Brazil: Ironies of the Colonial Past
Porto Seguro, the site of Cabral’s original landfall on the Brazilian coast in 1500, was once a separate and somewhat backwater captaincy but is now part of the state of Bahia. Long ignored by the politicians in the provincial capital of Salvador, Porto Seguro has in recent years become the center of a flourishing tourist industry catering mostly to the Brazilian middle class from Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and São Paulo who fly in to enjoy the beaches, the Lambada (it is claimed to have been invented there), and the cachaça. Agile young black men from Salvador come down to perform Capoeira in the streets for tips, and in the makeshift street markets the indigenous Pataxó people of the region now come to sell salad bowls and serving platters made from the same brazilwood that first caught the attention of the Portuguese five centuries ago. The layers of irony are thickening in postcolonial Brazil, five hundred years after Cabral’s arrival. It should surprise no one that after the inversion of symbols, the reversal of accepted wisdoms, and the outpouring of opprobrium that accompanied the 1992 commemorations of the voyage of Columbus and what it implied for the subsequent history of the Americas and the world, this year’s commemoration of the five hundredth anniversary of Pedro Alvares Cabral’s landing on the Brazilian coast has been condemned as much as it has been celebrated. Naturally, in Portugal, the National Commission on the Discoveries integrated Cabral’s voyage into its program of commemorations, and there was a serious attempt made by the Commission to present, if not a balanced vision of the epoch of discoveries in which Portugal played so large a part, at least a vision that was open to alternative views.1