Can Portugal apologise? As many times as necessary – Elísio Macamo

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Can Portugal apologise? As many times as necessary – Elísio Macamo

12:13 CAT | 16 Oct 2017

Publico (File photo) / Elísio Macamo

“What is at stake is the relationship between the Portuguese and their own values, not what they owe to the Africans”.

I recently participated in an interesting debate at the Hamburg Ethnological Museum on the relationship between colonialism and science. The immediate background to this debate was a lively discussion in Hamburg and Berlin about “colonial” toponymy, and more particularly about an exhibition of the Benin sculptures plundered by the British during the colonial occupation of Nigeria. The auditorium was full; more than 150 people, most of them quite old, and many of them with a genuine interest in understanding what is at stake in these discussions.

I confess that I have some difficulty in participating in this type of discussion. There is a sense in which they do not concern me, especially when they occur in Europe. I do not like to play the role of representative of the “victims,” a situation in which I am placed in the context of the discussion. That bothers me because it has the perverse effect of pulling me out. It obliges me, for example, to confuse the condition of victim with moral superiority, but at the exact moment when I assume this superiority someone appears who reminds me of the atrocities committed today by my African patricians. It completely shatters all my moral whims.

My position was simple. For me, there is no “colonial knowledge” if we refer only to the instrumentalisation of scientific knowledge for the purposes of colonisation. The “colonial knowledge” that counts for me is an intellectual posture that forces us to rationalise the incongruity between what we do and the type of values we defend. No one escapes this incongruity.

Kant defended slavery by recourse to the idea that blacks were no good; even when Georg Forster, who had travelled the world, told him about the others, how they were and under what circumstances they were obliged to live, Kant insisted that he knew better; only later was he horrified by the fate of the blacks, but something tells me that this was due to the fact that this attitude better matches the argument he was trying to develop about “eternal peace”.

John Locke also defended slavery, but on the basis of the argument that slaves had lost their liberty, defeated in “just wars” (wars to spread Christianity).

There is no doubt that these two brilliant minds saw things with the eyes of their time. But today, when an heir of the structural privileges that the kind of practices they have advocated helped build is confronted with the conditions under which their well-being has been historically constructed, how should they react? Here the question, for me, is not only scientific. It is moral.

You are the heir of a culture that is defined by a set of values that it itself has not consistently known how to respect. Confronted with that, how do you react? Do you shrug and says that it was a different time, or even worse, that the slaves themselves were victims of their own societies?

There is something profoundly wrong about this reaction, for it is no answer to the central question. And the central question is not if someone who also practices slavery, for example, deserves our pity when that person is also a victim of slavery. The question is how you relate to your own value,s which prevent you from upholding or promoting such practices.

The debate in Hamburg came to mind when I read a text written by a Portuguese historian and novelist, João Pedro Marques, about the campaign that has been carried out in his country in favour of an official apology from Portugal. He does not agree with this and asks, rhetorically, how often the country needs to apologise. My answer is: as many as needed.

The columnist does not seem to understand the ethical scope of what the issue of the apology raises. He seems to assume that Portugal should apologise to the Africans. But that is not what is at issue, at least for me. Portugal should apologise to itself for violating its own values. The apology renews its commitment to these values.

He cannot understand the question simply because he discusses the subject on the basis of problematic assumptions. First, he begins by mischaracterising the position of the one who demands the apology with recourse to the idea that he who requires it does so from the argument of humility. Although the Africans also practiced slavery, the Portuguese should apologise for humility. But, once again, what is at issue here is the relationship between the Portuguese and their own values, not what they owe to Africans.

Second, he elaborates a curious argument that suggests that the abolition of slavery would in itself constitute an apology. There may be cases of individuals who were certainly horrified. I am a fan, for example, of Joaquim Nabuco, one of the greatest Brazilian abolitionists. Nabuco turned against slavery based on his liberal political ideal (which did not prevent John Locke from arguing otherwise), but he also lamented the fact that slavery, as well as the presence of Africans in Brazil, contributed to “corrupt” the European culture and race.

Even in England, where abolitionism was stronger, it was economic reasons that dictated the end of slavery. The wealth that the plantation owners had acquired had made them very powerful in British politics. This made them targets of protectionist policies that simply hampered industrialisation by keeping peasants in captivity in England. Without the end of the famous “Corn Laws” that protected the monopoly of the planters, there would have been no abolition in England.

Third, it falls into the error that I briefly discussed above to consider that something is justified when the victim also practices it. As Africans also enslaved, then those who enslave the Africans are excused. Again: this is not the point. The question is whether the values I advocate allow me to do certain things. Only that. It does not matter what others do. I would not insist on this if it were not related to the malaise I feel whenever I am invited to participate in this type of discussion.

There are those who think that a non-European academic commits treason against his or her own culture by emulating forms of knowledge production that have always been hostile to them. I am aware of the theoretical and conceptual limitations of the social sciences because they have had their origin in a very specific place, time and context. I have tried to reflect this in my work.

But it is important for me to identify the ethical side that serves as the background for scientific activity, namely the promotion of human dignity. I reject Locke’s sympathy for slavery, but I defend the ideal of freedom that he inscribes in the set of goods that democracy must defend. If his defence of slavery contradicts this desideratum, well, the problem is his. I will continue to defend that ideal.

But here is where the problem lies. When the “natural” heirs of the culture which claims to have produced those values refuse to renew their commitment to these values, they place on me, as a non-European academic, the responsibility to uphold those values. It seems to me unfair. In fact, it is doubly unjust because I am the heir of this historical injustice first, and secondly, I still have to stand up in defence of that which oppressed me.

Portugal and Europe can apologise as often as is necessary to not only renew their commitment to their values but also to give good arguments to non-Europeans who would like to look at those values without cynicism. The subject has nothing to do with the Africans, deep down. It has to do with Europeans. And I said that in this debate in Hamburg too.

By Elísio Macamo

Source: Publico