As the video comes to a close and one hears increasingly loud background music playing the Brazilian national anthem in samba rhythm, the narrator concludes during a shot of Embrapa employees wearing white coats with hands on their hearts: “And it is for this country, a star and master player in tropical agriculture, that we lay our hands in our chests and sing out with pride: Embrapa, scoring goals for years in Brazil and in other courts of the world”. The video as a whole is remarkable for its ufanista103 combination of elements typically deployed as tokens of national pride: soccer, samba, the national anthem – and now, tropical agriculture. The fact however that Africans will most readily associate Brazil with elements that circulate in the global mediascape such as sports or television shows draws our attention to the contemporaneity of such connections, rather than any essentialist notion of centuries-old cultural affinities between Brazil and Africa. And even in the case of such a typically Brazilian “cultural specialty” as soccer, there is some triangulation with the North: all contemporary Brazilian footballers referenced by Africans played in European clubs. In fact, during fieldwork I ran into some clues as to how Africans’ views on their Latin American partners seem to be equally refracted by the historical density of Brazil-Africa relations discussed in the previous section,plastic grow bag which has always included the mediation of some hegemonic pole: first Portugal, then England, then the U.S. or the “West” at large.

This was first brought to my attention by a remark made by a Ghanaian researcher receiving training in Brasília in 2010. He had been there for a few days and was very excited about what he saw, especially in terms of Embrapa’s research infrastructure. While telling me about his good impressions he mentioned how “here in Brazil, people are very free. It’s not like other Europeans”. “Free” was an adjective I heard a number of times while in Accra, used by Ghanaians to positively qualify themselves for foreigners . Spontaneous expressions of mutual sympathy like that were not uncommon during the cooperation activities in which I participated; what surprised me in this case was his qualification of Brazilians as “other Europeans”. Being a Brazilian myself, that was not something I expected to hear – aren’t we a Southern country after all? What about our Africannness? In one of the rare scholarly works about Africans’ perceptions on Brazil, Anani Dzidzienyo argued that Africans tend to see Brazilians through a Euro-American mirror. This stems, he suggests, from the fact that few of the individuals who represent Brazil in past and present interactions with Africans – diplomats, businessmen, civil servants of all kinds – are in fact dark-skinned . Indeed, this was the case not of most, but all, Brazilian cooperantes I met from Embrapa and the Brazilian Cooperation Agency. I would disagree however that this identification with Europe has to do solely with perceived racial characteristics; after all, albeit the chief one, whiteness is not the only sign of “Europeanness”. From the perspective of practice, what this identification indicates is the fact that in these and other official initiatives of rapprochement, neither Africans nor Brazilians have a “wholesale” experience of Brazil and African countries; it is always a very partial view, perhaps even more than in the case of other travellers such as students or tourists.

Researchers and technicians from various African countries who came to Brazil for capacity-building trainings were ideally accompanied at all times by Brazilian staff during their working hours; even in the evenings or weekends they would check on them. Special transportation was provided at all times, and the choice of accommodation was made on their behalf. Even though choices were not prohibited, they were highly discouraged. Besides the long working hours at Embrapa facilities or experimental fields, the circulation of trainees in Brasília and other cities was generally restricted to good hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, or touristic sites indicated by the Brazilian staff. Such controls on the African trainees’ environment were not deliberately meant to hide economic, racial, and other kinds of domestic inequalities from them; they are part of the modus operandi of international cooperation more generally. Given the official status of such activities, there is a level of diplomatic responsibility for the safety and well-being of these foreigners that is manifested in the care and concern cooperation agents showed for them. These conditions lend further sense to the above mentioned remark made by the Ghanaian researcher: while in Brazil, African partners circulated mostly in high to middle-class environments, where material infrastructure is notably superior to that found in lower-class urban peripheries or in much of the Brazilian countryside, and where the presence of blacks or dark skinned mestiços is significantly reduced.

Therefore, from this double point of view of perceived phenotypic characteristics and quality of material infra-structure – coupled with previous perceptions sedimented during African countries’ much longer and intensive history of engagement with Europe –, it would make perfect sense that those Brazilians would appear as an odd kind of “European”. If such classification as European concurs with the self-recognition of many Brazilians, on the other it runs counter the contrastive North vs. South rhetoric privileged by official discourse.The can be said of Brazilian front liners working in projects in African countries, especially those who travelled on short-term missions. Besides the local research institutes and occasional trips to selected farm areas, their environment included hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, exchange bureaus and occasionally touristic sites and leisure places attended by other white expatriates. They also made exclusive use of hired transportation in order to circulate in town, and generally did not stray from prescribed circuits and guidelines. When I went on a mission as a translator for a Brazilian researcher in Burkina Faso, the schedule was all preestablished in terms of where to stay, where to eat, who talk to. This limited circulation had to do with language to some extent, since not all Brazilians spoke fluent English, and even fewer spoke French; outside of project activities, translation was not always available. Most had never been to Africa before, and occasionally it was even their first time outside of Brazil. These controls,pe grow bag that kept them separated from the daily routine of most Africans, were also ultimately related to health and safety concerns: Brazilian cooperantes go to Africa on official government duty, and indeed they have partly diplomatic status.Therefore, like their African counterparts travelling to Brazil, most Brazilian front liners also end up having a very partial view on the African countries where they work. But neither would these, at least in my experience, bring racial-cultural considerations to the fore, unless requested to do so by the anthropologist. And even then, a more diverse mix of attitudes and imaginations could be found: from a loose reproduction of the spontaneous affinities argument to perspectives that ran frontally counter assumptions of bounded cultural difference in favor of a more universalistic, practical-oriented view that Africans “are just men like in anywhere else”. Such diverse attitudes are evinced by the very concreteness and coevalness of the on-the-ground encounter between Brazilians and Africans – an encounter for which official discourse seems to lend little practical support. This passage is remarkably reminiscent of commentaries about other emerging donors in Africa: for instance, “sometimes, the majority of these [front line] experts come from China’s grassroots level and are familiar with harsh conditions, and thus are able to adapt quickly to different environments in Africa” .

This kind of assumption is relatively widespread, and draws on a loose notion of “Third World culture” that would supposedly translate, in practice, into greater adaptability of emerging donors’ front liners to the “harsh environments” arguably found in Sub-Saharan Africa. My fieldwork experience did indicate that most Brazilian cooperantes, especially agronomists, felt quite at ease in their working environments in African countries. But to seriously ascertain and generalize this presumed relative advantage of Southern developers beyond guesswork would entail comparative ethnographic research between South-South and North-South initiatives. Otherwise, to take claims like this at face value could mean sharing the self-romanticization of South-South cooperation discourse. I saw all kinds of individual reactions to bumpy roads, power outages, extreme heat, delays, lack and incompatibility of appropriate equipment, safety or health concerns, or bad traffic. But in all African countries I have been to, I also experienced good roads, great food, pleasant weather, very safe streets; quite commonly cooperation activities would unfold with no major problem of energy, equipment, or punctuality. The same is true for Brazil; working conditions vary according to the institution, the region, the epoch; but most importantly, there does not seem to be a pattern of responses to these and other practical conditions based simply on one’s nationality. If there is a difference – and even that is not a universal – it is to be found between project front liners on the one hand, and management and diplomacy personnel on the other; or, as some of the Malians would have it, between terrain and bureau people. Brazilian cooperantes trained in field sciences such as agronomy or conventional breeding, who regularly engage with farmers as part of their work at Embrapa, and/or who have a personal background in rural areas in Brazil, seemed to be particularly at ease in their work environment in Africa. But Northern developers must be pretty aware of what they are getting into when they go to rural Africa to implement a project, and – differently from most Brazilian front liners – they often have done it many times before. Even though assessments about the Brazilians’ performance were usually positive, assertive views that they fared significantly better than their Northern counterparts were not a rule. In sum, my fieldwork experience indicated, perhaps unsurprisingly, that more than the officials and intellectuals who indulge on discursive comforts, cooperation front liners were the ones closest to having a “real confrontation with the time of the Other” . Rather than being guided by predetermined notions about how relations between Africans and Brazilians were supposed to look like, this confrontation was partial to their own personal and professional backgrounds in Brazil and in African countries, as well as to the practical conditions in which their encounter happened. Therefore, the gap between official discourse and the heterogeneity of actual relations between Brazilians and Africans observed historically in the previous section also appears in contemporary South-South cooperation. One of this chapter’s suggestions is that this stems from the fact that official discourse about Africa is never “about” Africa: on the one hand, it projects outwardly, on Brazil’s international relations with Africa, a discursive emphasis that grew out of domestic concerns with internal colonialism; on the other, it stems from a broader relational configuration organized through the mediation of Northern hegemonic terms , from which Brazilians seek recognition. The last section will lend further theoretical substance to this claim by looking at how this movement can be found at the very root of Brazilian diplomacy’s deep and long-lasting interest in culture. This interest, traced to the ideas of the most influential ideologue of the Brazilian national character, Gilberto Freyre, are chief lenses through which Brazilians have looked at Africa since at least the 1930’s . In the remainder of this chapter, I will revisit this connection from a postcolonial angle, to shed another kind of light on the question of discourse, this time inspired by Edward Said’s Orientalism. The culturalist grammar popularized by Freyre will be taken as a model for the notion of nation building Orientalism that I will advance here – a manifestation, at a discursive level, of the double directionality of coloniality discussed in the Introduction. It is hard to overestimate the influence of Gilberto Freyre’s ideas on Brazil’s self-image as a nation. Since Freyre published his inaugural masterpiece Casa Grande & Senzala , thousands of pages in several languages have been dedicated to praising or criticizing his legacy not only for intellectual but political and social life in Brazil.105 In its relentless search for a positive self-representation of the country to be displayed abroad, Brazilian diplomacy has been particularly instrumental in raising Freyre’s intellectual musings to official state ideology .