‘The Kingdom of Nostalgia’South Africa’s Iberian Shadow

“The Portuguese have a strong, often too strong, sense of the past; the great nineteenth-century liberal historian, Alexandre Herculano, wrote of Portugal as laden down with the weight of her history. An American commentator who met [the dictator] Dr. Salazar in 1963 described him as ‘profoundly absorbed by a time dimension quite different than our own, conveying the strong yet curious impression that he and his whole country were living in more than one century, as though Prince Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama and Magellan were still active agents in the shaping of Portuguese policy.’”

- From Portugal (1975) by Sarah Bradfordw

 Bartolomeu Dias

I have to confess that the better part of me rankles whenever anyone I’ve even briefly met emigrates from South Africa. This is not just due to patriotism or resentment. I’ve managed to travel to every continent besides Antarctica and I still haven’t found any place worth investing my self in that matches up to home. Selfishly, I wish far more people felt the same way. However, I haven’t been to Lisbon yet, and I’m told it might just defeat my convictions. 

On the face of it, Portugal can boast everything South Africa prides itself on, and many of the things it can’t. The people are warm and charming. The landscapes are uniquely rustic and sublime. The climate doesn’t make you want to die for much of the year. The cities are - reputedly - more walkable, progressive and homely than any others in Europe. And, moreover, daily life is not defined by anxiety; the country isn’t rich, but there’s no poverty to compare with ours either. Life is on their side. However, if you move to Lisbon thinking you’ll escape our history, your choice will haunt you wherever you go. 

The two greatest writers in the Portuguese language, Luís Vaz de Camões and Fernando Pessoa - the Iberian Shakespeare and Kafka respectively - were both intimately connected with South Africa. The greatest South African English poet, Roy Campbell, is buried in the cemetery of São Pedro in the town of Sintra in Greater Lisbon. The Portuguese themselves are taught more of South Africa’s colonial history than we are (at least judging from the tourists I’ve met on the streets of Cape Town). In fact, there are few nations with more spiritual links across the Earth’s many divisions between North and South than ours. As the historian Tony Judt points out, Portugal only became a part of ‘Europe’ as we know it in the 1970’s. For 500 years beforehand, the country’s soul faced outwards towards the Atlantic and its identity depended on Africa.     

On a huge stone plinth on a roundabout in the middle of the Cape Town Foreshore (just where Table Bay used to rise before the land was reclaimed), an imperious bronze statue of Bartolomeu Dias still stands, gifted by Dr. Salazar to the Apartheid Government back in 1960. I work as a walking tour-guide in the city and occasionally an astute guest who’s noticed it will ask ‘If Dias was the man who proved you could sail around the Cape in 1488, and Vasco da Gama actually made it to India and back in 1497, why were the Dutch and the English the people who colonised South Africa? And why did they only start 150 years later?’ I usually jibe that the Portuguese did colonise us, but they just did it more slowly through fish & chip shops and Nando’s. I might add now that Vida e Caffè and pasteis de nata have also served as auxiliaries. But the real reason is that the Portuguese, in their Golden Age of Exploration, came to associate the Cape (and South Africa) with endless pain and sorrow. For good reason.

The first welcome they received on arrival on a South African shore was a 

violent one. When Dias and his caravels pulled into Mossel Bay (the Bay of São Brás as they called it) on the 3rd of February 1488, the local Khoi tribe gave them the cold shoulder, refusing to accept the usual overtures of trinkets and beads. Then, according to Eric Axelson, “[o]ne day they threw stones from an eminence that overlooked the watering place; Dias picked up a cross-bow and shot one of the assailants dead.” Dias carried on to the Keiskamma River before regretfully turning back home. Thus the tone was set. The Khoi probably guessed what was coming. 

Since the snatching of Ceuta on the coast of Morocco in 1415, the Portuguese crown had sponsored a series of marauding voyages down the West African coast that would have made the Vikings proud. It had taken many centuries for the Christian Iberians to reconquer most of their peninsula from the Muslim Moors, and now the whole world was going to know about it. In short order, in a matter of decades, the Lusitanian captains discovered and colonised the islands of Madeira and the Azores, before setting sail beyond ‘the edge of the world’, rounding Cape Bojador in Western Sahara. Entranced by legends of a kingdom of Gold once ruled by Mansa Musa, and by age-old rumours of a Christian realm in Africa ruled by a certain ‘Prester John’ (probably the Ethiopian emperor), King Henry the Navigator had fixed his sights on sailing to the Spice Islands. He even copyrighted the idea with the Pope, who in 1456 publicly thanked the Portuguese for spreading the message of Christ through violence and gave them the sole right to claim the ports of the Indian Ocean in the name of God (whenever they got to them). 

Now the horizon bore no limit. Erecting huge stone crosses (padrões) to chart their triumphs as they went, the navigators surpassed the Gambia River, then Sierra Leone, then traded slaves with the King of Congo, then charted Angola and Namibia, before Dias was finally blown off-course in a storm and belatedly realised, for the very first time, that he had started sailing North-East into warmer waters. Adam Smith, the intellectual godfather of capitalism, would later claim this to be one of the two most important moments in modern human history (the other was Columbus’s first voyage four years later). On his return leg, Dias rounded Cape Point for the first time and gave it the name Cabo da Boa Esperança, which would one day provide the City of Cape Town with its latin motto: ‘Spes Bona’ (Good Hope).

You can tell something of the ensuing history by all the features of the South African coastline which still have names originating from Portuguese: 

St Helena Bay, Saldanha Bay, Paternoster, Cape Agulhas, Algoa Bay, Cape St. Francis, St. Croix Island, St. Lucia, and especially the ‘Natal’ part of Kwa-Zulu Natal, named for the fact that Vasco Da Gama, in the follow-up voyage to Dias, made landfall on the Durban beachfront just after Christmas Day, 1497. (There’s a port city in Brazil named Natal for the same reason). But Da Gama’s journey also continued the trend of instant discord with the first South Africans. When they arrived in Mossel Bay this time, his sailors were initially feted by the ‘Hottentots’ and treated to a feast. However, Da Gama was soon spooked by the growing presence of armed men and he ordered soldiers off his boats to cover his sailors as they beat a hasty retreat from taking on water. Safely aboard, he “ordered two bombards to be fired at which the [Khoi] fled so smartly that they dropped their karosses.” This was the first time guns were ever fired in South Africa.

You might have realised by now that I lied two paragraphs ago when I said that Dias named the end of our peninsula the Cape of Good Hope. He actually called it Cabo das Tormentas - the ‘Cape of Storms’ - but his king later renamed it for the sake of PR. It is surely then one of the greatest ironies in history that Dias himself was fated to die in May 1500 in a storm off the Cape he named whilst captaining a ship on another voyage, apparently within sight of the beach that’s now named after him, as well as the giant replicas of white crosses you can spot along the boundary of Cape Point National Park. He would not be the first, or the last, casualty.

By 1509, the King was already directing his captains to wait until they arrived at their established base on Mozambique Island before making landfall. But sometimes it couldn’t be helped. That year the Madalena lagged behind its bedeviled convoy and lost two men (with seven injured) to an attack at a watering-hole along the Garden Route. The next year in February 1510, Francisco de Almeida, the King’s viceroy in the East, sailing home to retirement after a lifetime of pillaging, anchored his small fleet at the mouth of the Salt River Estuary in Table Bay. A trade dispute with the Goringhaqua tribe escalated quickly into a fracas of stone-throwing and broken teeth. In retaliation, the foolhardy admiral directed his men to seize Khoi cattle and kidnap some of their children. When the Portuguese arrived back at the shoreline, they found their boats had moved farther out into the bay to avoid being run aground by the wind. 170 Khoi warriors then descended on them with stones and arrows. The Europeans had left their guns onboard. Sixty-five men were killed in all, including eleven captains. Almeida himself was killed by a lance through the throat. This was, according to the historian Joao de Barros, the most disastrous event in Portuguese history. These men - many of them rich nobles - would never be replaced. Today, you can see a very kitsch and very gory picture of the battle in the military museum section of the Castle of Good Hope.

However, this was not their most affecting tragedy. In June 1552, the galleon 

St. John, returning home from India weighed down with thousands of pounds of silver treasure and 320 slaves, wrecked in the mouth of the Umzimvubu River.  The survivors, including the esteemed captain Dom Manuel de Souza, his young wife Donna Leonora and their two sons, set out to march to safety along the beach up the coast to Delagoa Bay (Maputo). Nearly everyone died along the way. As soon as the remnants of the party arrived in the Portuguese colony, native Mozambicans robbed them of everything they had left and killed the Donna and her two children. The Dom ran into the jungle, never to be seen again. Port St. Johns is still named for the wreck.

Today, on a traffic island at the corner of Dr AB Xuma and Monty Naicker Street in central Durban stands a much-maligned bust of Fernando Pessoa, the greatest Lusophone poet of the 20th-Century. His father was the Portuguese consul for the British colony of Natal and thus Fernando spent his childhood in South Africa and went to Durban High School (of all places) before returning to Lisbon to indulge his beautiful madness in 1905. 

Inscribed on the plinth below him is a quote from one of his lyrics:

Oh Salty Sea

How much of your salt

Are tears of Portugal! 

Hyperbolic as this may sound, Pessoa was only echoing the sentiments of his forebears. To the Portuguese themselves, the stories I’ve related were just a few drops in the bottomless bucket of their travails. Their national epic The Lusiads (1572) is the story of their 16th-Century voyages, composed by Camões, a one-eyed soldier-sailor who actually bore witness to many of them. In one section, he transfigures Table Mountain into the Greek titan Adamastor, thrown down to Earth millennia ago after defeat by Zeus and his cronies:

‘My solid flesh converteth to tough clay:

‘My Bones to Rocks are metamorphosed:

‘These leggs, these thighs (behold how large are they!)

‘O’re the long sea extended were and spred.

(Trans. Sir Richard Fanshawe, 1655)

Angered at the navigators’ temerity in disturbing his slumber at the edge of the world, he blows awful storms to sink their ships. Here the Portuguese sailors are cast as modern-day Prometheans, slated by the heavens for their own ambitions. Camões himself seemed to lead a cursed life - he died a penniless beggar on the streets of Lisbon. But he was eventually buried in the Convent of Jeronimos, right next to Vasco Da Gama and alongside the Bantu slave who accompanied him for the last years of his life. ‘Adamastor’ would take on a mythic life of its own in South African literature, referenced by Roy Campbell and Andre Brink in the titles of some of their most famous books. 

If you’re reading this in Lisbon, take the time to stroll over to the Jardim do Alto de Santa Catarina and have a look at this sculpture of the fallen deity:

Should we feel sorry for the Portuguese and their captains? Probably not. Their downfall was something of their own design. As Alexandre Herculano wrote: “The glory which we acquired in this epoch was one of the greatest the world has seen, but we purchased it at the price of future disgrace, with the death of all hope, the bearing for centuries of a cup full of ills and affronts.” In short, the overreach of the Portuguese navigators was followed by the overstretching of their stamina, manpower and revenues. With a population of only one-and-a-half million people at the height of their global empire, every shipwreck, every battle, every corrupt official, every turn of the wind mattered. So many young men were lost to the army, the navy and the colonies over the decades that Portuguese farms suffered labour shortages and famine. Having basically invented international trade as we know it, they were also the first international corporation to go bankrupt, their routes and strategies stolen by the Dutch, their royal house absorbed by Spain for half a century. Although they still managed to hold on to their trading posts in the East and their colonies in Africa for more than 400 years, Portugal receded into being an insular, paranoid, basketcase power in Europe.

Nonetheless, the fall of their empire had as many repercussions in South Africa as its beginning. One of the background justifications for the Boer War was that in the 1880’s the Portuguese laid claim to all of Central Africa between Mozambique and Angola, and the British were forced to pull rank and assert their dominance over the region. Likewise, in the 1890’s, they didn’t like the sound of a direct train-line connecting the landlocked Transvaal to the coast via a gentleman’s agreement with the Portuguese officials in Lourenço Marques. This would have circumvented their control on the Johannesburg goldfields, which just wouldn’t do. 

The first domino that brought down the Apartheid Regime fell, arguably, in Lisbon. The ‘Carnation Revolution’ - the miraculously bloodless military coup that finally brought down the Estado Novo dictatorship in 1974 - led to the retreat of the Portuguese colonial forces and the independence of Mozambique and Angola in the next two years after decades of civil war. Now surrounded by enemy states and faced with a destabilised region (compounded by Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980), the National Party gambled its life away by committing to a clandestine guerilla war in support of reactionary groups in Angola and a campaign of cruel targeted assassinations of ANC operatives and sympathisers in Maputo and Beira. These ramped-up military expenses alone would have stretched the coffers of the regime, but combined soon afterwards with renewed international condemnation, the aftermath of the Soweto uprising, MK’s insurgencies, oil shocks, boycotts and a decade of economic stagnation, the clock finally began to run down on a Whites-Only South Africa.  

One of the lighter repercussions of this history was the South African Portuguese community and its outsized role in our culture. Although Cape Town could boast a ‘Little Madeira’ of fishermen’s families in Woodstock from the 1930’s, and there had always been a Portuguese presence in Johannesburg, the end of the colonies caused their numbers to more than sextuple, from 49,000 to 300,000-plus, in a matter of years. Rosettenville in Joburg South became its own ‘Little Portugal’, home to tens of thousands of migrant white and black Angolans and Mozambicans. Portuguese was even taught in the schools. 

Out of this enclave came Nando’s, the most successful of all South African restaurants, founded by a Portuguese immigrant entrepreneur named Fernando Duarte and his Jewish-South African business partner Robert Brozin. The original branch is still there at 117 Main Street, converted from the original ‘Chickenland’ in 1987 into the cornerstone of the global Peri-Peri market and a mainstay in British meme-culture. Likewise, Vida e Caffè,  the biggest coffee brand in Africa with 320-plus stores, was started on Kloof Street in 2001 by a Portuguese South African, Rui Esteves, and his business partner Brad Armitage, as a tribute to Portuguese counter-cafe culture.

Beyond every snippet of history, our national temperaments are simply strange mirror images. Even in 1508, the chronicler Pacheco Pereira remarked “that many of the herbs and plants and trees of the [Cape] peninsula were similar to those of Portugal because 

of similarity in latitude and climate.” 

Unlike the Portuguese archetype, I don’t think South Africans, on the whole, are a melancholy people, but I’d say we can recognise something of ourselves in the magnificent Portuguese word Saudade: what Sarah Bradford translates as “a state of longing for a person or a place, a bitter-sweet feeling something akin to the ancient Greek word pothos.” In other words, a national sense of tragedy. A fatalism that encompasses the collective memory of many centuries of overwrought peasants and warriors. It’s the sentiment that colours the genius of fado music - the aching anthology of national folk-songs that Afrikaners might recognise 

as expressing the term hartseer.

You can listen to Amália Rodrigues and Miriam Makeba side-by-side and recognise their souls in each other. It’s perhaps no coincidence that the enduring motto of the Anti-Apartheid struggle, still relevant in every way today, is in Portuguese: 

A Luta Continua. The Struggle Continue