On the Lusophone Postcolony: - Miguel Vale de Almeida

of ‘New Brazils’ in Africa. A crucial element was, however, absent: there never was, in
spite of political decisions, a true colonization of the African colonies – large contingents
of Portuguese peasants continued to migrate to Brazil, not to Africa. The chances for the
creation of a process of colonization and ethnogenesis of the Brazilian sort were (or so it
seems obvious today) quite slim (not to mention the abyssal difference in historical
context, between sixteenth and nineteenth century concepts of citizenship, humanity and
so on). Furthermore, political upheaval in Portugal, mainly before and during the
Republican period of the early twentieth century, left the African colonial project ‘on
paper’, so to speak – as a series of projects and ‘colonizations of the future’, with a few
rare exceptions (governor Norton de Matos’s actions in Angola, for instance, or the actual
military struggle against African polities in Southern Mozambique or in Guinea).
Everything was to change with the advent of Salazar’s dictatorship on the aftermath of
the military coup of 1926. From that year until 1974 Portugal lived under a dictatorial
regime marked not so much by fascism as by a local version of integralism, i.e., a vision
of the nation as an isolated rural haven of Catholicism, patriarchal obedience ,
corporativism and economic protectionism. An isolated haven that, nevertheless, had its
economy increasingly depend on the African colonies. Also, its national narrative and
sense of identity – as promoted by the state, of course, but with amazing hegemonic
efficacy – increasingly depended on the conflation of the imagination of the Discoveries,
with the colonization and ethnogenesis of Brazil, and with colonialism in Africa. A true
modern colonial project saw then the light of day in the Portuguese African colonies,
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