Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography by Pamila Gupta

Abstract

Portuguese Studies vol. 37 no. 2 (2021), 256–68© Modern Humanities Research Association 2021 Reviews Pamila Gupta, Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World: History and Ethnography (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). 225 pages. Print and ebook. Reviewed by Paul Melo e Castro (University of Glasgow) A recent growth area in postcolonial studies has involved what one might loosely describe as ‘oceanic perspectives’. The attractions are obvious, in that such perspectives effectively provincialize Europe as one point in a network of exchanges and allow for a renovation of existing topics by recovering interconnections between former colonial spaces that a more national(ist) focus might occlude. Given that the bulk of Portuguese speakers are located around the South Atlantic and that a significant number, if not the majority, are of at least partial African descent, it is no surprise that Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic paradigm of a ‘counterculture of modernity’ emerging in the wake of the middle passage has provided the main inspiration within Lusophone Studies. Lately however, as attested by such works as Fernando Rosa’s The Portuguese in the Creole Indian Ocean (2015), among various articles and research projects, interest has also grown in how Isabel Hofmeyr’s countervailing Indian Ocean paradigm — in which processes of exchange long predate colonial modernity, even if increased and then informed by it — might bring about studies of the peripheral, less integrated, even residual eastern territories of the former Portuguese empire, stretching from Mozambique to India and onwards to Timor Leste. It to this emergent debate that Pamela Gupta’s Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean World contributes, asking some searching questions of an original variety of ethnographic materials and historical junctures yet equally showing the risks that working across such a broad scope may entail. GuptahasdoneasignificantamounttointroducetheIndianOceanparadigm, being inter alia one of the editors of Eyes across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (2010). The present work collects a series of articles written subsequently and linking Angola, South Africa, Mozambique and Goa through the lens of decolonization, which the author pegs to two dates: 1961, when Goa was annexed by India, and 1975, when Angola and Mozambique achieved independence after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. While 1975 is uncontroversial, whether 1961 represented decolonialization or recolonialization is a tricky subject, as the various debates put forward by Goa’s Al-Zulaij Collective show. One of this book’s main points of interest is the wide variety of subjects it traverses, taking in references to the work of Ryszard Kapuściński, Mia Couto and Ricardo Rangel alongside the life stories of the Goan fishing community of Catembe and White Portuguese Africans who left Angola and Mozambique Reviews 257 for South Africa. Decolonization becomes a way of discussing the messiness of lives that continued through traumatic breaks in the historical timeline. The section on ‘retornados’ (if I can bend the meaning of this word so much, though many of the ‘retornados’ to Portugal were hardly returning there either) in South Africa is fascinating, the most interesting in the book for me. We see how this exodus, which has been given less attention than the high-profile flux of Whites to Portugal, was driven by a complex mix of self-identification as white Africans and the desire to preserve the prestige that colonial status brought. The fine-grained discussion of these lives is neatly complemented by the inclusion of photographs by Ricardo Rangel detailing the 1975 settler exodus from Lourenço Marques, adding a contrasting viewpoint to the memories of the interviewees. The section on Goans in Mozambique is equally interesting, the interviewees’ recollection of their ambivalent entanglements with whiteness and blackness exemplifying what Cristiana Bastos, quoted, calls their ‘floating position’. When problems arise, it is often in point of detail and partly through the cursory treatment given some issues. Here for brevity I focus on two subjects I know something of. Can we simply discuss Ricardo Rangel’s photographs as ‘visual metaphors’? Does the analysis of such documentary photography not have to engage with its claims on reality as trace or metonymy? What proof is there that many of Rangel’s colonial-era photographs were destroyed by the Portuguese colonial state, rather than their publication simply...