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Fortifications, Post-colonialism and Power
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Heritage, Culture and Identity
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Series Editor: Brian Graham, School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster, UK Other titles in this series
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Towards World Heritage International Origins of the Preservation Movement 1870–1930 Edited by Melanie Hall IBSN 978 1 4094 0772 0
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Selling EthniCity Urban Cultural Politics in the Americas Edited by Olaf Kaltmeier IBSN 978 1 4094 1037 9
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Local Heritage, Global Context Cultural Perspectives on Sense of Place Edited by John Schofield and Rosy Szymanski ISBN 978 0 7546 7829 8
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The Dynamics of Heritage History, Memory and the Highland Clearances Laurence Gouriévidis ISBN 978 1 4094 0244 2
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Landscape, Race and Memory Material Ecologies of Citizenship Divya Praful Tolia-Kelly ISBN 978 0 7546 4957 1
Culture, Heritage and Representation Perspectives on Visuality and the Past Edited by Emma Waterton and Steve Watson ISBN 978 0 7546 7598 3
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Unquiet Pasts Risk Society, Lived Cultural Heritage, Re-designing Reflexivity Edited by Stephanie Koerner and Ian Russell ISBN 978 0 7546 7548 8
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Ruins and Imperial Legacies
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Fortifications, Post-colonialism and Power
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João Sarmento University of Minho and University of Lisbon, Portugal
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© João Sarmento 2011
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. João Sarmento has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
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Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East Suite 420 Union Road 101 Cherry Street Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405 England USA ww w.a sh ga te. co m
www.ashgate.com
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Sarmento, João. Fortifications, post-colonialism and power : ruins and imperial legacies. -- (Heritage, culture and identity) 1. Fortification, Portuguese--History. 2. Portugal-Colonies--History. I. Title II. Series 355.7'09469-dc22
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sarmento, João, 1969Fortifications, post-colonialism and power : ruins and imperial legacies / by João Sarmento. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-0303-6 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-0304-3 (ebook) 1. Fortification, Portuguese. 2. Fortification--Portugal--Colonies. 3. Postcolonialism--Portugal. 4. Portugal--Colonies--Civilization. I. Title. UG429.P6S37 2011 355.709171'2469--dc23 2011017999 ISBN 9781409403036 (hbk) ISBN 9781409403043 (ebk)
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, UK. © Copyrighted Material
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Contents
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List of Figures List of Maps List of Tables Preface and Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations
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1 Ruins and Imperial Legacies: Global Geographies of Portuguese-built Forts
vii ix xi xiii xv
1
Portugal’s ‘Weekend at the Coast’: Fort Jesus and Empire Celebration in Kenya
17
3
(Post)colonial Voices at Fort Jesus, Kenya
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2
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5 A Neglected Trophy, Elusive Oil and Re-workings of Memory in São Tomé e Príncipe
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4 Mitigating the Past: Landscapes and Memory Fabrications in Cape Verde
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6 In the Shadows of Mazagan: The Medina of Azamour, Morocco 109 135
Bibliography Index
139 157
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7 Conclusions
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List of Figures
4.1 Fort São Filipe, Cape Verde 4.2 Tarrafal Camp, Cape Verde 4.3 Sambala Resort, Cape Verde
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Fort Jesus Museum Guiding through Fort Jesus, Mombasa
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3.1 3.2
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2.1 Fort Jesus, Mombasa 2.2 The Malindi Monument
26 35 46 51 62 68 74 102 103 103 104 104
6.1 The Cashbah at Azamour 6.2 Meditating in El Jadida Angel Bastion 6.3 Mazagan Beach Resort
124 129 132
105
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5.1 Fort S. Sebastião 5.2 Fort S. Jerónimo 5.3 Three statues outside the Fort 5.4 Destroyed monument of Fernão Dias 5.5 Provisional monument of Fernão Dias 5.6 Future site of Fernão Dias Monument with pieces from old monument
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Portuguese-built Forts: a global geography
4.1 The island of Santiago, Cape Verde
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2.1 The island of Mombasa, Kenya
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1.1
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List of Maps
5.1 The island of São Tomé, São Tomé and Príncipe
6 20 59 82 117
6.2
119
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Plan of Azamour, Morocco
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6.1 The location of Azamour, Morocco
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List of Tables
Itinerary of the first day of Pedro Teotónio Pereira’s visit to Kenya (29 October 1960) ww w.a sh ga te. co m
2.1
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3.1 Number of visitors to Fort Jesus
44 49
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3.2 Interviewed Guides at Fort Jesus, August 2007
31
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Preface and Acknowledgements
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I did not intend to write this book four years ago, but my involvement with the contemporary resonances of various Forts throughout Africa and Asia made me think it would be valuable to compile a series of case studies in a single publication. My work raises issues in the development paths of Postcolonial Geography and critically points towards the present dominance of single minded spatialisations of the past. But I also like to think of it as a work that highlights the power of geographical knowledges and a contribution to a reinforced focus of Cultural Geography on the sheer uneven materiality of the lives of people affected by the colonial present. While this book has been written under the increasingly pressured interstices of life as an academic, I am clearly aware of the privilege of being a western academic, of having the opportunity to look and reflect upon Africa, even if all I can provide is a partial and exclusionary analysis. For this luxury, I have to thank the Geography Department at the University of Minho for allowing me to have a sabbatical year in 2007–8, and to make quick journeys to various places around the globe in the past 10 years. I also acknowledge the Centre for Geographical Studies of the University of Lisbon (CEG), where I have been a researcher since 2008, for funding part of my research in São Tomé and Príncipe and in Morocco. To the Science and Technology Foundation of the Ministry for Science, Technology and Higher Education, I must thank the financial support of the Sabbatical Scholarship (SFRH/BSAB/731/2007) that allowed me to be a visiting professor in the University College Cork, Ireland during the end of 2007 and parts of 2008, and to conduct fieldwork in Kenya and Cape Verde in those same years. The Portuguese Institute of Developing Aid (IPAD) facilitated my stay in São Tomé, and António Correia kindly introduced me to the practicalities of town. Jorge Correia from the University of Minho and André Teixeira from the New University of Lisbon made my journey to and in Morocco smoother. At CEG, José Manuel Simões was always very supportive of my various requests. I am also grateful to numerous colleagues and friends for ongoing conversations or specific engagements with versions of one or more of the chapters that follow. As part of the process of thinking through some of the ideas in this book, I have presented material on Forts, landscape and memory at a variety of conferences, seminars and lectures. It would be impossible to thank everyone who has influenced my ideas over time, but I would like to acknowledge just a few: Ana Francisca Azevedo, Carlos Ferrás, Carlos Macía, Francisco Armas, Jafar Jafari, © Copyrighted Material
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João Sarmento Guimarães
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Maria Alexandre Lousada, Patrick O’Flanagan, Paul Claval, Paul Fryer, Petri Hottola, Roberto Lobato Correia and Zeny Rosendahl. João Carlos Garcia, José Ramiro Pimenta and Eduardo Brito Henriques, friends and geographers I admire, have kindly commented in detail parts or the full manuscript. I appreciate their generosity and support. I clearly owe immensely to the many people who have talked to me during my periods of fieldwork in Kenya, Cape Verde, São Tomé e Príncipe and Morocco. Their patience, humour, generosity, willingness to help, offering their expertise and time while refusing any kind of compensation, is truly monumental. Denis Linehan has been a key person in this endeavour. He has always encouraged me to write about the Forts, opened his doors in Cork and in Nairobi (thanks also Kathy), and quite frequently we discussed personally and through Skype, many issues throughout the last years. Without Denis’ crisp geographical view and fertile lines of enquiry, I would not even have made it to the middle of this book. To my parents, sister, brother in law and nephews, who often have to put up with a cranky man frequently absent – I would like to acknowledge their love and patience. Finally, I would like to say a special thanks to Marisa Ferreira, my wife and the home’s honorary cultural geographer, who has accompanied me in many visits to Forts, archives and libraries throughout the world. She has tolerantly helped me in the most varied tasks, looking at ruins under pouring rain, talking to people in the street under the tropical sun, always gently making insightful comments throughout this journey. Without her support, love and kindness I could have never completed this book.
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List of Abbreviations
Arquivo Histórico de São Tomé e Príncipe, São Tomé Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon Lusophone Community of Countries of Portuguese Language General Administrative Office of Security, Portugal Equatorial Guinea Foreign Direct Investment Gross Domestic Product Joint Development Zone Kenya National Archive, Nairobi Kenya Tourism Board Kenya Wildlife Service Luís Benavente fund, ANTT, Lisbon Middle East and North Africa Region Non Governmental Organisation National Museums of Kenya African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde International Police of State Defence, Portugal São Tomé e Príncipe United Nations Development Programme United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation United Nations World Tourism Organisation World Heritage Service
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AHSTP ANTT CPLP DGS EG FDI GDP JDZ KNA KTB KWS LB MENA NGO NMK PAICV PAIGC PIDE STP UNDP UNESCO UNWTO WHS
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To the many people who warmly helped me in Africa.
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Chapter 1
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Ruins and Imperial Legacies: Global Geographies of Portuguese-built Forts
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Are academics located in the West, or working in Western conceptual and narrative paradigms, incapable of opening up the perspectives within which we can view the non-Western world? Or have they adopted reactive perspectives which lock them into a reductive position whereby they can return the colonial gaze only by mimicking its ideological imperatives and intellectual procedures? ww w.a sh ga te. co m
Ania Loomba (1998: 256)
Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989: 1)
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Never does one open the discussion by coming right to the heart of the matter … to allow it to emerge, people approach it indirectly by postponing until it matures, by letting it come when it is ready to come. There is no catching, no pushing, no directing, no breaking through, no need for a linear progression which gives the comforting illusion that one knows where one goes.
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Decadence begins when a civilization falls in love with its ruins. Derek Walcott (1964: 3)
Doing Cultural Geography
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Over 20 years ago, Pierre Nora (1989) argued that in the modern period not only was there a decline of ‘real environments of memory’ (milieux de mémoire), that permanently and organically recreated the past, but there was also the emergence of sites of memory (lieux de mémoire), that is, specific places where both formal and popular memories are produced, negotiated and take root. In these lieux, the material, symbolic and functional coexist, creating mixed, hybrid and fluid atmospheres. Partly following on these concerns and processes – the ways in which memory attaches itself to places – a growing number of cultural geographers (together with academics from fields such as anthropology, film studies, history, literature, sociology, and others) have been attempting to understand how heritage, seen not as a single story, but as plural versions of the past socially constructed in the present (Lowenthal 1998), and heritage sites, are increasingly mobilised as important cultural, political and economic resources in our contemporary world (Graham 2002). © Copyrighted Material
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Cultural geographers have extended this agenda by exposing, undermining and complicating simplistic readings of places and their pasts (Atkinson 2005), connecting these to wider transnational spatial processes, and questioning significant geographical categories of belonging and difference. Turnbridge and Ashworth (1996), for example, have focused on heritage sites as nodes where ‘dissonant heritages’ of different social groups collide, and explored the possibilities of a more inclusive and plural heritage in multicultural societies (see also Graham, Ashworth and Turnbridge 2000 on this large and growing literature). Johnson (2003) examined the articulation of remembrance, and the ambiguity between remembrance and forgetting, in the context of the political and cultural turmoil of Ireland post-WWII (see also Heffernan 1995 and Withers 1996 on monuments dedicated to nationalism and war). As an alternative to the fixed explanations of formal heritage, Crang (1994 and 1996) examined popular expressions of social memory by looking at the ways in which individuals and groups engage and articulate their senses of heritage through everyday artefacts and ephemeral materials such as photographs and postcards. Edensor (2005), looking at industrial heritage ruins in the west, argued for a destabilisation of the notion of ruins as signs of dereliction and waste, a notion constructed upon aesthetic judgements which widely differ from the tradition of attributing celebratory accounts to nonindustrial ruins. Contrasting with mainstream ideas, Edensor is concerned with the possibilities, effects and experiences which ruins can provide, reclaiming industrial ruins from negative depiction. At the same time, in the past decades, cultural geographers have been significantly influenced by developments in postcolonial theory and practice (Pratt 1992; Blunt and McEwan 2002; Nash 2002; Blunt 2005; Sharp 2009; Yeoh 2009). Inspired by early works of Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, among others, which attempted to bring anti-colonialism and ideas about African unity to a global audience, and by Edward Said’s Orientalism, Homi Bhabha’s hybrid and ambivalent identities and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work with the Subaltern Studies Group, cultural geographers have joined some of the postcolonial turn concerns. Postcolonial theory can be understood as ‘… a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath’ that insists upon revisiting, remembering and interrogating the colonial past (Gandhi 1998: 4), and most usefully, it embraces a variety of critical perspectives on the diverse histories and geographies of colonial discourses, practices, impacts, and their legacies in the present (Nash 2002). As Ryan (2004: 470) argues, ‘the interest in postcolonialism marks one of the more striking ways in which cultural geographers (and indeed human geographers more generally) have been concerned to respond to major intellectual and theoretical currents within the social sciences and humanities in the last two or three decades’. Thus, many cultural geographers have been examining the complex topographies of memory and forgetting on which colonialism depended and which postcolonial nations have inherited. © Copyrighted Material
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Cultural geography and postcolonialism have been criticised along similar lines. On the one hand there has been an apprehension about cultural geography’s ‘preoccupation with immaterial cultural processes, with the constitution of intersubjective meaning systems, with the play of identity politics through the lessthan-tangible, often-fleeting spaces of texts, signs, symbols, psyches, desires, fears and imaginings’ (Philo 2000: 33). On the other hand there are concerns regarding the neglect of the material processes ‘which are the stuff of everyday social practices, relations and struggles, and which underpin social group formation, the constitution of social systems and social structures, and the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion’ (Philo 2000: 37). This book, encouraged by the new debates that the postcolonial turn promoted concerning questions of ‘geography, colonialism and postcolonialism’ (Power, Mohan and Mercer 2006: 231), takes a critical look at this evolving situation. I am concerned with material heritage, with ‘dissect[ing] post-colonialism as threaded through real spaces, built forms and the material substance of everyday biospheres’ (Yeoh 2009: 562), and involved in the re-materialisation proposals that emerged in Cultural Geography in the past years (Driver 1996). But I also attempt to offer an alternative approach to free heritage from its own confines of monumental materiality, by emphasising the particular kinds of social and cultural relationships that are established among different users of a heritage site. Whereas it is long recognised that historical sites as public monuments are critical places which capture and help to constitute individual and collective meaning (Barthes 1957), increasing attention should be paid to the spatiality of public monuments, where the sites are not merely the material backdrop from which a story is told, but the spaces themselves constitute the meaning by becoming both a physical location and a sight-line of interpretation (Johnson 1995). Material heritage sites should no longer be viewed merely as innocent aesthetic embellishments of the public sphere, but instead attention should be placed on their contextual spatiality. Although today even more insidious and totalising forms of colonialism are at work (Venn 2006), there is a varied degree of continuity and discontinuity between colonial relationships and structures of power and privilege in the past and present. The ‘post’ in postcolonial does not signal the end of colonialism nor the stationary reproduction of the colonial in the present (Yeoh 2009), but, as Nash (2002) puts it, the ‘post’ represents the mutated, impure and unsettling legacies of colonialism, signaling also an emancipator project (Venn 2006). It is the continuation, although in transformed ways, of the forces that established the Western form of colonialism and imperialism, that constitute what Mbembe (2001) names the Postcolony. Thus, postcolonial nations are challenging places to think about the cultural geographies of memory, as the historical experience has created disruptive landscapes in which to consider the relationships between public memory, the production of knowledge and cultural self-definition.
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Ruins and Legacies
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For more than 500 years (1415–1974), during the Age of Discovery and colonialism, the Portuguese built or adapted fortifications along the coasts of Africa, Asia and South America. While these Forts were constructed under the aegis of one European power, with the profound global political changes of the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries, they are presently located in the political boundaries of at least 25 independent states,1 all in the Global South. At a macro scale, mapping these buildings reveals a gigantic territorial and colonial project. While deeply connected at the start with the re-conquest of Iberian medieval kingdoms and with dreams of a unified Christendom that could subdue Islam in a multi-pronged conflict, these Forts became part of a network of power, acting as junctions between the colonial and the metropolitan in a particular system of governance. They also functioned as nodes in a mercantile empire, shaping early forms of capitalism, transforming the global political economy, and generating a flood of images and ideas on an unprecedented scale. The goal was to penetrate the commercial networks of Africa and gain control over the gold trade from Sudan. To a large degree, following Grosfoguel’s (2007) argument in relation to ‘what arrived’ in fifteenth-century America, Forts were an integral part of the entangled global hierarchies (European, capitalist, patriarchal, military, Christian, white, heterosexual, male) that were imposed on arrival. Yet, as Davidson (2001: 172) argues in relation to sixteenth century West Africa Forts and castles, from an African point of view they were merely of local importance, since what mattered to coastal Africans was not ‘these minor European ventures’ but the major pressures of powerful states of the inland country. Today, these audacious architectural forms can be understood as active material legacies of empire that represent promises, dangers and possibilities, which are deeply understudied by academics, including geographers. It seems clear then, that as a global imperial system and a complex of postcolonial legacies shaped by local and diverse political contingencies, this network of fortifications presents critical opportunities to construct a cultural and political geography that can inform our understandings of the ‘colonial present’. Post-colonialism, memory and amnesia, celebration and forgetfulness, contact zones, cultures of travel, dominance, governance, resistance, etc., are some of the concepts that are travelled through in this book. Although my attempt is to participate in the contemporary understanding of the meaning of these Forts, I cannot claim a radical and alternative knowledge and a history and geography ‘from below’, since to a large degree this is a study about the subaltern and not a study with and from a subaltern perspective. Yet, while ww w.a sh ga te. co m
1 Morocco, Mauritania, Cape Verde, Senegal, Guinea Bissau, Ghana, Benin, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, Iran, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia, East Timor, China (Macao), Brazil and Uruguay. © Copyrighted Material
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recognising the situated position of my knowledge (Haraway 1988), I understand this work as a contribution to a deeper and needed decolonisation of the Forts. Mirroring the spatiality of the Portuguese imperial project until the second half of the twentieth century, Map 1.1 illustrates a predominantly coastal geography. To a certain degree this representation is deceptive and not only ignores flows, fluxes and changes, but does not do justice to the spatial processes that defined imaginary borders and territorialised the unknown. There are nonetheless some remarkable exceptions to the prominence of coastal sites: Massangano (on the UNESCO tentative list of since 1996), Muxima and Cambambe (both in ruins) in the Cuanza high plateaux and valley, Angola; the Forts along the Amazon river in Brazil, as far as the border with Peru (for the most part disappeared: see Dias 2008); the eighteenth-century Forts along the later established western border of Brazil; the Fort St Tiago Maior in the Zambezi river, Mozambique; and various Forts on the border of the state of Goa (prior to 1961 part of Portuguese India), India. When the empire was threatened in the nineteenth century, and also when it started to collapse in the twentieth century (see Sidaway and Power 2005), other fortifications were built inland, mainly in Guinea Bissau, Angola and Mozambique (Lobo 1989). The immensity and remoteness of the newly encountered spaces required fortifications to be (deceptively) self-sufficient (Lemos 1989), creating a discontinuous geography of micro settlements of varying sizes and degrees of isolation, an archipelago of empire. However independent, the centralising and surveillant power from Lisbon meant that people, reports, plans, instructions, etc., travelled back and forth, constructing a dense network of knowledge. Archival material related to the reconstruction of Fort São Sebastião, in São Tomé, reveals, even in the twentieth century, the anxieties of builders in relation to the long months of wait before the architect in Portugal made decisions regarding issues such as use of materials, colours, and so on. The Forts were utterly international is their architectural, engineering and even social aspects. Nothing from local arts was incorporated on the projects or on the buildings. The construction masters were people that worked in Portugal, and only occasionally travelled to the construction sites. In many cases even materials like stones were taken from Europe. Muslim art for example did not attract any attention (see Dias 2008a). Despite this centrality and authoritarianism, from Macao to São Paulo there were also colonial communities that were small and dynamic republics (Cortesão in Curto 2007: 314).
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Lisbon scrupulously determined the guidelines for the Forts’ location: the existence of a good port, preferably in a naturally fortified location (island or promontory), a salubrious place (avoiding swamps or bogs) adequate for commercial activities, and the existence of a fresh water source difficult to sabotage (Teixeira 2008: 159). Thus, despite some remarkable exceptions, explained by different geopolitical agendas, the preferred location of Forts was on coastal islands: i.e. Mozambique Island and Sofala, Mozambique; Kilwa Kisiwani, Tanzania; Mombasa, Kenya. In fact, the Portuguese spatial model of colonising the inhabited Atlantic islands consisted on an offshore Fort that would supply Forts on the mainland (Bethencourt 2007). That was the case of Madeira and North African Forts, Cape Verde and the Guinea’s rivers Forts and São Tomé and the Gulf of Guinea Forts. When Socotra (presently Yemen) was conquered, there was an (failed) attempt to export this model to the Indian Ocean (Bethencourt 2007). At times, maintaining a military force on inhabited islands was unsustainable, such as in Fernando Pó (presently Bioko, in Equatorial Guinea) or Socotra – as they presented serious challenges to control population. Seashores could also be artificially transformed into islands by opening a moat, such as in Galle (Sri Lanka), Cannanor or Cochim (India). If seashores were impractical, estuaries and marshes like Baçaim and Chaul (India) or Triquimale (Sri Lanka), and headlands like Muscat (Oman), Malacca (Malaysia) or Ternate (Indonesia), were chosen. A brief look into the shifting control of this complex of Forts illustrates the colonial entanglements and the nuanced and ephemeral reality of imperial endeavours as Forts changed hands between Dutch, French, British, Spanish, Omani, Moroccan, and other local and regional kingdoms. Some Forts were lost even when their construction was not finished (which often started by building a provisional wooden fortification); and others changed hands consecutively (nine times in Mombasa). Remarkably, two served as royal gifts: Tangiers and Bombay were offered to England in 1661 as a dowry gift for the marriage of Princess Catarina of Braganza with Prince Charles II. This rich history of diplomacy, enterprise and resistance is visible and imprinted in the combination and overlapping of many architectural styles and construction techniques, reflecting the hybrid nature of these landmarks’ heritage (i.e. Galle) and the relentless changes that took place. According to Bethencourt (1998: 404), the Portuguese built 244 Forts from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, from which six were located in Cape Verde, 15 in the West African Coast and 20 in the East African Coast and Persian Gulf. Smaller Forts, an uncountable number of these have simply disappeared. In Brazil, from an estimated number of 450 historic defensive buildings, only 109 are known and 40 are legally protected. Many of these Forts the central pieces in complex networks of defence buildings which no longer exist, while others had an important role in the layout of towns and cities (i.e. Chaul, Bassein [north Mumbai] and Daman in India); some were encircled and embedded in the urban fabric (Fortaleza and Macapá in Brazil) or ended up supplying stone for various buildings (Colombo is a remarkable example, and what little is known of the © Copyrighted Material
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Fort’s formation results from the limited interpretations of Dutch iconography); and many were simply engulfed by tropical forests and left to decompose. Whereas earlier Forts or castles were still medieval, advances in artillery required Forts to be built in a transitional style, lowering towers, reinforcing walls and introducing changes to support heavy weapons (Moreira 1989a). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a tremendous renovation of many Forts (no longer castles), an effort that represented a phase of absolute belligerent engagement on a global scale, a rehabilitation of colonialism, a signature of mercantilism, and above all a step in the transformation from adventurist colonialism to capitalist imperialism. Yet one of the more critical transformations in these buildings’ tangible and intangible dimensions is connected to the transition brought by the ‘winds of change’ that blew through Africa and Asia especially in the second half of the twentieth century (early nineteenth century in South America). To various degrees these ruins and imperial legacies articulated the postcolonial status of various nations. Official and popular attitudes towards heritage varied and obviously changed with time after the emotionally charged spirit of the immediate post-independence periods. One of the present challenges for geographers is to attempt to understand who controls the Forts and their meanings, and what roles do different groups have in the maintenance and development of the sites. This network of Forts can contribute to our understanding of the manner in which postcolonial states resolve the ambiguous relationship with their heritage, the public treatment of colonialism in contemporary postcolonial states as well as the present in public memory. Forts can be understood as marks and wounds of the history of human violence, but also as timely reminders that buildings never last forever, highlighting the fluidity of the material world. They are palimpsests. Some may comprise no more than empty shells of debatable authenticity, but derive their importance from the ideas and values that are projected on or through them. Many are open to visitors in a range of museums, from military history to culture and ethnography. UNESCO has classified 13 of these Forts as World Heritage Sites (WHS): one (Kilwa Kisiwani in Tanzania) has been on the danger list since 2004, and illustrating the power and politics of UNESCO procedures, actions and classification (see Boniface 2001), none is located in Brazil. Part of an imagined community, WHS are powerful symbolic markers of international cultural politics carrying with them promises of economic benefits. Significantly, in their postcolonial after-life, some of the Forts that represent this history of colonial expansion and struggle are now government buildings or official residences of high figures of state: i.e. Fort Dona Paula or Cabo Palace is the residence of the Governor of Goa, India; Fort Sohar (Oman), is a government building and since 1993 it has housed a history museum. Forts Jalali, Mirani and Mutrah, in Muscat, Oman (all thoroughly rebuilt by the Portuguese in the late sixteenth century) are presently in good condition, but closed to the public. The former, used as a prison and later as the official residence of the Oman Sultan, is currently a museum of Omani heritage and culture for visiting heads of state and royalty. © Copyrighted Material
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Among all inland Forts in Brazil, only Fort Coimbra participated in military action (1801 and 1864–70). Nowadays, Fort Príncipe da Beira, 3,000 km from the coast, is home to 58 soldiers whose everyday practice is patrolling the border with Bolivia. By contrast, Fort Nossa Senhora da Vitória (built in 1507 and renamed Nossa Senhora da Conceição in 1515), located in Hormuz Island, Iran, has retained its key geopolitical importance, as 90 per cent of all Persian Gulf oil leaving the region on tankers passes on this narrow waterway. Achieving an understanding between the Iranian and the Portuguese authorities (negotiating since 2006) to reconstruct this common heritage depends mostly on the degree to which global tensions materialise on the Strait and on the advances and retreats of Iranian-EU geopolitics. Not far from Hormuz, in Qeshm, the larger island of the Persian Gulf and a Free Area Authority since 1989, are the ruins of another Portuguese Fort (1607), now further damaged by the 2005 earthquake and purportedly located next to 60 (of the 75) Iranian Saccade missiles (Cordesman and Kleiber 2007). Tourism has been one of the most powerful industries in appropriating these imperial legacies in diverse ways, and promising, to various degrees, economic development and benefits. Yet, the circumstances are tremendously diverse. While the Fort at Colónia do Sacramento (Uruguay), one hour by high-speed ferry from Buenos Aires, became a well established tourist destination, receiving thousands of tourists every weekend, the communities at the Forts of Mozambique and Ibo Islands in Mozambique (the former was the country’s capital up to 1898) helplessly watch as the crevasse separating absolute poverty and heritage decay from luxury and exclusive tourism paradises widens and deepens. Illustrating the enclave nature and the disregard for the environmental, social and cultural sustainability of many tourism developments, a luxury hotel was built in Goa in the 1970s within the complex of fortifications of Fort Aguada. The Hotel, advertised as ‘built on the ramparts of a sixteenth-century Portuguese Fortress’ and named after the Fort – Fort Aguada Beach Resort – was developed on 73 acres of an historic site, and its narrow public area strip is considered a very fashionable spot to watch the sunset. Paradoxically, while part of Aguada’s fortification complex is still a state prison, the Fort’s historical role is widely and loosely re-appropriated within the cultural economies of contemporary tourism. One other example is Fort Tirakol, located in a northern Goa enclave. It is now a seven-room up-market heritage hotel, where ancient quarters and cells were transformed into rooms and lavish bathrooms with views towards the Arabian Sea. As a prelude to Goa’s liberation (or occupation) in the mid 1950s, freedom fighters occupied the Fort for some days on several occasions and raised the Indian flag. Understanding the opportunities and drawbacks that tourism and heritage pose in the Global South, and the complex role they play within the national and socio-cultural reconstruction of post-conflict and postcolonial societies needs to be urgently addressed. Whereas conservation and heritage development can be used as a tool for political reconciliation and for creating dialogue opportunities and cultural meeting grounds, it is crucial to understand the disputes over the authority to create, define, © Copyrighted Material
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interpret and represent collective pasts and the ways in which these processes are understood by different interest groups. At the Forts of Cape Coast and Elmina in Ghana, plaques proclaim that these sites remind us of ‘such injustice against humanity’ (MacGonagle 2006: 259). Here, while the story of slaves surpasses the story of masters, the youth appropriates the spaces of the Forts differently, partying and dancing in the dungeons and courtyards of these ‘sacred’ sites (Bruner 1996, 2005). Despite the Forts’ resonance as sites of extreme brutality and violence, having participated in the circulation and trafficking of people and commodities, the cultural engagement of these colonial structures is often manifestly apolitical. Bruner’s (2005) work on Elmina Fort in Ghana, highlights the tourism-inspired project of mummifying memory and landscape in order to create normative sites where a single way of narrating or experiencing space is privileged. This strategy is defined within the Western travel project solely in terms of their relevance to the Western ‘experience’ (Dunn 2004). As discussed in chapter four, the recent reconstruction of Fort São Filipe in Cape Verde has been described as participating in the construction of an unproblematic, painless and uncontested past, excluding acts of resistance to capture, and silencing the contours of slavery. Financed by international aid agencies, the Fort’s story emphasises the role of western masters, architects and engineers, and totally overlooks the contemporary history of the African archipelago. This is only one example of the danger of the continued popularity and convenience for postcolonial government elites to appropriate colonial mechanisms of public memory control for the dissemination of their own ideological purposes. Forts also generate profound and rich geographical imaginations. One anecdotal way of appropriating these imperial legacies takes place in Fort Chapora, north Goa. After being the setting of the Bollywood movie Dil Chahata Hai [Do your thing] (2001), hundreds of Indians, for whom Portuguese built heritage is quite distant, visit the site every weekend to pose, capture and sit on the same landscapes and stones where movie stars once were. Their experience is not about the resonances of the colonial past, but about modern contemporary India. At the same time, due to their symbolic and emotional value, Forts can play a significant role in cultural politics and considerably rework the relationship between postcolonial nations and their former colonial powers. Perhaps representing better than any other event what Lowenthal (1998) refers to as the ‘Heritage Crusade’, is the recent contest to select ‘The Seven Wonders of Portuguese Origin in the World’. Between December 2008 and June 2009, about 240,000 people participated in this contest sponsored by the Portuguese government. Announced on Portugal Day (10 June) in the Algarve tourist centre of Portimão, two of the winners were Forts (16 Forts in the 27 nominees). The event rapidly raised protests from academics, activists and other intellectuals, since the organisers attempted to construct a benign story of the colonial encounter, neglecting the clear entanglements of these imperial legacies with the Atlantic Slave trade. Despite official discourses endorsing advertising and education as the key drivers of the contest, the whole event engaged in promoting a neocolonial global-national heritage landscape, © Copyrighted Material
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cartographically represented by a hierarchical spatial network centred in Lisbon. Some critics established an online petition protesting against these omissions while freedom fighters in Goa objected to the appropriation of ‘their’ heritage as Portuguese symbolic landscapes. Postcolonial heritage is clearly intertwined with the strategic agendas of the political forces that promote and sustain it. Its relationship with conservation management forces and their shifting positions towards authenticity and historical purity has arguably become more multifaceted and contradictory. This global but chameleonic network of Forts poses fascinating challenges for geographers interested in both the geopolitics of Empire and in their postcolonial legacies. Forts present unique opportunities to investigate, with a firm view toward the performance of the colonial present, the intersection of colonialism, memory, power and space in the postcolonial Lusophone world and beyond. ww w.a sh ga te. co m
Goals and Scope of the Book
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What I set to do in this book is to analyse in detail some Forts, in a series of case studies. And case studies are nothing more nothing less than stories (Domosh 2009 in Price 2010). Deciding which ones to include in this study was a difficult and complex task, not only because they are numerous and varied, but also because my approach involves a direct contact with the buildings and especially with the surrounding environments and peoples. This book should not been seen as comprehensive in terms of coverage, whether geographically, thematically or in terms of approach. It should be clear from the beginning that the case studies result not only from a planned and pondered choice, but also from organic, intuitive and even random events that took place in my professional and personal life in the past years. Due to time, space and financial constraints I was limited to an approach that included five or six cases at the most. Representativity was not an issue, as the aim here was not to generalise but to study in-depth. Still, at first I considered to include one case study from each significant macro region where Forts were built: South America, North Africa, West Africa, East Africa, Middle East, India, Southeast Asia and Far East Asia. This could provide a global panorama on Forts and their meanings, but the task was just too ambitious, since establishing connections between one site on each of these regions, acknowledging its historical relations and contemporary challenges would be the assignment of a large team working on a long term project. I also considered selecting the most important examples at particular times in history (although this is not an innocuous issue among historians): Arguim in Mauritania, El Mina in Ghana, Sofala in Mozambique, Baçaim in India, Malacca in Malaysia, could justify this choice. Still, it did not satisfy me, since I also wanted to include other sites where apparently the Forts had a less important historical role. I eventually decided to focus on African Forts, and on the condition of memory in Africa itself. While leaving aside important realities of South America, especially Brazil, and Asia, especially © Copyrighted Material
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India, this move allowed me to narrow my study, despite concentrating still on a huge continent and on this loose and ill defined geographical and cultural entity. As Mbembe (2001: 1) argues, speaking about Africa rationally is not something that has even come naturally. It was here that the Portuguese colonial enterprise lasted the longest: from 1415 with the conquest of Ceuta (nowadays an Spanish enclave in North Africa) to 1975 with the independence of Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique and São Tomé and Príncipe. As Nash (2002: 228) argues, postcolonial geographies work through the tension between understanding colonialism as general and global, and particular and local, between the critical engagement with a grand narrative of colonialism, and the political implications of complex, untidy, differentiated and ambiguous local stories. While it is not my goal to claim for a coherent, enduring and grand narrative of the Portuguese Empire or to attempt to reinforce a study field within Lusophone studies, by insisting on case studies that have a clear connection with Portuguese colonialism, my aim is to stress the spatial connectedness of postcolonial heritage, bringing into sharp focus the challenges facing countless heritage landscapes around the world today. At the same time, I acknowledge that there is a dearth of geographical works devoted to questions of memory, heritage and postcolonialism in the Lusophone world. With few exceptions (see Feldman-Bianco 2001; Pimenta, Sarmento and Azevedo 2011; Power and Sidaway 2005; Sidaway 2000a; Sidaway and Power 2005) the vast majority of accounts of the European colonial system and its developments, have disregarded the ‘Portuguese Empire and colonialism’ and considered Portugal as a ‘marginal’ player (Miller 1993). A significant issue here was the time dimension and the length and endurance of Portuguese colonialism. Thus, I selected sites where the memory of Portuguese colonialism seems very present since it lasted long and is recent, and sites where the memory of Portuguese colonialism is apparently remote and fleeting, despite not less violent. In the initial stages of field work began in Kenya, I stumbled upon very interesting material in the National Library of Kenya Nairobi. Together with Denis Linehan, from the University College Cork, Ireland, we examined various folders with documentation related to the reconstruction works in Fort Jesus, Mombasa, the funding of the Fort Jesus Museum by the Gulbenkian Foundation, and a whole range of documents regarding the diplomacies, politics and details of the late 1950s and early 1960s on the Kenyan Coast. Later on I conducted some fieldwork in Mombasa, and Fort Jesus emerged naturally, as one of the most important historical buildings in sub-Saharan Africa, and where Portuguese, British and Omani colonial enterprises intersected. I then had the opportunity to travel to Cape Verde, to the island of Santiago, and to São Tomé and Príncipe. That allowed me to conduct fieldwork in these two former Portuguese colonies and archipelagos on the West of Africa. Finally I decided to go to include a case study on Morocco, the closest African country to Portugal, but positioned in Arab Africa. Despite using four Forts or fortifications built around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – Azamour in Morocco (1513–42), São Sebastião in São Tomé (1566–75), Santiago in Cape Verde (1587–93) and Fort Jesus in Kenya © Copyrighted Material
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(1593–1630) – as departure points for discussing heritage, identity, landscape and power, my work is also constructed upon the knowledge and information from various periods of fieldwork conducted since 2000 in various Forts in North and East Africa (Morocco and Tanzania), India (mostly Goa and Daman), East Timor, Sri Lanka and South America (Brazil and Uruguay). Moreover, these Forts took me in tangents to various other stone and cement buildings, which in some cases acquired an equivalent importance in the discussion. These other buildings have allowed me to have a broader look at ‘sites of memory’ and to widen the discussion, and at times directed me to places out of my initial itinerary. But it could hardly be otherwise in order to engage with power, landscapes and memory in the postcolonial world. The Malindi monument in Kenya, Tarrafal concentration camp and Sambala resort both in Cape Verde, Fernão Dias monument in São Tomé and Príncipe and Mazagan Resort in Morocco were the sites I chose. Fieldwork included several formal and informal interviews with key actors, such as museum curators, politicians, administrative staff at the Forts and responsible entities, journalists, etc., visits to many cultural institutions, museums and libraries and interaction with local people. Archival work was also conducted mostly in Lisbon, Nairobi, Mombasa, Praia and São Tomé. In some cases I have engaged also with online discussion forums (especially in the case of Sambala’s resort in Cape Verde) and online tourist comments (the case of Azamour in Morocco). But perhaps the most important method followed was the meandering through all these sites, merely observing people and stones, attempting to grasp the inherent sensuality of the experience of travelling through Forts and monuments. In this sense this work is shapeless and impressionistic, it is experimental and at times speculative. It is important to stress from the start that one of the strategies used to enquire about the landscape transformations and memory work throughout this book is to engage in multiple other entwined processes that connect places from local to global scales, following on Nora’s (1989) quest of exploring the links between apparently unconnected ‘sites of memory’. Therefore, throughout the various chapters I ‘travel’ back and forth from Goa and Nairobi to Lisbon, from São Tomé e Príncipe to Equatorial Guinea, and from Azamour to Fes. The aim is to stress the fact that scholars of tourism and heritage, cultural geographers included, need to pay greater attention to the cultural politics of development and postcolonial theory than they have done previously. Whereas there are clearly multiple contingencies in the case studies presented, they do offer a provocative insight into larger processes beyond the local. Moreover, these local ‘ethnographic’ portraits offer an empirical grounding for often vague concepts and processes such as neocolonialism, the construction of memory, neoliberalism, and provide a useful grounding research into the politics of global heritage. In brief, the principal aims of this book are i) to construct a cultural and postcolonial geography that can inform our understandings of the performance of the colonial present; ii) to investigate how memory attaches itself to places; iii) to discuss how contemporary postcolonial states resolve the ambiguous public treatment of colonialism and the © Copyrighted Material
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colonial present; iv) and to understand the role of various imperial legacies in the construction of memory and identity. This book is divided into seven chapters. Following this first introductory chapter, Chapter 2 – Portugal’s ‘Weekend at the Coast’: Fort Jesus and Empire Celebration in Kenya – discusses empire celebration in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at Fort Jesus in Mombasa, one of the most important public buildings on the continent, and a key site of the colonial expansion into East Africa. It focuses on the transformation of the Fort from a prison into a museum, a conversion that was funded through the assistance of the Portuguese government who grasped the opportunity to restore the Fort as part of their public commemoration of Prince Henry the Navigator, a central figure in Portuguese national and imperial identity. The birth of the museum in Fort Jesus, a result of the convergence of British and Portuguese colonial enterprises, has lasting consequences in the contemporary heritage presentation. As western institutions created in colonial regimes, postcolonial museums are still largely colonial presentations, burdened with the politics of memory and challenged with the reconstruction of new identities, which for political reasons, have not always been taken as far as they could. Chapter 3 – (Post)colonial Voices at Fort Jesus, Kenya – explores the challenges facing tourism development in Postcolonial Kenya through the analysis of the ways in which a sample of local guides engage with tourists and with the heritage and memory of Fort Jesus, Mombasa. It is discussed how the lack of alternative narratives of the past has prevented a more inclusive political condition of public memory of the present, and the degree to which Fort Jesus has not escaped the orbit of colonialism. Guides are somehow trapped in an interpretation that largely escapes their control. Chapter 4 – Mitigating the Past: Landscapes and Memory Fabrications in Cape Verde – examines the construction of landscape and memory in Cape Verde. It deals with the different ways in which three sites in the island of Santiago – an old Fort and a historical town; a concentration camp; and a global resort – participate in the erasure, maintenance and creation of memory, forging new ways of collective identity. It discusses how praising western technical achievements in Cidade Velha is relegating slavery and African heritage to a second role, how the colonial violence has been forgotten and erased in a concentration camp that presents a very weak pulse, and how landscape and memory are being played at a ‘fortified’ tourist resort. Chapter 5 – A Neglected Trophy, Elusive Oil and Re-workings of Memory in São Tomé e Príncipe – attempts to unpack meanings related with two stone monuments in São Tomé and Príncipe, in West Africa. It deals with a Fort built in colonial times and a memorial built in a postcolonial context, and with the geographical, economical and political contexts in which the islands are presently living. My aim in presenting these sites and stories is to trace the connections between places, to unravel some of the interpretation and representation performances of the past and how the construction of multiple temporalities and © Copyrighted Material
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spatialities is inscribed in a colonial present, but open to postcolonial critique and acts of remembrance, and possible decolonisation projects. Chapter 6 – In the Shadows of Mazagan: The Medina of Azamour, Morocco – begins by highlighting the centrality of Orientalism as a discourse that frames contemporary tourism experiences. It engages with an historical town in Morocco which was occupied by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century for less than three decades. While the physical and social transformations in this town were profound, the former being still visible for the informed or trained visitor, the many ways in which layers of culture and time have been inscribed in the ordering of space are quite opaque for an ordinary person. It is suggested that the distant past, although of violence and horror, seems to be perceived as benign. However, it is also argued that this past is not mobilised to the advantage of local people. This chapter further examines the nature of a large international resort, and based on the analysis of tourists’ comments, discusses the ways in which the town acts as a stage for western views on authenticity, Orientalism and the colonial experience.
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Chapter 2
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Portugal’s ‘Weekend at the Coast’: Fort Jesus and Empire Celebration in Kenya ww w.a sh ga te. co m
(…) I continue to be troubled by the unsettling spectacle offered by an excess of memory here, and an excess of forgetting elsewhere, to say nothing of the influence of commemorations and abuses of memory-and of forgetting. ww w.a sh ga te. co m
Paul Ricoeur (2004: xv)
Introduction
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The ‘world-as-an-exhibition’ has been a recurrent theme in analysing nineteenthand twentieth-century exhibition displays, frequently framed in a larger episteme in which the world was known via its representation (Gregory 1994). Imperial powers attempted to present and arrange new versions of space and time to both domestic as well as international audiences, in ‘great rituals of self-congratulation’ (Hobsbawm 1979: 32–3). Often modernity and industrial progress was celebrated, while events that caricaturised cultures, including the presence of ‘natives’, were promoted. These events served to highlight the colonising mission of European modernity, bringing enlightenment to occluded corners of the world. During the twentieth century the Portuguese Estado Novo1 orchestrated a whole series of events to promote the construction of the imperial nation, including various commemorations (João 2002; Sánchez-Gómez 2009). Inspired by the apparent success of its participation in the Grand Parisian Colonial Exhibition of 1931, the Estado Novo organised the first colonial exhibition in Porto in 1934 (see João 2002 or Sanchéz-Goméz 2009), which attracted more than one million visitors during the summer (Léonard 1999a: 27). Two major celebrations of the great myths in the memory of the expansion and empire in Portugal took place. Firstly, in 1940, while Europe submerged into war, Portugal celebrated the foundation of the nation (1140) and independence from Spain (1640) in the ‘Portuguese World Exhibition’ (see João 2002; Corkill 2005). The exhibition attracted three million visitors (Corkill 2005). Secondly, in 1960, while African independent movements were bustling, the country celebrated the 500th anniversary of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator (see João 2002). Lisbon was celebrated as the great imperial capital, and numerous urban renewal programs ensured that a lasting physical legacy embedded the landscape. 1 New State was a right-wing dictatorship in power from 1926 up to the Carnation revolution in 1974. © Copyrighted Material
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Through the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, inaugurated in the centenary exhibition of 1940 in Lisbon and replaced 20 years later by a permanent stone monument, the regime appropriated Henry the Navigator as the national hero, a figure who ‘contributed decisively to give the relations between European and nonEuropeans, whites and coloured people, a path singularly luso-Christian’ (Freyre 1961 in Léonard 1999b: 42). Paradoxically, just as the Portuguese Prime Minister Salazar never set foot in Africa, Asia or America (and consequently in any of the overseas provinces), Henry the Navigator, constructed as the driving force of the discoveries, never fully participated in any of the adventurous maritime voyages for which he is renowned (Léonard 1999b). The Portuguese regime appropriated the 500th anniversary of Henry’s death as a critical moment at which to claim a sense of nationhood, and to assert Portugal’s civilising mission, at a time in which anti-colonial liberation movements in Africa and Asia were gaining strength. In a very short period of time (1956–61) more than 20 African states emerged, with three of them – Senegal, Congo and Tanganyika (Tanzania from 1964 onwards) – bordering on the Portuguese territories. The first and last African empire was coming to an end, and as such, for the Portuguese state the celebration was not just a ‘simple manifestation of historical nostalgia’, but an ‘act of faith in the destinies of the motherland, deemed necessary at this time of incertitude in the world’s life’ (Ramos 2005: 192). Sardonically, in 1961 military conflicts took place in Goa and war start in Angola. This chapter analyses how these ‘global’ celebrations collided with the British colonial experience and evolution in 1950s Kenya, and traces the convergence of two imperial trajectories at a particular colonial building in Mombasa, Kenya. On the one hand, the British were trying to order the colony, combating a truly negative image of East Africa at home, and setting up a museum at Fort Jesus Museum, a sixteenth-century Fort, seemed to be a step in the right direction. On the other hand, an intricate political development in the creation of a foundation in Portugal led to a sudden funding that made the restoration of Fort Jesus possible, allowing also for an exaltation of this colonial legacy. Furthermore, it examines the role of Pedro Teotónio Pereira – Portuguese ambassador in London between 1953 and 1958, Ministry for the presidency between 1958 and 1961, and Administrator of the Gulbenkian Foundation since the late 1950s – as one of the key figures of this celebration. Pereira made a trip to Kenya on the eve of MacMillan’s ‘winds of change’, which would punch strongly the crumbling Portuguese empire. An incursion into the process leading to the decision of opening the Fort to the public and installing a museum, and the related diplomatic manoeuvres that led to the visit of the presidency Ministry of Portugal to Kenya are the core of the discussion. As a western institution created under colonial regimes, the museum in Africa is burdened with the politics of colonial memory and challenged with the reconstruction of new identities. The birth of the museum and this demonstration of colonial authority seems like the appropriate place to start with a critical history of the legacies of colonialism at Fort Jesus (see also Chapter 6 on the birth of the São Tomé e Príncipe National Museum © Copyrighted Material
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in postcolonial times). Drawing upon archival sources in Lisbon, Nairobi, and Mombasa, and on Kenyan and Portuguese newspapers, the chapter recovers the history of the birth of the museum and analyses how the alliances, motives and protests at the museums foundation were shaped by questions of memory, politics and colonialism.
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Fort Jesus, Mombasa
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The western Indian Ocean has been a trade route for some millennia and as early as the first century, Arabs traded in the East African shores. The proximity with the Arab peninsula resulted in colonisation by the Arabs and the Persians (mainly Shirazy), who intermingled with coastal peoples. By the eighth century, several coastal cities began to take shape and a flourishing maritime trade developed between East Africa, the Arabia Peninsula and India, particularly under the Omani and Zanzibar rule. Ivory and gold were the main commodities traded. Swahili, a Bantu language with Arabic, Persian, and other Middle Eastern and South Asian loan words, later developed as a lingua franca for trade between the different peoples. Contrary to hegemonic colonial discourses by James Kirkman and others, ‘the coast of East Africa was a region of autochthonous dynamic social and economic integration, rather than simply a dependant of Middle Eastern and oriental external influences’ (Abungu and Mutoro 1993 in Pearson 1998: 14). The arrival of the Portuguese contributed significantly to the continued transformation of the coast. While before 1500 East Africa was linked to a great international trading world, it became linked to a much larger political world, centred in Goa and Lisbon, and extending to Brazil (Boxer and Azevedo 1960; Pearson 1998, 2007). The history of Fort Jesus itself starts over 500 years ago, when the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama sailed up the East Coast of Africa. As he faced strong resistance in Mombasa in 1498, he established a commercial base in Malindi, some 70 km north. Years later, it was decided that the importance of trade justified the building of a Fort, and according to strategic and defensive principles (see Boxer and Azevedo 1960; Brandão 1989; and Chapter 1). Mombasa, a low lying island of approximately 14.1 km², with low coral cliffs, up to 20 metres height, serrated by small inlets, bays and promontories was chosen as the best location. Mombasa Island was already a maritime trading post over a thousand years ago, and its urban tradition started around the time when Shirazi arrived in the thirteenth century. When built, the Fort became part of an imperial and global network of Forts (see Chapter 1). Construction works started in 1593, but in 1614 the viceroy allocated more funds since there was much work to be done (Pearson 1998). The Fort was only completed in the 1630s. The architecture, by the Italian Military Architect and Engineer, Giovanni Batista Cairati, who was appointed Architect-in-Chief for the Portuguese overseas empire, was designed in classical Enlightenment fashion to resemble the body of a man, and as described by UNESCO (2010) is ‘one of the best military architecture of the sixteenth © Copyrighted Material
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century’. Built on solid coral rock and with an area of approximately one hectare, the Fort is, since 2011, on the UNESCO World Heritage List. As many other Forts and defensive structures, the site has a violent history and is shaped by multiple layers of history and memory. Despite attempts to succour it from Goa, in 1698 the Fort fell to the Omanis. The take over by this Muslim sea power based in Oman and later in Zanzibar, signalled the end of the Portuguese influences on the north coast (Pearson 1998). The simple fact that the Island or city of Mombasa was historically known as ‘mvita’ or ‘island of war’ (Wazwa 2006) indicates the central role of Fort Jesus in this convoluted arena. Between the years of 1631 and 1875, Omani and Portuguese exchanged control over the Fort nine times. From 1837 to 1885 the Fort housed soldiers’ barracks, and when the British colonised Kenya (British East Africa or East Africa Protectorate from 1885, the colony of Kenya from 1920 to 1964) the Fort became a prison: huts were removed and cells were built. Both men and women were kept here. There was also a section for mad detainees (Abungu 1996).
The island of Mombasa, Kenya
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Map 2.1
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Restoring the Fort
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During the colonial period, through the activities of white Kenyan historians and British archaeologists, Fort Jesus was re-situated at the centre of a cultural landscape, which constructed a distinctively colonialist understanding of the past (Linehan and Sarmento 2011). In the late 1920s, mirroring the goals of the Preservation movement in Britain, a number of key buildings and archaeological sites were legally protected. The coastal region around Mombasa was of major importance, and 15 of the first protected sites, identified as ‘Portuguese’ or ‘Arab’ ruins were recognised there. At the same time, just two tribal sacred sites were protected in the early years of the colony (Hart 2007). As Mudimbe (1994) argues, appropriating the past was a key ingredient of the colonial enterprise. During the 1940s and 1950s, Fort Jesus was re-imagined as an iconic ruin at the centre of a cultural landscape ‘discovered’ by British archaeologists, and was increasingly identified as an important but neglected asset to the burgeoning tourist industry of the coast (Linehan and Sarmento 2011). Coinciding with vast urban housing policies in the country in order to stabilise the African working class (Harris 2008), voices were felt towards a smarter use of the Fort: the Fort should become amenable for consumption and not ‘wasted’ on disciplining the natives, who could be imprisoned far away from the city. Prominent visitors to Mombasa were facilitated by the Prison Warden to tour the Fort, but hoteliers and schools in the city were often spurned by the prison administration when they attempted to make organised visits (Linehan and Sarmento 2011). The journalist Edward Rodwell had a key role in keeping the unsatisfactory status of the Fort in the public eye, and as Linehan and Sarmento (2011) illustrate, through various publications and actions, and by supporting previous studies, Rodwell gave voice to a constituency of established Mombasa colonial families and businesses engaged in civic improvement (Rodwell 1958). His work also encouraged the Royal Kenyan National Park to begin formal excavation of the archaeology of the region. In 1948, the British archaeologist James Kirkman was made the Warden of Gedi National Park. He was a highly productive individual, excavating, writing and pressing for monument protected. He consistently argued that the important settlements in the region had their origins in earlier waves of Asiatic and Arab colonisation, and in doing so, Kirkman perpetuated a European myth that civilisation came from outside Africa (Linehan and Sarmento 2011). Eventually living inside the grounds of Fort Jesus, his work acted out a scientific practice which was alien to local culture, and helped to create a colonial edifice in the shape of a museum, inside a colonial fortress, to represent a colonial view of the coast in which local African cultures had a limited role. Archaeology from the 1980s clearly denies Kirkman’s thesis that the coast was cut off from the interior (Pearson 1998) and his representations of the histories of the coast as non-African. Yet the decades between 1930 and 1960 were convoluted times in British East Africa. Strikes at Mombasa’s port in the 1930s, in 1945, and in 1947, © Copyrighted Material
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attracted British attention. In the 1950s, while educated Kikuyus voiced claims to Kenya, a more radical group formed a secret society named Mau Mau to fight for independence. Especially after 1952, Kenya was on a world spotlight (Harris 2008: 323). Viewed simply as tribal rebellions or as a deeper part of anti-colonial movements, the conflict was severe and shaped the Kenyan independence achieved in 1964 (see Simatei 2005). Fort Jesus played an important role in maintaining the security and judicial control of the coastal region during the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s. Prior to upraise, the Legislative Council instructed the Prison Department to build (using prison labour) a new prison to facilitate the evacuation of the inmates at Fort Jesus to Mtwapa.2 The future of Fort Jesus had started to be discussed at this time. On a letter dating from 9 September 1950, C.G. Usher, the local representative of the Legislative Council, looked for advice from Governor Philip Mitchell (governor from 1944 to 1952).3 The National Parks Planning Committee had already decided to establish a museum, in replacement of the existing prison, and Usher recommended an allocation of 10,000 pounds. He also showed concerns about the slower pace in building a new prison, which meant that the Fort would only be vacant by the end of 1953. Further, he expressed the backing among trustees of building an aquarium, which he personally thought to be too ‘limited an objective’. Usher’s ambitious idea, apparently supported by others, was the establishment of an ‘institute of historical research which would embrace the whole of the East African littoral and Western Indian Ocean’, which would include a workshop, a unique library and accommodation for visiting students. For this he envisioned a sum of at least 50,000 pounds would be needed. Mitchell replied after only two days and in a three pages long letter.4 He broadly agreed with Usher’s ambitious idea of a museum ‘(…) to represent the history, art and culture in its widest aspects on the Coastal area, and including its ramification to the Persian Gulf, Karachi, Bombay, Europe, America and what-have-you’. He further suggested that what Usher needed to do was to secure a substantial donation from one or more people. In his own words, ‘One really fat cheque, in my experience, is generally enough to start the show, but it would have to be a fat one of not less than £10,000 or even £25,000’. Finally, and utterly relevant, he suggested that James Kirkman could be the right curator for such a project. Unfortunately for this project, there were other more pressing issues taking place in Kenya at this time, and the Mau Mau uprising made Fort Jesus museum a non-priority project. On a 1954 letter to the governor, Mervyn Cowie, the director of Royal National Parks of Kenya, presents his (and the trustees) concerns on the ‘delay in proving alternative accommodation for the present inmates of Fort
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2 According to Linehan and Sarmento (2011), in 1957 there were 75 individuals on remand, 287 serving sentences and a further 80 detainees. 3 KNA, File 10–20, Document 6(1), 20 September 1951. 4 KNA, File 10–20, Document 2(8), 22 September 1951. © Copyrighted Material
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Jesus’.5 Roughly at the same time, new issues arose regarding the establishment of a school of archaeology and archaeology museum or institute in Bagamoyo, Tanganyika. Usher became ‘rather perturbed at the news’, and on a letter to the governor requesting a personal meeting, he argued that in his views this project would ‘diminish the chance of creating in Fort Jesus, beside the museum to which it has long been destined, an institute of historical research’.6 Furthermore, he complained that due to the delays, 10,000 pounds inscribed in the previous Development Plan had been lost. In May 1957, on a memorandum to the Ministry of Defence, Governor Baring revealed that Louis Leakey, director of the Corydon Museum in Nairobi and regarded by the British as an expert on the Kikuyu, informed him of Gulbenkian Foundation offer of £1,000 for a library and a ‘research place’, and a possible further £30,000 if the Fort was evacuated.7 In 1956 – the same year as the 500th anniversary was starting to be planned in Lisbon, and discussions over what to do with Fort Jesus were developing in Kenya – the Gulbenkian Foundation, a Portuguese private foundation of public utility was established (18 July). With headquarters in Lisbon, and having two branches in Paris and London, the foundation resulted from Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869–1955) will (the first from 1950 and the second from 1953). Gulbenkian was born in Constantinople, in a wealthy Armenian family and his ability as a negotiator transformed him into an oil magnate. Having a strong passion by the arts, Gulbenkian gathered an outstanding art collection. In 1936 he trusted parts of his paintings to the National Gallery and the British Museum. Gulbenkian’s idea was to establish a foundation in Britain, for which architectural plans for a building next to the National Gallery were made. His determination to keep the entire collection under one building, the start of WWII, and the fact that Britain considered him an ‘enemy alien’ (on the grounds that we was an economic advisor of the Persian government who moved to Vichy France), pushed him to transfer his collection to in Washington (where no successor taxes applied), and to call off the establishment of a British foundation (Perdigão 2006). From 1942, and for over a decade, Gulbenkian lived in Lisbon, and while after the war (1948 and 1950) parts of his collection went on loan to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, many items remained dispersed in Europe, outside museums and without fiscal protection. Gulbenkian’s itinerant spirit (despite owing several houses he lived mostly in hotels), made him uncertain as to where to establish his foundation. Only in his 1953 will did Gulbenkian decide in Lisbon’s favour, despite underlying the international spirit of his ideal foundation: with as many international branches ‘as may be considered necessary’ and with ‘activities to be developed in any country where its managers may think fit’.8 After his death, a ‘bitter controversy’ took
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5 KNA, File 10–20, Document 13, 25 August 1954. 6 KNA, File 10–20, Document 14(4), 27 September 1955. 7 KNA, File 10–20, Document 14(24), 21 May 1957. 8 Gulbenkian’s will (http://www.gulbenkian.pt/media/files/fundacao/historia_e_ missao/PDF, accessed on 12 July 2010). © Copyrighted Material
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place between two of the three initial designated trustees – Lord Cyril Radcliffe (Gulbenkian’s old friend) and José Azeredo Perdigão (Gulbenkian’s Portuguese lawyer). Salazar, Portuguese prime minister from 1932 to 1968, only approved the decree-law exempting the foundation from taxes, after assuring the trustees agreed statutes stating that the Board would always maintain a majority of individuals of Portuguese nationality (Colin 2010). Radcliffe considered this action a betrayal of Gulbenkian’s wishes and renounced his trusteeship in June 1956. Perdigão took the vacant position, and Marcelo Mathias and Pedro Teotónio Pereira, Portuguese ambassadors in Paris and London, respectively, and close allies of Salazar, became new trustees. Undoubtedly, Salazar saw the foundation as ‘a gift’ to the country (Colin 2010) and in a letter to Pereira stated ‘(…) we have in our hands and may loose by weakness or ineptitude large amounts that have a substantial weight in the country’s balance of trade and in the resolution of some of our problems’ (22 September 1955 in Almeida 2008: 475). Colin (2010) argues that from its inception the foundation has always favoured grants distributed inside Portugal, and with time that favouritism inflated. Yet, in the initial years of the foundation, high profile grants to the UK Branch appear to have served to fade any trouble that could emerge from the official quarters in London. The donation to the restoration of Fort Jesus may be seen as an offspring of that policy. In 1958 not only was Fort Jesus declared an historical monument, but under Governor Baring’s efforts in coordination with the Ministry of Defence, the Fort was vacated and the Governor Mitchel’s ‘fat cheque’ of 30,000 pounds from Gulbenkian was secured. James Kirkman cheerfully makes note of this in a letter to the Governor.9 The Mau Mau rebellion had been brought under control and Fort Jesus’ days as a military or defence place seemed to be over. A few days later, Alfred Vincent, the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Royal National Parks of Kenya, wrote to the Governor Baring, requesting him to write a short appreciation note to the Secretary of the Gulbenkian Foundation in London and, most importantly, to the Portuguese Ambassador in London, Pedro Teotónio Pereira.10 On his acknowledgement telegram to Pereira, Baring wrote ‘I am very glad that with this money it will be possible to renew and preserve a fascinating relic of the connection of this port of Africa with the famous Portuguese navigators of the past’.11 At that time, Pereira was about to leave his post in London as Ambassador (1 September 1958) to become Minister of the Presidency and vicepremier of the government of Portugal (9 September 1958 to 22 June 1961). Having been Minister for Commerce and Industry between 1936 and 1937, and with a long diplomatic career – ambassador in Madrid (1938–45), Rio de Janeiro (1945–7), Washington (1947–9) and London (1953–8), significantly here, he became a trustee of the Gulbenkian Foundation from its start in 1956. Some argue he was one of the possible Salazar’s successors, and the most influential minister. 9 KNA, File 10–20, Document 25(16), 17 May 1958. 10 KNA, File 10–20, Document 26(17), 26 May 1958. 11 KNA, File 28, Document 19, 4 June 1958. © Copyrighted Material
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Yet, after 1962–3 he became very ill and quit politics. Paradoxically, while Gulbenkian wanted a foundation that was totally separated from Salazar’s regime (Colin 2010; Perdigão 2006), its first administrator was a man of the regime (Colin 2010; Almeida 2008). Politics spoke loud, thus it is ironical, but without surprise that under the International Service, the funding for the 1950s restoration of Fort Jesus, in British Kenya, was the foundations’ first, when so many others within the ‘Portuguese overseas provinces’ were in need of repair (Benavente 1959a; Fernandes 1996). The grant from Gulbenkian of 30,000 pounds resulted in the formation of the Fort Jesus Advisory and Executive Committees within the Royal National Parks of Kenya. The decisions made by these committees were utterly important for Fort Jesus after life. On the first meeting of the Advisory Committee, on 15 December 1958, Usher was elected chairman and it was decided that Kirkman, the Warden of Fort Jesus, while not a member of the committee, should act as secretary in both committees.12 As Linehan and Sarmento (2011) argue, not only were there no Africans on the committees, but their involvement in the restoration, save as labourers, night watchmen or gatekeepers, was blatantly inexistent. One of the key decisions was made in the first meeting, when it was ‘proposed that the Fort should be restored as near to its original construction of 1593 as possible, without detriment to any of the later Portuguese additions’.13 As the Committee established, ‘(…) little (…) was of the Arab period, and even less of the prison period was of interest’.14 In a 1959 advisory committee meeting, it was also decided that it was ‘found impossible to adapt any prison cells as public lavatories or ticket office, and new structures would have to be built’.15 Yet, the return to a sixteenth-century building was complex, since the Fort had an intricate history, changing hands various times. It certainly must have been difficult to establish which additions and changes were caused by the Portuguese and the Omani occupations. On that same meeting a rather contradictory decision was made regarding what was named as ‘the old customs which had been handed over with the Fort’, implying that ‘the Sultan’s flag should continue to fly; a gun should be fired at the beginning and at the end of Ramadhan, and advice should be sought from the Provincial Administrator concerning the blowing of a horn when a ship was sighted’.16 While excavations continued, Fort Jesus should remain closed to the public, except for parties that asked for special permission.
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KNA, File 28(19), 15 December 1958. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid 14 December 1959. Ibidem. © Copyrighted Material
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Fort Jesus, Mombasa
Source: The author, August 2007.
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Preparing the Event
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Figure 2.1
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In 1956 the objectives of the 1960 Celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator were made public. They were not so much a ‘simple manifestation of historical nostalgia’, but an ‘act of faith in the destinies of the motherland, well needed in this time of incertitude in the world’s life’ (Ramos 2005). On 13 November 1959, in the headquarters of the National Information Secretariat in Lisbon, Caeiro da Mata, president of the executive committee, announced the programme of the celebrations. Certainly, the time was not right for celebrations. In June 1960 there was a massacre in Mueda, northern Mozambique, where 500 Africans were killed when claiming for independence. In that same month, in Angola, demonstrations against the arrest of MPLA (Angola Freedom Movement) leader, Agostinho Neto, resulted in 30 deaths and 200 injured. The debate in Portugal was centred on the discussion of what later (14 December 1960) was approved as the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1514, on the granting of independence to colonial countries and peoples. In Amílcar Cabral’s words, the regime multiplied its efforts in constructing ‘Africans as happy Portuguese of colour’. In this context, evoking the past and the memories of © Copyrighted Material
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Henry the Navigator was seen as a contributing to sustain the immobile positions of the regime against the dominant tendencies of the United Nations (João 2002). Between 4 March and 13 November 1960 there was an intense programme from the north to the south of the country, in the islands (Azores and Madeira), in the overseas territories, and in some foreign countries, significantly in Britain. The British Museum organised an historic exhibition during September and October 1960 entitled ‘Prince Henry the Navigator and Portuguese Maritime Enterprise’ and a publication for a young audience: ‘Portugal and the Age of Discoveries’. An imperial mega-event stretching from home to colony was at play. The beginning of the celebrations took place in the Jerónimos Monastery, in the capital Lisbon, at the sound of a Te Deum (which should be replicated in all Cathedrals, Mother Churches and Municipal Halls of the country and overseas provinces), that gathered the high hierarchy of the State and Church, continuing in a solemn session in the National Assembly.17 Memory and politics were set in motion through a hierarchical network of places. There was a significant diplomatic effort to sustain the organisation model of the Portuguese overseas territories, attempting to avoid the inescapable isolation, and in 1960 various official visits to Portugal were organised: Ahmed Soekarno from Indonesia, Dwight Eisenhower from the US, the Kings of Nepal, the Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitsheck, and the monarchs from Thailand (João 1999). Kubitsheck’s visit (6–10 August) gathered the highest State hierarchy and local authorities in various ceremonies, travelling the country from north to south, assisting to the naval parade in Sagres and to the inauguration of the Monument to the Portuguese Discoveries. Brazil was somehow perceived and represented as the success of Portuguese colonisation, of a ‘Christian mission’, and this was the time and place to show it. Notably, in Kenya, the newspaper The Goan Voice published Kubitschek’s letter to Portugal’s president where significantly he argued: ‘May God, that the two Nations linked by the same traditional and inalienable compromises, give always the world a lesson of this continuity’.18 The press, radio and, for the first time, television, covered the events of the commemoration, and sought to establish an atmosphere of collective celebration of the nation in memory of the founder of the empire. Various important publications were released for the celebration: Monumenta Henricina (1960–65), Bibliografia Henriquina, Iconografia Henriquina and Portugaliae Monumenta Cartographica (1959–60). The latter work had a close cooperation of British institutions and researchers and was published in Portuguese and English (Garcia 2005). Among various conferences and scientific meetings, it is worth highlighting the International Conference on the History of the Discoveries (September), which mobilised significant members of the international scientific community: 800 researchers from 85 different countries, and the representation from 17 See Comissão Executiva do V Centenário da Morte do Infante Dom Henrique (1961–4). 18 The Goan Voice 5 March 1960: 3. © Copyrighted Material
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62 British scientific institutions. The inaugural session, presided by Salazar himself, started with a speech by Gilberto Freyre, a Brazilian sociologist. Its title – ‘The integration of autochthonous races and different cultures from the European, in the Luso-Tropical community: general aspects of a process’ – revealed a strong ideological and political presence. Adriano Moreira, another keynote speaker who later became Minister of Overseas, stressed the idea that the nation turned to Henry for inspiration during the period of discoveries and again now, ‘when its own institutional integrity and personality were in peril’ (Moreira 1960: 13). Henry’s ‘fabricated’ wisdom is valuable once again, since ‘Portuguese national interest coincides with the greater interests of Christendom and also with those common to all peace-loving countries’ (Moreira 1960: 43–5). Charles Boxer, as representative of Great Britain, also gave a speech. If the memory work of the British ensured the European’s claim to the land, and constructed a colonialist gaze on the cultural landscape that surrounded Fort Jesus (Linehan and Sarmento 2011), in a remarkable convergence of colonial enterprises, the involvement of the Portuguese, who funded the restoration of site through the Gulbenkian Foundation, re-enforced the European claim to Africa when they enrolled Fort Jesus into their plans to celebrate the 500th anniversary of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator in 1960. At the second meeting of the Fort Jesus Advisory Committee, Kirkman suggested that Pedro Teotónio Pereira, should be invited ‘to open the new buildings in recognition of his invaluable assistance’. The invitation should be extended to José de Azeredo Perdigão (Director of the Council of Administration of Gulbenkian) and W.A. Sanderson (Gulbenkian in London).19 This proposal was accepted subject to funds being available. Some years before (1951), Gilberto Freyre made a six-month trip through the Portuguese overseas provinces at the invitation and expense of the Portuguese Overseas Minister. Freyre’s trip symbolised the starting point of the appropriation by the regime of his sociological theories (Léonard 1999b), an ideological change and (pseudo) scientific legitimating, for internal, but mostly for international consumption. Selective readings of Freyre’s work emphasised that Portugal was not an empire like the others. Luso-tropicalism, Freyre’s principal theory, was based on three pillars: miscegenation, cultural fusion and absence of racial prejudices which were articulated with the historical evangelic mission of Portugal. He therefore provided the ideological basis for the Estado Novo to transform the ‘imperial mystic’ of the 1930s and 1940s into a ‘Luso-Christian mystic of integration’ (Ribeiro 2002). In Bender’s words (1978: 3): ‘To most non-Portuguese, lusotropicalism is a romantic myth (at best) or an individual lie (at worst) used to obscure the realities of Portuguese colonialism (…) it is doubtful whether any other ideology has been more widely and fervently believed by the Portuguese or has generated as much written attention within Portugal’. In 1960 Pereira had his share of travelling: in January he made a long visit to Portuguese India, stopping in Pakistan and the Rome on his way home. In October 19 KNA, File 28(19), 14 December 1959. © Copyrighted Material
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and November he visited Kenya and made a tour through most of the African overseas provinces. He took every opportunity to tell journalists how the situation in the Portuguese ‘overseas provinces’ was under control, informing the press that ‘… so far the situation within Portuguese territories is completely calm’ and there are ‘only minor incidents’.20 Integrated on a larger visit to the Portuguese overseas provinces, between 27 October and 2 November 1960, and at an official invitation from Governor Patrick Renison, Pereira was in Kenya for a six-day official visit. His itinerary was broadly divided between two days in Nairobi, where he visited Goan Institutions and had several official meetings, and four days on the ‘Coast Province’, where he opened the museum at Fort Jesus in Mombasa, met with Goan Institutions, and unveiled the Vasco da Gama memorial in Malindi. Having an organisation committee made up by Kirkman, Rodwell, Usher and Felix Dias (the Portuguese honorary consul for the Coastal Province), this ‘weekend at the coast’ developed in ambiguous times, since by the time Pereira arrived in Kenya, the realpolitik of decolonisation, the emerging configurations of the post-colonial world, and the changing geopolitical relationships between Britain and Portugal, were reasons enough to advise a certain prudency and avoid controversy. Let me provide a few examples. There was the decision that the Governor would not accompany Pereira to the coast.21 The reasons behind this choice are not among the viewed documents, but there was a sense that the visit could provide an occasion for the agitation of nationalism movements, and Britain did not want to be too much associated with this type of colonial celebrations. A month later, Roman Rostowsky, one of the officers organising of the visit termed this visit as ‘a great nonsense’.22 F. Dias was attempting to stage a notable event with the highest honours, but became quite disappointed to know that the Uganda and Tanganyika Governors would not be invited. Behind this decision was the fact that if these two governors participated in the ceremonies, ‘the Sultan of Zanzibar, in whose territory Mombasa and Malindi lie, would have to be invited too’.23 Finally, on a long letter from Rostowsky, the Governor was advised that Pereira should not receive visits from the Goan community whilst staying at the Governor’s Mansion, as the ‘… Indians may be inclined to protest’.24 Various months before Pereira’s visit, numerous articles about Henry the Navigator and the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of his death, about Vasco da Gama and the impact of Portuguese on Africa were published in the Kenyan press. Jules P. de Mello wrote a series of articles on Prince Henry on
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20 Daily Nation 29 October 1960. 21 KNA, File 31(22), 29 August 1960. 22 Letter from Rostowsky to John Pinney (Provincial Commissioner’s Officer), KNA, File 31(22), 29 September 1960. 23 Letter from John Pinney to Major Terrence Glancy (Private Secretary of the Governor), KNA, File 29(20), 16 August 1960. 24 KNA, File 31(22), 29 September 1960. © Copyrighted Material
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various newspapers,25 which aimed to present a nostalgic and glorious portrayal of Portuguese history on the coast to an apprehensive Goan community. Other articles also included the speech of Kubitschek on his official visit to Portugal, and large events, such as ‘ten thousands of people, including the President of Portugal and Brazil, watched 43 ships sail and steam past Sagres Point (…).26 A meaningful photograph of Pereira with Pope John XXIII, taken on the presidency minister journey home from Goa and Pakistan,27 and several news on the celebrations worldwide. There were also various conferences on the Henry the Navigator theme (i.e Felix Dias addressed the Rotary Club in March 1960),28 symposiums (i.e. the Goan Institute initiative of the ‘Centenary Symposium’ on the 28 May 1960),29 and masses (i.e. hundreds of Goans participate in mass given by the Bishop of Mombasa and Zanzibar).30 The Mombasa council, through its Town Planning Committee, also participated in this colonial performance, and among several street name changes, it created the ‘Prince Henry Drive’.31 Portugal’s Weekend at the Coast32
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On 29 October 1960 at 10:50 am, Pereira solemnly entered Fort Jesus in Mombasa greeted by the roar of cannon.33 Roughly 200 years before the Portuguese had lost the Fort to the Omani, but as a consequence of the Portuguese Gulbenkian Foundation donation, it was Pereira that broke a seal on red, green, blue and white ribbons34 and unveiled a plaque to declare the opening of Fort Jesus museum. As part of the Kenya National Parks under the Museum Trustees of Kenya, Fort Jesus was open to the public (see Boxer and Azevedo 1960 and Kirkman 1964, 1974 and 1981 for the history and archaeology of the Fort and region).
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25 The Goan Voice 9 January 1960: 1, 3; 16 January 1960: 3; 23 January 1960: 3; 30 January 1960: 3; 6 February 1960: 4; 20 February 1960: 3, 4; East African Standard 3 March 1960: 3; Sunday Post 4 March 1960: 4; Goan Voice 5 March 1960: 3. 26 The East African Standard 9 August 1960: 3 and The Daily Chronicle 11 August 1960: 4. 27 The Goan Voice 5 March 1960: 3–4. 28 Mombasa Times 4 March 1960. 29 The Globe 3 June 1960; The Goan Voice 4 June 1960: 2. 30 Goan Voice 5 March 1960. 31 Mombasa Times 9 June 1960: 4. 32 This title alludes to the part of the title of an article from the East African Standard, from 31 October 1960: 2. 33 According to the East African Standard (31 October 1960: 2) this was a 125 year old British cannon; according to the Diário de Notícias (30 November 1960: 1) it was a seventeenth-century Portuguese cannon. 34 East African Standard 31 October 1960: 2. © Copyrighted Material
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Itinerary of the first day of Pedro Teotónio Pereira’s visit to Kenya (29 October 1960)
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Table 2.1
31
Pereira arrives at Fort Reitz Airport (presently Moi International Airport) and is met by the Provincial Commissioner. A party of six cars leaves to Kilindini Harbour. Arrival at Leven Steps, Old Port, Mombasa, after embarking on the ‘Malkia’. Arrival at Fort Jesus. Inspection of the Guard of Honour mounted by the Royal East African Navy. Greetings with several authority representatives. From a dais inside the Fort, Pereira listens to the National Anthems of Portugal, Zanzibar and Britain. Speeches by Sir Alfred Vincent, C.G. Usher and the Liwali for the Coast, whose name is omitted in the programme. Speech by Pereira, who unveils a plaque and declares the Museum open. Kirkman conducts Pereira on a short tour of the Museum and Fort. Refreshments, visit to Provincial Commissioner’s House, luncheon at the Oceanic Hotel given by the Royal National Parks of Kenya. Return to the Provincial Commissioner’s House. Visit to the Goan High School in the company of Felix Dias, Honorary Consul for Portugal. The school plays the Portuguese and British national anthems. Pereira opens an exhibition of Arts and Crafts. Tea. Leaves Mombasa to Malindi from Port Reitz Airport.
11:00–11:15 11:15–11:20 11:25 12:00–15:40
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15:45–16:50
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10:50
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10:45
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9:30
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17:20
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The national anthems of Portugal, Zanzibar and Britain had just been played and in 20 minutes four speeches were given: Alfred Vincent, C.G. Usher, Sheikh Salim Mohamed Muhashamy (the Liwali35 for the coast representing the Sultan of Zanzibar) and Pereira (Table 2.1). Also present were the Louis Leakey, Mervyn Cowie, J. Hilton, Deputy Director of the Royal National Parks of Kenya, and Kirkman. After a short tour of the Museum and the Fort, and roughly one hour after his arrival, Pereira left the Fort Jesus. He returned to the Fort two days later, to attend a municipal cocktail party. According to a Portuguese newspaper, the ambience was formidable, and when the sound of a bugle filled the illuminated ramparts, a Goan man interpreted the ‘spirit of Gama’, directing a message to Pedro Teotónio Pereira.36 At the local Goan school, the school principal, Ildefonse de Souza, was awarded with the medal of the Portuguese Navy. Pereira also donated to the school, what the Daily Nation called a ‘dream book … a lovely large volume bound in red with gold lettering on the cover containing some of the best maps made by the Portuguese since the early 16th Century – entitled Henry the Navigator’.37 Later that day, Pereira decorated James Kirkman, Edward Rodwell and the Portuguese 35 Governor of a town of district. 36 Diário de Notícias 1 November 1960: 3. 37 Daily Nation 30 October 1960. © Copyrighted Material
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Consul Felix Dias with the Order of Prince Henry the Navigator, an honour specially created in 1960 to mark the 500th anniversary of the Prince’s death.38 As Linehan and Sarmento (2011) illustrate, resistance to Pereira’s visit was deeper than the ‘… eight blacks exhibiting upside down banners’ reported on the Portuguese media.39 Pio Gama Pinto (1927–65), who campaigned for the liberation of Goa as a young student in India, had a critical role in the protests. In fact he worked as a political organiser, writing for anti-colonial English-Gujarati bilingual newspapers The Colonial Times and The Daily Chronicle (becoming the editor of the latter in 1953), and significantly, collaborated with the trade unionist and nationalist politician Tom Mboya, condemning the labour conditions in the Portuguese colonies (Durrani 2006). Pio and Mboya clearly sought to disrupt the nostalgic and colonial narrative and performance enacted at Fort Jesus. In Kenya, newspapers reported the detention for protesting of six people outside the Nairobi Goan Institute on the 27 October40 and three people outside the Goan secondary school also in Nairobi.41 In Portugal the selection was to highlight the vivid demonstration of loyalty of the 1,500 Goese residents in the capital and the 500 school children who engaged with the celebration.42 On Pereira’s arrival, the East African Goan League presented an open letter complaining that the Portuguese government had failed to recognise the basic human dignity and rights of it colonial subjects.43 More significantly, the Kenyan African National Union (KANU) applied to the District Commissioner for a license to hold a public meeting in Mombasa, to exercise the right to protest against the opening of Fort Jesus Museum and against the ceremonies. Since the request was denied KANU boycotted the ceremonies, warning Africans to stay keep off the streets (Linehan and Sarmento 2011). Meanwhile, the Indian Trade Commissioner, requested the Mombasa City Council to ensure that all Indian flags were lowered in the city on the occasion of Pereira’s visit.44 On his visit to Kenya, Pereira had close contact with various Goan institutions, both in Nairobi and Mombasa: Goan Institute, Goese School, Railway Goan Institute, The Goan Cymkhana, Santa Cruz Club, the Goan Taylor Society, Goans Overseas Association, The Goan Institute and the Goan Community. Many Goans were anxious to be present at most occasions and to get involved in the celebrations, organising dinners, visits, and other social events. But Pereira’s visit also disclosed the tensions and partitions in the Goan community in Africa and in Kenya in particular, and the fragile and close to explosion situation in Goa itself. There were members of Goan community who protested the visit, in part to
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38 39 40 41 42 43 44
East African Standard 3 November 1960: 3. Diário de Notícias 29 October 1960. Daily Nation 28 October 1960: 1. Daily Nation 29 October 1960: 3. Diário de Notícias 29 October 1960: 1. Daily Nation 28 October 1960. Ibid. © Copyrighted Material
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criticise continuing Portuguese colonisation in India and in part to ensure closer association with African nationalists and the cause for Kenyan de-colonisation, namely the East African Goan League led by Pio Gama Pinto. From the mid-nineteenth century Goans were attracted by trading in Zanzibar. Later, Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam were the main destinations and with recruitment by the Imperial British East Africa Company to work on the construction of the Uganda Railway, a significant increase in the number of people hired in India was registered, and Goese started to move from the coast to the interior. The Goese diaspora can be explained by an absence of economic development in Goa during the colonial regime, the rise of British colonialism, and the enhanced access to catholic Western education, which increased occupational expectations and a desire for a better quality of life (Mascarenhas-Keyes 2005; Thomaz 1994). Goans migrated voluntarily, and engaged in various types of jobs, from railway employees, to administration. The new social and cultural contexts in East Africa resulted in the founding of clubs, schools and churches.45 While Goan clubs were not homogenous or serene, as they attracted different sections of the community, and caste played an important role in membership, the umbrella organisations, such as the Goan Overseas Association and the Goan Community, aimed at reaching out for all Goans, irrespective of club membership (Frenz 2008). India’s independence in 1948, the increasing pressure on Portugal to leave its ‘occupied’ territories (Goa, Daman and Diu), the rigid geopolitical position of Portugal under Salazar, and the rising nationalist movements in East Africa, all contributed to an escalating tension and sense of uncertainty within the Goan community in East Africa. After 1948 Lisbon continued to refuse negotiation and the tensions between the two countries rose. In 1955, the peaceful marches over Goa and Damão by satyagrahis (nonviolent resisters), ended up in violence, as the Portuguese police opened fire, killing over 15 people. P. Teotónio Pereira, as Portuguese Ambassador in the US attempts to find some support in Washington, but Portugal becomes increasingly isolated, despite insistently reminding Britain of the assistance implications of the old Alliance in case of an attack to colonial territories. In December 1961, 40,000 Indian troops entered Goa, Daman and Diu, and the conflict was over in a little over 24 hours. A Soviet veto prevented the United Nations from approving a motion against this ‘invasion’ (celebrated by the majority in Goa as a liberation), and Salazar was proved wrong when he thought that a young State, born out of British rule, commanded by Ghandi’s follower, would not defy the ‘opposition’ of Americans and British, attacking and old ally of the latter and member of NATO (Rosas 1999). On 12 December 1961, Britain informed the ‘old ally’ that the help it may provide in a conflict with a Commonweath State is ‘inevitably limited’.
45 Founded in Mombasa in 1901, the ‘Goan Reading Room’, later renamed the ‘Goan Institute Mombasa’, was the first Goan association in East Africa (Frenz 2008). © Copyrighted Material
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The Vasco da Gama Monument
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Apart from the opening of the Fort Jesus Museum, one of the highlights in Pereira’s visit was the unveiling of the Vasco da Gama monument in Malindi on his second day of visit to Kenya (Figure 2.2). Malindi had a long historical connection with the Portuguese, since it was the first port where 450 years before Vasco da Gama had found some cooperation on his maritime voyages. As Boxer and Azevedo (1960: 16) argue, ‘It was the sheikh (or sultan) of Malindi who supplied Vasco da Gama with the famous pilot, Ibn Madjd, thus enabling the São Gabriel and her consorts to reach Calicut without further misadventure’. The Swahili society at Malindi, like Mombasa, Lamu and Pate, was very much maritime and mobile. According a national newspaper, ‘a crowd of more than 1,000 people – many of them Goans who travelled by bus from Mombasa – gathered on the sea-front (…) to watch the [unveiling of a memorial] ceremony’.46 Pereira made a short speech, after which he unveiled the memorial plaque. The Goan High School Band played the Portuguese and the British national anthems, and a street name plate with the name of Ibn Madjd, the infamous Arab navigator who assisted Vasco da Gama on his journey in East Africa in 1498, was unveiled. The memorial, apparently an idea stemmed from Felix Dias and Edward Rodwell,47 was expected to cost approximately 2,000 pounds and totally funded by the Goan community.48 A memorial fund was established, and soon the Provisional Commissioner John Pinney, Felix Dias, the Liwali, and several other Mombasa individuals contributed. Numerous events were organised in order to raise funds. The ‘Henry the Navigator Football Cup’, which final took place in the Municipal Stadium of Mombasa on 30 June 1960 is just an example.49 In the final, the Goan School band played the British and the Portuguese anthems. The monument was designed by the modern architect Anthony B. Almeida, a Tanzanian of Goan origins, who was also present at the ceremony. While in Kenya the Daily Nation wrote that the monument was ‘symbolic of the spirit of discovery’,50 in Portugal, the Diário de Notícias noted that ‘… this was further evidence of the profound loyalty of Goans to the motherland, as well as to the duty that the Portuguese government has in giving national solidarity full support to the community in Kenya’.51 Reporting to a journalist, Pinney said the monument would be a symbol of friendship not just between Britain and Portugal, but ‘… between English people and Portuguese Nationals here in the coast Province’.52
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46 47 48 49 50 51 52
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Figure 2.2
The Malindi Monument
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Source: The author, August 2007.
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35
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No reference to Africans or coastal people. In its official version, the monument depicts ‘a sail ship trimmed down to its elemental form: the mast, the sail and the sea’ (Almeida in Brussens 2005: 118). Explaining this unmistakable political work in 2004, Almeida, who was never directly or actively involved in politics (Brussens 2005), argued that the monument could also be understood as an abstracted depiction of a sword. This interpretation suggests that Almeida aimed to subvert the ambitions of the Portuguese to memorialise Vasco da Gama as a hero, since the monument could also act as a metaphor for ‘… a history of oppression, exploitation and slavery’ (Brussens 2005: 119). Whatever the effectiveness of this interpretation, which cannot be sustained from the discourse around its opening and by Almeida’s views on architecture which were more related to an instrument for development rather than to symbolise it, today the monument is practically abandoned, forgotten by most in a neglected location in Malindi. As Linehan and Sarmento (2011) argue, it is its derelict state rather than Almeida postrationalisation of his commission, that is perhaps a more authentic and critical response to the aims of original colonial commemoration and a suitable rebuke to the preservation of colonial myths at Fort Jesus. In 2007, the Vasco da Gama pillar, built at the end of the fifteenth century also showed severe signs of erosion. It was possible to identify a few newspaper articles regretfully commenting on the lapidated state of the monument. On his third day of visit, Pereira went fishing all morning, travelling back to Mombasa after lunch. He then visited the St Francis Xavier – Goan Tailor Society, where the Portuguese nation anthem is played once more and a commemorative © Copyrighted Material
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plaque is unveiled. Afterwards he went to the Goan Institute, where once again the anthem was played. Finally he attended a municipal cocktail party at Fort Jesus. On the fourth day he only visited the port in the morning, and attended a cocktail party given by the Goan community which was followed by a dinner at the Oceanic Hotel. On the 2 November he left to Nairobi, and afterwards to Mozambique. He still had a two week journey ahead: Mozambique, Angola, São Tomé and Guinea. On arrival in Lisbon on the 18 November 1960, he told the press: ‘Do you want to know what the Portuguese from Africa think? They are united and determined around the homeland flag’.53 Pereira argued that he had seen no sign of trouble in Portuguese Africa, and was impressed with the attitude of the Portuguese which was ‘don’t worry about us. Everything will be all right here if only the Government at home remains firm’.54 As expected, the echoes of Pereira’s visit to East Africa on diplomatic channels were extremely positive. On a letter to the governor, the provincial Commissioner mentioned that ‘apart from a feeble attempt to display some banners in Makupa Road’ (…) this was ‘a most successful and enjoyable visit’ (…) and ‘the opening of the Fort Jesus Museum and the unveiling of the Vasco da Gama Pillar at Malindi were very colourful ceremonies’.55 P.M. Renison, the governor, on a telegram to the British Consul in Lourenço Marques, Mozambique, informs that despite ‘some criticisms of Portugal’s colonial policy in the local Press by African political leaders and by a few Goan individuals, Dr. Pereira’s charm and natural dignity created a most favourable impression both in Nairobi and at the Coast, where the Goan community, in particular, contributed much towards the success of his visit’.56 According to the British Ambassador in Lisbon, Pereira himself was delighted with the reception, and Africans in the street had been perfectly friendly, ‘with the exception of the one or two who had taken part in the rather half-hearted and ill-arranged demonstration against his visit’.57
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Epilogue
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When a subsidy from the Portuguese Gulbenkian Foundation allowed for the restoration of Fort Jesus as a museum, a complex diplomatic and political narrative and practice began to unfold. For the British, the restoration of the Fort ensured that key colonial issues were addressed, such as the continuation of an imperial archaeology that made the colony appear more ‘civilised’ and the possibility of staging a certain normalisation of the colonial enterprise. For the Portuguese it allowed a vital approach to an old ally and the possibility to perform a charming
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trip with international coverage. Furthermore, while the funding in British Kenya contributed to address sensitive issues in the Gulbenkian Foundation, Pereira’s ‘weekend at the coast’ perfectly suited Henry’s celebration narratives and the propaganda tour of the African colonies. Throughout the celebrations and events in Mombasa and Malindi, like the British, the Portuguese took every opportunity to tell their history in very particular ways. Not only did they distort the harsh reality of conditions in the overseas provinces – ‘all well in Portuguese Africa’ – but they also used the opening of Fort Jesus and a whole host of events and key visits to the Goan community associations that followed, to present a utterly nostalgic portrayal of Portuguese history on the coast. Thus, the events underlined that the restoration of Fort Jesus enabled a convergence of two colonial enterprises, which despite their diverging strategies on the future of the European colonisation in Africa (which would be felt shortly afterwards), manipulated the histories and memories of this site and its surrounding landscape for their mutual benefit. Until 1961 Portugal claimed a certain ‘special relationship’ with Britain, which was accompanied by a certain British tolerance towards the Portuguese government (Ramos 2005). Nowhere is this more visible than at the birth of the museum in Fort Jesus, Kenya. The memory politics at work during the mid-twentieth century remain relevant to contemporary debates about heritage and memory in Kenya. Postcolonialism is a project that necessarily returns to the colonial past (Gandhi 1998). Looking at the birth of the museum at Fort Jesus, and its memory work has provided key insights into the politics of public memory, its forms, transformations and meaning in a colonial society. The recovery of the celebratory events is also important in terms of the understanding the orbit of colonial memory work that still afflict the consumption of the past and heritage at this site, and more broadly throughout Kenya. The next chapter will look at how Fort Jesus and its museum are interpreted today, and engage with the views and perspectives of various local tour guides.
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(Post)colonial Voices at Fort Jesus, Kenya1
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Chapter 3
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Any postcolonial geography must realize within itself its own impossibility, given that geography is inescapably marked (both philosophically and institutionally) by its location and development as a western-colonial science ww w.a sh ga te. co m
James Sidaway (2000: 593)
Introduction
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Understandings of the past have strategic, political and ethical consequences. As Hodgkin and Radstone (2003: 1) put it, ‘contests over the meaning of the past are also contests over the meaning of the present and over ways of thinking the past forward’. The production of smooth and hegemonic representations and narratives of the past and of public memory involves remarkable struggles (Nora 1989), but people’s ability to formulate and represent their own memories is regularly constrained by the discursive field in which they operate, and literally the space in which their statements, both figurative and literal, are made (Johnson 2003). Tourism has a strong influence on the ways the past is represented in museums and other heritage sites. To a large extent, the necessity of presenting neatly commodified, packaged products for an expanding tourist market has contributed to simplified, unthreatening, sanitised and superficial stories being presented as heritage (Urry 1990; Walsh 1992). Heritage sites and public museums face a set of conflicting demands, and this is especially the case in the context of the construction of nation and identity, and in postcolonial contexts. Ambiguity often lies in the ways in which sites of memory are urged to invoke colonial journeys, at the same time as they are being required to discard colonial histories and reflect new national pasts and their policies, exhibitions and collections. As approached in the last chapter, Fort Jesus, a sixteenth-century Portuguese built Fort in Mombasa, is one of the principal tourist attractions in East Africa (Sindiga 1996a; Irandu 2004; Farah 2006), and encapsulates and resonates many of the memory making struggles of contemporary Kenya. It is a good starting point to discuss the spatial and cultural dichotomy of coastal and safari tourism, as the site contains many conflicting aspects of heritage and interpretation connected ww w.a sh ga te. co m
1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Tourism Geographies, 2010, 12(2): 246–63 with the title ‘Fort Jesus: Guiding the past and contesting the present in Kenya’. I acknowledge the permission to reprint from the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals). © Copyrighted Material
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‘Jambo! Welcome to Magical Kenya’
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to political, ethnic and religious tension in the country. It is a place that directs us to the social and economic challenges of developing countries, and Kenya in particular. The principal aim of this chapter is to examine how a particular group of local tourist guides at Fort Jesus deals with the presentation and interpretation a colonial building, in relation to international audiences. These performances are framed under the pressures of daily life and the complex political and cultural contemporary situation in Kenya. My analysis and narrative is constructed from on-site experience in the summer of 2007, partly undertaken as a tourist and partly as a researcher. The primary source of material relates to semi-structured interviews conducted at the Fort’s entrance with 10 tourist guides. Formal and informal interviews were also made with some of Fort Jesus administrators. Finally, informal talks with tourists helped to construct this analysis. The archive of the Fort Jesus Library was visited on several occasions and various other coastal resorts, from Malindi to Diani Beach, were also visited.
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Despite all political, military and ethnic conflicts in many African countries in the last decades, tourism has been constantly growing: from 1980 to 1990 the number of tourist arrivals doubled (7.3 million to 15 million), and between 1990 and 2000 tourists practically increased twofold again. Just as in previous years, tourism in the continent continued to grow faster in terms of international tourist arrivals in 2007 (7.9 per cent) than the world average (6.1 per cent), being the only continent to register a positive growth in 2009, and reaching a total of 49 million tourists in 2010 (UNWTO 2011). This growth has been a general global trend, and despite Africa’s share of global tourism being a ‘drop in the ocean’ (Mitchell and Ashley 2006: 1), it is an important economic activity for many African nations. Yet, notwithstanding its great political fragmentation (53 independent countries in early 2011), in 2008 only nine countries received more than one million international tourists, revealing that tourism is very spatially concentrated. Put together these nine countries were responsible for almost three quarters of all tourists in Africa: Nigeria with 1.3 million, Algeria, Kenya, Mozambique, Botswana and Zimbabwe between 1.1 and 1.9 million, and the leaders Tunisia, Morocco and South Africa with 9.5, 7.8 and 7 million each, respectively (UNWTO 2011). During the 1970s, political and socio-economic stability allowed the relatively young multi-ethnic state of Kenya to become one of the leading tourist destinations in Africa (Irandu 2004). Over the last decade, the image of tranquillity has been periodically damaged by violence and political instability which is associated with the tourism decline in the 1990s. In 1997, severe conflicts emerged between the Mijikenda ethnic group and upcountry migrants who were attempting to gain a living from tourism in the coastal province. Conflicts were serious in Mombasa and Malindi (see Jamison 1999), and coupled with the terrorist attacks in Nairobi (August 1998 bombing of the American Embassy) and near Mombasa (November © Copyrighted Material
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2002 bombing of the Paradise Hotel at Kikambala), eroded the country’s image as a safe travel destination. Insecurity, crime, a deteriorating infrastructure, inadequate promotion and marketing, also led to a serious decline in the tourism industry (Rakodi, Gatabaki-Kamau and Devas 2000). The violence that broke in late 2007 in Kenya, result of the post-election conflicts, had a severe impact on tourism in the country. Several European countries and the United States issued travel advisories to their citizens, and there were thousands of trip cancellations. From 2007 to 2008 Kenya lost about half a million tourists, registering a fall of 32 per cent in tourist numbers (UNWTO 2011). This resulted in very low hotel occupancy rates (20–30 per cent) in some tourist areas in the first months of 2008, which in turn have already resulted in the layoff or permanent leave of about 20,000 people (Wangi 2008). This violence is associated with economic and political instability, which is turn is partly related to the existence of complex and deep inequalities between different ethnic groups. In 2009 tourism growth was above 20 per cent, and the country received 1.5 million tourists (Kenya 2010). Tourism is the largest single export earner in the country, contributing with 12 per cent to the GDP (only second to the foreign exchange earnings of coffee and tea combined), and employing 400,000 people in the formal sector and an estimated 600,000 informally. The Kenya Tourism Board captivating leitmotif ‘Jambo! Welcome to Magical Kenya’ serves to introduces visitors to the official web site named ‘Magical Kenya’, which divides the country’s tourism activities in seven products: ‘Wildlife Safari’, ‘Beach Safari’, ‘Sports Safari’, ‘Adventure Safari’, ‘Cultural Safari’, ‘Golf Safari’ and ‘Birding Safari’ (Kenya Tourism Board 2011). Naturally absent from these imagined geographies, as well as from the overall marketing images of Kenya and to a certain extent of Africa as a tourist destination of ‘pristine wildernesses’, are images of modern, urbanised and industrialised landscapes. In a rough way, tourism in Kenya can be divided in two broad themes and spatial areas, although they often overlap as discussed further in this chapter. On the one hand there is an older tourism development related to safari tourism, in the savannas of the Great Rift in Kenya. Beginning with big game hunting in the early twentieth century, the 1920s and 1930s made Kenya ‘the best example of empire as a vast system of outdoor recreation for the upper classes of Europe and America’ (Steinhart 2006: 3). The hunting safari for wealthy ‘tourists’ was gradually developed into East Africa camera safari package, which has a wide range of comforts, luxuries and prices. From the mid-twentieth century, various national parks and game reserves were established: Nairobi National Park (1946; 120 km²), nowadays a suburban location threatened by the growth of the capital, with a backdrop of ominous skyscrapers, speeding matatus and landing airplanes, but advertised as ‘The World’s only wildlife capital’ (KWS 2011); Amboseli National Park (1947; 392 km²); Tsavo National Park (1948; 21,343 km²); and Mount Kenya National Park (1949; 2,800 km²), chosen as a national icon after independence, together with Fort Jesus. Presently, National Parks still form the pillar of the country’s tourism industry (Akama and Kieti 2003). © Copyrighted Material
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On its official web site, the Kenya Tourism Board reassures that Kenya is a place where the visitor can ‘experience a natural world unchanged by the passage of time …’ in balloon safaris, walking safaris or camel safaris (KTB 2011). The dominant narrative of safari tourism relates to ‘primeval, untamed landscape dominated by wild animals, played out in the broad savannas of the Great Rift in Kenya and Tanzania’, coupled with a nostalgia of the disappearing and noble Maasai and Samburu (Kasfir 2004: 322). Western travellers on East African safaris are often whisked away from the airport on private buses and taken directly to maintained environments (game reserves) where they can consume African ‘nature’ without exposure to certain elements (such as urban life in Nairobi or Dar-Es-Salaam) that might disrupt or undermine this constructed narrative (see Sindiga 1996b). Safari tourism, a predominantly western construction, is based on a conception and programs of wildlife conservation, deeply embedded in a narrative of frozen spaces, also a western product (Akama 2004). Postcolonial African travel narratives are constructed on the shoulders of colonial discourses, tropes and experiences, on condescending and uncomplimentary depictions of the Kenyan by imperialist writers as Elspeth Huxley, Karen Blixen and Rudyard Kipling, among others (see Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1972, 1981). Through processes of appropriation, subverting and inverting, these ideas are transformed, but the dominant travel narratives and discourses are still of a presentation of an exoticised Africa where people travel to see and consume both ‘nature’ and the ‘native’ (Dunn 2004; Akama 2004). On the other hand, there is a more recent coastal tourism development which started to develop in the 1960s with air transport, and registered a boom in the 1980s. The coastline north and south of Mombasa saw many resorts being built, but tourism development did not occur in the city, which is characterised by a low standard modern urban growth. This coastal type of tourism is spatially and functionally similar to the Caribbean tourism model, in which tourists spend very little time away from the beach and hotel environments. While the dominant image of Kenya is related to the savannas and the wildlife, international tourism is overwhelmingly concentrated in the coast province of Kenya. In 2006 the total number of hotel bed-nights in the ‘Coastal-Beach Zone’ was higher than all other regions of the country combined (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics 2007). The country has a coastline of 536 km on the Indian Ocean (stretching from the border with Somalia in the north to the ‘quieter’ division with Tanzania in the south), and tourists are predominantly attracted by natural attributes: white sandy beaches, blue skies, warm water and coral reefs. Despite a recent tendency to diversify the country’s tourism product (Ondimu 2002), foreign tour operators tend to emphasise the country’s wildlife and beach settings at the expense of cultural tourism, such as the Swahili urban and historical environments – stone towns, archaeological sites and material culture (Irandu 2004; Kasfir 2004). The dominant travel narratives and discourses are still of a presentation of an exoticised Africa where people travel to see and consume both ‘nature’ and the ‘native’ (Dunn 2004), and on their journey through Kenya, tourists are soothed © Copyrighted Material
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by the aesthetics of the safari style or the colonial chic (Kasfir 2004). The Swahili coast is increasingly dominated by up market hotels with architectural and interior design that recreates an apparent mystique of colonial times and reproduces comparable race relations. Work undertaken by local people inside these exclusive hotel compounds is often done in uniforms that mimic the costume of colonial servants. Embraced inside the legacies of imperial spectatorship, the notion of African heritage inside these sites is constantly recycled in popular western representation of Kenyan culture. Even though ‘safari tourism’ and ‘coastal tourism’ are based on different kinds of tourism products, motivations and geographical spaces, they are increasingly associated. On the one hand, there are plenty of Maasai and Samburu rambling along the beaches attempting to sell souvenirs, to get a picture taken or, in some cases, to engage in a brief affair. As Kasfir (2004) argues, the warrior becomes a representation, a simulacrum of the pastoralism life that is not readily visible to the tourist at the coast, and the boundaries between ‘performance’ and ‘material culture’ become vague. Similar encounters take place between female tourists and ‘beach boys’, as well as between male tourists and local women. Sexuality and sex tourism is in fact a prominent part of the Swahili coast tourism equation (see Jamison 1999; Kibicho 2005, 2009). On the other hand, as tourists and tourism packages integrate coastal and safari experiences on a single trip, the coast becomes the basis for exploring the ‘the big five’, and the importance of material culture and its interpretation and representation increases (see also Ondimu 2002).
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Fort Jesus’ ‘After-life’
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Following independence, Fort Jesus was selected along with Mount Kenya as a national icon to be published in school text books. Declared a National Monument under the Archaeological and Paleontological Interest Act in 1970 (later renamed the Antiquities and Monuments Act 1983), Fort Jesus is the principal historical monument not only of Mombasa but of Kenya (Irandu 2004). It is one of the crown jewels of the National Museums of Kenya on the coast together with Lamu (Farah 2006), and the most outstanding historical monument in East Africa (Hoyle 2001). Kenya has three cultural sites inscribed in the World Heritage List, all on the coast: Lamu Old Town, since 2001 and Sacred Mijikenda Kaya Forests, since 2008, and Fort Jesus, since 2011. Unlike the late 1950s profound intervention, the Gulbenkian Foundation funded a light renovation in Fort Jesus in 2001, which focused on improving the exterior lighting, the surrounding environment and plastering the outer walls. Presently, the Fort is open to the public daily (from 9:30 am to 6:00 pm) and is administered by the National Museums of Kenya. To a certain extent, it can be understood a multifunctional space (see Wazwa 2006): it houses a museum, a conservation lab, and education department and is the nexus of a research programme dedicated to the © Copyrighted Material
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Table 3.1
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archaeology of the coastal region. Due to its location, not far from the business and commercial centre of Mombasa and on the edge of the old town – the Old Town Conservation Office is responsible for an area of roughly 33 hectares – many local and regional functions take place there (roughly 120 in 2006). There are corporate functions (for a rent price of about 50,000 shillings), wedding functions (10,000–20,000 shillings), concerts, art exhibitions, and social meetings at no cost: the elders of the community meet here monthly, as well as other community based organisations (Abdulqadir 2007).2 At the time of the fieldwork, there was an exhibition on HIV-AIDS and drug abuse, geared towards the local community. Like many other Forts around the world, Fort Jesus is a major local, regional and international attraction. School children from all over the country and even as far as Uganda visit the Fort on educational fieldtrips and participating in a critical tour of their learning process. In Africa, a comparable site to Fort Jesus is Fort St George D’ Elmina, in Ghana. In 1993 this West African monument received 17,091 visitors (Bruner 2005: 102), registering an exponential growth since 1998. In 2000 and 2001 more than 100,000 people visited Elmina, of whom 50,000 were foreign (KEEA 2003; see also MacGonagle 2006). These numbers are very similar to those registered in Fort Jesus (see Table 3.1).3 Number of visitors to Fort Jesus Non-residents
Residents
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
91,932 66,585 36,964 45,055 50,439 n/a 52,220 35,957 47,195 55,394 39,875
67,183 48,774 46,206 49,280 48,747 n/a 61,787 69,144 73,197 71,553 58,794
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Year
Educational groups 13,148 13,717 13,971 15,912 16,637 n/a 24,157 27,866 28,203 39,259 40,241
Total 168,263 129,076 97,141 110,247 115,823 140,300 138,164 132,967 149,595 167,303 139,974
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Source: Modified from Sarmento (2010: 252). Data for 2001 from Irandu (2004: 145).
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2 Abdulqadir, M. 2007. Education Officer of Fort Jesus. Interview on 9 August 2007. 3 In 1959, when the Fort Jesus Advisory Committee was discussing the entry fees to be established when opening to the public (see Chapter 2), it was ‘hoped that from the Port alone there would be an average of five hundred adults a month, passengers and crew, beside children’ (KNA, File 28(19), 14 December 1959). © Copyrighted Material
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The Fort had a convoluted history, not only changing powers several times, but acquiring new functions during the twentieth century (see Chapter 2). These roles are rarely mentioned in the literature, are significantly absent from tourist information materials, and also from the museum’s exhibition. This is mostly a static display of objects which are the result of archaeological excavations at Fort Jesus (in essence those conducted by British archaeologist James Kirkman in the 1950s and 1960s), Gede, Manda and Ungwana; items donated by individuals from colonial collections; and shipwreck artefacts (mainly artefacts from the 1977–9 excavation of the Santo António de Tana, a Portuguese frigate which sank off the coast of Mombasa in 1697 when it was on the way to relief Fort Jesus). Visitors walk through these exhibits of rocks, clay and glass which testify the cosmopolitan nature of the Swahili Coast, but as a result of a number of omissions they hardly engage in the dense spaces of struggle which the Fort represents. The Fort had a primary role in the slave trade, and there is even one episode in which rebellious Bantu slaves took hold of the Fort (see Boxer and Azevedo 1960). Slavery was legal in Mombasa up to 1908, and according to Lovejoy (2000: 232), in 1897 there were still 4,667 slaves in the plantations in Mombasa. Yet, the museum is silent and there is a strange muteness and rigidness of the objects. As analysed in the previous chapter, the decision to return the Fort to its ‘original’ state, meant that the cells and prison buildings were destroyed during the restoration in the 1950s so the role of the Fort as a prison is down played. Nowhere is there any mention that the Fort was used as a prison for political dissidents who campaigned and fought against British colonial regime. As Linehan and Sarmento (2011) argue, the Fort is riddled with omissions, with silences and to all extends and purposes is spacing forgetting. Despite its international visibility – and the site was often promoted as an UNESCO WHS before 2011 – Fort Jesus is somehow caught in-between different tourism experiences and various tourism movements. Owing more to tour operators’ awareness of the need to diversify the tourism product from safari and beach environments (Ondimu 2002), than to a planned effort in the development of cultural tourism, a visit to Fort Jesus is a standard item on the itinerary of many tourists that visit Mombasa (Hoyle 2001), who are usually ending or starting a safari, or ending or starting a beach holiday. After several visits to the Fort, and through informal conversations with locals, it became apparent that the site is also a meeting place for young couples. In a conservative society where public space is particularly visible and streets are extremely hectic, the Fort is appropriated as a sheltered place, where the design and architecture of war and defence, the oreilles and bastions, are reinterpreted to create secluded and intimate environments (the same can be said about the ramparts of El Jadida, in Morocco). As part of the diversification of activities within the Fort, and its multi-functionality, Fort Jesus organises a light and sound show three to four times a week depending on season (US$20).
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Fort Jesus Museum
Source: The author, August 2007.
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Figure 3.1
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Through an agreement with a local travel agency, there is also a combined package including a boat trip along the harbour, a luxury dinner in the Fort patio and the light and sound show (US$75–85), where history is packaged and commodified for tourism consumption: ‘Diners, served by waiters dressed as pseudoPortuguese naval officers, are presented with a flamboyant performance in which a history of the Fort is presented in a specially choreographed show. This piece of theatre is a mixture of the exotic and the arabesque. Whilst the performance tells something of the turbulent history of the Fort and of Mombasa, in its style and in its omissions it is undeniably interlaced with the legacies of imperialism’ (Linehan and Sarmento 2011: 307). While the apparently benign nostalgic memories of the colonial period as found in restaurants, bars, and hotels are just a short step from these performances on the ramparts of Fort Jesus, they also represent the extent to which the experience of colonialism has been elided, and how far from the aspiration of early post independence thinking about historical identity and cultural identity in Kenya has drifted. As Cosgrove (2008: 211) argued, ‘fifty years after Kenyan independence was achieved, a simulacrum of the colonial White Highlands continues to be played out in the nostalgic tourism of equatorial social clubs, hunting lodges and veranda hotels’. © Copyrighted Material
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Arriving at Fort Jesus, either by walking, by auto rickshaw (tuk-tuk), taxi, jeep or on a tourism van or bus, we are confronted with a monumental and compact building slightly yellow-greyish. For those who make a full visit or just quickly stop to observe the facade of the Fort only allow themselves to photograph the building from a vehicle, rushing to the next tourist site after collecting another memory and ‘presence certificate’, the roundabout in front of the Fort’s main (and now only public) entrance is the first thing to gaze at. This public space outside of the Fort is busy at most times of the day. There are some very basic local shops that serve drinks and ‘snacks’; there are also a few sellers of ‘local handicrafts’, foodstuff such as potato chips, peanuts and ice-creams. Apart from the guides who invariably approach everyone who is there for the first time, the wide range of paintings portraying zebras, lions, elephants, savannas and Maasai against the backdrop of the Fort is the most noticeable sight. There are very few paintings or representations of coastal environments, coastal architecture or Swahili culture. As Kasfir (2004) argues, the ubiquitous presence of paintings of idyllic tribal village life, wildlife and apparently ‘authentic’ sculpture of native tribe people eradicate political history and discomfort. This colourful scene is continuously accompanied by the ubiquitous music of ‘Jambo Bwana’, written in the mid-1980s by the group ‘Them Mushrooms’, which includes the ever-present expression of hakuna-matata (see Bruner 2005). From this roundabout, there is also access to the Mombasa Club, a private club established at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1885, which includes a hotel, a swimming pool and a restaurant for members only. One of the most vibrant places outside the Fort is the ground squashed between the Ocean and of the Forts’ walls, where there are two soccer goals. Here youth gather daily and somehow oblivious to the historical significance of the site engage in formal and informal matches. This is also a popular spot for many other locals and tourists, who come here to relax, chat, date and make photographs. After dusk the whole area quickly empties and the site has a reputation of being unsafe. Silenced ‘Tourist Guides’?
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There is a relatively long track and variety of studies focusing on tourist guides. Holloway (1981) approached guides as knowledge providers, while Cohen (1985) has shown how guides are key elements in the translation of a strange foreign culture into a discernible and familiar cultural language, being cultural mediators and functioning as ‘pathfinders’ or as ‘mentors’. These categories were also explored in relation to the role of the counsellor-guides of the ‘Israel Experience Program’ educational tours that bring Diaspora youth to the country (Cohen, Ifergan and Cohen 2002). Pizam and Gang-Hoan (1996) analysed Korean tourguides’ perceptions between tourists of different nationalities and Dahles (2002) discussed the impact of state propaganda on the narratives of tourist guides in Indonesia. Also conducting fieldwork in Indonesia, Salazar (2005) pointed how local tour guides are important actors in the process of ‘localising’, ethnicising © Copyrighted Material
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and exoticising a destination in interpreting tourism places. He further developed this idea of globalised discourses being locally reproduced by guides in a study in Tanzania, where he concluded that guides do not merely reproduce the narratives and practices they were taught at school, but they became creative storytellers on their own (Salazar 2006). As mentioned, listening to tourist guides narratives aimed at engaging with the different ways in which they negotiate the dialogue between the heritage and memory they are presenting and their own values and identity. According to Abdulqadir (2007),4 the educational officer at Fort Jesus, there are roughly 180 official local tourist guides in the city of Mombasa, that is, guides registered at the Mombasa tourist office, a number which is possibly well underestimated. According to local information, in the 1970s and 1980s there were only four or five tourist guides in the Old Town. This number has increased to 25 tourist guides registered in the Old Town Tourist Guides Association, plus an undetermined number of unofficial guides. This study focuses on 10 of the 25 official tourist guides (Table 3.2). They are all men, all Swahili, and all born in the coastal region (most in Mombasa, but some in Malindi, Pate Island and other coastal villages). Due to the complexity of the Swahili identity, which is beyond the scope of this paper, I use Swahili to refer to any Muslim native of Kenya’s coastal region who speaks some variation of Swahili as first language (see Caplan 2007 for a discussion of the Swahili identity). The strategy of the present research involved semi-structured interviews, engaging in a partly formal discussion of pre-defined topics, while allowing for a certain elasticity and freedom to debate other issues. All interviews with the guides were conducted outside the Fort, under the tree shade by the cannons, where they normally wait for tourists. All interviews were paid, particularly to compensate guides for the time spent with me. Interviews lasted between 30 and 45 minutes. In the days following the interview with one guide, several short interactions took place, while a more close proximate relationship between researcher and researched evolved. Only two out of 12 guides refused to participate in the research, arguing that they had tours already arranged. Under the circumstances of the research (no control of local languages, and with insufficient time to slowly get acquainted with local guides), it was decided to ask the guide being interviewed to indicate the next guide to participate in the study. This strategy carries a certain degree of subjectivity and distortion, creating a non-representative sample. Still, 10 out of the 25 official guides were interviewed. All names are fictitious. Perhaps more important than characterising guides as mediators of culture, as people who establish a bridge between tourists and tourist sites, is to underline that guides are above all concerned with their everyday life existence.
4 Abdulqadir, ibid. © Copyrighted Material
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Abdullahi Ahmed Amri Bin Faraji
42 44 50 48 34
Mombasa Mombasa Pate Island Mombasa Malindi
Mombasa Old Town Mombasa Old Town Mombasa
Hasa
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Mombasa
Old Town
Jahidi Mohammed Radhi Sefu
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Kikambala Mombasa Mombasa Mombasa
Old Town Mombasa Mombasa Old Town
Working years as Training Sources guide 7 No OTG* 7 Yes OTG, NSB* 15 Yes Own notes 5–6 Yes Foreign guide 10 Yes OTG* NSB*, 19 Yes Other’s information 12 No Newspapers 5 No OTG* 4 Yes OTG* 5 Yes OTG* ww w.a sh ga te. co m
Place of Resident
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Place of Birth
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Age
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Interviewed Guides at Fort Jesus, August 2007
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Table 3.2
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Notes: *OTG: Old Town Guidebook, NSB: Non-specified book.
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In very different ways, they made clear they attribute an importance to history, memory and interpretation, but it is the shillings that come with them that are of paramount consequence. All interviewed guides had a variety of jobs previous to being tourist guides (or they still do), and are very open minded in relation to changing job again. They are generally happy about their current profession, since their job allows them to improve language skills, to establish connections abroad that might be useful in future. They all argue that interacting with foreign tourists is interesting. Nevertheless, they do position themselves in the African job market context, and are aware of the possibility of sudden changes in such a volatile situation. A few examples of jobs that guides did or do are taxi driver, small boats captain, small businesses, welding, safari and coastal tour guiding. It was practically impossible to obtain a precise figure on the number of guided tours that each of them makes per week, a number that obviously varies considerably with the tourism season. Most guides state taking three to four tours per week. This might be the case in the low season, but it is possibly a strong underestimation in the high season. At the same time, prices for guided tours are extremely variable. Guides may charge 200 to 800 shillings (roughly 2 to 8 euros) for a basic one-hour tour in the Fort, and 800 to 2,500 shillings (approximately 8 to 25 euros) for a half-day or even full-day tour of the Fort, old city and other Mombasa attractions. Prices vary according to the duration of the tour, but they also fluctuate according to subjective issues such as the perception of their wealth vis-à-vis their country of origin, party size, bargaining skills, and the way they dress and appear. It is the guides’ perception of what the tourist can pay that is central to this issue. Guides’ common feeling is that this is a highly uncertain © Copyrighted Material
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business. Not only the guides have to share the tourists among them (they have established a rotation system whereby the guide that arrives puts his name down on a list and has to wait his turn to approach a tourist or group of tourists), but they also feel the negative impact of the increasing number of beach boys and other hustlers and hawkers throughout the country. Mombasa Island is connected to the mainland by several bridges and is part of Mombasa City, the second largest after Nairobi, with well over 600,000 inhabitants. The city is one of the commercial hubs of Kenya, being the most important port in East Africa, and is the centre of a region that is the leading tourist centre is East Africa (in number of hotel beds and other tourist facilities and in number of tourists). But Mombasa is an extremely poor place with very high levels of social deprivation and poverty (Rakodi, Gatabaki-Kamau and Devas 2000). It is estimated that more than a quarter million people live in the city with less than one dollar per day (Kenya Government 2007). Akama and Kieti (2007: 746) have produced a quite important study on the relations between the increasing figures of tourism at a macro level and the strategies that must be put in place in order that local people effectively benefit from this situation, since ‘current forms of tourism development in Kenya have not reduced poverty or contributed to the socio-economic empowerment of local people’. This is a departure point to understand that guides, more than just ‘mediators’ must be entrepreneurs who are required to ‘turn their social relations and narratives into a profitable enterprise’ (Dahles 2002: 784). Many of the guides are concerned that ‘[local] people don’t get anything from the Fort’. While at first this could be the direct consequence of the Fort being a National Monument of Kenya, and revenues reverting directly to Nairobi (a standard financial architecture in many countries throughout the world), this discontentment has more profound routes. For most guides, the region, and Mombasa in particular, benefits very little from the Fort development. For them, local people (and here they mean coastal people) gain almost nothing, except the number of tourists that comes to Fort Jesus, who might buy some crafts or drinks in the very short period of time they stay in this part of town. Coastal people (read Swahili) tend to see the city as their own, and resent the success of migrant groups, characterising up-country people (read Kikuyo, Luo and Kamba) as more aggressive, unscrupulous and grasping than themselves (see Rakodi, GatabakiKamau and Devas 2000). This is well in line with the arguments presented some time ago by Middleton (1992: 53): ‘The coast is the scene of intensive tourism controlled by European entrepreneurs and their African partners, who are virtually never Swahili. The profits are shared by them and the national governments, and any “trickle-down effect” is slight. Tourists and their hangers-on are despised by most Swahili as non-Muslims who bring new commercial and sexual mores and have a corrupting influence. This is the final and perhaps the most degrading exploitation of the Swahili coast’. This lack of control over tourism development is also clearly present in the guides’ position towards organised tours. © Copyrighted Material
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Figure 3.2
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Guiding through Fort Jesus, Mombasa
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Source: The author, August 2007.
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To a large degree they resent their own marginality and are incapable of position themselves in a business where a large number of tourists arrive at Fort Jesus already with an organised tour: ‘it is foreign guides who bring foreign tourists groups to visit the Fort and the Old Town’. The guides express grief that this business takes place in a sphere that is out of their reach; by the time tourists arrive everything is planned, and their local knowledge and expertise stays out of the equation. Their view on foreign guides is that they may have solid knowledge about Fort Jesus, on its history and dynamics, but have an outside vision and are unaware of local history. The principal aspect to highlight from the guides’ knowledge about Fort Jesus is its diversity. It is significant to refer that although guides’ ages are similar (the youngest was 34 and the eldest 50), their business experience varies considerably. Whereas Radhi has been working as a guide for only four years, six of them have been guides for up to 10 years, and three have even been in this business for more than 15 years. They have acquired knowledge about the history and geography of Mombasa and of Fort Jesus in very different ways. Some, like Sultan, did not attend high school, and have learnt most things about the Fort through colleagues. Faraji and others have been to one workshop organised by Fort Jesus. Others rely on the Old Town Guide-book and on another non-specified book. Most have mentioned that they would like to participate in more workshops and feel that opportunities to develop their professional skills are scarce. © Copyrighted Material
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Due to the old town’s proximity and connection to Fort Jesus, prices for guiding tours often include both attractions. The old town, which for centuries was Mombasa’s gateway through its harbour and was gazetted as a National Monument in 1990, is now a marginalised space of a rapidly expanding metropolis (see Hoyle 2001 for a discussion of urban renewal in Mombasa). With a complex Shirazi, Omani and Islamic urban heritage, the old town is a complex maze of streets, where guides, acting as pathfinders, that is, providing privileged access to an otherwise ‘non-public territory’ (Cohen 1985), are almost indispensable. In fact, various tourists have complained that unofficial guides can be quite intimidating after a guided tour in the Old Town is refused. To a large degree, the guides are also knowledgeable about other tourist attractions in Mombasa and throughout the Kenyan coast. They often take tourists to local markets, temples, and along the coast to places such as Lamu, Paté or Malindi. These tours are usually arranged through an informal structure of acquaintances. In a society and economy like in Kenya, people’s success (or survival) relies to a great extent on the circle of people who can be involved in making business possible. Guides always have a cousin, a relative or a friend, who can arrange a taxi trip, make a hotel reservation, be a guide elsewhere, and so on. It is this knowledge of the local culture, which as Dahles (2002: 784) rightly argues ‘is not limited to facts, figures, and couleur locale’, since it must include the art of building an informal network, of monopolising contacts, a familiarity with the operations of the tipping and commission system, which converges to make the encounter with tourists as profitable as possible. This is perfectly understandable in the context of postcolonial Africa and postcolonial African cities, where urban Africans with their complex ‘informal economics’ (craft, street vending, shoe polishing, ‘smuggling’ and so on) are ‘re-villagising’ the cities by superimposing their indigenous cultures, institutions, traditions, norms and practices and in the process decolonising the city itself (Demissie 2007). It is this complexity and fluidity which characterises the nature of contemporary African cities that is clearly present in the narratives of guides (see Ndi 2007 for an approach to the study of the postcolonial West African city). The guides’ understandings of Fort Jesus convoluted past in the context of the extensive trading network developed in the Indian Ocean, appears to be quite narrow. Their local and regional knowledge extends along the Kenya coast (sometimes as far as Tanzania and Zanzibar), but is understandably thin outside these borders. At the same time, their ability to develop narratives and offering explanations is based on superficial knowledge. Even local geographical knowledge can be one-dimensional, as none of the guides had information on Fort Joseph, another Fort which lies at the entrance of Mombasa, or of any of the other ruins that made the complex of Forts in Mombasa. Only four out of 10 guides knew where Fort Joseph is located, but only one referred to have taken tourists there. No one could add any information about this structure (see McConkey and McErlean 2007). As discussed below, only some of the guides have a depth of © Copyrighted Material
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information that enables them to subtly adapt their guided tours to the average intellectual level of a group (see Salazar 2005). Some of the guides are profoundly aware that history and the past are not a given. The subjective character involved in telling a story allows for a dynamic which is open to interpretation. The guides’ narratives are constantly negotiated according to the readings they make of tourists. This flexibility varies significantly not only in regard to the guides’ knowledge of the history of Fort Jesus, but also in relation to their own personality. Abdul told me that for him ‘locals find that there is no use’ in Fort Jesus. ‘It’s not their story’ (…) ‘history is a fabrication’. These ideas clearly illustrate his awareness of power relations and history, marginalisation and dominant discourses. Also Amri mentioned that his work is quite important, since some tourists are not simply looking for an experience that highlights pain and suffering. His ideas were close to some of Caren Kaplan’s (1996) inquires on postcolonial travel. For him (as well as for Kaplan), tourists (engaged in postcolonial travels), are embedded in ‘imperialist nostalgia’ (Amri did not actually use this term): ‘we must recognise what they are looking for (…) some do not want to hear so much about the past, the misery, the slavery, the battles, the blood, and so on (…) some just want to listen to a nice story, they want to feel we have simple lives (…) yet other tourists like to know about the full history of these buildings [Kaplan’s edifices, markers and altered economies of former colonies that imperialism left] (…) we just have to know which is which’. Through his speech it was possible to understand that Amri knew exactly that some of the western modern tourists construct the non-modern Africans as pre-modern. At the same time, and in line with the arguments of Salazar (2005), some of the guides’ swiftly and fluid engagement with local culture, adapting their discourses to what they perceive as tourists’ desires, is a good example of glocalisation. From the guides’ point of view, Bruner’s (2005) idea that tourists yearn for the story of the colonial past is not always the case. Many tourists want to see the Fort as a physical structure that echoes countless stories, silences and memories, but also want to find out about the daily life of guides. In fact, on various occasions some of the guides took tourists to their home environments and showed them some of the ordinary routines and landscapes of Mombasa. Perhaps in these cases that were narrated to me, tourists were looking for a more ‘authentic’ travel experience, for MacCannell’s (1976) uncontaminated back region, attempting to disrupt the spatial binary connecting metaworlds of tourism or ‘tourist bubbles’ (Hottola 2005) and public spaces. But not all guides are flexible and aware of the ‘capricious’ nature of tourists’ desires. For most guides history is perceived as a single narrative, and they understand their job and role as being precise and accurate mediators in telling the ‘truth’. Along these lines they may emphasise or downplay certain aspects according to tourists’ interests, but there is a certain rigidity in their discourse. To a large degree this is the result of a poor educational record and a very thin understanding of the cultural and spatial complexity of the East Coast and of tourists’ psyche. © Copyrighted Material
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At the same time, and most crucially here, the story that is being told by most guides is constructed upon colonial narratives of the Fort. These reflect the ‘remarkable’ story and tenacity of Portuguese sailors and western achievements, who constructed a monumental building that still endures. It is about decontextualised and de-spatialised Omanis who time and time again conquered the Fort. It is about the British who set up the museum with Portuguese funding. It is about James Kirkman and other British archaeologists who made important excavations in coastal Kenya ordering the coastal history. It is about colonial artefacts. Although the guides are creative and embed this dominant narrative with flair, individual points of view and particular tellings, to a large degree, they are locked in a colonial mode of representing the past. They are constrained within a tight web of information and a lack of qualifications and training, and squashed between the absence of local control of tourism at the Fort and the global control of tourism development. Epilogue
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Both George Abungu (1996), ex-curator of the Fort Jesus Museum, and Wazwa (2006), have shown a positive attitude towards the contemporary role of the Fort Jesus. Abungu (1996: 102) argued that ‘no longer a symbol of oppression or a prison, but an image of unity for the various coastal people’, it is here that the people of Mombasa find a common sense for their history. It is fair to say that many regular social, cultural and community functions take place at the Fort, and that is one way of decolonising it. But at the same time, through my analysis of the guides’ ‘voices’ I could not feel this common sense, this stability, this meeting ground. In fact, not only guides contest what they perceive as the external (read Nairobi) control of the Fort’s history, but they argue that the Fort is only one of the pieces of the long Swahili coastal heritage, which has been neglected and downplayed by the dominant ethnic groups. This is much more in consonance with the arguments of Jamison (1999), who emphasised that ethnic tensions are latent in many of the interrelationships that have developed as a result of increased contact which is a direct consequence of the tourism industry. Like other colonial buildings, Fort Jesus and its museum were put to work to inscribe power and shape identities (Chapter 2). One consequence of the narratives they project about the history of the Kenya coast, using Ali A. Mazrui’s (2000: 89) words, is the ‘havoc which colonialism played with the African memory – initiating new forms of amnesia, nostalgia and false memories’. It is hard to sustain that tourism is increasing the existing cleavage between coastal people and the dominant political and cultural groups from central Nairobi. Yet, it is clearly visible that the resentment of guides towards the inability of coastal people to have a stronger say in the process of tourism development and heritage interpretation at the Fort is very strong, and constructed upon a certain degree of cultural alienation. The studied group of guides revealed to be very © Copyrighted Material
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heterogeneous not only on their personal characteristics, but on their views on the Fort, on heritage, on tourism and culture. Some of the guides seem to be aware of the complexity of history and coastal heritage, and of the importance of politics in the national construction of history and ethnicity. Yet, the majority is unable to decolonise their own performances for tourists. On the one hand, most guides are open-minded, and are aware of their own subjugation and role play. Unlike many other destinations where there is an official script or a highly controlled formal speech (the latter being the case in São Sebastião Fort, São Tomé – see Chapter 4), here guides have room to be sophisticated and subtle, accommodating the needs of their audience. Their agency is strong, and revealing a hybrid postcolonial condition they are tuned into multiple and open ended stories. On the other hand, their inability to subvert the dominant narratives and discourses that tell the story of the Fort, is clearly connected to a lack of qualifications and training of some, but principally related to the pervasiveness and hegemonic nature of the western views on African heritage and history, and to a smaller degree to the construction of national heritage by the ethnic majorities in the country. In anyway does the Fort and its museum or the materials available to guides instructs and implicates the diverse ethnic subjects and audiences, or becomes part of the conspicuous ongoing cultural struggles in the Swahili Coast. The economic forces of tourism, the tourists ways of consumption, and the guides’ backgrounds allow for the circulation of certain forms of knowledge and presentation that embody the continuation of a colonial present in Africa, and importantly, of various domestic imbalanced power relationships. As reported by other authors (Bruner 2005; Caplan 2007), the present is charged with the legacies of the colonial past, but one of the main consumers of this heritage, the western tourist, must be saved from feelings of guilt, and offered instead an alternative and wholly stereotyped image and experience of ‘Africa’. Referring to the Mau Mau freedom fighters roughly 40 years ago, Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1972: 30) argued they ‘rediscovered the old songs – they had never completely lost touch with them – and reshaped them to meet the new needs of their struggle. They also created new songs and dances with new rhythms where the old ones were found inadequate’. Perhaps it is now the time to rediscover old stories and reshape them to engage in a more contested way in the commodified landscapes for sale on the coast. Despite the vast range of postcolonial criticism and plenty of new scholarship that is presently attempting to recast the history of the coast (see Wilding 1987; Kusimba 1999; Mazrui 2002; Middleton 2003) the ghosts of the colonial episteme remain embedded in the Fort. The Fort still tells a muted story about colonisation, and the suppression of Mau Mau memory, for example, is a form of violence. The history of the resistance to the restoration of the Fort and the visit of the Portuguese (see Linehan and Sarmento 2011 and Chapter 2) could certainly be used to elaborate an alternative narrative at the site. This story of resistance is even more powerful, given that the two key figures involved in this protest, Pio Gama Pinto and Tom Mboya were both assassinated in the period following independence, by still unknown elements of the post-colonial regime lead by © Copyrighted Material
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Kenyatta. Not totally unconnected is the argument of the director of the National Museums of Kenya – Idle Omar Farah, that it is not until African museums are economically independent (they rely heavily on support from the west) that they will be able to shake off colonial or neocolonial agendas that still drive a good deal of what goes on in African museums (Silverman 2009). In February 2009, Iran’s Prime Minister Mahmud Ahmadinejad and a delegation of more than 100 officials and business people made an official visit to Kenya. On their quick tour, it is emblematic that Fort Jesus was chosen as the site where the prime minister emphasised the historic links between the Swahili coast and the Persian Gulf, the will of fostering businesses while openly criticised the west for a long history of oppressing Africa. Following bilateral discussions on the areas of cultural heritage conservation, it was agreed that Iran would ‘Assist Kenya in the preservation, conservation and restoration of historical buildings and sites including Fort Jesus, Lamu Old Town (…). Kenya could turn them into world famous hotels and handcraft centres’ (NMK 2009: 27). It is deeply ambiguous and illusory that while negotiations to restore the Portuguese-built Fort Hormuz in Iran with Gulbenkian Foundation funding have failed since 2006, promises of Iranian technical and financial restoration of Fort Jesus are announced. Once again, Fort Jesus and ‘its’ people are the passive receptacle of others’ ambitions and geopolitical agendas. Appropriately, when referring to holocaust memorials and meanings, James Young (1993: 2) argues that ‘Memory is never shaped in a vacuum; the motives of memory are never pure’.
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Chapter 4
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Mitigating the Past: Landscapes and Memory Fabrications in Cape Verde1
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The commodification of cultural forms, of people’s histories and traditions, through tourism entails dispossessions. David Harvey (2009: 69)
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Introduction
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This chapter attempts to explore the construction of landscape and memory in Cape Verde. It deals with the different ways in which three sites in the island of Santiago – an Old Fort and a Historical Town; a Concentration Camp; and a Global Resort – participate in the erasure, maintenance and creation of memory, forging new ways of collective identity. All three sites are embedded in local as well as global forces and spatial processes, and encapsulate the complexity of memory making. Through the analysis of the changes taking place on-site, I attempt to unravel the processes and outcomes of the construction of memory which are perceptible on the island’s landscapes. The ways in which they are being constructed, re-constructed, invented, forged and embedded in space are the means to explore identity in this Atlantic nation-state archipelago. By sketching the terrain of a Geography of Santiago, this chapter attempts to reveal the connections and flows that constituted history in Cape Verde, while destabilising the process of privileging a singular version of heritage and eliding other stories. As memory and heritage are drawn into the webs of capital and place commodification, this chapter intends to be a critical engagement with the complex spatial history of Cape Verde, and an encouraging example of the ways in which cultural geographers can respond usefully to pressing issues of social memory. This study draws mainly on fieldwork conducted in Cape Verde in Spring 2008, especially in the island of Santiago. During this period of time, several formal and informal interviews were conducted with key actors in the capital Cidade da Praia, most of the cultural institutions, museums and libraries in the island were visited, and all three sites were examined in detail on several occasions. A past visit to ww w.a sh ga te. co m
1 An earlier version of this chapter was published in Social and Cultural Geography, 2009, 10(5): 523‒44 with the title ‘A sweet and amnesic present: the postcolonial landscape and memory makings in Cape Verde’. I acknowledge the permission to reprint from the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals). © Copyrighted Material
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the island of Sal also helped to contextualise some of the analysis made here. During 2009 and 2010 the evolution at the three sites was closely observed from a distance. Cape Verde and Santiago Island
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Cape Verde is an archipelago of 10 islands located off the west coast of Africa (Map 4.1). Uninhabited until the mid-fifteenth century, it was first colonised by the Portuguese from 1460. Lacking natural resources and experiencing severe droughts, its importance emerged from its location, which revealed itself to be of geostrategic importance. Midway between Europe, Africa and America and facing the Guinea rivers coast, Cape Verde was a key site in the slave trade due to its position at the crossroads of transatlantic navigation (Duncan 1972). The islands soon specialised as an entrepôt in the four centuries that followed. Administratively, the island of Santiago became also important. King João III of Portugal made it an ecclesiast administration centre granting it a bishopric headquarters in 1532. Ilídio do Amaral, an Angolan-born Portuguese geographer who wrote a thorough and meticulous account of Santiago in the early 1960s, refers to the island as a place characterised by many social experiments and multiple cultural influences. Here he identified ‘a new human type, a new type of mentality and even language: the “creoule”, born out of the harmonious fusion of the white and the black slaves’ (1964: 19, my emphasis). Harmonious fusion is an unfortunate formulation, considering the cultural erasures and terror geographies in which slavery occurred, and can only be understood under the light of a research project embedded in an official academic geography that was still aligned with the regime’s discourse (Pimenta, Sarmento and Azevedo 2011). As Anjos (2003) argues, the physical and symbolic violence that destroyed a great part of the ethnic memory of slaves has been read by Cape Verdean intellectuals (among others) as a ‘cultural fusion of Europeans and Africans’. Up to the seventeenth century, Ribeira Grande, in Santiago Island, was a flourishing commercial centre. However, from 1644 Cacheu (present Guinea Bissau) replaced Ribeira Grande as the place where the duties on slaves exported from Upper Guinea had to be paid. Santiago was commercially bypassed, the islanders slave trader declined and the white elites left. This decline left room for the filhos da terra (those born in the islands), especially the mestizos, to occupy the top positions in the administration and in the local economy.2
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2 In 1731, out of 30,850 inhabitants in Cape Verde, 68.5 per cent were black (29 per cent mestizos and 2.5 per cent white), the majority (51.5 per cent) were forros (born on the land) and the number of slaves was already declining (17 per cent). For a detailed history of Cape Verde see the three-volume work by Albuquerque and Santos, published between 1991 and 2002. © Copyrighted Material
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Map 4.1
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In this creolisation process, which developed very early and which ‘involved reciprocal changes on the part of both colonisers and colonised as well as the contested nature of their encounter’ (Rodrigues 2003: 91), the elites became ‘cultural brokers’ between the traditional societies in mainland Africa (especially in Portuguese Guinea) and the Portuguese. The fluid nature of national identity is clearly seen by the changing attitudes towards the spatiality of creolisation. In the 1930s and 1940s, through the journal Claridade (enlightenment), the dominant intellectual cultural movement emphasised the fading of African values in Cape Verdean society and culture, mainly due to the archipelago’s geography of poverty, drought and insularity. From the 1960s, the emergence of the nationalist movement of PAIGC (the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) was constructed upon an ideology that attempted to strengthen the Africaness of the islands, politicising the origins of poverty and droughts, and downplaying its creolisation, uniting, in Amílcar Cabral’s words (in Wick 2006: 50), ‘the African Nationalists of Guinea and Cape Verde’. If it is fair to say that there was colonial neglect and silence over severe droughts and famines (15,000 lives per year in the 1947‒8 drought), a history that is mostly still to be written, objectively the lack of natural resources and water was always a central environmental problem the islands. However, from the 1980s, in contrast to the early liberation movement, the post-nationalist democratic movement represented by the African Party for the © Copyrighted Material
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Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV), institutionalised mestizo identity as the essence of Cape Verde nationhood (Anjos 2003).
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Fort São Filipe: ‘Heia for those who …’ Built Forts
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Thus, it was through the slave trade and colonialism that Africans came face to face with the opaque and murky domain of power, a domain inhabited by obscure drives and that everywhere and always makes animality and bestiality its essential components, plunging human beings into a never-ending process of brutalization. (Mbembe 2001: 14)
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Amaral (1964) highlighted the great profits of Ribeira Grande as a direct consequence of the slave trade between 1461 and 1497, which allowed for prosperity and the accumulation of wealth. The value of the slave trade was eagerly desired, and attacks from British, French and later Dutch pirates were common. In 1583 the pirate Manuel Serradas occupied the island, and around 1585, the British buccaneer Francis Drake attacked Ribeira Grande and Praia (Disney 2009). As a result of this instability, it was decided that a fortification or a network of fortifications should be built, to protect the principal town – Ribeira Grande. Accordingly, under Spanish sovereignty (1580‒1640) the Fort of São Filipe was built. Works started in 1587 and were completed around 1593. This was the key building (a land fortress) in a group of fortifications composed of São Lourenço and São Brás on the west side of the river, and Presídio, São Veríssimo, São João dos Cavaleiros and São António to the east. With the already mentioned de-centring of the Slave Trade to Guinea in the mid-seventeenth century, the bishop deserted to Santo Antão in 1754, the Governor moved to the city of Praia in 1770, and the decline in Ribeira Grande accelerated. The Fort, although illustrating European technical superiority, is a monument of failure. Failure since it had to be built in the first place, failure since it did not contain large scale attacks (French pirate Jacques sacked Ribeira Grande in 1712), and failure since five decades after its construction, there was very little left to defend. In the late 1950s, Figueiredo (1959) referred to the indifference of the Portuguese state towards historic monuments of representative value existent in the island. In his opinion, supported by photographs of the time, the Fort was in ruins. This neglect extended to other buildings in Ribeira Grande (presently known as Cidade Velha – Old City), such as the Episcopal Palace, the Franciscan Convent, the Cathedral and other churches. During the colonial (or liberation) wars with Guinea, Angola and Mozambique, Luís Benavente (1902‒93), the director of the National Monuments, who was posted overseas under the Public Works Ministry, visited, studied, photographed and drew various Forts, carrying out and proposing numerous reconstructions. In 1962 he described the ruins of Cidade Velha de Santiago and suggested the possible tourist use of the Fort (Fernandes 1996). While Portugal was sending troops to fight in Africa, the potential of Forts © Copyrighted Material
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as monuments to Portuguese imperial identity was widely acknowledged, notably at the restoration of Fort Jesus in Mombasa (see Linehan and Sarmento 2011 and Chapter 2 in this book). Many of the monuments within Cidade Velha were reconstructed in the 1960s under Benavente’s responsibility: the Stone Pillar and the Holy Trinity Chapel, São Roque Chapel and N.S. Luz Church, and the N.S. Rosário Church and Fort São Filipe. Projects and descriptions of the latter were done in 1969 and works were apparently carried out between 1969 and 1973. In 1971 Benavente proposed that the heritage of Cidade Velha should be classified as a National Monument. Despite this reconstruction work in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Fort was ‘labelled’ a ruin in 1989, and was in a very poor condition in 1998 (Peña and Larena 2002). Recently, Cidade Velha and the Fort were the target of several archaeological excavations and reconstructions, all of which funded and controlled by foreign agencies, mostly Portuguese and Spanish. The 1999 reconstruction of the ‘Royal Fortress of San Felipe’, funded by the Spanish government, is referred to by Peña and Larena (2002) as an opportunity to ‘bring closer friendship and cooperation ties with an emergent country such as Cape Verde, destined to be the focus of tourism and researchers attraction’ (my emphasis). They go further, by arguing that ‘it is possible that this work of military architecture becomes the most distinguished piece of all monuments the country can offer, and that at the end of its military history it recovers and justifies the spending that was done throughout the centuries’ (Peña and Larena 2002: 48). In Aimé Césaire’s romantic primitivism (Mazrui 2000) words: ‘Heia for those who never invented anything’3 (Césaire 1969: 75). A visit to the Fort starts in the recent and discreet semi-buried building which functions as ticket office, interpretation centre and small cafeteria (the latter is closed most of the time). There are hardly any items for sale, except for a few postcards and books. In the interpretation centre, located right in the small entrance room, there are some posters with information on the Fort, several rows of chairs, and on request it is possible to see a film on a television. The film is narrated in Spanish, and it tells about the past state of degradation of the Fort, the importance of architecture, engineering and techniques which characterise the building of this Renaissance Fort (which is in fact the Master narrative throughout the Fort), and also the Spanish intervention and requalification funded by the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation for Development. Historically it is a poor and shallow display, lacking any mention to slavery or to the reasons why the Fort was built in the first place. There is also no reference to previous reconstruction work in the Fort or in Cidade Velha. The reconstruction of the Fort reveals a bulky and massive building overlooking a wide and vast landscape (Figure 4.1). The views towards the valley, the city and the sea are rewarding, but it is quite difficult for the visitor to imagine how the Fort worked as a military site. The ramparts, central courtyard, watch towers, and so 3 Eia pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien inventé. © Copyrighted Material
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on, are immaculate, hygienic and almost aseptic. It is somehow a morphological reversal but ideological conformity of Fanon’s ideas of coloniser and colonised, with the Fort being the clean and well-lit European city, overlooking and commanding Cidade Velha as the dark and foul smelling casbah. The small number of information displays inside the Fort concern past archaeological interventions, the engineering of water supply, the military architecture of the sixteenth century, and the history and context of colonial artillery. Even a brief analysis of the available information panels reveals that slavery is an almost ‘forbidden’ topic: ‘economic development, a result of the unification of the peninsular crowns, which as a consequence converted the islands in geographical points eagerly desired, determined the need for protection (…) the Fort served as a refuge for the city’s inhabitants in case of conflict’. To a large degree, this is still a colonial presentation, praising the engineering and architectural deeds of Europeans and totally neglecting the articulation of the Fort with the local people and the changing society in Cape Verde throughout time. It neglects the past and what little history is presented is benign. A visit to the Fort does not provoke or bring to voice the ongoing stories of struggle, and thus, its sense of responsibility in telling stories of loss, displacement, reconnection, and so on, is extremely limited. To a large degree this is the result of a non-existent process of self-reflection on the part of Cape Verdean society and a lack of control over the development of national heritage.
Figure 4.1
Fort São Filipe, Cape Verde
Source: The author, April 2008.
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According to various brochures, media, promotional literature and political discourses, Cidade Velha is signalled as the birthplace and the most important site of Cape Verdean identity. In recent years, with the aim of being included in the UNESCO list of WHS (achieved in 2009); several physical interventions have been taking place. They range from restoring facades and painting key buildings – like the one in the neighbourhoods of Santo António and São Brás, funded by the Spanish Cooperation, in which the main objective was to address the ‘less pleasant aesthetics’ of the houses – to physical and functional regeneration – such as the present works in the Cathedral, funded by the Portuguese Ministry of Culture. In the latter example, after a preliminary work of structural consolidation, the valorisation of the Cathedral is under way (signed by architect Siza Vieira), which will allow for cultural performances in the building (the draft-project was presented in Lisbon in June 2008). The documentary ‘O Arquitecto e a Cidade Velha’, directed by Catarina Alves Costa (2003) is a remarkable example of the conflicts and perception over heritage in Cidade Velha. It was filmed over a period of three years (2000‒2003) and it portrays the relationship of the distinguished Portuguese architect Siza Vieira, the Cidade Velha and its people. The film draws viewers into Siza’s dialogues with local people, into the expectations that the rehabilitation project created, and reveals the incompatibility of an historical and cultural restoration and the lived experienced of the local population. Several scenes illustrate quite well some of the arguments I am attempting to construct here. Significantly, the documentary starts and ends in Siza’s atelier in Oporto, Portugal, where he explains and goes over some historic drawings of Ribeira Grande and over the plans he envisioned. While Siza goes back and forth to Cidade Velha over a period of three years, local people continue their daily activities. In one scene a local woman is explaining that in her house the thatched roof has many holes, and when it rains it is a problem. Siza, oblivious to these mundane anxieties, continues his contemplation, articulating that it is a fine roof of four sides. His assistant attempts to explain to the woman that tradition is very important, arguing that these roofs are very typical of Cape Verde and since there are not many left, Cidade Velha can be just as important as other cities throughout the world. Puzzled, another local woman ardently states that despite everyone arguing that Cidade Velha is all about History, because they are poor they will not gain anything from History: ‘it is only them who benefit with the historic. At least they could let us fix our houses to live, isn’t it?’ In another significant moment, after the documentary impressively illustrated the heavy rains and the utter transformation of the place during the wet season, we see Siza arriving in a 4x4 asking if it had rained in the place they were driving, which weeks before was literally a river. Back in his office in Oporto, going over all the plans, sketches and drawings, saying that putting things into action has been difficult, and that due to political changes in Portugal and in Cape Verde everything is taking more time than he thought, the documentary ends with his words: ‘it is very simple, but after all very complicated to make’. For Gomes (2007), the film is a tender portrait of a failure, © Copyrighted Material
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since Siza’s idea that architecture should be better than people, better than the poverty of materials, better than the incapacity of builders, strongly collides with local people’s ideas of having a better material life: they were not asking for art, while Siza, however, insists on art. Heritage is not politically neutral, and heritage initiatives often reflect the political agenda of much wider spaces. It is under this light that we should read the Portuguese Minister for Culture statements to a Cape Verdean newspaper: ‘Portugal will lobby in UNESCO for the proposal of Cidade Velha, since this heritage is also Portuguese, as it is common heritage to the two countries’ (A Semana Online 2007). At the same time, the attempt to memorialise the Spanish passage and importance in West Africa, and legitimise and thrust its contemporary presence, is clearly visible in the many signs with the red and yellow icon of the Spanish Cooperation. Evocatively, above the front door of the municipal hall of Ribeira Grande there was a photograph of the Queen of Spain, cushioned by Spanish and Cape Verdean flags in 2008. International cooperation related to heritage and culture and economic investment and business opportunities related to tourism and real estate are not as unrelated as sometimes believed. As noted by Boniface (2001), the global distribution of WHS remains heavily biased in favour of historic city centres and buildings in Europe. This fact can partly be attributed to the ability of advanced industrialised nations to deliver an almost endless supply of candidates that conform to the template of a WHS, as well as the affluence that enables them to manage and promote the sites in the manner envisaged by UNESCO. Developing countries, whatever the merits of their heritage, face an uphill struggle to gain admittance to UNESCO’s prestigious list, since the vast majority lack the resources and presentational skills necessary to convince panels of experts located at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters. To be part of UNESCO’s WHSs list,4 is to belong to an imagined community, to ‘become a powerful symbolic marker of international cultural politics’ (Shepherd 2006: 243). In the conception and interpretation of the Fort and in Cidade Velha very few connections are forged with continental Africa, especially those possible and more obvious with Guinea Bissau, and those bridging to the places where slaves were taken from. Inherent to Cape Verdean heritage is the continuous flow of people from mainland Africa and their movement to Brazil. These contacts allowed for the reinforcement and sustained knowledge of western African languages, traditions, social practices and cultural patterns. Also, nothing points us to São Tomé, to where thousands of people were forcefully sent to work in the cocoa and coffee plantations mainly in the nineteenth century (Chapter 5). As Leela Gandhi (1998) has suggested, post-colonial states often seek to forget the past through a process of amnesia, making various attempts at erasing what we may call violent 4 In January 2011 it included 911 properties (704 cultural, 180 natural and 27 mixed) in 148 countries (UNESCO 2010). Of the 34 properties on the list of world heritage in danger, 15 are located in Africa. © Copyrighted Material
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memories. Postcolonialism promise lies precisely in its ability to elaborate on forgotten memories, insisting on revisiting, remembering and interrogating the colonial past. Contrasting with the situation in Cidade Velha, in Ghana’s famous Fort Elmina, built by the Portuguese in 1482, many ‘roots’ tourists perform a homecoming through the ‘door of no return’, marking this place as the final moment of a journey which started centuries ago to a place of no return. As MacGonagle (2006) remarks, the memorial sites at Elmina are marketed for tourists just as history is packaged for consumption, and it is money and memory, rather than meaningful history, that determine the discourse at the site. A sophisticated telling of Africa’s history is absent, as no one wants to know about the active African involvement in the slave trade over the centuries. In Elmina the story of slaves surpasses the story of masters. The narrative represents well the struggle between Diaspora blacks who left as slaves, the Elmina citizens, the traditional chiefs who remained in place, as well as the international agencies that finance restoration and interpretation, and tourists to whom the Fort is now dedicated (Bruner 2005). On the contrary, in Fort St. Filipe in Cape Verde, it is the story of masters, of architects and engineers that is praised, constructed by international capital from aid agencies, with a distinct silence from local people. Unlike Elmina, St. Filipe does not resonate with symbolic meaning as a site of extreme brutality, violence and genocide. Cultural politics, present in museum displays, exhibits and heritage programmes, rather than being neutral, shape particular narratives of the past for contemporary purposes. What is at play in Cape Verde, in the reconstruction of Cidade Velha and Fort St. Filipe, is the construction of an unproblematic, painless and uncontested past, excluding all acts of resistance to capture, where indigenous history is eroded. The contours of slavery are absent and memory becomes sanitised for apolitical consumption. The involvement and almost neocolonial endeavours of several international teams of historians, archaeologists, architects, engineers, and so on, especially from Portugal and Spain, ‘indispensable’ due to the aim of presenting heritage to a ‘global-international’ audience and institutions, constructs the idea that Africans cannot interpret their past. Saluting the cattleherder rather than the castle-builder (Mazrui 2000), ‘Heia for those who have never invented anything; those who never explored anything; those who never tamed anything’5 (Césaire 1969: 75).
5 Eia pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien inventé; pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien exploré; pour ceux qui n’ont jamais rien dompté. © Copyrighted Material
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Tarrafal: The Slow Death Camp is Dying
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In recent years, a growing number of places associated with human misery, suffering, disaster and death have acquired a tremendous importance as tourism sites and places of consumption. The attraction for these sites and events is not new, and Seaton (1996) traces it to a thanatoptic, or contemplation of death tradition, dating back to the middle ages. Yet, academic interest on the part of academics is relatively new. Lennon and Foley (2000) were the first to label this type of tourism as dark tourism, although others had already discussed the theme. Urry (1990), drawing upon Foucault, analysed these places in terms of their voyeuristic potential, Rojek (1993) addressed these new pilgrimage sites as ‘fatal attractions’ and ‘black spots’, and Bruner (1996), focusing on the visitation to Ghanaian slaves Forts, discussed the different engagements with and experiences of the sites according to the various subject positions of visitors. Some of the most famous and commodified of these places of cruelty and suffering are the prisons of Alcatraz, in the US, and of Robben Island, in South Africa, made famous by the Hollywood industry and the anti-apartheid movement, respectively, which set the stage for the story telling once the sites were open to tourists. Christopher Colvin (2003) analysed the ways in which tours at Robben Island promote a ‘proper’ way to remember personal memories through ‘objective, thorough and unemotional’ means, raising questions related to the ‘therapeutic role of memory’ at play. The interpretation staff at the island (many of them former prisoners), convey an official message of victory over adversity, even as many South Africans’ feelings of disillusionment and frustration in the ‘new’ South Africa rise. In contrast with ‘darker’ Robben Island, in Alcatraz, despite the effort of national park rangers to encourage tourists to understand the site in all its complexity, many continue to pose comically inside open cells (Strange and Kempa 2003), and the interpretation of the prison is overshadowed by commercial and entertainment values. Recently, there are news of the construction of a Hotel at Alcatraz, allowing for the ‘ultimate experience in visitor access’ (Elsworth 2008 in Sharpley and Stone 2009: 112). A somehow similar extent of commodification in the process of visiting the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau is described by Lennon and Foley (2000: 61): ‘Groups of schoolchildren were taking photos at each other, parents were photographing their children at the gates of Birkenau and, indeed, school parties were sitting on ruins of the crematorium eating sandwiches’. With 1.3 million visitors in 2009, the Auschwitz Memorial has certainly acquired a critical importance in the tourism trail of Poland and central Europe. In the 1930s, after evaluation of potential sites in its colonies, the Portuguese government chose Tarrafal, in Chão Bom (which means good earth or soil), North of Santiago Island in Cape Verde, as the ideal place for a ‘penal colony for political and social inmates’. According to the official report, Tarrafal was the best suited place due to ‘hygiene, surveillance and natural resources, fundamental for its good functioning’ (Diário do Governo 1936), a rationale which was supposedly based on twentieth-century hygienist theories. Yet, there was no drinkable water in the © Copyrighted Material
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camp, and brackish water was brought in gasoline cans from a nearby well. Malaria was also common in this part of Santiago. The principal purpose of the camp was to concentrate and isolate both political prisoners from Portugal and from the various colonies. Between 1936 and 1953 Tarrafal was used as a concentration camp detaining Portuguese political prisoners. The camp was inspired and strongly influenced by the fascist modus operandi of the German concentration camp model. Tarrafal was an ‘arbitrary deposit of the regime’s opponents’, the ‘quintessence of state terrorism under Salazar’ (Barreto 2000: 487), and it is a place full of traumatic memory. Under the name of Campo de Trabalhos Forçados (Labour Force Camp) the camp was re-activated in 1961, and it imprisoned militants and liberation fighters engaged in anti-colonial movements, especially from Angola, Portuguese Guinea and Cape Verde. There were also other non-political prisoners. In 1961 the Portuguese government decided to open another concentration camp – São Nicolau – in Angola, in the desert of Moçâmedes, province of Namibia. The Camp of Tarrafal is located on the north side of the island of Santiago, 80 km, or two hours drive north of the capital, Praia. Before the rise of tourism in the island of Sal, Tarrafal was one of the tourism centres of Cape Verde, especially due to the white sand beach and crystalline water. Nowadays, it is quite a peripheral location within the island of Santiago. The ‘after-life’ (Till 2006) of Tarrafal is characterised by the existence of the original physical building (a rectangle of 250 by 180 metres), partially in ruins, which can be visited after paying an entry ticket. As Lennon and Foley (2000) argue, the place of death is itself dying. Since 2004 the building has been registered on the tentative list of UNESCO for a WHS and since 2006 has been scheduled as part of the National Heritage of Cape Verde. The date of opening of the camp – 29 October – is now the National Day of Anti-fascist Resistance. Visitor information is scarce. No plan of the camp is provided, so visitors have to guess the internal structure of Tarrafal. At the entrance there is a room with a television and video which have not been working for some time. Some panels with reproductions of old photographs partially illustrate the physical evolution of the camp. Two buildings have been restored. The first is the health centre (Posto de Socorros) – with the double function of mortuary house, which provides a few information panels about the medical assistance that (did not) exist(ed). The second restored building is the former reading room, which has been converted into a small library (still with no books) and coffee shop (which is not functioning). All the other buildings are abandoned, some without any roofs, some in an advanced state of decay (Figure 4.2). One of the most horrifying buildings of Tarrafal was the Frigideira (frying pan), a torture cement building of 6 by 3 metres with no windows, where temperatures could reach 40 to 60 degrees Celsius during the day. Frigideira was used to keep prisoners for some days, weeks or even months. The building was located about 200 metres outside the quadrangle, and precisely because of that, international pressure and the regime opposition action contributed to its being demolished. Nowadays, nothing points to its existence or location. © Copyrighted Material
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Tarrafal Camp, Cape Verde
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Figure 4.2
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Source: The author, April 2008.
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In the museum (see above) there is only a prisoners’ drawing of the building and a small model to remind us that it ever existed. When the camp was re-opened in 1961, the Frigideira was replaced by Holandinha, a similar building of smaller dimension (90 x 90 x 1.65 cm), this time destined for African prisoners, which was built just beside the kitchen building. Its name, a diminutive for a Dutch room, was a sadistic reminder of the country where so many migrants from Cape Verde successfully rebuilt their lives. There is no information on the conditions and contexts in which prisoners were kept here, and no engagement with the local environment or local people. Furthermore, there are no commercial activities outside, and the situation contrasts with the experience of visiting Auschwitz as described by Lennon and Foley (2000). To a large degree, many people visit Auschwitz ‘out of curiosity or because it is the thing to do’ (Tarlow 2005: 48). In the first two years the camp was composed of 16 canvas tents (7 x 4 metres), which could accommodate 12 prisoners each. No electricity, no ventilation and no protection against the wind or rain existed. According to some personal accounts, as a result of the sporadic, unpredictable but heavy wet season, the canvas got rotten and rain was abundant inside the tents. Cottinelli Telmo, one of the regime’s architects and celebrated for designing the exhibition of the Portuguese world in 1940, was involved in the plans for the enlargement of the camp to cater for about 4,000 inmates. After 1938, permanent brick buildings were built. Obviously, the © Copyrighted Material
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question of authenticity comes to mind: which camp should be preserved? Should there only be management instead of restoration? Is decay part of the character of the camp? Outside the large rectangle walls, in the building where the administrative services of the Camp used to be, there is a museum, inaugurated in 2000 and funded by the Portuguese government. Although it is called Museu da Resistência (Resistance Museum), it is much more a representation through posters and photos of the resistance to the Estado Novo6 (first and principal floor) in Portugal, than a depiction of the resistance to that same regime in Africa (semi-basement floor). Here, in the museum of resistance, nothing points us to Amílcar Cabral, the most prominent figure of the struggle for independence, to the recent Amílcar Cabral Foundation in Praia that is attempting to evoke his memory and work, or to PAIGC (a nationalist organisation which nonetheless was created by elites and that based many of its operations on western thought). Luandino Vieira (José Vieira Mateus da Graça), one of the most outstanding Angolan writers was kept in Tarrafal between 1964 and 1972. There he wrote some very influential books, and while in the camp, in 1965, he was awarded a prize by the Portuguese Writers Society (SPE) due to the book Luuanda. As a consequence, the headquarters of SPE in Lisbon were vandalised and the society was made illegal. Nowadays, there is no mention to Luandino’s presence, nor to these episodes that connect resistance in Cape Verde and other African countries and oppression in Lisbon. Significantly, in 2006 Luandino refused the Prize Camões (a prize awarded by the governments of Portugal and Brazil since 1988, considered to be the highest literary prize for an author of Portuguese language), which has a prize money of 100,000 euros. Only ‘personal and intimate reasons’ were claimed by the author (Diário de Notícias 2006). Between 29 April and 1 May 2009, and organised by the Amílcar Cabral Foundation in collaboration with the Ministries for Culture of Cape Verde and Angola, an International Symposium on the Concentration Camp took place in Tarrafal. The event had a wide impact on Lusophone countries and beyond, and there were important scientific discussions, personal testimonies and debates. One of the key ideas is that the camp is part of a shared heritage and it has no single owner. At the same time, references were made to the network of political jails built by the Portuguese, which included sites in Angola (such as São Paulo in Luanda, São Nicolau, in Cunene, and Missondo, in Bié), Mozambique (Machava) and Guinea (Chicken island). Let me point to two political discourses and postures on heritage which reveal the intersection of two postcolonial projects that might eventually find ways to converge, despite revealing at first a number of contradictions. Through them we can observe how the interpretation and construction of heritage at a particular site is embedded in transnational spatial processes and flows. The first one relates to the relationship between Portugal and the memory of the dictatorship resistance. 6 The New State was a right-wing dictatorship that ruled Portugal from 1926 to 1974. © Copyrighted Material
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The second one signals the discourses and attitudes of the Angolan state towards the anti-colonial resistance movements and the present condition of repression, freedom of speech and democracy. During a visit to Cape Verde in 2007, the Portuguese Minister for Culture proposed financial support to reconstruct Tarrafal, improve the museum, and contribute to the preservation of the memory of resistance. On the surface this discourse seems relatively straightforward, but it carries an ambiguity when compared to heritage practices in Portugal. Created organically in the streets of Lisbon in 2005, in the context of a specific protest against the construction of a luxury condominium in the headquarters of the Portuguese secret police (PIDE/ DGS),7 the activist group Não apaguem a memória (Do not erase memory), emerged to fight against the erasure of historic memory of the resistance against the Estado Novo. Eventually the movement became a civic association, struggling to remember the memory in the buildings of the Lisbon headquarters, the Oporto headquarters (now a military museum), and the Prisons in Aljube and in the Fort of Peniche.8 While the prison of Aljube will be converted into the Museum of Resistance and Freedom, the old secret police headquarters in Lisbon became a luxury condominium. Despite the significant erosion of heritage and memory as a result of the growth of neoliberal landscapes, these struggles and civic movements in Portugal serve to highlight the existence of competing stories and ‘dissonant heritages’ (Turnbridge and Ashworth 1996) and the preservation of some of them. In a charming action comparable to the Portuguese minister for culture and peculiarly echoing some of the words of Mahmud Ahmadinejad in Fort Jesus just two months earlier (Chapter 3), Rosa Cruz e Silva, the Angolan minister for culture announced in Luanda on 27 April 2009 that the concentration camp in Tarrafal will become a cultural and historical space, so it can commemorate the memory of all those who were detained during the Portuguese colonial and fascist regime. Rosa Cruz e Silva made this statement before leaving to Cape Verde where a large Angolan delegation of 48 people (24 were prisoners) took part in the above mentioned symposium. In this context, Cruz e Silva, enthusiastically spoke of the studies that Angolan historians will make on Tarrafal, on the need to protect heritage and the memory of oppression in Cape Verde, and particularly on the fact that the camp is part of a common heritage of Angola, Cape Verde, Portugal and Guinea. But at the same time as these words of moral obligation to remember the past were spoken, reports by international independent agencies were signalling that Angola had no free press and that there were regular random detentions, torture
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7 PIDE (Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado – International Police of State Defence) was replaced in 1969 by DGS (Direcção Geral de Segurança – General Administrative Office of Security). 8 This Fort, built in 1557 and reinforced in 1645, was visited by the Italian architect Filippo Terzi in 1589, the architect who was responsible for the building of the Fort St Filipe in Ribeira Grande. © Copyrighted Material
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and other human rights violations, especially in Cabinda (see also Reed 2009). Numerous examples point to very harsh and life threatening prison conditions in contemporary Angola. Catete road jail is still in use and for similar purposes of the colonial times. São Pedro do Penedo, a Fort built in the eighteenth century by the Portuguese in Luanda, used to detain political prisoners in colonial times, still functions as a prison, and although in bad condition, is on the tentative list for UNESCO heritage since 1996. The country ranks 147 in 179 countries in the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, and few improvements have been registered in poverty levels despite the country being the largest oil producer in Africa (ranks 162 in 177 countries – Human Development Index). In 2009, on one of his rare visits outside the country, José Eduardo dos Santos, in power for more than 30 years and never democratically elected, has been welcomed in Portugal with full head of state honours. Angola, just like Portugal, is searching for business opportunities, and for investment sites in the fields of tourism, construction, energy, and so on. While some political discourses point to a concern with Tarrafal and with the perpetuation of the memory and stories that this place echoes, memory, landscape and politics intersect in complex ways. Heritage and heritage sites not only can be mobilised as important cultural, political and economic resources, but are often part of a deal, or the motive for a deal of a different nature. In Chapter 2 we saw how two colonial projects converged in Fort Jesus at a particular moment of time. In Tarrafal, there are signs that the Angolan and the Portuguese postcolonial projects could also meet, perhaps under the banner of that imagined community that goes under the name of Community of Lusophone Countries (see Chapter 5). Yet, unlike in Kenya in the 1950s, this time there are other important and powerful players on the table, such as China, Brazil and Spain. Somehow under a different light I will take on this issue in Chapter 5, when discussing the position of São Tomé e Príncipe in the Guinea Gulf and the developments at Fernão Dias. Sambala: ‘Tropical Island Living’ on a Private Resort
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Can we really talk of moving beyond colonialism? (Achile Mbembe 2001: 237)
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Issues of heritage and memory are also being mobilised in a new set of developments based on the exploitation of tourism developments and within the context of global financial flows and economic investments. Cape Verde is a service-orientated country, where foreign direct investment (FDI) has gained a remarkable importance in the last years: from less than 100 million euros in 2000 to 1.6 billion euros in 2008. At the end of 2010, it is expected that FDI reaches © Copyrighted Material
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4.4 billion euros (five times the current GDP of the country). Tourism is a major player here, representing over 90 per cent of the total FDI, with traditional investors such as Italy, Spain and Portugal now joined by the United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, various countries from the Middle East, notably the United Arab Emirates, and China. Tourism is rapidly growing in the archipelago: between 2000 and 2006, it increased by 193 per cent and in 2008 is was responsible for 19.4 per cent of total GDP. Visitor numbers register an enormous geographical concentration in three islands: Sal (44.8 per cent), Boavista (25 per cent) and Santiago (16.3 per cent), and in the first two islands, more than half of the tourists stay in ‘all inclusive accommodation’. The building of new resorts is growing rapidly, and there are strong signs of an increasing pressure on land and natural resources, such as those created by sand removal from beaches for construction (especially in Sal), and land speculation. Tourism commodification is also noted through the naming of the resorts: ‘Cabral Beach Resort’ and ‘Cesária Resort’ are just some examples. At the same time, there is a generalised positive and optimistic view on tourism growth and every week newspapers report on tourism numbers, revenues and on the continuous foreign investment in large scale resorts. While the African success story has been internalised in political and media discourses and tourism became a national priority, poverty and food vulnerability risks are being relegated to a second plan (Rodrigues 2008). I have already provided an account of San Francisco Bay Development, a 3.5 billion euro project that includes seven resorts in an area of 16.4 km² in the island of Santiago (Sarmento 2009). The project, to be developed until 2017 by the international property company Casa Group Plc, aimed at ‘redefining the resort concept’, and 23,000 houses would create a new coastal settlement. I brought up the dissonance between the corporate discourse of drawing upon ‘the true vernacular approach to developing in an African climate (…) retaining what is special about the Cape Verde islands, its topography and environment, traditions and the indigenous communities’ (Sarmento 2009: 536), and the practice of constructing marinas, swimming pools and 23,000 new houses, which would completely redraw the coastal landscape. In early 2011, the development is stopped. I want to focus my attention on a very large resort in the island of Santiago, named Sambala. The 20 km² (2 per cent of the island) project, which ‘includes’ 8 km of coastline advertised as ‘the largest tropical white sand beach on the island’, ‘will eventually incorporate four tourism villages, 10 villa and townhouse developments, three five-star hotels, marina, two 18-hole golf courses, restaurants, bars and sporting and spa amenities’. According to the company, Sambala’s first phase – Sambala Village – with nine condominiums of 38‒48 apartments each plus 68 villas was sold in about eight months. The second phase – Vivendas de Santiago – with 41 villas and townhouses is practically sold (in early 2010 there were only 17 houses for sale) and the third and last phase – Fogo Villas – with 96 villas is for sale. © Copyrighted Material
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Sambala is located around 7 kilometres northeast of the capital and 4 kilometres from the new international airport. It is conveniently separated from the poor aesthetics of African urban landscapes and the unhygienic low building standards of sprawling Praia. Sambala’s location on top of an ‘Achada’ (high plateau), overlooking São Francisco Valley and its white sandy beach, allows for a pleasing perspective over a still ‘pristine’ stretch of coastline, while fitting the miasmic theories and preferred practices of colonial settlements, distanced from locals and local settlements in the plains, and in high cool places (see King 2004). Similarly to many gated communities, the resort develops behind a large iron gate, and it is like a new fortification in Santiago. Sambala’s ‘sun all year round’ is constructed as Europe’s Caribbean, and the company re-positions Cape Verde as the ‘nearest tropical archipelago to Europe, situated only five and a half hours from the UK and only one hour behind GMT’. Promotion Dann 2006). In the island, about 75 per cent of people consume desalinised water, and there is a need to quadruplicate the production of water in the near future, especially due to the expansion of real estate and tourism. Electra, the water and electricity company of Cape Verde, which until recently was mostly under Portuguese capital, faces severe problems to supply the capital, and is now in the process of privatisation. In 2008, the company admitted that it had no capacity to supply water to the entire city, and despite an improvement in late 2009, when two new plants were inaugurated, regular technical problems and electricity failures result in water shortages. In Sambala water is provided by a private desalination plant, an investment worth eight million euro, which is more powerful than those serving the entire population of Praia: it has the capacity to produce about 5,000 m3 of fresh water per day. The autonomy of Sambala in relation to the ‘chaotic’ situation in Praia regarding water and electricity supply and sewerage, positions the resort as a paradise enclave. Regardless of the severe water shortages that almost 100,000 people experience just ‘next door’, it is possible to play golf, enjoy different swimming pools, have a bath, and still be part of a social project. Naturally, in the words of Prime Minister José Maria Neves (in the corporate site) Sambala Resort is ‘a symbol of the new future we want to build in Cape Verde’. Yet, the gap is so wide, that such a discourse is only possible when voices of prosperity and growth dominate society and silence the predominantly urban poverty and food vulnerability that should undermine the postcolonial discourse on modernity, liberalism and development (see Rodrigues 2008). If the fundamental mission of the neoliberal state is to create a ‘good business climate’, facilitating and stimulating all business interests (Harvey 2006), no doubt Cape Verde is on the neoliberal path. Sambala Development is announced as having a critical economic importance in Santiago, currently employing 450 people and when completed, it will be the largest employer in the island, providing jobs to 800 people. Similarly to many resorts around the world, the expectation and future for locals, who generally lack the education and specific skills for high paid jobs, resides in the less desirable, © Copyrighted Material
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temporary and seasonal jobs, such as construction workers, hotel maids, gardeners, kitchen workers and other low paid, low skilled jobs (see Torres and Momsen 2005 for the case of Cancun and Diagne 2004 for the case of Senegal). In Cape Verde there is no minimum wage. To a certain extent, this is related to a certain enclave nature of the project and inclusiveness (see Freitag 1994 for the case the Dominican Republic). In a country historically dependent on external resources and where most products are imported, the global nature and transnational networks established by the developers will not leave much room for local initiatives and gains. The discourse of sustainability, of an environmentally friendly project, of the use of advanced technology and high building standards is based on a western control and command of operations. Mark Greenfield, the construction director, argues that ‘(…) the electrics are northern European standard, all the water is northern European standard, we have our own treatment plan and our own desalinization plant’ (Sambala 2006). In a similar fashion to the architects’ documentary already analysed, which begins and ends in Oporto, the Sambala’s promotional film swiftly moves the spectator from the interior of the houses and apartments in Cape Verde, to the ‘heart of the UK’.
Figure 4.3
Sambala Resort, Cape Verde
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Source: The author, April 2008.
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While in Praia people might be queuing for hours to fill a plastic container with water, inside Sambala, the Caribbean paradise can provide the same comfort as the rooms which are on ‘permanent display in the Sambala UK offices in the Cotswolds village of Charlbury near Oxford’. Here, customers can choose from a range of different ‘exclusive ecologically designed furniture packages’, using Indonesian hardwood timber, and many with a ‘colonial design’. Reflecting the complete mastering of the environment and the land, Sambala Development puts an emphasis and care in the open and apparently public spaces (Figure 4.3). There are long ‘streets’ lined with palm trees, there are large squares with Portuguese style cobblestone work, there is carefully designed public lightening, litter bins, benches and so on. It is a pleasant and safe space. This clearly contrasts with the public spaces in Praia, which are increasingly unsafe especially at night, and where violent crime is fast rising. After 6:00 p.m. most of the central and historical streets and squares of Plateaux (central area of the city) are empty. Finally, in this ‘tropical gem’, culture and history are condensed in the words of ‘historical intrigue’, and Sambala is built and marketed as a development that anchors the past and heritage in contemporary landscapes: ‘The architecture is based on Portuguese colonial design’ (Sambala corporate film); the design of the houses, the tiled roofs, the verandas, the windows, all report to a certain idea of what Portuguese colonial architecture was, and which can still be seen in some building in the Plateaux. But this trend extends to the whole archipelago. According to its promoters, Vila Verde Resort in Sal Island, ‘emulates a small colonial village amidst luxurious green areas’ (Vila Verde Resort 2010). While many of the original colonial houses in Praia are collapsing, a monumental neocolonial hyperreal space is being created, a place where the copy overtakes the original. This material landscape evokes, erases, forgets and creates colonial memory, which, as Harvey (2005) points out, is build upon a space that serves to solve the over accumulation problems of neoliberal capitalist states. But by early 2011 not everything looks bright in ‘Cape Verde’s leading luxury resort’. In the corporate web site news are not updated since August 2009, and just as in San Francisco Development Bay, construction works have stopped and all machinery has been removed from the site. After six years of construction, even the first phase has not been completed. Several foreign investors have already paid the full amount for a house and have been waiting for 2‒3 years for completion. While Cape Verdean newspapers seem to be mute about these issues, in the abundant number of owners’ on-line forums9 there are talks of misappropriation of investor funds. A brief analysis to the owners’ comments on specialised websites reveals complaints and intended legal actions and a great disappointment at what is perceived as a fraud. The Sambala Owners Group, for example, was formed by three owners, and has now over 120 members, who have met regularly in the UK 9 http://www.sambalafriends.forumcircle.com, http://www.caboverde24.com/forum, http://www.capeverdeportal.com. © Copyrighted Material
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during 2010, creating a pressure group to obtain answers from Sambala board on the delays of the project. There is also an Action Against Grepner Group, which is preparing legal action10 in face of delays and what they see as a fraudulent behaviour. Jonathan Grepne stated that construction had not proceeded accordingly to date as the company expect future constraints on cash flow at completion (http:// www.sambalaoptions.com), and Sambala announced that in September 2010 a new Master Plan for the resort was approved. Now, transparency seems to be an issue, and the plan can only be seen by private investors and in the UK offices at Charlbury, under confidentiality. In late January 2011, on a intimidating response to investors’ opinions on these various forums, Sambala threaten, through a message on an investors friends forum, to take legal action against anyone who ‘publicize and proliferate false and damaging rumours about our business’. The discussion of the possible outcomes of these disputes and the time it takes for them to be solved is out of the scope of this chapter. Yet, it is remarkable and indicative of the power of global capital and of the postcolonial condition in Cape Verde, how a dispute over the development of 20 km2 of Santiago Island is being held in online forums by British investors and a British company, who at times meet physically at Oxford, in total detachment from local people and local debate, who ignore these struggles. I finalise with a question from Mbembe (2001: 237) which nicely summarises what this issue brings to mind: ‘have we really entered another period, or do we find the same theatre, the same mimetic acting, with different actors and spectators, but with the same convulsions and the same insult? Can we really talk of moving beyond colonialism?’
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Epilogue
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None of the three examples here studied leave any echoes or traces of the violent and unjust past (and present?) upon which Cape Verde and West Africa have been built. Everyday poorly built canoes and boats desperately leave African shores, taking people from Burkina Faso, Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Nigeria, and so on, who are searching for an El Dorado, which includes the Canary Islands, and sometimes end up homeless at an uncaring European urban square in Madrid, Marseille or Rome. Paradoxically, Gorée Island in Senegal, globally known and commodified by the history of millions of slaves who (did not) physically pass there, is unknown by the thousands of people who cross it daily. Through these developments, Cape Verde, a stone’s throw away from continental Africa, is constructing a sweet and amnesic present out of a painful past. Cidade Velha and its Fort do not call upon the past questioning contemporary problems which affect and have similarities with those of Cape Verdeans and other Africans. Memory, past and present are rehabilitated by the powerful, who rather 10 http://www.actionagainstgrepne.com. © Copyrighted Material
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want to exploit a connection of Cape Verde to an imaginary Europe. At the same time, an opportunity is lost to engage with the fluid and multicultural communities that the Diaspora originated while shaping the hybrid spaces and culture of Capeverdianess. More than half of Cape Verdeans live outside the archipelago, notably in the US, being central to the nation and to national identity, profoundly connected to the poverty of the land, to famines, to slavery and forced migration. The rich colonial and postcolonial encounters fail to emerge. Through the analysis of these three examples in postcolonial Cape Verde, I cannot agree with Atkinson’s (2005: 148) cheerful concluding remarks that ‘increasing numbers involved in commemorating their local pasts mean that one-dimensional, partial heritages will remain contested, and that skepticism towards “official” heritage stories will flourish’ (…) [and that] the conversations and debates that develop as a consequence will help facilitate more democratic, more inclusive and less problematic ways of thinking through multiple heritages and their pasts’. In the three examples examined here, there are clear marks of neocolonial processes, coupled with the failure of the State to provide basic services to the population and to critically engage with heritage, and with the virtual absence of competing accounts of the past. The nation is built upon foreign aid, supported by western donors, financing or investing in a land where the elites are legitimised and perpetuated due to their knowledge as cultural brokers of landscapes. The existing fracture between Cape Verdean elites, who dominate and have access to western codes and procedures, and the rest of the society, who have almost no participation (Anjos 2003) is striking. The forms of imagining the past which are used by the elites to produce place and community are clearly associated with a strong promiscuity between the elites, the politicians and economic interests (Anjos 2008). It is only by revealing the connections and flows that constitute spatial processes that we start to understand, expose and complicate one-dimensional readings of places and their pasts. While the Fort hygienic landscapes praise colonial engineering and architecture, celebrating empire in a total absence of a critical history of the place, in Sambala the art of ‘mastering the land’ is now apparently crumbling under the current neoliberal condition. The idea of Loff de Vasconcellos, a nineteenth-century Cape Verdean writer, that Capeverdianess is expressed not by the difference from continental Africa, but by the sharing in the archipelago of suffering and pain in no longer fashionable.
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Chapter 5
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A Neglected Trophy, Elusive Oil and Re-workings of Memory in São Tomé e Príncipe
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Now, now that you have stamped my face with the perfections of your civilization, I ask you, Europe, I ask you: NOW WHAT?1
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Tomás Medeiros, in Hamilton (1975: 371)
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Introduction
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Located right on the equator, the Democratic Republic of São Tomé and Príncipe (STP) is one of the smallest nations on earth, with only 1,001 square kilometres, distributed by two islands – São Tomé (859 km2) and Príncipe (142 km2) – which are roughly 100 kilometres apart. With little over 150,000 inhabitants in 2006 (INE 2006), and an 106.6 million euro annual budget in 2010 (80 per cent of which is foreign aid), the country’s history and heritage are inseparable from a long colonial past, a plantation economy, and a short independence period. The archipelago’s independence history is still in its infancy, but since 1975 a relatively stable democracy has been in the making. Despite its apparent ‘cartographic transparency’, the ‘overseas province’ of STP was the world’s largest cocoa beans producer in the nineteenth century, and presently, the country is located in one of the most important geostrategic regions of the contemporary world: the Gulf of Guinea. Recently ‘catapult[ed] (…) from strategic neglect into geopolitical stardom’ (Oliveira 2007b: 5), this is a highly disputed region, being the arena of multinational oil and gas corporations, developed nations governments and their African counterparts. Until recently STP has been somehow marginal to these developments, but the global economy has recruited a new member for its powerful geopolitical games. It is the hopes and fears of future transformations that are being played here, as the country sets up itself for a new phase of its history, a phase which for many, holds the promise of a total change, of economic wealth and social wellbeing. In line with all transformations, memory, the past 1 Agora,/agora que me estampaste no rosto/os primores da tua civilização,/eu te pergunto, Europa,/eu te pergunto: AGORA? (Poem ‘Meu Canto, Europa’ – ‘My song, Europe’). © Copyrighted Material
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and the islands’ landscapes are redrawn, recast, in order to engage with the novel dynamics. This chapter attempts to unpack meanings related with two stone monuments – a Fort built in colonial times and a memorial built in a postcolonial context – and with the geographical, economical and political contexts in which the islands are presently living. I analyse in detail the sixteenth century built Fort São Sebastião, in São Tomé city, providing an extensive descriptive view/visit/stroll of the National Museum established there in 1976. I then zoom out to larger issues that have been shaping the Gulf region in the past decades, focusing on oil business and spatial and social changes. Finally, I return to São Tomé, to discuss how under the rationale of modernisation, progress and creative destruction, one of the most significant monuments of the independence struggle was recently demolished. My aim in presenting these stories is to sketch connections between places, to unravel some of the interpretation and representation performances of the past and explain how the construction of multiple temporalities and spatialities is inscribed in a colonial present, but open to postcolonial critique and acts of remembrance, and possible de-colonisation projects. ww w.a sh ga te. co m
The Gulf of Guinea
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The Gulf of Guinea is a vague geographical term that traditionally refers loosely to the western coast of Africa from Senegal to Gabon. In a more narrow and strict definition, it refers to the concave recess of West and Central Africa, and is also called Bight of Biafra. In a wider perspective it can be understood as a macro region that includes nine countries: Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroun, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and São Tomé e Príncipe. Historically the region has seen the development of early African civilisations, especially around Ancient Ghana and the kingdoms of Benin (see Davidson 2001). At a later stage it was also one of the critical zones of contact (Pratt 1992) of European colonisers and African kingdoms, and an active stage of Atlantic slavery. More recently, carved by the oil industry, the Gulf of Guinea stretches from Nigeria to south Angola. It has one of the most important estimated crude oil reserves in the world (Ariweriokuma 2009), and a century-long history of exploration for petroleum and 40 years of sizable production (Oliveira 2007b). Considering the increasing volatility of the Persian Gulf region, the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Gulf of Guinea (together with the Gulf of Mexico) acquired a particularly significant role in global geopolitics (Omeje 2008), illustrating how space is easily reconceptualised by capital and politics (Oliveira 2007b). This significance can be accentuated by the early 2011 turmoil in North Africa, especially in Libya, the fourth African oil producer. At the same time, an ever-increasing global demand for oil, with China and India playing a major role here, exacerbates this significance. In fact, the US is studying the possibility of having a new military operation base in West Africa, and STP is a candidate, being close to oil production countries, especially to Nigeria, which © Copyrighted Material
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in the future could account for one fourth of the total US oil imports (Frynas and Paulo 2007). The countries’ diversity is astounding, from varied colonial backgrounds, postcolonial trajectories, experience in oil business, land size or demographics. They share the critical importance of the extraction of petroleum and the rents that accrue from its sale, based on monopolies controlled by handful of major oil companies (Oliveira 2007a), the state failure to deliver improved standards of living. STP is somehow different in this scenario in that oil as yet to be produced. There are four main islands in the Gulf of Guinea, aligned along a volcanic ridge of over 2,000 kilometres – the Cameroon line of volcanoes – that descends from Chad Lake in the northeast to Annóbon island in the southwest (Map 5.1). From its ‘discovery’ by the Europeans (except for Bioko the islands were not inhabited), until the 1778 El Pardo Treaty between Portugal and Spain, the four islands were part of the Portuguese empire.2 Bioko and Annobón are now part of Equatorial Guinea (Spanish Guinea up to 1967), and in fact its capital city – Malabo – is located on Bioko Island. For different historical and geographical reasons the settlement and colonisation of the four islands was quite distinct. The Portuguese gave priority to São Tomé (settled in 1486), and both Príncipe and Annóbon developed in its shadow (settled in 1502 and 1503 respectively). Bioko, adjacent to mainland Africa (roughly 30 kilometres), was found later (possibly in the 1480s), and was already inhabited. Locals offered fierce resistance to the Portuguese so settlement was abandoned. It was only effectively occupied after 1778 (Tenreiro 1961). In very broad terms we can distinguish four different development periods in STP: the sugar cane plantations in the sixteenth century, the slave trade from the midsixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries, the coffee and cocoa plantations from the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century, and a foreign aid dependency cycle from independence till now. Perhaps oil will establish and determine the start and conditions of the next cycle.
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2 Portuguese interests related to South America and Brazil in particular and Spanish interests in claiming some soil on Africa led to a land exchange and to the settle of older conflicts (established in the Treaty of San Ildefonse in 1777 and confirmed in the Treaty of El Pardo in the following year). The Spanish kingdom took possession of Fernando Pó (former Formosa, renamed Fernando Poo by the Spanish and presently Bioko), Ano Bóm (present Annobón), and the mainland between the Niger and Ogoue rivers. The Portuguese claimed territory in Rio de la Plana (later originating the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil). © Copyrighted Material
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The island of São Tomé, São Tomé and Príncipe
Fort São Sebastião, São Tomé
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Map 5.1
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Fort São Sebastião was built in the context of a sugar cane plantation economy and society. Sugar was indeed the main drive of the colonisation process, which developed with Europeans from mainland Portugal, from Madeira Island and with slaves brought from mainland Africa (Figure 5.1). According to Seibert (2006), in the 1520s São Tomé imported annually about 2,000 slaves, of whom about 500 were re-exported to Elmina (present Ghana). It was only in the 1530s that the export of slaves to the Caribbean began. In the first half of the sixteenth century between 5,000 and 6,000 slaves were transported annually to São Tomé. Most were sold to the Americas, but those who stayed in the island were employed in the households and in the growing sugar industry plantations. By the mid sixteenth century there were about 10,000 slaves on the island (Seibert 2006). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, slaves were taken from two active slave regions: the kingdom of Benin3 and the Congo (Tenreiro 1961 and ww w.a sh ga te. co m
3 The kingdom of Benin was one of the most important states of Lower Guinea, and is now located in Western Nigeria. It should not be mistaken with the modern state of Benin, wedged between Togo and Nigeria, where following the presence of British and French, a Portuguese Fort was built at Ouida (or Whydah) in 1721 (construction started in 1680), © Copyrighted Material
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Lorenzino 2007). Unlike Angola and Mozambique, large continental territories of diverse ethnic groups with a history of uneven Portuguese presence and poor colonial integration (Chabal 1996: 13‒14), São Tomé (and Cape Verde also) can be characterised by a stronger ethnical and racial mixture and a sense of identity based on a common Creole language. On the one hand the building of a Fort can be understood as the result of a failure. It materially represents the failure to engage in mutually advantageous negotiations with the surrounding people and to establish a nonviolent and sheltered environment. On the other hand it reveals or marks the start of a less provisional settlement. The first defensive building in STP was the captain’s tower, built in 1492‒3 and located near the present government palace. It was both a defensive building and the captain’s residence. In the following 70 years no other defensive buildings or structures were built, despite various internal assaults. In 1531, revealing incapacity to control and manage the whole of the island, the Portuguese residents asked permission to the crown to build fortifications to protect the people and the goods involved in the ‘bush war’. To a large degree these requests, result of the ‘wars’ between the island authorities, the plantation owners and their slaves, on the one side, and the ‘black escapees’ on the other, mark the Africanisation of the island (Henriques 2000). Although the ‘black treats’ coming from the core of the island were always the most feared, the Portuguese interests in STP were also threatened by the French, Dutch and British colonial enterprises and merchants (often described as ‘corsairs’ or pirates). One year after attacking Funchal, in Madeira Island, the French attacked São Tomé in 1567. Not long after, in 1574, the Angolares4 rebellion took place. Fort São Sebastião was built between 1566 and 1575, and was considerably reformulated in 1579. With four bastions (Real, S. Sebastião, S. Anna and S. Tomé), the Fort was built upon coral reefs with three sides facing the ocean
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becoming an extension of El Mina. From here, slave trade with Brazil flourished until the late eighteenth century (see Disney 2009). Up to 1961 the colony or overseas province of STP ruled over the exclave of Ouida. By then this colonial ground consisted of a Fort, a Trading Station and no more than a dozen men. 4 Various sources refer to the Angolares as descendents of Angolan runaway slaves, possibly arriving in STP after a shipwreck in the mid sixteenth century. Even today they form a separated social and cultural group of approximately 7,000 people (Seibert 2006) living in the southeast of the island and mostly from fishing (see also Lorenzino 2007). They never engaged in labour in coffee or cocoa plantations. In a very simplified manner we can still distinguish three other ethnic groups in the country: Forros, contract workers or Serviçais and Tongas. The former are a group of free Creole blacks who have both an African and a Portuguese identity, who arrived from the early sixteenth century onwards, and who were later gradually disposed of their ancestral lands, ‘through purchase, fraud or force’ (Seibert 2002: 291). They have always refused contract work in the plantations. Former contract workers are those who came mainly from Cape Verde, Angola and Mozambique in the late nineteenth century to work on the plantations. Finally, Tongas are the descendents of contract workers (see Henriques 2000). © Copyrighted Material
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and with two floors. On the ground floor a large patio surrounds a pluvial cistern, which always functioned precariously due to the lack of stone masons and potters that could maintain it (Tomé 2004). Facing the entrance there is a chapel devoted to São Sebastião with an altar. On either side there was a kitchen and a food storeroom and a jail. Carpenter and blacksmith workshops were also located on the ground floor as well as the military caserns. In 1585 there was a fire in the city, which was later sized by the Dutch in 1599, who aimed at upsetting the Portuguese trade circuits in the Atlantic (Emmer 2003). Since the Fort was considered to be too separated from the city, somehow secluded by the waterfront, other Forts were built in the city of São Tomé, in Ana Chaves Bay: Fort St. Jerónimo (of which only some ruins remain) built between 1613 and 1614 and separated by about 1.5 kilometres (Figure 5.2); Fort St. José, built in 1756 (Madeira 2001a) of which nothing is left; and the Forte Picão de Nossa Senhora da Graça, built between 1638 and 1639, which was possibly never completed (Madeira 2001b) or was later demolished (Carita 1989: 204). If we think that the existence of the Fort is connected in part with the internal resistance assaults, then we can also argue that the Fort symbolises the first victory of the subaltern and is a symbol of the coloniser’s defeat. The Fort was incapable of resistance to serious attacks. There were neither military captains nor trained soldiers nor adequate maritime power, and in time of war, the Governor and inhabitants locked themselves in the Fort, leaving the city and the plantations opened to attack. The Fort also lacked proper artillery. There were only six small guns and two bombards, and a lack of dry powder (Garfield 1992). Between 1641 and 1648 the Fort was occupied by the Dutch West Indian Company, which controlled the sugar and slave trade, and São Tomé became an entrepôt in a global trade connecting Dutch possessions and interests in Africa (notably Elmina, in present Ghana and Luanda, in Angola) and South America (Pernambuco, in northeast Brazil). There were other ‘private’ Forts that preceded São Sebastião. In fact, as early as the sixteenth century, several of the wealthy sugar cane planters built wooden Forts, which were highly armed, to protect their lands (Sibert 2006). These were decidedly privatised spaces where the planters maintained absolute powers, totally separated and autonomous from the meagre local authority. There are very few sources regarding the Fort’s ‘life’ during the following 200 years. In fact, Tenreiro (1961), names the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in STP as ‘the great fallowing’ (O Grande Poisio) and Tomás (2004) points to the state of degradation of various monuments in the late sixteenth century, aggravated by the French incursion of 1709. In the 1720s the weapons arsenal were moved to the first floor to avoid flooding and in the 1730s, the governor Sousa Coutinho altered the original wooden floors of the Fort, which required constant maintenance, and replaced them by paved floors (Tomé 2004). With the decline of the sugar cane economy, mainly due to competition from Brazil, but also due to some internal instability created by local rebellions (which led for instance to the governor’s residence being moved from São Tomé to Santo © Copyrighted Material
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António in Príncipe Island in 1753), STP increasingly became a slave entrepôt. Until the move of the capital back to São Tomé in the mid-nineteenth century, the island was a very unstable place, where agriculture and public colonial order was frequently disrupted by fugitive slaves. The Last ‘Hurrah’
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During the twentieth century the Fort was part of the captaincy of the Ports and was partially used by the statistical services of the colony. Occasionally the facilities were used for short imprisonment periods (see 1953 Massacre bellow). Yet, during the 1960s, pressed by the aspirations of a crumbling empire, the Fort experienced its final colonial phase. On 28 March 1961, reflecting the rising tension and instability in Lusophone Africa (the restructuring of the Navy was in place since the late 1950s and the first attacks in Angola were registered in February and March of 1961), the Overseas Ministry granted the Fort to the war navy (part of the Navy Ministry) with the goal of transforming it into the Maritime Defence Command. The winds of change were being felt across the world. Salazar’s stubbornness resulted in the integration of Goa in the Indian Union in that same year. His obstinacy in holding to the ‘overseas provinces’, integral parts of the motherland, when the decolonisation years in Africa had started, would result also in the opening of three war fronts: Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau, which lasted for more than a decade. Luís Benavente (1902‒93), architect commissioned to the Portuguese overseas Ministry from the Public Works Ministry (see Fernandes 1996), and working in Africa between 1957 and 1973, was responsible for the Fort’s adaptation project.5 The sizeable works, which indicate the state of decay of the Fort, included waterproofing and plastering all outside and inner walls, construction of inner rooms, replacing the roof by a reinforced concrete structure, replacing roof tiles, tilling floors and walls, renewing all sewerage, electric and plumbing, putting new wooden doors, metal or iron fittings, etc.6 Living conditions for 34 men (one commanding officer, three officials, six sergeants and 24 privates) should also be attended: bedrooms and furniture, living rooms, kitchen, toilets.7 Benavente was an architect with a long experience in restoring and rehabilitating historical monuments, both in Portugal and abroad. He recognised that in the 1950s and 1960s the knowledge of the built heritage in Africa (and also India, Macao and East Timor) was close to zero. His grievance was a clear reflection of
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5 In STP he was also responsible for the restoration of the Churches of Madre de Deus and Bom Despacho. 6 Estimated costs, the list of suppliers, and so on can be found at the Luís Benavente fund (LB 1961a). 7 A rich documentation on the work progress is available, which includes letters exchanged by Benavente while in Portugal and Alberto, the construction supervisor in STP (LB 1961b for example). © Copyrighted Material
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the repressive intellectual climate of the Estado Novo, which ‘made impossible the development of any serious Portuguese historiography of (both metropolitan and overseas) Portugal’, and ‘impractical for non-Portuguese scholars to have access to the kind of historical sources which they were able to use for the study of the British and French empires’ (Chabal 2002: 31). Benavente was mostly concerned with the built heritage and what it could tell of the historical presence of the Portuguese, of the ‘civilization mission’ that was taking place since the fifteenth century, materialised in churches, Forts, etc. He was also concerned with the surroundings of the Fort, since the building should not be treated like a house. The grounds beside it ‘should be rough and entirely unblocked, the roughness that lends it a warfare look’ (Benavente 1959a). He was also preoccupied at re-establishing the ‘more natural’ ochre colour of the walls, since in his opinion the existing dark looking walls resembled a ‘gas factory’. He strongly opposed to the installation of a radio navy station inside the Fort, since this would imply fitting three red and white iron antennas of 30 metres height, plus steel cables. Benavente argued that monument preservation thinking should be the same here as in the metropolis, and this type of structures had already been eliminated in the metropolis – Tomar and Sagres (LB 1961c). The architect regarded the presence of the statistical office as an inadequate use for the Fort (LB 1959b), and at the same time emphasised that owing to the lack of furniture and objects, the absence of archaeological artefacts and other open air elements, together with the insufficient lighting conditions of the interior, he did not advice to establish a museum at the Fort of São Sebastião (LB 1959a). Ironically, roughly 10 years after the conclusion of the adaptation works for the Maritime Defence Command, a National Museum was established in the Fort. Regrettably, documentation related to this later re-adaptation of the Fort (1975‒6), which involved the demolition of some walls, could not be located.
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The National Museum or the Fort’s After Life
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Unlike Fort São Filipe in Cape Verde or Fort Jesus in Mombasa (also the medina of Azamour in Morocco), which are monumental constructions clearly distinguishable within the immediate urban structure, Fort São Sebastião in São Tomé is relatively small, and it can be missed in a short visit to the town, since it is somehow peripherally located. Presently the Fort houses the National Museum, but unlike the National Museums of Kenya, for example, which were established in the intellectual and exploratory spirit of the early twentieth century (Scott 2007), this one was established in a very short period (Barros 2010)8 straight after independence. In fact, the first steps to conduct an inventory of the cultural heritage were taken in May 1975. On 13 July of that same year, one day after the
8 Barros, J. 2010. Vice-Director of the São Tomé e Príncipe National Museum. Interview on 12 February. © Copyrighted Material
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country’s formal independence, the Fort became part of the cultural department of the Ministry for Education and Culture, and the colonial command for maritime defence ceased to exist. With the quick nationalisation of the roças (Plantations),9 many objects of interest were simply taken to the Museum (notably from Rio do Ouro – presently Agostinho Neto). The ecclesiastic chamber donated or agreed to deposit some religious objects in the museum, while items from the Town Hall were also offered. In 1976, even before the collection was completed, the National Museum organised a series of conferences that took place in another ‘colonial’ building: the city’s high school (Liceu, renamed Liceu Técnico). These events aimed at fostering a new cultural environment, discussing and promoting the identity of the country through themes such as ‘São Tomé e Príncipe and its Human Geography’ (7 February 1976), ‘Issues in Women’s liberation’ (14 February 1976), ‘The medicine doctor and society’ (21 February 1976) and ‘African Literature of Portuguese expression’ (28 February 1976). At the museum’s opening ceremony on 11 July 1976, integrated on the commemorations of the first anniversary of independence, ‘comrade’ Alda do Espírito Santo (1926‒2010), at the time Minister for National Education and Popular Culture, and one of the most renowned national poets, freedom fighters, and teachers, stated: ‘this museum is the witness of the past, the witness of the Faust built by a five-century old colonial feudalist system. It is not the Museum of silence but a screaming museum, enriched by a heritage that illustrates the clear vision of the people’ (Revolução 1976: 3). This attempt to ‘decolonise the mind’ (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1981), understood as a first steep in decolonisation, was also accomplished in record time, a product of a revolutionary momentum and spirit, an organic and impetus creation, which intended to provide a fresh and truthful insight into the country’s history as opposed to the dated hegemonic colonial perspectives. But it is unclear if the elimination of the colonial administration, the sovereign power over the juridical-political boundaries of the nation-state, and the establishment of a National Museum in record time, were enough to produce a decolonised representation of the colonial past, heritage and identity of STP. My interpretation is obviously very subjective, and to a certain degree speculative. It is also inescapable that I am a Portuguese white male taking a snapshot on STP. I am aware of Mbembe’s (2001) argument that most discourses of Africa human experience are conducted by emphasising its incomplete, mutilated and unfinished nature, and thus, I attempt to be careful with statements, with complete diagnosis and with the unproblematised relationship between facticity and truth.
9 In September 1975, 23 Portuguese owned plantations of over 200 hectares were nationalised (Eyzaguirre 1989; Seibert 2006). They were later regrouped into 15 State Agriculture and Livestock Enterprises (Empresas Estatais Agro-Pecuárias). © Copyrighted Material
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Walking through History
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Perhaps one of the most striking features of visiting the National Museum, which is housed in the Fort of São Sebastião, is the fact that nothing is told about the Fort itself. Visitors know and possibly feel this is one of the oldest buildings in the country, but its history, unquestionably central to the construction of São Tomean identity, is not present. Paradoxically, this defence building is omnipresent in most tourism brochures, leaflets and postcards. A small entry corridor brings us to a relatively small room where six watercolour paintings from the 1950s are on display.10 From this room we have access to the main courtyard, where visitors must ring a bell or search someone for guidance. At the time of my visits (February 2010), 11 rooms were opened and the visits followed a rigid one-way route. The route included a visit to the ramparts and started and ended in a small dark room where tickets are sold for 2 euros, and where a few handicraft objects are on display and for sale. There is no written script of the guided tours, but after engaging in a few individual visits as well as amongst small groups, and after an informal conversation with the guide, it was possible to establish that the guide reproduces an almost unchanging oral text, limited to a few observations in each room. There is no possibility of walking freely and unaccompanied through the museum. The visit route takes us first to two rooms which focus on objects of religious and sacred art, collected as already mentioned, with the cooperation of the São Tomé diocese. It is a static view of objects. In the 1960s and 1970s these two dark and stuffy rooms used to be the dormitories of about 24 privates. It is interesting to see how religion is not represented as imposed from abroad, as a mark of colonialism, as coercive, and while most islanders are deeply religious,11 Catholicism is limited to baptism and rites such as processions and funerals (Seibert 2006). Still today, Christian-style marriage respecting monogamy and male fidelity is an exception. Yet, the first thing that was done to slaves when they arrived in the islands was to replace their African names by catholic names, in order to acculturate them into Portuguese culture. At the same time, Serviçais were often excluded by Forros from various social and cultural practices, including from participating in religious institutions. Unlike in East Timor, where the catholic church had a critical role in helping Timorese going through a period of violence between the mid 1970s and the late 1990s, and contributing decisively to the construction of national identity (Sarmento 2006), in São Tomé the church had always a more secondary role, never able to establish itself as one decisive pillars of national identity. Despite this relative detachment, and the ending of most catholic feast-days as national holidays, an action certainly connected to an attempt to secularise the country by the radical Marxist-Leninist government 10 Five from M.M. Vigôço and one from Eduardo Alves. All are dated from 1955. 11 In the 2001 census, 70.4 per cent of the population declared to be catholic, 3.4 per cent Evangelic and 1.8 per cent Adventist. © Copyrighted Material
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in the late 1970s, throughout the year several saints are honoured in festivals in many villages around the country. The route continues out to the central courtyard, and then ascending the stairs to the first floor, into the Agriculture Room. Considering that nothing is told about the Fort in the National Museum, it is quite a paradox that here the introducers of the cocoa and coffee beans in STP are celebrated without contextualising the implications of this recolonisation, which is deeply connected to the independence of Brazil in 1822, and the abolition of slavery in 1836. To a large degree the investments made on the islands’ plantations are the result of slave trade earnings in Brazil, and the introduction of cocoa and coffee beans made large-scale production viable (Seibert 2006). In display are two large oil paintings of João Baptista Silva de Lagos, who introduced coffee from Brazil in 1787 and cocoa possibly in 1820, and of Jorge Ferreira Gomes, known as the introducer of cocoa. To a large degree they mark the establishment of the plantation economy that developed in the islands using slave and forced labour, and which, according to Eyzaguirre (1989) have been the fundamental socio-political foundation of this Creole African society. Throughout the nineteenth century the land structure and ownership, and the social and demographic composition of the islands changed dramatically, as the Portuguese engaged in a process of land dispossession and reclamation, which accentuated in the 1880s and 1890s. The large cocoa plantations, employing hundreds of workers recruited from Cape Verde (Nascimento 2001) and from other places in mainland Africa, covered a large part of the island of São Tomé. Some were states within the state, with their own infrastructures (hospitals, schools, railways, etc.), and having a large degree of autonomy from the colonial administration (Seibert 2006). At the same time, the development of coffee and cocoa roças represents the beginning of a new colonial stage: the posts of surgeon and pharmacist (1857), the establishment of an agency of the overseas national bank (1867), a health centre for serviçais (1877), and several infrastructural improvements in the capital. From this moment onwards, a deeper crevasse is established between the African population and the colonists. The introduction of these cultures also represents the reigniting of social and ethnical dissensions, since the native elite (Creole descendents) were dispossessed of their lands. With the consolidation of colonial administrative structures, São Tomean society lost its ‘racially porous’ character, and an identity consciousness began to emerge, with a rapprochement and miscegenation of different African ethnical and cultural groups (Mata 1998). In this ‘agriculture room’, it would be far more destabilising to approach and illustrate some of the agriculture practices conducted by the slaves that ran away from the plantations and organised their survival and resistance in the interior of the island. By emphasising the dominant landscapes of the plantations, the museum downplays the spatial, social and cultural organisation of the kilombos.
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In a remarkable poem – ‘A Sòcòpé for Nicolás Guillén’12 – Tomás Medeiros ‘asks’ Nicolás Guillén (1902–89), an Afro-Cuban poet member of the Negrista movement, if he knows about ‘the island of wealth’, ‘the island of coffee plants in bloom and of cacao trees swaying’, ‘the island where misery hounds the people’s footsteps’ (see Hamilton 1975 and Mata 1998). The ‘trail’ continues into the Independence Room, in which we find the photographs of the first two presidents: Manuel Pinto da Costa (1975‒91) and Miguel Trovoada (1991‒2001). The exhibit includes the desk where Independence was signed and a glass cabinet where the last Portuguese and the first São Tomean flags are stored in two large drawers. There is hardly any information on the few things on display. Connecting this room to the next there is a dimly lit corridor next to a bathroom (not open to the public), in which we can (barely) see two representations in canvas. One depicts the mythical sixteenth-century figure of the self-proclaimed King Amador (Lorenzino 2007), and the other the sixteenthcentury rebellion. King Amador, possibly a run away slave, is of critical importance to the construction of São Tomean identity. A large sculpture of King Amador can be found at the entrance of the Historical Archive of STP, his representation is present on the bank notes, and since 2005, the 4 January is a national holiday in his memory. In STP Amador is imagined as a key figure in the anti slavery movement and central to the colonial resistance. Nevertheless, not only the museum curators chose a hidden place for Amador, but they tell nothing, of the little that is known, regarding the organisation of his army and resistance wars. The next room hosts temporary exhibitions (this room joined two of the 1960s and 1970s officers’ bedrooms). I am told that in the past 12 months (from early 2009 to 2010) visitors could see glassware from some roças and Art Nouveau paintings. There is no information about their origin. Newspapers and blogs provide loose clues on past exhibitions. It takes us by surprise to find that the next room is committed to environmental awareness and ecological education, displaying a number of posters and paintings of turtles and their habitats in STP. The organiser of this room is Marapa, a nongovernmental organisation concerned with sustainable coastal living, and the display is funded by the European Union and by KUDU – Western African programme for the conservation of sea turtles. This is the most recent display of the museum, with some paintings dating from 1993 and several recent posters. Visitors leave this room to the staircase opposite to where they ascended, and here the guide pauses and alerts visitors that the next room is somehow shocking, containing representations which might be too harsh for some. ‘Past the turtles’, immediately as we walk in D. Maria de Jesus Agostinho Neves Room, we face five black and white photographs of the faces and bodies of the victims of the 1953 massacre. The rest of the room displays photographs of Carlos Gorgulho, the governor between 1945 and 1953 (see below), scenes of interrogations, of 12 ‘Um Sòcòpé para Nicolás Guillén’ – Sòcòpé is a popular San Tomean dance. Its beat is used in the poem in parallel with the Cuban rhythm of son. © Copyrighted Material
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the police forces and of a court-martial. There is also a set of clothes full of bullets of a man who allegedly survived the incident. The room is named after Maria Agostinho Neves,13 who was imprisoned for 12 days in this same room in 1953. Here, contrary to the agriculture room, the colonial system is heavily and explicitly contested, but despite the shocking photographs of the massacre victims, it is a poor display that tells us very little about this important historical incident. There is a rich poetry related to this bloody event that could be used to enrich the exhibit. This is almost the only space in the museum that engages with the ‘opaque and murky domain of power, a domain inhabited by obscure drives and that everywhere and always makes animality and bestiality its essential components, plunging human beings into a never ending process of brutalisation’ (Mbembe 2001: 14). Considering the darkness of colonial history of the country, my understanding is that it makes it quite sweetly. In the following two rooms the contrast between the luxury and aired bedroom of a plantation owner (the furniture was taken from Roça Rio do Ouro) and the basic, comfortless petite space in which workers lived in the plantation quarters is successfully illustrated, and visitors can sense the inequalities established under the plantation system. Past these rooms, visitors go up a few steps and come out to the ramparts. Here the visit acquires a more flexible tone, as visitors may wonder and gaze the magnificent views, and it is allowed to make photographs. The route follows clockwise, passing various gravestones, ornamental stones from buildings facades, the court of arms of the governor’s house, cannons, the twentieth-century lighthouse,14 and all four bastions. Visitors descend then the stairs back to the central courtyard, and enter the ethnography room. Back in faintly lit rooms visitors can gaze with difficulty at various interesting objects: traditional dancing dolls, fishing tools, musical instruments and other ethno-objects. There is an interesting corner with ritual objects, which deserve a more prominent place, since in STP various cults, beliefs and forms of witchcraft, which blend into syncretic forms are a critical part of history, society and identity. Partially they are an outcome of a weak indoctrination process (due to linguistic and cultural barriers) of African slaves and workers. Finally, crossing once again the central courtyard, visitors can see what was once the dining room of Roça Rio do Ouro. The luxury of the china and the particular emphasis that the guide makes in ‘all’ tours towards explaining that a little boy or a monkey was used to fan guests with a large canvas hooked to the ceiling, implicitly carries a critique to the colonial system and its prejudices. It is obvious that the liberation expectations emanating from Alda Espírito Santo inaugural speech at the museum in 1976, voiced amongst the idealist context of a recently independent country – ‘we are certain that in a decade our museum
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13 Mother of Alda do Espírito Santo, Minister for National Education and Popular Culture, who was married to the President, Manuel Pinto da Costa. 14 Although sources mention the existence of a lighthouse in the original fort (Tomé 2004), the first modern lighthouse was built in 1866. The current lighthouse was inaugurated on the 10th December 1928 and remodelled in 1994. © Copyrighted Material
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will be enriched with contributes from national art’ – did not realise. The museum is a depressing site for the young and rebellious minds. Rather than inspiring a cathartic or uplifting transformation in visitors, the experience is of loss and absence. The exhibit’s historical treatment is odd, and there is no time rationale in the visit. Since there are no guide books with a detailed description of the National Museum, and no available catalogue – apparently and according to Barros (2010)15 it has run out of print (I could also not trace any copy in the national library or historical archive in STP) – information is limited to our own interpretation of the display and to whatever the guide tells us (in Portuguese). There are several visitors that bring a guide, whenever they are engaged in a tour of the island or travelling by taxi. It was impossible to obtain visitor numbers, although Barros referred to about 2,000‒3,000 per year.16 In 2006, there were 12,266 international tourists in the country (INE 2006), although many of these were in STP only on business. Nevertheless, judging from tourists’ views informally obtained, in the context of a tourist stay of six or seven nights, visiting beaches and old plantations, this makes a good two hours experience. As already mentioned, the Fort is absent from within, and the National Museum exhibition is decontextualised of the Fort itself. At the same time it does not point to any of the defensive structures that once existed in the city or to those that existed in Príncipe. To go to the ruins of Fort Jerónimo, the only other defensive structure that can still be seen, one has to enter the gate of Pestana Hotel, a Portuguese five star hotel. This entry opens to a small roundabout around which hotel guests can park. To the left one finds the main hotel door, and to the right, following an almost hidden narrow path that crosses some bushes, we arrive to an impeccable green lawn with a wooden path that surrounds it and also leads to the sea. Here, facing the ocean, hidden from the road and the rest of the city by the recent yellow and pink neighbouring buildings that belong to Pestana Hotel where a casino and night club (Beach Club) operate, and almost acting as a private historical view for Pestana’s tourists and framing the artificial beach, are the ruins of the Fort. An analysis of the National Museum reveals an ambiguity and plastic mode of dealing with the past. Throughout the country, some of the former plantation buildings are now being used as tourist accommodation, while back in the museum, former plantations’ furniture are key artefacts. The catholic religion, which also arrived with white Europeans and was imposed on ‘barbarians’ without history and without religion,17 is in prominent display. Could the museum be elsewhere? An example of this ambiguity can be seen in the bank notes that are in circulation (all first issued in 1996). While they have King Amador and various
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15 Barros, ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Following the writings and characterisation of the four types of ‘negative barbarism’ of sixteenth-century Dominican Friar Bartolomé de las Casas (see Mignolo 2007: 471). © Copyrighted Material
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birds18 on the obverse, several colonial buildings and works are represented on the reverse: the grandiose promenade leading to Roça Agostinho Neto, with the large colonial hospital in the background (5,000); Papagaio’s bridge in Príncipe (10,000); the Santo António city bay, in Príncipe (20,000); and the central bank building (50,000). In 2008 a new 100,000 dobra bill was issued. Instead of the King Amador on the obverse, it has a representation of Francisco José Tenreiro, a national poet and geographer,19 and a grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus); the reverse depicts men in costumes with shields standing before the Floripes monument, celebrating Auto de Floripes in the city of Santo António on the island of Príncipe. This is a very popular cultural manifestation that has its routes in sixteenth-century Portuguese plays, which in turn had their origin in eleventhcentury tales (see Valverde 2000). It is also quite a paradox that the period of slavery is almost absent from the National Museum. Slavery is older than the Fort itself. Vogt (1973), for example, mentions that in 1532, a Portuguese ship named Santo António transported 201 Africans bought in the Kingdom of Benin, directly from São Tomé to the West Indies, marking one of the earliest Middle Passage voyages. The Fort certainly played an important role in the development of the Atlantic slave trade, and so have the warehouses where slaves were kept, the port where slaves disembarked from continental Africa and embarked for the Americas, and the Customs and the Foremanship, both built in the second half of the sixteenth century (Tomé 2004). The places of memory of slavery in STP, such as sugar mills, churches, markets, trees, legends, myths, theatre representations, and so on, as described in Henriques’ and Medeiros’ (2001) guide for the Lusophone world, are not present here. More disconcerting is that the country’s slavery archive – both the conventional physical, material and institutional storage of boxes and folders and especially the conceptual which allows for possibilities of future knowledge production and sites of contested knowledges – is inexistent. The construction of identity is done upon a balance of memory and forgetting (Ricoeur 2004), and almost more important than what is represented, it is the absences, the silences, the gaps. As suggested, the treatment of time is peculiar, but the treatment of space is also puzzling. Perhaps it is a detail, but the fact that the museum does not have a single map of the country in display signals the absence
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18 5,000 dobras: Papa Figo bird – Príncipe Glossy-starling (Lamprotornis ornatus); 10,000 dobras: Óssobô bird – African Emerald Cuckoo (Chrysococcyx cupreus); 20,000 dobras: Camussela bird – São Tomé Oriole (Oriolus crassirostris); 50,000 dobras: Conóbia bird – Endemic São Tomé Kingfisher (Alcedo thomensis). 19 Ironically, although considered to be one the great national poets (see Seibert 2008b), Tenreiro was an advocate of the Luso-tropical thesis (see Pimenta, Sarmento and Azevedo 2011), which attributed to the Portuguese all the vitality in the creation of creoles, transforming women in pure sexual objects. His work ‘Island of the Saint Name’ (Ilha do Nome Santo), precisely the work from which a quote is used in the dobra bill, confirms this ‘way of seeing’ corresponding to the ‘psychoses’ described by Fanon (see Henriques 2000). © Copyrighted Material
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of the geography of the country. The Museum is aspatial, and the exhibition is just a juxtaposition of different materials from different locations and times which scarcely serves to advance cultural dialogue. Finally, an interesting reading can be made from the large yard outside the Fort, regarding three large white statues: two fifteenth-century navigators who are credited with finding São Tomé – João de Santarém20 and Pero Escobar21 – and a nobleman to whom King João II of Portugal attributed São Tomé as a captaincy – João de Paiva22 (Figure 5.3). Inaugurated in the 1950s in three different public spaces in São Tomé city,23 the statues were dismantled after independence and taken to the yard in front of the Fort where they since remained. Dismantling and displacing the statues can be understood as a new beginning for the city, a cleansing process, the forgetting and nearly erasing the past western triumph, and is common to other postcolonial cities.24 Although colonial monuments still abound in the city and on their original places (such as the monument erected to commemorate the 500 anniversary of Henry the Navigator’s death in 1960, a standard colonial monument still found in Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Angola and East Timor), removing the ‘three dismantled men’, the embodiment of colonialism in human forms, to the Fort’s yard (and the Fort could hardly be moved), created a sort of a colonial corner, a neglected and empty space of colonial ghosts. Under this light, the establishment of the National museum inside the Fort is rather ambiguous. In the early 1990s, whilst still displaced in the colonial neglected space, the statues were reassembled and re-erected. In the original squares, we find simple, non-figurative concrete objects. These blank objects establish a tabula rasa, while no opportunity is given for self-representation. As Mbembe (2001) argues, more than resistance and opposition, the postcolony is defined by its baroque practices, ambiguous, fluid and modifiable. This is in sharp contrast with the modern impulse of exterminating ambivalence (Bauman 2001), conducted by mapping, classifying, producing heritage inventories, by UNESCO’s creation of global scale heritage mapping.
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20 Closer to the sea, sculpted by A. Duarte in 1952. 21 Further away from the sea, sculpted by Euclides Vaz in 1953. 22 In the middle, sculpted by J. Correia, also in 1952. 23 João de Santarém in front of Império cinema (presently cinema Marcelo da Veiga); João de Paiva next to the stadium, and Pero de Escobar in the Praça da Alfândega (Square of Customs, nowadays Independence Square). 24 The colonial statue of Lord Delamere in central Nairobi, Kenya (Larsen 2004), the equestrian statue of the Duke of Orleáns in Algiers, Algeria, the equestrian statue of King Leopold II in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (see Marschall 2008). © Copyrighted Material
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One of the inherited traditions of Western education in the last four hundred years is that of putting things in compartments, resulting in an incapacity to see the links that bind various categories. We are trained not to see connections between phenomena, and we become locked in Aristotelian categories. So the East becomes East, and the West becomes West, and never the twain shall meet! (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 2000: 120)
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It is perhaps an abrupt move to jump from my speculative readings of the micro geographies of the National Museum of STP and its host building, to a somehow vague and brief account of neighbouring Equatorial Guinea (EG) and other Gulf countries spatialities. Yet, such a move attempts not only to prevent a singleminded focus on STP, but, following on Mignolo’s (2007) border thinking, allows me to direct attention to the other trajectories in the Guinea Gulf region. By focusing on events that can modify the sleepy character of STP, events which are associated with places where ‘oil is a mentality and expectation’ (Oliveira 2007: 338), and which have the potential to rework memory and identity and transform the islands’ landscapes, I attempt to connect different experiences of exploitation, and speak back to changes that are already taking place in STP. While usually the ‘Scramble for Africa’ refers to the 1880s and 1890s endeavours of the partition of the African continent by various European countries, in the past 10 years, academics, politicians and the media have been referring to a ‘New Scramble for Africa’, pointing to commercial interests and increasing political involvement of the US and China, as well as other actors in the continent, all indicating the centrality of Africa in the twenty-first century (Frynas and Paulo 2007). Both scrambles are related to land and natural resources control. Although the former involved a formal partition conducted by colonial powers only, in the latter, clearly built upon oil and gas interests, states play an important role, paving the way for companies entrance in the African markets: opening, closing and re-opening embassies (the US in Equatorial Guinea, Brazil in STP in 2003), offering economic incentives, military aid, and promoting aidfor-oil schemes.25 Like in the past, the ‘new scramble for Africa’ is unsettling and recreating identity and memory, and is altering landscapes. Despite some parallel colonial dynamics, STP does not share with EG the deplorable post-independence violence and tyranny that the latter’s dictatorial regime has established in the past four decades, in a country which has the highest per capita income in Africa. Until recently, STP has been practically an observer in the huge transformations that oil has been operating in the Gulf of Guinea. Apparently, the scale of political unrest in Nigeria, the continuous upraising against the state and the resurgence of secessionist moves seem remote 25 China is currently building and rebuilding railways, roads, hospitals, schools, and governmental buildings in Angola in exchange for oil concessions. © Copyrighted Material
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to the dormant daily life of São Tomeans. STP’s closest neighbour has also been profoundly transformed by natural resources exploitation. Contrary to public discourses circulating in STP, oil developments have not generated significant job creation. As Maass (2009) describes in a ‘crude’ picture of the ‘oil world’, most workers are low-paid Asians (primarily Indians and Filipinos), who have previous experience in working in large projects, who can ‘easily’ work for 12 hours shifts, while managerial positions are filled by American or Europeans. The few locals working on-site are hired to comply with established quotas. In Malabo, business vitality relates mostly to nightlife and prostitution.26 Maass’ (2009) description of the Marathon natural gas facility in Malabo reveals an intense heterotopian enclave space, of a nature not comparable to those described at Sambala Resort, in Cape Verde, or Mazagan Resort, in Morocco (see Chapters 4 and 6). The whole site functions with imported materials and it is totally disconnected from local suppliers. The plant has its own satellite phone network,27 a power plant, water purification and sewerage systems, all independent from the local grid. Paint, portable toilets, wood, food, cranes, etc., all was imported. Clearly, in offshore explorations these issues are even more blatantly present. The recent controversy over the tourism resort at Rolas, (a small island off the south tip of São Tomé island), in which the Portuguese Pestana Group has been accused by politicians and local people of putting pressure on locals to abandon the island with the aim of creating a self-contained private tourism island, seems negligible when compared to the scale of land dispossession and inequalities registered in Nigeria and EG. Viewing the Gulf region from STP, it is somehow alarming to note that changes can occur quite fast. EG started to be an oil exporter in the 1990s, and very quickly became the third largest energy exporter in Sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria and Angola. Flights to Texas, became frequent and known as the ‘Houston Express’ (Maass 2009). In 2007, oil and gas revenues accounted for 91 per cent of GDP, 91 per cent of government revenues and 99 per cent of exports. In STP, oil exploration licences were granted to British and American companies as early as 1970 (Frynas, Wood and Oliveira 2003). Seismic studies and drilling proceeded in the 1980s and 1990s. More recent technology allowing exploration in deep sea areas created an optimist environment in turn of oil production (even the recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 does not seem to affect developments in this part of the world), and pressed on the negotiations on maritime borders. In 1998, for the first time after independence, the delineation of the 200 miles Exclusive Economic Zone (roughly 167,000 km2) was approved by the National Assembly,
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26 I do not have room here to discuss transformations in Annobón. Suffice to say that on top of its peripherality and poor connections to the other three islands and to mainland Africa, there are worrying signs that the island is a large-scale dumping of western countries’ toxic waste (Wood 2004). 27 In a reversal of space, calls to Houston were local calls, while calls to Malabo were international calls. © Copyrighted Material
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and in 1999 and 2001 maritime borders agreements with Equatorial Guinea and Gabon were reached. Yet, in 2000, negotiations between STP and Nigeria came to a halt, since Nigeria did not accept delimitation based on the equidistance principle (Frynas, Wood and Oliveira 2003). Faced with an eventual long legal dispute, STP agreed on establishing a Joint Development Zone (JDZ), in which costs and profits are shared at 60/40 per cent, in favour of Nigeria.28 Despite all projections and hopes of the past 20 years29 not a single drop of oil has been commercialised up to 2010. Two long decades of oil talk and oil expectations and geographical imaginations of landscapes that can finally escape the unequal wealth produced throughout centuries of colonialism have gone by. A simple newspaper analysis illustrates how oil has been high on the agenda. Let me discuss two central aspects of the anatomy of STP, viewed here in the regional context. Firstly, despite 20 years of multiparty democracy with relatively free and fair elections, STP is a very fragile state: continuous political instability, weak institutions and misappropriation of development funds.30 In 2001, STP president Fradique de Meneses turned to Jeffrey Sachs – a well-known development aid expert from New York Columbia University – for advice and for designing and implementing an oil revenue management law. Meneses also asked for assistance to the World Bank and to the IMF. In 2004, an oil law based mostly on Sachs’ team was unanimously approved in the National Assembly, aiming at preventing what is known as the ‘resource course’ (Macartan, Sachs and Stiglitz 2007). The law requires oil revenues to be deposited into an account with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, constituting a National Resource Fund, while only a small share of those revenues should be reinserted into the budget. The control of the oil should be in the hands of an 11-member Oil Control Commission, constituted by people of all political spectrums. Apparently the whole process is corruption free. Nevertheless, not only the Oil Control Commission has yet to be established,31 but the negotiations and oil contracts between the government of
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28 The JDZ covers an area of approximately 34,548 km2 in water depths of 1,500 metres in the northern segment to 4,000 metres in the south western sector. The treaty was signed in 2001, and the JDZ headquarters in Abuja, Nigeria, were inaugurated in 2002. 29 The International Monetary Fund (IMF), for example, forecasted that by 2009 the country would be producing 120,000 bbl/day, making it one of the more oil dependable countries in the world. 30 In 1997, former STP President Pinto da Costa (in Seibert 2006: 3), stated publicly that in STP ‘corruption spreads and enjoys impunity, hatred is a virtue, political power is exercised without consensual rules, and prosperity is sought through illicit actions and activities’. 31 During the conference ‘Transparency in the Management of Oil resources’, sponsored by the International Alert, the USAID and a Platform of Non Governmental Organisations, which took place in São Tomé (17‒19 February 2010), the journalists’ questions on the constitution of the Commission remained unanswered by the President and Vice-President of the National Assembly. The aspiration of a perfect incompatibility system in such a small country as STP is close to utopian. © Copyrighted Material
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STP and private companies,32 described by Frynas, Wood and Oliveira (2003) as unprecedented in Africa’s oil industry since colonialism, revealing severe flaws33 and a number of ‘major irregularities’, continued to be enclosed in secrecy and corruption (Seibert 2008a). In STP, negotiations, memoranda of agreement, letters of intent, stipulations, etc., have demonstrated not only the lack of experience of the country politicians in dealing with the oil dossiers, but also the absence of transparency and accountability (IMF 2002; Frynas, Wood and Oliveira 2003; Seibert 2008a; Weszkalnys 2009). Appalling examples from neighbours abound, as Nigeria, Angola and EG have been identified as countries in which oil revenues found their way into private accounts of corrupt governmental officials (Ariweriokuma 2009: 18; Maass 2009; Reed 2009). Historically, the comrades, clients, and cousins (Seibert 2006) have been looking after their own well being, and the open question is to know how much legislation and technical advice will change the existing status quo. Secondly, despite the apparent tranquillity of the country, continued political instability associated with two military coups d’état direct us to consider the eruption of social unrest. In 1995 a coup illustrated the discontentment of the military which in turn reflected the economic difficulties of the majority of the population, despite the wealth of various politicians and their relations. It also proved the fragility of the state without the intervention of international donors and other nations to solve the internal crisis (Seibert 1996). Again in 2003, a coup which symbolised a condemnation of a disjuncture in living standards (Seibert 2003) increased the dependence of STP on regional actors, notably Nigeria. While not being directly the consequence of the country’s hypothetical future oil wealth, the coup revealed the ‘dissatisfaction with the course of government petroleum policy and their frustration over exclusion from the expected economic benefits’ (Frynas, Wood and Oliveira 2003: 53). At this time there was a serious and committed involvement of three inter-state organisations and eight countries in the negotiation process to solve this coup, and in the normalisation of oil businesses and contracts. The bloodless nature of both coups and the relative easiness and promptness of their resolution, coupled with the absence of ethnic, religious and linguistic cleavages in the country point to a very different nature of reactions from those in the region. Many of the petro-states involved in the 2003 coup negotiations are characterised by violence, environmental and social degradation, and exclusion, as the egregious human rights violations of the Ogoni in Nigeria or the people of northern Angola demonstrate (Reed 2009). As Nash (2002) argues, colonialism continues in the present through modern systems of law and government, silencing or severely restricting the ability of first nations and indigenous people to contest their dispossession. For Mbembe (2001), it is ww w.a sh ga te. co m
32 Notably the ERHC (Environmental Remediation Holding Company), a small US firm which was later bought by Nigerians and is presently named Chrome Energy Corporation (see Frynas, Wood and Oliveira 2003; Seibert 2008a). 33 In favour ERHC/Chrome. © Copyrighted Material
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this uncontrolled violence, sparked by worsening inequalities and corruption, that may be the ultimate defeat of the African state as we have known it in recent years. Moving again to Equatorial Guinea, it is valuable to look at the recent developments taking place in its capital, Malabo.34 While the city is awkwardly lit at night by an orange glare from the oil platforms, resembling some Hollywood apocalyptic landscape scene, the ‘colonial’ dilapidated city is being frenetically traded by Malabo II, a totally new modern capital without memory which is under construction. The ‘old’ Malabo is about oil, with platforms scattered around the harbour, tankers steaming and refineries shooting off flames night and day (Lonely Planet 2007: 572). With roughly 100,000 inhabitants (80 per cent of whom do not have electricity or drinkable water), many of whom live in infra-human conditions the capital is being labelled as unviable for higher social classes. The past is decaying, and the rebuilding of the city’s social and physical fabric was abandoned in favour of a totally new and separated city. With an estimated cost of 750 million dollars (OECD 2008), dystopian Malabo II, overlooks ‘old’ Malabo from a hill, but is located a world away. The glass and steel city of large avenues and parks, has a state of the art stadium, conference centre, government buildings, a new parliament, presidential palace, apartment blocks, etc., constructed mainly by Chinese, Moroccan and Lebanese contractors. The city represents the modernity of EG, the global power of this tiny African country, and the cornerstone of a novel phase of public investment. Marking the importance of festivities and celebrations as vehicles of commandement (Mbembe 2001), some of these developments were lavishly inaugurated by President Obiang Neguema, on June 2009, on the occasion of his 66th birthday. EG is trying to reposition itself within the complex geopolitical space of West Africa. While being the only Spanish speaking African country, French, and more recently Portuguese, are also official languages. The latter was adopted by decree in 2010, as EG applied to upgrade its position from associate observer to permanent member of the Lusophone Space of the Community of Countries of Portuguese Language (CPLP). Established in 1996, CPLP can be understood as a postcolonial re-configuration of the Portuguese empire, in the form of a 240 million people (200 million in Brazil alone) community of relatively peripheral countries which have historical, cultural and linguistic bounds. For the moment the application has failed (the unofficial reason being that the community values the promotion of democratic practices, good governance and human rights, despite poor records on part of some members on these same issues) – but it is only a matter of time before the ‘new scramble for Africa’ (Frynas and Paulo 2007) dictates an enlargement of this imagined (and real) community. With the arguments of a shared culture,
34 Malabo was first founded by the British in 1827 and named Port Clarence or Clarencetown. Later, the Spanish renamed it Santa Isabel, and in 1973 it gained its African name. © Copyrighted Material
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history, heritage, and now language,35 Sonangol, Gepetrol (‘states within states’), Petrobras, Galp and many other large companies will be able to proceed in deeper business engagements and accumulating wealth. All oil rich CPLP permanent members have already officially and publically demonstrated support for EG entry. Viewed from STP, and even considering their unparalleled sizes, lessons from Brazzaville, Luanda and Lagos together with the developments at Malabo II should provide enough material to reflect not only on the degenerate, out of control, unjust cities that are thriving in oil rich countries (see UN-Habitat 2010), but also on the lack of discussion on the material and intangible heritage of these places. São Tomé city is a rather lethargic and small African capital, which reflects the stagnant economy of the country, and most physical renovations result from NGOs actions and from internationally funded projects. Furthermore, and closer to the concerns of this chapter, is the fact that a fragile state in which politics and economics are overwhelmingly dominated by international entities (IMF, World Bank, International donors, NGOs), is a state which has little power over the fragmentation or dissolution of local public culture and memory. Therefore, creative destruction and gusts of neocolonialism that destabilise landscape and public memory in the Gulf of Guinea at large should be carefully examined. Under these circumstances public memory, as discussed bellow, becomes a vulnerable hostage of neoliberal paths, ambitions and imposed obligations.
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The Inability to Territorialise Memory
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The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. (Milan Kundera 1981: 3)
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In 1953, as a consequence of an unrelenting brutal work recruitment policy led by the colonial government (supported and practiced by Governor Carlos Gorgulho), Forros revolted against what they considered to be slave work. The authorities response to this upraise was disproportional and the imprisonment, inquire, torture and massacre of dissidents took place in STP. To substantiate the brutal response, the governor, who had also been engaged in a powerful colonial spatial ordering in the city, enveloped the occurrence in a hypothetical communist conspiracy. Still today the death toll is uncertain and different sources point to numbers that range from 30 to 2,000 (Seibert 1997). Regardless, the 1953 Massacre is regarded by São Tomeans as a key moment in the independence struggle, ‘used as one of the founding myths of anti-colonial resistance’ (Seibert 2002: 293), and it has been lived and commemorated as such since independence. On a poem inspired by the events Alda do Espírito Santo transposes her anger and revolt by questioning 35 Annobón Creole, a Portuguese based Creole, is spoken by about 4,000 Annobonese: 2,000 still living in Annobon and the other 2,000 dislocated in Bioko (Hagemeijer 1999, see also Ladhams 2009). They represent a tiny minority in a country with 650,000 inhabitants. © Copyrighted Material
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‘Where Are the Men Hunted on This Wind of Madness?’36 A 4th grade school manual published in 1979 (Ministério de Educação Nacional e Desporto 1979: 13 and 16) opens with the lyrics of the national anthem, followed by the importance of the national heroes (‘the martyrs of freedom/on the beaches of Fernão Dias/ Massacre of 53/Heroes of the People’) and a coloured photograph of Fernão Dias beach and the pier accompanied by a poem. This massacre is also commonly referred as the Batepá war, almost as if in STP an independence/colonial war had taken place, in a similar fashion to Angola, Guinea Bissau or Mozambique. For the nationalists, this is the key date that signals the beginning of a new struggle phase which led to the formation of the Committee for the Liberation of STP (CLSTP) in 1960, a movement created in exile with headquarters in Gabon. The 3rd of February was officially named ‘Day of the Martyrs of Colonialism’ and renamed in 1980 ‘Day of the Heroes of Liberty’ (Seibert 1997, 2006). In 1976, a ‘March of the Youth’, starting from Independence Square and going in the direction of Fernão Dias beach, some 10 kilometres north of the capital, commemorated for the first time this event. Through this postcolonial memory practice the place surrounding the pier where an uncertain number of bodies were thrown into the sea became the lieu de mémoire of the traumatic events of 1953. In the words of President Pinto da Costa at his 1976 speech: ‘By working hard to construct this country destroyed by five centuries of colonisation we shall succeed in honouring the memory of the martyrs of February 1953’. After 1991 a religious ceremony takes place annually on February 3, and from 1993, when a simple monument was erected in front of the Pier – a concrete pillar covered with different tiles, this ceremony takes place in Fernão Dias. Celebrations are officially positioned and endorsed as empowering and inclusive, fostering unity and nation-building. Every year flowers are laid by the president at the modest monument in Fernão Dias paying homage to the victims of the massacre. Yet, in August 2008, following a feasibility study pointing the country’s advantageous location for a regional hub for container shipping in West Africa (U.S. Trade and Development Association), the government signed a 300 million euro (400 million dollar) contract with the French company – Terminal Link37 – to build a deep sea port in the country. Ironically, and after various prospective studies, the lieux de mémoire was elected as the best location for the engagement with the global shipping economy and industry. The port is expected to handle 2 million containers per year, generating 1,000 direct jobs and another 3,000 indirectly (Pinho 2008), so its future economic and social importance, cannot be underestimated. In the first year of operations an income of about half of the country’s GDP would be generated. This is not an isolated development and the
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36 Onde estão os homens caçados neste vento de loucura? 37 Terminal Link is a wholly-owned subsidiary of CMA CGM S.A, the world’s third largest French container transportation and shipping company, which uses 200 shipping routes between 400 ports in 150 different countries (URL http://www.cma-cgm.com corporate web site, February 2010). © Copyrighted Material
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trajectory out of a forgotten location can also be seen through various emerging projects, such as the refilling station for ships in Neves (27 kilometres north of São Tomé), a 20 million euro investment of Sonangol, the Angolan national oil company (see Oliveira 2007a; Reed 2009). In the middle of all the hype surrounding this investment, in August 2009, 12 months after the agreement signature, and as part of the initial works on the 40 hectare site, the Fernão Dias monument was demolished (Figure 5.4). The discrete and swift bulldoze generated widespread discomfort and protest and also an uncertainty about the 2010 memory commemorations. The situation considerably aggravated when news that the French company was going through a financial crisis led to postponing the deep port construction starting date to 2011. On a large photo in a weekly newspaper, Alda do Espírito Santo stated that this destruction ‘was a lack of respect towards the people of São Tomé and Príncipe’ (Semanário o País, 6 February 2010). As I fixed the debris of Fernão Dias monument on my photographic camera, I had the illusion of reclaiming it from the further effects of time – that is, from death.
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Figure 5.1
Fort S. Sebastião
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Source: The author, February 2010.
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Figure 5.2
Fort S. Jerónimo
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Source: The author, February 2010.
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Figure 5.3
Three statues outside the Fort
Source: The author, February 2010.
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Destroyed monument of Fernão Dias
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Source: The author, February 2010.
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Figure 5.4
Figure 5.5
Provisional monument of Fernão Dias
Source: The author, February 2010.
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Figure 5.6
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Future site of Fernão Dias Monument with pieces from old monument ww w.a sh ga te. co m
Source: The author, February 2010.
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A short multiparty system history, together with the fact that 2010 was an election year, exacerbated the public debate about the monument’s destruction. Shortly before the 2010 annual commemoration, the government decided to endorse the building of a temporary monument located in the Plantation of Fernão Dias, roughly one kilometre from where the old monument was located. The monument, built with an iron frame and covered with plaster and other materials, depicts a coloniser whipping a slave (Figure 5.5), and was made in record time by two artists from the Association of Plastic Artists of STP (Zéme and Armindo Lopes). Artists from São Tomé were also commissioned to represent the colonial history in a series of paintings that were hanged along the ruined walls of a warehouse, behind the monument. On a rather bizarre gesture, the government secretly brought a few pieces of the monument debris to the main yard of Fernão Dias, in an attempt to mark the place where it intends to build a new monument (Figure 5.6). All of this takes place within a set of old colonial plantation buildings and among an extremely impoverished population. On the previous day of the commemorations the minister for education and culture, Jorge Bom Jesus, announced that a public competition was open for the construction of a new monument that should be completed by 2011. To the newspaper Correio da Semana (6 February 2010: 9) the minister explained that the idea is not to have an open air monument similar to the one just demolished, © Copyrighted Material
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but ‘a kind of chapel, with a documentation and information space, with windows and doors, etc.’. According to the government (on various newspapers), financial assistance to build this ‘new site of memory’ is expected to emerge from the company Terminal Link. Further discourses related to the construction of a museum in this plantation, a documentation centre, social housing, and so on, can only be understood in the context of the vicinity of electoral elections. On the 3rd February 2010, about 600 youngsters participated in the march starting at Independence Square (Correio da Semana, 6 February 2010: 5). Before mass was given by the bishop at the new monument, there was a minute of silence in front of the ruins of the demolished monument. It is rather ironical that one of the reasons to build a deep sea port in Fernão Dias is the political stability of the country in the regional context, while at the same time the site is precisely the one of the few where there is a national consensus on memory and on the commemoration of the past. The building of the new monument is dependent on the financial health of a French company and on the neoliberal logics of building of the deep sea port. On its turn the construction of the latter is dependent on the advances of the oil dossier in STP and on the geopolitical situation of West Africa. The destruction of a monument and the supposed construction of a new one highlight the complicated and entangled nature of this place, where the commemoration of the past has been silenced and is hostage of the inevitable and relentless pace of the neoliberal project. It also reveals the extraordinary power and performative force of colonial modernity: ‘I ask you, Europe, I ask you: now what?’ (Medeiros in Hamilton 1975: 371).
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Epilogue
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Unlike a celebration of colonial architecture such as that commemorated in the neocolonial style of the ‘Seven Wonders of Portuguese Origin in the World’ (Chapter 1), I argue here for a centrality of the Fort as a material site that can critically contribute to the dynamics of São Tomean identity. A postcolonial approach to the Fort would be the continuation of the work of its decolonisation which started in 1976 but for various reasons stopped. As STP made its way from a socialist to a multiparty system and from a diplomatically isolated country into a liberal and even neoliberal economy (if for a moment we close our eyes to the overwhelming importance of foreign aid), the National Museum should engage openly and critically with the interpretation of the country’s colonial built heritage. The Fort in STP is very different from those in Ghana (see MacGonagle 2006; Jordan 2007). It is not a magnet for tourists, it is not a focal point for roots tourism (which does not exist as such here), it is not a return to Africa trip for blacks, and yet, millions for Elmina crossed STP. Just as in Cape Verde’s sweet past (Chapter 4), the Fort does not link disparate continents, identities or cultures and does not demonstrate the fragmentary character of space. The ‘Atlantic triangle’ © Copyrighted Material
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coined by Paul Gilroy (1993) is not present. As it fails to establish connections, as the museum remains a frozen attempt at mimicking the colonisers’ western behaviours of memory-making, the island does not come out of itself and apparently it turns itself into a prison. The Fort does not mark the origins of African Diasporic identities. One wonders … where were the warehouses where slaves were kept? Where were the slave auction markets? STP ignores its trophy, not allowing for the Creole nation to emerge from invisibility! The country’s ‘distinctive historicity’ (Mbembe 2001) is rooted in a multiplicity of times, trajectories, and rationalities, which must be conceptualised and understood in relation to a globalised world, for which the National Museum housed at the Fort is not able to respond. Following Mignolo’s (2007) ideas on the decolonisation of knowledge, the ‘museum’ (maybe I should be calling it something else) should be a place where different experiences of colonisation and exploitation are engaged and de-linked from modern rationality. A possible world is destabilising the dominant view of the country as insular by engaging with the rich recent geographies of resistance embedded in the region at large, from actions in exiles like Libreville in Gabon or Accra in Ghana, to the links of socialist times with Cuba, the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic, rewriting history from a more multicultural perspective. It is in this regard that what is happening in Equatorial Guinea, together with other histories of exploitation and resistance in the Gulf of Guinea are central to this neglected trophy. On a harsher analysis I could say that forgetfulness can be understood as a sort of capitulation to and perpetuation of former injustices. As Gandhi (1998) argues anti-colonial nationalists and post-colonial states sought to forget the past through a process of amnesia, as the basis of historic self invention and the erasure of what we may call violent memories. This repression has usually failed to surpass the past. The National Museum does not provide a distanced historical account of São Tomé (in its secular, intellectual and critical sense), but at the same time is does not constitute memory in Nora’s (1989) terms, understood as life, as permanent evolution and open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting. Perhaps the longevity of this structure of dominance has just coming to an end. On the one hand I have attempted to illustrate how a close attention to the space of the museum and its memory work, is arguably an effective route to follow the nature of public memory and its forms, transformation and meanings within civil society. But on the other hand, perhaps the museum is not the place to take advantage of the trophy. Identity and memory circulate and are constructed in various ways and most importantly, they are not forged by transnational processes. Perhaps I should have studied how the museum conveys meaning in the everyday life. It is in school visits and teachers’ words that subjectivities are constituted. Heritage promoted by the colonial and postcolonial state through official sites of memory are often irrelevant for local communities, which find different ways of engaging and commemorating the past, through songs, poetry, storytelling, ritual action and other performances (Marschall 2008). McMahon’s (2008) work on the performative role of memory through theatre plays in Cape © Copyrighted Material
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Verde, suggests that the actors’ imaginative use of the past, through changing representations of race, colonial authority and historical subjects’ agency, can have lasting repercussions on the way a nation remembers its past. Tchiloli is a good example of how the past is revived annually through an historical performance (Valverde 2000). It is a hybrid cultural manifestation that is purely São Tomean. It represents counter-modernity, an act of resistance to the modern project of subjectification and subjection. At the same time, perhaps neglecting the trophy constitutes an unplanned strategy of dealing with the colonial past, and just as with the Vasco da Gama memorial in Malindi which is neglected and abandoned (Chapter 2), forgetting the past is a way of engaging with the trophy, as proof of the fragility of power.
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Chapter 6
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In the Shadows of Mazagan: The Medina of Azamour, Morocco
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(…) the fatal attractions of colonial nostalgia are inscribed within contemporary cultures of travel. Derek Gregory (2001: 113)
Introduction
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In 2010, at a Lisbon exhibition named ‘D. Afonso V and the invention of glory’ (12 June to 12 September), four late-fifteenth-century (1471 to 1475) large tapestries (4x10 metres) depicting the Fall of Tangier (1), and the trilogy of the Landing (2), Siege (3) and Assault (4) of Arzila were at public display in Portugal. Concerned about his future image, and with a fundamental desire for celebration, Afonso V – the Portuguese king known as the African (1432‒81) – chose to sumptuously and monumentally represent and portrait these key historical events in silk and wool, commissioning Flemish artists who wove time and space.1 At a first glance we may wonder at the sheer size and detailed account of the glorious dynamics of conquest: tough soldiers, elegant horses, the king himself, royal postures, ships, cannons, firearms, armours, pikes, standards, banners, and so on. Yet, in a more meticulous analysis, we can also recognise that this contact zone (Pratt 1992) depicts dispossession and sack. While narrating the event more than providing a good perspective onto the site,2 the Pastrana tapestries not only illustrate the ‘panoply of glory’, but depict what Mbembe (2001) describes as the founding violence, reflected in the depiction of various mothers carrying their babies and infants on their backs leaving the town. Certainly, notions of acceptable behaviour in warfare are quite different now than in the fifteenth century, otherwise the king would not chose to represent these scenes of dispossession.
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1 Produced at the Tournai workshops, they have been, at least from the seventeenth century, at the Pastrana Collegiate Church, Spain. Almost five centuries after being made, Salazar (the Portuguese dictator who was in power between 1926 and 1968) unsuccessfully tried to bring the original tapestries from Spain, but as he failed he ordered copies to be made in the 1930s. The copies are permanently at display in Guimarães. One other remarkable representation of the conquest of Azamour can be found in Vila Viçosa, south Portugal. Here three large tile panels from circa 1600 tell one story of this event. 2 ‘The architecture of the city [Arcila] under siege is reminiscent of that of northern Europe (…) it bears no resemblance at all to the actual layout and defences of the Moroccan city’ (Bunes 2010: 65). © Copyrighted Material
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This chapter focuses primarily on the material and imagined geographies of the medina of Azamour, a relatively small city in Western Morocco. The rationale behind this choice is the fact that the city – medina, literally meaning city, is generally the older part of an Arab or Muslim city – was occupied and strongly modified by the Portuguese between 1513 and 1542. I will begin by locating the trajectory of historical cities in Morocco in the discussion of Orientalism, and its significance in the construction of imagined geographies of the ‘other’, in the fascination that medinas hold for western eyes and in the recent boom of a luxury tourism based on a colonial present. I then trace the development of Azamour, briefly sketching its social and economic decline, and highlighting what seems to me the ambiguous presence and absence of its Portuguese heritage. After pointing to some experiences of tourists in Azamour, I attempt to establish a brief dialogue between the Portuguese and Arabic heritage legacy of this urban settlement and El Jadida, a much larger and important coastal city, located about 15 kilometres to the south, and principally with the recently open Mazagan Resort, seen by many as having the potential to change Azamour’s sleepy character, producing substantial changes in visitor numbers, real estate prices, employment, and so on, within the context of a contemporary tourism shift in Morocco. To a certain degree I may think of my work here as shapeless, impressionistic and limited. Wandering and meandering through the medina, back and forth from the souk to the casbah, is seen as a strategy of research. I do not use any codified field methodology, any professional detachment, any systematic write up. This meandering – the geographer as a tourist and the tourist as geographer – can be understood as a way of feeling the urban space, of touching what westerners have been labelling as the problematic maze of little streets and squares, of both old and gentrified houses, of engaging with what Bensmaïa (2003: 28) calls the poeticalrhetorical imaginary of the medina. But my interpretative power is limited. What I see is very far from what there is. Somehow to complement these meanderings, and to group together the disperse materials and information I collected, I have conducted various interviews with key people, from hotel owners to the official representatives of the Ministries of Culture and Tourism in the Doukkala-Abda region. Talking to people on the street proved to be a hard task, since my knowledge of Arabic is quite limited and I cannot speak any of the other languages spoken in Morocco. Yet, many conversations occurred with people that speak French. Various informal conversations with the few, independent and occasional tourists in Azemmour also took place. Finally, an analysis of comments and reviews that people that visited Azamour left on various web sites was also conducted. Available sources on Azamour are scarce and often limited to historical accounts of the Portuguese period. Hence, at times I resort to illustrating ideas by pointing at other places, such as Fez, Marrakesh or Essaouira. It seems appropriated to close with a chapter that examines a Moroccan Fort. Firstly, because it was in the Atlantic islands and in North Africa that the Portuguese colonial endeavour began, and consequently, this book’s narrative © Copyrighted Material
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starts.3 The conquest of Ceuta in 1415 initiated a military settlement process of preexisting Islamic cities in North Africa: Alcacer Ceguer (1458), Arcila and Tangier (1471), Safi (1508) and Azamour (1513), interspersed with attempts to create new fortified bases along the coast (Moreira 1989a). Secondly, although viewed as a distant and exotic land in Portugal, Morocco is Portugal’s closest neighbour apart from Spain. Lisbon is closer to Rabat than to Paris, Faro is closer to Tangiers than to Lisbon (Daveau 2004). Yet, despite the long Islamic influences, which did not end with the re-conquest in 1249, Portuguese identity has been built to a large extent upon an epic history of territorial conquest based upon Christianity, especially during the Estado Novo, and until very recently national narratives have almost completely erased Islam. Portugal has one of the most discreet Muslim presences in Europe, which largely results from the process of decolonisation, since this community is made up mostly of people from Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. Historiography efforts to include Islamic legacy as part of the nation have often resulted in idealised constructions. All this contributes towards a widespread unawareness of the other and contributing to the enactment of forgetfulness (see Vakil 2003; Tiesler 2005). The decision to include a chapter on Morocco opens up the discussion of heritage, identity, tourism, and so on, to the Arab world and to spaces such as the Middle East and North Africa Region, while at the same time implicates a closer, although limited to space, look at French and Spanish colonialism,4 Not only one of the main propositions of this book is to explore the links between apparently unconnected ‘sites of memory’ – so this choice is here understood as constructive – but this focus onto Morocco attempts to undermine a certain partition of geographical markers into different analysis, which have hindered a fuller appreciation of the African colonial and postcolonial experiences in wider and varied cultural contexts.
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3 This first phase of Portuguese expansion in North Africa has been named the ‘period of conquest’ (1415‒1515), and was ruled by João I (1385‒1433), Duarte I (1433‒8), Afonso V (1438‒81), João II (1481‒95) and Manuel I (1495‒1521). 4 Whereas the French protectorate (1912‒56) occupied 90 per cent of the Moroccan territory, and its presence was colonialist and social Darwinist, the Spanish protectorate (1912‒56), which capital was Tetuán, accounted for the other 10 per cent ‒ all the north from Arcila/Larache to Melilla, and the south in the Draa river and Tarfaya regions ‒ and was much more militarised. Previous to the establishment of the Spanish protectorate, Spain and Morocco were involved in a series of war and military campaigns since 1859 (see Cererols 2008), which served, among many other things, to establish the idea in Europe of the inferiority of the Moroccan people. Spain still has a territorial presence in North Africa, in the colonial existence of Ceuta and Melilla exclaves, and an ambiguous political attitude towards the Western Sahara. © Copyrighted Material
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‘Disdainful Immutability’
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Edward Said was one of the first to write and engage with Orientalism (Said 2003), an intellectual movement that questioned the ways in which the west constructed ‘an other’ space to define and identify itself (see Sharp 2009). In France, at the time of the Third Republic (1870‒1940), vast territories began to feed the imagination of large audiences, and Algeria, Morocco and other North African spaces under the French flag became terrains of exploration, where sensuality, desert, oasis and purity contrasted with Parisian culture (Benjamin 2003). As Sharp (2009) describes, the French painter Eugène Delacroix commented on the scene of his painting ‘The Fanatics of Tangier’ by saying that ‘their enthusiasm excited by prayers and wild cries, they enter into a veritable state of intoxication, and, spreading through the streets, perform a thousand contortions, and even dangerous acts’. For Delacroix, the fanatics ‘reached a state of ecstasy which allowed them to walk on red-hot coals, eat scorpions, lick red-hot irons and walk on sword blades, all apparently without noticing their injuries. This image of impassioned religion, steeped in mysticism and secret rites, stood in stark contrast to the restrained and orderly practices of religion in Europe of the time’ (Sharp 2009: 22). For the French, the independent state of Morocco, where power was divided between the sultans in the urban areas and the tribal and Sufi leaders in the countryside, represented an ancient and inaccessible Moorish culture (Benjamin 2003) which could provide new and exotic experiences. Its symbolic status had been established by Delacroix’s watercolours and canvases, images later revised by rare visitors like Benjamin Constant and Henri Regnault. After the annexation of 1912, Matisse was among the first to arrive there in what became a veritable flood of painters and writers. As Said argues, it was precisely the process of invoking and citing one another that allowed to sustain a canonised tradition of Orientalism, that both invites and legitimates claims to authenticity and truth (Gregory 2001). Pierre Loti, an openly anticolonial nineteenth-century French writer, wrote in his travelogue Au Maroc (1890), the following passage, demonstrating his preservationist attitude: ‘O sombre Maghreb, stay, for a long while yet, walled in, impenetrable to things new. Turn your back upon Europe and immobilise yourself in the ways of the past … May Allah conserve for the Arab people its mystic dreams, its disdainful immutability, and its gray rags!’ (Loti quoted in Benjamin (2003: 169). Loti had followed on Delacroix footsteps in Morocco, and Henri Matisse did it also, after reading Loti’s travelogue. In the contested city of Tangiers, Matisse chose to paint the least European aspects, and attempted to construct and perpetuate scenes of traditional Moroccan life that contrasted heavily with the existent cosmopolitan, polyglot and modernised landscapes of the city. The casbah was his favourite subject, which for him signified the indigenous stronghold and active resistance space to the colonial power. Edward Said insists upon the continuity of Orientalism and Eurocentric views of the world into the present. These are now embedded in new forms, and just as the Orient is not uniform, Europe is far from being homogeneous. © Copyrighted Material
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In the early twentieth century, Portuguese intellectuals certainly followed this Orientalism perspective of their French and British counterparts. These views were already present in several nineteenth-century architecture works in the country, such as in the Monserrat or Pena Palaces in Sintra, for example, and also in literature. But if Orientalism was dominant within these circles, it is not so clear that it was a widespread thought. Al Maghrib – the extreme west – the most western territory of North Africa, which was actually the South and not so much the East, was not finely enveloped in prejudice and romanticism. Up to 1956, the long stretch of the south side of the Mediterranean was Spanish territory, a large region for commerce and trade and a close social space. In the first decades of the twentieth century, there were several thousands of Portuguese emigrants in Spanish Morocco, and a close proximity of social and economic relations between the two countries supported a thriving industry of tuna fishing and canning in the south of Portugal, in the Algarve. Albet-Mas (2006), referring to the Spanish case, argues that in the early twentieth century, North Africa was viewed more like an extension of the Iberian Peninsula than as home of a full oppositional other. Indisputably, Said’s Orientalism must be here used cautiously in the Iberian Peninsula, as he himself as recognised in relation to Spain on the preface of the Spanish translation of main work (Said 2002). Unlike in Algeria, ruled directly from Paris, in Morocco, Marshal HubertGonzalve Lyautey shared power with the Sultan and his governmental forces (the makhzen) between 1912 and 1925 (see Benjamin 2003). Under his guidance, protectorate Morocco is interesting not only for its experiments in fostering the indigenous decorative arts, but also for the tremendous changes on the way urban planning was done in the country (the colonies as laboratories of modernism). The touristic value of some Moroccan cities (not Azamour) was identified very early in the protectorate period: for Porter (2000), Rabat as a showpiece of French colonialism and Fes as the exemplar of oriental urbanism. As early as 1918 the entire medina of Fes was classified by the Service of Fine Arts as an historical monument. At the same time, as Porter (2000: 65) argues in the case of Fes, ‘protectorate administrators were often the authors of tourist guide books and used this genre of literature to disseminate romantic images of Fes to wider audiences’. The colonialist and imperialist view of Morocco was present in various mediums and channels. At the end of the nineteenth century, palaces, exuberant interiors and beduin tents were striking in world exhibitions (Çelik 1992) In 1918, the tourism authorities published a special issue entitled France-Maroc. In 1919, the French publisher Hachette released the Guide Bleu Le Maroc (significantly, Lyautey wrote the preface to the third edition). In both publications Orientalism is clearly present, with its decaying but colourful ancient civilisation, completely different from Europe, a place of extraordinary grandeur, a dream world of the Arabian Nights. Travellers tales conveyed similar messages (see Hunter 2010 for an analysis of Edith Wharton’s travels in 191‒720 which points in this direction). Garcia Ramon, Nogué and Zusman (2008), argue that Catalan travellers to Morocco in the period between 1858 and 1936, share with their other European counterparts © Copyrighted Material
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the idea of a civilising mission and concerns regarding the preservation of local identities. By the mid 1930s tourism was one of the most important earners in Morocco. Henri Terrase, the Director of the Service of Fine Arts and Historical Monuments (1935‒56), continued the policy of preservation, and among many actions and pieces of legislation he struggled to prevent the modernisation and renovation of historical quarters, by blocking electrification, the use of steel doors, and the arrival of other quotidian infrastructures (see Porter 2000). It was at this time (1927) that in Azamour the ‘Portuguese’ ramparts were classified.5 Through policy, the medinas were being separated from modernity. The perseverance of the idea of Morocco as timeless, pure and primitive continued even after independence, such as through the international art market’s valorisation and demand for Orientalist, ‘naïve’ art, for the exotic other, despite strong opposition by Moroccan modernist artists (Pieprzak 2010). Tallal (in Pieprzak 2010: 106) a Moroccan academic painter argued in the late 1960s: ‘I am a Moroccan – thus I have no need to paint a mosque or a fantasia to prove it (…) And anyway, I think that Delacroix has already painted everything about Morocco and that there is nothing to add’. ww w.a sh ga te. co m
Bipolar Cities
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The French colonial efforts and policies designed to protect historical cities, (which created a dual urban management and reality of traditional and modern), were not followed after independence. In part as a result of the lack of national expertise in the field, heritage protection was enforced by colonial legislation up to 30 years ago. After the inscription of the medinas of Fes and Marrakesh in the UNESCO World Heritage List (1981 and 1985 respectively), various actions took place: the creation of the Direction du Patrimoine Culturel (1985), the opening of the Institut des sciences de l’archéologie et du patrimoine (1986), and the establishment of the Agence de dédensification et de réhabilitation de la médina de Fès (1992). Presently, and among MENA countries (Middle East and North Africa Region), Morocco has the highest number of medinas inscribed as properties in the UNESCO World Heritage List (besides Fes and Marrakesh): Meknes (1996), Tétouan (1997), Essaouira (2001) and El Jadida (2004). Despite these encouraging facts, the protection and rehabilitation of historical cities in Morocco has been considered quite fragile (Cernea 2001; D’ Ayala and Copping 2007). As the 2005 Human Development Report – Morocco states, ‘anthropological and architectural heritage remains at the mercy of the erosion of time and human degradation despite classification of many sites and works as world cultural heritage’ (UNDP 2006: 9). With an annual population growth of 3.5 per cent, the majority of Moroccans presently live in urban areas (56 per cent). Urban growth has led to the rise of shanty towns in the peripheries of the larger cities and to the occupation of 5 Decree 9 November 1927 (790: 719). © Copyrighted Material
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many historical cities buildings, contributing to its degradation. In the past decades, international and national programmes aiming at promoting security and eradicating potential focus of insurgence groups, slum and poverty alleviation, and heritage rehabilitation, became common in northern Africa in general, and in Morocco in particular. These types of programmes are often interconnected, and it is now a commonplace in international reports to argue that culture is ‘a key issue in developing strategies and aid programmes’ (European Commission 2007: 7). These programmes are responses to the changing nature of cities and are one of the palpable ways in which urban areas are altering. Following the 2003 Casablanca bombings,6 housing became an urgent matter in the country, and the government quickly approved a programme (2004) called Villes sans Bidonvilles (Cities without slums), which aimed at eliminating slums in 83 urban centres in Morocco by 2012. Roughly at the same time, UN Habitat also launched two campaigns in the Arab region aimed at eradicating slums. By the end of March 2010, 154,000 shacks had been demolished in Morocco, and over 30 cities were already declared ‘sans bidonvilles’. In Azamour, 653 households should be built by the end of 2010 (Al Omrane 2010). Despite positive achievements, cities such as Kénitra, Larache, Rabat, and Casablanca still pose real problems, since the extent of shanty towns is massive. At the same time, a rising rural exodus is quickly counterbalancing the successes of these programmes.7 The European Union (EU) has also been concerned about the developments in North African urban areas, of which the EU funded Euromed Heritage programme is an example. It is promoted as contributing to the ‘mutual understanding and dialogue between cultures through the Mediterranean region by the valorisation of cultural heritage’, creating ‘new opportunities for people’s awareness and appropriation of their extraordinary common cultural heritage’.8 Bridging urban heritage and poverty and security has also been a concern to the World Bank in North Africa since the 1980s. Fes, a city with an historic centre that has been characterised as in crisis (Serageldin 2001), was the target of the first large poverty-reduction oriented approach to cultural conservation (Cernea 2001) of the
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6 The attacks resulted in the death of 45 people (12 suicide-bombers and 33 victims). The perpetrators, part of the Salafia Jihadia group, lived in the Casablanca suburb bidonvilles of Sidi Moumen, a place which lacks any kind of communal life. It was said that the suicide bombers saw the centre of Casablanca for the first time on the day of the attack (Bellala 2004), and in an abrupt reversal of the metropolitan privilege, Bauman’s (1998) ‘vagabonds’ made themselves visible to the world. 7 Although an old phenomena, rural to urban migration has increased dramatically in the past decades. 8 This programme has its origins in the Barcelona Declaration of 1985 (‘to the end of building an area of peace, security and prosperity’), developed into MEDA (a financial instrument for regional co-operation managed by the European Commission’s EuropeAid Co-operation Office between 1998 and 2008) which run three programmes: Euromed Heritage I (1998‒2004), II (2002‒7) and III (2004‒8). Euromed Heritage IV (2008‒12) has a budget of 17 million euros. © Copyrighted Material
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World Bank in Morocco. Despite its ambitious targets – ‘the Fes Medina project may become the forerunner of a line of urban/cultural interventions with great benefits for the country’s poor and the general population, and with rewards for the global community’ (Cernea 2001: 75) – the World Bank has evaluated the project outcomes as unsatisfactory. The ‘overall state of the housing stock of the medina has not improved, with the exception of the project interventions and of the private investments in the transformation of about thirty palatial homes into up-scale boutique hotels’ (World Bank 2006: 4). The contribution towards a dual medina is clear – poverty alleviation was rated as unsatisfactory – and interestingly, the report also highlights that there was ‘a significant impact on the attractiveness of the Medina to cultural tourism visitors’, since ‘conservation of key cultural assets along tourism itineraries (…) has taken place’ (World Bank 2006: 5). Likewise, there is no surprise to whom the World Bank points out as winners and losers in the rehabilitation project of the medina of Marrakesh. In the first group are property owners who benefit from an increase in property values and entities involved in real estate transactions and other tourism related operations; in the second group are renters who have increasing difficulty to find accommodation, inhabitants of degraded housing, and people whose neighbourhoods have seen the replacement of traditional shops catering for local needs by tourist-serving establishments (World Bank 2010: 10). Moroccan medinas, unlike those from Algeria which suffered extensive damage during the French colonial period (Sari and Justin 2000), are increasingly attractive for foreign investments (D’ Ayala and Copping 2007; Lee 2008; Kurzac-Souali 2007), and some (Tangier, Rabat, Fes and Essaouira) register strong gentrification processes. The medinas of Marrakesh and Fes have been the two most important places where extensive social and spatial transformation driven by European-led property investment has occurred, and Lee (2008) refers to this process as the Riad fever (a Riad is a traditional Moroccan courtyard house or palace, usually with an interior garden). Many of these Riads, located at the heart of the medinas, have been converted into hotels and bed and breakfasts (named maison d’ hôtes), offering the new ‘cultural’ tourist a luxurious and ‘comprehensive experience of Moroccan life’ (Saigh Bousta in Minca and Borghi 2009: 44). Ordering Azamour’s Medina
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The city of Azamour, located approximately 2 kilometres from the sea, on the left bank of the largest Moroccan river, the Oum er-Rbia, is a very ancient settlement (Map 6.1). In the late fifteenth century, with roughly 1,000 inhabitants, Azamour was an important border city in south Morocco, at the edge of the kingdoms of Fes and Morocco. At that time the walled city had an elongated rectangular shape, although it is possible that a pre-Islamic walled city existed with a rather different shape (see Lopes 2009), protected by 80 turrets. Within the walls there were 28 large buildings (Dias 2004). © Copyrighted Material
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Map 6.1
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Through a contract established in 1486 with the Portuguese King João II, Azamour became a tributary of Portugal, whereby in exchange for protection, the city had to pay 10,000 shads yearly, give tax privileges, and allow for the construction of a foremanship in the city (Fagundes 1979). Azamour controlled a vast hinterland which was, in Godinho’s words, ‘an ocean of cereals’, rich in wheat, barley and rye. Since the contract was not enforced, in 1513, at the second attempt to conquer the city (the first was in 1508), Azamour fell to the Portuguese. This move was part of a larger project to establish several coastal fortifications,9 by building or repairing existing Forts, under the visionary enterprise of subduing both Fes and Marrakesh, and creating an overseas Algarve. Time proved King Manuel wrong. More than establishing an effective occupation of a large territory, the main goals were obtaining goods not only for consumption but also for trading with other parts of the empire, and to secure ports, especially following the exploration of gold in El Mina (Ghana), the trading route to the East Indies, and the contacts with Brazil.
9 Santa Cruz do Cabo Gué (1505, later Agadir), Mogador (1506, present Essaouira), Aguz (1508, present Souira Quedima), Safim (1508, present Safi), Azamor and Mazagan (1513, present Azamour and El Jadida). © Copyrighted Material
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Although not a unanimous proposal (Dias 2004 and Correia 2008), it was decided to rebuild Azamour as a city (rather destroyed after its conquest) and Mazagan (El Jadida) as a Fort, since its port was superior (Azamour’s bar was quite shallow). The Portuguese occupied Azamour for 29 years (1513‒42) and their arrival meant profound changes in the physical, political, social and cultural dimensions of cities.10 As Correia (2008) explains, one of the principal strategies was to reduce the perimeter of walled cities (in the fifteenth-century Ceuta by 85 per cent, Safi by 70 per cent, Arcila by 45 per cent and Tangiers by 75 per cent), by establishing new stone walls (‘atalho’) that cut across on a straight line the intricate fabric of the Muslim city, dividing communities, separating them from the urban centres, and forcing people to leave the city to peripheral villages. The idea of a modern, rational and controllable city emerged, and works in Azamour started in 1513, like in Mazagan. The reconstruction of the Fort and the construction of a new wall (built between 1517 and 1520) transformed the walled city in an almost square shaped city. During the almost three decades of occupation, several works were executed: fortifications, adaptation of old mosques, houses, warehouses, and so on (Dias 2008a). None of these transformations is discernible for the common tourist (see Map 6.2). While the taking of Azamour meant the quick departure of Moors, the Jews were allowed to stay, occupying a riverside area within the town: the Mellah, or Jewish quarters. They had the exclusive specialisation of certain professions, such as jewellery and silver tools. Slowly, Portuguese settlers arrived as well as people from other parts of Morocco, from Madeira and Spain. Some of the former Moor inhabitants also returned, occupying their old houses (Fagundes 1979). Thus, the coexistence of three religions, corresponding to different professions, resulted in different spatial settlements. The failed attempts to conquer Marrakesh (1515) and to build a Fort in Marmora (bridging the southern and northern coastal Forts), together with the growing Ottoman threat and presence of the artillery equipped Moroccan forces, the expansionist attempts in Morocco ceased (Disney 2009). Roughly two decades later the Sadian Sharif laid siege to Safi (1534) and to Azamour (1537). Santa Cruz do Cabo de Guer was lost in 1541 to the Sus Serif, and an alliance with the King of Fes failed. As a consequence, in that same year, King João III ordered the withdrawal from Safi and Azamour. All non-combatant Jewish were also ordered to leave to Arcila. After 1820, many settled in Mazagan. The Muslim reoccupation of the city meant new changes in the spatial, economic, social, cultural and religious dimensions of Azamour. The walls surrounding the present medina are the result of the reutilisation of the city’s old walls which the Portuguese never destroyed.
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10 Under the guidance of the Arruda brothers: Francisco and Diogo were both architects responsible for the design, among others, of the Belém Tower in Lisbon, the repair works in the fortifications of Moura, Mourão and Pinhel, all in continental Portugal, and of Safi, in Morocco. © Copyrighted Material
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Map 6.2
Plan of Azamour, Morocco
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Source: Modified from Cruz, Correia, Lopes et al. (2009).
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During the next centuries, Azamour was an important base for the attacks to the Portuguese Fort of Mazagan. The city entered a long period of decline after 1769, when freed Mazagan gave rise to El Jadida and the Casablanca port developed. At the start of the twentieth century the population of Azamour was around 10,000 people, who mainly worked in agriculture, fishing, crafts and local products trade. By 1912, under Lyautey ordering, numerous buildings and town precincts in Morocco were classified as monuments historiques, in an attempt to preserve classified buildings and avoid the physical depredations of colonialism seen in Algeria (Benjamin 2003). While Lyautey developed the nouvelles villes – entire new small cities (sanitarily) separated from and opposed to the medina, and more suitable for the modern Moroccan life, accommodating better vehicular traffic – he also established the path to develop tourism, the museumification of culture and a new historical consciousness (Benjamin 2003). According to Minca (2007: 441) it was precisely this politique indigène (leaving older urban spaces intact, creating new separate cities and promoting arts and crafts) that ‘began to frame Morocco as an aesthetic object of conservation, as an Other space to be encountered, set up for tourist consumption’. This impetuous did not prevent the decline of Azamour, since the construction of a bridge over the Oum Rabia river in 1924, and the opening of the Sidi Said Maâchou dam in 1929, led to the end of the city as a stoppage station and to the disappearance of shads, which negatively impacted on fisheries. Rural migration meant population growth in Azamour (from 9,816 inhabitants in 1952 to 12,449 in 1960), but the post-war period was of economic and social stagnation, and until the end of the protectorate in 1956, the old city did not benefit from the French authorities’ policy. Jewish craftsman remained in Azamour until 1948, but during the 1960s most Jewish left, contributing to the emptying of the medina and signalling the end of the traditional embroidery. From the Djellabas11 weaving and the Belgha12 manufacture, only some street names are left, such as Derrazine or Kherrazine (shoemakers). Many people left to Casablanca and other coastal cities to find work and in reaction to this there was an influx of poorer segments of the population originating from rural areas. Many houses in the medina were occupied. The lack of physical maintenance reflected the high number of tenants, sub-tenants and squatters.13 At the same time the medina lost its commerce structure, and in fact, while in 1982, only 9 per cent of the artisans’ shops and workshops were vacant, in 1994 this number was about 21 per cent
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11 Traditional long, loose-fitting outer robe with full sleeves, mostly worn in the Maghreb and in Arabic-speaking countries along the Mediterranean. 12 Traditional Moroccan slippers. 13 In many other cities, the increasing migration of people from the countryside led to the construction of shanties within the central courtyard of many Fondouks (also named Caravanserais, they are semi-public building developments with a large courtyard originally built for transit and trade), dramatically increasing the population density in a process that has been defined by Faiz as taudification (in D’ Ayala and Copping 2007). © Copyrighted Material
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(Elazrak 2002). From 40 workshops of weavers, 60 of cobblers and 60 carpenters in the mid nineteenth century (Elazrak 2002), only about four artisan workshops with three to four looms each are left. Houses have high occupancy rates – 2.5 persons per lodging according to Elazrak (2002) – which accelerates physical degradation. Many walls have collapsed and numerous building face fissures, infiltrations and high levels of humidity. Ruined buildings are numerous which result in physical discontinuities, and in turn contribute to the overall degradation of the medina. Other structural problems relate to sewerage, the system of which dates from 1927 and mixes pluvial water and used water, and electricity, dating from 1926. Many houses have no electricity and running water (resourcing to public fountains), and tenants pay no rent. At the same time commerce drained towards the nouvelle ville and contributed to the existence of a very different and much lively space ‘outside’. There are several small and basic restaurants and cafes overlooking the medina’s walls. In the surrounding streets, along the souks, we find plenty of shops from Henna tattoo, olives and nuts, small grocery stores, donkeys pulling carts with fish. Some tourist shops sell cheap paintings representing Azamour’s medina from a riverside perspective, and also glazed painted pottery. They cater for pilgrims and tourists that come essentially to the mausoleum of saint Moulay Bouchaib Erredad. Interestingly, only in Dar Mâalma I could find a couple of representations of some canons. The Portuguese Fort or heritage is completely absent from any craft work, and the only ‘connection’ that is established relates to the dragons in Azamour embroidery. More pronounced than in the other case studies in the book – Fort Jesus in Mombasa; Fort São Filipe in Santiago Island; and Fort São Sebastião in São Tomé Island – the example here of the city of Azamour relates to spatial and cultural appropriations of pre-existing urban structures.14 Today the city is about 40,000 inhabitants, and according to a management study of the medina published in 2005 (in Chraïbi 2008: 91), its medina, a walled city of roughly 12 hectares, contains about 1,000 households having an estimated population of 4,000 people.15
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A Concealed Space
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For the westerner, the stranger, the foreigner, the tourist, the medina of Azamour, like many other medinas, is simultaneously intimidating, inviting and deceptive. From various conversations with occasional tourists, the medina is clearly a place
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14 In Morocco other examples of Portuguese appropriation of Islamic settlements in the fifteenth century are Ceuta (presently Sebta), Alcácer Ceguer (presently Ksar Sghir), Arcila (presently Asilah) and Tanger (presently Tangiers). 15 This is quite a high figure (almost 10 per cent of the population) when compared to medinas such as Tangiers or Casablanca (only 2 per cent). Fez, one of the most populated medinas accounts for circa 12 per cent of the total population (World Bank 2010). © Copyrighted Material
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one goes in, through doors and gates, in which one tries not to get lost (and here there is a mix of adventure and discomfort), from which one tries to get out. There are no signs or maps available to visitors, nor is there a tourist information office to ask for directions. In the town there is not a single museum or ‘visitable’ attraction, and inside the medina there are no restaurants or cafes. There are some small local shops, selling bread, drinks and other basic goods, and a few handicraft workshops. This ‘accidental and organic site’, which exists regardless of who visits it and why, is undoubtedly strange for the western viewer, but constitutes precisely its attraction. As MacCannell (1976) long ago noted, tourists are constantly looking for ‘back-spaces’, those places which are apparently more authentic. In tourism literature and promotion there is the recurrent idea that the Portuguese built Azamour, as if nothing existed before the sixteenth century. Lonely Planet (2009: 149) for example, says: ‘The Portuguese built the town in 1513 as one of a string of trading posts along the coast’; shore excursions of the Norwegian Cruise Line company, refer to Azamour and El Jadida as the ‘Charming Portuguese Towns of Morocco’ (NCL 2010); and even the Moroccan National Tourism Organisation states that ‘the two magnificent 16th-century fortified port towns of El Jadida and Azemmour are nearby and will delight travellers with their historical and cultural heritage’ (MNTO 2011). On the ground, the heritage left by the Portuguese, or that the Portuguese built, still exists, although it is invisible for tourists. Let me illustrate this by pointing at research coming from history and architecture that focuses on ‘the shortcut’, the gates and the bastions. As mentioned, the ‘atalho’ or ‘shortcut’, a clear physical imprint of colonialism, was a stone wall that cut across the medina, built to shorten the area to defend, transforming it into a quadrangular shape, and ‘ordering’ space. It is still visible in some parts, but it might be invisible for the ordinary tourist. The Portuguese Citadel – named Dar El Baroud – located in a strategic place to control the casbah and the medina, is presently in a state of ruin. Renovations are being carried out under the Ministry of Culture, and perhaps in 2011 a small museum in the casbah will be open (Karra 2010).16 This is a clear opportunity to promote the interpretation of the site, illustrating the idiosyncrasies of this medina in relation to others in Morocco, and despite important information gaps and some speculative work,17 there is enough information regarding measurements, plants and three-dimensional reconstitutions of what the medina looked like (see Correia 2008 and Lopes 2009). One critical aspect of the Portuguese spatial ordering in the medina was the wall-in of all gates in the citadel and the opening of two round arches gates: one facing the river and the other providing access to the citadel (Bab el Kasbah). Both still exist. Bab el Medina was the only gate that the Portuguese
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16 Karra, A. 2010. Regional Director of Culture in Doukkala-Abda. Interview on 11 October. 17 For instance, was the captain house built on top of an existing alcáçova – citadel – or was it built anew being transformed in a later period (see Lopes 2009 for a detailed discussion). © Copyrighted Material
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maintained (Correia 2008: 296‒300). The Portuguese also built various bastions, for which lime was brought in from Portugal. The main four bastions reveal the advances in ballistics: two on the river side – Rio and North, and two on the land side – Raio (facing North) and S. Cristóvão (facing South). Moreira (1989a) argues that these bastions were colossal works, more innovative that those in Safi, and the bastions of Raio and S. Cristóvão are among the best quality works that King Manuel epoch produced. ‘Nothing comparable exists in Portugal, except for works like the Belém Tower and Évora Monte palace (…) the Raio bastion (…) was an absolutely impressive war machine’ (Moreira 1989a: 131‒2). In 1516, on a letter to King Manuel I, the governor Simão Correia argued for a clear exercise of urban planning (see Dias 2004) and colonial violence. He defended that the citadel was large enough to open streets and build a square, to pave them, to build a church and a tower, and that a gate should be open to the river. The old houses should be demolished and the space should be used for growing vegetables. The Jewish quarter should be done in two or three streets in a separate place near the walls. What followed in the next years was a substantial change of the urban space, which is present today, although indiscernible for the amateur eye. As mentioned above, Azamour’s physical decay is clearly observable, as there is a substantial derelict fabric of buildings (Figure 6.1). Elazrak (2002) argues that the restoring action of the Ministry for Cultural Affairs of 1970 did not touch the ramparts or the ensemble of the monuments, and presently they are in a dilapidated state. In fact, about 20 metres of the south wall of the medina have collapsed recently, and walking along the ramparts (something still advertised in some tourist literature, specifically by Mazagan Resort) is clearly dangerous. At the same time, there is a proliferation of drugs consumption and trafficking, prostitution and other social and economic problems, despite the existence of traditional solidarity. Yet, Azamour is misleadingly promoted as timeless and ‘authentic’: ‘unlike Assilah, to the north, it is completely unadorned and still gives an authentic glimpse of life in modern Morocco’ (Lonely Planet 2009: 149). Furthermore, and turning the view towards Azamour tourists’ comments,18 it is possible to identify four main tropes which to a certain extent corroborate what I have been arguing so far and fit in the idea that tourists are implicated in the performance of the colonial present (Gregory 2004).
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18 The methodology used consisted of an analysis of 79 comment-reviews (68 reviews on Riad Azama; five reviews on Riad 7; five reviews on Dar Wabi and one review on L’ Oum Errebia) on Trip Advisor (www.tripadvisor.com, accessed on 24 January 2011), the largest online network of travel consumers. Despite allegations of the site veracity being compromised by false reviews posted to enhance a particular hotel reputation, studies have shown that there is little evidence to make such a claim (see O’Connor 2008). © Copyrighted Material
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The Cashbah at Azamour. The photo was taken from the northern rampart. At the far left it shows the Oum River and at the far right, beside a palm tree, it shows São Cristovão bastion.
Source: The author, October 2010.
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Figure 6.1
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Authenticity is the most cited key word, with various comments on both the Riad (mostly Riad Azama) and the medina: ‘we wanted to expose our children to the ‘real Morocco’ which we found in Azamour, a sleepy little coastal town’; the town is ‘still authentic and not infested with too many tourists’;19 and the perfect place to discover an authentic Morocco and smiling people.20 Then there is also the idea of returning to the past, to a place where time stopped, to an Oriental and colonial land, where ‘you feel like a prince in old Morocco’, where you ‘(…) step back in time! (…) Full of the colonial charm you would expect of the old Morocco; with the exact oriental atmosphere’;21 a Riad that take us to the thousand and one nights;22 a town which has not been
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19 Also a small, nice and authentic town (‘une petite villa sympa, authentique’); and beautiful, with elegance, calme and authentic (‘sa beauté, son élégance, son calme, son authenticité’); ‘Azemmour selbst ist untouristisch und authentisch’. 20 ‘découvriez un maroc authentique et des gens souriants’. 21 ‘la giusta atmosfera orientale’. 22 ‘riad des mille et une nuits’. © Copyrighted Material
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touched by tourism.23 This is the old tradition of L’ Appel du Maroc reworked in contemporary Morocco as a restaging of the colonial for the masses (Minca and Borghi 2009), the colonial chic that is visible in many parts of Africa (Linehan and Sarmento 2011), the Morocco that Loti longed for, and invokes the strong presence of a colonial nostalgia in many tourism practices. Also present in people’s comments is the view that the Riad is a separate world from the medina, an(other) world,24 a fairy tale,25 a tranquil island.26 It is a safe place, ‘hidden away behind the blue door’; ‘a real hideout’; that ‘you even don’t have to leave the place for dinner’. ‘The medina is a bit strange, so we actually didn’t leave the riad except to buy water’, and ‘we would not recommend the area surrounding this beautiful riad’. Pierre Loti’s sombre Maghreb and its disdainful immutability persist. The Orientalist trope of ‘impenetrable and unknowable spaces’ persevere. Only one in 79 comments made a short reference to the ramparts as Portuguese built heritage. Overall, Azamour is described as an oriental, old Moroccan town, where one can feel an aristocrat in a riad. Charm lies in its poor tourist development. Lastly, there are some commentaries that emphasise the great terraces of the Riads and the possibility to panoramically gaze27 in ‘safety’ at the turbulent medina and their inhabitants: ‘(…) great place from which to watch locals go about their everyday life’. While the terraces convert the medina into a theatre, the Riad acts like a self-contained bubble that allows tourist to instantly experience, even if for brief moments, the medina rhythms, disorder and menaces. The terraces that traditionally belonged to women, this top realm in opposition to the bottom masculine streets (Çelik 1997) are now appropriated by tourists, who indulge themselves in the luxury provided by Moroccan hospitality. Despite the idea of stillness, there are several developments taking place ‘behind doors and walls’, which are not visible to the occasional tourist. One aspect that has changed in the past decade, is the establishment of five ‘boutique’ hotels inside the medina: Dar Lkbira (four rooms; this was the first Riad to open as a boutique hotel, back in 2003), L’ Oum Errebia (nine rooms, opened in 2004), Riad Azama (six rooms), Riad Dar Wabi (five rooms) and Riad 7 (five rooms). These Azamour Riads (with the exception of Riad 7 which has a modern contemporary design) attempt to recreate an Oriental ambiance and a luxurious environment, in sharp contrast with the poverty and decay of the surrounding quarters. These contrasts are noticeable by tourists who use these accommodations and by locals who work
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23 ‘ville encore complètement préservée du tourisme’. 24 ‘bienvenue dans un autre monde’. 25 ‘C’est dans un conte de fées que l’on pénètre en poussant la porte du riad azama – un palais des mille et une nuits!!’; ‘les chambres majestueuses digne d’un Palais des 1001 nuits’; ‘Wunderschöne Tage, wie in 1001 Nacht!’ 26 ‘Un îlot de calme, enrichi d’une décoration authentique et rafinée’; ‘un havre de paix’. 27 ‘Dalla terrazza si gode un bellissimo panorama sulla medina’. © Copyrighted Material
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in them. According to Person (2010),28 at the present moment, there are only three foreigners living in the Azamour medina all year round: the owners of two Riads and an architect (all French). Many other foreigners bought property but do not live in Azamour. There are also many properties for sale but few under renovation (the only works that I found in the medina are small renewals by locals). In my meanderings, I visited a couple of properties for sale and one real estate agency in El Jadida. Speculation is high. Informally, it is said that before becoming public that Mazagan Resort was going to be built (see next section), politicians and other influential and wealthy people bought property here, which is now vacant and waiting for prices to go up: ‘Morocco is more the place to buy and hold to your property for a few good years’ (Hall 2008: 49). The representative of the Ministry for culture in the Doukkala-Abda region mentioned that within the medina, most properties overlooking the river were already in the hands of foreigners or Casa (Casablanca) elites (Karra 2010).29 On a newspaper article from 2003, it was stated that about 20 houses facing the river had been bought by Europeans of various nationalities (L’ Economiste 2003). As the ‘buying property in Morocco guide’ argues, with the building of the various Plan Azur resorts (and Mazagan is one of them), it is expected ‘to see massive price hikes over the next few years’ (Hall 2008: 105). In the past years Azamour became known in some media and tourist promotion as an ‘Arts town’, and has attracted some artists and painters who seasonally live there. Ahmed El-Amine is perhaps the most famous one (mentioned in various guide books, and significantly in the Mazagan Resort promotional brochure), but there is only one permanently open gallery (Akwas, Espace d´Art et de Culture). Most years, in a clear attempt to emphasise, promote and celebrate arts, and to engage with the intersection of history and memory, local authorities and the local community organise mural paintings by local school children, with the collaboration and under the supervision of local artists. The Association des Amis d’Azemmour, together with the city of Azamour, organised in 2008 the second edition (the first was in May 2007) of a Spring festival, with life music, and cultural activities such as mural paintings. Quite distant from the business-orientated, commodified events and flamboyant performances that enact the colonial that take place in Fort Jesus, Kenya (Chapter 3), here the local authorities sporadically organise open-air cultural and musical events, which take place in the medina, in the former Portuguese captaincy. Perhaps it is only a matter of time (engaging with security and with western ideas of hygiene) before Mazagan Resort starts to capitalise on this setting. Somehow swimming against the current the atelier Dar Mâalma d’Azamour, inaugurated in 2009, is a cooperative (part of Dar Mâalma Morocco and the national Réseau des Femmes Artisanes du Maroc), which aims at preserving and promoting arts and crafts produced by woman throughout the 28 Person, D. 2010. Owner of the Riad Azama – Maison D’ Hôtes and Vice-President of the Tourism Region Doukkala Abda. Various interviews 8‒13 October. 29 Karra, ibid. © Copyrighted Material
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country. This centre, which sells products made by around 200 artisan woman from various regions (only two living in the medina),30 also organises training workshops on innovation, self-employment, management, besides arts and crafts techniques. All over Morocco Dar Mâalma counts with the collaboration of 1,200 women. Illustrating the local authority commitment to order space in the medina, two interventions have been made. By taking advantage of a void space, a large public space with some benches facing the river was constructed. This is a place where locals and tourists can relax and enjoy the river views. One other development was the making of a river walk, along the full extent of the wall. Despite these substantial changes, the situation in Azamour still contrasts with other historical Moroccan cities, such as the coastal medina of Essaouira. In 2003, there were already 298 foreign property owners (over 320 properties), of whom more than half were French nationals (2003 Census in Bauer, Eschter and Knieper 2006: 32). The ‘success’ story in Essaouira is based on the view that these are the ‘welcomed’ new residents; they are the proper actors for the restoration of the medina. This view is also subliminally present in Serageldin’s text (2001: 238‒9) on Fes, when she argues that ‘the population is very conservative, and their absorptive capacity for foreign visitors in quite limited’. At the same time, while not prescribing the displacement of people, the text considers that ‘sooner or later some of the inhabitants will have to be moved out’ (Serageldin 2001: 242). By contrast, Said Elazrak, on an Icomos report, argues that the conservation of the Azamour’s medina should not be limited to the physical structures but also engage with the perpetuation of social and cultural life. The different forces at play are well expressed by a woman who lives inside the medina, who in tears says: ‘sell to the foreigners? No, that is effortless, I do domestic work for them, what’s left is misery. And my landlord wants to sell, where am I going to go, me and my six children?’31 Several Moroccan medinas are increasingly dual and fragmented, with poverty and upscale rehabilitation side-by-side. On a recent report, the UNDP (2009) refers to an income inequality rise in Morocco during the past decade, together with very high rates of urban slum dwellers in Arab cities and towns. Referring to Marrakesh, Kourzac-Souali (2007) has concluded that the requalification of old neighbourhoods has reinforced socio-spatial and residential segregation. In Azamour the situation is (apparently) different, but the signs of the ‘Riad fever’, or what Atkinson and Bridge (2005) call ‘new urban colonialism’, while not visible, are already present. The economic and demographic changes produced in
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30 Bentermoune, F. 2010. Artist that manages the atelier Dar Mâalma d’Azemmour. Interview on 11 October. 31 ‘Vendre aux étrangers? Non, ça ne donne pas de travail, moi je fais du ménage chez eux, ça reste la misère. Et mon propriétaire veut vendre, où est-ce que je vais aller, moi et mes six enfants? (une dame en pleurs dans la médina, in Chraibi 2008: 88. Author’s translation). © Copyrighted Material
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the past decades in Morocco, have attracted rural inhabitants seeking economic, educational and housing opportunities to urban areas in general and to Azamour in particular. In Morocco, about two-thirds of the population below the poverty line lives in rural areas with limited access to basic social services (UN-Habitat 2010). They are often perceived as the transgressors of the space whose borders were physically defined by the medina’s walls. The decay of the medina is partially attributed to these new residents, whose rural background is viewed here as well in many other Moroccan cities (see Porter 2003 for the case of Fes) in a very negative way.
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Luxury, Moroccan Style
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In Chapter 4 I attempted to connect the ways in which the past is being spatialised in Cidade Velha and Tarrafal with the trajectories and consequences for heritage and tourism resulting from the construction of Sambala, a large scale resort. Here I follow a similar strategy, by looking at the development of the Mazagan Resort. Approximately half way between Azamour and El Jadida a large resort has been open to the public in 2009. Its entrance is only 2 kilometres from Azamour, and the recent and frequent arrival of hundreds of tourists, plus the job creation that the resort is bringing (from the Plan Azur to various reports and newspaper articles, numbers of job creation range from 1,200 to 12,000), is certainly affecting the region. But before I turn my attention to this development, to its contemporary meaning, and to the links that are being forged with Azamour, I want to briefly concentrate on the city of El Jadida, one of the most important coastal towns in Morocco and a tourism centre. Just like Azamour, Mazagan became a protectorate of the Portuguese crown in 1486, and in 1513 the Portuguese started to build a Fort (Dias 2008a). In 1541, under a totally different geopolitical context – all sites in the Maghreb coast were abandoned but Mazagan32 – what is considered by some as the most important Portuguese-built Fort in Africa, and the only one built ex-nihilo, started to be constructed. Its Italian architect, Benedito de Ravena, designed it considering the development of modern artillery in the Renaissance, and it resisted all attacks up to its abandonment in 1769.33 In 1820 Magazan changed its name to El-Jadida, or the ‘new one’, and in the context of the emergence of the first forms of modern tourism in Morocco, the city was developed as tourist resort at the start of the French protectorate. In the 1930s its casino was famous and frequented by expats and European tourists. It is
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32 The exceptions are Ceuta, which was integrated into the Spanish kingdom in the mid-seventeenth century and Tangier which was given as a dowry to the English in 1661. 33 After the city’s evacuation in 1769, by order of the Marquis de Pombal, roughly 2,000 inhabitants were re-settled in the New Town of Mazagan, a town founded in the Brazilian Amazon (presently in the state of Amapá). © Copyrighted Material
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interesting that a new five-star resort was named Mazagan (see below), and in fact, there has been a tendency within the tourism industry in Morocco to use composite names, such as ‘Larache-Lixus’, ‘El Jadida-Mazagan’ and ‘Essaouira-Mogador’, returning to colonial or even pre-Islamic names, creating new connections between the past and the present. El Jadida is inscribed in UNESCO’s World Heritage List since 2004 – ‘witness to the exchange of influences between European and Moroccan cultures from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, which are evident in the architecture, technology and town planning’ (UNESCO 2004), and it is the main tourism attraction in the region. The medina is smaller than the one in Azamour – around 6 (Dias 2008a) or 7.5 hectares (UNESCO classification), but it is a remarkable example of an early Renaissance military design. The cité portugaise, as it is known, is quickly becoming a quintessential tourist town, and foreigners are investing heavily, buying property, transforming small houses into hotels, and a commerce that caters for tourists (postcards, Moroccan souvenirs, and so on) is flourishing. UNESCO status ‘guarantees’ a minimum number of visitors.
Figure 6.2
Meditating in El Jadida Angel Bastion
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Source: The author, October 2010.
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The main attractions in the medina are the Portuguese Cistern (paid entry of roughly one euro), the church of the Assumption built in the Manueline style of late Gothic architecture, and the ramparts. Tourists stay only for a couple of hours. Many come out of the bus just outside the main gate, walk up the ramparts, pose for photographs, take scenic landscape shots of the harbour framing the ramparts as Oriental ruins, and walk straight back to the bus. The ramparts are also popular with domestic tourists and locals, as it is a more secluded and tranquil place than the ville nouvelle (Figure 6.2). In 2001, under the spell of neoliberalism and following a global trend, King Mohammed VI launched Vision 2010, a 10-year development plan in which tourism acquired the status of national priority and was reflected in Plan Azur. With the aim and challenge of reaching 10 million tourists and 20 per cent GDP by 2010, the plan established an offensive positioning on the resort segment (70 per cent of the total supply). Plan Azur launched five coastal resorts on the Atlantic – Larache, Essaouira, El-Jadida, Agadir and Guelmin – and one on the Mediterranean – Saïdia, a 700-hectare resort, and the first to be built as part of the Plan Azur. This policy brought a reliance of the Moroccan tourism cluster on foreign investors and developers, namely, on the Spanish Fadesa, the Emirate Emaar, the Belgian Thomas & Piron, the US Colony Capital, and the South African Kerzner. Plans for the second phase of Vision 2010 (unimaginatively called Vision 2020) are already being made, and will certainly include the construction of further tourist resorts (Ernoul 2009). In October 2009, Kerzner International opened a 250-hectare resort – Mazagan Beach Resort (www.mazaganbeachresort.com) about 90 kilometres south of Casablanca. The resort was inaugurated in grand Hollywood style. Numerous VIPs were invited, such as the supermodel Naomi Campbell, Hollywood stars Lindsay Lohan and Naomi Watts, and in order to spatialise the resort, over 250 local musicians plus 300 Moroccan entertainers and artisans were hired for the night. More than 1,500 guests were accompanied by 100,000 roses, 10,000 candles and 50 horses from El Jadida. The tone was set for Mazagan, on which a total of 300 millions euro was invested on the first development phase. Mimicking the international tourism marketing jargon, Mazagan Beach Resort uses the same language and discourse as Sambala, in Cape Verde. It offers 500 hotel bedrooms of ‘Moroccan inspired décor’, and 67 private villas for sale only. Media talks of its location mainly through three key factors. Firstly, it is a ‘coastal unexplored region’. Secondly, it is close to the traditional Portuguese port towns of El Jadida (a UNESCO WHS) and Azamour, with ‘its souks, markets and perfectly crafted medina’ (my emphasis). And finally it is only three hours away from London. Just like Sambala’s Johnatan Grepner, Kerzner is also pointed as ‘a visionary who has redefined the scope and scale of destination resort/casino development’ (Mazagan Beach Resort – Morocco Press Enquire, 2009: n.p). Also
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important is the fact that the resort is only 40 minutes drive from Casablanca, the largest metropolis in Morocco.34 Compared to the scale of developments in the region, the resort is immense – at best, Azamour has a capacity of 20 tourist rooms; Mazagan has 25 times that number! From the main gates – a mere 2 kilometres from Azamour – there is a long winding road that descends towards the ocean in direction to a large square shaped building (Figure 6.3). Its ochre colour and earthy look resemble an adobe casbah, and has been described as ‘Moorish contemporary style’. The interior architecture design was the responsibility of Wilson Associates, a Dallas company with 40 years experience, which has worked with Kerzner resorts on several occasions. Trisha Wilson, founder and CEO argues: ‘We blended the spirit of the region with contemporary refinement and elegance throughout the design of the entire property’. These words vividly remind me of Santiago Island and the corporate discourses of San Francisco Bay Development (Chapter 4). On another flamboyant description, director and principal James Carry explains that ‘the richness of colour expression, 180 degree ocean views and dramatic traditional architecture all speak true to the Moorish contemporary style that remains present in the streets of Morocco’ (Wilson Associates 2010). The lobby reminds us of a giant Riad, and gives access to several of the resorts’ facilities: the Las Vegas’ style Casino – the largest in Morocco (overtaking Marrakesh’s Le Grand Casino de la Mamounia) and the only one in a 200 km radius, the restaurants (there are eight in total and significantly one is named Sel de Mer, and described as ‘a casual yet modern Portuguese dining experience packed with energy and excitement’), the nightclub and a 2,000 m² conference room. The Resort also boasts a 1,800 m² Spa, and the longest golf course in Morocco, designed by South African Gary Parker. Morocco is no longer viewed as the ‘far west’, the ‘al-gharb’ of the Islamic and Arab world. ‘Yves St. Laurent & Co. are ensconced in Marrakesh, Moroccan condo ads appear in the Wall Street Journal, Moroccan food is commonplace not only in Paris, but in Chicago and Portland, Oregon’ (Dichter 2009: 550), and people like Richard Branson, Malcolm Forbes and David Beckham have bough luxury property in the country and ensure an high media profile (Hall 2008). The experience at Mazagan Resort certainly confirms the allure of the west for consuming Orientalism and represents the continuation of Orientalism themes in contemporary cultures as described by Edward Said.
34 The Kenitra–El Jadida corridor, which includes Casablanca and Rabat, accounts for 61 per cent of the urban population, 80 per cent of permanent jobs, and 53 per cent of tourism (Cohen and Jaïdi 2006: 44). © Copyrighted Material
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Mazagan Beach Resort
Source: The author, October 2010.
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Figure 6.3
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Just like in Sambala, and many other tourism developments in Africa, there is a wide range of villas (three to five bedroom) for purchase. Investors can be part of a ‘select community’ (Mazagan Beach Resort 2011) and can benefit from an attractive tax regime landscape: five years exemption on annual property tax and on payment of income tax for rental income; 0 per cent inheritance tax; and exemption from capital gains tax on properties held for longer than 10 years (Hall 2008). It is significant to mention that already in the 1930s Morocco was ‘advertised as a place where taxes were low (no tax on dividends or sales tax existed), labour was cheap, and the return on investments was high (ranging between 8 percent and 14 percent)’ (Hoisington 1985: 316). Although Mazagan Resort is a place where tourists can stay for the whole duration of their trip (there are shops, restaurants, cafes, entertainment, etc.), the resort recommends and organises some ‘sightseeing’ in the region. For 350 dirham (roughly 30 euros) the resort offers (very brief) guided tours to Azamour and El Jadida, leaving at 10:00 a.m. and returning at noon. Azamour is described as ‘a haven and a hidden gem waiting to be explored’, ‘a nest of charm and tranquillity’ (Mazagan Beach Resort 2011), and a place where ‘the narrow white streets of the medina, peppered with architectural features, are not to be missed’ (Mazagan Beach Resort no date). Again, tourists consume mostly © Copyrighted Material
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a certain Orientalist aesthetics related to a European colonial imaginary which is embedded in paintings and travel writing, from Pierre Loti to Paul Bowles, going through Delacroix. The opening of Mazagan Tourism Resort is a good example of this exotic arabesque luxury.
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Epilogue
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Drawing from my work in Azamour, I am tempted to argue that Portuguese heritage in this coastal town seems to be as unproblematic as invisible, since it hardly plays any role in the construction of memory and identity. When it is evoked, without any coherent narrative, it is solely for tourist purposes – loose connections between Azamour’s embroidery motives and Portugal for example, the existence of a ruined building which once was the Portuguese captaincy, and so on. Perhaps the explanation lies in that these events and spatial ordering remount to a very distant past. Possibly it is because other more pressing contested spaces and fractures have emerged. Periodically, relationships between Rabat and Madrid are tense over Ceuta, Melilla, the Western Sahara, and over clandestine trans-Saharan migrants (see Naylor 2009). There are also voices towards a need to continue decolonisation (Pieprzak 2010), and while the anti-colonial struggle is a common denominator with Algeria (Stora 2003), repeatedly the contestation of the French legacy in terms of imposition of language, institutional architecture, policy, urban structure, imposed modernisation, and so on, come into view. I could also include here a whole grey area which I did not even glimpse at for space limitation, which points to the role of the Berber (or Imazighen) in the history of Morocco at large and of Azamour in particular. This relates to the forgotten spaces that are absent from texts and discourses, which question the traditional Arab-Islamic basis of Morocco official history (see Crawford 2003; Stora 2003). At the same time, the workings and reworkings in the medina are not as clear as the dichotomy between the ‘pre-colonial’ space of the medina and the ‘colonial’ structure space of the ville nouvelle. The pre-colonial and colonial periods of the medina transformation overlap and are superimposed in the eyes of tourists due to the lack of information: ‘there is nothing very Portuguese about it’ as one tourist remarked. The Fort and the Portuguese transformations have been embedded in the fabric of the city, but the fact that the Portuguese occupied Azamour for 29 years and significantly transformed its urban structure is still physically reflected in the contemporary medina. Although there is a strong relationship between the lapse of time and the strength of the memory, Ashworth (2008) has argued that dormant heritage can be rediscovered and revived. Ideologies or contemporary needs such as differentiation strategies in tourism promotion can provide the motive. I believe that interpreting the medina is important, but often the state and the powerful groups attempt to fix a memory that is stable, such as through the monuments of the Royal family, UNESCO’s protected buildings, and narratives that grasp on to continuities. © Copyrighted Material
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The ‘Portuguese shortcut’ should not be viewed in a reductionist way as a mere example of a colonial empire strategy to order space. It should also be understood, like the mothers fleeing the towns with their babies in arms represented in the king’s tapestries, as a mark of oppression, a materialisation of violence, a bio-political tool to generate new relationships between body and space, and as another layer of the city as a palimpsest. And this fact should be connected to the violence which is the creation of a colonial urban space such as the ville nouvelle, representing the cultural, social and physical freezing of the medina. Colonial violence begins at the very point when regulation or conquest of space and territory takes place (Simatei 2005: 89). Above all, the ‘shortcut’ was a strategy of colonial dispossession (see Harris 2004). But the post-colonial task is not simply to contest the message of history, engaging with the medium of narrativity and with the heterogeneity of historical representation as the coloniser describes it. For Mazagan Resort, the fact that Azamour and El-Jadida are so physically near – just 15 minutes away – is an asset. Tourists can make a quick tour into the past, into the Islamic world, into the medina, and return to the safety, comfort and western world or colonial chic of the resort. Azamour can be seen as a more rough experience, more ‘authentic’, a medieval or timeless space miraculously removed from the quotidian modernity of the resort. El-Jadida, although a more developed, touristified experience, also incorporates some of these elements. From the resort point of view, these two spaces do not need to be rationalised. The ‘timeless’, ‘real’, ‘authentic’ spaces of Azamour medina do not need to be made intelligible by routes, itineraries, triangulated by sights and views. The geographical imaginations of tourists will operate on the articulation of these spatial dissonances, connecting ‘us’ and ‘them’, framed and worked by transnational capital circulation and commodity chains, by a global flow of images and information. Postcolonial Azamour, like Fernão Dias, Tarrafal and Sambala, was certainly caught in the neoliberal path of development. But this story should also serve to think about the numerous powerful ‘shortcuts’ being made at the present moment throughout the world.
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Chapter 7
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Conclusions
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Each geographic space, insofar as it is a space for a possible history, is … a function of many variables. Ortega y Gasset (1973: 271)
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The journey is never over. Only travelers come to an end. But even then they can prolong their voyage in their memories, in recollections, in stories. When the traveler sat in the sand and declared: ‘There’s nothing more to see’, he knew it wasn’t true. The end of one journey is simply the start of another. You have to see what you missed the first time, see again what you already saw, see in springtime what you saw in summer, in daylight what you saw at night, see the sun shining where you saw the rain falling, see the crops growing, the fruit ripen, the stone which has moved, the shadow that was not there before. You have to go back to the footsteps already taken, to go over them again or add fresh ones alongside them. You have to start the journey anew. Always. The traveler sets out once more. José Saramago (1995: 387)
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This book has evolved out of my enthusiasm for visiting Forts. However, I want to start this final chapter by sharing some of the reservations I have towards assigning a ‘happy ending’ to this entire itinerary, to these stories, to my gaze on ruins. My hesitation originates from establishing throughout the book that the power relations under which ruins and imperial legacies and a number of contact zones operate, have much in common with those that existed in the ‘colonial past’. Possibilities of opening up multi-voiced spaces and places where competing narratives coexist seem faint. Resorts where colonial relations are enacted are mushrooming, Forts display colonial presentations of a docile past, and these legacies seem to be oblivious to locals and vice versa. I have looked at the birth of a museum in colonial times in Kenya and the birth of a museum in postcolonial times in São Tomé and both presentations appear deeply embedded in the colonial episteme. I have discussed the interpretation provided by international agencies in Cape Verde and the voices of locals telling the story of others in Kenya and I could not feel any postcolonial tones. I have examined the massive scales of Sambala and Mazagan resorts and was stunned by the oriental and neocolonial physicality and discourses present in the luxurious grandiosity of both projects. To a large degree there is a dominant colonial nostalgia embedded in tourism that reveals how the postcolonial has failed. And it has failed precisely by not being able to allow wider audiences to establish a dominant ‘anamnesiac’ environment. Forts seem to act like passive stages where culture is mobilised for certain purposes, often political or geopolitical, sites of memory where material and © Copyrighted Material
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symbolic culture is used à la carte. All case studies in this book have explored three intertwined ways of mobilising memory in space: forgetting, celebrating and inventing. Forgetting relates to the ways in which memory is erased, as landscapes of pain are removed and places of amnesia are constructed instead of sites of memory. Certainly, forgetting is wining in Tarrafal, in Fernão Dias and in Azamour. At an initial stage, as Ricoeur (2004) puts it, forgetting is experienced as an attack, a weakness, a lacuna on the reliability of experience. But more deeply, forgetting has to negotiate with memory the balance of its being. This negotiation takes place in space and it is above all a political struggle where the winners are the powerful, those plentiful with financial and cultural capital, such as the World Bank, UNESCO, the EU, knowledge and technical experts like western historians, architects and engineers, and the local economic and social elites. Guides are silenced, monuments are demolished, imprints are lost in the passage of time, and decontextualised museums are built. The presence and absence of the representation of the past is enacted through a dialectical relationship often embedded in logics of neoliberal development. At stake are larger postcolonial questions about representing history in Africa, where for years the European versions were the only ones featured in textbooks: the benign story of the colonial encounter. The past has a pressing contemporary relevance, since divergent understandings of it become political sites where communities cultivate identity and invoke claims to socio-economic resources. Possibly, my understandings are ‘contaminated’ by what Mbembe (2001: 4) calls the west’s obsession with the ‘absence’, the ‘lack’, and ‘non being’. But these silenced landscapes trouble me. I must realise that museums, for instance, are a western construct, a product of the Enlightenment, and to a large degree intend to convey a world-order, and a colonial invention serving cultural élites. They are often a storeroom of the nations’ treasures as decontextualised objects, and they are only one way of representing history and the past, despite being an ‘official’ and formal representation of the nation. One other way of mobilising memory is through celebration. I have attempted to show how both in past and present, navigators, architects, engineers, kings, settlers, and many other westerners have been and are celebrated in Kenya, Cape Verde and São Tomé. In Malindi, Ibn Madjd was only celebrated as a notorious Arab sailor by the Portuguese, from his subaltern position as an assistant of Vasco da Gama. Critically, one question that must be posed relates to the dominance of the European culture of remembrance in Africa. Remembrance is embedded in a culture of nostalgia, consumed mostly by western tourists, and fed in Portugal by shallow competitions such as the ‘Seven Wonders of Portuguese Origin in the World’ (Chapter 1). It is supported by various institutions which provide the necessary financial and technical support for many actions leading to hegemonic inscriptions of memory upon space. In the west, the dominance of these narratives and celebrations, and the power of the groups who are behind their control and maintenance, over a supposed African postcolonial context seldom allows for the emergence of spaces of counter-memories. © Copyrighted Material
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A final way of mobilising memory is through pure invention of the past, and as Hobsbawm (1997: 7) puts it ‘Myth and invention are essential to the politics of identity’. Choosing between therapeutic or creative amnesia and traumatic memory might be gruelling, as each of them may open up the terrors of the past or the agonies of the present (Simatei 2005). Orientalism, a western construction of the way the East looks like has been mobilised in contemporary tourism to construct luxury and exotic places that touch the mind of western consumers. Resorts bring fantasies and carry fantasies of imagined geographies of a past that never existed as such, in a kind of creative amnesia. The proliferation of lavish Riads or postmodern choreographed spectacles such as those taking place in Fort Jesus ramparts are also good examples of inventing pasts that accommodate neatly into westerners imagined geographies. This fits perfectly into the widespread Portuguese view at these ruins and imperial legacies in postcolonial Africa, totally in tune with Eduardo Lourenço’s (1999) ideas of the labyrinth of myths that create unrealistic and invented images of the past, which construct a complex of affects to consume nostalgia. Ruins and imperial legacies are, as Stoler (2008) argues, less sites of love than implacable resentment, disregard, abandonment and documents to damage. Yet, I do not want to close with an allusion that they should be used to condemn the colonial alone. Nor should this be the point. Looking again at the global mapping of the physicality of these colonial endeavours (Map 1.1), it is clear that not all forts can be turned into museums, not all can be preserved, not all can be remembered. UNESCO’s claims about the common humanity of ruins may project some of them as resurrected ruins, part of cultural heritage projects designed to capitalise on the allure of partially restored people and things. But ruins will remain ruins until their future is thought in tune with and by the people that live in them, as the histories ruins hold are less than the sum of the sensibilities of people who live in them. Forts are not solely related to dark pessimist places, and therefore ‘the focus then is not on inert remains but on their vital refiguration’ (Stoler 2008: 194). Forts are sites that animate new possibilities, as dynamic and relational, as interstitial, as sites of plurality, plasticity, dismantling and destabilising the power of endless self-invention. Looking at different sites, aided by Mignolo’s (2007) border thinking and Appiah’s (2006) vigorous case for learning from unexpected links we forge across borders and languages, ethnic, national, and historic divisions, I attempted to connect apparently separate sites of memory and experiences of exploitations ‘rooted in a multiplicity of times, trajectories, and rationalities’ (Mbembe 2001: 9). It is with the knowledge of these processes that we may think of de-colonising the Forts, of de-linking (Mignolo 2007) their histories and cutting against ‘Benjamin’s wind’ that impels the angel of history towards the future, not allowing ‘him’ to pick up the pieces of the past and to reconfigure life facing the present and the future. Postcolonial Africa needs to transform the ruins and imperial legacies into local and national trophies; it needs to mobilise them into buildings which reveal a participated history and into sites that echo and speak of multi dimensional © Copyrighted Material
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narratives of the past. Yet, physically they may remain ruins, as ‘they are always more eloquent than any restored building’ (Saramago 1995: 251). Certainly this work has a transitory feeling, and it calls for a wider analysis of case studies, and for a collective effort that considers fully the subaltern perspective and other ways of looking at Forts and Imperial legacies. That is certainly a task that needs to be undertaken. But the histories and spatialities analysed in the case studies are important in terms of the ways in which a post-colonial treatment of the Forts and other heritage buildings might be considered, since the colonial is certainly not a closed story. The task of postcolonial geography is to uncover colonial discourses and practices inscribed in space, making them visible and point to the tenacious trends that encourage inequalities.
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Index
Geopolitics 9, 11, 80 Ghana 4n1, 10–11, 44, 80, 82, 84, 106–7, 117 Gregory, Derek 17, 109, 112, 123 Gulbenkian 12, 18, 23–5, 28, 30, 36–7, 43, 56
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Harvey, David 57, 73, 75 Heritage 1–3, 7–14, 20, 37, 39, 43, 48, 52, 54–7, 61–5, 67, 69–71, 75, 77, 79, 85–7, 94, 100, 106–7, 110–11, 114–15, 121–2, 125, 128–9, 133, 137–8
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Border thinking 95, 137 Britain 21, 23, 27–9, 31, 33–4, 37 British Empire 7, 12, 14, 18, 21, 25, 28, 33, 36–7, 45
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Amnesia 2, 4, 54, 64, 107, 136–7 ‘Anamnesiac’ environment 135 Angola 4n1, 5, 12, 18, 26, 36, 60, 67, 69–71, 80, 83–5, 94–6, 98, 101 Azamour 12, 13, 15, 86, 109–11, 113–34, 136 Azores 27
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Cape Verde 4n1, 7, 10, 12–14, 57–77, 83, 86, 89, 94, 96, 106–7, 130, 135–6 Casablanca 115, 120–21, 126, 130–31 Celebration 4, 14, 17–18, 26–7, 29–30, 32, 37, 99, 101, 106, 109, 136 China 4n1, 71–2, 80, 95 Colonial Present 4, 11, 13–15, 55, 80, 110, 123 Colonialism 2–4, 8, 11–14, 28–9, 28, 33, 46, 54, 60, 71, 76, 88, 94, 97–8, 101, 111, 113, 120, 122, 127 Neo-colonialism 13, 71, 100 Commemoration 14, 17, 27, 35, 87, 102, 105–6 Creole 83, 89, 93n19, 100n35, 107 De-linking 137
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Equatorial Guinea 7, 13, 80–81, 95–100, 107
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Fernão Dias 13, 71, 101–2, 104–6, 134, 136 Forgetting 2, 17, 45, 93–4, 107–8, 136
Identity 3, 13–14, 39, 46, 48, 57, 59–61, 63, 77, 83, 87–91, 93, 95, 106–7, 111, 133, 136–7 IMF and World Bank 97–8, 100, 115–16, 121n15, 136 Kenya 4n1, 7, 12–14, 17–18, 20, 22–5, 27, 29–32, 34, 37, 39–43, 45–7, 49–56, 71, 86, 94, 126, 135–6, 139 Landscape 10, 13–14, 17, 21, 28, 37, 42, 57, 61, 71–2, 75, 99–100, 130, 132 Lisbon 5, 7, 11, 13, 17–19, 23, 26–7, 33, 36, 63, 69–70, 109, 111, 108n10 Luanda 69–71, 84, 100 Madeira 7, 27, 82, 83, 118 Malindi 13, 19, 29, 31, 34–7, 40, 48–9, 52, 101, 108, 136 Marrakesh 110, 114, 116–18, 127, 131 Mazagan Beach Resort 13, 96, 109–10, 123, 126, 128–35 Mbembe, Achille 3, 12, 60, 71, 76, 91, 94, 98–9, 107, 109, 136–7
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Fortifications, Post-colonialism and Power © Copyrighted Material
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Oil 9, 14, 23, 71, 79–81, 95–100, 102, 106 Orientalism 2, 15, 110, 112–13, 131, 137
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Said, Edward 112–13, 131 Salazar, António 18,24, 28, 33, 67, 109n1 Sambala Resort 13, 71–7, 96, 128, 130, 132, 134–5 São Tomé and Príncipe 4n1, 5, 7, 12–14, 18, 36, 55, 64, 71, 79–98, 100–102, 105–7, 121, 135–6 Slavery, Slave Trade 10, 14, 35, 53, 58, 60–62, 64–6, 76–7, 80–85, 88–91, 93, 100, 105, 107 Space 3, 5, 10–11, 15, 17, 39, 42–3, 45, 47, 52–3, 57, 64, 70, 75, 77, 80, 84, 91, 93–4, 96, 99, 106–7, 109–13, 120–23, 125, 127–8, 133–6, 138 Spain 17, 64–5, 71–2, 81, 109n1, 111, 113, 118 Statues 94, 103 Tanzania 4n1, 7–8, 13, 18, 34, 42, 48, 52 Tarrafal 13, 66–71, 128, 134, 136 Tourism 9–10, 13–15, 21, 39–43, 45–50, 52–5, 57, 60–61, 64–7, 71–3, 88, 92, 96, 106, 110–11, 113–14, 116, 118, 120–37 UNESCO 5, 8, 19–20, 43, 45, 63–6, 67, 71, 94, 114, 129–30, 133, 136–7
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Pereira, Pedro Teotónio 18, 24, 28–36 Portugal 5, 10, 12, 17–18, 24, 26–34, 37, 58, 60, 63–5, 67, 69–72, 81–2, 85–6, 94, 109, 111, 113, 117–18, 123, 133, 136 Postcolonial(ism) 2–4, 8–15, 19, 37, 39, 42, 52–3, 55, 57n1, 65, 69, 71, 73, 76–77, 80–81, 94, 99, 101, 106–7, 111, 134–8
Ricoeur, Paul 17, 93, 136 Ruins 21, 52, 60, 66–7, 84, 92, 106, 130, 135, 137–8
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Nairobi 12–13, 19, 23, 29, 32, 36, 40, 41–2, 50, 54, 94n24 Nora, Pierre 1, 39 Nostalgia 18, 26, 42, 53–4, 109, 125, 135–7
Power 3–5, 8–13, 17, 20, 53–5, 60, 64, 71, 76, 79, 84, 87, 91, 95, 97, 99–101, 106, 108–10, 112–13, 133–37
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Medina 15, 109–10, 113–14, 116, 118, 120–30, 132–4 Memory 1–4, 8, 10–14, 17–20, 27–8, 37, 39, 47–9, 54–8, 65–7, 69–71, 75–6, 79, 90, 93, 95, 99–102, 106–7, 111, 126, 133, 135–7 Sites of memory 1–2, 12–13, 39, 71, 93, 106–7, 111, 135–7 Morocco 12, 13, 15, 40, 45, 86, 96, 109–33 Mozambique 4n1, 5, 7, 8, 11, 12, 26, 36, 40, 60, 69, 83, 85, 94, 101, 111 Museums 8, 12–14, 18–19, 21–3, 27, 29– 32, 34, 36–7, 39, 43, 45–6, 54–57, 65, 68–70, 80, 86–95, 106–7, 120, 122, 135–7
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