty crime, it seems, are not deemed relevant experiences and memories by the epistemic authority. The website of the IPC mentions that near the Holandinha one
18 The “frigideira” (or frying pan) was a small rectangular cement building without windows and with a flat roof that would get extremely hot, used during the first phase of use of Tarrafal (Brito, 2018: 279).
29 can also find a replica of the no-longer existing frigideira, demonstrating the importance of these objects as a symbols and testimonies of pain and suffering. As the website states, “there is no doubt that the darkest side of the Concentration Camp was the torture and forced labour carried out by the jailers, with a clear intention to reduce the resistance of the political prisoners exiled there” (IPC, 2020b, my translation).
Figure 11. A map displayed in the Museum of Resistance, showing European concentration camps (source: Ana Baptista, September 2019, Google Maps).
Google Maps photographs show that in one of the cells there is a map showing several concentration camps of the Nazi regime in Europe, with accompanying texts about “resistance and the rise of Nazi- fascism” (fig. 11). According to Aleida Assmann, the boundaries of memories, much like texts, are not clear-cut and operate within a system of references to other texts (or narratives), enabling some memories to become prisms for other memories (2014: 550). Several authors have shown how the Holocaust emerged as a “model for memory-making world-wide”, helping to “provide a language in which to articulate other narratives of suffering” (De Cesari & Rigney, 2014: 10). The choice to associate Tarrafal and thus the Estado Novo with other European twentieth century fascist regimes and experiences of incarceration seems to, at first sight, reveal a willingness to engage in a multidirectional exchange of memories, to draw on Michael Rothberg’s concept (2009). Such a choice could also be seen as a recognition of the Holocaust as a “transnational mnemonic symbol” of violence (Erll, 2011:
30 9), identifiable and accessible to international visitors, and as a way to foster a critical engagement with the memories of the Estado Novo as both fascist and colonial. That the Cape Verdean, Angolan, Portuguese, Mozambican and Guinean governments are currently working towards the inscription of Tarrafal on the UNESCO World Heritage List, can further help explain the choice to connect the histories of this site with other, internationally known histories of suffering and incarceration. It is, however, rather telling that there seems to be no comparable map nor mention of incarceration sites in former colonial contexts in Africa (related to Portugal or other former colonial powers), even though the Estado Novo established a large-scale network of incarceration sites across its domains, from Africa to Asia, where violent treatment and forced labour were common practices (Rosas, 2018: 60-64). As De Cesari and Rigney argue, although memory narratives are deeply entangled, interconnections between them are often asymmetrical (De Cesari & Rigney, 2014: 10), as seems to be the case in Tarrafal regarding the memories of fascism versus colonialism. I argue therefore that through this and other mnemonic references to fascism (as seen in information plaques and the name of the site), and the comparatively less visible references to colonialism, the epistemic authority frames this site within the context of European fascisms, and primarily as a site of fascist violence, working to downplay the colonial character of the Estado Novo, and Tarrafal’s memories of colonialism. Furthermore, because it works to highlight the first phase of Tarrafal to the detriment of the histories of its later phases of use, the epistemic authority articulates a “hierarchy of suffering”, to borrow Rothberg’s term (2009: 9), whereby the suffering of anti-fascist prisoners is given primacy in relation to the histories and experiences of the prisoners from 1961 onwards (or any prisoner who did not identify primarily as anti-fascist). The fact that the colonial/liberation wars, the role of the PAIGC and the third phase of use of Tarrafal are also not represented (Sarmento, 2009: 534) - despite this conflict explaining the imprisonment of many during the second phase - also contributes to obscuring Tarrafal’s and by extension (given the “national” character of this heritage site), Cape Verde’s colonial history. These wars eventually led to the end of colonialism and the Estado Novo, something which is also downplayed in dominant narratives in Portugal (Cardina & Martins, 2018). To openly address this violent conflict and Cape Verde’s period of power transition would require addressing the entanglements of this site (and the country) with the colonial/liberation wars, the Portuguese colonial regime, and Portugal’s operations during the transition period towards independence, which would complicate a state-intended and promoted (re)approximation to Portugal.
Throughout this chapter, I examined how the epistemic authority of Tarrafal, in showing elements of the site and particular objects aided by the medium of text, produces and transmits meanings about this site and thus proclaims truths about its histories and their significance today. Furthermore, in applying a transnational analytical approach, I examined how particular narrative strategies and choices connect to frames of remembrance and mnemonic traditions located beyond the borders of Cape Verde. The Tarrafal memorial site museum incorporates a variety of memories of different groups: Portuguese anti-
31 fascists, a few Spanish men who fought in the Spanish Civil War, African anti-colonialists, petty criminals, “enemies” of postcolonial Cape Verde, and many others whose experiences were less directly yet nonetheless related to this site, such as the families of the prisoners, Portuguese and African guards, local communities and those who live today in some of the buildings that were once part of Tarrafal. My analysis of the meanings produced by the epistemic authority, however, has revealed that the official narrative focuses only on the political prisoners of the first and second phases, and by extension the Estado Novo. Only these are worth telling about and thus attributing meaning to, and this telling is done by containing their experiences within an over-simplified and selective narrative that focuses on the tropes of resistance and victimhood. These narratives claim particular truths, which derive partly from the physical character of this site, from its location in Cape Verde and from the way the representational practices used here communicate with memory practices located elsewhere. Given the way the epistemic authority connects structures and objects to narratives, I argue that the narrative of victimhood derives from and is legitimised mainly by the physical character of Tarrafal. That is because the type of violence this site was implicated in (mainly physical) can still be seen in its physical remains, through the large gate and walls, sober buildings with window grills, small cells, and objects such as the Holandinha. These constitute remains that can easily evoke empathy from visitors, given their explicit association with violence, and which serve to legitimise the representations of violence intended by the epistemic authority. The narrative of resistance, however, required making use of additional objects - such as the helmets - and texts in order to imbue this site with meanings about a specific history of resistance. The development and the characteristics of this narrative seem to be informed (or perhaps imposed) by the Portuguese involvement in the heritage and memory practices at this site from the moment it became a museum. As Marschall has shown, the entanglement of memorialisation practices between former colonisers and former colonised, as well as some form of dependency of the latter towards the former, can be seen across many postcolonial contexts (2008: 348). In the case of Tarrafal, this entanglement should be framed by the enduring representational purchase of Portugal on Cape Verde (which can also be seen at other locations),19 and by the Cape Verdean government and elites’ intended political, economic and cultural reapproximation to Portugal since the 2000s. This shift, as I addressed in the previous chapter, has been leading to an increased silencing of Cape Verde’s colonial past, and a recovery of Western-friendly narratives that highlight continuities with this past. The focus of the narrative of resistance on the fascist character of the Estado Novo (and European fascisms more generally) attests to that. As a site located in a former colony, with strong historical connections to other former colonies, such as Angola and Guinea Bissau, this dominant narrative works to exclude many in these countries for whom Portuguese colonialism - which only ended 45 years ago - represents more relevant, vivid and traumatic memories than fascism. That these
19 An example is the ongoing research project titled Concha carried out by the New University of Lisbon in Cidade Velha in Cape Verde (Lusa, 3 February 2019).
32 memories are still alive in Cape Verde can be seen, for instance, in the choice made by some to speak Kriolu as a form of protest. That this language is not included on site nor in the virtual tour, strengthens my argument that the dominant narrative enforces the exclusion of some. The way the colonial past is represented in Tarrafal and the power structures that seem to have dictated these representations attest to the durabilities of colonial-era political and epistemological power structures in the present. The mnemonic shift taking place in Cape Verde and reflected at Tarrafal, mirrors the silencing of colonial violence which characterises dominant narratives in Portugal about its colonial past. Furthermore, Portugal’s involvement in Tarrafal at a time when the “memory of resistance” was being erased at home, indicates that the Portuguese government’s interest in this site seems to be motivated primarily by political and perhaps economic interests. By examining how the narratives produced at Tarrafal communicate and contrast with mnemonic references and traditions located elsewhere (namely Portugal and Western Europe more generally), I have been able to show that this represents a site where transnational geopolitical interests (and their legitimising narratives) are negotiated. These negotiations allow Cape Verdean political elites to reassert their political, economic but also cultural (and racial) connections to Portugal, based on the colonial and Western-induced narrative of Cape Verdean crioulidade and exceptionality, while allowing Portugal to reaffirm its representational (and perhaps also economic and political) hold on its former colony. This is neither unique to Tarrafal, nor to Cape Verde: as Marschall has argued, due to its symbolic and affective character, heritage often plays an important role in cultural politics, helping redefining the relationship between postcolonial countries and their former colonial powers (2008: 348). Marschall adds that national heritage in postcolonial societies is, like elsewhere, a discursive and selective practice, closely allied with prevailing power structures (2008: 355). These geopolitical reconnections between Cape Verde and Portugal, which assert themselves through cultural representations based on purported shared pasts, represent ways in which the colonial past endures today in both countries. That in 2011, the Cape Verdean University of Mindelo distinguished Adriano Moreira, the former Overseas Minister responsible for the reopening of Tarrafal in 1961 (Lopes, 2012: 19), with the title of Doctor honoris causa, in a move that was considered an “insult” by the Cape Verdean Association of Ex-Political Prisoners (Esquerda, 2011), supports my argument.
“Perpetual Cycle”: (Re)appearing memories, alternative realities
The dominant narrative in and about Tarrafal contributes to perpetuating and reinforcing the silencing of the colonial past which has been taking place in Cape Verde especially since the 2000s, as well as to maintaining the “amnesia” regarding the immediate post-independence period. These silences are addressed and critiqued by several scholars (such as Redy Wilson Lima), activists (such as Alexssandro Robalo) and artists (see Nolasco, 2019) in the country who work to produce narratives that counter the
33 dominant narratives about the past and attempt to restore its cultural ties to Africa. César Schofield Cardoso is one of these artists who, through his video art, aims to salvage the African heritage of Cape Verde, while reflecting on the country’s colonial past and contemporary conditions (Nolasco, 2019: 98- 99). Cardoso was one of the artists whose work was presented at the exhibition “A Glimmer of Freedom”, curated by Marzia Bruno, and shown at Tarrafal for one month in 2017. According to the official brochure, the site itself was used as a “laboratory to analyze the history of the location and question the experiences and realities that coexist there”, aimed at “making the identity and memory of the fortified 1,700 hectares’ camp tangible” (Bruno, 2017).
L to R: Figure 12. “Surrounding Seas” by César Schofield Cardoso. Figure 13. “Hard Water” by the same artist (source: Storia na Lugar, n.d.). Figure 14. “Perpetual Cycle” by Cardoso (source: Storia na Lugar, n.d.).
During this exhibition, Cardoso presented his audio-visual series Ferrugem (Rust), which sought to question the current status of Tarrafal, by “placing it in context and reflecting on the social and cultural measures that the government of Cape Verde intends to implement for the site” (Bruno, 2017). This series included three installations: Perpetual Cycle, Surrounding Seas, and Hard Water, which articulate
34 a connection between the colonial past and the postcolonial present. These works focus on issues such as isolation and imprisonment, discourses of power, exclusion and oppression, and “new forms of direct or indirect violence” (idem). Surrounding Seas was installed in one of the former cells which was filled with large stones, upon which a video was projected (fig. 12, above). Hard Water consisted of an audio installation recorded at a fountain where local women collect water, complemented by eight water tanks inside a cell and illuminated from the inside (fig. 13). Perpetual Cycle included a video without sound projected on the wall of another cell, and a television set in the middle of the space, showing a local public channel with sound (fig. 14) (Nolasco, 2019: 100). I focus my analysis on the silent short video (lasting under 3 minutes) shown in the Perpetual Cycle installation, which can still be watched on the artist’s website (Storia na Lugar, n.d.). In this work, Cardoso overlaps three videos that represent contrasting realities: the left-hand side mostly shows images of white Portuguese people from the National Television Archive of Portugal (Nolasco, 2019: 100), while the right presents archival and more recent-looking video snippets that overlap and show mainly black individuals. While the left side shows family scenes and gatherings of Portuguese engaging in leisurely activities at the beach, at home and other locations, the images on the right show men and women working in dry fields, an allusion to Cape Verde’s harsh environment, and wearing clothes that for their simplicity contrast heavily with those of the Portuguese, in reference to the extreme wealth discrepancies of the colonial period. The images of the Portuguese are combined with texts that read: “Sunday in Luanda, the capital of Angola… the largest African province of Portugal. […] Since they landed here in 1482, the Portuguese have always mixed with the Africans” (fig. 15, below). This text is presented with images of black and white children playing together. It continues: “these Sunday scenes, rare in other parts of Africa, represent the essence of Portuguese policies here: the development of a genuinely multiracial society” (my translation). These scenes and texts reveal the lusotropicalist mentality and narrative of the Estado Novo. The contrast between these images and text and the images of black individuals working tells the viewer that the darker (and silenced) side of the official narrative of the Estado Novo was the violence imposed on black bodies. The video shows also what seem to be mixed families, and images of both black and white children at school, framed by the text: “of all the European colonisers, the Portuguese were the less sensitive to colour. There is a saying which goes: God created the white and the black, but the Portuguese created the “mulato” or mixed person” (my translation). At this point, the images on both sides of the screen become overlapped in the background by images of Tarrafal in what seem to be contemporary times (fig. 16, below). These occupy the entire breadth of the screen, and show Tarrafal from the outside, where one can also see locals walking and carrying large buckets presumedly of water, perhaps alluding to the ongoing harsh climatic and economic conditions of Cape Verde. The images on the left and right then change to showing only black people at work, with the images on the left including the text: “[n]ot only did they force the blacks to work, but also their children, disabling them from attending school”. These images and associated text seem to represent different archival materials since
35 the letter type and the discourse is not in tune with the sources of the National Television Archive. The video ends by showing images of white Portuguese people attending mass, while black people continue to work the fields on the other side of the screen.
Figures 15 and 16. Screenshots of video of “Perpetual” Cycle by César Schofield Cardoso (source: Storia na Lugar, n.d.).
Through these images, the artist brings into one visual and physical space contrasting narratives and realities: the official discourses of the Estado Novo and the experiences of white Portuguese set against the harsh realities of black individuals in the colonies. By incorporating recent images of Tarrafal in the film and given the location of this exhibition, the artist seems to articulate the idea that the realities and the narratives of the colonial period live on in Cape Verde today, and in Tarrafal more specifically. On his website, Cardoso states that the “Tarrafal is a symbol of terror and resistance, [hence] the status of
36 Resistance Museum in the present days. Nevertheless the poor population occupying the camp after its closement is push away [sic], for the sake of tourism and a clean museum.” These communities could be seen as represented in his video by the locals walking near Tarrafal, bringing to mind Patti Anahory’s critique of the government’s attitude of neglect towards local communities. Prestige and economic gains seem to be more relevant for the authorities, as seen in the ongoing application to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Cardoso concludes by adding that his series Rust calls for an awareness of past and present terror (Storia na Lugar, n.d.). As Ana Nolasco argues, the archival images “are used here as critical tools for questioning modern Cape Verdean society”, where traces of the Estado Novo’s lusotropicalist narrative remains alive today, namely in the celebration of the “creoule” identity of Cape Verde (2019: 102). While the title of the series, Rust, seems to speak of the way in which things of the colonial past live on as ruins in the present, Perpetual Cycle seems to refer to the way colonial-era violence, both epistemic and physical, repeats itself today in dominant national narratives in Cape Verde, and in contemporary heritage and memory practices which, as seen at Tarrafal, work to displace and exclude local communities. According to Nolasco, the erasure of the colonial past in Cape Verde impedes debate on the matter, and about the enduring ways in which this past continues to underly the country’s social, cultural and economic structure (2019: 100). By generating a dialogue between official colonial narratives and the harsh realities of the colonised, and between past and present at and through Tarrafal, Cardoso is able to shed light - literally and figuratively - on how the representations of the past and present history and identity of Cape Verde lead not only to a silencing of memories and individuals, but also to the exclusion and displacement of Cape Verdeans in the present. If “black holes”, to reproduce Cardoso’s words, absorb light, and thus visibility, his artworks can be seen as a counter black hole (or narrative), for the way they restore light (and therefore visibility) upon histories, memories and individuals made invisible by the authorities and the dominant narratives they (re)produce. His work, for making memories and contemporary realities appear, serves to offer alternative truths to those claimed by the official narratives (and elsewhere in Cape Verde): namely, that the victims of Portuguese colonialism, the victims of the musealisation efforts at Tarrafal and the silences imposed on them do matter. As Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, if to appear is to matter, to make appear is to claim the right to exist. César Schofield Cardoso’s Perpetual Cycle, in creating a “space of appearance” (Mirzoeff, 2017: 17-18) and articulating alternative knowledges, while making visible and challenging colonial-era epistemologies, can be as a decolonial narrative.
Conclusion
As Sodaro argues, rather than engaging openly and critically with violent pasts, memorial site museums tend more frequently to reflect the present regimes that created them, and which become legitimised by
37 them (2018: 10-11). My analysis of the official narratives produced at Tarrafal has shown that more than a “site of memory and knowledge about the anti-fascist fight and the independence of the Portuguese colonies in Africa”, a “space of education” and “dialogue for peace”, Tarrafal is instrumentalised by Cape Verdean authorities to assert their proximity to Portugal, and through which the Portuguese government reasserts its representational hold in its former colony. According to Marschall, the way in which the colonial past is remembered in former colonised countries in the present is to a great extent informed by a country’s specific experience of colonialism, which in turn depends on the country it was colonised by (2008: 349). The dominant narratives produced at Tarrafal, speak of the enduring effects of the specificities of the Portuguese colonial project in Cape Verde, which established a racial and cultural hierarchy whereby everything that was regarded as good, civilised and advanced was defined and measured in Portuguese (or Western) terms (in contrast to the African and colonised “other”) - what Aimé Césaire termed the “colonial discourse” (2000) -, and whereby local, lighter skinned or creole elites were regarded as “exceptional” kinds of Africans. The way these narratives reproduce colonial-era cultural references and (racially informed) power structures, reveal the afterlives of colonialism in Cape Verde today. Cardoso’s work, on the other hand, reveals contemporary tensions at this site, and in Cape Verdean society more generally, which speak of discordant identifications and representations of the past, with official narratives contrasting heavily with unofficial or decolonial narratives such as his. According to Haizea Barcenilla, contemporary artists “can offer a complex reading of uncomfortable heritage, addressing its different layers of history and ideology, without the pressure of giving a certain, scientific answer” (2020). Rather than giving answers and providing claims to truth, artworks that engage with difficult or uncomfortable histories and memories raise questions and touch upon issues often left unaddressed in dominant and official narratives. As Barcenilla shows, “such proposals can also help unblock stuck discussions and bring diverse, transversal perspectives to the table”. Cardoso’s artworks, in revealing some of the afterlives of colonialism in Cape Verde, and in enabling a dialogue with the official narratives of Tarrafal and presumedly between the visitors of the exhibition in 2017, offered (and continues to offer) a new perspective about this site, and about contemporary Cape Verdean identity and its relationship with its violent past. To conclude, my analysis of the official narratives, and a consideration of an unofficial narrative produced through heritage, memory and creative practices in the former incarceration site of Tarrafal, has revealed that the afterlives of the colonial past here are characterised by violent durabilities, which should be understood through Cape Verde’s particular history of colonialism, and the country’s contemporary (political and economic) connections to the former coloniser. The ways the official narratives have been produced at this site, informed by national and transnational frameworks of remembrance, can also partly be explained by its particular character as a former prison, where the memories of physical violence are still palpable in its material structures, thus working to legitimise, reinforce and crystallise the official narratives. In the following chapter, focused on the Tropical Botanic
38 Garden of Belém, I follow a similar line of inquiry but applied to a different heritage, geographical and historical context, where official narratives are informed (partly) by other social frames and mnemonic traditions, that stems from Portugal’s own relationship with its past, and with its European neighbours.
39 The Tropical Botanic Garden: Between re-emerging and aphasic memories
Historical background: The garden as a layered landscape of violence
This chapter focuses on the Tropical Botanic Garden in Belém, a neighbourhood of Lisbon, and it aims to answer the second part of the research question: how do memory narratives articulated in and about this site reflect the afterlives of colonialism in Portugal today? Compared to Tarrafal, this site differs in terms of its character (a public garden), location (the capital of the former colonial power), and the less obvious character of the violence it embodies. Despite the presence of tropical plants and several objects hinting at the colonial past, as of a visit in 2018, I observed that no connections were made between this site and the histories it is implicated in. In 2019, a renovation project started, and a visit to this garden in 2020 revealed narrative changes alongside continuities. In the previous chapter, I argue that the official narrative produced at Tarrafal, characterised by its selectivity and the downplaying of the site’s connections to colonialism derives from the way it is used by the Cape Verdean and Portuguese governments to reassert their historical ties for contemporary purposes. These contemporary negotiations, which recover colonial-era structures of power that work to exclude many in Cape Verde today while legitimising the country’s elites, are possible due to the transnational character of Tarrafal as a site of memory, and are informed by the colonial experience of the country. The official narratives produced about the Tropical Botanic Garden, on the other hand, are characterised by contrasting approaches to the representation of the colonial past, which derive from its character as mainly a place of leisure where memories of violence are not visible, and reflect both the dominant Eurocentric narrative in Portugal about its colonial past, and increasing calls to confront the silences of this narrative. Although this garden has existed since the eighteenth century, I focus my analysis on remnants of its twentieth century history, given their strong connection to the colonial past. I refer to the creation of the Colonial Garden in 1912 and the Exhibition of the Portuguese World in 1940, histories I explore in more detail below. Because of the physical character and context of this site and the ways it is deeply implicated in histories of colonial violence, I view and examine the garden as a “layered landscape” of violence. My understanding of “landscape” as an analytical concept that derives mainly from archaeology, describes spaces or environments that incorporate both natural and artificial elements, connected to human activities (Holtorf & Williams, 2006: 235). The adjective “layered” refers to the presence of material elements related to histories and experiences that accumulated (horizontally and vertically) in this landscape over time. I also use “layer” metaphorically to describe the complex character of landscapes, manifest in the ongoing processes of (re)use and (re)interpretation that lead some material elements (and the meanings attached to them) to remain intact and others to change, be removed or added (Renes, 2015: 404-407, 410). My analysis of the garden through the concept of layered landscape allows me to focus on the meanings attributed to those natural and artificial physical
40 elements associated with the colonial past, and on how these have changed (or not) over time. Furthermore, it allows me to examine the garden as part of the wider mnemonic landscape of Belém of which it is geographically, historically and, since 2007, discursively and legislatively a part, since the garden was classified as a National Monument, together with other spaces and buildings in Belém.20 In the remainder of this section I expand on the two histories of colonial violence that materialise in some of the physical and meaningful layers of this landscape. The first involves the conversion of this garden into the Colonial Garden of Lisbon in 1912.21 Until 1974, it was used to support botanical research in the African colonies,22 and, especially during the Estado Novo, at producing and teaching knowledge on the colonies’ agricultural potential (Castela, 2010: 82).23 Several authors have shown how botanical studies and gardens in Europe were deeply connected to colonial politics, given their role in the expansion and exploitation of empires (e.g. Baber, 2016; Weber, 2018). Walter Mignolo argues that especially since the seventeenth century, Western empires asserted their control over knowledge about nature by disqualifying coexisting and equally valid knowledges, in a process of epistemological dominance which affected many other fields of knowledge (2011: 11). Later, in the context of the Industrial Revolution, the “West” transformed the idea of “nature” into “natural resources”, thus kickstarting what Mignolo termed the “environmental catastrophe” (Mignolo, 2011: 12-13), enabled through the labour of enslaved people. By the nineteenth century, ideas of nature as an economic resource and as a “precious reservoir of unchanged wildness”, to be used by humans for their own contemplation and pleasure, were well established and represented an important element in colonial ideology (Adams & Mulligans, 2003: 1). Mignolo argues that the global order established since the 1500s through Western colonial capitalism, endures today in the way the world continues to be interconnected by the same type of (capitalist) economic system, wherein nature serves to fulfil the needs and wishes of humans (2011: 7).
20 The law decree in which the National Heritage classification was established explains that the garden “should be preserved in order to ensure the structural characteristics of the Institute’s [IICT] scientific research”. It also mentions that this heritage site includes the Palace of Calheta and “a valuable botanical and built heritage” (without specifying which heritage), and that it conserves “a valuable collection of phytogenetic resources, which are the object of national and international research” (Decreto Lei nº 19/2007, 2007). The discourse of this law decree establishes that the importance of the garden anno 2007 is mainly attributed to its botanical collection and its history of “scientific research”. 21 The Colonial Garden had initially been created in 1906 and established in a different garden in Lisbon, yet due to a lack of suitable conditions, it was later transferred to what is now the Tropical Botanic Garden of Belém. In 1912, the Colonial Garden was established on what was then a garden of the presidential residence, one of the several historical palaces in Lisbon (Castela, 2010: 82). 22 Portugal had for long held colonial territories in Africa and other geographical locations, but it was only at the beginning of the twentieth century, and following around eight decades of the euphemistically called “Pacification Campaigns”, that the Portuguese effectively established their colonies in Africa at the start of the twentieth century (Rosas, 2018: 17-19). 23 The garden also included a Museu Agrícola Colonial (Colonial Agricultural Museum), located inside the existing Palace of Calheta, which in 1944, merged institutionally with the Colonial Garden (Museu Nacional, 2015).
41
From L to R: Figure 17. The Monument of the Discoveries seen from the Praça do Império. Figure 18. The Monument to the Discoveries seen from the West side (photos by the author, 2018).
The second episode of violence was the garden’s use for the “Colonial Section” of the Estado Novo’s Exposition of the Portuguese World, that took place for a few months in 1940 (Castela, 2010: 82). Inspired by other “Universal Exhibitions” that took place in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the nationalistic character of the 1940 Exposition, with its goal to translate the spirit of the Portuguese nation and the “Portuguese race”, showed it was mainly intended for a national audience (De Matos, 2012: 206). With the goal to insert the Estado Novo into a seemingly historical continuum, this large-scale cultural and political event resulted in a historical and performative representation of Portugal and its empire (Sapega, 2008: 22). The decision to set up this Exposition in Belém was far from random, since “Belém represents the most paradigmatic case of the inscription and condensation of the [state-sanctioned] memory allusive to the Portuguese colonial empire within the public space” (Peralta, 2013: 361, my translation). Besides using existing buildings allusive to empire,24 the Exposition also built new ones, thus articulating a connection with the past, while strengthening the character of Belém as the national site of memory of the Discoveries. The best example is the Monument to the Discoveries, built in wood for the Exposition, rebuilt in stone in 1960 (Sapega, 2008: 26), and one of the most visited monuments in Lisbon today (figs. 17 and 18).
24 Two of Belém’s most emblematic structures – the Tower of Belém (1515-21) and the Jerónimos Monastery (1516-44) – date from the early period of maritime expansion. Their construction itself is indicative of the economic circumstances of the time, made possible by the revenues from Africa, Asia and Brazil which were entering the kingdom of Portugal. By the early sixteenth century, Belém was recognised as a launching ground for the Portuguese voyages of discovery and conquest and therefore, King Manuel I supported the construction of both the structures in this location (Sapega, 2008: 20).
42
Figure 19. One of the “indigenous villages” located on the main lake (source: Casimiro dos Santos Vinagre, 1940, Collection Casimiro Vinagre, Exposition of the Portuguese World, Art Library of the Gulbenkian Foundation).
The exposition included various sections, located around the still existing Praça do Império (Square of the Empire). The Colonial Section was placed inside the Colonial Garden to evoke Portugal’s colonial dominions, given the existence of plants extracted from around the globe (Rodrigues, 2016: 65). It included exhibitions and monuments, such as the “Monument to the Portuguese Expansion Across the World”, and busts, tiles and other elements representing colonial subjects were used to adorn the garden (De Matos, 2012: 212-215).25 One of the central elements were the “Indigenous Villages” (figs. 19 to 21) including around 138 individuals from the colonies (De Matos, 2012: 213). The location of these “indigenous” villages inside the garden was not coincidental. As Val Plumwood argues, “[a]lthough now largely thought of as the non-human sphere, in contrast with the truly or ideally human (identified with reason), the sphere of ‘nature’ has, in the past, been taken to include what were thought of as less ideal or more primitive forms of the human” (2003: 52). In placing the “primitive” or “indigenous” within a space associated with nature, the epistemic authority of the exposition strengthened the allegedly inferior character of both these individuals and of nature, in binary opposition to the rational, cultured and thus superior Western individual and culture. According to the official catalogue, the “indigenous villages” were built as loyal reconstructions of settlements, to show different ethnicities from Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, S. Tomé and Principe, Angola, Mozambique, Timor, Macau and the then Portuguese State of India (De Matos,
25 In her work, Patrícia Ferraz de Matos describes the seven sections and their contents in detail, shedding yet more light on the violence that this cultural event entailed. For instance, she explains how one of the sections was the “Pavilion of the Catholic Missions”, which was located near the “indigenous villages”, so that the missionaries could continue their “work” during the Exposition amongst the “indigenous” (2012: 213).
43 2012: 215; Galvão, 1940: 284-285). In line with the Colonial Act of 1930, which legally imposed racial difference in the colonies,26 those from Cape Verde, Macau and India had a special status (De Matos, 2012: 62), which translated itself in the way they were exhibited. The “classification” and “differentiation” amongst the colonial subjects amongst them, according to unclear criteria, mainly based on physical characteristics. The colonial subjects from Cape Verde, for instance, are described as being the result of “miscegenation” between Portuguese and black people, and therefore as superior to other Africans and as good examples of the process of assimilation (De Matos, 2012: 216, 221), i.e., the desired process of becoming less African (i.e. uncivilised) and more Western (i.e. civilised). This is in line with what I showed earlier in this thesis, regarding the privileged position of Cape Verdeans with lighter skin colour during colonial times, for their alleged racial and cultural proximity to Portugal). As I showed in the chapter about Tarrafal, these racial ideologies and narratives of Western superiority endure today in Cape Verde as an afterlife of Portuguese colonialism. The practice of exhibiting humans was widespread between the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century, when hundreds of “ethnographic spectacles” were created in Europe, North America and colonised spaces (Putnam, 2012: 56, 61). They had often two interconnected aims: to develop “scientific” anthropological knowledge about colonial subjects;27 and to reinforce and normalise the idea of (racial) difference, towards fostering national pride and showing that the colonial endeavour was succeeding, being therefore worth the costs (Hall, 2003b: 260; Putnam, 2012: 56). As “pedagogies of inequality”, aimed at rooting these differences in the Portuguese imaginary, these cultural representations were deeply implicated in the reinforcement of colonial power (Castela, 2017: 189). I argue therefore that the Colonial Section - and similar cultural representations - represented a form of epistemological violence, whose effects have endured in many societies around the world. These afterlives manifest themselves in the deep-seated racism that continues to hold sway in Portuguese society (e.g. Henriques, 2018; RTP, 2020;), and in the former colonies (e.g. Henriques, 2016), as I showed in the previous chapter.
26 The Acto Colonial (Colonial Act) of 1930 was a legal document that established a hierarchy of rights and duties between those born in the metropole and the colonies, and amongst the colonial subjects, it distinguished between the “assimilated” and the “indigenous”, the latter being those who, through education and cultural customs, distinguished themselves from the rest of the “indigenous” for their closeness to Portuguese standards of civilisation (De Matos, 2012: 62-65). 27 European anthropological research involved attributing racial and cultural typologies to individuals and groups according to allegedly scientific criteria. This often included measuring physical strength and resistance to effort, motivated by the prospect of economic gains through labour in the colonies. Anthropology and racial theories were, especially in the twentieth century, used to justify the colonisation of territories with populations that were viewed as inferior. In Portugal, this violent practice of “scientific research” started developing in the twentieth century, and contributed greatly to justify the exertion of power upon the populations of the country’s colonies, and to affirm the Estado Novo’s status as a necessary civilising power (De Matos, 2012: 56-58).
44
Figures 20 and 21. "Extras of the exhibitions” (source: Casimiro dos Santos Vinagre, 1940, Collection Casimiro Vinagre, Exposition of the Portuguese World, Art Library of the Gulbenkian Foundation).
From Colonial to “Tropical” Garden: Repressing memories of violence
Although created to be temporary, some objects and structures were not dismantled after the end of the Exposition, including 14 busts representing African and Asian individuals. These, and the many plants extracted from around the world, live on in the garden today. After 1974 and the end of colonialism, the garden was renamed the Tropical Agricultural Garden-Museum, and fell under the administration of the governmental Institute of Tropical Scientific Research or IICT, which could be seen as a relic of colonial-era practices of knowledge production.28 Tropical became an euphemistic adjective for practices of knowledge production inherited from colonial times and about locations formerly under Portuguese rule. Between 1940 and 2019, the garden underwent only limited changes to its composition and physical elements,29 and despite its significance (as a National Monument), it witnessed many years
28 This IICT, which was until 2015 managed by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, could be seen as a postcolonial successor of the State-sponsored colonial research practices examined above, since its history goes back to the establishment of the Comissão de Cartografia (Cartography Commission) in 1883. This Commission was partly motivated by the “scramble for Africa” and aimed at advancing scientific research and exploration of the colonies (Casanova & Romeiras, 2020: 2-4). After the end of the Estado Novo and the independence of the Portuguese colonies in Africa, this institute became a centre for scientific research and cooperation with the countries that are part of the Community of the Portuguese Speaking Countries) (2020: 4). It is because of its history and the genealogy of “scientific research”, that I see the work of the IICT, and similar and subsequent institutions, as a relic of colonial practices of knowledge production. 29 António Cruz Serra (the dean of the University of Lisbon) mentions in an interview during the official reopening ceremony of the garden on 25 January 2020 that the garden hadn’t witnessed significant changes since the Exposition of 1940 (Universidade de Lisboa, 27 February 2020).
45 of increasing deterioration.30 In 2015, the IICT became extinct and the renamed Tropical Botanic Garden was integrated into the University of Lisbon, managed by the National Museum of Natural History and Science (MUHNAC) (Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência, 2015). Its bad state of conservation led the University to initiate a large-scale renovation project in January 2019, the first phase of which ended in early 2020. The second phase, which includes mainly the restoration of the buildings, is underway.31 The goals of this project, stated on its official webpage, bespeak to the garden’s contemporary function as a leisure space for the general public, and as a space for botanical conservation, research and education. To examine how this layered landscape is dealt with today, I examine the narratives (re)produced there as of 2020 through the new signboard system created in situ and in the new mobile phone application (or app) JBT, which represent the most recent efforts at representing and (re)mediating the memories of this site. The mobile app, launched in June by the University of Lisbon, is part of the renovation project and is connected to the new signboard system in the garden, since it expands on the limited information available in situ.32 For this reason, I focus my analysis mainly on the narrative articulated in the app. Contrasting with the virtual tour of Tarrafal, the garden’s app is meant to be used on location, given its interactive character. Despite the pandemic, I was able to visit Portugal in the summer of 2020, allowing me to explore the app in situ. During the official reopening ceremony in early 2020, Luis Ribeiro, the landscape architect responsible for the project, stated that “we didn’t want to erase any of the [garden’s historical] phases, but rather make them more visible for the public”, and he mentions that the new signboard system tries to fulfil this goal (Universidade de Lisboa, 27 February 2020, my translation). Similarly to what I argued in the previous chapter, my analysis of the new signboard system (in situ and on the app) is based on the idea that it represents the media through which the epistemic authority imposes and claims particular truths about the garden and multi-layered histories, and therefore exercises its authority to produce knowledge. The signboard system in situ organises the layers of the garden and its elements into different routes: Botanic/Notable Trees; Historical Circuit; and Inclusive Circuit (for people with disabilities). These are explained at the entrance, and in the garden, signboards single out particular objects - of “botanical” or “historical” interest - to tell the visitor truths about them. The text is offered in Portuguese and English, given the many national and international visitors to Belém. The new signboards at the entrance offer the visitor historical information about the garden (fig. 22, below). According to these boards, its importance garden is attributed to the “remarkable botanical collection” it contains,
30 This was mainly related to the fact that in the run-up towards its extinction, the IICT was receiving increasingly reduced public funds to maintain its infrastructure, including the Tropical Botanic Garden in Belém (Marta Costa and Ana Godinho, in conversation with author, 5 August 2020). 31 All the information included here about the Programme of Rehabilitation and Improvement of the Tropical Botanic Garden was retrieved from the official website, unless stated otherwise (Universidade de Lisboa, 2020), 32 Some of the signboards in the garden include a QR code which redirects the visitor to the app, where one can find more detailed information about the corresponding object.
46 determined by its history of scientific research. This history is narrated in a positive light, exemplified by the statement: “the prestige of the Colonial Garden led it to be invited to participate in several national and international exhibitions”. It echoes Luis Ribeiro’s statement during the reopening ceremony: “this garden tells the story of Portugal and the Portuguese in the world. This is a tropical garden and thus it tells the story of the plants that the Portuguese spread all over the world, for decorative but especially for practical reasons” (Universidade de Lisboa, 27 February 2020, my translation). The signboard concludes by stating that the garden is “a place of high scientific interest, distinguishing itself in the areas of research, education, culture and leisure”. Colonial histories of environmental and epistemological violence are conspicuously absent. Given their location at the entrance to the garden, these boards authoritatively frame the experiences and perspectives of the visitors.
Figure 22. The new signboards at the entrance of the Tropical Botanic Garden, with a map of the area, historical information and (on the right) the three new routes created in the garden (photo by the author, 2020).
It is also at the entrance that a new world map was built into the ground, bringing to mind the large world-map located in front of the Monument to the Discoveries (figs. 23 and 24, below). This map was inaugurated in 1960 and it shows dates, ships and caravels that mark the main routes of the Portuguese maritime expansion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (Padrão dos Descobrimentos, n.d.). If the reconstruction of the Monument in 1960 and the creation of this map served to literally (and once again) cement the narrative of the Discoveries onto the public space, the new map in the garden works, by
47 association and given its location in Belém, to symbolically reproduce this narrative in the garden. By showing different parts of the world, and in combination with the signboards at the entrance, it illustrates the historical and global connections of this garden in an almost glorifying way.
L to R: Figure 23. The new world map at the entrance of the garden, according to the Dymaxion projection (photo by the author, 2020). Figure 24. The Compass Rose, as seen from the top of the Monument to the Discoveries (photo by the author, 2018).
The JBT app (also available in different languages), explicitly articulates the connection between the garden and its wider mnemonic context, by stating that it is located “in the monumental area of Belém”, and that “[t]he JBT organises scientific, educational, cultural and leisure activities aiming to preserve and enhance heritage, as well as disseminating specialised knowledge on tropical science and the history and memory of science and technology during the Discoveries, the major period of Portuguese expansion and colonization” (Universidade de Lisboa, n.d.). This text not only exalts Western colonial science while eliding its “darker sides” (i.e. environmental and epistemological violence), but it is also inaccurate, since the most significant part of the garden’s history associated with “tropical science” took place in the twentieth century, a period that is not associated with the “Discoveries". The app also arranges the garden’s layers and physical elements along four routes: Trees You Must See; Garden With History; the Birds route; and the Biosensors route. Much like with the routes in situ, the app also separates the “natural” and the “historical” points of interests, with important consequences for the official narratives produced at and about the garden. The Introduction text of Trees You Must See states: “[e]xploring an area with plenty of tropical and subtropical species, this walk includes some of the most important specimens in the garden. It features plants linked to economic interests, highlighting the role of the JBT in teaching Tropical Agronomy. Palm trees, so characteristic of tropical habitats can be seen, as well as endemic species, some rare in their natural habitats […], ready to reveal all their stories.” The choice of “tropical” to characterise the agronomic education which
48 took place there during colonial times constitutes a first indication of an unwillingness to address this garden’s deep entanglements with Portugal’s colonial past.
L to R: Figure 25. Screenshot of a page of the JBT mobile phone app showing the “Afrocarpus mannii. Figure 26. Screenshot of a page of the JBT mobile phone app showing the “Angolan Women” (source: App JBT).
The route singles out 20 trees and for each it includes information such as family and taxonomic notes, origin and uses. The same yet simplified information can be found in the garden. Using the Afrocarpus mannii as an example, the app states that: it is part of the Podocarpaceae family; the species was named after Georg Mann who collected the specimen; it is endemic to the island of S. Tomé and Príncipe; and “the wood has high commercial value” (fig. 25). The “story” revealed (or rather, imposed) by the epistemic authority is hence that of Western science, seen for instance in the taxonomical information, while only indirectly alluding to (and thus eliding) colonial-era stories of environmental extraction (by referring to the utilitarian and profitable purpose of the tree), and Portugal’s colonial past, by referring to a former colony. The information is provided in an assertive, matter-of fact manner rendering it impossible to contest its alleged truths. These are the truths of Western science developed during the modern/colonial era, whose supposed facticity and totalising character live on, innocently and unchallenged, today, as can be seen in this narrative. Much like the official narrative was legitimised at Tarrafal by showing particular structures and objects, the self-celebratory narrative of Western botanical
49 science is claimed and thus legitimised by pointing at and describing the garden’s many different plants. In other words, the physical character and elements of the garden work to strengthen, much like in Tarrafal, the truth and believability of the official narrative. I argue that the epistemic authority of the mobile app and the in situ plaques reproduce and reinforce the totalising claims of Western scientific epistemologies, while concealing their colonial genealogies of epistemological and physical violence. Furthermore, it recreates a narrative of othering, developed during colonial times, whereby nature is located outside (and below) the rational and cultured (Western) humans. This approach to the “natural” elements of the garden can be seen as a form of narrative erasure or “repression”. Grada Kilomba explains how “repression”, a concept derived from psychanalysis, refers to “that process by which unpleasant ideas - the unpleasant truths - are rendered unconscious, out of awareness, due to extreme anxiety, guilt or shame they cause” (2019: 19). For Christoffer Leiding Kolvraa, repression represents a mode of colonial heritage practice which either simply ignores that particular sites or objects are enmeshed in a colonial history, or which articulate colonial histories through self-celebratory discourses (2018: 1). The repression operating in the garden seem to indicate a lack willingness to address the darker sides of the history of Western (botanical) science, and are characterised, as I showed above, by a self-celebratory tone, that should be understood within a context whereby the narrative of the Discoveries continues to dominate the way Portuguese society views itself and its past.
“Garden with history": Showing the other in 1940, telling violence in 2020
The Garden With History route allows the visitor to select four sub-routes: 18th and 19th Centuries; 20th Century; Trees With History, which also do not address colonial histories;33 and Exposition of the Portuguese World. In the introductory text, the app tells the visitor about the garden’s historical layers, from the sixteenth century (as a royal summer farm) to the twentieth century when, as the Colonial Garden, “it housed tropical and subtropical plants from the former Portuguese Colonies”. It also mentions that “[i]n 1940, the JBT hosted the Colonial Section of the Portuguese World Exhibition [sic],34 one of the propaganda vehicles for the Estado Novo and its colonial policy”. These histories are told by pointing at specific objects, and its twentieth century history is represented by some of the structures that were built when it became the Colonial Garden (such as the Main Greenhouse), and the remains of the Exposition of 1940, including the 14 busts. The fact of mentioning the Colonial Section, as well as imbuing certain objects in the garden with meanings about this event, is a significant narrative
33 Three of the plants are presented as having a history for having been planted by prominent men, for example Manuel de Arriaga, the first elected President of the Portuguese Republic. The fourth plant, the Dragon Tree, is also conferred a history because of a legend that is associated with it. 34 In official translations of the Exposition of the Portuguese World, one often sees “Portuguese World Exhibition”, which is incorrect, since the Portuguese name refers to an exhibition about the Portuguese world specifically, and not of the World. Unless I’m directly quoting one of the official texts, I will use the term “Exposition of the Portuguese World”.
50 change since 2019. To examine this change, I focus on two (groups of) objects in the garden that have been singled out for their potential as mnemonic devices: the 14 busts and an artificial island where one of the “indigenous villages” was created.
L to R: Figure 27. Two of the busts representing what in the app are named as the “Angolan Women”. Figure 28. The plaque that stands next to the two busts (both photos by the author, 2020).
The busts are represented in pairs given their position throughout the garden siding gateways. Each pair is described in the app following the same logic: they are named according to their alleged gender and country (then colony) of origin, such as “Angolan women” or “Timorese Man”, followed by a short description of the object, ending with an inventory number (fig. 26, above). In the garden, small plaques have now been placed next to each pair of busts, showing essentially the same information as the app (figs. 27 and 28).35 As an example of the descriptions, the app describes the “Angolan Women” as “[p]ainted cement sculptures representing two female figures of African origin wearing necklaces. They were produced for the “Hall of the Peoples of the Empire” in the colonial section of the Portuguese World Exhibition [sic]. Artist: Manuel de Oliveira. Date: 1939/1940”. That the busts have acquired new meanings worth presenting and protecting can also be seen in the fact that there are plans to restore these objects and that since the renovation project, these objects have been added to the MUHNAC’s collection, as seen in their inventory numbers.36 The information on the app and on site draws from knowledge dated to 1940,37 given that very limited information is available about these objects.38 The official catalogue of the Exposition states:
35 Marta Costa and Ana Godinho, in conversation with author, 5 August 2020. 36 As of my visit in August 2020, only the plinths of the busts had been restored, however, their restoration is planned for a later phase of the renovation project (Marta Costa and Ana Godinho, in conversation with author, 5 August 2020). 37 Marta Costa and Ana Godinho, in conversation with author, 5 August 2020. 38 Ana Duarte Rodrigues argues that nothing indicates that these busts represent portraits of specific individuals, yet she proposes an interesting hypothesis for the story of these busts: by carrying out a comparative analysis between the objects and photographs of colonial subjects taken in the context of anthropological missions, she suggests that at least some of the busts might have been made based on these photographs (2016: 66-69). A more in-depth study would be required to corroborate this suggestion.
51 “[d]rawing on the most representative races of the Empire, a collection of sculpted heads was made, by Manuel de Oliveira. Placed on plinths alongside an avenue made of baboes, they represent the first large gallery of the peoples of the Empire shown through sculpture” (Galvão, 1940: 284, my translation). According to Ana Duarte Rodrigues, who carried out what is possibly the only study about these busts, these were used as decorative elements of the Colonial Section to represent the “types” of peoples of the empire through their physical characteristics and adornments, and in their large quantity and variety, they served to show the diversity and greatness of Portugal’s empire (2016: 70). In this sense, they served a similar function as the “indigenous villages”. Their present-day position, spread in pairs throughout the garden rather than lining an avenue, represents a post-1940 alteration,39 and seems to attest to a perceived decorative potential of these objects. During the Exposition of 1940, these busts contrasted heavily with other representations located elsewhere in Belém, such as the (mostly) men represented on the Monument to the Discoveries, whose full bodies, in dignified positions, tell histories about well-known individuals (fig. 18, above). While today these historical figures are still remembered, the only thing that is known about the unnamed and unidentified individuals represented through the busts refers to knowledge produced by the Estado Novo about the “types” of people of the empire, and to the name of the Portuguese man who represented this racial ideology through sculpture. These contrasts speak of the deeply unequal context in which knowledge was produced during colonialism, an inequality which endures today in the limited and highly selective archive which curators, such as those working in the garden, are required to draw on for their work. By using this archive, however, the new meanings attributed to the busts fall short of critically addressing and countering the epistemological violence they represent. Rather, they (most likely unintentionally) restore colonial-era claims of racial and ethnic differences based on physical characteristics. In doing so, and given the location of this garden in Belém and its proximity to the Monument to the Discoveries, these new meanings bring back to life colonial-era ideologies of difference and Western superiority, incapsulated in Aimé Césaire’s “colonial discourse” (2000). The second object corresponds to a new information board, located only in situ (for now)40 on the artificial island of the garden’s main lake, where one of the 11 “indigenous villages” - the “Bijagós Village” - was located (fig. 29, below).41 The plaque doesn’t point to a specific object, since the only trace of this and other “villages” is the ground they once stood on. This plaque represents the only instance in the garden where memories of colonial violence have been explicitly and critically engaged with. This was done by turning a physical element of this layered landscape into a mnemonic device, through which memories formerly silenced could be articulated. The text included on the plaque is very
39 Their present-day position in the garden, thus, correspond to a post-1940 alteration to the garden, although it is as yet unknown when it took place (Marta Costa and Ana Godinho, in conversation with author, 5 August 2020). 40 Ana Godinho informed me that more extensive information about the “Bijagós Village” will be made available through a QR code and the app (personal communication with author via email, 12 November 2020). 41 The 11 “indigenous villages” of the Colonial Section were spread throughout the garden (Galvão, 1940: 285).
52 short, in line with the standard plaque size of the garden, thus limiting the depth to which the curators could engage with this complex history. I argue that the narrative it produces somewhat normalises the practice of displaying (the cultures of) “others” in the twentieth century, by claiming it was then common practice, as seen in the sentence “[in] line with other European exhibitions (…)”. Furthermore, it displaces the violent character of this practice by referring to it as a shocking practice today, thus seemingly implying that it was unproblematic then. Finally, it establishes no connection with the surviving 14 busts that were made for similar purposes, whose visual character would have potentially helped strengthen was it told here, while connecting the histories of this layered landscape with each other.
Figure 29. The new signboard, added to the garden after August 2020 (photo: Ana Godinho de Carvalho, 2020).
Nonetheless, this text represents a significant narrative change that points to the development of more critical engagements with the colonial histories of violence this garden embodies. By contextualising the practice of exhibiting the “other” and their cultures within the Estado Novo’s colonial policy, “based on political dominance and subjugation”, the new text produces a contrasting narrative to that found elsewhere in the garden, while hinting at the garden’s deep-seated connections to colonialism. I argue that by imbuing objects in the garden with new meanings, mediated through the new signboards and the app, the epistemic authority in the garden has been able to infuse this site with new meanings, and to produce new truths about it. According to Ann Rigney, “although not designed to be records, objects and landscapes can turn out to be an unexpected repository of memory, an ‘accidental archive’ we might call it, made up of as yet-unarticulated traces rather than verbal records, of potential rather than as-yet- unarticulated actualised meanings” (2015: 14). The new narrative about the “indigenous village”
53 represents an example of how elements of a layered landscape can shift from a condition of unarticulated to articulated and mediated memories. From an earlier lack of knowledge or willingness to deal with parts of the history of the garden, this shift represents a narrative “re-emergence”. Britta Timm Knudsen explains how the concept of “re- emergence allows the ghosts of the colonial past to re-appear in the becoming of new futures” (2018: 1). For Knudsen, re-emergence implies an active and critical engagement with the past that is reactivated from its previous condition of invisibility, to foster the creation of alternative realities, while challenging Eurocentric narratives that tend to obscure the violence which the process of “modernity” involved (2018). The new plaques and the app’s pages about the busts can be seen as a form of narrative re- emergence, for the way they actively engage with pasts previously unarticulated, even if they fall short of articulating a narrative change. The plaque about the “indigenous village”, on the other hand, goes one significant step further in engaging critically with these re-emerged memories. Nonetheless, one cannot yet speak of truly decolonial knowledge, since this would involve “thinking and doing otherwise” by delinking from Western practices and epistemologies, towards the creation of alternative narratives and realities (Mignolo: 2018: 113). I argue that, given the historical purpose of the busts and the “indigenous villages” and the way racial thinking holds sway in contemporary Portuguese society (and elsewhere), much more could be done at this site to engage with these memories, and to tackle their contemporary afterlives. To give an example of how that could be done, I draw on the Portuguese artist Vasco Araújo and his audio-visual artwork The Garden. Araújo can be seen as part of a group of people born in Portugal after 1974, who, and as shown above, has increasingly been working to challenge dominant narratives about the country’s colonial and fascist past. Through creative practices that engage with the past, Araújo offers an alternative reading of the busts and the narratives they could articulate, in a way that takes into account the ethical and social stakes of representation. An almost 10-minute-long video, it shows close- ups of the busts interspersed with views of the garden, thus connecting the “cultural” and “natural” elements of this layered landscape and refusing the binary division articulated in the official narrative. It was created in 2005, it has been shown in several exhibition spaces located outside the garden,42 and it seems to represent the first effort to re-emerge these objects from their former condition of silence. Through voice-over using excerpts from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Araújo enables the busts to hold a conversation with each other about the condition of the stranger or foreigner, which is attributed to one of the characters of the fictional story he engenders. The individuals that give voice to the busts are Portuguese men and women of Angolan and Cape Verdean descent. This represents a conscious choice on the part of the artist to connect colonial histories of racial differentiation and displacement (which the garden is implicated in), with individuals of African descent living in Portugal
42 This artwork was exhibited in different places, the last of which seems to be at this exhibition E Daqueles Que não Queremos Saber (About Those We Don’t Care About) in 2016 in Coimbra (Araújo, 2016).
54 today, onto whom the condition of foreigner is often enforced (Duarte, 2019: 71). In doing so, Araújo addresses postcolonial immigration and the limits of social integration - themselves also afterlives of colonialism -, which are informed by enduring racial and cultural discrimination. Furthermore, by making the busts speak, the artist confers agency to the (until then objectified) colonial subjects represented in these objects, allowing the busts (and the people they symbolically represent) to transition from being objects to be gazed at, into subjects to be listened to.
Figures 30 and 31. Screenshots from The Garden (source: Vasco Araújo, n.d.).
Araújo’s narrative, however, has limitations: once again, the agency to speak comes from a Portuguese white man, through which he maintains control of the “power to represent” (Hall, 1999: 7). Furthermore, the texts he uses, as part of two works of ancient Greek culture, are usually seen to belong to the genealogy of Western thinking (Mignolo, 2018: 129). Araújo often resorts to classic literature in his work because of its allegedly universal and intemporal ideas and concepts, and as a way of “universalising” the meaning of his work (Duarte, 2019: 71). Given the modern/colonial genealogy of the concept of “universal” knowledge, Araújo’s embrace and reproduction of this idea disables him from truly delinking from Western hegemonic epistemologies. Nonetheless, The Garden attests to the possibilities of engaging with objects implicated in histories of colonial violence through artistic practices, in ways that offer alternative and critical readings of the past and the present realities. This type of work, like Cardoso’s Perpetual Cycle, enables the articulation of alternative narratives that contest and challenge the silences and problems of dominant and official ones. Although this artwork was created in 2005, and the garden’s official narrative has partly changed since, Araújo’s work still articulates a reality as yet unarticulated in the garden: the historical and epistemological connection between the histories the busts embody and the reality of individuals in Portugal of African descent, who because of the normalisation of racial thinking and the “colonial discourse”, continue to experience exclusion and discrimination today. In doing so, and much like Cardoso, Araújo makes appear afterlives of colonialism, manifested in the contemporary durabilities of racial and cultural discrimination. In one of his exhibitions, the artist presented The Garden together with a similar audio-
55 visual work (titled Theme Park) that uses statues of stereotyped colonised subjects located in a different park in Portugal. In doing so, he questions lusotropicalist narratives of colour-blindness and the colonial past more generally that endure almost unchallenged in the country today, as seen in the many “marks of colonialism” in the public space, such as those embodied in the garden, in Belém and elsewhere (Henriques, 26 June 2016). Although The Garden was only exhibited outside the Tropical Botanic Garden, given that “art galleries and museums can create a space of contemplation and debate around problematic material heritage” (Barcenilla, 2020), Araújo’s presentation of this and other artworks will have hopefully enabled a dialogue amongst visitors about the issues addressed here.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I showed that the official and dominant narrative at and about the Tropical Botanic Garden is characterised mainly by an erasure or repression of the memories of violence associated with its “natural” elements, alongside the re-emergence of narratives related to its “historical” elements, namely the 1940 Exposition. I argue that the coexistence of contrasting and dissonant approaches to the site’s colonial past stems from the character of this site as a layered landscape implicated in relatively invisible forms of violence, and its location in Belém, the site of memory of the Discoveries par excellence, and in Portugal more broadly. Contrasting with the memorial site museum of Tarrafal, the memories of colonial violence analysed in this chapter are located within a public garden, whose primary function is not to tell stories about the past. Rather, this is a space where visitors come for a walk in their free time, and the location of ongoing scientific research, which helps explain (to a limited extent) the relatively scarce information available about colonial (and other) histories. The way narratives about the past are articulated here reveal a binary view of the world as consisting of the distinct realms of nature and culture. This dualism, as I hinted at above, constitutes one of “hallmarks of Western modernity”, that continues to inform disciplinary boundaries and traditions of thought, as well as heritage and curatorial practices today (Byrne & Ween, 2015: 94-96) and that legitimises and perpetuates what Mignolo termed the “environmental catastrophe”. A conversation with Ana Godinho and Marta Costa, curators of the MUHNAC involved in the renovation project and in the (re-)interpretation of the garden’s historical elements, confirmed this curatorial approach.43 By pursuing binary curatorial practices, the epistemic authority has reproduced the Western idea of the allegedly ahistorical character of nature, and claimed truths about the “natural” elements of the garden that elide - authoritatively yet discretely - the violent histories of colonial scientific research and natural exploitation that this site is implicated in.
43 Marta Costa and Ana Godinho, in conversation with author, 5 August 2020. This can also be seen in the “Credits” section of the app, where different “experts” are listed for each of the routes (Universidade de Lisboa, n.d.).
56 This curatorial approach, however, did enable the garden to be, if to a limited extent, imbued with new narratives that address some of its histories of colonial violence. The narrative re-emergences since 2018 should be understood within the shift that has been taking place in Europe towards increasingly critical and inclusive ways of dealing with Europe’s colonial pasts. According to Godinho and Costa, an institutional turning point in Portugal regarding these discussions, especially within the museum sector, was motivated by the contribution of Wayne Modest (director of the Research Centre for Material Culture in the Netherlands) to an event organised in 2019 by Acesso Cultura about “decolonising” museums (Acesso Cultura, 2019).44 Within the MUHNAC, and particularly amongst curators engaged in historical topics, this event kickstarted many discussions and activities aimed at critically addressing Portugal’s dominant historical narratives, and fostering more inclusive heritage practices within this museum and the gardens it manages, including the Tropical Botanic Garden.45 The narrative change I identified in the garden attests to the way memories and practices of remembrance often travel between countries, and can inform ways of dealing with difficult pasts across different contexts. As a landscape that is recognised primarily for its natural and only secondarily for its historical elements, as seen in the name and function of this site, and given the information on the signboard system that focuses primarily on the “natural” elements, I argue that the Eurocentric narrative that exalts the “prestige” of the garden as a place of “high scientific interest”, that “tells the story of Portugal and the Portuguese in the world”, somewhat overshadows the re-emergent narrative about the Exposition of 1940 and its “indigenous villages”. The dominance of this narrative was evident during an episode of the well-known Visita Guiada (Guided Tour) television series on 22 June 2020 that focused on the garden and its renovation project (RTP Play, 2020). During this episode, Luís Ribeiro describes the garden as a “living museum”, “rich in historical layers” (idem, my translation), that includes many plants from around the world. Ribeiro hints at the garden’s colonial history, when he explains that it acquired an important pedagogical function as a space for colonial education. Yet his tone is one of pride, as seen for instance in his enthusiastic description of an “extraordinary document” written by king D. Carlos I at the beginning of the twentieth century that established Portugal’s first guidelines for colonial education. To this he adds that twentieth century official colonial missions produced “incredible information”, speaking mainly of geographical and cartographical data about Portugal’s African domains. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the garden’s history related to the Colonial Section of the Exposition of 1940 is completely absent from the programme. Rather, his narrative is one that transmits
44 Marta Costa and Ana Godinho, in conversation with author, 5 August 2020. 45 Godinho and Costa mentioned several events they have organised, together with communities of African descent in Portugal, towards these goals. An example of that was the programme of events surrounding the World Africa Day and titled “Africa in the Museum”, which included discussions specifically surrounding the topic of “decolonising museums” (see Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência, 2020).
57 a sense of pride for the Portuguese historical presence around the world, emulating the narrative of the Discoveries. I argue therefore that the dominant official narrative in and about the garden remains, or rather, reinforces to a great extent, what Knudsen defined as “a Eurocentric modernity narrative that does not take into consideration its own foundation on the exploitation of non-European territories” (Knudsen, 2018: 3). As such, it reveals a form of “colonial aphasia”, to use Ann Laura Stoler’s concept (2016: 128). For Stoler, the concept of colonial aphasia lends itself to unravelling the different processes whereby particular histories become occluded, be it through loss of access, active dissociation, difficulty in speaking or in generating an appropriate vocabulary. “Aphasia! helps conceptualise “a simultaneous presence of a thing and its absence, a presence and the misrecognition of it” (idem), and a “disconnect between words and things, an inability to recognize people and things in the world and assign proper names to them” (idem: 158). By applying this concept to my object of analysis in this chapter, it becomes clear that the narrative silences do not derive from a lack of knowledge about this site’s connection to colonial histories, given the occasional if diluted references to them, nor from the lack of mnemonic devices that might help rearticulate these stories. Rather, these silences seem to derive from a lack of willingness to critically engage with these histories, or with a misrecognition that the natural elements in the garden and the histories of colonial scientific research are entangled with and implicated in the exploitation of nature for human purposes, a process that started during modern/colonial times, and which endure - at new scales of destruction - in the present. Besides the physical character of this heritage site, its location in Belém and in Portugal has also affected the reproduction of dominant Eurocentric and aphasic narratives. The new map on the ground, the exultation of the garden’s international scientific prestige that “tells the story of Portugal and the Portuguese in the world”, and the aphasic narrative approaches to its “natural” elements mirror and reinforce the facticity of the Discoveries narrative. These Eurocentric narratives speak particularly to white Portuguese people, while excluding postcolonial immigrants and their descendants, as well as many others in Portugal today - including myself - who do not see themselves represented in this narrative that conceals the country’s histories of colonial violence. A lack of attention for or the uncritical representation of the colonial past ignores and perpetuates the epistemological structures of power that created them in the past, and which endure today, for instance, in the ongoing environmental catastrophe and in the deep-seated racism that prevails in Portuguese society. According to Tiago Castela, the teaching of colonialism and of the racialised “other” encoded in the Exposition of 1940 persist today, albeit in more nuanced forms (2017: 201). The narratives produced in Belém and elsewhere, and objects such as the Monument to the Discoveries, as well as (if to a more subtle extent) the Tropical Botanic Garden, contribute to keeping these teachings alive. I believe that those responsible for managing and attributing meanings to the garden today, to a great extent ignored or did not recognise what could have been a chance, during the recent renovation project, to reveal and challenge the exclusionary narrative of the Discoveries, and to articulate other, more
58 critical and inclusive narratives about the past and the present conditions it engendered. The garden, I argue, holds an enormous potential to support the production of narratives that challenge dominant narratives about Portugal’s colonial past and Portuguese society’s contemporary self-perception. This is the case of many other places and objects in the country, where much work is yet to be done towards recognising colonialism as a central element of modernity and of the country’s history, towards recognising its contemporary afterlives, and towards generating alternative, more equitable futures.
59 Conclusion: Narrating the past, perpetuating violence
My research was guided by the question: how do memory narratives articulated in and about national heritage sites reflect the afterlives of colonialism in Portugal and Cape Verde today? To answer this question, I examined two sites, the former incarceration site and current Museum of Resistance of Tarrafal, and the former Colonial Garden and current Tropical Botanic Garden of Belém, located respectively in Cape Verde and in Portugal. Both were created during colonial times, and in recent years have been the location of heritage and memory practices that have imbued them with meanings about the past for contemporary purposes. Although my thesis focused but on two objects of analysis, both mirror, to a great extent, the dominant ways in which the colonial past has been dealt with in recent years in both countries. I focused my analysis mainly on the official narratives produced by the authorities that manage both sites, while contrasting these with unofficial narratives articulated through the artworks of César Schofield Cardoso and Vasco Araújo. Together, these heritage, memory and artistic practices enabled things from the colonial past, a former prison and a garden, to be brought back to life in and for the present. Furthermore, my analysis (particularly) of the official narratives rendered visible the ways in which Western epistemological and, to a lesser extent, geopolitical power structures, informed by centuries of colonialism, endure today in representational practices. In doing so, I have been able to reveal and critically address certain continuities between the colonial past and the postcolonial present, which I refer to as afterlives of colonialism. As my analysis has shown, the afterlives of colonialism reveal themselves and operate differently. In my research, these differences derive mainly from the following interconnected factors: who does the telling (whether official authorities or individuals); through which cultural media (the kind of site); and where (i.e., the geographical, political and cultural contexts where these narratives are produced). At Tarrafal, particular narrative mechanisms and choices enabled the epistemic authority to articulate strong mnemonic connections to Portugal, and Europe more generally, while downplaying Cape Verde’s memories of colonialism and its historical and cultural ties to other African countries, such as Angola and Guinea Bissau. I argued that this narrative stems from and is driven by the way this heritage site has been used, since the 2000s, by the Cape Verdean and Portuguese governments as a medium to reaffirm their (colonial) historical ties for contemporary (political and economic) purposes. These political negotiations, sustained by the transnational character of Tarrafal, and informed and legitimised by Cape Verde’s specific experience of colonialism, work to recover colonial-era narratives that highlight particular memories, while eliding others, privileging the Cape Verdean elite while excluding and even displacing others. This does not seem to be a phenomenon entirely specific to Cape Verde: according to Marschall, postcolonial societies often seem to view being politically and economically connected to the former coloniser as potentially advantageous (2008: 357-360). In this context, heritage is often
60 perceived as a resource to enable connections to be re-established, and in the process, cultural and social values from the colonial past are frequently restored (idem). According to Cláudia Castelo, although the way Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, and S. Tomé and Príncipe have been dealing with their (colonial) pasts is ridden with internal dissonances and contradictions, and is characterised by significant differences between them, in these countries there seems to be a lack of strong opposition towards the memories conveyed by the former coloniser (2006: 6). Furthermore, lusotropicalist narratives that defend the colour-blindness of the Portuguese, the exceptionality of Portugal’s colonial project, and the centuries-old cultural connections between the former coloniser and its former colonies, can often be found to be reproduced in African postcolonial societies (idem), attesting to the “formative nature of the colonial project” (Marschall, 2008: 347). How these durabilities operate at and differ across heritage sites (and other cultural media) and these countries seems to be an understudied topic, and one certainly worth further investigation. To better understand how colonialism lives on today through the way postcolonial societies deal with their pasts, it would be relevant to, at a later stage, expand this research to include other former colonised contexts, such as Angola, Mozambique, Brazil and Timor. My analysis of the Tropical Botanic Garden, on the other hand, revealed the coexistence of contrasting and somewhat contradicting narratives, which operate within and reproduce mainly national mnemonic traditions, while being informed, to a lesser extent, by developments taking place elsewhere. This coexistence stems from the binary approaches to knowledge production employed at the garden, informed by modern/colonial understandings of nature and culture as distinct realms. These narrative contrasts can be seen, on the one hand, in the willingness to partially engage with some of the colonial histories of this garden, namely the “indigenous villages” of 1940. This critical approach to the “cultural” or historical elements of the garden represents, I argued, a reaction to ongoing international debates about the need to critically address and redress the injustices and violences of Europe’s colonial pasts. On the other hand, the more dominant aphasic approach that obscures the garden’s implication in environmental exploitation and territorial (and social) oppression while celebrating Western science, should be understood within the context of stubborn Portuguese mnemonic traditions, wherein the Discoveries narrative continues to inform and frame much (institutional) thinking about the country’s past and contemporary identity. Besides their geopolitical locations, so too have their physical characteristics, the type of violence they were implicated in, and their contemporary functions had an impact on the representation of the (colonial) past at these two sites. Through the concept of epistemic authority, I explored how connections are established between physical elements at Tarrafal and in the garden and written text, which work to support and often reinforce the narratives produced in and about them. Furthermore, I identified and addressed the way the invisibility and assertive tone of the epistemic authority serve to affirm the power and (alleged) facticity of the narrative it produces, in such a manner that it becomes difficult to challenge or contest these narratives. In doing so, I was able to consider how the epistemic
61 authorities in the garden and the former prison and the truths they claim impose and reproduce particular forms of epistemological (and political) power. In the garden, this can be seen in the way botanical elements are described authoritative- and normatively from a Eurocentric perspective and according to Western science and taxonomy, and in the way the busts are re-represented following colonial-era racialised understandings of the “other”. The violent knowledges that have been reproduced at this site speak of the type of violence that took place there in colonial times: a form of non-explicit violence, that operates on the level of knowledge production, but which nonetheless was deeply implicated in physical forms of violence, for the way they justified and legitimised the exploitation and oppression of non-Europeans and nature. Tarrafal, on the other hand, was implicated in more explicit forms of violence. The official narratives produced there violently silence and disregard the memories and experiences of many in Cape Verde (as well as Angola and Guinea Bissau) today. As a site that has been preserved and musealised to tell stories of (purported) national and international significance, the official narratives engender a more explicit form of exclusion in comparison to those created in the garden. Furthermore, and especially through Cardoso’s artwork, I was able to show how this site also enforces physical forms of violence, seen in the heritage management strategies employed by the IPC which have led to the displacement of local populations. Hence I argue that, in comparison to the official narratives in and about the garden, the official narratives and heritage practices taking place at Tarrafal enforce more explicit forms of violence. Although my analysis focused mainly on official narratives, I also considered and compared these with unofficial, artistic forms of narrative production, as articulated and transmitted through two artworks: The Garden by Araújo and Perpetual Cycle by Cardoso. These artworks, and the manner in which they address more or less directly the official narratives produced at these sites, demonstrate the lack of consensus in both countries regarding the way the (colonial) past should be remembered today. They represent unruly interventions that speak to, against and differently than official narratives, thus leading these to be challenged. In the case of Cardoso’s video artwork, by articulating a symbolic dialogue between Portuguese colonial-era lusotropicalist narratives and the condition of the colonised, between the colonial past and the postcolonial present, between colonial-era narratives and the narratives produced at Tarrafal (and the rest of the country) today, the artist made appear - and thus made matter - the violent afterlives of colonialism in Cape Verdean society and politics. Araújo’s audio- visual artwork engaged with the colonial-era busts in the garden, through which he articulated a dialogue between them about the condition of the foreigner, establishing a connection between colonial ideologies of racial and cultural differentiation and the contemporary condition of Portuguese men and women of African descent. The Garden and Perpetual Cycle, in acknowledging that cultural representations matter socially in the present, have demonstrated the power - and the danger - of these representations, and particularly those that operate in totalising and normative ways.
62 These unofficial narratives also demonstrate that it is possible (and necessary), through creative and affective practices, to articulate alternative meanings about the past, nationhood, belonging and identity. In making explicit and visible to the reader or viewer who the “speaker” or “teller” is, instead of rendering the speaker invisible (and thus authoritative) as seen in the official narratives, the narratives produced by Cardoso and Araújo have shown how to produce knowledge without claiming its facticity or universality. Through this alternative narrative approach, the two artists and their works do not reproduce authority, nor do they claim to speak to and for everyone. Examples such as these, I believe, could offer managers of heritage sites and museum curators alternative and more inclusive approaches to dealing with and representing violent pasts. These artists and the type of work they produce should be contextualised within the growing number of individuals and groups which, often born too recently to have experienced the violences of colonialism, are claiming and demanding their societies to engage more critically with their pasts, a development which I addressed in the Introduction to this thesis. Despite their potential to challenge official narratives and to engender alternative knowledge, these unofficial or counter-narratives are often limited by their ephemeral character, meaning that they often only fleetingly disturb and contest official narratives. Ultimately, “it is the manager of a site who has the most impact on its interpretation through the way in which he/she decides what to say and what to leave out” (Logan & Reeves, 2009: 1). Official dominant narratives therefore often remain dominant, given their long-term presence, crystallised in objects in the public sphere (such as “national heritage” sites), and thus in the minds of communities. Hence I argue that to engender more inclusive and equitable futures, critical - perhaps decolonial - narratives should also be articulated through more durable media that can lead to long-lasting and thus more significant effects. Furthermore, together with engaging with already existing objects and narratives, it is also necessary to develop new forms of knowledge that truly delink from Western epistemologies. The upcoming creation of the memorial to the victims of slavery in Lisbon attests to this need, and will hopefully demonstrate the potential of decolonial narratives to engender more inclusive understandings of the past, and more just contemporary and future societies. In this thesis, by rendering visible the coloniality of knowledge inherent to cultural representations of the (colonial) past in Cape Verde and Portugal, I hope to have been able to contribute to critical work and discussions about the need to recognise the colonial past as a central element of Western modernity. Furthermore, I hope to have stimulated a better understanding of the operationality of the afterlives of colonialism in contemporary societies, and more specifically, in practices that engage with the collective past for the present’s sake. Finally, through this research and its comparative approach, I hope to have contributed, if on a humble scale, to Miguel Cardina and Bruno Sena Martins’ proposal: “by placing, side by side, “dominant memories” and “subaltern memories”, “difficult memories” and “heroic memories”, “strong memories” and “weak memories”, memories constructed in the former metropole and others constructed in the former colonies, we open space for dialogue and reciprocal understanding” (2018: 19, my translation).
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