BRAZIL NEEDS LIBERATION BY AFRICA

Blocking access to quality education for Afro-Brazilians is unhealthy, writes Okello Oculi

After 1994 when democracy triumphed over racial governance in South Africa, African diplomats got the UN General Assembly to proclaim the vision of the dignity and rights of peoples of African Descent worldwide; as well as the promotion of knowledge and honour of their contributions to world civilisation.

Christovan Buarque, a former minister of education in Lula da Silva’s government, has suggested that Brazil is gripped by a mental illness rooted in brutal importation of over 4.9 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to labour in growing sugar cane, digging gold and diamonds, and growing coffee. Portuguese exploiters of their labour hold permanent nightmares of being slaughtered in a revolt by the Africans.

In 2017, Buarque sees this condition expressed in the brutal reality that ‘’Brazil still doesn’t feel indignation at modern slavery due to inequality in the educational access of each child’’; insisting that ‘’inequalities in access to quality education should be considered a crime against humanity and as stupidity against the future of the country’’. Brazil developed a national genius for denying progress to Afro-Brazilians. Leticia Marteleto reports that, in 1982, only 13 per cent of black youths finished PRIMARY school; and 49 per cent of them moved on to attend secondary school.

The fear of Brazil becoming the largest African country that once geologically broke off from the mother-continent led to mass murders. Burials in mass graves were revealed in Rio de Janeiro before the 2014 World Cup. There were also deportation of thousands back to Ghana (the ‘’Tabom’’), Nigeria and Togo (the ‘’Amaros’’) and Benin (the “Agudas’’). In the 1825 ‘’Friendship and Alliance Treaty’’, Portugal committed Brazil to rejecting wishes by Portuguese colonies in Africa to become part of independent Brazilian’’. When racist South Africa troops invaded Angola to re-colonise her - following the flight of Portuguese troops - it was Fidel Castro’s Cuban troops who assisted Angola. Brazilian secret police were training their South African peers new techniques for torturing liberation fighters of the African National Congress.

Following the triumph by Africans in Haiti over a French navy sent to crush their revolution, Brazil’s white rulers adopted the strategy of ‘’ambranquecimento’’ or making Brazilian population predominantly white. In 1929, Brazil imported 1,485,000 immigrants from Italy; 1,321,000 people from Portugal; 223,000 from Germany and 86,000 Japanese. The Germans came memories of genocide against Herero people in Namibia; Italians with massacres against Eritreans, and Japanese with horrendous crimes in Korea, Manchuria and Philippines. Such memories would be channelled against Afro-Brazilians.

In ideological terms, focus was put on making mulatos or ‘’padros’’ increasingly hostile to any identification and association with Africa and black Brazilians. A recent illustration of black-skin being a fatal virtue occurred in June 2017 when a policeman hit, with the butt of his rifle, Marisa de Carvalho Nobrega, a black mother of four children, for talking with the son of her landlord. The police accused her of kidnapping a white child. She died the following day.

This long process of ‘social genocide’ at the core of bad governance in Brazil must receive urgent attention during the ongoing ‘’International Decade for Peoples of African Descent’’ (January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2024), as proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution (18/237). Shari Wejsa, writing in AMERICAS QUARTERLY, January 16, 2014, notes that in the 21st Century, evidence of continuing discrimination include: blacks ‘’living in the poorest areas, their lives often blighted by violence and largely excluded from political power’’.

In 1972 Foreign Minister Mario Gibson Barbosa visited nine African countries. It is remarkable that one of the joint declarations that came out was ‘’a repudiation of all sorts of racial, social, and cultural discrimination’’. The countries in focus were almost certainly racist regimes in South Africa, Namibia, and Southern Rhodesia. As a friend of Portugal’s prime minister, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar - who regarded Mozambique, Angola and other colonies as ‘’overseas provinces’’ of Portugal –it was unlikely that Brazil included Afro-Brazilian victims of her domestic slavery in her proclaimed ‘’support for self-determination of nations’’. In 1972 Brazil primarily interested in winning votes of independent African countries for her quest for a permanent seat at the UN Security Council.

On November 2, 2003, President Lula da Silva’s maiden visit to Africa waved a flag with the inscription that ‘’Brazil had a moral duty to Africa and that its historical debt should be paid’’. The investors accompanying him hardly shared the conviction that the ‘’moral duty’’ included dignity, equality and pursuit of social and economic happiness to Brazilians of African descent.

Lula’s visit to Africa was followed by an explosion of private sector investments in Africa during his tenure and into the present. By 2016 about 500 Brazilian companies were roving across Africa. Vale digs coal in Mozambique and oil in Libya. The ‘’Brazilian Agricultural Research Cooperation (EMBRAPA) anchored in Ghana, is supporting cotton, bio-fuel and other tropical agricultural products in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Chad, and Benin. Andrade Gutierrez is constructing ports, houses and health projects in Angola, Algeria, Congo and Guinea. Petrobras is adding new countries to oil production in Angola and Nigeria. These countries have an obligation to champion the welfare of Afro-Brazilians in their trade and investment relations with Brazilian capitalists.

Brazil’s programme of ‘’Bolsa Familia / Family Allowance’’ gave financial help to families with children ‘’as long as the children attend school and are vaccinated’’. It also provided ‘’free education to those who cannot afford it’’. Afro-Brazilian benefited from it. The big business leaders who promoted the ‘’parliamentary coup’’ against President Dilma Rousseff will cancel it.

Africa must urgently compute with Brazil the value of talents blocked in poorly educated and illiterate Afro-Brazilians: a crucial INFRASTRUCTURE for enhancing productivity of her economy. Blocking access to quality education for Afro-Brazilians remains an expensive stupidity against the future of Brazil. China’s vigorous investment in Africa’s industrialisation, infrastructure and agriculture should be used to liberate Brazil’s capitalist sustaining centuries of racial psychosis.