DEMÉTRIO MAGNOLI

One Drop of Blood: History of The Racialist Thinking

English version of:

Uma Gota de Sangue: História do Pensamento Racial. São Paulo: Editora

Contexto, 2009

How to cite this book: MAGNOLI, D. Uma gota de sangue: história do

pensamento racial. São Paulo: Editora Contexto, 2009. 385p.

Since the book was published only in Portuguese, this is a guide for the non
speakers to understand it, thus references cited by the author are not listed.
About the author

Demétrio Magnoli is a sociologist, PhD in Human Geography by the University of São

Paulo and member of the Group of Analysis of the International Conjuncture
(GACINT) of the University of São Paulo. He writes columns to newspapers such as
Folha de São Paulo, O Estado de São Paulo and O Globo. He was the editor of the
books History of Wars and History of Peace, both published (in Portuguese) by the
Editora Contexto. You can e-mail him at demetrio.magnoli@terra.com.br
Summary

INTRODUCTION – EXCESS OF COLOR

PART I – THE WHITE MAN´S BURDEN

A history of blood

The science of races

A mission in Africa

Classifying the natives

Nation as a lineage

Hitler and the crisis of race

In the beginning it was the Volk

A perfect Volk

Laws of Nuremberg

Victory in defeat

The rejected race

Revolution in Soweto

Apartheid as norm

Norm as an exception

Afro-Americans

The sense of citizenship

The confusion of races

Triumph of multiculturalism

Ford Foundation and the policies of differences

Nations inside the nation

Meeting in Durban

Minorities from all over the world, unite yourselves!

PART II – ONE DROP RULE

Loving Day

Melting pot

Jim Crow

Equality and difference

The whole and the parts

The vote of Anthony Kennedy

Barack Obama: the speech

Black into white

Miscegenation as a solution

The mixed in USA and in Brazil

Freyre at Pelourinho

The yarn of Durban

Indio muerto indio puesto (dead Indian deposed Indian)

The interrupted revolution

The Tableland and the West

The communitarian plurinational Estate

Inventing the Camba nation

Booty of war

PART III – BACK TO AFRICA

The empire against the traffic

The principle of freedom

A Christian home in Africa

The real distinctions nature did

From Zanzibar to Congo

The Pan-African dream

Africa as a metaphor: Du Bois

Africa as a destiny: Garvey

Pan-Africanism reaches Africa

A speech out of place

African mix

Black Economic Empowerment

Seals of authenticity

We had to teach how to hate

The three sons of Gahanga

From one myth of origin to another

Hutus in power

The gears of the genocide

The evil names

PART IV – ORIENT

Restoration of castes

Caste makers

The castes and the nation

One million mutinies

The sons of the soil

Malay supremacy

A racial nationalism

The social contract in crisis

A country for all?

PART V – INDUSTRY OF IDEOLOGIES

Diseases of blacks

A Pan-African disease?

The import of a speech

Aids in the racialist pot

Health against miscegenation

Abolition of abolition

An African homeland?

Palmares, the metaphor

War and peace among races

Pedagogy of race

Racial hornbooks

The color of poverty

Statistics on the perch

The talented 10%

Racial tribunals

A young lady of clear skin and blue eyes

Rivers that never meet

Redemption without return

Naturally ambivalent beings

Starting again?
INTRODUCTION – EXCESS OF COLOR

Frederick Douglass was born as a slave, in a poor house in Maryland in 1818.

His mother died when he was 7 year-old. Probably, she was born from the union of an
African and an American Indian. The boy never knew his father, but he had the
information that he might be a white man, probably the owner of those lands and of
himself. Anyway, when his presumed father died, he was 12 year-old and was
transferred to the Auld family in Baltimore.

Sophia Auld, the wife of his new owner, was not just somebody. Without telling
his husband, and disobeying the law, she alphabetized the boy. Through Sophi,
Douglass discovered The Columbian Orator, a collection of patriotic speeches and
poems where he found the idea of equality among the human beings. In the following
years, he had several owners and even taught some slaves to read the New Testament at
Sunday classes in a black church. In 1838, in a second trial, he succeeded in escaping,
dressed as a sailor, through train and vapor, to New Bedford, Massachussets, where he
became one the most important leaders of abolitionism in USA.

Douglass´ speech of 4th July was pronounced in 1852, at Corinthian Hall of

Rochester city, New York, a place nowadays transformed in a parking zone where other
abolitionists presented their speeches, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Dickens
and William Lloyd Garrison. Between the escape from slavery and the invite to speech
at the American national date, Douglass collaborated with the Antislavery American
Society, wrote his precocious autobiography that was a great success, visited Ireland
and Great Britain and edited abolitionist journals. In his overseas trip, he legalized his
condition of a free man, bought by British friends, and had a meeting with Thomas
Clarkson, the greatest British abolitionist, who would die some months later, at the age
of 81 year-old. The North Star, one of the journals he created, had as label the phrase
„the Law doesn´t have sex – the Truth doesn´t have color – God is the Father and we all
are siblings‟.

The pathway of Douglass towards the abolitionist movement was open by a

meeting with Garrison, the editor of the journal The Liberator, who spoke to an
abolitionist audience. The ex-slave was then 23 year-old. Invited to tell about his life, he
made such an impression in the respectful abolitionist, who was also a reporter and a
reformer, son of Canadian immigrants. These two men worked together until a
philosophical divergence took them apart.

Garrison considered the American constitution as an abominable slavery

contract and in 1854 he even fired it publically, provoking an animated fuss. Douglass
reflected deeply over the matter and, under the influence of Lysander Spooner, an
anarchist-individualist, concluded that, in opposite to Garrison, the constitution was
basically an anti-slavery document. In the constitutional text, the institute of slavery was
implicit in sections 2 and 9 of the 1st article that mentions “all the other persons” (the
slaves) or the import of persons (the slavery traffic). However, it is only explicit in a
failed proposal of 1861 that aimed to prohibit the congress to interfere in anti-slavery
state laws and in the famous 13th proposal of 1865 that abolished slavery. Douglass
extracted from this and mostly from the constitutional principle of equality the reasons
for his appraisal to the fundamental text of the American nation.

Douglass accused, at the 4th July of 1852, not against the fundaments of the
USA, but against its betrayal. The abolitionism of Douglass represented an adhesion to
USA, not the country of slavery, but the one of the freedom as announced in the Declare
of Independence and in the Constitution. He tried to convince the radical abolitionist
John Brown to not put into action his plans to organize an armed revolution in the South
and disapproved the attack to the federal weapons of Harpers Ferry, in Western
Virginia, the first and unsuccessful act of this abolitionist project. With the beginning of
the civil war, partially started by Brown´s attitudes, Douglass claimed for all the blacks
to adhere to the federal troops and in 1863 he spoke to Abraham Lincoln about the
treatment that was given to those soldiers.

After the war, he defended the universal voting and the women´s rights. During
the years of the reconstruction, a short period of liberal changes in the states of the old
confederation, Douglass was the chief of a federal bank devoted to the development of
the black communities of the South, gave support to the repression against the Ku Klux
Klan and served as a diplomat in Haiti and Dominican Republic. In 1876, he
pronounced his most touching speech in the inauguration of the Memory to
Emancipation (also known as the Memorial to Lincoln) in Washington.

The reconstruction ended in 1879, when the old Southern elites conquered back
the control of the government of the states. As a reaction, a movement claiming the
blacks to leave the South appeared. Douglass strongly reproved this initiative and took
the word in the reunions of this movement to dissuade the blacks, under a booing
audience, from the idea of physical separation. He claimed for resistance and under the
worst conditions he believed in the dream of the single nation.

Anna Murray Douglass, the wife with whom Frederick lived since he escaped,
died in 1882. Two years later, he married Helen Pitts, a white feminist of New York,
defying the taboo against interracial marriages. In 1888, in the Republican Convention,
a member voted in Douglass as a candidate for the Presidency. In an event in
Jacksonville, in Florida, 120 years later, one day before the presidential elections,
Barack Obama concluded his speech citing Douglass: “ You don´t imagine for a single
minute that the power will give anything without a fight”.

From Douglass to Obama, passing by Martin Luther King, an anti-racial cord

goes through two centuries of the history of USA. These three men, under different
circumstances, were raised as the announcements of the principle of equality and
insisted on see the American nation through this point of view. However, a powerful
side of the American history was born around the myth of the races, which means, the
principle of the difference, not of the equality. Douglass fought against the slavery and
won, but, even before his death, he lived to see the first segregationist laws be edited.
Luther King fought against these laws and also triumphed, but at the moment he was
killed, the myth of the races reappeared with its plenty vigor under the paradoxical
forms of reverse discrimination policies. Obama got apart from these racial preference
policies and defined himself as a mixed man, in a country that classified its citizens
according to racial criteria.

At the time of Douglass, both science and common sense believed that the
humankind was divided into races. This belief had lost credit when Luther King
conducted the march for civil rights. Spite this event, the idea of race was re-introduced
in the law a few years after the murder of the leader that not only preached for equality
but also nourished the dream of a nation where nobody would be judged by their skin
color. At the moment when the congress and the Supreme Court adopted the
interpretation of the constitution as wanted by Douglass, the political doctrine of
multiculturalism re-emerged and again challenged the principle of the equality. Since
the decade of 1970 and under the approval of black leaders, they reactivated the motors
of programs that make the skin color criteria for distinguishing the candidates and
government contracts, public jobs and admission to universities.

„Afro-Americans‟: an expression created together with the multiculturalism, is

nothing more than a post-modern reflex of the old vision of Africa as a patria of a race.
It was precisely this vision imported from the classical racism that guided the main draft
of the black movement in USA, before and after Luther King. It is this vision that
sustains the projects of policies of political racial preferences in Brazil. The relationship
between skin color, geographical and racial origin is present in Africa.

Mia Couto, a Mozambican writer, discuss the disapproval of the young people of
his country regarding the identity of the famous soccer player Eusébio da Silva Ferreira,
born in Mozambique and hero of the Portuguese selection of the World Cup of 1996.
He affirms himself as being Portuguese of nationality and heart. According to Mia
Couto, „the example of Eusébio reveals many other phantoms. Is there a reason for the
black Africans can´t be converted into „something else‟? If there are whites who are
Africans, blacks that are Americans, why the black Africans can´t turn into Europeans?‟

The writer proceeds: „There are nowadays many blacks who were born in
Europe. They studied, grew and absorbed values. They are citizens of the countries
where they were born. They will have European kids and grandkids. They shall never
fall into a trap of claiming a ghetto, a species of a second-class citizenship named as
Afro-European‟.

Race is, precisely, the vindications of a ghetto. The name of this ghetto is
ancestry. The life of a person who defines their place in the world in racial terms is
organized by loops, either real or fictitious, that connect them to the past. But modernity
was inaugurated by an opposite perspective that is mixed with the rights of the
citizenship. The citizens are equal in front of the law and they have the right to create
their future, spite of their family origins or blood relations. The racial policies are,
however, a denial of the modernity.

However, the multiculturalist denial of the modernity is a recent event. The

science of the races appeared at the end of the XVII century, together with the French
revolution and the consolidation of the concept of citizenship and continued into
extremely depraved practices of the Second World War. The policies of racial
preferences were disseminated in the post-war, not much after the Universal Declaration
of the Human Rights and the worldwide repudiation of the Nazi racism. The message of
the multiculturalism is that the principle of the equality can be a beautiful declaration,
but the real truth is formed by the essential differences of the human groups.

The scientific racism planted the races in the soil of nature, defining them as
human families separated by their biological essences. When science demolished this
belief, the multiculturalism replanted the races on the soil of the culture. The argument
of the multiculturalists is that the races are social and cultural entities. Based on this, the
racial policies, that seemed to disappear at the time of the opening of the Nazi fields, re-
appeared triumphantly in many points of the Planet.

The production of races does not make an exigency of differences in skin color.
It is enough, as the Nigerians, Kenyans and Rwandese know it deeply, the elaboration
of a historical narrative organized as starting from ethnic paradigms and, most
importantly, the inscription of racial groups in the texts of the law. The distribution of
privileges according criteria of ethnicity or race records in the consciences the sense of
racial pertinence. Race is a self-succeeded prophecy.

The races were presented as very old entities, with roots attached to the spring of
the times. In fact, they are modern identity constructions or, at least, recent re-
elaborations of diffuse identities of a deeper past – as well known by Indians, Malays
and Bolivians. Race is the fruit of the power of a Estate that rejects the principle of the
equality among the citizens.

The American affirmative policies based on race served as model for South
Africa and Brazil. In South Africa, the principle of the racial difference, glued in the
laws and consciences since the colonization until the apartheid regime, gave the logical
scenario for the new policies of preferences of the black economic empowerment. In
Brazil, in the contrary, the principle of the political equality finds support in the
powerful identity speech of mixing, which has blurred the frontiers of race. Even so, in
name of the multiculturalism, the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso tried to
divide the citizens between blacks and whites and the following government of Luís
Inácio Lula da Silva supported the introduction of the first racial laws of the Brazilian
history.

In the last year of the XX century, the scientists who sequenced the human
genome declared the death of the races. The myth of the races, however, instead of
dissolving as an anachronistic belief, something comparable to the old belief in witches,
persists or re-sprouts in the political spheres, denying the ideas of equality. Like if they
keep saying Douglass that the 4th July will never be his day.

PART I – THE WHITE MAN´S BURDEN

A history of the blood

Classify is to put objects or ideas in order. Mankind has classified since its
remote times. The most general rules of classification, exposed by Aristotle, are known
by almost everybody. One: the items must be grouped in classes the most homogenous
as possible. Two: each new specific item must be grouped to the class to with it shares
the most similar characteristics. Third: a new item with too many different
characteristics must originate a new class.

Order requires hierarchy. When the classes are considered as items, they can be
grouped into sets bigger and bigger. The superior set is the Universe. Below it, there are
less and less heterogeneous groups until the most inferior level, where the classes
remain. All hierarchical levels receive names, as well as the sets and classes. Order is
done.

In Biology, classification is named taxonomy, a word that has spread out into
other fields of knowledge. The taxonomical hierarchy of the life beings is organized into
eight principal levels, since the kingdoms to the species. Classifications obey to rules,
but always use a snooze of subjectivity. In the biological taxonomy, ordering all levels
superior to species contains some degree of arbitrariness. But the species, the most
inferior level, was given a special characteristic: according to the dogmas of the concept
of biological species, each species represent a real unity from nature.

Regarding the animal kingdom, a species is a group of organisms that can cross
naturally and give raise to fertile descendants, according to the usual definition. Thus,
the species are not a product from the mind of the taxonomist, but of the nature itself.
The frontiers among the animal species are clearly defined, and it is enough for the
taxonomist to collect enough data from nature. However, this gets too complicated
when developing a complete classification that comprises the extinguished life beings.
The biota reflects the end points of innumerable branches of the evolutionary tree. The
extinguished organisms are related both among themselves and the living biota. How
can science classify the fossils that are in intermediary positions? So, through this point
of view, even the taxonomical level of species is somehow impregnated by
arbitrariness, since the classification is derived from a human act –and human-centered-
of making a temporal cutting and put in order only the recent biota.

Below the species, there are only sub-species or geographical races. This
secondary level of classification is deeply arbitrary. The frontiers among sub-species are
never static since, by definition, individuals from one sub-species can cross with the
others. Also, to the biological classification, it is not needed to subdivide the species
into sub-species. The imaginative fabrication of sub-species is an act for the
convenience of the researcher and even this practice has been more and more
questioned.

One species is separated from the others by the abyss of the reproductive
isolation. One sub-species is separated by the others only by morphological or
physiological differences or by living in a particular geographical area. The sub-species
were defined starting from the identification of some characteristics clearly different
inside the same species. When just a few characteristics are seen, it is not easy to define
the differences inside the population, so, the term race is used.

The appearance of the computers and sophisticated multivariable analysis has

enhanced the spectrum of characteristics investigated. The scenario has changed, not
due to any natural modification, but to the greater power of investigating it. So, the
scientists saw a continuum of variations inside each species, not only superficial
characteristics. The imposition of sub-species makes such screening even more difficult
and leads to that important information get lost. So, again, naming geographical races
has lost popularity among the biologists.

The first trials of ordering humanity by classifying it into races are dated from
the end of the XVII century. 100 years later, starting from analysis of the skull, the
German doctor Johann Friedrich Blumenbach proposed a classification of the human
beings in the races Caucasian (white), Asiatic (yellow), Malay (brown), Ethiopian
(black) and American (red). Although classification is an Aristotelian attitude,
Blumenbach did not apply classificatory rules to compose his racial picture. Instead, the
used the Platonic notion of ideal type. From this notion, abstract models would serve as
icons of the races and all the real persons would be grouped according the similarities
with those icons.

One more century has passed until this theme of racial classification derived to
appreciations that connected Biology and History. At the times of Charles Darwin, it got
usual to think about racial hierarchies in terms of intellectual abilities and explain the
cultural and economical features of the societies as being related to the racial
potentialities. However, in the XIX century nobody understood their own racial
classification. Georges Cuvier reduced the races into 3, James Prichard found 7, Louis
Agassiz enhanced them to 12, Charles Pickering said 11 and Thomas Huxley suggested
4. Things even got worse at the XX century with the discoveries of the explorers and the
anthropologists. Joseph Deniker numbered 29 races in 1900 and Egon von Eickstedt
listed 38 in 1937, while other systems proposed more than one hundred of races. Even
before these systems collapsed, Darwin had registered the difficulties of identifying
clear differences among the human races, although he somehow seemed to believe in
the racial superiority of the Europeans.

Biology recognizes mono-typical species (species with only one race) and poly-
typical species, where there are many distinct races. Human species is monotypic, and
that´s why it was historically impossible to reach to a consensual racial classification.
Modern genetics has shown that individual differences inside the continental
populations can be even greater than the differences among the populations. Also,
revealed that so-called differences among the races are just superficial physical
characteristics, controlled by an insignificant portion of the human genome. The skin
color, the most iconic feature of the racial characteristics is a mere evolutionary
adaptation to different levels of ultraviolet solar radiation, expressed in less than 10
genes from a total of more than 25 thousands of genes of the human genome.

Out of Africa is the name of the model predominant in Paleoanthropology to

explain the origin of the anatomically modern humans. According to this model, all the
human beings descend directly from the same African population, which was formed
around 200 thousand years ago. This population of Homo sapiens expanded quickly,
colonizing Asia and Europe and substituting the precedent human sub-species, which by
the way were also originated from older African migrations dated of around one million
years ago.

The human genetic variation is greater in Africa and decreases as the distance
from this continent enhances. This supports the model of Out of Africa, since it is in
accordance to a small migrant group came from a broader stock of genetic variations.
The arrival of the modern humans occurred around 60 thousand year ago in Asia and 40
thousand years in Europe. In the scale of time of the human evolution, this means
„yesterday‟. Anyway, the human groups never stopped migrating. “Regarding the
human diversity, the absence of races can be explained precisely under the lights of the
fact we are a young and mobile species, while it is required time and isolation for
distinct genetic groups appear.

When the contemporaries of Darwin experienced innumerable human racial

classifications, there were already enough scientific data to at least put into doubt these
efforts. Spite of it, the idea that the human beings were divided into races had an
incontestable hegemony. This willing to impose a natural order in mankind needs an
explanation external to the sciences of the nature.

The science of races

Aristotle nourished an elevated evaluation of the Hellenic race, endowed with

spirit, intelligence and ability to govern. The Europeans also had the attribute of the
spirit, but the cold climate made them with low intelligence and a weak ability to
govern. Inversely, the Asiatic were smart, but they had no spirit and lived permanently
under slavery.

Ethnocentrism is a trace common in all peoples and eras. The ancient Egyptians
named themselves as „men‟ while their neighbors were rustic, ignorant and were no
more than „Libyans‟, „Africans‟ or „Asiatic‟. Herodotus, the Greek, described the
ethnocentric system of the old Persians, who used concentric circles. In the China of
Ming dynasty, between the XIV and XVII centuries, it was consolidated a conception of
a system centered in own China similar to the Persian one. The graphic representation
of this conception put in a nuclear position the “Empire of the Center”, which was
surrounded by an inner circle of vassal Estates –such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam- and
for an external ring of barbarians habiting non-civilized areas.

The European version – the eurocentrism- got articulated at Renaissance under

the mode of a historical thinking. At that time, the Europeans made the notion of Classic
Antiquity and converted the Greco-Romanian civilization into the fountain of a singular
and superior European tradition. But many analphabet peoples, such as the Pueblo
Indians of New Mexico and the Siberian Ostiaks of the Yenisei river draw ethnocentric
cosmic diagrams and the Inuit of Greenland believed in the beginning of the XX
century that the European explorers were sent from backward peoples to learn with
them their virtues and good manners. The Inuit, of course, didn´t know that those
Europeans had pejoratively called them as Eskimos, which means, „eaters of crude
meat‟.

Throughout history, in the most diverse ethnocentric contexts, the word race has
been used with descriptive finalities and senses associated to type, variety, ancestors.
However, this word got its modern sense, of a general division of mankind supported in
physical characteristics, under the eurocentrism of the XVIII century. The burst of the
concept was the campaign against the traffic of slaves and the institute of slavery.

Since old times, the societies enslaved persons as a result of wars or debts, but
this act never needed a legitimization based on physical or mental differences. The
Bible, with its insistence over the essential unity of the mankind, seemed to condemn
the slavery of Africans, largely practiced by the Europeans since the colonization of the
New World. To overcome such difficulty, it was told that the slaves were pagans or that
Noah had thrown a malediction of the slavery over the descendants of his son Ham,
black. Another further step was given by the English colony of Virginia, when it
decreed in 1667 that the converted to Christian could be kept under slavery as a
payment for the paganism of their ancestors.

The scenario deeply changed with the philosophy of the Lights that postulated
the natural equality among the humans, a principal that became the center for the
abolitionists. If the human beings are born free and equal due to a destination at the
same time divine and natural, how could the institute of slavery conserve?
 The first scientific theories of the division of mankind into races offered an
answer to this dilemma with deep economic implications. Carolus Linnaeus, the father
of the biological taxonomy, suggested in the XVIII century a division of the Homo
sapiens into four races, based on the geographical origin and skin color: Americanus,
Asiaticus, Africanus and Europeanus. Obviously, the Europeanus race was the most
intelligent, gentle and creative, while the Americanus were stubborn and choleric, the
Asiaticus suffered from inborn difficulties of concentration and the Africanus were not
able to escape from laziness and laxity. Linnaeus had a fertile imagination, as he also
described fantastic persons, such as the Homo anthropomorpha as the troglodytes, the
Homo monstruosus as the Alpine dwarfs and the Patagonian giants and the race of the
Homo ferus, of men created and nourished by wild animals.

Thomas Jefferson, in Notes of Virginia State, in 1787, thought that the

unfortunate differences of color and even of talents are a serious obstacle to the
emancipation of the blacks. He waited from science a conclusive word about the races,
but recommended that, when free, the blacks should be kept away from mixing.

Among the naturalists of the XVIII century, an acid debated was raised about the
common or separated origin of the human races. The defenders of the first hypothesis,
monogenic, used as an argument the definition of species proposed by Georges-Louis
Leclerc, where the individuals of one given species could never fertilize representatives
of other species. The defenders of the second idea, polygenic, contested this definition
and pointed out fertile hybrids generated from the crossing of wolves, jackals and foxes.

A crucial book in the articulation of the racialist thinking is the Essay on the
inequality of the human races, from the French aristocrat and diplomat Arthur de
Gobineau. Published between 1853 and 1855, the Essay said the history was derived,
foremost, from the racial dynamics. Mankind would be divided into three great racial
complexes – white, black and yellow – and the historical progress would depend
directly or indirectly from the white races. All the great civilizations would have the
origin, directly or indirectly, in the white races and particularly in the Arian family.
Mixing the races would degenerate the mankind, with disastrous impacts on the
civilizations and empires. This Gobineauish notion of racial purity inspired the anti-
mixing laws of USA and the Nazi Germany.

Gobineau called the science, but he never forgot to support his conclusions on
biblical interpretations. In his book, he said that „Adam is the founder of our white
species, this must be certainly admitted. It is clear that the Texts want us to understand
like this, since from him the incontestable white generations has descendant‟. The idea
that the human races were originated by different ancestors inspired the American
Josiah Clark Nott, translator of the book of Gobineau from French to English, to support
the polygenists in the scientific environment of the United States.

Being a disciple of the French Cuvier, the greater adversary of the pre-Darwinist
evolutionism, the Swiss naturalist Agassiz migrated to USA in 1846, where he quickly
was converted to polygenism. Agassiz was among the stronger defenders of abolition,
but was also a strong enemy of miscegenation. He, more than any other, wrote as a
scientist, claiming for objectivity and being away. However, the never censored himself
regarding political opinions. Referring to the future of the blacks in USA in letters sent
during the Civil War, he wrote: „Social equality, I consider impracticable at any time. It
is a natural impossibility, derived from the inherent character of the black race‟.
Science, this way, gave the answers to the questions of Jefferson.

Agassiz was fluent but he never carried out the hard work of grouping empirical
proofs of his theory. The working scientist was the doctor Samuel G. Morton, the
founder of the American school of ethnology. Morton dedicated to collect and
investigate skulls of the different human races. He died in 1851 and left a collection
with more than one thousand skulls and two main studies: Crania Americana (1839) and
Crania aegyptiaca (1844). Agassiz saw in those studies the evidences for the
polygenism. Although Morton refused to adopt the thesis that could shake the biblical
myth of the creation, his disciples Nott and George Gliddon became enthusiastic of
polygenism.

In both the Crania, Morton started from the principle that the size of a skull is an
indirect indicator of intelligence and gave himself to prove his previous thesis of racial
hierarchy. The works don´t reflect a conscious intention of falsifying results, but rather
constitute on an illustration of how an illusion is capable of directing the procedures of
the scientists towards the wanted conclusions. Using selective methods, analysis and
statistics unsustainable, the most applauded empiricist of his time produced detailed
draws in which the Caucasians had the greater skulls and the blacks divided with the
American Indians the inferior positions. The division of the races into subgroups gave
to the scientist even the opportunity of showing the Teutonic family of the Caucasian
group in the top of the list of skull abilities. Revising his collection of skulls and
original tables, Stephen Jay Gould evidenced the many mistakes committed throughout
the work and proved that the differences were statistically insignificant.

The pioneer essays of a science of the races were placed in a picture purely
descriptive that excluded the concept of evolution. The scientific racism was born
together with the modern evolutionism, at the second half of the XIX century, when the
discussions between monogenic and polygenic lost interest. The publication of the
classical book of Darwin in 1859 practically cancelled the creationist arguments and
established the concept of unity of human species. The triumph of the monogenism was
the basis over who was developed an anthropology that confirmed the inborn
differences among the races and insisted on the racial hierarchies formulated by the
naturalists from the previous era.

Measuring the skulls continued to be a fundamental practice for the science of

the races. The French doctor Paul Broca, who left important discoveries in neurology
and was also a pioneer in the physical anthropology, elevated the measurements of
skulls to the apex of glory by applying sophisticated methods of statistical analysis. In
the Anthropological Society of Paris that he founded at the same year the book of
Charles Darwin was published, Broca defended the study of skulls as a mean to identify
the differences among the races. He concluded as: „in general, the brain is bigger in
mature adults than in elders, in men than in women, in eminent men than in ordinary
men, in superior races than in inferior races…‟ Other equivalent conclusions, there is a
noticeable correlation between the development of intelligence and the brain volume.

Contrary to other colleagues, Broca did not manipulate numbers and liked to
present himself as an example of scientific objectivity. His zeal to rigor led him to
accuse a German anatomist who sustained the non-existence of differences in the skull
volume of blacks and whites on being left by his pre-formed ideas. It was precisely this
zeal that provoked on him an extreme difficulty: indeed his researches had shown that
the skull of the blacks was smaller than those of whites, but they also showed that the
skulls of Eskimos, Lapps, Malays and Tartarians were bigger than any of the others,
included the „most civilized peoples of Europe‟. The solution to not dismantle a work of
years and years was to select the data that were convenient to the previous thesis,
denying value to the other data. Broca then concluded that „the skull volume doesn´t
take a decisive part in the intellectual rank of the races‟, but also that „a small brain size
is a mark of inferiority‟.

Broca measured everything possible in the skulls, keeping himself loyal to both
his numbers and his prejudice. Many times, his measurements contradicted his theories
– and invariably he concluded that it was needed to measure other more relevant
features. His pathway as a scientist is a model, in an individual scale, of the general
pathway of the science of the races that demonstrated all the times a previously
elaborated thesis.

A Mission inside Africa

Alexis de Tocqueville published The Democracy in America between 1835 and

1840. Like his contemporaries, he believed that mankind was divided into races, which
was not an impediment for him to register acute observations regarding racial prejudice
in USA. By a comparison between old and modern slavery, he noticed that in
modernity, the immaterial and ethereal fact of slavery was combined in a more fatal
manner with the material and permanent aspect of racial differences.

The modern slave is a foreigner and a stranger in racial terms, explained

Tocqueville. The abolition of slavery does not abolish this essential difference that is a
natural fact. The smart traveler understood that, in the contrary, the idea of segregation
tended to get stronger – and not get weaker- with the progressive dissolution of slavery:
„the prejudice that repels the blacks seems to enhance in the proportion that the blacks
are not slaves anymore and the inequality gets worse in the manners as the differences
get blurred in the laws‟. This observation should not be exclusive of the reality of USA.
 The imperial adventure in Africa started with the expeditions financed by
geographical societies and other private (but supported by the governments) entities, at
the second half of XIX century. The reports of their discoveries, spoken in newspapers
or also personally in conferences that were great political and intellectual events,
hypnotized the European public opinion, giving support for the colonial enterprises.

The starting point of the so-called division of Africa was the Conference of
Berlin (1884-1885) that was carried out under the sign of the complete elimination of
slavery and black traffic. In the following decade to the Conference, the European
potencies draw, through mutual treatises and treatises with African kingdoms, the
frontiers of the colonial territories. The scientific racism reached the apex exactly on
this period, working as an important ideological function of legitimating the
imperialism.

The science of races gave the first steps toward abolitionism. But it consolidated
after the slavery thematic got behind, substituted by the imperial annexation of African
and Asiatic peoples. The concept of intrinsic inequality among races could conciliate
the illuminist principle of equality and the imperialist principle that could not work
without the support of the European public opinion. The civilizing mission of the
European countries was the „white man´s burden‟, in the famous title of the poem of
Rudyard Kipling, published in 1899. In the words of the French diplomat and colonial
administrator Jules Harmand, wrote in 1910: „it is necessary to accept as a principle and
starting point the fact that there is a hierarchy of races and civilizations and that we are
from the superior civilization. The basic legitimacy of conquering the native peoples is
the conviction of our superiority, not only our mechanical, economical and military
superiority, but foremost our moral superiority. Our dignity is based on the principle of
equality and it founds our rights to direct the rest of mankind‟.

Evolutionism indicated to the scientists what they should search for, if they
wanted incontestable proofs of racial hierarchy. In 1866, the German zoologist Ernst
Haeckel, a noticeable scientist and a broadcaster of Darwin´s ideas, formulated the
theory of recapitulation, under the what the embryonic development of the most
complex animals reflected the whole life tree. „Ontogeny remembers phylogeny‟ was
the synthetic expression of that time. This theory experienced a great success and
jumped the walls of Biology and invaded the lands of Psychology, even being adopted
by Sigmund Freud.

The scientific racism converted immediately into recapitulation, saying that the
individuals of the inferior races walked incompletely the paths of the evolution of the
species. So, if the embryonic stages of human beings recapitulated the reptiles, fishes
and inferior mammals, the adult stage of individuals of an inferior race reflects the
infant stages of the superior races, and the infant stages of the inferior races reflected the
adult stages of our monkey ancestors. So, it was drawn the objectives to the scientists
devoted to measuring skulls and skeletons: to identify in samples of the inferior races
the aspects corresponding to the children of a superior race or also of the simians.
 Like in many other examples, practice anticipated theory. The atlas of natural
history and geography of the XIX century brought, routinely, comparative illustrations
of facial and cranial aspects of African blacks and monkeys. Types of Mankind, the
most common manual in USA, published in 1854 by the polygenic Nott and Gliddon,
compared heads of chimps, orangutans and gorillas with black Argelians. At this time,
under the travels of the explorers, an excitation about the races run through American
and European public, as reflected in the febrile great interest in the „human zoos‟.

The human zoos were ethnologic expositions of exotic human types. The oldest
exhibition of this gender was the one of Saartjie Baartman, the „Hottentot Venus‟, a
South African Khoi slave exposed in London and Paris between 1810 and 1815.
However, a broader consumer market for the exhibition of „inferior races‟ configured
around the decade of 1870, when London, Paris, New York, Amsterdam, Antwerp,
Hamburg, Milan and Barcelona started to have expositions that attracted two to three
cents of thousands of visitors and offered attractions such as African and New Zealand
pygmies, Nubian blacks, Apaches, Eskimos and natives of Samoa or Surinam. In the
peak of the colonial run to Africa, the Universal Exposition of Paris of 1889 offered to
the visitors the contact with four hundred Indian peoples and a walk inside a black
village. Parallel to it, the editors published innumerable encyclopedias and illustrated
atlas that presented the diversity of human races, with their possible intellectual and
cultural hierarchies. Even in 1958, the human zoos survived: at the Universal
Exposition of Brussels, there was a Congolese and an African village exposed.
However, with recapitulationism, those popular figures of scientific racism got a more
elaborated evolutionism structure.

At the entrance of the Natural Academy of Sciences of USA, in Philadelphia,

there is a plaque in memory to Edward Drinker Cope, the most celeb American
paleontologist of the XIX century. Cope identified dozens of species of dinosaurs and
got involved in the „war of bones‟, a dirty dispute for scientific primacy with his rival
Othniel Charles Marsh, which extended from 1877 to 1892, exhausting resources and
energies from both. Cope was a Lamarckist in a time where Darwinism was triumphant.
He started from recapitulation to formulate some of the most common arguments for the
imperialism.

In Cope´s vision, women, the Southern Europeans and the poor persons
represented inferior human forms whose evolution was cut at earlier stages from the one
of the Nordic whites. The basis of the pyramid of human evolution, however, was
occupied by the blacks, whose inability to create complex civilizations was written in an
immature anatomy with weak legs and lacking of „those important elements of beauty:
nose and beard well developed‟. The proofs of the infantilism of these inferior humans
were never limited to anatomy, but had diverse branches in psychology. Emotionally,
women, blacks and others were similar to white children or teens. The pre-historic art
was similar to the draws of children. The esthetic sense of the wild peoples was
reflected on children´s conceptions of beauty.
 The British Herbert Spencer had an important paper in broadening the
ideological field of the scientific racism. Although he was known as the champion of
social-Darwinism, Spencer derived this philosophical system from the concept of
characters inherited by use or disuse. In Spencerism, not only the biological evolution,
but also the development of civilizations could be explained over this Lamarckist basis.
According to him, the superior social organisms – which means, the complex industrial
societies – were fruits exclusively from the white race and pointed to something as a
final stage of evolutionary equilibrium. As a rule, the philosophers of that time had a
modest influence over the great public, but Spencer was a noticeable exception: when
he died, in 1930, his books sold more than 350 thousands of units in USA and another
so in the United Kingdom, contributing to the popularity of the explanation of the social
question in biological terms.

The idea of a straight social evolution, through successive technological and

cultural stages that conducted mankind from wilderness to civilization, gained a
complete anthropological model with the American Lewis H. Morgan. In the chapter of
opening of his classic book of 1877 he wrote: „the same way we can´t deny that portions
of the human family existed in wilderness stage, other portions in barbarism and others
still in a civilized stage, we can´t also deny that these three distinct conditions are
connected in natural and necessary sequence of progress‟. The positivism of Morgan
originated the theory of cultural development that had a long impact over anthropology
and inspired Marx and Engels. In the triumphant march of Morganian progress, the
Arian and Semite families detached from the others starting from a mild period of
barbarism and the Arians got the leadership of the civilization period.

The febrile interest of that time of the themes of evolutionism and heredity
reached the field of criminality with the Italian Cesare Lombroso, the creator of the
doctrine of the uomo delinquente. The criminal anthropology founded by Lombroso
affirmed that the tendency to crime was not only inborn and inherited but also that could
be discovered by the investigation of the anatomical features of the persons. The
criminal behavior reflected the gross instincts of beasts that had perpetuated as
evolutionary defects in some persons. The external signs of uomo delinquente – a
stigmata – included the „enormous jaws‟, the „high molar bones‟, the „extreme size of
the orbits‟ and „the ears in form of loop‟.

In his theory, Lombroso postulated that the inferior animals had criminal
instincts and that criminality was the norm among the wild human groups. With such
ideas, the criminologist arrived to Africa and, in an ethnological work of 1896,
identified the stigmata of the Sudanese Dinkas of Nile. At those years of end of century,
the peoples of Africa and Asia had been extensively classified by the European
ethnology.
Classifying the natives

Writing in 1851, the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon defined: „being

governed is to be watched, inspected, spied, directed, subordinated to law, numbered,
regulated, listed, indoctrinated, controlled, examined, evaluated, censored and rewarded
by creatures that don´t have neither the rights nor the sapience nor the virtues to do
that‟. The generalized intrusion of the Estate in the private life of people is a recent
phenomenon that is coincident to the beginning of the industrial era and comes together
with the modern census. Being governed – Proudhon didn´t say, only suggested – is to
be surveyed. The imperialist powers brought the modern census to the colonies. At this
moment, they made collective identities based on concepts of ethnicity and race.

Investigating the census conducted by the British on Malaysia, the sociologist

Charles Hirschman registered progressive changes in the categories used to classify the
population and a general sense that guided such changes: „as the colonial period went
further, the surveyed categories became more visibly and exclusively racial‟.
Throughout the process, the religious identities tended to disappear or to get
subordinated by the racial identities. The racial identities acquired a increasing
standardization and less ambiguous meanings. Something similar occurred in the
neighboring Oriental Dutch India (the nowadays Indonesia).

Malays and Indonesians used fluid identity systems, referred in many distinct
criteria and with a broad local variability, such as the social position, the occupation and
religion. In the pre-colonial census, the governors were moved by a practical sense: to
identify the lieges available to be taxed and military listing. The consolidation of the
colonial administrations provoked the introduction of regular and broad census, focused
on the classification and quantification of the population. With dissemination of the
scientific racism, the categories were organized around race and ethnicity. By the logic
of the colonizers, which had nothing to do with their lieges, stereotyped identity labels
were imposed to all. Among other repercussions of this, there are the appearances of the
„Chinese‟ from Malaysia and Indonesia.

In the British colonies of Malaysia, around 1870, explains Benedict Anderson,

„one non-taxed Southern Asiatic could have their own life, happy or not, without the
weaker perception that they were named like that from the superiors‟. But this situation
would not last long. In the following decades, the new systems of education, health,
justice, security and migration were organized in the basis of the categories of the
census, making from the invented labels a quotidian element in the life of the persons.
Soon, the imagined identities of the colonial administrations filtered into the
consciences and coagulated under the form of racial and ethnical communities.

The academic usage of the word ethnicity began in XIX century. In general, this
word was meant to indicate a social group defined by the ideas of ancestry and common
culture. However, the cohesion of ethnical communities is not supported by any
objective similarity, but, as the anthropologist Siegfried Nadel explained more than a
half century ago, „it depends on a theory of cultural identity that ignores or discharge as
immaterial the existent variations and ignores or neglects the uniformities presented
away from the selected borders‟. Thus, according to Nadel, the ethnic communities
derive from „a similarity accepted as a dogma‟.

Ethnologists participated together with militaries and bureaucrats for the colonial
conquest of Africa. Their ethnical descriptions and classifications didn´t reflect the local
loyalties that were very relevant to the communities, but resulted only from an
anthropological dogma. In the southern Africa, the hunters and nomads from the
Khoisan language were named as „bushmen‟ in opposition to the „men‟ properly said. In
the colonialist mind, those primitive beings were more than a single race, they were a
new species, placed somewhere as intermediate between humans and monkeys.

Among the natives considered to be humans, there are many examples of

communities invented by the European knowledge men who were entrusted to put in
order the diverse ethnological view of the continent. The explorer Henry Morton
Stanley, during the establishment of a private colony in the Belgian Congo for the king
Leopold II, discovered the Bangals, a very developed tribe. That sign was enough for, in
1907, the different clans of that region had gained the status of a new ethnicity, in an
official work of the ethnography of the peoples of Congo. The Dinks of the Southern
Sudan, in fact many distinct clans, were accidentally converted into an ethnical group,
due to a mistake of an explorer that took the personal name of a local chief as the
generic denomination of a group. Similarly, sixty clans of the Luo language form the
north of Uganda became the Acholi ethnicity because the word shooli was used by
Arabian traders to refer to those clans.

The imagined order of the administrators tended to become as a real order, felt
and lived as the ethnical classification entered in the census and the laws. In the Anglo-
Egyptian Sudan, since 1924, the British administration physically separated the northern
Muslim southern population from the southern rural groups, prohibiting the circulation
of natives among the two parts of the territory and promoting Christian in the south. The
Dinks started to act as an ethnical community at the time of the independence of Sudan,
in the decade of 1950, in opposition to the Islamic and pro-Egyptian placed in Cartum
and they kept acting like that throughout the Sudanese civil wars, ended by a fragile
negotiation in 2005.

If, in Sudan, the Dinka were raised as a British desire to Christian the south, in
the protectorate of Uganda, the Acholi recognized themselves as an ethnical group in
opposition to the British policies of favoring the old kingdom of Buganda in the south.
Due to the British policies for recruiting workers, the Acholi and other northern groups
gave labors to the Ugandese colonial army, which became a military ethnocracy and
seeded the land for the many successive coup d´états of the independent Uganda. Since
1987, Acholiland is the focus of war of the Resistance Army of the Lord, a bloody
Christian guerrilla that aims to establish a theocracy based on the Acholis traditions.
 The colonial ethnogenesis in Africa reflected the conceptions of world of the
Europeans, but also had a pragmatic objective to gain the support of the traditional
chiefs. The British, with their system of indirect government, created the several
ethnicities that served for their intention of imposing order. Referring to the modern
Tanzania, colonized by Germans and transferred as a protectorate to United Kingdom,
the historian John Iliffe explained: „the idea of tribe was already present in the nucleus
of the indirect government of Taganica. Refining the racial thinking common at the
times of the Germans, the administrators believed that all the Africans came from a
tribe, the same way as all the Europeans belonged to a nation‟. This mistake, however,
worked as a prophecy: „The British believed (wrongly) that the natives of Taganica
came from tribes; the natives created tribes to work inside the colonial context”.

The ethnologists devoted to the classification of the natives imagined that the
ethnicities constituted a variety of great racial families and that each one was singled by
an old, immanent and closed culture. Under the lights of the theory of cultural evolving,
they tried to situate each group in a specific point of the line of the progress, identifying
the more developed and the more underdeveloped ethnicities. All these beliefs suffered
the fire of the critics of the German-American Franz Boas, who dissociated culture from
biology and created a new floor for Anthropology.

Boas started his conceptual revolution inspired with the contact with the Inuit of
Baffin Island, in an ethnographic research started in 1883. This experience revealed to
him the risks to try to understand different cultures from the occidental point of view.
He early perceived that the theory of cultural evolution did not clarify anything about
their objects of study, but said a lot about the inefficiency of methods and predominant
concepts in Anthropology filled up with the notion of racial superiority. He concluded
that the elements of a culture have a genuine meaning only inside their own cultural
context.

Ethnology considered the culture as something inherent to a human group. Boas

was against this essentialist approach, showing that culture is a dynamic notion, referred
in defined situations and local contexts, hence subjected to a continuous process of re-
elaboration. His anthropological program was based on the historic method, as he
recognized the singularity of the phenomena and the compromise of articulating
narrations based on empirical data. The objects of study of the modern anthropology
should be seen as historic subjects: agents capable of act creatively inside their cultural
context, modifying it and giving new meanings to their social existence.

In the vision of Boas, the concept of race had no relevance. Truly important was
the eye that creates a race. The following text was written in 1928: “We are easily
betrayed by general impressions. The Swedish are blond, with blue hairs, tall and with
long heads. This idea makes us to create our ideal model of a Swedish and forget the
variations found in Scandinavia. If we speak about a Sicilian, we think about a dark and
short person with dark eyes and hairs. People different from this type are not in our
minds when we think about a typical Sicilian. The more uniform is a people, the
stronger we get impressed by the typical. All countries are shown to us as inhabited by a
certain type, whose facial characteristics are determined as of the most common
occurrence. However, this nothing says to us in respect to their hereditary composition
and the extension of their variations. The type is formed subjectively, based on our
quotidian experience.”

The anti-racist anthropology emerged from the peak of the imperial racism. It
had to wait for two decades, Nazism and the Holocaust to occupy the center of the
political arena.

Nation as a lineage

The French constitution of 1793 lasted for only a few months, but it was retained
as the most important legal document of the Revolution. It defined citizenship as a
contract of the inhabitants of a territory and conceded the rights of citizenship to the
foreigners living in France for at least one year and to „any foreigner considered by the
legislative body to be in need of human treatment‟. But the romantic reaction to Lights
connected nation to blood and imagined a national community as linked by loops of
ancestry.

The Prussian philosopher and poet Johann Gottfried Herder is the original
fountain of this reaction. Together with the young writer Johann von Goethe, he started
the movement of Sturm und Drang, an angry shout against the French universalism and
a literary platform to the expression of emotion and national specificity. Speak German,
you German: this calling was supported by the idea that the poet creates his surrounding
nation when he confers voices to the ancestral turbulence of the feelings and thinking of
a people.

In the thinking of Herder, culture is a hallmark of differences. The appeal to a

past of traditions glued in the national soul, spoken one century before the unification of
the German Estate, worked as the cultural mark of a territory: „It was like that that
certain German intellectuals, without any power as class and any union as a nation,
responded to the illuminist apostles of a universal civilization (without forgetting the
threaten of industrial domination), through the celebration of the indigenous Kulturen of
their nations‟.

Since the Germany of Herder was not an Estate, the philosopher substituted it
for the political-juridical concept of nation, formulated by the illuminists and sacred by
the French Revolution, by the concept of „folk nation‟. Nation would be a natural
organism, born in old times and that needed protection and nourishment. The culture,
not the law, embraced the nation so that the national survival would need the
conservation and glorification of its culture. The spirit of the folk (Volk), expressed in
the folklore, would occupy the center of the national organism. A German is a German
because they share a culture; a foreigner could never become a German by a
government decree. The right of the blood raised against the rights of land of the
French.

Herder was far away from being a fanatic. He never opposed the feelings against
reason, but tried to incorporate the second into the first. He didn´t mix the German Volk
with the Prussian nationalism. He abominated the absolutism and, for the surprise of
many, declared his support to the French Revolution. Although he shared the anti-
Judaic prejudices, he believed in the essential unity of mankind. The romantic
nationalism of the XIX century selected fragments of the Herderian thinking and mixed
them with new ideas – markedly the concept of race.

In the diverse panel of the romantic production of nation, under the impulses of
the editorial industry and the public system of education, the modern national languages
appeared, as well as the paradigms of national literatures and also the national historic
narratives. The imagined community by the nationalism anchored its legitimacy in an
immemorial past and in a natural territory. Not all romantic nationalism was racist, but
the notions of races and ethnicity developed crucial papers in the delimitation of
national and foreigner. In Europe, the anti-Semitism gained a new meaning: the Jews,
who were religious foreigners, converted into ethnical foreigners. Richard Wagner said
in 1850 that they were intrinsically unable to compose the true German music. In USA,
with the abolition of slavery, it was consolidated the idea that the Republic of the
Equals, the brilliant city in the top of the hill, in the celeb phrase from the speech of the
puritan John Winthrop, was a nation of whites.

The senses of nation and race mismatched in the French Revolution and re-
approached in the romantic naturalism. In the volume 13 of the Encyclopédie de Diderot
e D´Alembert, published in 1765, the entry for race defines: extract, descent, lineage;
those referring both to ascendants and descents form a same family: when it is noble,
this word is synonym of „being born‟. The entry for nation, which is in volume 11,
refers to the popular dictations that highlights peculiar characteristics of each nation
(licentious like a French, jealous like an Italian, serious as a Spanish, malicious as an
English, proud as a Scottish, drunk as a German), but essentially it was placed in the
fields of the rights to the land. The decisive part is: „a considerable amount of persons
that inhabits the extensions of a country, bordered by certain limits and that obeys to a
same government‟.

In its medieval meaning, nation was an aristocrat lineage, articulated by blood

loops. In the beginning of XVIII century, the French Charles Montesquieu applied the
word to designate only the aristocracy and the high clerk, not the common people. But
the illuminists cut the cord that linked the nation form naissance or „blue blood‟ and the
revolutionary irruption of the Third Estate connected it firmly to the ideas of a political
contract and of a territory. The separation between nation and lineage is evidenced in
the Encyclopédie, a French work and an expression of the current conceptions of the
XVIII century. The romantic nationalism restored the old cord, but in new words. The
romantic nation was not aristocratic, but was an ethnical lineage: the Volk, the whole
people, looped by an organic culture deeply in the blood. The Germany of Hitler
conducted this notion to its ultimate and tragic consequences.

Hitler and the crisis of the race

In the Putsch of the Brewery, 16 Nazis were killed at the failed trial of coup
d´état of Adolph Hitler of November 1923, but only one of them was a member of the
higher circle of the Nazi Party. This man was Ludwig Maximilian Erwin von
Scheubner-Richter, a German from the Baltic who was born in Riga, Latvia and that
had fought together with the counter-revolutionary of the Russian Revolution and was
transferred to German in 1918. The intellectual influence of this man, who was side by
side with Hitler when he was shot, was filtered in the book The Myth of the XX
Century, written by his comrade of migration Alfred Rosenberg, also a German from
the Baltic and also a counter-revolutionary.

Furthermore, the book of Rosenberg suffered influences from the eugenicist

thinking of the American Madison Grant, but drank directly from the ideas of the book
The Foundations of the XIX Century, published in Germany in 1899, from the British
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a follower of Gobineau. In the vision of Chamberlain, a
line of continuity unites, through the German peoples, the classic Europe to the
contemporary: „these barbarian, that threw themselves naked to the battles; these wild
people that suddenly raised from the forests and dumps to inspire a civilized world and
cultivating the terrors of a violent conquest reached by the solely strong hand; they were
the legal heirs of the Helens and of the Romanians, blood of their blood and soul of
their soul‟.

The Europeans, fountain of the Western civilization, would pertain to only one
single great racial trunk, the Arians, the most advanced amongst all. The main axis of
the Arian trunk would be constituted by the Nordic or Germanic peoples that had
rescued the classical civilization from the destruction of a decadent Romanian Empire
submitted to the domination of the Jews and other non-Europeans. In Chamberlain, the
scientific racism of the XIV century became the racist nationalism of the XX century,
that found a complete and extreme expression in the Nazi German.

The idea of the superiority of the Arian race was not new and had been
developed, noticeably, by Gobineau. The anti-Semitism was very old and suffered a
deep transformation by the racial thinking of the XIX century. The novelty was in the
articulation of those notions to a philosophy of history that gave to the Germanic
peoples the fundamental paper of guaranteeing the continuity of the classical tradition
by separating it from the degrading Jewish influences. The eugenism was expressed in a
very broad way that escaped from the vials of Biology and invaded the sphere of
culture.

The racial thinking of that time did never contest the mixture of races itself.
Chamberlain imagined that all racial trunks, included the Arians, was generated by a
mixture of original races. However, the elements of the pot could not be excessively
distinct, under the risk of producing mongrels, a concept parallel to cur dogs. The Jews
(Homo judaeica, in his denomination) was inside this category, since they would be
derived from the low viable crossing of the true Semitic, the Bedouin Arabian, the
Hitite or Syrian. This miscegenation would have resulted in the reunion of the worst
traces of the first, such as the „Jewish nose‟ and the attraction to usury and from the
second ones, the anti-intellectual inclination. Without the leadership of the Germans, the
Arians could not have escaped from the sick miscegenation and following degradation.

The book of Chamberlain was received with many praises form the British press
and scholars. In the other side of the Atlantic, however, the critical voice of the
American president Theodore Roosevelt lifted up. In a summary written in 1913,
Roosevelt predictably concurred with the generalized idea of the superiority of the white
race, but considered ridiculous the German ideology: „All he says about this forced use
of the word humanity could be, in a greater proportion of truth, said in relation to the
words named as Teutonism and Arianism. The way he uses these words are equivalent
to his personal likes and dislikes‟.

The repulse of the Jews and the idea that they were incompatible to the German
culture were central elements in the essays of the musician Richard Wagner.
Chamberlain moved to Austria, married Eva Wagner, daughter of Richard and became a
very active German nationalist. He supported German against the country where he was
born and even took part in the Nazi Party. Hitler and Joseph Goebbels visited him a few
times in his residence and almost all the Nazi umbrella went to his funeral in 1927. Two
years before, the newspaper of the Nazi Party qualified his books as a gospel of the
movement.

The Myth of the XX Century was published in 1930. As Chamberlain,

Rosenberg believed that humanity was an empty concept: only races had soul. Also as
his muse, he insisted on the corruption of the Arian blood by miscegenation of the other
races and the historical contrast between the Nordic-Arian race and the Jews. He was
interested in the degradation influences of the Semites over culture and art, rejected the
traditional Christianity and defended the idea of a religion of the blood that expressed
the nobility of the Arian character and had expressions in the Indo-European paganism,
in Brahmanism, in Zoroastrism and in the primitive Christianity. The Protestant
Reforming was an advance, though limited, towards the correct point.

The racism of Rosenberg promoted the Nordic theory, where the axis of the
Arian race was made up by the group of the Nordic peoples: the Germans, the British,
the Scandinavians, the Dutch and the Baltic. The Arian race was something broader,
including the peoples of the south of Europe, the Berbers of the north of Africa and
even the Slavic of Eastern Europe, which for Hitler formed an inferior race. The blacks
and the Jews occupied the lowest places of the pyramid of the races.

In the historical interpretation of Rosenberg, the cosmopolitism, the democracy

and the Bolchevism – the three, emanations from Judaism – threatened to destroy the
civilization. Only the myth of the blood (the race-nation) could restore the order in the
world. “Chaos was placed as an almost conscious programmatic goal. As the final
consequences of a democratically disintegrated, the anti-natural messengers of anarchy
announced their presence in all the great cities of the Globe. The explosive material can
be seen in Berlin as well as in New York, Shangai or London. As a natural defense
against this worldwide danger, a new experience spreads out as a mysterious fluid over
the Globe. This idea places concepts such as people and instinctive race and consciously
in the center of their thinking. It is linked to the supreme values organically established
in each nation, around their feelings develop, determining the character and the color of
culture starting from the past. What was partially forgotten, partially neglected is
suddenly recognized by millions as their work: live a myth and create a character‟.

Rosenberg called the German people to action. It needed to retake the long and
glorious tradition of the „Nordic-Arian race‟ and lift a Estate, a Empire based on the
myth of the blood.

The racial mysticism of Heinrich Himmler was not supported by the network of
philosophical and historical references of Rosenberg. The all-powerful chief of the SS
(a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party) who supervised the system of fields of
concentration and extermination reached to be the number 2 in the Nazi hierarchy.
However, he was never a scholar, but rather a fanatic bureaucrat and his ideas of race
were not original.

Himmler entered very young to a mystic fraternity of followers of Ariosophy, an

esoteric system that grew from a late reappearance of romanticism movement and was
inspired in the medieval German paganism. The idea of superiority of the Arian race
was written in Ariosophy. Himmler studied Agronomy in Munich and spent some time
in an aviary, getting interested in animal crossing. These experiences left him to
imagine a scheme of physical improvement of the German population by a directed
selection that would make it completely Nordic.

According to a biographer, Himmler told that he always held the Bhagavad Gita,
an Arian text written in Sanskrit extracted from the Indian epic Mahabharata. This old
text allowed him to place himself in the position of the Hero Arjuna and conduct
without fear nor guilty the Holocaust procedures. In his order of ideas, exterminating
the Jews was a crucial element of this eugenic work based on mystical reasons.
“In the beginning it was the Volk”

The celeb phrase of Benito Mussolini – everything for the Estate, nothing
against the Estate, nothing out of the Estate – is an adequate synthesis of the fascist
doctrine, but it doesn´t serve to characterize Nazism. The Nazi totalitarianism, in
contrary of the fascists, did not start from a celebration of the Estate, but from the
glorification of the people (Volk). One year after he reached power, in 1934, Hitler
explicated once more his position: “Foreigners perhaps say that Estate created us. No!
We are the Estate! We don´t follow the orders of no powers except of God, who created
the German people! The Estate depends on us!”

In the Fascist Manifest of 1932, Mussolini wrote that it is not the people that
make the Estate, but the Estate makes the people. In Mein Kampf, published 7 years
before, Hitler wrote that the authority of the Estate can never be a final itself, because if
it was true, any type of tyranny would be sacred and inviolable. „We must never forget
that the highest objective of the human existence is not the maintenance of a Estate, but
the maintenance of the race”. In 1938, this theme reappeared in a speech in Salzburg
and Führer said: „in the beginning was the Volk and after that the Reich appeared‟.

Hitler was a romantic revolutionary whose vision of history was in conflict with
the institutions created by modernity – among them, the Estate. However, his north had
not been always described in the same way: sometimes, he used the word Volk, other
times, race. One should not conclude that he identified Volk with race. The history
researcher John Lukacs showed that, in Hitler´s thinking, the Arian race was never
clearly defined and was never defined as the German people. Also, Hitler did not like
very much the primitive and mystic racism of Himmler and he had his suspicions on the
glorification of the immemorial past of the Germans.

There are significant registers of Hitler´s denial to the book of Rosenberg, which
he considered unintelligible and contaminated with mysticism. Rosenberg tended to
compare the Volk to the Nordic-Arian race, while Hitler distinguished clearly these
concepts. In a piece of the speech he pronounced to officials in Platterhof hotel, in
Bayern, in 1944, he said that „Volk and race are not the same thing. Race is a
component of blood, while the Volk is not composed by a single race, but two, three,
four or five different racial nuclei.‟ In the same speech, he denied that existed, from the
genetic point of view, a Jewish race, but he declared that „we use the expression Jewish
race as a matter of convenience.

Politically, Hitler was foremost an extreme nationalist – the more fanatic

amongst all. The race, as everything else, was subordinated to the conveniences of this
nationalism. If the racial advertisement was able to contribute to awaken the passions of
nationalism in the German people, it was in fact just an instrument for the supreme
finality. But Nazism can´t be seen as a legitimated heir of the racial thinking of the XIX
century: in fact, it evidenced a crisis of the hierarchical system of the races.
 The hate nourished the thoughts of the Nazi chief. He knew the efficiency of the
hate as a powerful political instrument. Hitler hated the Jews. He believed in the
historical anti-Semite myths, reproduced in similar version in many books, such as the
ones of Chamberlain and Rosenberg. He had no doubts about the truth in the Protocols
of the Sapiens of Zion, the famous fraudulent report of the worldwide Jewish
conspiracy created by the political police of the czarist Russia of the first years of the
XX century. But his anti-Semitism only got stained in another picture of references,
personal and contemporary.

The anti-Semite tradition converted the Jews in the representation of usury and
cosmopolitism. In the narration of the Nazi leaders, the Jews were the incarnation of the
international finances and, mostly, they were noticeable for the inability of creating a
true nation. All of this appears in Chamberlain and Rosenberg, as well as in Mein
Kampf and many other speeches of Hitler. But the Hitler´s hate against the Jews derived
basically from his interpretation of the German lost of 1918.

The surrender of the First World War conducted Hitler into the paths of politics.
In his conceptions, the highest nation tasks were to overcome the traumatic loss and to
restore the national proud. In his eyes, an imminent war was inevitable and it was
needed to learn with the lessons of this first tragedy. The first lesson: the Jews were the
culpable of the loss.

To Hitler, the Jews controlled the politics of France, had a dominant position in
the USA and constituted a powerful group in the high circles of the British power.
German had been curved in front of an enemy coalition organized by the Jews.
However, the most important was the internal enemy: the Jews formed a fifth-column
inside the German nation. The loss of 1918 could have been avoided since militarily the
war was not lost. Everything ruined when the fifth-column called the workers to
insurrection, destroying the German capacity of fighting. The humiliation of Germany
and the slavery imposed to the Germans by the Treatise of Versailles were direct fruits
of the actions of the Jews. Because of that, the destiny of German depended on the
result of the historical fighting against the Jews, which would only end with the total
annihilation of one of the sides.

In general, the racism of Hitler was not more intense than many of contemporary
others, either inside or outside Germany. His specificity was in his obsession against the
Jews, or, in other words, to the war without army, carried out inside the white race,
between the Jews and the German Volk. The Jews, that had taken by assault the power
in the Bolshevist Russia, threatened to totally destroy the German nation. But, if so,
how could the inferiority of the Jews be sustained? The explanation is present in Mein
Kampf: „although among the Jews the instinct of auto-preservation was not weaker, but
much stronger than other peoples and although the intellectual abilities of the Jews are
at least equal to other races, the Jews don´t have the most important requirements of a
cultivated people. In the Jewish people, the disposal to sacrifice doesn´t go further than
the simple instinct of personal preservation. In their case, the racial feeling of solidarity
is nothing more than a primitive instinct of aggregation, similar to many found in other
organisms of this world.‟

Lacking of spirit of sacrifice and of a true racial solidarity, selfish and cowards,
the Jews would go into endless conflicts one against the other if they were left alone in
the world. Because of this, they were not able to organize themselves in a territorial
Estate and the Jewish Estate has absolutely no territorial border. The Jews formed
Estates inside the Estates, being parasites of nations.

The anti-Semitic racism of Hitler was not based on Biology, being distinct from
the scientific racism that was in fashion. The incurable problem of them was of
historical and cultural order. Hitler in fact partially believed in the dogmas of the
physical and intellectual differences among the races and in the conventional racial
hierarchy. But this was not his most important interest. Under the destiny of glory of the
German Volk, his absolute reference, the essential was the war against the Jews. In that
war, the advantage of the Germans was in the idealist spirit. It was the paper of Nazism
to develop it to the ultimate consequences.

A Perfect Volk

In the time that many members of our Parliament of the Lords marry with
daughters of millionaires, it is reasonable to think that our Senate is characterized, as
time goes by, by an uncommonly acute perception for business, and probably also for a
lower pattern of honesty than in the present.

Francis Gaulton wrote this snappy evaluation. He really believed in what he was
saying. He created in 1833 the word eugenics and defended the legal delimitation of the
marriages and the size of families related to the inherited virtues and defects of the
couples.

In an intellectual atmosphere enchanted by the idea that the science had

discovered the secrets of the division of humanity into races and of heredity, the
„science of eugenics‟ soon gained followers and invaded the universities. The eugenic
investigations received many funds from foundations such as Rockefeller and
Kellogg´s. Under the influence of Galton, the government of Theodore Roosevelt
instituted a commission of heredity in USA, with the mission of stimulating the physical
and intellectual perfection of the race. Laws for sterilization with eugenic aims were
created in some American states after 1907. Other countries, such as Sweden and
Switzerland, conducted official eugenic programs.

A first international conference of eugenics was carried out in London in1912

und the presidency of Leonard Darwin, son of the celeb naturalist and a tireless
defender of the science of eugenics and the adoption of public policies of eugenics. The
following conferences were carried out in New York in 1921 and 1932. In this third
conference, the Swiss psychiatric Ernst Rüdin was elected as the president of the
International Federation of the Eugenic Societies. Rüdin was the chief of the most
prestigious scientific institutions in the fields of psychiatry and genealogy in German
and soon became an enthusiast of Nazism. When the Nazis reached the power, they
supported on his international recognition and his intellectual authority to conduct the
greater eugenic program of History.

Hitler disdained the mystic racialism, but glorified the science and passionately
ran after the ideal of purification of the Volk. Such idea had already been fully
developed in Mein Kampf: „the Estate is only the recipient and race is what it contains.
The Estate can only have a meaning if it preserves and protects it. Otherwise, the Estate
has no value‟. As a consequence, the eugenic program occupied a central place in
Hitler´s thoughts: „it will be a task of the Estate of the people to convert the race into the
center of the community life. The Estate should guarantee the purity of the racial
lineage that will be preserved. It should proclaim that the children are not the most
valuable resource that a nation can have. It should understand that only the healthy
children should generate children; and that there is only one blasphemy, named as
parents that are sick or evidence inherited defects bring kids to the world and in such
cases, it is a great honor to avoid doing this‟.

Germany was the first and only Estate officially eugenic with the promulgation
of the law for prevention of the sick inherited descendant, in July of 1933. The law
conferred to the Estate the power of sterilizing the portrayers of diseases that were
supposed to be inherited, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy and maniac-depressive
insanity. Blinds, deaf and other portrayers of other deficiencies could be also sterilized
if the official doctors diagnosed inherited causes for those problems. Also, the persons
addicted to alcohol were listed in the law.

A complete judicial system was constituted to decide over requests for

sterilization. In the basis of this system there were districts of eugenics courts, made up
by a judge, a public doctor and a doctor specialized in eugenics indicated by the Reich
and that carried out secret judgments. The sentences of these courts could be contested
in a supreme eugenics court that was part of the Supreme Court and was composed
similarly to the district courts.

The inspiring model of the Nazi law was the eugenics laws adopted in several
states of USA. The American eugenicists saw in the German law a refinement because
it had a national aspect, giving uniformity of criteria and applications that did not exist
in USA. A commission of American eugenics visited Germany to know the courts. At
the end of this visit, the secretary of the American Eugenic Society, Frederick Osborne,
saluted the German initiatives as maybe the „most important experiment ever tried‟.

Under this judicial apparatus, in 1937 225 thousand of persons had been
sterilized and at the end of the Nazi regime, the total reached 400 thousand, while in
USA there were about 30 thousand sterilizations. The courts worked in flexible criteria
and political recommendations of not cutting the extension of the experiment. The goal
to perfectioning the Arian race, freeing the German people from impurities, should not
be hijacked by scientific controversies of the inherited nature of some diseases. It was
better to prevent and, even though some individual injustices, to ensure the future of the
nation. The processes were surrounded by meticulous scientific scenery and many times
the courts submitted the individuals under threaten of sterilization to tests of intelligence
to clarify some doubts.

One thing brings the others. Soon after the beginning of the experiment, Hitler
determined the sterilization of habitual criminals, what was carried out starting from the
Lombrosian hypothesis of a natural and inherited tendency to criminality. Since the
process were carried out secretly, the law converted into a pretext for a general ethnic
cleaning. In 1937, they sterilized several children born from the union of Germans and
soldiers of the north of Africa that participated from the occupation of Germany at the
end of the war.

The scientific nucleus of the Nazi program was organized in the Institute Kaiser
Wilhelm of Anthropology, Heredity and Eugenics, founded in Berlin in 1927 and of the
Hadamar Clinics, the principal psychiatric hospital used in the program of euthanasia
Action T4. As a general essay of the Holocaust, T4 functioned officially between 1939
and 1941, period when it had fulminated more than 200 thousand people classified as
psychopaths, incurable paralytics, schizophrenic or mentally disabled. Hitler, directly,
took the decisions for deflagrating the genocide operation.

Initially, the victims were children under 3. Months later, as the war began, the
killing machine got developed, swallowing children and adults. In January 1940, instead
of the slow and expensive method of lethal injection, carbon monoxide started to be
used. The corpses were incinerated. The families received false declarations of death,
which were part of the camouflage strategy. However, due to the proportions that the
program reached, the secret didn´t last too long and many protests multiplied, coming
mainly from the religious men. In August 1941, T4 was suspended.

The Nazi eugenism was not lifted in a vacuum nor was a simple import from the
American eugenics movement. It had roots in the peculiar evolution of the German
medicine during the second half of XIX century, from which the movement for racial
hygiene appeared.

The starting point was the diffusion, among the German psychiatrics, of the
theory of degeneration, formulated by the French Bénédict Morel in 1857. According to
it, since the original sin of Adam and Eve, mankind divided, according to climate,
feeding, habits, in a normal and healthy variety or an abnormal and sick one, both
reproducing. The transmission of the abnormal characteristics would make the
individuals more and more sick generation after generation, until the extinction of
contaminated groups or families. The German psychiatrics removed all the religious
language and connected it to brain and nervous system. This way, they created a strong
nexus of the theory of Lombroso to the inborn delinquent.
 In the beginning of the century, the theory of degeneration had overcome the
domains of psychiatrics, being converted into a medical dogma of generalized use. The
healthy bodies resisted to infections, but the abnormal bodies would receive the agents
of the diseases. The notion of inherited transmission completed the explicative model,
giving almost a magical diagnosis of the individual diseases. The next step was carried
out by the gynecologist Friedrich Wilhelm Schallmayer, who published in 1903
Heredity and Selection in the Process of the Life of the Nations, the foundation book of
the German movement of racial clearance. Schallmayer transferred the idea of heredity
from a Lamarckian context to a Darwinist conception. Also, under the impact of the
social-Darwinism at that time in fashion, he destroyed the borders that separated such
paradigms to medicine and opened a horizon for the interpretation of the social question
through the biological concept of degeneration.

“The mad men constitute an enormous burden to the Estate”. The diagnosis of
Schallmayer, a dogma of the German eugenism from what the Nazis extracted terrible
deductions, had a double meaning. By one side, it wanted simply to say that the
efficiency of a nation was reduced by the deviation of resources destined to the care of
the inborn abnormal persons. By other side, that the cares were a waste of work, since,
instead of reducing the abnormal population, it stimulated its enhancement as it
prolonged the life of the sick people who would then generate more sick children.

Schallmayer should not be seen as a racist of the school of Gobineau. His

principal book suffered strong criticisms of social scientists and specialists in public
health. In the debates he carried out, the founder of the movement of racial hygiene got
clearly distinguished from the ideologists of the supremacy of the Nordic-Arian race, as
he expressed doubts regarding the superiority of the white race over the yellow race.
Actually, he considered that a policy of a racial superiority lacked of scientific
fundaments and could only lead to a political and moral anarchy.

Also, it is not correct to draw a line of direct continuity of Schallmayer and the
T4 program. In the vision of the fanatics of Arianism, eugenism represented an
instrument for the perfection of the race of Volk and should be concentrated in
enhancing the Nordic element in the German population. Schallmayer never agreed with
the idea that the mental ability of a person had anything to do with their racial
pertaining. His movement of racial hygiene was based on inherited differences among
the individuals, not in cited differences among racial groups. The Nazi eugenism had
elements from both conceptions.

The German Society for Racial Hygiene was founded in 1905. In 1911, eight
years before the death of Schallmayer, a group of eugenicists aligned to the Arianism
created secretly a Nordic Circle inside that institution. Slowly, the German eugenism
got the colors of the Arian supremacy, in a process concluded only after the arrival of
the Nazis to power. In this trajectory, the concept of racial hygiene gave place to the
word Rassenhygiene, of markedly racist connotations, never employed by Schallmayer.
In its letter, the eugenicist law of 1933 confirmed the conventional ideas of racial
hygiene that hadn´t became a policy of Estate before the appearance of Nazism. But in
its practical appliance, that law served perfectly to the specific finalities of Arian
supremacy.

The Institute Kaiser Wilhelm worked as the scientific center of the Nazi
eugenism. His most detached scientists were Fritz Lenz and Eugen Fischer. The first,
old colleague of Schallmayer and one of the founders of the Nordic Circle, defended
since long time before the renewal of the German Volk through the implantation of rural
colonies in fields to be conquered from Russia. Such fields would be freely given to
model couples that would be obligated to form a family with at least five children. The
second researcher, affiliated to the Nazi Party since its beginning, was named by Hitler
as the chancellor of the University of Berlin.

Under Nazism, the biologist Otmar von Verschuer assumed the direction of the
Kaiser Wilhelm, in place of Fischer. Verschuer was the academic orientator of the post-
doctoral thesis of Josef Mengele, the angel of death, official of SS and medical chief of
the extermination field of Auschwitz. Recent researches indicate that Mengele was a
linking chain between the field of death and a network of centers for research where
many scientists worked orientated by Kaiser Wilhelm. By the monster of Auschwitz,
human samples obtained in the gas chambers were sent to the Berlin institute and to
many high standard university departments. Verschuer never suffered a process and in
1951 was gifted with a title of merit of the University of Münster, where he was the
chief of an important laboratory on genetics.

Laws of Nuremberg

In the last page of Mein Kampf, Hitler articulated his racial program to his
expansionist project: “An Estate that in a time of racial adulteration is devoted to
preserve the best elements of the racial stock shall be one day the Lord of Earth”. But to
turn into the Lord of Earth, the Nazi Estate must resolve the Jewish question. The
answer to this problem provoked the most terrible genocide of History.

The seeds of the Holocaust can be found, all of them, in Mein Kampf. Hitler´s
book, differently from the anterior tradition of the racial thinking, inserts the notion of
race in a coherent geopolitical picture, around the Nazi Estate created the decision of the
final solution (Endlosung). One side, the theme of the Arian race was subordinated to
the imperative of the German nationalism. Other, the Jews were identified as the mortal
enemies of Germany. The extermination machine was put into functioning starting from
these two considerations. However, it is equivocated to consider the final solution as
direct or inevitable fruit of the doctrine of Hitler.
 The process that culminated into the decision of the final solution was not
developed in the plane of the ideas, but the one of a policy of Estate. Intellectually, the
attitude of Hitler in front of the Judaic question didn´t change between 1919 and 1945.
But, in the beginning of this trajectory, his ultimate objective was not to physically
exterminate the Jews, but rather expulse them from Germany. Throughout time, diverse
policies for the Jews had been defined, according to the international situation. The
extermination was only decided when the world war assumed a threatening
configuration to the future of the Nazi Estate.

The program of the Nazi Party of 1920 was to reserve the German citizenship to
the Arians, exclude the Jews from public jobs and from the press and expulse the Jews
that had immigrated after the beginning of the First War. Additionally, that program
said that, in case of necessity, the Estate should expulse all the foreigners. This
combination of tactic and transitory decisions lasted until the Nazi Party reached the
power. In the end of 1928, the starting point of the successive crisis and elections that
conducted him to the government, Hitler declared that the Jews could only be tolerated
in German under the condition of foreigners.

In the perspective of Hitler, the Jews did not essentially represent a problem of
internal politics. The Jews were the worldwide enemies of Germany and, thus, the
solution of the Judaic question was embraced to the question of the place of the German
nation in Europe and the world. Apparently, during many years the Nazi leader
restrained his tendency of expulsing the Jews from Germany imagining that they would
be valuable as hostages. In this order of ideas, the Nazi control over the German Judaic
community would help to dissuade the enemies to attack Germany before its war
machine got fully consolidated.

Hitler saw with good eyes the Zionist project of creating a Jewish Estate, but he
didn´t believe this could be ever concreted. In the same order of ideas, the evaluated the
possibility of deportation of all the Jews of the world to a reserve, but discharged it as it
would need an improbable international cooperation. The spectrum of the extermination
had never got away from the declarations and confidences of the Nazi leader. However,
his genuine hate was always subordinated to the reason of Estate, hence to the national
and international political situation.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler offers an analysis of situation of the beginning of the

First World War that clarifies his approach to the Judaic problem. Remembering the
explosion of patriotism that was typical of that moment of the conflict and the sacrifice
of the soldiers in the battle fields, he evaluated that moment as the time to remove
everything that might oppose to the national spirit. The fire of his criticism was directed
to the Kaiser because of the omission in destroying the criminals and the worms (the
Jews) that acted as fifth-columns of the German nation. A future opportunity such as
that could not be wasted. As explained by Phillippe Burrin, this moment is crucial to
understand the mind of Hitler: “Writing after the loss, he gave retrospectively a double
value to the quick decision he intended to apply. An imaginary value, since this
decision, showing a desire to fight until the end, maybe favored victory and saved the
life of many precious German soldiers. And also a value of revenge and what is
creepier: the death of thousands of Jews, although would never change the result of the
war, would be plentifully justified because it would revenge the death of the German
soldiers in the battle fields”.

It is important to understand the historical meaning of the evaluation of Hitler

from the point of view to the repercussions for the Nazi policy. Hitler considered that
Germany would be totally doomed to fail if the situation of the previous war was
repeated, in where the country fought a broad coalition in a prolonged armed conflict.
The planning of a war he elaborated, since he reached the power, foresaw a quick
conflict in the Western frontier, the neutralization of the United Kingdom and the
consolidation of the German victory, everything before opening a war against URSS, in
the Eastern border. It is reasonable to imagine that, in this scenario, a solution for the
Judaic problem would be deportation and the creation of a reserve policed by Germany
and its vassals. The extermination of the fifth-column would only get imperative in the
worst hypothesis: the reproduction of a prolonged war.

The solution for the Judaic problem and the conquest of the vital space to the
German Volk were the two historical great goals for Nazi. They hat equivalent
importance, but occupied distinct strategic places. The vital space could be obtained by
the victory in war and nothing would interfere with this. If things worked as Hitler
wanted, the restored Reich had under its disposal the means to expulse the Jews from
Europe and confine them forever in a surveyed place. While the war didn´t start, the
German Jews would be terrorized and neutralized as a political factor and used as
hostages. However, if things got an unwanted direction, the Endlossung could be
anticipated and assume the draws of a genocide.

The Nazi regime conducted tirelessly an anti-Semite policy. But this policy did
not obey, until the beginning of the world war, to any coherent central plan. Between
the nomination of Hitler to compose the cupola of the government in 1933 and the
declaration of war in 1939, different agencies of the Nazi power adopted their own
policy of persecution of Jews. These initiatives did not have always the same sense and
reflected the correlation of changing forces inside a block constituted by the Nazis and
by the traditional conservative right. In this context, Hitler acted as a judge of the last
instance, favoring ideologically the more radical Nazis but at the same time prohibiting
acts of imprudence considering the international situation of Germany.

The first national anti-Judaic law, adopted in 1933, forbade to non-Arians the
access to public jobs. The texts destined to clarify the law defined the Jews as those who
had at least one quarter of Jewish blood (a Jewish grandparent). By pressures of the
conservatives, an exception was opened to the ex-combatant Jews. Similar laws from
the same year forbade the Jews to practice medicine and Law.

Almost at the same time, it started a co-operation between Himmler, chief of SS

and police, and the Zionist movement. The aim of Himmler was to achieve a quick
emigration of the German Jews. This was coincident to the efforts of the Judaic Agency.
Following this logic, several decisions were adopted in order to create a distinct Judaic
identity, and the Zionists were authorized to open schools of Hebraic and professional
courses for candidates to the transference to Palestine.

Another second cycle of anti-Judaic laws was completed in 1935. Pressures

started from Goebbels, the minister of Announcements, and from the Nazi Party, that
initiated acts of vandalism against Jewish traders. In the Nazi congress of Nuremberg,
Hitler personally solicited to Bernhard Lösener, worker of the Ministry of Interior, the
elaboration of discriminatory norms related to marriage and citizenship. The two Laws
of Nuremberg were quickly approved. The law for protection of the German blood and
honor prohibited marriages and sexual relationships between Jews and Arians.
Additionally, this law prohibited the Jews to lift the German flag, but in coherence with
the Zionist movement, they left them to lift the white and blue Jewish flag with David´s
Star in the center. The law of citizenship of Reich cancelled the citizenship of the non-
Arians and introduced a distinction against citizens and nationals. Only the citizen of
Reich, class that excluded the Jews, had complete political rights. The debate that was
followed, about the half-Jews or mixed Jews clarifies a lot the attitude of Hitler
regarding the racial question.

The Nazi Party intended to preserve the broader definition where a single
grandparent defined somebody as a Jew, but the conservatives of the cupola wanted a
more restrict definition. By surprise and consternation of the Party, Hitler decided by
the point of view of the conservatives, declaring that the solution to the mixed would be
the assimilation, after a few generations. Walter Gross, chief of the agency for racial
policy of the Party, explained that the Führer didn´t adopt a tactical maneuver, but
announced an orientation of principles. Goebbels even tried that at least the half-Jews
(two Jewish grandparents) were considered Jews, but Hitler didn´t break and the final
decree considered them as Germans, excluding those married with a Jew.

The approach of Hitler can be interpreted as a circumstantial regression aiming

to keep the unity of the government and to calm down the international opinion, but the
arguments of the Nazi leader point to another direction. They indicate that the central
point of view was not racial, but political. The cohesion of the German Volk would be
affected if a layer of the population divided their loyalty or had no security about their
nationality. The theme of blood purity, important to the racist mystics, was not truly
important. The hate against the Jews had a strategic value. The restrictive definition
helped to concentrate the hate in a focused target.

At this time, the Southern states of USA were in plentiful vigor of anti-mixing
laws based on the rule of one blood drop that defined as black any person with a black
ancestor. Some historic researches sustain that the laws of Nuremberg were inspired in
the American model. However, an important difference should not be forgotten. The
segregationist American laws excluded totally the figure of the mixed and in this sense,
they were in accordance to the racial thinking of the XIX century. The decision of Hitler
to recognize the half-Jew German admitted the provisory existence of mixed persons,
thus signalizing a significant rupture with the traditional racism.

The ambivalence of the Nazi regime about the Judaic problem persisted until the
war began, but the tension among the initiatives destined to expulse the Jews and the
policy of conserving them as hostages peaked in 1938. With the annexation of Austria
(Anschluss), followed by the conference of Munich, the international situation of
Germany changed deeply and the freedom of action for the Nazis was enhanced. In
Vienna, under the supervision of Reinhard Heydrich, chief of intelligence of SS, Otto
Eichmann created a system of massive Judaic emigration where the confiscation of the
goods of the rich Jews financed the migration of the poor ones. In Berlin, Goebbels tried
to force the walk and in November, he deflagrated the great attack (pogrom) in the
Night of the Cristal.

The Night of the Cristal marked the beginning of the systematic expulsion of the
Jews of the Reich. Between 1933 and 1937, 130 thousands of Jews left German, one
third of them toward Palestine. In 1938 and 1939, 118 thousand left. In September of
1938, Hitler communicated to the Poland ambassador that he wanted to articulate with
the countries of Central Europe a plan for transferring the Jews to a colony outside
Europe. The idea was repeated to many speakers of the countries under the sphere of the
German influence in the first semester of 1939. In January 30 th, in front of the
Reichstag, Führer explained that international strategy and reaffirmed more clearly than
in previous opportunities, the premonitory threaten: if the Jews once more pulled the
nations of Europe to another war, they would be annihilated as race.

Victory in defeat

The program of euthanasia T4 worked strongly during the first two years of war,
but practically did not reach the Jews. In this phase, the best hypothesis of Hitler had
been frustrated by the British decision of keeping fighting, but the alliance with URSS
ensured a perspective of triumph to Germany. The division of Poland between Germans
and Soviets and the quick victories of the German army in the Western front formed the
scenery for the anti-Judaic policy of the Nazis.

The war impeded, obviously, a sequence of the project of Hitler of general co-
operation for removing the Jews from Europe, but at the same time, having conquered
Poland opened the paths to a creation of a Judaic territorial reserve outside the Reich.
This idea apparently sprouted from Rosenberg, but was announced by Heydrich soon
after the beginning of the hostilities. The reserve would be in the south of Poland,
between Kraków and Lublin, in a territory not annexed to the Reich, and would also
receive the Gypsies expulsed from Germany. This was, in the view of the Führer, a
transitory solution, adapted to the international situation.
 The ambitious project of the reserve did not go further, because there were no
logistic means to carry this out and there were many other military priorities and also
the reinstallation of the Germans that were coming from the Soviet influence of the
Eastern Poland and the Baltic countries. Months later, with the fail of Himmler´s efforts
to evacuate the Jews from the annexed territories, the Führer lost interest on the Polish
solution.

However, the destiny of the Jews oscillated in the waves of the evolution of the
war. In the spring of 1940, after France was beat and when rumors were circulating that
the British would firm the peace, Hitler reassumed the idea of expulsing the Jews from
all of Europe and transfer them to the French colony of Madagascar. Soon, however, it
was clear that the United Kingdom would keep fighting and the project was postponed
to an unknown future. The expression „final solution‟, termed in the last months of
1939, appears in Nazi documents about the Judaic question, but until the invasion of
URSS it meant „deportation‟.

The invasion was imagined in the end of July 1940, decided definitely after the
re-election of Franklin Roosevelt in November, but deflagrated in June 1941. In this
interval, it was persistent in the Nazi horizon the expedition of expulsing the Jews from
Europe, and Eichmann worked actively in the Madagascar Project, sending anti-Judaic
counselors to the countries under the German influence to discuss the question.

The situation radically changed with the beginning of Barbarossa Operation, in

June 22th 1941, when the German forces advanced over URSS. In the back, they started
with massive shooting and annihilation of hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews. The
exterminating actions, conducted by the Einsatzgruppen (task force of SS), had as the
goal the communist employees, the Jews and everyone that could resist to the invasion.
Hitler´s guidelines said to the commandos to stimulate pogroms of Jews by the local
populations. The extreme violence in the invasion of URSS was destined in the formula
of Hitler to eliminate the driving layer Judaic-Bolchevik. It didn´t correspond to a
decision of a systematic extermination of the Jews of Europe.

The fatal decision came in early September, after the punch represented by the
signature of the Letter of the Atlantic, between Winston Churchill and Franklin
Roosevelt at the August 11th at the same time Hitler knew about the defeat of the
Babarossa Operation. The campaign in Russia was supposed to last a few weeks or
months, but the enemy had greater military reservoirs and fought strongly. In August,
the Führer evidenced to speakers that he lost the expectations of a rapid triumph. In the
following weeks, he even chewed the sour memories of 1918. The conclusion of those
chews conducted to the greater planned genocide of History. The Jews were condemned
to the gas chambers while the victory escaped from his hands, what converted the
ultimate objective into immediate priority. Germany could win or lose, but the Jews
would not survive to testify the results.
The rejected race

Less than four years after the opening of the Nazi fields of extermination and the
plentiful recognition of the Holocaust, UN pronounced the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights. The first article of this historical document starts with the celeb
sentence: „All the human beings are born free and in equal in dignity and rights‟. The
second article cites the word race, to affirm that „All the people are the titular of rights
and freedoms announced in this Declaration, without any distinction of any type, such
as race, color, sex, language, religion, political opinions or others, national or social
origin, property, born or any other condition‟.

Nineteen months later, in July 1950, Unesco broadcasted a declaration entitled

„The Question of the Race‟. The declaration was reported by the British-American
anthropologist Ashley Montagu, born as Israel Ehrenberg from Jewish parents in the
poor suburb of East End in London, and also was assigned by another seven influent
specialists in the fields of anthropology, biology and psychology. Written under the
brutal impact of the fields of death, as remembered by one of the original assigners,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, in the 60th anniversary of Unesco, the text starts as: „The
importance that the problem of race acquired in modern world difficultly needs to be
emphasized. Mankind shall never forget the injustices and the crimes that conferred
tragic resonances of the word race‟.

Some years before of the start of the War, political and scientific leaders had
solicited an international conference to denounce the racism. However, in the name of a
policy of peace, the initiative was aborted. Unesco brought it back after the unbelievable
human catastrophe produced by the union of extreme nationalism with racism. In efforts
for a political clarifying, the declaration characterized racism as a depraved and ignorant
expression of the spirit of caste, that is sustained by the belief in an inborn and absolute
superiority of one human group arbitrarily defined over other groups also arbitrarily
defined and that instead of being based on scientific criteria is often kept in opposition
to the scientific method.

The question of race is a document written by scientists. Denunciation of racism

was not fruit of any spectacular advance in the scientific knowledge over the theme of
race. In the same way the belief in the race of the scientific racism predominant since
the XIX century was supported by cultural attitudes, the denunciation of the post-war
reflected much more the new political context than any sudden emergence of solid
scientific proofs able to destroy old prejudices. The spectrum of Auschwitz flew over
the world, imposing a revision with repercussions on both sides of the Atlantic. As
pointed out Stephen Jay Gould, in a comment about the position of science regarding
the theme of race: „some topics have an enormous social importance but at the same
time they have little trustable information. When the relation between empirical data
and social impact is low, a history of scientific attitudes can be a little bit more than a
mere registration of social changes. The historic of scientific views over race, for
example, reflects the social dynamics. This mirror continues to reflect in good times and
in bad times, in periods of beliefs of equality and in the eras of exultant racism. The
bells of the dead of the old eugenism in USA rang more likely due to the singular use of
Hitler of arguments that were accepted before regarding sterilization and racial
purification rather than advances in the genetic knowledge‟.

At the moment the declaration of Unesco was written, Genetics had still not
shown the nature literally superficial of the differences among the so-called races.
Wisely, the specialists wrote that „the biological fact of race and the myth of race must
be distinguished. For all the practical social proposals, race is less biological
phenomena and more a social myth. The myth of race created an enormous human and
social loss‟.

Supported by the sciences, the specialists indicated that the human groups are
not distinguished by their intellectual abilities, that the genetic differences have no
impact in the interpretation of social and cultural differences among human groups and
that there was no scientific evidence showing any malefic effect of miscegenation.

In its last paragraph, the declaration eulogized the ethics of universal fraternity,
ensuring that this is sustained on the results given by the biological investigation. The
intention was to firm a definite obituary of the race. Few people at that moment could
imagine a triumphant return of race in the fields of the social and political speech…

REVOLUTION IN SOWETO

Pieter Willem Botha, PW or the Big Crocodile, governed South Africa between
1978 and 1989 as Prime Minister and after as a President. In an interview, he explained:
„Apartheid, as far as we know about it, existed in South Africa since the previous
centuries under the British domain. The colonial paternalism had a racial connotation
and for some hundreds of years, the whites governed the blacks all over the world.
South Africa inherited the colonial paternalism and as a consequence, the government
of the blacks by the whites.

The interview was carried out in 1986 and the situation should be interpreted in
an international context of crescent diplomatic pressures against the regime he leaded.
In the autumn of apartheid, which was completely abolished with the elections of 1994,
the South African president searched for passing an erasure over the singularity of the
racial Estate implanted almost four decades before an, to do that, placed the origins in a
far away past. In this walk, he divided the responsibilities of the official system of
segregation with the United Kingdom, the old colonial power that subordinated the
Boers colonizers in the bloody War of the Boers (1899-1902). Boer is the Dutch word
that describes rural persons. Historically, this word got related to the protestant
colonizers that came from Holland and that established in the south of Africa since the
foundation of the Colonia of Cape, by the VOC – Dutch company of the Western Indies
in 1652.

PW had a clear political interest in placing the racial situation of this country in
the broader scenario of the European colonization of Africa. The United Nations had
made several resolutions condemning apartheid in the international conferences against
racism of 1973 and 1983. South Africa already suffered cultural and sportive sanctions
and in the decade of 1980 suffered from the loss of international investments.
Internationally, the government of the white minority received only the constructive
engagement from Margaret Thatcher of United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan from
USA, who saw in South Africa an anticommunist guardian in the south of Africa, but
even this irregular and ambiguous support stopped with the end of the Cold War.

The interpretation of PW was contrary to the historical narrative organized

surrounding the singularity of the apartheid regime. According to that narrative, the
political regime was established in 1948 with the electoral victory of the National Party,
the political organization of the Afrikaners over the United Party that represented the
interests of the population with British origin. The word Afrikaans refers to the group of
descendents of the Boer colonizers and who speak Afrikaans, a dialect derived from the
Dutch of the XVII century. The Afrikaner power represented a deep deviation of the
norm of the British colonization of Africa and also expressed an extreme ethnical
nationalism, with clear Nazi inclinations.

The chain of events that conducted the Afrikaners to power seems to sustain the
canonic narrative. The United Party, which governed the country from 1934 to 1948,
was born from the fusion of the South African Party of Jan Smuts, the statesman who
incorporated the loops between South Africa and Great Britain, and a faction of the
National Party directed by the General James Barry Hertzog, one of the Afrikaner
leaders in the War of the Boers. At the time of the British declaration of war to the Nazi
Germany, South Africa engaged into the war in the side of the British, while Hertzog
conducted his political faction back to the National Party, which had survived under the
ultranationalist direction of Daniel François Malan. This reunited and anti-British
National Party implanted formally the apartheid regime.

There are more evidences to support the idea of the South African
exceptionality. In 1918, 4 years after the formation of the National Party of Hertzog, the
Young South Africa, soon renamed as the Broederbond Afrikaner (Afrikaner
Fraternity), appeared as a secret society, composed exclusively by men and of protestant
religion, devoted to promote the supremacy of the descendents of the Boers. Later, Jan
Smuts classified it as a dangerous fascist cell, but when it was constituted, it lacked
clear objectives and was seen by its first members as a cultural network destined to
preserve the Boer traditions and the Afrikaans language in a world in a fast mutation.

Broederbond was born in reaction to the humiliations imposed to the Afrikaners

after the British victory in the War of the Boers and to the policy of turning South
Africa similar to a British place conducted by the British governor Alfred Milner,
especially in the old Boer colonies of Orange and Transvaal in the inland plateau of
South Africa. But this society was organized doctrinally around the romantic concept of
an Afrikaner Volk, an intellectual bridge that would connect many of its leaders to the
Nazi thinking. According to a declaration of Hertzog of 1935, Broederbond was the
subterranean face of the National Party and the National Party was merely the public
expression of the Broederbond. Notwithstanding, almost all the members of the cabinets
of the government posterior to 1948 pertained to this secret Afrikaner society.

Functionally, the legislation of the apartheid were idealized in 1947 inside of the
South Africa Office of Racial Questions, a governmental agency infiltrated by members
of Broederbond and progressively implanted from the elections that conducted Malan to
the chief of the cabinet in the following year. Malan pertained to Broederbond as well
his successors Johannes Stridjon, Hendrik Verwoed, John Voster and… PW! The
directors of Broederbond constituted the South African financial conglomerate Absa
Groupe and other detached South African companies in the fields of finances and
production of military material were raised from the cupola of this secret society.

The official system of apartheid took form in the same year UN wrote the
Universal Declaration of the Human Rights and two years before the celeb anti-racist
declaration of Unesco. It is not difficult to tell the history of the South Africa of
apartheid as a narrative of a deviating event, literally reactionary. This version, that got
dominant, would place the diagnosis of the Great Crocodile Botha to the drawer of a
trial to a late justification of a horrendous regime. But PW was neither a sophisticated
ideologist nor a smart statesman. He spoke what he really thought and in his historical
evaluation there is part of the unease true.

Apartheid as a norm

The Cape was colonized initially by a few thousands of people from Holland,
Germany and Scandinavia. In the majority they were Calvinists and two hundreds of
French Huguenot escapees. Together with the free colonizers, several slaves took
participation in the local economy and they came from other parts of Africa and even
Malaysia, but mostly they were native Khois, named as Hottentots. There was a
significant miscegenation between colons and slaves, from which resulted a mixed
population, the so-called coloreds, who represent nowadays at least 9% of the 44
millions of South Africans.

Throughout the XVIII century the border of the Boer colonization moved to a
Northwest direction, in successive waves named as treks (journeys), promoting the
occupation of the fields by cattle breeders. The treks promoted the encounter of the
Boers with the Bantu rural peoples of the interior. The Bantu resistance against the
invasion of the colons degenerated into the first Kaffir wars, in 1779 and 1789, soon
before the invasion of Holland by the Napoleonic forces and of the end of the control of
the Dutch company of the Western Indies over the colon in the far extreme southern
Africa. Kaffir was the name of a particular Bantu tribe, but it got used by the colonizers
as a generic term.

The sovereignty over the Cape colony passed formally to the British crown in
1814, as a consequence of the treatises of the Congress of Vienna. In these transitions
lay the roots of the political fragmentation of South Africa in distinct colonies. The
collision between the British power and the Boer way of life was manifested as an
opposition of English and Afrikaans languages and between the Anglican clerk and the
Dutch Protestant Church. But, mostly and more importantly, the tensions came from the
British project of re-colonizing the country.

With the finality of standardizing the tributes, the Colonial Ministry of London
regulated the rights of property of lands and created reserves for the Bantus, restricting
the possibilities of land expropriation from the natives. The crucial rupture occurred
with the general abolition of slavery in the British domains, by decision of the
Parliament in 1833. In Cape, around 35 thousands of slaves gained freedom and their
owners were indemnified in a total of 20 millions of pounds. The action of abolishment
was the burst for the Great Trek, the journey that would occupy the place as the
foundation myth of the Afrikaner nation in South Africa.

The precedent treks had formed a continuous carpet of colonies, connected to the
colonial basis of the Cape. In the Great Trek, between 1834 and 1838, thousands of
colonizers departed in successive waves, with their cattle and oxcarts, following
religious and military leaders and going to the high inland plateaus. In the spirit of those
colonizers, the journeys remade the Biblical epopee of Exodus and signalized the
pathways toward the Promised Land. The episode, an act of revolting against the future
and of a radical denial of modernity, molded for a long time the vision of world of the
Boers. Isolating themselves from the evolutionary process, the colonizers refused a
technical and ideological environment in a rapid transformation and devoted themselves
to the adventure of reaffirming indefinitely their way of life and their traditional mental
models.

Winning uphill steeps, the trekkers reached the lands covered by grass and
savannahs. Many of them crossed the Orange River and founded the Free Estate of
Orange with capital in Bloemfontein. Others went further, crossed the Vaal River and
founded the Transvaal, with capital in Pretoria, named to honor Andrés Pretorius, the
Boer leader who commanded the extermination of more than 3 thousand Zulus in the
battle of Blood River in 1838. A third Boer flux tried to establish a republic in the
oriental portion of Natal but the colonizers were repulsed by the British, receded and
united to Transvaal.

The British recognized the autonomy of both Boer Estates, but in 1877 they
declared the annexation of Transvaal. The act started the first Anglo-Boer war in which
the colonizers, under the direction of Paul Kruger, the greatest Boer chief, imposed
themselves over the British troops. In their isolated republics, based on the Bible and to
the manners of the antecessors, the Boers completed a trajectory of Africanizing. With
their old leaders of long white beards, cattle, slaves and numerous families, they
constituted a new tribe in the interior of austral Africa. The venerated Paul Kruger
illustrates, in an exaggerated scale, the pattern of the Boer families. Along his life,
among sons, grandsons and grand-grandsons, he had 156 descendants.

The successive discoveries of diamonds in 1876 in the confluence of the rivers

Orange and Vaal, in an uncertain limit between the Cape and Orange, and of gold in
1885 in Witwatersrand (or simply Rand) close in the south of Pretoria in Transvaal,
disrupted the geopolitical equilibrium in South Africa. The run for diamonds make the
city of Kimberley grow from nothing, surrounded by nuclei of black immigrants that
worked to the white diggers. A run for gold even greater left thousands of Uitlanders
(foreigners in the expression of the Boers of Pretoria) to Rand, where in the desolating
plateau was born the city of Johannesburg, nowadays the greatest commercial, financial
and demographic center of South Africa.

The exploitation of diamonds soon fell in the monopoly of De Beers, company

created by the celeb British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes, who diversified his business
and under the approval of the Colonial Ministry, assumed concessions for railways and
telegraphs. De Beers expanded to the gold mines of Rand, where it faced the
concurrence of the German businessman Ernest Oppenheimer, who ended to assume a
major position and found in 1917, the giant Anglo-American corporation, the symbol of
the mining capitalism of South Africa.

The War of the Boers started from a series of incidents between Kruger,
representative of the Boer power in Transvaal, and Rhodes, the symbol of the new
mining capitalism. The first, attached to his utopia of an isolated rural republic, denied
political rights to the Uitlanders, strongly taxed the mines and transports. The second
turned into the prime-minister of the Cape, wanted to eliminate the barrier to business
represented by the Boer political entities. The conflicts, of a singular violence, started
with quick triumphs of the forces of Kruger and made necessary that 400 thousand
British soldiers took part in the war, transferred even from Canada and Australia. In
1900, the British got imposed and Kruger went to Europe to search for alliances. He
would never return to his country and when he died, in Switzerland in 1904, he was
buried with honors of Estate in Pretoria. In 1902, Rhodes, his nemesis, died in Cape
and, according to an express desire, was buried in the granite peaks of the Matopos
hills, in the so-called South Rhodesia (nowadays Zimbabwe).

The Boers kept a war of guerrillas under the leadership of men such as Louis
Botha and Smuts, who later promoted the conciliation of the Afrikaners with the United
Kingdom. The tenacious resistance was overcome by the combination of use of force,
firing farms, massive lockdowns of Boers in fields of concentration and of persuasion
such as massive distribution of British citizenship to all colonizers and guarantees of
autonomy of the South African Union inside the British Empire.

In the area of diamonds of Kimberley, since the beginning, a system of visas

impeded the independent access of blacks to the fields of fortune. In Rand, in scale
bigger than in Kimberley, the African natives were recruited to work in the mines and
constituted in the periphery of Johannesburg the vast agglomeration of Soweto. The
name Soweto is the abbreviation of South Western Townships, indicating the black
ghettos that constituted around the white city of Johannesburg. In 1983, the white
miners protested against the concurrence with native workers, and the Boer government
of Transvaal imposed a norm of color, limiting the hiring of blacks by the conglomerate
of Rhodes. The rigid separation between whites and natives certainly hindered the
business, but was certainly not a novelty in the British colonial Africa.

The historiography of the European imperialism in Africa distinguished between

the assimilation, a mark of the catholic Portuguese colonization, and the segregation, a
mark of the protestant British colonization. In an inspired essay, the anthropologist
Peter Fry observed that such distinctions should never be interpreted as a contrast of
immutable and fixed attitudes, as he registered the significant miscegenation between
protestant colonizers and natives of the Cape and signalized that both colonial powers
invocated either one or another principle, in different situations. As he points out: „Only
in the end of the XIX century the segregation became the dogma of the British colonial
governments. In the same period, Portugal kept its compromise with the assimilation,
but amended it with the informal operation of the racial prejudice, the institute of the
forced labor and the partial lockdown of the native people in circumscriptions,
equivalent to reserves”.

Along his analysis, Fry showed that the historic approach was impregnated by
the classic anti-Portuguese inclination of the British. But, foremost, evidenced the
following paradox: the civilizing mission of Africa, such as claimed by the British,
associated the denouncement of slavery by the underdog of miscegenation. It is not by
occasion that different persons such as the first minister Palmerston, the explorer Davig
Livingstone and the colonial administrator Frederick Lugard revealed, between the
second half of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century, the same feeling
of moral superiority regarding the Portuguese colonizers and used expressions such as
„moral delinquency‟ and „lewdness‟ to refer to miscegenation in Mozambique.

In the British South Africa, the principle of segregation was imposed

progressively after the second half of the XIX century. In the middle of the century, as
occurred in other parts of the British colonial system, parliaments were created in Cape
and in Natal. In them, contrary to the Boer´s parliaments, blacks could vote and be
elected. However, the rules for educational and economical qualification impeded in the
reality the presence of colored or Bantu representatives. Anyway, in the municipal
parliament of Cape, the doctor Abdullah Abdurahman, leader of the African Political
Organization, was a representative. APO was the first non-white party of South Africa.
It was created in 1902 and its affiliated members were exclusively mixed persons from
the Cape. Such rules, which varied locally, were standardized by promulgated laws in
the decade of 1890. In 1905, a law delimitated the lands reserved to the Bantus and
created the system of pass (pass laws) that restricted the rights of circulating of the
natives. In the following year, the ethnical register and the internal passport for the
Asiatic persons of Natal were implanted.

The young lawyer Mahatma Gandhi, who migrated to Natal in 1893 and stood
there until 1915, started his long career as an activist defending the political rights of the
Indian community of his colony. He founded the Indian Congress of Natal and
organized protests against the ethnical register of the Asiatic. When a war between the
colonial administration and the native Zulus of Natal began in 1906, Gandhi negotiated
with Smuts the incorporation of an Indian troop to the British armed forces. The north
of his policy was to achieve the statute of British citizens with plentiful rights to the
Indians, so that ethnical community would not be confounded with the Kaffirs.

One decade before assuming the government of South Africa, Smuts

pronounced, in Oxford, several speeches in the memory of Rhodes. In these
conferences, this guy, who was a symbol of the conciliation between British and
Afrikaners, criticized, from his point of view, the British attitudes that prevailed in
Africa during most of the part of the XIX century. During a lot of time, under the influx
of the principles of French Revolution, it was drawn a mission of transforming the
primitive Africans in good Europeans. This goal offered the natives an appearance of
equality with the whites from which they got no use and also destroyed the basis of the
African systems that were their most important good. The true civilization mission,
which was already being plentifully applied, consisted in preserving the African
traditions and institutions, keeping them away from the European ones. The British
Empire does not symbolize the assimilation of the peoples to a same type, does not
standardize anything, but rather promotes the development of the conquered peoples
according to their own specific wishes. The Asiatic community of South Africa
originated from immigrant Indian workers in the British Indies to cultivate sugarcane in
Natal since 1843.

Much time before the formal implantation of the apartheid, Smuts were
explicitly defending the institutional segregation and the territorial segregation. In 1909,
a constitutional convention with British and Afrikaners healed the scars of the War on
Boers and established the basis for the unification of the colonies of the Cape, Natal,
Transvaal and Orange in the South African Union. The Law of South Africa, raised
from that convention, created a parliament with two chambers located in Cape Town
and determined that senators and deputies would be considered as British subjects of
European ascendance and defined the electorate in racial basis. As a concession to a
more liberal past, the constitutional law gave the rights of voting to the colored of the
Cape and to the scarce Asiatic and Bantus that had this right before the unification of
the colonies.

The building of segregation grew relentless. In 1913, the Law of the Lands of
the Natives reserved earths to each racial community, giving to the Bantus 8% of the
total of earths and allowing the expulsion of a million farmers. In 1918 and 1923, two
laws of residential zoning delimitated racial ghettos (townships) in the white cities. In
1926, the Law of Barrier of Color interdicted the hiring of non-whites to the qualified
jobs in mines and industries. In 1936, the Law of Representation of Blacks cancelled
immediately the rights of voting of the blacks and created a separated representation for
the colored of the Cape. After ten years, almost before the electoral victory of the
National Party, the cabinet of Smuts approved the Law of Lands of Asiatic that
prohibited selling lands for Indians.

The norm as an exception

The original constitution of Transvaal, of 1858, said that it was out of cogitation
the equality between whites and non-whites both in Church and in Estate. The Boers
had no doubts regarding the principle of racial separation, in a time when the British
oscillated between the conflicting ideas of the equality among humans and the
permanent differences among races. However, as soon as they consolidated their control
over South Africa, the British thought very similarly to the Boers regarding the question
of race.

The segregationist law anterior to 1948 derived partially from the necessity of
conciliating the colonial administration and the Afrikaners. There was not an
unconditional rendition at the end of the War on Boers, but an ambiguous agreement
that only allowed the unification of the colonies after years and years of complicated
negotiations. The governor Milner exposed with disgust in 1905 the receipt to form the
South African Union: „it is only needed to sacrifice the niggers and the game becomes
easy‟. The niggers (blacks) were sacrificed step by step in the altar of the British
geopolitics. But it was not difficult to sacrifice them in those times of glory and
scientific racism, of fusion of paradigms of nationalism and race and the international
enthusiasm for eugenism.

In the South Africa of the mining capitalism, the thematic of race crossed since
the beginning with the one of the rights of the workers. Before the War on Boers, De
Beers of Rhodes wanted the freedom to hire blacks to reduce the costs of its deep mines
and since those times the white workers resisted to this strategy. The explosive growth
of the mining sector and of industry, together with the urbanization of the Afrikaners,
amplified the tensions. When the First World War ended, the businessmen of the
Mining Chamber reacted to the inevitable fall of gold, increasing the recruitment of
blacks. The initiative deflagrated a wild strike movement in Rand that degenerated into
field battles between the white workers and the governmental forces. More than 250
strikers were killed and the leaders of the Red Revolution were hung. The idea of the
revolted, based on the Communist Manifest of 1848, was: „workers from all over the
world unite for a white South Africa”. The young South African Communist Party,
founded in the year before, occupied key positions in the leadership of the movement.
The South African communists defended the limitation of hiring blacks until 1924. In
that year, following an order from the International Communist, they rebuilt their
program defending South Africa as nation to be pertaining to the natives, Africanizing
the party. Soon after that, they changed position and defended a nation for all South
Africans and a government based on the wishes of the majority.

The Red Revolution signalized the beginning of the inflexion that would get
concluded in 1948. Two years after the bloody riots in Rand, Smuts lost the elections to
Hertzog. The new government reflected both the nationalism of Broederbond and the
interests of the white workers and the poor Afrikaners of the cities. The Law of Color
Barrier and the creation of state industries destined to guarantee employment for the
whites put in practice the wishes of the revolted people of 1922. The world war
imploded completely the coalition between the pro-British elite of Cape and the
Afrikaners of Pretoria. Some leaders of the National Party expressed openly their
support to Hitler and the Ossewabrandwag (OB), a clandestine group of extreme right,
promoted sabotage acts against the government of Smuts. The young John Vorster, who
would become prime minister after one quarter of century was a militant of OB and due
to sabotage acts were put into jail in the province of Orange.

In the canonic narrative that was established when the apartheid regime
struggled the international isolation, the National Party victorious in 1948 is shown such
as an almost-Nazi political draft and the white South Africa as a pathologic deviation
remnant from the Germany of Hitler. Such interpretation hides the most important: the
coalition that implanted apartheid was not a direct interpretation of the romantic elite of
Broederbond of Transvaal, buy mainly from thinkers from the Cape, influenced by the
predominant racial thinking in the Western and organized around the leadership of
Malan.

The persistent impact of Broederbond in the center of the South African power is
something well documented, but the secret organization worked as a more or less fluid
network of ideas and business. Malan belonged to it, as much part of the Afrikaner
political elite, but his crucial connections were found in the Cape. The decisive thinkers
on the formulation of the plan of the apartheid, inspired in the colonial paternalism of
the missionaries of the Dutch Reformed Church and on the system of segregation of the
south of USA, imagined it as a modernization of the already existent segregation laws
of South Africa. These intellectual founders of apartheid, N.P. van Wyk Louw and
G.B.A. Gerdender, delineated in the decade of 1930 the outlines of the general program
of racial separation conducted in the post-war period. Gerdener wrote a biography of
Sarel Cilliers, preacher and companion of Pretorius in the Battle of Blood River. Cilliers
would have sworn in honor of the battle that if God conceded the victory to the Boers,
they would construct a church and that day, 16th December, would be forever and ever
celebrated as a religious holiday. The date was not celebrated in almost all the XIX
century. The biography of Gerdener, published in 1919, seems to have a decisive paper
in the diffusion and consolidation of the Afrikaner holiday of the Day of Swearing.

Wyk Louw, academic and poet, had as the greatest authority in Afrikaner
literature, tried to conciliate the idea of apartheid with the principles of liberalism. He
saw in South Africa a civilizing bridge between Europe and Africa and preached the
adaptation of the liberal thinking to the South African peculiar conditions. Gerdener, a
history researcher on the Dutch missions of the University of Stellenbosch, in Cape,
narrated the epopee of the Boers in order to show the separation of the races as a
condition for keeping both the freedom of the whites and the culture of the natives. Both
of them would criticize the cruel traces of the apartheid that they interpreted as
deviations of a benign norm.

The National Party of Malan had 402 thousand votes in the elections of 1948,
while the United Party of Smuts had 524 thousand votes. However, the at the time
present district system amplified artificially the representation of the rural areas, so the
National Party got 70 chairs and the United Party, 65 in a parliament made of 150
representatives. Under the cabinets of Malan (1948-1954), Strijdom (1954-1958) and
Verwoerd (1958-1966), the Afrikaner party established the so-called small apartheid. In
1961, stimulated by the British policy of concession of independence to its African
colonies, Verwoerd ruptured the loops with the British Community and proclaimed the
South African Republic.

The juridical building of apartheid was grown over the Law of Registration of
the Population of 1950, which classified the South Africans based on racial criteria. The
law defined the four great racial groups: whites, blacks, mixed (colored) and asiatics.
Also, it divided the blacks into linguistic groups (Nguni, Sotho, Venda, Shangaan-
Tsonga and Ndebele) from which emanated nine ethnic groups: Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi,
Tsonga, Venda, Tswana, Northern Sotho, Southern Soto and Ndebele.

The classification operation was supposedly based on ethnology, but could never
hide its fragilities. Some Bantu groups were distinguished by a past of military conflicts,
while others represented only small language differences related to the geographical
distance. Anyway, the sapient classifiers had not a single drop of shy to invent the
Ndebele ethnical group, even Ndebele being simply a word of the Sotho language to
refer to the Zulus.

Ethnological suppositions served to classify the blacks in ethnical groups, but

had absolutely no utility in the case of the mixed persons of the Cape, from variable
origins and who spoke English, Afrikaans or both. To distinguish them from blacks and
whites, they invented such embarrassing practical tests, such as the test of the comb,
where the agent of the census determined the degree of curliness of the hairs. Naturally,
as a result of this test, members of the same family were labeled in different ethnical
groups.

Submitted to the classification of the apartheid, the colored developed a feeling

of ethnical cohesion that hided the cultural diversity of the mixed of the Cape. The
history of segregation put them in an intermediary position between the Bantus and the
whites. The Afrikaner Estate curiously defined them as a nation in formation.
Throughout time, the colored political leaderships oscillated between the trial to be
distinguished from the blacks (so they could preserve some privileges) and the adhesion
to a project of a South Africa democratic and non-racial.

The small apartheid started to be settled over the Law of Group Areas, voted in
1950 and emended in 1966, which consolidated the urban residential segregation. The
legal document was complemented by the Law of the Natives of 1952 that regulated the
old internal system of pass laws. The verification of the passports by the police
provoked a rising number of detentions for the regulation of the passing books. In some
years, 600 thousand transgressors were arrested. The segregation system got complete
in 1959, by the Law of Bantu Self-Government, anchored in the old Law of the Lands
of Native, which consolidated the tribal reserves. According to this law, these reserves
would give to the Bantu ethnical groups the means to develop autonomous manners of
political organization, restoring their identities and cultures. The legislation of self-
government had its roots in the Law of Bantu Authorities of 1951 that allowed the
creation of traditional tribe authorities in the reserves. The Department of Native Issues,
an essential agency of the building of apartheid, was tasked to supervise the tribal
chiefs.

Side by side to the main legislation, several laws of the stingy apartheid were
created and erroneously taken as less significant. The Law of Prohibition of Mixed
Marriage of 1949 and the Law of Immorality in the following law, directly inspired in
the anti-miscegenation laws of the south of USA, prohibited the unions and the sexual
relations between whites and non-whites. The Afrikaners wanted to preserve the purity
of their white nation, avoiding the reproduction of the mixing that generated the colored
of Cape. The stingy apartheid closed its circle in 1953, with the Laws of Separated
Public Services, which segregated the libraries, restaurants, parks, beaches, transports
and public restrooms and the Law of Bantu Education that racially separated the
systems of education in all the levels and defined distinct curricula to the natives.

The Law for Registration of the Population, basement of apartheid, was

promulgated in the year Unesco broadcasted its declaration over race. The anti-mixing
laws of South Africa came in the same year when California finally abolished its own
anti-mixing law and an American judge related it to the Mein Kampf of Hitler. Spite
this, throughout the first decade of apartheid, South Africa suffered only scattered
criticisms from UN.
 The international relationships against apartheid took body after the Massacre of
Sharpeville of 1960, when the South African police opened fire against black protestors
against the pass laws that concomitantly inspired the fights for civil rights of USA. The
norm that was the segregation finally converted into a deviation to the eyes of the West.
South Africa became an exception and the apartheid system was seen as a singularity
and an aberration. In this compass, the proud Afrikaner leaders who saw themselves as a
legitimated integrants of the civilized nations started to be pointed out, for their surprise,
as heirs of Nazism.

Afro-Americans

Facing the international isolation, the governments of Vorster (1966-1978) and

the following Crocodile Botha expanded the engineer of the social segregation toward a
daring target. Instead of an Estate of a white minority, they tried to transform South
Africa into an Estate of white majority, through juridical suppression of the presence of
black South Africans. This project (that ended failing) was named as the Great
Apartheid.

The vertex of the project established with the laws of Citizenship of the Bantu
Nations of 1970 and of the Constitution of the Bantu Countries of 1971, which
delimitated the way to the creation of ethnical Estates (Bantustans) in the lands reserved
to the different native groups. Before, with the law for the Bantu Self-Government,
Verwoerd was satisfied in creating ethnical territories covered by a caricature of
autonomy in which tribal institutions of power would work. Now, Vorster opened the
curtains to the fabrication of sovereign ethnical micro-estates that would gravitate as
satellites in the orbit of a triumphant white South Africa.

In the arrival point, the apartheid regime suppressed the nationality of the blacks
who would compulsorily transformed into citizens of „their‟ ethnical entities. With this,
it would be viable to conciliate, once and for all, the inclusion of the blacks in the work
market with their exclusion of the political life of the white Estate. In the condition of
foreigners, the natives could work but never think on getting the statute of electors.

According to the law of 1971, the tribal reserves were transformed into Bantu
countries, each one designated to a specific ethnical group, except the Xhosas who were
placed in Bantustans separated from Transkei and Ciskei. Seducing tribal leaders, four
Bantustans (Transkei, Bophutatswana, Venda and Ciskei) were declared independent
between 1976 and 1981, but none of them got international recognition. The others were
administrated as semi-autonomous territories by tribal leaders.

The efforts of apartheid involved crucially the fabrication of ethnical nations. In

the same manner the Afrikaner intellectuals narrated the history of the Boers they
produced academic narratives about the ethnical native groups defined by the racial
Estate. Historians, anthropologists and linguists made efforts to describe singular
cultures of the natives, starting from the romantic paradigm that culture is an essential
pass, an attribute almost biological of groups regularly delimitated. The census and the
museum carried out parallel functions in the policy of racial separation in South Africa.
The first fixated in statistics the demographic presence of the ethnicities, the second
exposed the material evidences of the singularity of each one of them.

The Kaffrarian Museum, actual Amathole Museum, was named in reference to

the land of coffee and was abandoned in 1999. This museum was founded in King
Williams Town in 1884 and figured as the most important institution on the ethnology
of the South Africa of the apartheid. Its collections of handcrafts and ethnical
documents reveal much more about the way of thinking of the white researches than of
the cultures and their native object of study. The cult to the ethnical traditions was
disseminated by the successive Afrikaner governments. The law of Bantu Education
was destined not only to segregate the white institutions of education but also to
stimulate the use of the native languages by the different ethnical groups. As a
consequence of this law, the University of Fort Hare, founded in 1916 in Western Cape
as a liberal institution for the superior education of the blacks, was subordinated to the
ethnical paradigm and transformed into a university of the Bantustans. Before that,
figures such as Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki, leaders of the anti-apartheid
movement, passed in the benches of Fort Hare, as well as the Zulu chief Mangosuthu
Buthelezi and Robert Mugabe, who directed the fight against the white minority of
South Rhodesia and became the dictator of Zimbabwe. In the beginning of the decade of
1960, they edited laws for the education of the colored and of the Indians that created
separated school systems for these groups.

Inside the Bantustans, under the influx of Pretoria, a policy of re-tribalization

opened the ways for a tireless invention of traditions. Ciskei was an extreme example of
the strategies of production of false ethnicities. In the independent Bantustan,
anthropologists serving to the Department for Native Issues judged the qualification of
the candidates of local tribal chiefs based on genealogic studies. The candidates must
demonstrate that they pertained to clan lineages from the old Xhosa chiefs. Typically
hundreds of candidates could demonstrate the adequate qualifications, such a way the
result depended on the network of political relationship carried out with the bureaucrats
and anthropologists.

Apartheid became exhausted because the black majority did not incorporate the
ethnical narrative articulated by the Estate. In spite of the immense efforts of police and
administration, the attraction exerted by the cities sabotaged continuously the territorial
segregation. In the government of Verwoerd, a policy of industrial decentralization
conducted by fire and iron against the business logic provoked a wave of transference of
industries to the limits of the tribal reserves. In the decade of 1970, with the Great
Apartheid, forced transferences pushed out nothing less than 1.2 million of blacks to the
Bantustans that reached to have 11 millions of habitants, around 55% of the total of
Bantus. Even with this, the deep tendencies of the market economy pointed out toward
integration, not segregation.

The signs of the crisis walked under the superficial apparent calm. In the
Bantustans, a confusing tribal politics predominated, but even in those ethnical reserves
many influences infiltrated from the urban world, of which many migrant workers
participated. In the townships, mainly in the mining area of Rand, English was the
common language of the blacks and since the first half of the XX century the American
jazz was the predominant musical expression. An invisible and silent avalanche
projected against the Afrikaner Estate.

The theme of language catalyzed the Revolution in Soweto, which signalized the
prolonged crisis of the apartheid. The law for the Bantu Education reduced the resources
for the black segregated schools and the government gave priority to the construction of
schools in the Bantustans. The tensions got higher with a regulation of 1974 that
amplified the use of Afrikaans in the Bantu educational system. According to this new
regulation, English would be used in Sciences, Afrikaans would be the language in
Math and Social Studies and the native idioms would work as languages for Music and
Religion. Anti-apartheid activists such as the bishop Desmond Tutu as well as the
syndicate of the Bantu teachers protested saying that Afrikaans was the language of
oppression. In April 1976, high school students from a township declared strike and
were followed by other schools and formed a committee on action.

The revolution started in the public manifestation of 16th June. The pacific
protest degenerated into confrontation when police used dogs and tear-jerking gas
bombs. The students re-acted throwing stones. Police opened fire. In a complete day of
violence, 23 persons died. In the following day, the Protestants took the streets and were
received by a police force armed with automatic rifles, guns, tanks and helicopters. The
total of dead people reached 500 persons. Soon after, revolts in Cape Town and Port
Elizabeth appeared. Black workers declared strikes of protest and a march of 300 white
students indignant with the repression took part in the streets of Johannesburg.

The young fellows won. The norms about teaching in Afrikaans were cancelled
and the spark of the popular fight against apartheid had spread out. But, foremost, a
political message was given: the urban blacks of South Africa said they didn´t want to
be Xhosas, Zulus, Tswanas, Sothos or Tsongas, but simply South Africans. Not only
this: claiming to learn English, they were defining their identity with the relationships
they had with the external world, outside the limits of Africa. Those students of Soweto,
who heard jazz and rock and whose parents had seen the marches for the civil rights of
Martin Luther King defined themselves, in the deep, as afro-Americans.
The sense of citizenship

The National African Congress was born in 1912 uniting political activists,
religious leaders and tribal chiefs to defend the rights of the blacks of South Africa. The
organization got a new impulse with the formation of the Youth League in 1944 and
mainly with the inauguration in 1952 of the Campaign of Challenge, a movement of
pacific resistance against the unfair laws of apartheid. But the program was delineated
by the Letter of Freedom, approved in a football field around Johannesburg in 1955 and
that started with the words: „we, the people of South Africa‟ and proclaimed: „South
Africa pertains to all who lives here, blacks and whites, and government can claim
legitimate authority unless it is based in the wishes of all the people‟.

Inspired in the paradigm of equality, the program defined the citizenship

referring to the territory, not in race or ethnic group. The people of South Africa were
blacks and whites equally together and siblings. In 1961, without the consent of the
president Albert Luthuli, a traditional but combative Zulu chief, the NAC formed a
military aisle, Umkhonto we Sizwe (arrow of nation) that conducted acts of sabotage
and attacks against targets of the regime. Soon later, the regime localized and arrested
Nelson Mandela, the new NAC´s president. In the Judgment of Rivonia in 1964, the
persecutors characterized the Letter of Freedom as a Marxist document and Mandela
was sentenced to perpetual prison.

The true goal of the program of NAC – a united Estate, democratic and non-
racial – provoked the first significant dissidence in the black coalition anti-apartheid. In
1959, under the leadership of Robert Sobukwe, old member of the Young League of
NAC, formed the Pan-Africanist Congress. Influenced by the Ghanese Kwame and the
Kenyan Jomo Kenyatta, Sobuke defended the geopolitical unity of Africa and the idea
that the continent belonged to the blacks. He did not accept the non-racial principles of
the Letter of Freedom and deplored the collaboration between NAC and the whites of
the South African Communist Party.

Anticipating a planned campaign of NAC, PAC directed the protest that

degenerated into the Massacre of Sharpeville and as a consequence into the official
banishment of the two organizations. Sobuke was sentenced to prison in Robben Island
and was kept in a solitary for 8 years. Renamed as the Azanian Pan-Africanist
Congress, PAC created an army that never carried out an effective guerilla. Azania,
word of uncertain and old origin, was the name proposed by Nkrumah to substitute
South Africa and baptize the future black nation.

In the political emptiness produced by the repression of NAC and PAC, the
Movement for the Black Consciouness (MBC) emerged. The movement sprouted from
inside of the exclusively black Organization of the South African Students, founded by
the medical student Steve Biko in 1968. Soon after, he originated a national politic
chain, the Black People Convention (BPC). Biko defended the Pan-Africanism of
Nkrumah and Sobuke, but was involved by the anti-colonialist philosophers Frantz
Fanon, Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor. Also, his activism was influenced by the
American black nationalism of Malcom X and the Black Panthers Party, constituted two
years before the foundation of Saso.

Black man, you´re by your own: the phrase of BCM had a clear racial sense, but
the theme of the race appears weaker than in PAC or the American black movement.
The conception of blackness gained a translation in the thinking of Biko as a fight for
dignity and for the consciousness of the blacks: the personal freedom should walk
together with the political freedom. BCM and PAC rejected the non-racialism of NCA,
but defined as blacks all of the non-white South Africans. The definition was destined,
tactically, to make coalitions with the colored of Cape and the Indians of Natal, but had
a deeper meaning. The negative term non-whites should be abolished, as it implicated in
converting the whites in a general reference of identities. In its place, the word blacks
would designate not a race, but an oppressive condition shared by the majority of South
Africans.

Biko approached to the political fight under a flexible and pragmatic

perspective. He didn´t believe in the efficacy of guerilla as prescribed by PAC, and used
the pacific methods of resistance of Gandhi. His movement was organized on
decentralized basis and stimulated the appearance of local leaderships. BCM was the
main political force in the articulation of the Revolt of Soweto, but Biko didn´t
participate personally form the movement, since he was forbidden to speak in public
and submitted to restrictions of circulation.

Soweto sealed the destiny of Biko. In 1977, the leader of BCM was arrested and
tortured until he died in the floor of a prison hospital in Pretoria, just 30 year-old. After
Soweto, all the organizations linked to BCM were banned and the majority of the
activists went to NCA that again got stronger. The political legacy of Biko originated
the Azania People Organization (Azapo), constituted in 1978 from Saso. In the last
decade of apartheid, Azapo tried to conciliate the idea of black consciousness with
Marxism and got involved in bloody underground fights with NCA.

At the end point, the fight against the Afrikaner Estate was polarized between
the United Democratic Front, a broad coalition anti-apartheid formed in 1983 by the
reverend Allan Boesak and closely linked to NCA. UDF adopted the Letter of Freedom
and attracted the support of social organizations, syndicates and personalities from all
over the country. In a situation of a strong retrocession of the Black Nationalism and
intensive repression to its organizations, the aim of a united non-racial Estate found
opposition only the local Zulu political elite.

The sense of cohesion of the Zulus was consolidated only in the beginning of the
XIX century, with the formation of a power empire in the region of Natal, centralized
by the authority of the king Shaka. The subsequent conflicts against the Boers, the
tragic battle of Blood River and the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879 destroyed the sovereign of
the empire and reinforced an ethnical identity that is nourished by a narrative of blood
and honor. In the white South Africa, the majority of the Zulus stood in the vast reserve
Bantu of KwaZulu that would be converted in an autonomous Bantustan.

Gatsha Mangosuthu Buthelezi was born in 1928 in the Zulu royal clan, studied
in Fort Hare and took part of the Young League of NCA. Oscillating between a
moderate opposition to the white regime and a pragmatic ethnical policy, he was
pointed out as chief of KwaZulu in 1970, suffered tireless accusations of collaborating
to the whites but refused the offer of Pretoria of the concession of independency to the
Bantustan and kept loyalty in defending Mandela. The Inkhata Party of Freedom,
founded by Buthelezi in 1975 on the basis of an old Zulu cultural organization ruptured
with NCA 5 years later due to the opposition of Buthelezi to the armed resistance tactic.

In the years of 1980 the militias of NCA and Inkhata fought several times,
conducting campaigns of murders and intimidation. Fraternal friend of Harry
Oppenheimer, son and heir of the founder of Anglo-American Corporation, the Zulu
chief was seen by the Afrikaners as an instrument of the English-speaking South
Africans and, effectively, he had a diversified network with businessmen from Natal
and Cape. However, as Anthony Sampson said, Buthelezi admired the Afrikaners and
saw in the Boer tribe a reflected image of the Zulus.

Inkatha was considered as tribalist by NCA and worked as an ethnical party

controlled by the government apparatus of KwaZulu, although it was open to the
affiliation of any person. His persecutors accused it to promote a decentralized South
Africa, composed by ethnical autonomous entities, which would be simply a re-
configuration of the Great Apartheid. The accusation, an element of the faction fights of
the autumn of apartheid, has no documental supports. Buthelezi and his party invocated
the singular identity and culture of the Zulu nation not aiming to break the country into
ethnical pieces but to negotiate the place that would be occupied by the regional Zulu
elite in the post-apartheid scenario.

The efforts of Buthelezi reached a significant success. The constitution of 1966

defined South Africa as a united Estate, but weakened the centralization of power by
conceding a significant degree of autonomy to the provinces. In the post-apartheid
elections of the province of KwaZulu-Natal, where Zulu is the mother language of 80%
of the population, Inkhata got consolidated as the second big party, few before NCA.

The confusion of races

Frederik Willem de Klerk was elected leader of the National Party in February
1989 and assumed the presidency of South Africa some months later, when the Big
Crocodile suffered a heart attack and in Europe the great manifestations put down the
Berlin wall and the communist regimes of the Soviet countries. He was born in a family
of Afrikaner politicians of Johannesburg and had a long carrier in the parliament and
was minister of Botha, always exhibiting perfectly conservative credentials. His
conversion started only at the time he became the leader of the directing party, when he
pronounced a surprising speech proposing negotiations with NAC for the edification of
a South Africa free from racism.

The reforms conducted by De Klerk began by freeing Nelson Mandela

culminated in multi-racial elections in 1994 and the end of apartheid. But the signs that
an era ended came before, in 1986, when the Dutch Reformed Church, the main column
of the segregation regime and that reunited two fifths of the white South Africans,
opened to people from all the races and adopted a document that defined the racism as a
sin that no one could defend nor practice. At that moment, many people thought that the
apartheid was in a terminal crisis, but only a few persons foresaw a pacific end of a so
old and tangled regime of the history and institutions of South Africa.

Margaret Thatcher and the British conservatives resisted to follow the

international sanctions against apartheid and did not hide their firm conviction that the
implantation of a regime of the majority would degenerate into a dictatorship a massive
breakout of the whites of South Africa. Gloomily, respected analysts prophesied
worsening of ethnical conflicts between CAN and Inkhata, as well as among the
different ethnical groups divided by the apartheid laws. Outside segregation, there
would be only the alternative of a civil war – this was a generalized opinion before the
negotiated collapse of the Afrikaner Estate.

The prophets made a mistake. They could not evaluate the repercussions of the
economic and social modernization of South Africa. Apartheid was able to distort and
retard, but not reverse, the process of urbanization of the black people of South Africa.
In 1978, only one fifth of the urbanized blacks had parents or kids in the Bantustans and
half of them had been born in the white urban areas reserved to the whites. In 1985,
from 25 millions of blacks, 10 millions lived in the townships of the white cities. In
Soweto, 95% of the families lived in the township for more than three decades and even
in a mining city such as Kimberley the proportion of temporary migrants had fallen
more than 85% in 1970 to close to 35%. The integrative logic of the capitalist economy
produced an identity pot where the ethnical frontiers, so carefully described in law, got
dissolved.

The sharp racial frontiers also suffered the impacts of modernization. Since the
decade of 1970 the syndicates of black workers of mines and industries had modernized
themselves. The Congress of South African Syndicates (Cosatu), created in 1985 by
NCA and the communists, had one quarter of white employees in their regional
secretaries and so reflected the emergence of a multi-racial proletariat. In that year, the
blacks represented 32% of the qualified workers and more than 40% of the university
students were black. A black medium class already lived illegally in some of the white
suburbs of Johannesburg. BMW opened a store in Soweto and a black colonization of
the commercial centers of Johannesburg and Cape Town took place.
 At the same time small groups of black medium class lived in the white urban
areas, black favelas were formed outside the townships. These illegal invasions started
in Cape Town, there the Crossroads favela appeared in 1975 and successive removals
were unable to prevent it to grow. Ten years after, when the habitants conquered the
right of permanence, there were illegal favelas in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban and
Port Elizabeth. The residential segregation of the cities got down, slowly but
irreversibly. Apartheid was dismantled pacifically because among the inhabitants of the
cities of South Africa a non-racial identity was diffuse and had political correspondence
in NCA.

Exactly three decades separate the elections that ended the apartheid to the
speech of „I am ready to die‟ pronounced by Mandela in the opening of this defense at
the Supreme Court in Pretoria, 20th April 1964. The final phrases of that speech had not
lost actuality: „Above all, we want equal political rights because without them our
privations will last forever. I know that this sounds revolutionary to the whites of this
country because the majority of the electors will be Africans. This makes the white men
to fear democracy. But it is not allowed this fear to close the way to the only final
solution that will guarantee harmony and freedom for all. It is not true that the
emancipation of all will result in racial domination. The political division based on
color is totally artificial and when it disappears, the domination of one color group by
the other will also disappear. NCA fights since a half of a century against the racialism.
When we triumph, we will not change this policy‟.

Mandela concluded: „In my whole life, I devoted myself to the fight of the
African people. I fought against the white domination and I fought against the black
domination. I nourished the ideal of a free and democratic society where all the people
can live together in harmony and equal opportunities. It is an ideal for I want to live and
I want to reach. But, if necessary, this is an ideal I am ready to die‟.

In the elections of 27th April of 1994, NAC received 62% of the votes and two
weeks later Mandela was named the first black president of the country. However,
racialism would turn to figure as a government policy in South Africa, at the hands of
NAC.

THE TRIUMPH OF MULTICULTURALISM

Why do you bother us? – She asked to the policeman who was approaching her
inside the bus. „I don´t know, but law is law and you are arrested‟. Rosa Parks was born
in Tuskegee, Alabama, from black, Indian and Irish ancestors and was 42 year-old in
1955 when she disobeyed the order of the driver who wanted her to give her seat to
white passengers in Montgomery, the capital of the State. Her gesture was not
specifically programmed but also didn´t derive from a simple personal impulse. Parks
was a member of the local section for NAACP – National Association for the
Advancement of Color People, whose president was searching for an emblematic case
of racial segregation in the public system of transport with the finality of deflagrating a
protesting movement.

NAACP was an influent organization for the promotion of civil rights. It was
founded in 1909 by the black academic of Harvard William E.B. du Bois. It for a long
time was concentrated in fighting the American segregationist laws in the tribunes. In
the post-war, however, stimulated by the new international situation, it started to
organize public protests. Edgar D. Nixon, the combative president of the local section,
could never imagine that the boycott to the buses of Montgomery that started after the
arrest of Parks would represent the appearance of the movement for civil rights in USA.

The boycott was organized by Nixon and by the young Baptist pastors Ralph
Abernathy and Martin Luther King Jr. who founded MIA – Montgomery Improvement
Association. During 381 days, the black population, attending to the call of MIA,
stopped to use buses. Walking, riding, taking lifts, using taxis that in solidarity charged
the same prices of the buses, they attracted the attentions from all over the country.
Black activists suffered attacks, the houses of Luther King and Abernathy were attacked
with Molotov cocktails and the first was arrested for a fortnight. A Federal Court of the
district judged as unconstitutional the segregation in the buses of Alabama. At the end
of 1956, the Supreme Court pronounced a judgment against the appellation so the
movement conquered a historical victory.

In the following year, together with other local organizations and segregated
Southern churches, MIA formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
(SCLC). Under the presidency of Luther King, SCLC converted into the motor of the
national movement that knocked down the segregationist laws. Under the influx of that
movement, the congress approved in 1964 the Law of Civil Rights that banished racial
segregation in schools, jobs, equipments and public places and approved in 1965 the
National Law of the Rights of Vote that prohibited discriminatory qualifications that
limited the right of the blacks to vote. This law was sent to the congress by the president
John Kennedy and voted in the government of Lyndon Johnson, who was a great
promoter. According to a narrative, the Southern Johnson commented that the law
would cost the South to the Democrats. He won the presidential elections of that year
but lost in five Southern states to the Republican Barry Goldwater. In 1968 the
segregationist George Wallace, running independently, divided the South with the
Republican Richard Nixon.

By the voice of Luther King the movement of civil rights lifted the flag of
equality of the citizens. In his most famous speech, in front to the Memorial to Lincoln
in Washington, August 1963, the leader of SNLC invocated the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution that formed the basis to the ideal that people were
never judged by their skin color. The concept of equality of rights is in the nucleus of
the National Law for the Rights of Voting, which is a regulation of the 15th
Constitutional Amendment adopted years after the Civil War to protect the rights of
voting against racial discrimination. This same concept served as the basis for the
judgment of the supreme court of June 1967 that knocked down the last anti-
miscegenation laws still existing in USA.

The victories of the movement for civil rights corrected a historical deviation,
aligning finally the country to the principles proclaimed formally in the international
arena in the immediate post-war. The triumph of the principle of equality in USA
represented a valuable direct stimulus the anti-apartheid fights that started in South
Africa. However, paradoxically, soon after those speeches that the citizen couldn´t be
judged due to their ancestry or skin color, USA turned around and promulgated laws
and regulations destined to distribute rights according to racial categories.

The expression of affirmative action entered into the legal American language in
1961 when the president John Kennedy published the Executive Order 10925 that
created the committee for equal job opportunities and ordered that the projects financed
by federal funds should adopt affirmative action and hire freely from racial
discrimination. In the version of the heralds of the policies of reverse discrimination,
this document is shown as the beginning of everything. However, this is not true, as the
Executive Order of Kennedy was placed in the fields of the fights against
discrimination, anticipating one of the sides of the Law of Civil Rights. In the text, the
document associated the notion of affirmative action with the obligation of hiring
people without considering race, religion or nation.

The same false version consecrated in the next step the Executive Order 11246
of the president Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Once more, however, the legal text was
written in the format of the principle of equality. Its concepts reproduced, literally, those
of the order of Kennedy. The novelties were a more detailed formulation of obligations
and the penalties for infractions. The goal was to win the strong resistance of
discrimination, rooted in old habits and attitudes.

The executive orders of Kennedy and Johnson participated of the conceptual

logic of the Law of Civil Rights that in the subsection 703 of Title VII declared that it
was not required from an employer to concede special treatment to any individual or
group based in any differences that may exist in relation to the employees of that group
and the rest of community, city, State or country. In the American law, the affirmative
action acquired the meaning of reverse discrimination with the plan of Philadelphia
announced by the president Richard Nixon in 1969.

Philadelphia was selected because the companies and the syndicates

continuously broke the Law of Civil Rights, denying equal opportunities to black
candidates of jobs in the civil construction of the city. This plan provided goals and
chronograms, provoking the reaction of the Democrat senator Sam. J Ervin: „it is clear
like the sun of midday in an open sky that these percentages are quotes and that they are
based on race‟. In the polemic that was lighted, Nixon denied he tried to impose quotes
and the congress supported the position of the president.
 The Republican Party is the real initial point of the policies of reverse racial
discrimination in USA. In 1970, under the inspiration of the plan of Philadelphia, the
federal government referred to procedures guided for results. The conclusive act of this
trajectory occurred in 1973, when ministries and federal agencies published the letter
Guide of practices of local and state employments. The document took care in affirming
that rigid quotes were unacceptable but sustained a system of quantitative goals to be
verified. The language was in the contrary of the spirit of the Law of Civil Rights,
opening the way for employment policies based on the concession of preferable
treatment.

The employment policies ran parallel to the promotion of what Nixon qualified
as black capitalism, in 1968. By the Executive Order 11458 of 1969, the president
stimulated the mobilization of activities and resources from the Estate and local
governments, companies, commercial associations, universities, foundations, profession
organizations and voluntary organizations and so on for the growth of companies owned
by minorities. In 1917 in the sequence of such initiative the executive order 11625
demanded the federal agencies for plans and goals to the program of inclusion of
business of minorities, which favored racial criteria in contracting suppliers for the
government.

The brain behind these racial policies of Nixon was Arthur Fletcher, black, born
in Arizona in 1924 and activist for the movement of civil rights. He was named as
assistant-secretary of the Department of Work. The Republican Fletcher, known as the
father of the affirmative initiative in USA, served in the governments of Gerald Ford
(1974-1977), Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) and George H. Bush (1989-1993), hence
ensuring the continuity of the policies inaugurated by Nixon.

The precedence of the republican is an historical uncontestable fact. However,

the concept of black capitalism and the policies of affirmative action based on racial
criteria evolved as a program of both parties, so that these action were kept and
amplified in the government of Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) and Bill Clinton (1993-
2001). Under the impact of the federal initiatives, there was an outbreak in state and
local policies of reverse discrimination regarding employment and schooling. At this
time, race converted into a relevant aspect in the admission to universities that
developed their own programs of quantitative goals and quotes destined to minorities.

The legal statute of policies of racial preferences was never clarified. The
Supreme Court reluctantly offered support to these policies until the end of the decade
of 1980. However, to pass the judicial evaluation, the programs were hidden under the
mask of anti-discriminative procedures. A new Law for Civil Rights that was approved
in 1991 banished notorious methods for concession of racial preferences, as well as the
creation of distinct patterns for minorities in selection exams. However, the practices of
reverse discrimination continued, but more dissimulated.

The publication in 1971 of „A Theory of Justice‟ by the American philosopher

John Rawls was coincident to the conclusion of the rapid process of attribution of a new
meaning to the expression „affirmative action‟. This book, considered as the intellectual
basis for the policies of preferences for „disadvantaged groups‟, investigates solutions
for the problem of distributive justice and formulates the theory of justice as equality.
Concerned with the discrimination against minorities in his country, the philosopher
aggregated the „principle of the difference‟ to the „equality of opportunities‟. According
to this principle, the positions of prestige and influence should be used for the greater
benefit of the members of minorities in a situation of disadvantage.

A strong defender of liberalism, Rawls suffered the intellectual influences of the

philosopher Isaiah Berlin and of the lawyer Herbert L. A. Hart. His books can be seen
as a tentative of conciliating the liberal doctrine with the modern democratic mass
societies. Although he has never written directly about the theme of affirmative action,
his theory gave to the heralds of the preference policies as a legitimate way to use
inequalities of rights to produce a greater social equality. The reinterpretation of the
sense of the expression „affirmative action‟ between the Law for Civil Rights and the
first initiatives of the government of Nixon probably influenced Rawl´s thinking. But
the triumphant marches of the policies of reverse discrimination have no casual
relationship with his books.

The Ford Foundation and the „policies of the difference‟

The United States were intellectually and morally ready to receive the policies of
affirmative action based on race because the paradigm of difference occupies a central
symbol in the American history. In spite of the formal declarations on the equality of
rights on the foundation documents, the American nation saw itself, since the beginning,
as a nation of whites. Few years separate the end of slavery to the production of
segregationist laws that converted the blacks in second-class citizens. These laws kept
working during almost a total of a century.

In the legal sphere, the notion of race can only work effectively if everybody
knows with no doubt who is who. USA was the first country to adopt anti-
miscegenation laws. These laws were supported in the named one drop rule, by which
the presence of a single non-white ancestor excluded a person from the category of
white. This rule appeared together with the anti-mixing laws and allowed to the census
to classify the Americans into white and non-whites and to classify the non-whites into
diverse minorities (blacks, Indians, Asiatic and more recently, Hispanic). The policies
of affirmative action grew on this ideological, administrative and legal construction that
was not abolished even with the victory of the movement for civil rights.

The reverse discrimination didn´t sprout automatically from the predominant

conceptions of the American society. It appeared in the political environment by the
effort of many actors. Although many leaders of the movement for the civil rights had
foreseen the risks of the policies of racial preferences, others considered that they
constituted the logical subsequent step to the conquest of the legal equality. Fletcher is
the key figure in the republican side. In the democrat side, the name is Jesse Jackson,
friend of Luther King in SCLC. Jesse Jackson ruptured with Abernathy, the new leader
of the organization and became the articulating point between the Democrat Party and
the black electorate. The Democrats became hegemonic among the black electorate
during the governments of Kennedy and Johnson. When Nixon with the Philadelphia
plan tried to restore the space lost to the Republicans among the blacks, the Democrats
adopted the policies of affirmative action and claimed they were pioneers in the way
they interpreted the Law of Civil Rights of 1964.

The movement for civil rights mobilized crowds. In contrast, the policies of
reverse discrimination never were sustained by any massive movement. But their
diffusion further on the limited federal programs was supported by intellectuals and
academics that implanted systems for admission to the universities guided by racial
criteria and articulated initiatives of racial equilibrium in the public schools and
formulated a multiculturalist explanation of the American society. Nothing of this
would have been possible without the intervention of the Ford Foundation, the most
detached actor in the triumphant marches of the racial policies.

Edsel Bryant Ford, son of Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Corporation, was
the president of the giant of Detroit between 1919 and 1943. In 1936 he and his father in
the philanthropic American tradition created the Ford Foundation and defined as its
mission to administer funds for the educational and scientific development and for
charity. After the death of the two founders in 1947, Henry Ford II, son of Edsel,
became the president of the company and Ford Foundation received a fortune in papers
from Ford Motor. In 1955 due to decision of the counsel of curators the Foundation
started to sell its papers and in the decade of 1970 it hadn´t no relation with Ford Motor.

The American journalist Dwight McDonald described in 1956 the Ford

Foundation as a „great body of money totally surrounded by persons who want some‟.
The financial patrimony left by the founders transformed the Foundation in the biggest
philanthropic entity of the world and its mission was redefined in terms of promoting
internationally the freedom, democracy, peace and education.

In the golden years of the Cold War, the Ford Foundation acted as a hidden
tentacle of the American external policy. Paul Hoffmann, one of the most important
architects of the Marshall Plan for Europe left the American government to be the
president of Ford Foundation between 1950 and 1953, when it started to expand
overseas. Richard M. Bissell Jr. worked as a high executive of the Foundation soon after
serving in the administration of the Marshall Plan and soon before officially entering
into CIA. John J. McCloy was secretary of War between 1941 and 1945 and after,
successively, president of the World Bank, high commissary of USA in the occupied
Germany, CEO of Chase Manhattan Bank and CEO of Ford Foundation. In the seven
years he governed the Foundation, since 1958, he kept the habit of defining, in informal
visits and talks to members of the National Security Council, the projects overseas that
would get the greatest financing of Ford Foundation.

McGeorge Bundy was only 30 year-old when he participated with Bissel in a

group of formulators of external policy that wanted to articulate the Marshall Plan with
CIA to help anti-communist groups in France and Italy. He reached the government
together with the team of academics made by John Kennedy and served as a counselor
of the National Security Council in the governments of Kennedy and Johnson until
1966, when he became president of Ford Foundation. In the thirteen years with Bundy
as president, the Foundation discovered the minorities, developing a crucial paper in the
diffusion of the policies of race in USA and in international environment. Such policy
could not be more radical: in 1960, the item „rights of minorities‟ represented 2.5% of
the budget; in 1970 it reached 40%.

At the end of the decade of 1960, Ford Foundation was facing a scenario of
political crisis that worsened in the first mandate of Nixon, when the social coalitions
articulated in the movement for civil rights went against the War on Vietnam. The
executives of Ford Foundation interpreted the radicalism of the protests as a symptom
of an ill functioning of the political pluralism and formulated the concept of
multiculturalism as a tool for restoring the normality in the engines of democracy.
According to the logic of multiculturalism, the broad social coalitions should be placed
by to organizations and specific movements delineated according to the interests of each
minority. The Foundation would help to sculpt these movements, offering to them
political platforms and funds capable of sustaining groups of pressure.

The introduction of the policies of difference - or diversity in the official

language of Ford Foundation- had a powerful effect in congregating leaders and
intellectuals. Investigating the philanthropic foundations, the sociologist Craig Jenkins
registered that they worked as doorkeepers, financing movements and initiatives that
this way are able to convert their flags into public policies. In the process, they also
selected the new organizations that became permanent traces in the political scenario. It
is precisely what happened in USA after the intervention of Ford Foundation.

The strategy was started by the argument of public interest devoted to the
minorities. Ford Foundation financed organizations for the process defending the
American Mexicans (Maldef), Porto Ricans (PR-LDEF), native Indians (Native-
American LDEF) and women (WLF). These organizations hadn´t a basis of associated
members and totally depend of the donation offered by companies and foundations,
especially Ford Foundation. As natural, the executives are activists linked to the
Foundation. However, these activists showed themselves in the public sphere as
legitimate representatives of the respective minorities and due to the financial resources
they had they had significant institutional influence. Obviously, all of these
organizations created on such basis acted in promoting the policies of reverse
discrimination, acting as professional pressure groups.
 The approach of Ford Foundation to the blacks started with financing of a
historic organization that developed relevant papers in the fights for civil rights.
NAACP gained educational and law support but lost the independence. Although it kept
more than 600 thousand affiliates, it got dependant essentially from the great
philanthropic entities and engaged in the racial policies. The process peaked in 1994,
when this venerable organization, which was almost undergoing bankruptcy, receive
two contributions from Ford Foundation in a total of 600 thousand dollars, after
substituting the executive director by the candidate selected by the Foundation.

Ford Foundation didn´t limit financing previously existent organizations.

Militant movements of „chicanes‟ were transformed into ethnical organizations with the
sponsor of Ford Foundation. The Council of Southwestern of La Raza (SWCLR) was
born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1968 since three leaders from the community were hired
by Ford Foundation. Five years later, SWCLR began a national organization, changed
the headquarters to Washington and the name to National Council of La Raza. The word
raza in this context has a paradoxical meaning, since is the result of mixing. It refers to
the mixed people created by the meeting of Spanish men and Indian women in the
colonial America. The origin of this expression can be found in the book of the Mexican
José Vasconcelos, La Raza Cósmica, published in 1925. Soon after, the Foundation
entered into friction with the unionist Henry Santiestevan, who was the president of
NCLR, and demanded his substitution, threatening to cancel to finance the organization.
Raul Yzaguirre assumed the presidency, aligned completely the organization to the
political schedule of the donator and converted the organization into a powerful
institution, financed by the federal government and by great companies and other
philanthropic entities.

The speech of victimization and the financial resources of Ford Foundation

linked together to create what the journalist George Will properly named as the
proliferation of groups nourishing sufferings and claiming rights. As Joan Roelofs
registered, one of the results of the process was to co-opt independent leaders
massively: „activists of social movements are this way transformed into researchers,
administrators and claimants. The social movements are fragmented into identity
policies‟.

In the origin, Ford Foundation already presented the modern tendencies of

philanthropy that doesn´t intend to give donation to the poor but make use of the social
sciences to transform the societies. Since the review of its mission in the post-war, the
Foundation had fixed in the goal of influencing public policies and promoting
institutional reforms not only starting from convincing governments but especially by
the mobilization in the basis. The multiculturalist adventure of the American
universities derived from the combination of these two paradigms.

The basic approach of the Foundation consisted in supporting the adoption of

systems of admission guided by preferences by minority groups. The pragmatic
instrument was to offer big donations with the condition of implanting quotes for
minorities. However, the ambitions of Ford Foundation overcame the mere changing of
the admission systems. The finality was to reform from up to down the academic
perspectives, the political attitudes, the curricula and the practices in the universities.
Actually, the aim was to implant the principle of the multiculturalism inside the genetic
code of the academic practice. Once more, the tool of persuasion was the conditional
offer of generous donations.

The annual reports of Ford Foundation describe, sometimes minutely, the modus
operandi of assaulting the universities. One single example: in 1989, 200 universities
and faculties were invited to concur for donations of 100 thousand dollars to „revise or
develop academic programs to a maximal attention to culture and experience of ethnical
minorities and make the perspectives of multiculturalism weigh in all aspects of the
curricula.‟ One of the 19 winning institutions was the University Brandeis of
Massachusetts, which compromised to organize a summer course on the oral traditions
of Africa and the African Diaspora and, broadly, to incorporate African and derived
from Africa disciplines in the nucleus of the curriculum.

The political scientist Harold Laski (1893-1950), with his long experience in
Harvard, Yale and in the London School of Economics, knew the impact of the
foundations on the universities: „the foundations don‟t control simply because in the
direct and simple meaning of the word, there is no necessity to do this. They simply
have to indicate the momentary inclination of their minds so the university world
discovers the pointed sense and quickly tend to that angle of the intellectual beat‟.
However, Laski didn´t live enough to appreciate the audacious operation of Ford
Foundation in the American universities. The Foundation wasn‟t limited to distribute
conditioned institutional donations. It created vast programs of scholarships destined to
lecturers and to post-graduating and graduating students. To have greater changes of
success, the candidates should form multicultural teams and define multiculturalist
themes and approaches.

From the theoretical point of view, multiculturalism lays on a first

presupposition that is not dramatically distinct from the article of faith of the scientific
racism. This presupposition can be expressed as the notion that mankind is divided into
discrete and well defined families, named as ethnicities. The scientific racism made the
families –races- derive from nature. The multiculturalism makes the races derive from
the culture. The second presupposition of multiculturalism is that culture corresponds to
an essential attribute, immanent and ancestral to each ethnical group. This naturalization
of culture put into evidence that the concept of ethnicity occupies in the multiculturalist
narrative a methodological place parallel to the one of the concept of race in the
narrative of the scientific racism.

Under the influx of the millionaire budgets of Ford Foundation, the universities
imitated the patterns of urban segregation and created their own ghettos in the forms of
new fields of study: Black Studies, African-American Studies, Mexican-American
Studies, Native-American Studies, the studies on race relations, the women´s study and
innumerable specific ethnic studies. In the first initial five years, more than 500
programs of black studies were implanted in USA. This way, the presuppositions of the
multiculturalism got life and reality as component of the consecrated academic
knowledge. Not satisfied in producing objects of study, the curricular transformation
injected race, ethnicity and gender in all the departments and disciplines, investigating,
for example, the Afro-American sight of the urban landscapes, the feminist themes in
contemporary art and the misogyny written in the Nine Symphony of Beethoven.

Universities running after money and academics running after prestige defined
their academic priorities in the terms suggested by the donator. The University of
Chicago, following the general tendencies, implanted a Center of Studies of Race,
Policy and Culture that in the beginning of 2005 received from Ford Foundation and
other philanthropic entities more than a million dollars in donations. Cathy Cohen,
director of the Center explained that „receiving donations shows that innovative
research is being carried out‟, a thought supported by the curious idea that the owners of
the money are the best judges for the pertinence of a knowledge.

The greatest of the donations received the Center directed by Cohen came from
Ford Foundation, in the value of 600 thousand dollars, and was destined to the research
line of „Young Afro-Americans and their sexual empowerment: sex, politics and race‟.
It is obvious that this line of research would never exist without the intervention of the
Foundation. But there is something of a great relevance: the mere enunciation of the
academic program means that according to the adventitious institutional knowledge,
Afro-Americans constitute a perfectly identifiable group distinct from the others to
cultural aspects related to sex and politics.

The march of multiculturalism in the university campuses not always counted on

the volunteer adhesion of the researches, but the Foundation always knew how to
handle efficiently its means of persuasion. Robert Steele, professor of Psychology of the
University Wesleyan, of Connecticut, carried out the paper of coordinator of one of the
sessions of the conference „Intensification of the cultural diversity‟, sponsored by Ford
Foundation in Pasadena, California, in 2004. He explicated the receipt: „people will not
pacifically be assimilated to the multiculturalism by the means of the truth and of the
dialogue. You give to them assistant researches, post-graduation supervisors‟. The goal
is not simply inculcate ideas, but put the researches linked to the Foundation in the
command seats and effectively assume the control of departments and whole
universities: „we´ll have changed the university when women and colored people can
direct the place‟.

Henry Ford II left the presidency of Ford Foundation in 1950 but kept involved
with the direction along another quarter of century as CEO and after as curator.
However, he experienced a crescent disillusion with the ways of the philanthropic entity
and in 1977 he renounced to his position in the council. The Foundation is a creature of
capitalism as he observed, but it was difficult to identify any trace of capitalism in
anything it does. It is even more difficult to understand this in many of the institutions,
particularly the universities that are beneficiary of the subvention program of the
Foundation.

The heir of the founders was a conservative of the old lineage and didn´t
understand the sense of the policies conducted by the Ford Foundation after the end of
the decade of 1960. But under the perspective of Bundy and his successors,
multiculturalism was a vital remedy for the political system of capitalism – and not only
inside USA.

Nations inside the Nation

The policies of preferences of jobs and quotes in the universities could only
work if they had a uniform and broad classification of the citizens. USA had a long
traditional of ethnical classification expressed in the census. Also, the one drop rule
cancelled the existence of mixed, avoiding difficulties in labeling citizens. As legally
making equal the citizens, the Law of Civil Rights made the ethnical policy to become
innocuous. However, soon after, the initiatives of affirmative action restored the
political use of classifying people. Multiculturalism made the rest, conferring a new
legitimacy to these racist traditions.

In general, the multiculturalists engaged in the defense of the rigid American

classification of the census, which describes a society fragmented in ethnical groups
perfectly delimitated. The organizations that spoke in the name of the Afro-American
interests converted into defenders of the one drop rule, which was transformed in
something as an article of national consensus. In the resume of the historian David
Hollinger: „the black model as understood in the beginning of the years 1970 – either by
Afro-American organizations of pressure and public administrators and tribune – was
based on the interpretation of clear limits of groups as irreversible facts of life and
didn´t challenge these limits by characterizing them as occasional historic constructions.
In fact, proceeding in other manner would be, potentially, to deny the victims of the
white racism the benefits that they had rights. If the one drop rule defined
discrimination, it naturally defined the anti-discrimination laws.

When an ethnical label has potential repercussions in practical life, the persons
create new identities or select, among more than one possible identity, the most adapted
to its interests. The number of America Indians and natives of Alaska enhanced 259%
between the census of 1970 and 1990, spite of a very low birth rate in the group. In the
following decade, the expansion was 26.4%, much superior to the vegetative growth
and much bigger than the population growth of whites and blacks. In the census of
1970, the group represented 0.4% of the population. In the census of 2000, after three
decades of reverse discrimination, it reached 0.9% of the total. However, probably due
to the singular stigma that marks the black identity of USA, it was not registered a
similar movement of whites classifying themselves as Afro-Americans.

The cultural essentialism has not a compromise of the scientific racism with
Biology, which confers it a wide flexibility in the fabrication of ethnical groups. This
political advantage was largely exploited by the multiculturalists in the relation with the
„Hispanics‟. In the beginning, the Mexican-American won the statute of ethnicity. After,
the ethnical group experienced an enlargement, circling all the community originated
from Latin America of Spanish language. However, the Mexican-Americans kept
figuring as a sub-group inside the broader minority, with their own organizations of
pressure and ethnical centers of studies.

José Angel Gutierrez, lawyer, activist and university lecturer, founded the
United Raza Party, a regional chicane party, and in 1970 the Center for Mexican-
American Studies of the University of Texas in Austin. „We are a nation inside this
nation‟, explained Gutierrez in a radiophonic debate. In the view of multiculturalism,
the American nation is a confederation of ethnic nations, each one with its singular
culture and interests also singular.

The concept of nation inside nation inspired the bilingual educational system
that worked in California for more than three decades. The legal basis of the system
came from two laws of bilingual education published in 1968 and 1974 that offered
supplementary funds for schools interested in promote special programs for students
with limited proficiency in English. One year before the approval of the first of these
federal laws, the governor of California, Ronald Reagan, knocked down a law that
imposed the exclusive use of English in public education. In 1974, a state law of
bilingual-bicultural education established educational programs in Spanish for students
with low English proficiency. After seven years, a new state law detailed the obligations
of the schools with the bilingual system.

In South Africa of apartheid, the Batu languages occupied central places in the
education of black children. In the USA of multiculturalism, children whose genealogic
trees had roots in the Spanish America should basically learn in Spanish. As wanted by
the organizations that pressured for the adoption of bilingual education and the
syndicates of teachers directed by multiculturalists, the Californian bilingual education
became an education exclusively in Spanish. The result was the configuration of an
educational ghetto in which 400 thousand students only listened to English half an hour
in a school day. In 1998, in the broad mold of the decline of the reversal discrimination
policies, the electorate of the State approved with 61% of the votes the Proposition 227
that imposed the education in English, except in the cases the parents solicited bilingual
classes. This Proposition was largely supported by the Hispanic electorate, spite an
aggressive campaign of the multiculturalist organizations and after its approval it was
registered a low demand for classes in Spanish.

Richard Rodrigues, son of Mexican immigrants, born in San Francisco,

California, became an acclaimed writer with the publication of the autobiographic book
Hunger of Memory, which narrates his development as an American student of
Hispanic origin in a school composed by kids of high money. The book appeared in
1981 in the zenith of multiculturalism and provoked noise. Comments from both
extremes of the political spectrum accused the author to have got benefits from the
affirmative action to minorities, which now he was putting into contest. The traditional
conservatives bombed him to criticize the restrictions to immigrants, while the
multiculturalists execrated him by his opposition to education in Spanish.

None of these criticisms hit Rodriguez´s positions. Much later, in an article for
the review Dissent he observed that in the initial years of the affirmative action in
Harvard or Berkeley it was common to hear „many words about exemplar personalities
and go back to help their people. It was an embarrassing question because the first
persons to receive benefits came from medium class. And worse: inside the university,
these persons gained the label of minority due to their supposed relation with a great
number of persons outside‟.

In the logic of the multiculturalism, the beneficiaries of the programs of reverse

discrimination would constitute directing elites of „their‟ ethnical groups. The graduated
and post-graduating students should assume the compromise of continuing the
movement, becoming activists in the organization of minorities. In this process, as
Rodriguez registered, the guilty played its paper: „the graduating of medium class knew
they were gaining over the back of the poor‟.

Ford Foundation participated in all the aspects of the multiculturalist

entrepreneurship in USA. But, foremost, it acted as the most important hub of
articulation among university, organizations of pressure and organs of public
administration. By the work of the Foundation, researchers found the ways to direction
seats in the organizations of minorities and to governmental positions tasked to
affirmative programs. In the inverse sense, activists were inserted into university
programs of post-graduation under the guidance of lecturers financed by the
Foundation. As a consequence of this circulation of brains, a tentacle multiculturalist
web was raised, organically decentralized but sharing the same view of the world.

Since its origins, Ford Foundation saw itself as a global player. The financial
power of the Foundation conferred it a capability of projecting influence much further
than the American frontiers so it organized itself to aggressively act in the Exterior. In
1952, it inaugurated the first regional office in New Delhi, India, soon followed by
Jakarta (Indonesia), Cairo (Egypt, 1957), Lagos and Nairobi (Nigeria and Kenya,
decade of 1960), City of Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago (Mexico, Brazil, Chile,
decade of 1960). In a posterior phase, with the Chinese opening, the end of the Cold
War and the collapse of apartheid, it implanted offices in Beijing (China), Moscow
(Russia), Hanoi (Vietnam) and Johannesburg (South Africa). In 2005-2006 the
donations of the regional offices represented 30% of the total budget of the Foundation.

The world office is at New York and has 13 curator members and the regional
overseas offices hires a permanent body of 600 persons. Money was never a problem. In
the fiscal year of 2007, Ford Foundation was among the riches philanthropic entities
with a patrimony of 13.7 billions of dollars. In seven decades, it distributed more than
15 billions of dollars in donations to thousands of institutes and individuals. In 2001, in
its greatest single subvention in its history, it used 280 millions of dollars to create a
program of scholarships destined to post-graduate „emergent leaders of marginalized
communities outside USA‟. Obviously, it was a tool to co-opt community leaders in
large scale. With about 4.3 thousands of people receiving a scholarship all over the
world, the program received in 2006 an addition of 75 million and was extended until
2014.

Multiculturalism organized practically all the aspects of Ford Foundation in

USA since the 1970. In the exterior, the new paradigm had to be adapted to the various
national scenarios and to other priorities in the schedule of the Foundation. In India, the
regional office defined diversity in the terms imposed the old system of castes, which
had been re-activated by the British colonial policies and directed resources to the
defenders of affirmative action in benefit to the unfavored castes. In Mexico and Central
America, Ford Foundation concentrated on the promotion of ethnical identities of
Amerindian groups, which were classified as marginal minorities.

In Africa, the offices of Lagos and Nairobi subsidized organizations for

protection of rights of minorities, which in many cases, but not always, means the
promotion of exclusivist interests of regional and ethnical elites. With the end of
apartheid, the policy of black empowerment conducted by the South African
government gained the approval of Ford Foundation. The influence of the Foundation in
some African countries was evidenced more than once by the presence of the „Ford
men‟ in ministries and high governmental administration. The most notorious case is the
one of Nigeria, whose ex-dictator Olusegun Obasajno became a member of the council
of curators of the Foundation, directing its Committee for International Issues, job he
abdicated to be elected president of his country by the popular vote in 1999. After
Obasanjo assumed the presidency, Ford Foundation helped him to finance the official
commission to write a new constitution.

The international diffusion of multiculturalism was interpreted by the new

French sociologists Bourdieu and Wacquant as a true globalization of the American
problems. The action of Ford Foundation in Brazil reflects the accuracy of this
diagnosis. The subsides of the Foundation multiplied in Brazilian universities the
models of ethnical studies and of racial relations applied in USA and consolidated a
chain of racialist organizations that started to reproduce the speeches and demands
typical of the Afro-American ones. By this way, the polarity white/black that
crystallized in USA with the one drop rule was imported by the activists from Brazil, a
country crossed by very different social inequalities and whose traditional identity is
articulated around the idea of miscegenation.

From the inauguration of the Brazilian office until 2001, Ford Foundation gave
347 millions of dollars in donations, in values adjusted by the inflation. In the first
years, the annual values of the donations were around 11 millions. Since 1975 the
donations fell down dramatically, to the lowest value of 2.1 millions in 1978. A
continuous recuperation started in the 1980 years and in 2001 the donated value had
reached 16 million dollars. After 1995, the mean values reached the platform of 13
millions.

The profile of financing in Brazil experienced a changing of another nature,

expressed in the clear historical tendency of enhancing the annual number of donations,
which jumped from less than a dozen in the initial years to more than one hundred at the
end of the 1990 years. The original strategy of concentrating donations in big
institutional receivers, especially universities, was placed by an orientation of
pulverizing the money into innumerous NGOs (non-governmental organizations). The
numbers prove the scale of changing the ways: the Brazilian NGOs received only 4% of
the total of donations in the decade of 1970 but jumped to 54% in the beginning of XXI
century.

The popular turn-around of the Foundation followed its decision to give

privileges to a definition of a more instrumental Social Science and gifted especially the
Afro-Brazilian activist organizations engaged in policies of race and in the demands of
reverse discrimination initiatives. In a complimentary movement, the donation destined
to universities, although directed to various programs, started to give privilege to
institutions that figured as models for the diffusion of system by admission by racial
quotes. The University of State of Rio de Janeiro received a donation of 1.3 million
dollars, one of the biggest from the regional office, in 2001, when it implanted its
pioneer program of racial quotes. The University of Brasilia implanted its program in
2004 and in the following years received successive donations. The Federal University
of Rio Grande do Sul resisted until 2007, when instituted racial quotas and received 130
thousand dollars. The Federal University of São Carlos, another „lazy‟ one, got an
exceptional donation of 1.5 million dollars in 2007 when it adhered to the system of
quotes.

In Brazil, there were no traditional organizations such as NAACP. Also, there

were no black organizations of relevance, except the Unified Black Movement that
paradoxically rejected the American model of black capitalism. Because of this, the
popular turn-around of Ford Foundation resulted in the appearance of a chain of racialist
NGOs constituted around academic activists. The new NGOs cultivated their relations
with the Foundation and imported the multiculturalist language elaborated in USA.

However, the multiculturalist doctrine incorporated in the genetic code of the

regional office of Ford Foundation and was converted into a transversal axis of
articulation with the total of the donations. The sociologist Edward Telles, chief of the
program of Human Rights of the Foundation in Brazil between 1996 and 2000,
explained the methodology used by the selection of candidates since the end of the 1990
years: „Ford-Brazil wants a scheduling of diversity and this explains all its donations in
all the fields it works. This includes more than one hundred supports per year from
which less than 20 are mainly about racial questions. Such scheduling list all the team in
different levels according to criteria of gender, race (whites/non-whites) and the
explanation induces the candidates to explain why they reflect (or not) the local
diversity regarding gender and color and what they intend to do to ameliorate this‟.

Meeting in Durban

In the session of 1997, the General Assembly of UN invoked the half of a

century of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to call for a World Conference
against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerances that would
be carried out in Durban (South Africa) in 2001 under the coordination of the High
Commission for Human Rights. Mary Robinson, the high commissioner and honorific
president of Oxfam, one of the most powerful international NGOs, promised in the
occasion to make a conference of action, not only words. Indeed there would be action
and a torrent of words.

In the origin of the convocation there were hundreds of NGOs engaged in the
promotion of human rights. Many, if not the majority, adopted the multiculturalist
perspective and saw the Conference as a unique opportunity to introduce their concepts
in the official language of UN. Ford Foundation was far to be the only financer of these
organizations, but figured in the list of sponsors of a significant portion of them.

The choice for Durban as the host of WCAR obeyed to a symbolic imperative
and a political arrangement. Durban not only was in the country that had become free
from the apartheid but also is a center of diversity where the black majority lives with
the whites and with the numerous minority of Indian origin, a social environment where
the young Mahatma Gandhi started his career. Also, the South African government
conducted the biggest program of affirmative action in the world and kept a strong
cooperation with the high commissioner of Robinson and with the regional office of
Ford Foundation inaugurated in 1993 in Johannesburg.

The action started in preparative regional meetings in 2000 and 2001 in

Strasbourg (France), Santiago (Chile), Dakar (Senegal) and Teheran (Iran). In the
democratic countries, the national delegations included in important positions the
representatives of the civil society, which means, the directors of multiculturalists
NGOs and collaborators of these organizations originated in the universities. The
previous texts indicated beforehand the surprising ideas that would get consecrated in
Durban. In the meetings of the Asiatic countries in Teheran, NGOs engaged in the
Palestine question presented strongly anti-Israelite proposals, associating Zionism to
racism. The American diplomats imagined that those NGOs were financed by the
government of Saudi Arabia. After some time they discovered that the money came
mainly from the regional office of Ford Foundation of Cairo and reached those
organizations by means of umbrella entities. Among these entities there were the
Palestinian Committee for the Protection of Human Rights and of the Environment,
operating under the acronym LAW and the Web of Palestinian NGOs (PNGO).

The first diplomatic disaster of our new century was drawn when, in its official
resolution, the intergovernmental meeting of Teheran accused Israel to practice racial
discrimination against the Palestinians in the occupied territories and the Syrian
delegation seemed engaged in the trial to reactivate the Resolution 3379, approved in
the General Assembly of UN in 1975 but declared null in 1991, which qualified the
Zionism as a form of racism. The tense equilibrium was ruptured the parallel conference
of NGOs in Durban, a planned forum in the official program of WCAR. In the middle
of posters where Israelite images were mixed to Nazi icons, the NGOs presented a
declaration considering Israel as a racist Estate of apartheid and charging it for genocide
and ethnical clearance. The episode poisoned the hard negotiations among governments
and hurried the retirement of the American and the Israelite delegations.

After this double retirement, the polemic parts of the project of resolution were
knocked down to avoid the retirement of Canada and of many European delegations,
which would configure the collapse of the Conference. But a wound had been made.
Due to the dispute with Israel, the texts of the Declaration and of the Program of Action
of Durban, which introduced in the official language of the international community
some crucial notions of the Multiculturalism, had not got the assignment of the country
where this ideological doctrine raised.

The final documents of the Conference of Durban constitute a tense compromise

between the classic concept of political equality and of the concepts of ethnicity, race
and of Multiculturalism. Side by side to the reaffirmation and to the detailing of the
general principles proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of 1948, the Declaration of
WCAR qualified the values of solidarity, respect, tolerance and multiculturalism as the
moral terrain and inspiration for our fight all over the world against racism and
characterized the cultural diversity as a valuable patrimony for development and welfare
of mankind.

The introduction of the principle of cultural diversity in the international law

served as the basement for the construction of a building with deep practical
implications. The Declaration turned official the concept of afro-descendents and asked
for the recognition of the culture and identity of the afro-descendents in the Americans
and, in general, in the regions of the African Diaspora. Using these words, the document
recalled the concept of a Diasporic nation, constituted based on ancestry and culture.
The proclaimed nation in the Diaspora would be composed by populations scattered in
many countries and would have the rights of indemnity.

It is on the war rights where a concept of indemnity appears as a collective right.

Historically, the indemnity in money or goods took the place of the pillage of the loser
by the winners. In the case of the Diasporic nation of the Declaration of Durban, the
blacks of the Americas are presumed descendants of the African slaves transferred by
the traffic on the Atlantic and in this condition they have the rights of being
indemnified. According to the tortuous logic of the demand, the indemnity must be paid
by the whites, who figured as the supposed descendants of the owners of slaves. Trying
to operate the concept of racial repair, the Program of Action of WCAR asks to the
Estates to implement positive or affirmative action in communities of primarily African
descendant.

The incorporation of the concept of Diasporic nation of afro-descendant inserted

the categories of Afro-Americans and Afro-Brazilians, among others, in the
international law. The repercussions of this step are evident. The countries of the
Americans that signed the documents of Durban were implicitly adopting by themselves
a definition of being poly-national Estates. This means to confer to the minority –or
Afro-descendants- the statute of a nation. In consonance with this, the multiculturalist
NGOs started to require from the governments the incorporation of laws of special
collective rights for the Afro-descendants. In Brazil, particularly, the Declaration and
the Program of Action of WCAR got a strong political impact.

Durban represented an inedited ideological triumph for Multiculturalism, but

Ford Foundation could not celebrate for a long time. American Judaic organizations
exposed the sense of the donations of the regional office of Cairo, charged the
Foundation by the attacks to Israel in the preparatory documents and accused it to
promote anti-Semitism. Parliamentarians talked about requiring an investigation of the
counts of Ford Foundation and threatened to approve laws enhancing the taxing of
philanthropic entities. Susan Berresford, the president of the Foundation, an old friend
of the council of Chase Manhattan Bank hurried to make new negotiations when the
crisis reached the sphere of money. She cancelled the donations to the Palestinian
entities accused of anti-Semitism. The direction of Ford Foundation created new norms
of control of the gifted with donations and went back to give money to Judaic
organizations that were out of the donation list, such as the Anti-defamation League, the
American Judaic Committee and the Center Simon Wiesenthal.

The new norms were explicated in the beginning of 2004 by an internal

document directed to the five thousands of gifted persons that said: „by signing this
donation letter, you agree that your organization will never promote or engage in
violence, terrorism, bigotry or destruction of any Estate, nor will make donations to any
entity engaged in these activities‟. To avoid giving margin to interpretations, the
document clarified that the interdiction refers to all the funds of the organization, not
only those originated by a donation of Ford Foundation.

The language, extracted from the patriotic law approved by the government of
George W. Bush in the war on terror, provoked protests from traditional receivers of
funds of Ford Foundation, such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and
rectors of prestigious universities of USA. They said the term bigotry has a broad
variety of interpretations and imposed an unacceptable vigilance of the donators on the
manifestation of lecturers and students. In the end, money shouted loudly and the
universities surrendered to the terms of the Foundation. In 2004, however, ACLU kept
the position and refused donations that summed more than one million dollars.

As a consequence of the incidents on the Judaic question, the diplomatic process

of Durban suffered wounds and the reputation of Ford Foundation was hit in a sensitive
area. But Multiculturalism was confirmed in this world conference in documents that
registered some of its principal concepts. UN renounced, at least partially, to the line
expressed in the immediate post-war of the Universal Declaration of 1948 and of the
anti-racist declaration of Unesco. After Durban, ethnicity and race could be invoked to
the legal creation of minorities to whom special collective rights could be given.

Minorities from all over the world, unite yourselves!

The Palace of Peace, in Haia (Holland) started to be built in 1907 from an

architectonic project in neo-renaissance style signed by the French Louis Cordonnier
and with integral financing of the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie who for that finality
created the Carnegie Foundation. The first inhabitant of the Palace was the Permanent
Court of Judgement created in the First Conference of Haia in 1899. Since 1946, it is
the headquarters of the International Court of Justice of UN.

It seems improbable, but in the monumental Palace in 1991 a reunion was

carried out with entities that spoke in the name of 15 Indigenous peoples, minorities and
occupied nations such as the Australian Aboriginals, the Philippine natives of
Cordillera, the Papuas of Western Papua the Tibetans followers of Dalai Lama, the
Crimean Tartars, the Iraquian Curds and curiously even the population of Taiwan,
represented by its government. From the meeting the Unrepresented Nations and
Peoples Organization (UNPO) was born with the clear finality of supporting its
members in an effective international participation.

Since its foundation, UNPO counted with the generosity of donators such as the
European Union, governments and public agencies of Taiwan, from Switzerland,
Holland and Nordic countries and also from philanthropic foundations such as
McArthur and, markedly, Ford Foundation. Maybe because of this, the number of
members experienced a vertiginous growth, close to 60. Among the entities that entered
into the organization there is the separatist government of Chechnya, Hungarian
representatives of Romania, Abkhazians of Georgia, Ahwazi Arabians of Iran,
Assyrians of Mesopotamia, Baluks of Pakistan, mountaineers of Vietnam, Ogonis of
Nigeria, Batwas of Rwanda, Masais of Kenya and Tanzania, the mixed Rehobot Basters
of Namibia, the Amerindians Nahuas of Mexico, Mapuches of Chile and Argentina, the
Nation Dene of Canada and even a small Afrikaner party of South Africa.
 UNPO does not promote separatism, although some of the associated entities are
separatist groups. The organization preaches the pacific resistance and defends cultural
and political autonomy of the minorities congregated. There is nothing in common in
the heterogeneous collection of nations, but the entities that proclaim to represent them
share a vindication: the recognition of such minorities as distinct collectivities hence
with potential titles of special collective rights, which implies, almost directly, the
elevation of such entities to the statute of representatives of the respective nations.

The traditional nationalist movements want to establish a sovereign Estate for a

nation that is proclaimed as distinct. There are movements of that type inside UNPO,
such as the separatist movements of Chechnya and Abkhazia and of two great parties of
Iraqi Curds that use the organization as a platform for their fight on their sovereignty.
However, the majority of members of UNPO are financial and ideological fruits of
Multiculturalism – and they want to create regimes of regional autonomy inside the
existent Estates. The strategy of these entities develops in the international diplomacy
and consists on receiving the support of UN and other multilateral institutions to impose
to national governments, from outside to inside, the acceptance of their demands.

There is a crucial difference between the traditional nationalist movements and

the minority multicultural ones. In the first case, the nationalist elites have only
possibility of success if they can articulate a narrative capable of awakening the masses,
which then are disposed to sometimes dramatic sacrifices in the name of flag of a new
nation. In the second, multiculturalist elite don´t need popular support, as their
legitimacy is conquered in the noble rooms of the international institutes. Differently
from nations that grow from a complex process of creation of a history, a literature and
a geography the minorities of globalization emerge simply from a superficial ethnical
postulation. Nations can be sometimes interpreted as impostures, but they are
impostures in which a people believe. The minorities in contrast are impostures that
neither the impostors believe.

The Indigenous peoples make a significant part of these minorities described by

the doctrine of multiculturalism. The international community gave a first step to the
recognition of these minorities in 1982 when the Economic and Social Council (Ecosoc)
of UN created the Working Group on Indigenous Populations (WGIP). The next step
came in 1989 with the approval of Convention 169 about indigenous and tribal peoples
of the International Labor Organization.

The Convention 169 substituted a previous one of 1957 with the same title. The
original document was articulated around notions of equality facing law, non-
discrimination and protection of earth and cultural rights. In the new version, the
convention flirts with the notion of political autonomy of indigenous peoples, especially
in the articles referring to territory rights, institutions and traditional systems of justice.
The 6th article of the documents calls on the governments to consult indigenous peoples
through their representative institutions over legal or administrative decisions
concerning them. This provision means that the Estates must recognize traditional
institutions of political power that are placed outside the constitutional situation.
Additionally, the same article confer to the Estates the responsibility of stimulating with
financial resources the total development of the institutions of these peoples, a
formulation that has an uncomfortable parallel with the policies synthesized in the Law
of Authorities Bantus of the South Africa of apartheid.

Everything got clear in the following years. In 1994, WGIP gave to the
Commission of Human Rights (nowadays the Council of Human Rights) a sketch of a
Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. At the same time, the General
Assembly proclaimed an International Decade of the Indigenous Peoples of the World
(1995-2005) during different agencies of UN engaged together with the traditional
peoples in the formulation of projects in the areas of economic development,
environmental protection, health, education and the rights of minorities. In that context
the Permanent Forum of Indigenous Issues of Ecosoc appeared, composed by 16
rotating members, 8 indicated by governments and 8 indicated by indigenous groups.

The session of the General Assembly of 2004 proclaimed a Second Decade

devoted to the indigenous peoples (2005-2015). The governmental institutions and
NGOs were called on contributing to the fund destined to finance the activities of the
Second Decade. Among the objectives of the Program of Action drawn for the Second
Decade, a political right of autonomy to these minorities clearly appeared: „Promote the
participation complete and effective of the indigenous peoples in decisions that directly
or indirectly affect their ways of life, territories and traditional lands, their cultural
integrity as indigenous peoples with collective rights or any other aspect of their lives,
considering the principle of free, previous and informed agreement‟.

Things ran quickly. In 2006 the Council of Human Rights adopted the Universal
Declaration of Rights of Indigenous and submitted it to the General Assembly of the
following year that approved it with only 4 votes in contrary and 11 abstentions. The
document doesn´t constitute a treatise and its application is not legally obligatory to the
Estates that subscribe it, which helps to explain the large favorable majority. However,
it constitutes an audacious step towards the incorporation of Multiculturalism into the
international law. The Declaration cancels potentially the sovereign of the Estates on
part of their territories. The 3rd article proclaims „the indigenous peoples have rights to
self determination. Due to these rights, they freely determine their political statute and
freely run after their economic, social and cultural development‟.

The theme of political autonomy has, obviously, serious repercussions. In the 4 th

article of the Declaration, destined to avoid the proclaimed article be used to support
secession, the self-determination is translated as rights to self-autonomy or self-
government in the internal issues. The 5th article indicates more specifically the mean of
autonomy: according to it, the indigenous peoples have the rights to preserve and
strengthen their singular political, legal, social, economic and cultural institutions.
Through these articles, the assigned Estates are compromised to admit, for example, the
absolute jurisdiction of indigenous tribunes in the lands of these communities.
 USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand refused to sign the Declaration saying
it is against their national sovereignty. The document foresee the obligation of the
Estates to restitute or compensate the indigenous peoples by the removal in the past of
their lands, resources, cultural, intellectual, religious or spiritual properties. Under such
a generic form, the obligation can be applied to episodes happened centuries ago and
originate endless juridical disputes.

Under the point of view of sovereignty, the 30th and 36th articles are particularly
sensitive. The first say that military activities can only occur in indigenous lands when
justified by a relevant public interest. Even in this case, the assigned Estates are
obligated to conduct effective consults with the representative institutions of the
indigenous peoples before using their lands and territories to military activities. The
second recognizes the rights of indigenous peoples separated by international frontiers
to develop co-operative activities, including political activities.

Brazil voted aligned with the majority of the Estates and approved the
Declaration. Few months later, the Document converted into a crucial element in the
dispute around the Indigenous Reserve of Fox Ridge of Sun in Roraima state. The
continuous delimitation of the indigenous land adopted by the federal government
attended the dominating demands from inside the government, expressed in the
indigenous groups of the Indigenous Council of Roraima and of the Indigenous
Missionary Council of the Catholic Church. In the opposite side, the state government
of Roraima, agriculture businessmen established in the indigenous lands, the Armed
Forces and part of the Amerindians influenced by protestant missionaries. The polemics
came across themes such as indigenous identity and the relations between the Indians
and the rest of the Brazilian society.

ICR is an entity financed by foundations and international NGOs and receives

money from Ford Foundation. In the arguments to keep the continuous delimitation, the
canonic concepts of multiculturalism and the Declaration of Rights of Indigenous
Peoples emerged. The defenders of an alternative solution criticized the idea of political
autonomy of the Indians that was hidden behind the model of delimitation adopted by
the government. Military commandants interfere in the debate pointing the threatens to
the national sovereignty of the 30th and 36th articles of the Declaration and insisting on
the exclusion of a stripe in the international frontiers of the indigenous land.

The polemics reached the Supreme Federal Tribune under a petition that claimed
the demarcation of the indigenous land to be null and void. In March 2009 the judgment
was concluded and by 10 votes against 1, the constitutional court confirmed the
continuous delimitation, but submitted it to 18 conditions that are jurisprudence for
future delimitations. It was prohibited to the Indians the economic exploitation of the
hydrous, energetic and mineral resources of the area; the implantation of military,
communication and transport structures don´t demand the approval of the Indians; the
general transit of Indians and non-Indians was free; researchers, as any citizen, have
total rights to enter the area. This decision was criticized by the ICR and the Catholic
council as equivocated limitation to the rights of the Indians.

The dissonant vote came from Marco Aurélio de Mello who highlighted the
degree of integration of the indigenous groups of the area with the surrounding society
and defended the thesis of delimitation in islands. The minister went deep into the
political basis of the theme, highlighting the crucial conflict between the Universal
Declaration of Indigenous Rights and the principle of national sovereignty, rejecting the
romantic view, based on the redemption of expired debts and emphasizing that Indians
and non-Indians are all Brazilian citizens. His vote together with the 18 conditions
evidences that the polemics is still open.

The global diffusion of multiculturalism closed the cycle of post-war when the
ethnicity and race had been labeled as expressions of prejudice and residues of the
golden times of the burden of the white men. Under the influx of the experience of
USA, the principle of equality broke down and the concepts of race and ethnicity were
reborn triumphantly. The belief in the division of mankind into families separated by
inborn differences dressed itself with a new language of exulting cultural diversity, but
still keeps fidelity to the past.

PART II – ONE DROP RULE

LOVING DAY

Seaborne Anderson Roddenberry is an obscure name in the American political

history. He was born in Georgia in 1870 five years after the Confederation lost and
during the period of Reconstruction when a broad legal reform conferred social and
political rights to the Southern slaves. He became a lawyer, was elected to the state
legislative, was the president of the commission on education of the county of Thomas
then selected as judge in the same county and also became the major of Thomasville. In
the apex of his career, he was elected to the Federal Chamber by the Democrat Party in
1909 and reelected twice, dying in 1913.

The only permanent sign of his passage by Capitol is a proposal of a

constitutional amendment that was rejected in 11 th December 1912. It said: „the
marriage between blacks or colored persons and Caucasians or any other type of
persons in USA or in any other territory under its jurisdiction stands prohibited forever
and ever. The expression of black or colored person should be employed as by all and
any person with African ancestors or that have any African traces or black blood‟.
 The Reconstruction lost impetus in a few years and, articulated in the
conservative draft of the redeemers, the old Southern elite retook control of the State
governments of the old Confederation. The reaction against the reforms peaked between
1890 and 1908, with the approval of new state constitutions and laws that put some
conditions to the rights of voting, to schooling and to property, excluding almost all the
blacks and the poor in general from political participation. The amendment of
Roddenberry was a trial to expand the reaction in the federal plan. It didn´t pass, but the
states kept the privilege of forbidding inter-racial marriages.

This privilege had the approval of the Supreme Court, established in the case
Pace versus Alabama in January 1883. The Code of Alabama punished with two to
seven years of prison the crime of matrimony or life in adultery or fornication between
whites and blacks or blacks of third generation. A state tribunal sentenced the black
Tony Pace and the white Mary J. Cox to two years of prison because they lived in
fornication and the supreme court of Alabama confirmed the decision. Pace contested,
saying that no state could deny the rights of equal protection facing the consecrated law
by the 14th Emend and that the state laws previewed a smaller penalty by the crime of
fornication made by persons of the same race. The Supreme Court rejected the
appellation under the hilarious argument that the state Code didn´t contain any
discrimination, as it previewed equal penalty for both of the offenders, the black and the
white.

In a long story of judicial decisions, the prohibition to inter-racial marriages

suffered partial kicks until they were totally abolished in 1967. A judicial mark was
established in 1923, in a case not related to inter-racial marriage, when the Supreme
Court absolved an accused person to teach in German, which would be infringing the
state law banishing education in foreign language to children under the 8 th grade. The
judges interpreted the sense of word „freedom‟ in the context of the 14 th Emend and
concluded that it „means not only physical freedom, but also the right of the individual
to contract, engage in a common occupation, acquire utile knowledge, marry, create a
home and raise children‟.

In California, the banishment of the prohibition to inter-racial marriages has only

occurred in the post-war, in the case Peres versus Sharp of 1948. Andrea Perez, white
and Sylvester Davis, black, had denied a request of a license of matrimony by the
county of Los Angeles, since the civil code of the state determined that „all marriages of
white people with blacks, mongoloids, Malays or mixed are illegal and null‟. Peres
appealed to the supreme court of California arguing that she and Davis pertained to the
Catholic Church that did never prohibit the matrimony between persons of different
races and that the Code was against the religious freedom of the couple, protected in the
1st Emend. The tribune received the appeal not only based on the 1 st Emend but also on
the 14th Emend, defining marriage as a fundamental right of free men, citing the
interpretation formulated in the case of 1923 and declaring that law against the
constitution because it was discriminatory and irrational.
 The vote of the judge J. Carter, in accordance to the majority, characterized the
state law as a product of ignorance, prejudice and intolerance, citing the Declaration of
Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Letter of the United Nations. He also advanced
over the eugenic arguments presented in the defense of the questioned law, comparing it
to parts of Mein Kampf in where Hitler sustained the superiority of the pure races. In
that year, less than three months after the judgment, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights appeared. Under the impact of the world war and the Nazi Holocaust, the
notion of race retroacted and the idea of equality of human beings was diffused in laws
and judicial decisions.

Another step happened in 1964 in the judicial decision of the case McLaughlin
versus Florida that cancelled a state law prohibiting the habitual sharing of a room at
night by a black and a white person. The law didn´t prohibit matrimonies, but the inter-
racial cohabitation, and previewed punishment of prison for up to one year or a ticket of
up to 500 dollars. The disclaimer appealed based on the 14 th Emend against the decision
of the supreme court of Florida that sustained the constitutionality of the law based in
the precedent article of Pace versus Alabama.

McLaughlin versus Florida was a more complex case, as the law in question was
part of a legal chapter entitled „Adultery and Fornication‟ that criminalized these
practices for any couple. The difference was placed only that in the case of cohabitation
between blacks and whites it was not necessary to prove sexual intercourse. The
Supreme Court gave won to the claimer and in the justification showed that the
precedent of 1883 had already been knocked down in other decisions. The verdict
limited to register the singular discrimination of the law and left pendant the question of
validity of state prohibition of inter-racial marriages. A few months before, the
Congress approved the historical Law of Civil Rights. Even thus, vital elements of legal
segregation survived to scrutiny of the constitutional court.

The final knock-down came in the case Loving versus Virginia of 12th June 1967
when the Supreme Court declared invalid the restrictions of that state to inter-racial
marriages. Nowadays, 12th June is celebrated in many places of USA as the Loving
Day. The commemoration often involves inter-racial couples and is organized as a
modest civil project of exulting tolerance and equality.

Loving is a surname, full of suggestive resonances, of the white Richard who

married in 1958 with the black woman Mildred Jeter. The couple lived in Virginia and
contracted matrimony in the District of Columbia, avoiding the restrictions of their
state, but they were imprudent to continue living in the county of Caroline. A state
tribunal condemned them to one year in prison with suspension of the sentence
conditioned to the transference of couple to other state. In his argument, the judge said:
„God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red and put them in separated
continents, so, if was not due to an artificial interference in this arrangement, there
would be no motives for such matrimonies. If He separated the races shows that He
doesn´t want them to mix‟.
 The Loving couple moved to the District of Columbia and in 1963 they started
to appeal in the state courts of Virginia. But they faced a wall of anti-miscegenation
laws that described in detail and meticulously preview punishments to those who
married in other states. In the nucleus of those laws there was the absolute prohibition to
matrimony or cohabitation of a white person to any other who was not white. The
Supreme Court of Appellations of the state confirmed the original decision by justifying
the validity of the laws in the propositions of „preserving the racial integrity of the
citizens‟ and „avoid the adulteration of the blood‟.

In the conclusive sentence, the Supreme Court strongly bombed the

discriminatory laws of Virginia and the arguments of their tribunals, considering them
as „means destined to conserve the supremacy of the whites‟ and declaring against the
Constitution all acts that restrict rights of citizens under the invocation of race. The
judges considered the distinctions among citizens derived from their ancestors as
horrendous for a free country whose institutions are founded in the doctrine of equality.
The sentence almost declared illegal the racial classifications, but they didn´t advance
this signal.

Melting pot

Literally, melting pot means a recipient where metals are liquefied and welded.
In the myth of origin of USA, the American man is distinguishable from the British man
because of a product of the meeting of immigrants from different layers who, together,
engaged in the construction of a new nation. The concept appeared at the time of the
War on Independence and appears as an embryo in a travel report of 1782. „From where
did all these people come? They are a mixture of English, Scottish, Irish, French, Dutch,
German and Swedish. From this promiscuous crossing emerged the race now named as
American. What is, therefore, the American, this new man? He is not a European
neither a descendant of a European; so this strange mixture of blood that is not seen in
any other country. The Americans were, one day, scattered in all Europe; here, they got
incorporated into one of the best population systems ever seen‟.

The vision of a fusion of races had, in general, a clear limit. The Americans
derived from a mixture of blood among Europeans, but not a broad mixture where
westerns, Amerindians or blacks could be included. Throughout XIX century, with the
consolidation of the scientific racism, the melting pot got a diverse sense from the
original one – and in contrast to the literal meaning of the expression. It was not a
fusion of bloods, but a coexistence of different strains in a single political mold, defined
by the values of the Republic of the citizens. Something closer to a fruit salad than to a
pot of metals.
 Ralph Wando Emerson was a philosopher and a poet of transcendentalism, the
pioneer of the American environment romanticism. He exalted the miscegenation
between whites and non-whites but figured as an isolated voice. The theatrical piece
The Melting Pot of Israel Zangwill was mounted in 1908. It registers the first exact use
of this expression. It was an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet that celebrated the cultural
assimilation of the immigrants in the new country. The pot of USA included Germans,
French, English, Irish, Jews and Russians but not the races black, yellow and red.

The law of naturalization of 1790 delimitated the racial frontiers of the

American identity. According to it, only the immigrants who were free white persons
could request naturalization and citizenship. A new law promulgated after five years
conserved the racial limitations. Only in 1870 under the effects of the Civil War the
African immigrants got the rights to ask for citizenship. The yellows from Oriental and
Southern Asia had to wait for the post-war.

In the famous poem „The New Colossus‟ recorded in bronze in the Statue of
Freedom, Emma Lazarus describes USA as the port of immigrants, of masses in
disorder, of poor and downcast persons who wanted the freedom. The assimilation,
however, was never easy, even among the white Europeans. The Irish and the Italians,
as well as the Jews faced prejudice and, only half a century ago, John Kennedy had to
ensure to the electorate that we wanted to be the president not as a catholic, but as an
American. The melting pot, however, was redefined effectively by the lines of frontier
of race.

The common sense suggests that racism is an antique phenomena that should
weaken slowly and continuously, in a linear process as time goes by. The mistake of
this idea is to imagine that the black slavery was a culminant point of racism. But the
legal institute of slavery has no relation with racism and didn´t need it to exist: the black
slaves were not slaves because they were black, but because they were converted into
the condition of products in the molds of a legal and political system that admitted the
extension of the right of property of a human body. The racism got clearly organized
only in the autumn of the slavery market that liked Europe, America and Africa.

The state of Pennsylvania, placed outside the domains of slavery, abolished its
anti-mixing laws in 1780, before the end of the War on Independence and its example
was followed by some states in the XIX century. However, between the end of the XIX
century and the first decades of the XX century, nothing less than 30 states produced
anti-mixing laws.

The racial segregation enhanced as a reaction to the reforms of the

Reconstruction. The black segregated churches started to appear in 1816 when the
Methodist African Church of Zion was established. This tendency only got the aspects
of a general movement between the Civil War and the decade of 1880 with the
segregation of the Black Baptists. In New Orleans, the creoles, old liberated slaves from
French ascendance, composed a modest medium class until the decade of 1880, when
the worsening of segregation pushed them to close to the poor blacks –that helped the
conditions of the appearance of the jazz music. As a manifestation of systematic
segregation in a context of crescent urbanization, between 1910 and 1914 the first great
theaters back to an exclusively black public such as the New Palace in New York the
Peking and the State in Chicago and Booker T. Washington in St Louis, named in honor
to a respected leader of the black community.

In the idea of fruit salad, the melting pot describes the American society as a
collection of racial groups with cultural identities essentially distinct. The urban
residential segregation in the way it occurred in USA derived from the division of the
society according to clear lines of race. The American urban ghettos contrast with the
pattern of spatial segregation of Brazil, essentially linked to the income money and
made of racial mosaics. The classical model was developed in Los Angeles: the whites
got separated by running away into the suburbs but in the central areas the Hispanic and
black areas formed separated groups with small delimitated ethnical regions of Chinese,
Philippines and Koreans.

In the center of the concept of melting pot there is the conviction that the spine
of the nation is constituted by the white Protestants, the race configured by the original
fusion of European strains. The eugenic imperative to preserve the integrity of a white
race inspired the anti-mixing laws. But the vision of a threatening to the white Anglo-
Saxon Protestant identity of USA was not confined to the blacks. In 2004, under
crescent concerns regarding the flux of Mexican immigrants, the politic scientist
Samuel Huntington, famous by his Clash of Civilizations, published Who Are We? The
Challenges to America´s National Identity. The book identifies in the Hispanic
immigration a corrosive acid acting over the American culture and gave arguments for a
conservative articulation to restrict the rights of the immigrants.

The arguments of Huntington are that USA is not a nation of immigrants, but of
colonizers. The original European colonizers melted their identities and established the
cultural basis of the country. In that origin it can be found the values of the constitution,
the Protestant ethics, and the special place of religion in the social life. Everything that
came after was only addition, so that the appearance of a massive immigration of Latin
Americans who are Catholic and adapted to a culture of dependence frazzles the rocks
over the nation is erected. Who Are We? - As Alan Wolfe registered- is a nationalist
shout, a cultural reaction remnant from the thoughts of Madison Grant than bring us
back to the blacks and eugenics.

Jim Crow

In the judicial history that culminates with Loving versus Virginia, in any
moment it is posed the problem of knowing who is black. The claimant don´t question
the racial label that defined them and even when a verdict such as Perez versus Sharp
pointed notorious inconsistencies in the paradigms of eugenics, the judges never had
imagined the hypothesis of declaring null the system of racial classification on the legal
segregation erected. This conceptual clarity is due to Madison Grant, a lawyer who was
born in New York in 1865 and who divided his attentions between eugenics and the
environment conservation.

Grant had friendship with the presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert
Hoover, created national parks, formulated the first laws against the hunt of deer and
helped to create the Zoo of Bronx. Because of his insistence, in September 1906, Ota
Benga, a pygmy from the Belgian Congo, was exhibited in the jail of the apes of that
zoo. After ten years, Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, an eugenic treatise
that delineated that the Nordic race was the responsible for the development of
civilization of mankind. The book sold more than 1.5 millions of issues in two decades,
something that serves as an index of the dimensions of the reaction against the
contamination of the country by the hordes of Asiatic and Catholic Europeans that
arrived in the summit of the greatest migratory wave of the history of USA.

A visceral fight by the control of the American Association of Anthropology

opposed Grant to Franz Boas and ended with the victory of the second. The legend says
that Grant refused to shake hands with the Jew Boas. Under the influence of the eugenic
Grant, the German eugenic movement adopted the thesis of Nordic race, which the Nazi
ideologist Alfred Rosenberg named as Nordic-Arian. The German Nazi government
promoted the translation and broadcasted official editions of the book of Grant, who
received from Hitler the compliments: „this book is my bible‟.

After the academic loss to Boas, Grant founded with Francis Galton the Galton
Society, the principal eugenics organization of USA and devoted to give legislative
form to his racial ideas. In 1924, USA approved the Immigration Law, which
established quotes for the entrance of Europeans from South and East and prohibited the
entrance of Asiatic. Virginia promulgated a Law of Racial Integrity that became the
most famous anti-mixing laws of the country. Grant advised directly the production of
both of the laws.

The state law of Virginia determined in the item 5 that „it is illegal that any
white person marries to anyone who is not white or a person with a blood mixture of
white and American Indian. To the finality of this law, the term white person will be
applied only to who doesn´t have any trace other than the Caucasian; but people that
have 1/16 or less of American Indian blood and don´t have any other non-Caucasian
blood will be defined as white.

Many anti-mixing laws existed in USA before the law of Virginia of 1924.
However, they used diverse fractions to define mixtures of blood that put somebody
outside the domains of the white race. In some states, 1/16 or 1/32 of black blood were
not enough to maculate the white essence of person. In others, the term mulatto gave
some confusion in the racial classification. The law written with the help of Grant
removed ambiguities. With the very partial exception of the Indian blood, a single drop
of non-white blood contaminated irreversibly the carrier, excluding them from the white
race.

One drop rule. The rule of the single drop served as a model to state laws that
soon adapted their definitions to the paradigm of racial purity. Before the law of
Virginia, the miscegenation between people with European and African ancestry were
not welcomed but were seen as a matter of life the existence of mixed persons, usually
classified as mulattos. The law of 1924 had no interest in precisely defining the non-
white races, although it determined a nominal classification of the inhabitants of the
state according to its racial composition. However, since it delimitated meticulously the
white race, it produced the legal division of the population into whites and non-whites.

The repercussions of the law didn´t stand restricted to the sphere of matrimony.
Under the baton of Walter Plecker, chief of statistical registers of Virginia, the state
simplified the original classification in six races, emitting birth certificates that labeled
all persons exclusively in the categories of white and colored. This way, the Indians lost
the privilege of generating white descendants for successive miscegenation and, most
importantly, two entire generations of Indians were precluded to prove their ethnical
identity to the effect of taking participation in federal programs.

Before the Civil War, many American states, mostly in the South, created laws
of discrimination against blacks. The Constitution of Indiana in 1851 prohibited that
blacks and mulattos established in the state and the slavery states, without exception,
had anti-mixing laws. The Black Codes, as these laws were named, were reinforced in
the time of the loss of the Confederation in 1865, but were removed soon by the
governments of the Reconstruction. With the end of the military occupation of the old
confederated states in 1877, the governments of the redeemers approved segregationist
laws, named as Laws Jim Crow. Jim Crow is a proper name used as an adjective with
pejorative meaning, from unknown origin, and that refers to the black American. The
use of this expression was documented since 1830. The one drop rule – in the beginning
under slightly distinct forms, but after uniformed by the model of Virginia – gave the
structure for the legal system of discrimination.

In the states of South and Southwest, the segregationist laws embraced marriage,
sexual relations, public transports, restrooms, schools, hospitals, hotels, restaurants,
prisons, theaters, libraries, sports equipment and open areas. In North Carolina, a law
prohibited the interchange of books from schools for whites and schools for blacks:
after being used by somebody of one race, the issue became of exclusive use of that
race.

Strictly, the Jim Crow laws didn´t expand further than the limits of the old
Confederation and states under the area of influence. However, the segregation in the
beginning of the XX century had a general aspect. The electoral bills and the necessity
of alphabetization excluded almost all the blacks from the rights of voting, but many
poor whites could vote using breaches of the law. In the government of Woodrow
Wilson, the old Southern political elite found the way to again occupy high seats in the
federal administration. The discrimination was intensified while the memories of
Reconstruction got blurred in the past. In Washington and other cities, they erected
physical barriers segregating black employees in offices, restaurants and restrooms of
federal organs.

Equality and difference

The racial laws created after the Reconstruction immediately generated tensions
around the principle of political and juridical equality consecrated in the 14 th Emend.
The juridical law of the fight for civil rights is essentially the history of the
interpretation of the principle of equality.

The first marked decision was adopted by the Supreme Court in the case Pace
versus Alabama of 1883. Soon after, Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896 consolidated the
juridical doctrine of „separated but equal‟ that served as support to the segregationist
laws. In Louisiana, before the consolidation of the one drop rule, a state law separated
the trains of passengers in cars for whites and cars for coloreds and blacks. Homer
Plessy, citizen of New Orleans with one eight of black ancestry, participated in a small
group with disposition to defy in justice the Jim Crow laws. He entered in a wagon for
whites and no one impeded him. Inside the car, he declared to the employees his racial
condition and so he was arrested to not accepting the transference to a car destined to
coloreds.

The case was taken to Supreme Court that decided against Plessy based on the
argument that the accommodations were the same hence didn´t violate the 14 th Emend.
In the single discordant vote, the judge John Marshall Harlan, previous owner of slaves,
converted to the idea of equality in horror to Ku Klux Klan and to lynches, wrote that
the Constitution refuses castes in the American society: „our Constitution is blind
regarding color‟, as he anticipated the nuclear objective of the movement for civil
rights.

One year before the verdict, Booker Tagliaferro Washington conceded his
valuable support to the idea that equality could walk together with segregation. He was
born as a slave in 1856 and liberated in the end of the Civil War. He could study at a
university in Virginia and became the rector of a new Normal School in Alabama that
became the University Tuskegee. In 1895, in front of a white audience of an
international exposition of cotton breeders, he pronounced a speech where he defended
to hire black employees in the era of the great European immigration. This speech was
nicknamed pejoratively by Du Bois (the leader of NAACP) as the Concession of
Atlanta, since Booker Washington sustained that whites and blacks could progress
together in segregation: „in all the purely social aspects we can be as separated as the
fingers, but we have to be as united as a hand in all the essential things for the mutual
progress‟.

The doctrine of the „separated but equal‟ proportioned a way to accommodate

the Jim Crow laws to the constitutional principle of equality. However, the tension
between separation and equality was present the whole first half of the XX century and
some decisions of the Supreme Court declared as against the constitution some aspects
of the segregationist laws. Brown versus Board of Education, the historic verdict of
1954, was not a lightning in a clear sky, but ended the circle inaugurated by Plessy
versus Ferguson and represented a fatal knock down in the doctrine over the legal
building of the racial separation had support.

The case was organized by the local section of NAACP that convinced Oliver L.
Brown to be the leader in a collective action of parents of black students against the
segregation in schools in Topeka, Kansas. The district tribune ruled in favor of the
council of education based in the precedent of Plessy versus Ferguson and arguing that
the public schools for blacks had the similar quality of the ones for whites. The
Supreme Court linked the appellation of Brown to similar cases in other states, all of
them sponsored by NAACP. However, with the exception of Topeka, the schools for
blacks were clearly inferior. In 17 may by unanimity the Court declared that separated
educational installations are inherently unequal and violated the 14th Emend.

It is false, however, the legend according the case of Brown versus Board of
Education completely knocked down the doctrine of „separated but equal‟. The verdict
was confined to the sphere of education and the decisive argument was that the
segregation of children provoked on them a sense of inferiority in the blacks, with
negative repercussions in the motivation to learn. In the following years, cases such as
NAACP versus Alabama (1958) and Boyton versus Virginia (1960) amplified the
judicial consensus against the segregationist laws. Even so, only with Loving versus
Virginia the remnant columns of „separated but equal‟ finally ruined.

Martin Luther King Jr. was 25 year-old and had just become a pastor in a Baptist
Church in Montgomery, Alabama, when the verdict of Brown versus Board of
Education appeared. In the following year, he leaded the boycott to buses of
Montgomery that started the movement for civil rights. The political sense of the
movement was „I have a dream‟, the famous speech he pronounced in front of the
Memorial to Lincoln during the March over Washington in 28 th August 1963.

„I have a dream‟ is a conversation with the ideals proclaimed by the founders of

the American nation and that started invoking Abraham Lincoln: „One century ago, a
great American, whose symbolic shade we live now, assigned the Proclamation of
Emancipation. That momentous decree arrived as a great lighthouse of light and hope
for millions of black slaves. He arrived as a happy day rise to end the long night of their
slavery. But one hundred years after, the blacks are still not free. One hundred years
after, the blacks still languish in the margins of the American society and they discover
to be exiled in their own land.‟

The exile, which reminded the Bible, had a deep programmatic objective. The
racial discrimination exiled the blacks, converting them into foreigners. The conquest of
the civil rights meant a return from the exile, the return of the blacks to their own land.
Against a tradition of black leaders who looked the world through the lenses of race,
Luther King was saying that the black Americans were, first of all, Americans. He
prepared to connect the civil rights movement to the American Revolution: „when the
architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of Constitution and of the
Declaration of Independence, they were assigning a promissory note and all the
Americans are heirs of it. This note was a promise that all people – yes, black people
and white people – had a guarantee of the inalienable rights to life, freedom and
happiness. But instead of honoring this sacred obligation, USA gave to the blacks a bad
check, a check that came back with the inscription „no funds‟. I have a dream that one
day this nation will rise up and live the true sense of its creed: we sustain as a self-
evident true that all persons were created equally‟.

The climax arrives as a torrent of images where the scenarios of the Deep South
become visions of salvation and redemption. In the dream, „one day, in the red hills of
Georgia, the sons of old slaves and of old owners of slaves will be able to sit together in
the same fraternity and there in Alabama, small black boys and small black girls will
give hands to small white boys and girls as brothers and sisters. In this day, all the
valleys will be elevated and all the hills and mountains will be lowered down and the
rough places will become smooth places and the tortuous places will become straight‟.

The synthesis is very famous: „I have a dream where my four small kids will live
in a nation where they will not be judged according to the color of their skin, but of
what is inside their character‟.

The vision of Luther King, of a single American nation, was not in accordance
with other black leaders who wrote in the long and heterogeneous tradition of the black
nationalism. Malcolm X, born as Malcolm Little in 1925 in Omaha (Nebraska), was the
principal representative of this perspective in the years 1950 and 1960, when the civil
rights movement was boiling.

Violence captured Malcolm in early childhood. Louise, his mother, was

generated in an act of rape by a white man against a black woman. His father, Earl, was
a layman Baptist preacher and member of an international organization founded by the
Jamaican Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey. Earl died in an accident never well explained.
Three of his brothers were murdered by whites, one of his uncles was a victim of lynch
and his family lived for years under the threatening of hordes of Ku Klux Klan and
other groups of white supremacy. In his adolescence, Malcolm was involved with
robberies and drug traffic in Boston and New York. In the years of prison from 1946 to
1952, he entered to the Islam Nation, an Afro-Muslim denomination leaded by Elijah
Muhammad who preached the black separatism.
 Malcolm X leaded the Islam Nation in New York based on the temple of Harlem
until 1964, when he ruptured with the denomination due to the promiscuous behavior of
Elijah Muhammad, converting into the traditional Islam and carrying out the
peregrination to Mecca. Cassius Clay (Muhammad Ali) entered to the Islam Nation
influenced by him and later also changed it to the traditional Islam. The intrigue that
murdered the black leader in February 1965 was never totally clarified, but the
evidences point to the denomination.

Throughout most part of his political life, Malcolm X sustained the idea that the
American blacks are part of a Diaspora nation generated by the traffic of slaves. He
visited Africa three times, meeting with government leaders, political and student
leaders. He defended in front of the Organization of African Unity the creation of the
United States of Africa. During the period he stood in the Islam Nation, the sustained
kind of a black supremacy of ethnical and religious lines. After he ruptured with it, he
reviewed this perspective of a racial conflict and lamented his previous opposition to the
coalition between blacks and whites.

The March over Washington of Luther King was roughly criticized by Malcolm
X, who saw it as movement controlled by whites and subordinated to the white
historical tradition of the American policy. In the speech „the ballot or the bullet‟ of
April 1964, Malcolm X characterized the religion as a theme of the private sphere. He
defined himself as a black nationalist fighting for freedom and appointed the following
goals: „the black men must control the policies and the politicians in their own
community‟ and „we must command, operate and control the economy of our
community‟.

The black nationalism of Malcolm X, together with the left thinking of Lenin,
Mao Tsé Tung, Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon inspired the foundation of the Black
Panthers Party by the young activists Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale from Oakland,
California, in 1966. Initially, the Black Panthers concentrated on the idea of self-defense
of the black communities and suburbs against the brutality of the police. With time, the
Party expanded and substituted the doctrine of the Black Nationalism to the socialism.
In this process, although conserving the characteristic of an exclusively black party, it
passed to condemn the black racism and to defend alliances with organizations of
Mexican immigrants, pacifist groups and of the contra-culture. A dissidence of the
Black Panthers, leaded by Stokely Carmichael, restored the movement Black Power and
the concept of Black Nationalism.

In the Olympic Games of the City of Mexico in 1968, Tommie Smith and John
Carlos, gold and bronze medal-winners of 200 meters shallow, worn black gloves and
made the salute of the Black Panthers in the podium, during the ceremony of awards. In
that year, the laconic director of FBI John Edgar Hoover classified the party as the
greatest threatening to the internal safety of the country. At this time, the Black Panthers
were divided into a political group and a group that used weapons, did demonstrations
with cars on the streets and got involved with fights against the police. Newton was
arrested and condemned after a brawl transit where he involuntarily killed a policeman.
Other activists were condemned under dubious accuses of conspiracy. In the subsequent
years the party fragmented into small fractions until it disappeared from the political
scene.

After the collapse of the organizations created in the years 1960, the heir of
Black Nationalism fell down over the lap of Louis Farrakhan, son of Caribbean
immigrants who entered into the Islam Nation inspired by Malcolm X and in 1978 he
reconstructed the denomination that had got ruined by internal dissensions. Farrakhan
was a controversial figure, a brilliant speaker and author of homophobic and anti-
Semitic comments. He leaded the March of One Million Men that reunited about half a
million of rioters in Washington in 1995. The march was invocated by Farrakhan as an
exclusively masculine riot. However, other organizations shared the convocation,
extending it to the women. Rosa Parks was one of the speakers. The speech he
pronounced in that 17th October should be interpreted as a direct answer to the „I have a
dream‟ of Luther King.

In the same way Luther King did three decades before, Farrakhan went back to
the figures of Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington, but to accuse them, not to remember
the original promise of equality: „Abraham Lincoln saw in his time the great abysm
between blacks and whites. When he saw this abysm, he pondered about a solution of
separation. Abraham Lincoln never defended that we could members of a jury or we
had an equal statute of the whites of this nation. Abraham Lincoln said that, if it was
inevitable to exist superiors and inferiors, he preferred that the superior position was
occupied by the white race‟.

The accusation was that the founder fathers had lifted up an American nation
anchored by the concept of the white supremacy. It was not, as wanted Luther King, to
require the meeting of the principles of the Declaration of Independence and
Constitution, but to discharge the limited perspective of the founders, recreating the
nation. Farrakhan didn´t have a program for this recreation but had one for the blacks.
The first point of this program was the racial unity: „There is a new black man in the
USA today. There is a new black woman in the USA today. Now, brothers, from now
and forever we can never see us again with the narrow eyes of the limited frontiers of
our fraternal, civic, politic, religious or professional organizations. When you return to
your city and find a black man, a black woman, don´t ask them what is their social,
political or religious affiliations. Simply know that they are your brothers‟.

The threatening to the unity of the blacks came from the social assimilation that
Farrakhan described as a co-optation. The whites co-opted the blacks offering privileges
to a minority, sending the best athletes to NBA, to NFL and transforming them into
celebrities. The association of those blacks started to be with white men and women and
association generates assimilation. The second point of the program of Farrakhan was to
create a black economy and black policies, autonomous regarding the world of whites,
starting from the individual efforts of blacks and of the general racial solidity: „Black
man, you must not speak bad of white people. All you have to do is to go back home
and transform our communities in productive places. All you have to do is to make our
communities safe and decent places to live. And if we start to give the black
communities of companies, creating industries, defying us to be better than we are, the
whites, instead of driving their cars using the word nigger, they will say: look at them,
they are wonderful; we can never say again that they are inferior‟.

The preacher of the Islam Nation didn´t want to change society, as Malcolm X
or the Black Panthers nor obtain reparations for the slave past, as the preachers of the
affirmative action want. His speech was directed to a great black ghetto that should see
itself as a separated nation and progress separated. In the end, he proposed the
constitution of a fund for the economic development of the blacks, which would be
financed by a volunteer individual contribution of ten dollars monthly.

In the view of Luther King, USA was born under a true promise of equality that
was not honored by the governments. His fight was to recover that solemn promise of a
nation for all the citizens. This non-racial horizon definitely distinguished him from the
Black Nationalism in the versions revolutionary or conservative. The debate was over
equality and difference. Contrary to Luther King, the Black Nationalism, over its many
dissensions, converged into the creed that the race is the primordial fountain of identity
and only the separation of the black and white nations could offer a solution for the
problem of racism. Ironically, the many groups of the Black Nationalism continued
developing the aims of the Jim Crow laws…

The whole and the parts

The policies of reverse discrimination started to be implanted in the beginning of

the decade of 1970 in the government of Richard Nixon. The racial preferences were
accepted without resistances as they molded in the consolidated notion of the melting
pot, helping the blacks to find to themselves a proportional place in the condominium of
races of the American society. Together with the diffusion of these policies, the word
afro-American took the place of „black‟.

The programs of affirmative action based in quotes for blacks didn´t demand the
production of new concepts, as the one drop rule had made clear the limits of the races.
This way, the federal and university initiatives of racial preferences didn´t need to
concern about the definition of the target-public to get the benefits. However, with the
reverse discrimination, several judicial disputes were renewed over the sense of the
principle of equality consecrated in the 14th Emend.

University of California Regents versus Bakke, in 1978, was the first

opportunity for the Supreme Court to pronounce over the juridical nucleus of the
question. The candidate do the medical school Allan Bakke, white, appealed to the
tribunals after, in two occasions, he couldn´t get a matriculation even that he got better
results than those to the approved in the reserve for blacks. The Court got divided and
by 5 against 4 it deliberated that race could be used to determine programs of
affirmative action, but not under an inflexible system of quotes. Bakke was admitted
into the medical school, but the constitutional tension persisted. In 1979, the Court
emitted a similar verdict in the case United Steel-workers of America, AFL-CIO versus
Weber. In the following year, in Fullilove versus Klutznick, the Supreme Court was in
front an appellation against a federal law that destined 10% of the budget of public
works to contracts with companies owned by member of minorities. The law defined six
minorities with benefits: blacks, Hispanics, Orientals, Indians, Eskimos and people from
the Auletian Islands. The verdict affirmed that the law was in accordance to the
constitution under the argument that it tried to remediate the discrimination in reality
that the owners of minority groups suffered in the process of sub-hiring. According to
the judges, in a context of a initiative for compensation, „it is not asked the Congress to
act blindly regarding the color question‟.

In those times of the peak of the racial preference policies, the Supreme Court
avoided verdicts of principles, trying to conciliate the principle of equality to the
demands of correction of the discriminatory heritage and the promotion of diversity. In
Wygant versus Jackson Board of Education in 1986, it was declared against the
constitution the district policy of, in case of dismissal, to fire firstly the white teachers.
The argument of the judges concentrated in the difference between the act of hiring
where the weight of the racial preferences are distributed diffusively in the society and
the act of dismissal, which touches the employment of single individuals.

In the following year, in United States versus Paradise, the Supreme Court
supported a decision of a federal court that had imposed racial quotes for hiring and
promoting inside of the Department of Public Safety of Alabama. The verdict supported
on the proof that the department of that state of old segregationist tradition kept
practices of persistent, systematic and obstinate discriminatory exclusion of blacks.

From the juridical point of view, the generic concept of historic repair was never
considered sufficient to legitimate policies of racial preference. In City of Richmond
versus Croson, in 1989, the Supreme Court judged as against the constitution a
municipal program to reserve 30% of the budget for public works to hire companies
owned by blacks. The judges argued that „an undefined allegation that there were
discrimination in the past can´t justify the inflexible use of racial quotes‟. The verdict in
the case Adarand Constructions versus Peña, in 1995, over a similar federal program,
requested that the quotes were strictly cut to correct some specific distortions. The
Court went further, questioned the federal policies based on race and determined that all
the racial classifications imposed by organs of government must by analysed by a
reviewer tribunal under strict scrutiny.

Outside the tribunals, the debate organized around the poles of juridical equality
and universal policies at one side and of the racial differences and historic repair at the
other. Anyway, the contenders put the heir of Luther King in the center of the polemics
and offers contrasting responses to the hard task to know what would be the position of
the leader of the civil rights movement if he lived to see the development of the reverse
discrimination policies.

In an interview to the TV program Crossfire, the writer David Horowitz, one of

the main voices of the American conservatism, provoked an international noise when he
judged Luther King as a conservative, since he believed essentially in the character, the
value that the conservatives defend nowadays. It is necessary to completely forget about
the historic context that Luther King lived to classify him as a conservative, but his
famous speech over the „inside character‟ raises legitimate questions about the sense of
the civil rights movement.

The essayist Tim Wise says that the criticizers of the reverse discrimination have
of Luther King only a line of a speech. As other activists of the affirmative policies, he
mentions parts where Luther King gets distance from the unconditional defense of
blindness in front of color. In fact, it is not difficult to harvest in the books of Luther
King phrases that contain the idea of racial compensations. In Why We Can´t Wait, he
affirms that it is not realistic to ask the blacks to only require equality in the law. In
„Where do We Go from Here‟, he asks that, after such a long period of discrimination,
the society makes something to favor the blacks to reach equality of conditions. In an
interview to Playboy in 1965 he used the expression „special compensatory programs‟
and draw a parallel with the treatment given to the veterans of war.

They were not only words. Luther King leaded the Breadbasket Operation, a
campaign developed in 12 cities to press companies that discriminated blacks against
hiring to correct their postures. The idea of historic repair appears in the interview to
Playboy as: „for two centuries, the blacks were enslaved and robbed from any salary –
richness potentially added to what would be the legacy of their descendants. All the
richness of USA nowadays could not compensate the blacks for these centuries of
exploitation and humiliation.

However, the Luther King of the heralds of reverse discrimination is as unreal as

the one of Horowitz and can only be sustained over careful fragments of his words. In
fact, the leader of the civil rights movement tended to agree in a crucial aspect with the
old texts of Du Bois, to whom the white workers had nothing to gain with the
segregation, except the psychological reward of pertaining to the powerful race and as a
return they conceded the political and economic power to the elites. In an inspired
expression of Luther King, the poor whites were the derived victims of slavery and of
the Jim Crow laws. This historical interpretation is a key to understand the extension of
poverty among the whites of the south of USA. The Jim Crow laws depreciated the
work in a generalized way, contributing to compress the salary of blacks and whites.
The legal segregation divided the working class, reducing the power of the syndicates
and impeding the formation of reformist political coalitions. Soon before the Second
World War, the enhancement of the electoral rates in eight Southern states excluded
from the electorate virtually all the blacks and also two thirds of the whites.

Luther King had everything of this in mind when he explicated that his Bill of
Rights to the poor, inspired in the programs for the veterans of war, should give benefits
to both black and white poor. In Where do We Go from Here, his next to last book, he
went further. He registered that in absolute numbers there were twice white poor than
black poor in USA and affirmed that instead of an excessive emphasis in the relations
between poverty and racial discrimination, it would be better to fight poverty that
kicked both whites and blacks.

The Baptist minister, sociologist, theologist Luther King, son of a pastor who
leaded the section of NAACP in Atlanta, doesn´t fit in the trace of a caricature.
Philosophically, he wasn´t aligned to the progressive liberals, who believed in human
perfection and interpreted salvation as a creation of a paradise in Earth through civic
action. Instead, he was aligned to the fundamentalist doctrine of his black church that
had roots in the notions of the original sin, the salvation in another world and in a God
intensely active, ready to forgive and also to punish. Politically, he markedly
participated in the progressive coalition in the fights for civil rights and against the War
on Vietnam, articulating a program of reforms targeted to the social inclusion of black
and white poor. In the months before his murder, the leaded the Campaign of the Poor
People and traveled in the country to reunite a multi-racial army of the poor that should
press the Congress to approve the Bill of Rights of the Poor.

At the time of Luther King, the affirmative action had not yet assumed the aspect
of racial preferences and even less the numeric quotes for blacks. The „one line of a
speech‟ over inside of the character expresses his true convictions of a nation based on
the political equality. There is, of course, a black question in Luther King´s thinking. It
couldn´t be in other way, as the laws of diverse states and a solid segregationist tradition
made the blacks citizens of second class. But the multiculturalist doctrine and the racial
policies put into practice in the decade of 1970 represented a fundamental rupture with
the nucleus of the vision of Luther King.

The heir of the civil rights movement and the judicial ambivalence as expressed
in the decisions of the Supreme Court didn´t avoid the expansion of the policies of
reverse discrimination. During almost two decades these new racial laws took the place
of the Jim Crow laws, extinguished little time before. The substitution of one to the
others testifies the force of the paradigm of the melting pot and of the one drop rule.
USA, even after the political storm of the 1960 years, still see itself as a whole
fragmented into pieces that can be easily named by ethnical and racial references. The
black leader Jesse Jackson, more than any other one, incarnated the persistence of this
conception.

Jackson was 27 year-old and was with Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, in
the fatidic 4th April 1968. He was born in South Carolina, son of Helen Burns, mother
when she was 16 year-old, and Noah Robison, married to another woman. He took
opportunities of sports scholarships to conclude university and entered to a theological
school, which he didn´t conclude, before devoting himself totally to the movement
leaded by Luther King. In 1966, he directed the Breadbasket Operation in Chicago and
soon after he became the national director of the initiative.

Three years after the murder of Luther King in Memphis, due to divergences
with Ralph Abernathy, the new chief of SCLC, Jackson created his own organization,
the Push Operation. His presidential candidatures of 1984 and 1988 stopped in the
primaries of the Democrats, but conferred him national influence and allowed him to
articulate the Rainbow Coalition. The two organizations were grouped together in 1996
in the Rainbow/Push. Leading them, and in the molds of the Democrat Party, Jackson
converted in the most salient herald of the racial policies in USA.

The civil leader Jackson had few in common with the sectary preacher
Farrakhan, his contemporary in the stage of the American black politics. The first
expressed an integrative policy that depended on a network of politicians, economic
corporations and academic institutions. The second conducted a movement of autonomy
for the blacks whose vitality was supported by the popular adhesion to his leadership.
Both were followers of anti-Semitic ideas (Jackson much less than Farrakhan) and both
shared the idea that the American nation is not composed by single individuals, but by
collectivities delimitated by the frontiers of race.

Rainbow Coalition, the name of the political organization of Jackson, broadcasts

the concept of a multicultural nation. The speech he pronounced in front of the
Democrat National Convention in 1984 was very revealing: „our flag is red, white and
blue but our nation is a rainbow: red, yellow, brown, black and white – and all of us are
precious to the eyes of God‟. Translating the sense of melting pot, which makes the
whole to be the mere exact sum of the parts, he constructed the adequate metaphor to
multiculturalism: „USA is not like a blanket – a single piece of fabric of the same tissue,
same color, same texture, same size. USA is more likely a patchwork with many retails,
many pieces, many colors, many sizes, all sewn and tailored by a uniform thread. The
white, the Hispanic, the black, the Arabian, the Jew, the woman, the native American,
the small farmer, the businessman, the environmentalist, the pacifist, the young, the old,
the lesbian, the gay and the invalid constitute the American patchwork.

Multiculturalism, as expressed by Jackson, constitutes a conservative and

integrative option to the program of the Black Nationalism. At the same time, it
represents a strategy different of the one of Luther King, as the logic frontally hit the
universal principle. The high tide of the policies of racial preference was coincident to
the era Reagan, but started to ebb even before the Conference of Durban.
The vote of Anthony Kennedy

The verdict of Adarand Constructors versus Peña fell as a block of ice in the
boiling pot of the programs of reverse discrimination, as the argument cited Loving
versus Virginia to question the legitimacy of the racial classification of the citizens.
Reacting immediately the president Bill Clinton, a notorious defender of the policies of
racial preferences, established in July 1995 a series of parameters on affirmative action.
The document of the White House basically asked to eliminate the use of numerical
quotes but interpreted the words of the judges as a sign of reaffirmation the necessity of
affirmative action.

The Supreme Court used the first opportunity to contest the presidential
interpretation. In 1996 in the case Hopwood versus University of Texas Law School, the
decision confirmed a sentence of a court of appellations that had cancelled the program
of affirmative action to admission in that University. Entering into the field of
principles, the court of appellations declared invalid the use of race as one of the factors
among many others in the selection of candidates, annulling the precedent of University
of California versus Bakke.

Under the impact of these decisions, states and universities reverted policies that
seemed to be consolidated. In the end of 1997, California approved the Proposition 209
that says the state must never discriminate against or offer preferential treatment to any
person or group based on race, color, sex, ethnicity or national origin in the
administration of the public jobs, public education and public business. One year after,
the state of Washington approved the Initiative 200, similar to the Californian law,
abolishing completely the programs of affirmative action.

Behind the Proposition 209, there is the figure of Ward Connerly. Black,
according to the one drop rule, but mixed into four equal parts – black, Irish, French and
Choctaw Indian – in his own definition, Wardell Anthony Connerly was born in
Louisiana in 1939 in times of uncontestable segregation, concluded Arts and Political
Science and reached the position of rector of the University of California in 1993. In
this condition, the was noticeable to denounce the programs of affirmative action of the
institution as equivalent to racial discrimination and convinced the direction of the
university to abolish the racial preferences, but keeping affirmative action based on
social and economic criteria.

Republican of liberty thinking, Connerly assumed the command of the campaign

of civil rights in California, which was successful in approving the Proposition 209 with
54% of favorable votes and against the opposition of the foundations Ford, Rockefeller
and Carnegie and also ACLU and the syndicate of the teachers of the state. After, he
extended the campaign to other states and succeeded in approving similar propositions
in Washington (1998) and Michigan (2006). In California, he defended a proposition,
finally beat, that would have prohibited the state government to classify people
according to criteria of race, ethnicity or national origin.

In the Supreme Court, a solid majority was ready to stop the way to the
ostensive policies of racial preferences, but there was a fracture over the general
principle of race as accessory criteria in educational programs. The first battle was
carried out in Grutter versus Bollinger, a case about the system of admission to the
Faculty of Law of the University of Michigan that had generated conflicting verdicts in
inferior instances. In 2003, the dispute reached the constitutional court that by 5 votes
against 4 invalidated Hopwood versus University of Texas and allowed the use of race
as one among many other criteria of selection. However, by 6 against 4 votes, the
judges declared as unacceptable the system of adding points with racial basis and
required an individualized analysis of the candidates.

The second battle was decided in 2007 and had a different end, but reproduced
the result of 5 against 4. Two distinct claims on programs of „racial equilibrium‟ in
secondary schools were grouped together and appreciated in Parents versus Seattle. The
verdict prohibited the use of racial criteria in the admission of students. In the
argumentation, the majority made a dialogue deliberated with the history of USA. The
crucial fragment is: „Governmental actions that divide the people through the race are
essentially suspicious, since these classifications promote notions of racial inferiority
and conduct to policies of racial hostility; reinforce the belief, sustained by so many
people during a lot of time of our history, that the individuals should be evaluated by
their skin color; confirm arguments based on race and a conception of a nation divided
in racial clusters, hence contributing for an escalation of racial hostility and conflict‟.

The implicit mention, but very evident, to the „one line of a speech‟ of Luther
King exterminated any doubt about the opinion of the majority. For the first time, a
decision of the constitutional court attacked frontally the center of the idea of racial
classification and with it, the conception of a nation divided in racial clusters. The
president of the court, judge John Roberts, went back explicitly to the letter and to the
spirit of Brown versus Board of Education and wrote: „regarding the use of race to
determine the entrance of children in the schools, the history shall be listened‟. He
wanted to say that the inversion of the sign of discrimination, as it has been done in the
racial affirmative action, consecrates the races in the domains of the law, destroying the
principles of citizenship. His conclusion: „the way to finish discrimination based on race
is to finish discrimination based on race‟.

The judge Anthony Kennedy dared even more than the majority, outrunning the
extreme conceptual frontier. Throughout all its history, USA carefully defined precisely
who was and who was not white. The one drop rule that gained a definite formulation in
the law of Virginia of 1924 was propitious to the exact demarcation of the white nation.
The questioning of Kennedy is equal to a program of rupture with the logic of racialism.

Parent versus Seattle was the culminant point of a trajectory of crescent rejection
to the racial policies started by the supreme court more than one decade ago. This
trajectory can´t be understood outside a broader context of changing in the perceptions
of the Americans about the theme of race.

Historically, the American society looked itself through the predominant prism
of the duality black/white. In the post-war, the fluxes of Asiatic and Latin American
immigrants speckled this contrast, introducing new variables. The Hispanic immigration
developed a singular paper in this process, as they moved together their own
conceptions on the theme of race. These conceptions, originated from the social
experience of Latin America, are much more fluid and comprehend noticeably the
notion of miscegenation. USA could not stand immune to a world incapable of
describing the world in two polar categories.

At the same time, the patterns of urban spatial segregation knew a curious
evolution. The white suburbs of medium class, a happening that got diffuse since the
decade of 1950, had consolidated the residential segregation in the American cities. In
2000 the majority of the population lived in the suburbs but they experienced notably
transformations due to the influx of non-whites. From 2000 to 2006, the white
population of the suburbs of the biggest cities grew 7%, while the Asiatic population
grew 16%, the black, 24% and the Hispanic, 60%. In the same time interval, Manhattan
and San Francisco lost a significant number of blacks and Hispanics and Los Angeles
lost a great portion of blacks. The residential segregation is not lowering down, it is
changing form. While the traditional suburbs get less segregated, the exurbs expand,
inhabited by the high medium class. The exurbs are condominiums far from the urban
centers, sometimes in rural areas, but functionally linked to the cities by the swinging
flux of the inhabitants between their work places and homes. Although these exurbs are
predominantly white, these communities reflect a segregation pattern by income, not
race.

At the same time, in the same direction, it is verified subtle processes, such as
the clear tendency of the augmentation of interracial unions and, not less important, to
the social recognition of multiracial identities. In the census of 1970 it was declared
only 500 thousand kids (less than 18 year-old) from interracial unions. Twenty years
later, this number enhanced to two millions and in 2000 to around three millions.

These social tendencies of long time took a form of a crisis of the classification
system adopted by the office of the American census. The census, reflecting the concept
of melting pot, imposes to people the choice of one among four closed options of racial
pertinence: white, black, Amerindian, Asiatic or originated from Pacific Islands. In a
separated item, the declaring person must answer if they pertain to the ethno-linguistic
group of the Hispanics. This crisis emerged in the census of 1990, when around 10
million people answered to the option „another‟ in the item of racial classification. This
significant group surrounded mainly Hispanics, but also many descendants from
interracial unions.

This happening stimulated groups of citizens to propose a new multiracial

category destined to hold the declarers who don´t identify themselves with the other
races of the census. In July 1996 thousands of citizens manifested in Washington in a
March of Multirracial Solidity invoked to press the government to include this new
category in the census. Connerly and his American Institute of Civil Rights joined the
campaign in the following year. The Multirracial Movement, as it is known, converted
into an influent voice, expressed in publications such as the Interracial Voice of New
York and the Multirracial Activist based on Virginia.

However, the venerable one drop rule would never give up easily. In 1997 a task
force composed of 30 federal agencies to evaluate the proposal concluded curiously that
create a multiracial category would enhance the racial tensions and deep the
fragmentation of the population. Under intense pressure of organizations involved with
the defense of the policies of racial preferences, the office of the census decided to keep
the old classification, allowing that the persons can choose to describe themselves as
pertaining to more than one race.

Such solution created nothing more than 63 racial combinations for non-
Hispanics and another 63 to Hispanics, as recognized by the federal government,
evidencing the absurd of the argument of „avoiding a greater census fragmentation of
the population‟. But the task force evidenced another argument, through which it is
possible to clarify its real motivations: it explained that a multiracial category would
cause confusion because it would group together in an indistinct group the descendants
of whites with blacks and of whites with Asiatic, making it difficult to delimitate the
groups receiving benefits of the reverse discrimination policies.

The census of 2000 was carried out under the definitions of the old categories
but according to the new rules. However, even the modest changes of rules were
sterilized by the decision of registering the persons who marked more than one racial
category in a minority specific group – the one in more social disadvantage. Thus, for
example, in the publications of synthesis, the ones who marked white and Asian were
registered and Asian; white and black, as black; and black and Asian, also as black. This
way, the Estate conserved the definition of the one drop rule to define who is exactly
white. Also, it avoided the reduction of the black population, satisfying the basic
demand of the organizations engaged in the promotion of racial preference. In this
census, the option „another‟ was selected by more than 15 millions of people. Almost
seven millions of people marked as pertaining to two or more races. More than 90% of
these last described themselves as fruits of unions between blacks and whites.

Anthony Robert Hale, student of Literature of University of California in

Berkeley and defender of the adoption of multiracial category in the census found that
to majority of people, „mixed race means no race‟. Maybe this is another motive why
the census decided to preserve the integrity of its racial aquarelle.
Barack Obama: The Speech

„There is no United States of the blacks, the United States of the whites, the
United States of the descendants of Latin or the United States of the descendants of
Asiatic. There is only the United States of America.‟ Barack Obama pronounced these
words in the Democrat National Convention of 2004 as a young candidate to the Senate
by Illinois. Four years later, the senator was indicated as the candidate to president of
USA, winning Hillary Clinton in the primaries of his party.

Jesse Jackson criticized in the presidential campaign of 2008 to not emphasizing

thoroughly the theme of race and in the interval of an interview, imagining that the
microphones were off he confessed his desire in gelding the Democrat candidate.
Deeply, Obama retook the lost ties since the murder of Luther King, highlighting the
universal public policies. In a book published at the half of his mandate of senator, he
wrote: „I reject any policy based only in race, sex, sexual orientation or victimization‟.
Obama didn´t show himself as a black politician (as Jackson would like to) and
suggested as post-racial future for the nation.

In the apex of the dispute with Hillary Clinton, the campaign of Obama was
confronted to its most difficult defy, when the reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor of his
black church, the man who turned official his marriage and baptized his kids, in a
resentful preach, blamed USA as a racist nation. The candidate needed to react to a
scandal – an instead of dissociating from the old confessor, offered a balance of the
„racial impasse in which we are immerged since many years ago‟. The speech, elegant
and emotive, pronounced in Philadelphia in 18 th March 2008 is written in the pieces of
the political oratory that mark an epoch.

Obama examined the fountains of the persistence of the American racial schism
and indicated the signs of its possible overcome. Layer by layer, he dug the soil that
hides the signs of the sour of blacks in relation to whites, putting into evidence the
relations with the long history of discrimination and segregation. As Luther King had
done a quarter of a century ago, he retook the principle of equality consecrated in the
documents of the foundation of USA and showed the way they form a stepping stone
for the fight against racism. But, breaking a frontier that was not cut by Luther King, he
introduced a vision of a society culturally mixed. The courageous pass started from a
biographical declaration: „I am son of a black man of Kenya and a white woman of
Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived the Depression
to serve in the Army of Patton during the Second World War and the help of a white
grandmother who worked in an assembly line of bombardiers in Fort Leavenworth
while he was overseas. I frequented some of the best schools of USA and lived in one of
the poorest nations of the world. I am married to a black American woman who brings
in her the blood of slaves and of owners of slaves – an inheritance that we transmitted to
our two precious girls. I have brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, uncles and cousins of
all races and all tons of skin, scattered in three continents and for all of the time I live I
will never forget that in on other country of Earth my personal history would ever be
possible‟.

He was describing himself as a mixed. In USA the word mestizo is imported

from Spanish. Sometimes, it is used the compound words half-breed and half-blood,
which remains to a blood division, but can´t translate the idea of fusion. This difficulty
is not a problem in the language, but a testimony of the cultural Anglo-Saxon
experience and of the American history.

The one drop rule still survives and according to it, Obama can´t exist as a
mixed: either he is black or he doesn‟t exist. The solution to this implies in a conceptual
revolution, which is the redefinition of the melting pot. This was what Obama suggested
as a conclusion of his personal and familiar description: „It is a history that didn´t made
me as the most conventional of the candidates. But this is a history that marked my
genetic personality with the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that,
starting from many, we are only one‟.

To be more than a simple sum of the parts: this is a formidable defy to USA.

BLACK INTO WHITE

„Morena‟, „nutty‟, „honeyed white‟, „tanned‟, „cinnamon‟, „chocolate‟, „sararah‟,

„copper‟, „sun burned‟, „waxed‟, „brown‟, „half black‟, „honeyed‟, „parahyba‟, „burned
rose‟, „freckled‟, „toasted‟, „swarthy‟… In the National Survey by Samples of
Domiciles (PNAD) of 1976 the censors of IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and
Statistics) registered 136 different answers to the request of self-declaration of
color/race of the interviewed.

The result was interpreted by intellectuals and activists of organizations of the

black movement as a proof of the insidious effects of a disseminated (but subterranean)
racism that would live in the Brazilian society. The blacks don´t want to assume their
true identity, hiding it under the blanket of uncountable euphemisms: this was the
diagnosis that they reached starting not from any relevant evidence, but from a pre-
existent interpretation of the Brazilian history and of the social relations of the country.

This diagnosis had consequences. Few after a decade, organizations of the black
movement deflagrated a civic and educative campaign to persuade the blacks to declare
in the census of 1991, their true color/race. The principal instrument of the initiative
was an outdoor of a beautiful young black woman and claiming: “What is your color?
Answer with good s(c)ense. Do not let your color pass in white‟. The idea was to take
the opportunity of the census to confer visibility to the blacks since in the vision of the
promoters of the campaign this group had virtually been eradicated from the national
political scenario. In the end, the aim was to promote an identity rectification.

Censes have multiple utilities. Less visible, but not less important, than its
administrative function are their identity functions. In the system of racial classification
of the American census, as a reflex of the one drop rule, there is not a multiracial
category. The biological fact of miscegenation and the cultural notion of miscegenation
are officially banned. The system of classification of the Brazilian census is doubly
distinguished from the American one. Firstly, the concept of race appears as equal to
color, which signs absence of objectivity. Secondly, there is a category expressively
designated to shelter the persons who identify themselves as mixed. This category
appears under the curious label of „browns‟ (pardo) and has nothing of peripheral: in the
drawer of the browns almost two fifties of the population is classified.

Neither whites, nor blacks: the idea of an intermediary category, mixed, sends to
the formation of the Brazilian national identity. Haddock Lobo, organizer of the census
of Rio de Janeiro in 1849 rejected to insert an item about color in the survey because he
considered odious the racial classifications. The first national census was carried out in
1872 and introduced this type of classification using the categories of whites, blacks,
browns and caboclos (the slang for Amerindians). The following census of 1890 kept
the pattern but substituted the terms „brown‟ and „caboclo‟ to mestiço (mixed).

The elites of the Empire of Brazil interpreted their mission as a creation of a

modern civilization – which means, European – in the tropics. But Brazil could never
occupy a detached place in the concert of the nations while it was a country of blacks.
The dilemma found solution in the „whitening‟. The action started early, years before
the proclamation of Independence, when the government of D. João VI financed the
immigration of some hundreds of Swiss and German colonizers, who founded the city
of Nova Friburgo. The new city, in the proximities of Rio de Janeiro should contribute
to change the racial panorama of the headquarters of the court. Half a century after, the
promotion of the immigration of European workers to coffee was largely justified as a
decisive step in the racial reform of the country.

The idea of civilizing by a massive transference of whites got explicit in 1810,

even before the arrival of the royal family, by the mulatto José da Silva Lisboa, the
viscount of Cairu, who wanted to reduce the growth of the black and mixed population
after the end of the traffic of slaves. José Bonifácio de Andrada disagreed with Cairu
about the deleterious nature of mixing but he agreed with the embryonic project of
whitening. Soon after the Independence and aiming to influence the Constitutional
Assembly, he proposed a gradual suppression of slavery and the governmental stimulus
to the interracial marriages which would produce the so desired whitening of the
Brazilians.

Bonifácio, with his interracial marriages, was an exception. In general, mixing

was not an objective but a disagreeable intermediate step toward whitening. The goal
defined by the Empire of Brazil was very vivid in 1911 when João Batista Lacerda,
director of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, presented to the I International
Congress of Races in London a thesis that prophesied a parallel extinction of the mixed
and of the black race in Brazil in the beginning of the XXI century. This idea was
dominant two decades after, when Edgard Roquette-Pinto, anthropologist and anti-
racialist, rival of the Arianist Oliveira Viana, foresaw that in 2012 blacks and Indians
would have disappeared from the country and the mixed would represent only one fifth
of the population.

However, the Brazilian society didn´t incline to the direction imagined by the
imperial elites. The census revealed that it didn´t occur any whitening, but something
that could be named as brownization. The census of 1900 and 1920 eliminated the racial
item, in the second case under the argument that „the answers hid great part of the truth‟.
Such item returned in the census of 1940, together with the word brown (pardo),
delineating the pattern that would be conserved until the XXI century. Only in 1970 the
census didn´t include a racial item.

In 1940, 63.4% of the Brazilians declared to be white, while 14.6% self-declared

blacks and 21.2% as browns. In 2000, the parcels of whites and blacks had fallen to
53.7% and 6.2% respectively, while the parcel of browns had grown to 38.5%. In only
six decades the participation of the whites in the total of the population reduced more
than 15% and of the blacks, more than 57%. In the same time interval the participation
of the browns improved in almost 82%. Obviously, these trajectories can be explained
in part by the continuity of the process of miscegenation of the Brazilian society.
However, the dramatic nature of these changes can´t be a result of only this single fact.

As it was noticed by the employees of the census of 1920 the answers given to
the surveyors are somehow molded by the predominant conceptions and ideologies in
each given historic moment. In the second half of the XX century, a significant part of
the Brazilians stopped to identify itself as black and chose the identity of brown and
another part, although smaller, stopped to identify itself as white and also chose the
option brown. The migration of the answers of the two polar categories to the
intermediate category shows the failure of the project of the imperial elites but puts in
evidence that whitening is not the true difficulty that the organizations of the black
movement have to face to confer visibility to the blacks.

In the idea proposed by the racial thinking of the XIX century, brown was the
product of the miscegenation of the races white and black. The argument used in the
census of 1890 to substitute the word by „mestiço‟ was that the category could not be
rigorously applied to the product of miscegenation between whites and Indians and
between Indians and blacks. The statistical success of the category of brown in the
second half of the XX century has no relation to the meaning of the word or the
meaning originally given to it. This success reflects, as the dozens of creative
expressions of the interviewed people of PNAD of 1976, the paucity of the racial
identities in Brazil and the valorization of an intermediate identity that is not essentially
racial. It is impossible to understand this without studying the failure of the project of
whitening of the imperial elites, which ruined down with the kicks of the anti-racist
thinking of the sociologist Gilberto Freyre.

Miscegenation as a solution

Arthur de Gobineau, one of the founders of the scientific racism, lived in Brazil
less than a year from 1869 and 1870, contrary to his interests, as the diplomatic
representative of France and became friend of the emperor D. Pedro II. The theories in
fashion in Europe about the hierarchy of the races were seeded in Brazil with him, in the
winter of slavery and in the time of the debate that prepared the European immigration
in large scale to the coffee complex of São Paulo.

The institute of slavery made the racial theories a superfluous item in the Empire
of Brazil. The differences among people were defined by property, particularly the
property of slaves. The primary distinction, between free men and slaves, and the
secondary distinction, between free owners and free non-owners, were enough to the
social order. The slaves were legally able to buy their freedom as they could save some
money in personal works during free times. It was obviously a high barrier to overcome,
but many slaves reached it and many ex-slaves bought and had other (black) slaves.
But as the end of slavery approached, the problem of the differences was put in new
terms, opening space for the diffusion of the scientific racism.

The racial thinking gave impulse, more than other aspect, to the action of
massive immigration of Europeans. Under a direct order of D. Pedro II, Gobineau wrote
in Sweden, three years after leaving his position in Rio de Janeiro, „L´emigration au
Brésil: l´empire du Brésil à l´exposition universelle de Vienne‟, an essay destined to
present Brazil as an attractive destination to Scandinavian immigrants. The key word is
Scandinavian: the French guy, scared with the recent fires of the Commune of Paris, did
not only think in whites, but especially in a strong, laborious people without
revolutionary ideas.

The theme of miscegenation soon reached a central position in the civilizing

project of the Brazilian elites in the transition of the XIX and XX centuries. The doctor
and anthropologist Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, who was dedicated to the problems of
public health and registered many ethnologic aspects of the black culture, didn´t admit
miscegenation, since the three races that composed the Brazilian population were in
distinct phases of the biological evolution. The mixture, as he argued, would generate
physically and mentally disabled.

Euclides da Cunha qualified the mixed as a strong man, but also considered
them disequilibrated. His opinion, expressed in Os Sertões in 1902, is coincident to
Nina Rodrigues: „the extreme miscegenation is a retrocession. The Indo-European, the
black and the Brazilian-Guarani or Tapuia reflect different evolutionary stages that
border one to each other and crossing them obliterates the qualities of the first and
stimulates the revival of the primitive attributes of the others‟.

The degeneration by miscegenation is one of the argumentative nucleus of

Portraits of Brazil, the masterpiece of Paulo Prado, published in 1928, that defines
sadness as the singular hallmark of the national character. The sad people of Prado
emanated from the inaugural luxury, which means, the unions of pure animalism
between lascivious colonizers and sensual naked Indians, at first, and after between the
same colonizers and black Africans of an infantile passivity.

If in Prado miscegenation constituted an irremediable original sin, to many

people it represented a practical difficulty of distinction in the daily life. Around the
decade of 1930, the doctor and anthropologist José Bastos de Ávila, high employee of
the Institute of Educational Researches of Rio de Janeiro, tried to solve the pressing
problem of identifying the black and the white students. He suggested using the index of
Lapicque. Invented by the French Louis Lapicque in 1906, the index would give a
ration between the arms and other body parts and would give a doubtless racial
classification. However, even though this looked more scientific than comparing the
type of hair or the format of nose and lips, this index clamorously failed in tests carried
out by him in hundreds of children.

The predominance of the scientific racism was large but not absolute. The doctor
and psychiatric Juliano Moreira, black from Bahia of a poor family and director of the
National Hospital of Bedlamites from 1903 to 1930, gave opposition to the hegemonic
points of view that associated the degeneration to racial constitution. He related
degeneration to factors such as sanitary and schooling conditions, alcoholism and
syphilis, pointing ways to a psychiatric thinking free of the prejudice of race. Moreira
took part in the sanitary movement, which had Roquette-Pinto as an exponent person
and who was a pioneer of the rural ethnography and implacable criticizer of the notion
that the problems of the country came from racial causes. In the traces of the sanitary
movement, the writer Monteiro Lobato invented Jeca Tatu that appeared as a metaphor
of the chronically ill rural mixed man, but was converted into a victim of the Brazilian
defeats in the fields of health and education.

Manoel Bomfim, also a doctor, but devoted mainly to the cause of popular
education, was one of the pioneers of the criticism against the racialist thinking. In his
book „Latin America: Problems of Origin‟, published in 1905, written in France under
the influences of the liberal Walter Bagehot, he denounced the scientific racism as a
vomiting sophism of egoism, a hypocrite mask of cheap science and cowardly applied
to the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Such words caused him a noisy polemics
with Sílvio Romero, a convict herald of the project of whitening and an intellectual of
great prestige at that time.

The anthropology of Franz Boas early echoed in Brazil, breaking the racial
dogma. The ideas of Boas as well as the thesis of the geographer Friedrich Ratzel can be
found in the book „The Brazilian National Problem‟ of the republican Alberto Torres.
The collection with articles published in the Jornal do Commercio in 1912 and a
pronounced speech in the Brazilian History and Geography Institute (IHGB) had this
text: „The idea of race is the one most abusively applied among us. The number of pure
races is very restricted. Only few persons, nowadays, can be considered as true
specimens of a race, virgins of any miscegenation. The modern man results much more
directly from the environment he lives and principally from the surrounding society
than any congenital impulses of his race. Brazilians, our patriotic love must surround in
an equal and complete fraternity, the descendants of Portuguese, blacks, Indians,
Italians, Spanish, Germans, Slavs, of the all the other peoples that form our nation. We
have only to recognize them as men, as our similar, beings of the same nature and of the
same spirit to whom our country had always opened doors and souls.‟

Gilberto Freyre had, however, something as an antiracial tradition before him.

However, his books went much further and developed a singular identity function.
Through them, Brazil moved from one paradigm to another, passing a page of its
intellectual history. The transition as well as the debt of the sociologist from
Pernambuco to the sanitarians is stamped in the preface to the first edition of Casa
Grande e Senzala: „I saw one time after more than three complete years away from
Brazil, a group of national mariners – mulattos and cafuzso – coming from I don´t
remember if from São Paulo or Minas and walking in the soft snow of the Brooklyn.
They gave me the impression of a caricature of men. And came to my memory the
phrase of a book of an American traveler to Brazil that I had just read: the fearfully
mongrel aspect of most of the population. Miscegenation resulted in that. Nobody told
me that, as in 1929 Roquette-Pinto and the Arianists of the Brazilian Congress did, that
they were not simply mulattos or cafuzos the persons that I judged to represent Brazil,
but sick mulattos and cafuzos‟.

Soon after this part, Freyre attributes to Franz Boas his comprehension that there
was no intrinsic problem with the mulattos and cafuzos. In the library of Freyre, in the
suburb of Apipucos in Recife, there are the portraits of him, of the diplomat Manuel de
Oliveira Lima and of Boas. In the beginning of the years 1920, under the influence of
Oliveira Lima, Freyre took part in the courses of Boas at Columbia University. The
contact was kept through a common German friend, Rüdiger Bilden who travelled to
Brazil receiving a scholarship in 1926. Boas taught Freyre to distinguish race from
culture.

The learning was hard and tortuous. When he was a student of the American
anthropologist, Freyre wrote to Oliveira Lima suggesting him to read the eugenicist
Madison Grant, the rival of Boas who helped to write the anti-mixing law of Virginia.
At those times, the young student was aligned to the idea of whitening and in his MSci
dissertation he doesn´t mention Boas. According to Pallares-Burke, in „A Victorian in
the Tropics‟, the change occurred during the brief stage of Freyre at Oxford University
from 1922 to 1923, when he took contact to the books of Chesterton and with a book of
the Greek-Irish Patrick Lafcadio Hearn about miscegenation in the French Caribbean.
 Roquette-Pinto and Bilden concluded the intellectual meeting of Freyre with
Boas. Reading his texts of the end of the years 1920, the guy from Pernambuco
definitely ruptured with the ideas of Grant. Reading the articles of Bilden at the same
moment, he identified the theoretical keys for an interpretation of the Brazilian society.
Casa Grande e Senzala is the fruit of this long learning and an unequal tool in the
diffusion of the antiracist anthropology in Brazil.

It is a double way. In his Anthropology of Modern Life of 1930, Boas wrote,

attributing the interpretation to information from Bilden: „the perception of race among
whites, blacks and Indians in Brazil is totally different from the way we do it. In the
coast, there is a big population of blacks. The miscegenation with Indians is too marked.
The discrimination among these three races is much less than among us and the social
obstacles to miscegenation or social advancement are not noticeable.‟

This is exactly the main idea of Casa Grande e Senzala. Freyre never hid the
violence of slavery, an accusation that was directed against him in the post-war. In his
first classic book the minutely exposed the sufferings that the slaves were submitted
and, foremost, he ruptured with the scientific racism and its paradigm of the racial
superiority of the whites. Published in 1933 at the same moment Hitler ascended to
power, Casa Grande e Senzala signalized the divergence between Brazil and the
predominant racism of the West in the first half of the XX century.

Freyre didn´t reject the existence of human races. He simply considered the
races as a biological factor. He strongly refused the notion of a racial hierarchy and,
foremost, he refused the idea that the races should remain separated. The Brazil of
Freyre gravitates around the relationship among the polygamous white owners and a
heterogeneous mass made by the slaves of the senzalas and by the aggregate persons
who lived as vassals from the Great Houses. With the time, the sociologist refined his
observations on miscegenation and recognized the strong presence of freed slaves and
the predominance of women among them. In the evolution of his thinking, from Casa
Grande e Senzala to New World in the Tropics, published in 1971, he understood that
miscegenation occurred even more intensely in the universe of free men and women. As
resumed the historian Manolo Florentino, in a certain phrase: „we result from the
meeting of poor lovers‟.

Sex has a detached place in the classic book of Freyre, but it is wrong to
interpret it as en eulogy to biological miscegenation. In Casa Grande and Senzala,
miscegenation appears as a historic and cultural happening of multiple senses. The
decisive part is: „All Brazilians, even the white with blond hair, brings in soul, or both
in soul and body, the shadow, or at least a dot, of the Indian or the black. In tenderness,
in the excessive gesture, in the Catholicism in which our senses are pleasured, in music,
in walking, in speaking, in baby singing, in everything that is a sincere expression of
life, we all bring the mark of the black influence‟.
 To Freyre, the cultures of the different components of the Brazilian nation exist
in each one of the Brazilians and in this sense he expressed in the language of Sociology
the modernist ideal of nation.

Spite being a sociological pioneer, Freyre was part of a greater movement of

national revision and recreation. Only five years separate Casa Grande e Senzala from
the publication of Macunaíma, which was precedent and introduced a mixed hero in the
imaginary of the country. It was not by occasion that Manuel Bandeira celebrated the
book of Freyre in a poem of 1948 where he also joked with the Arian madness of
Oliveira Viana.

In the intellectual history of Brazil, there is before and after Casa Grande e
Senzala. Its conceptual revolution supported to overcome the image of the country
elaborated by the imperial elites who saw in the black population the principal obstacle
to the construction of a modern civilization in the tropics. The conceptual fracture
opened by the sociology of Freyre inspired historians and social scientists bringing to
surface a scenario of objects of study that were dug under the rubbishes of the racial
thinking. One single example, plentiful of meanings: in the Fear of Magic, an
investigation about the judicial persecution against the Mediumship religions, the
anthropologist Yvonne Maggie evidenced that the judges and lawyers involved in
process against the participants of candomblé shared the belief in magic and this affects
peoples of all colors, social classes and religious denominations in Brazil.

The mixed person in USA and in Brazil

Casa Grande e Senzala appeared less than one decade after the law of racial
integrity of Virginia, the most finished synthesis of the anti-mixing laws applied in
USA. The divergence was not exclusively between Brazil and USA: the project of
miscegenation circulated in the whole Latin America since 1925, year of publication of
The Cosmic Race, of the Mexican intellectual and politician José Vasconcelos.

Vasconcelos occupies a detached place among the realist ambitious doctrinaires

of the period still tumultuous when the powder of the Mexican Revolution was layering
in a bureaucratic and authoritative regime. Nationalist and vigorous defender of a
geopolitical alliance among the Latin American nations, Vasconcelos directed the
National University of Mexico, served as minister of education of the government of
Álvaro Obregón in the first half of the decade of 1920 and was a candidate for president
in 1929. Later, drafted by a combination of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, he
converted into an admirer of Hitler and of the Nazi racism.

The Cosmic Race is from a previous period, less shadowed, of his thinking and
suffered a direct influence of the experience of author in Brazil. In 1922 as a diplomat
from Mexico, Vasconcelos lived in many countries of South America and participated
in the commemoratives of the centenarian of the Brazilian independence. His book
narrates the impressions of these travels, prophecies the greatness of Latin America that
would be modernized by science and generate a refined civilization. He also announces
the appearance of the „fifth race‟, that cosmic race constituted by the Iberoamerican
racial mixture.

The conception of history of Vasconcelos was vicious with the idea of a conflict
between the Iberian and the Anglo-Saxon civilizations. The Iberian fall and humiliation
were fruits of the non-union of the nations of this origin, which he contrasted with the
geopolitical alliance of the Anglo-Saxon nations. The restoring of the lost glory after the
epopee of the Great Navigations would not be done from Spain, but from the New
World. The fundament of this restoring – our ethnical mission – could be found in the
union of all lineages of Latin America, through miscegenation.

The miscegenation in Vasconcelos is a mystic tool of his anti-American

ideology, or, precisely, his anti-Anglo-Saxon ideology. Gilberto Freyre never nourished
something similar and never saw in the horizon any kind of „ethnical mission‟.
However, deeply, to him, miscegenation had a positive spiritual value. In USA, in the
contrary, miscegenation meant degeneration and racial contamination. The law of
Virginia of 1924 layered in politics and in legislation the idea of racial purity. In this a
prohibition was condensed – in USA, the mixed persons have no right to exist.

The principle of the separation among races was predominant, in general, in the
Anglo-Saxon imperial expansion. The biological fact of miscegenation of course
occurred, in bigger or smaller scale, in all the places, but it was not incorporated to the
identity sphere. In South Africa, due to a particular history of region of the Cape, a
complete category of mixed – the colored – reached legal statute. However, the
exception confirms the rule: legalizing the colored served to surround miscegenation by
an iron ring, fixing it in the sphere of the exceptionality.

In USA, large miscegenation occurred. However, even a peripheral admission of

mixed was denied. The word miscegenation, bringing a connotation of bad luck, was
introduced in the English language by Americans during 1863, during the Civil War, an
event that brought the perspective of the end of slavery and therefore the augmentation
of interracial unions. Before the war, the rare abolitionists who saw something positive
in the mixture of races used the word amalgamation.

The creators of miscegenation were two journalists who defended slavery, in the
course of an electoral low blow to sabotage the reelection of Abraham Lincoln. These
two guys used the word in a title of a pamphlet falsely attributed to the abolitionists in
order to associate the Republican Party with that unpopular idea. During the campaign
that ended with the victory of Lincoln, the republicans effectively believed in the
artifice and some friction occurred between the direction of the Party and the minority
group of radical abolitionists.
 The American census included the word mulatto, but it was abandoned after
1920 when the one drop rule got generalized in laws and consciences. Anti-mixing laws
existed in the colonies of the South since the XVII century, with the principal function
of regulating inheritances. These laws, restored after the end of the Reconstruction,
turned into bastards the unions between blacks and whites, cancelled their rights to heir.
Due to this the dynamics of racial formation and of class formation was, in this crucial
American case, basically the same.

The bipolar racial model of USA converts the mixed from unions of blacks and
whites into blacks. Inside the most notable effects there is the happening of passing, a
strategy of identity re-invention under which a person gets „passed‟ as an integrant of a
social group where they wouldn´t normally be admitted. As a rule, in the American
racial passing, a mixed person, socially classified as black, recreates their identity as
white. One historical example is the one of Walter Francis White, executive-in-chief of
NAACP from 1929 to 1955, a mixed with 27 white ancestors of 4 th generation and 5
black, but defined as black due to the one drop rule. Blond, with blue eyes and clear
skin, White passed as white during his investigations on lynches in the South against
blacks.

White carried out the passing by safety reasons in the course of a political action.
But, in general, the strategy was used as a manner of social, professional and personal
integration to the dominant group. This was the case of several creoles of medium class
of New Orleans, hit by the worsening of segregation at the end of the XIX century. One
of them, the famous cartoonist George Herriman, whose parents were classified as
mulattos in the census of 1880, moved with his family to Los Angeles, where he passed
as white with Greek origin. To hide his hair, Herriman never took off his hat in public.
Another famous créole of New Orleans who made the passing was Anatole Broyard, a
literature criticizer of the New York Times in the middle of the XX century who was
pictured in a biography written by his daughter Bliss and probable fountain of
inspiration to the character Coleman Silk, of Philip Roth, in The Human Stain.

Passing could be a short adventure as many mixed that passed by whites to

frequent segregated restaurants or stand for many years and even a whole life. To
transfer to other city, to rupture with old friends, to substitute the name, to destroy
personal documents, to hide from the kids (either temporary or permanently) the true
familiar history were tactics used by many passers. Of course, there is no precise
demographic estimation of such happening. When he directed NAACP, White affirmed
that „each year, around 12 thousands of blacks of clear skin disappear into the white
universe‟. In post-war, an academic estimation put the annual number of passers in the
values around 2.5 and 2.750 and the total of white blacks in USA as around 110
thousands.

Parallel to passing in real life, it was developed in USA a peculiar literary

tradition that takes this theme in inspiration. One of the first novels in this line is Clotel
or the President´s Daughter, of William Wells Brown, published in 1853, that put in
fiction the life of a supposed daughter of Thomas Jefferson with the young slave Sally
Hemings, she herself a mixed woman. In fact, according to some trustable narratives,
Jefferson had many bastard kids with Hemings, among who were the girls Beverly and
Harriet who was passed as whites in the decade of 1820 to escape from slavery. But the
explosion of both passing and the literary stories occurred in the transition from the XIX
to the XX century, following the anti-mixing laws and the diffusion of clusters of the
terrorist organization Ku Klux Klan. The first Ku Klux Klan was formed in Tennessee
in 1865 by veterans of the Confederated forces and inspired similar movements in other
Southern states. The Reconstruction suppressed them, but in 1915 a second Ku Klux
Klan appeared as infiltrated in many places and it lasted until the Second World War.

Frances Harper, black, abolitionist, poet and journalist, wrote in 1892 Iola
Leroy, a novel that condemned the strategy of passing. The mixed Charles W. Chesnutt
pictured the passing with empathy and softness in The House Behind the Cedars, in
1900. In 1929 it was published Passing, of Nella Larsen, a talented mixed writer of the
Reborn of Harlem. Some years later, it appeared the famous journal Imitation of Life, of
Fannie Hurst, adapted twice for the cinema.

In a country that still identifies meticulously the race of the citizens the passing
goes working as an identity strategy. According to an extrapolation analysis on the data
of the census of 2000, per year, around 35 thousand and 50 thousand young adults
previously identified by their parents as blacks redefined themselves as whites or
Hispanics. In the opposite direction, due to the reverse discrimination policies, it has
been registered cases of whites that passed by blacks. One of these cases, that reached
the tribunals, was the one of the brothers Paul and Philip Malone.

The Malones defined themselves as whites when they were candidates to work
as firemen in Boston in 1975 but were rejected. Two years later, the Department of
Firemen of the city applied a program of affirmative action judicially imposed they re-
showed themselves as blacks and were admitted. One decade after, in an occasion of a
promotion, somebody denounced them as racial impostors. In the end of a judicial
battle, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts emitted a verdict contrary to the brothers.
The verdict condemned them not because they chose to identify themselves as blacks,
but due to evidences that they acted in bad faith. In an article published during the
course of the polemics a proposal emerged to supervision the policies of reverse
discrimination. The author defended the introduction in the birth documents a racial
identification based on the race of the parents and those „who falsely affirm the race
shall be object of criminal penalties‟.

The biological amplitude of miscegenation in Brazil was clearly intuited by

sociologists and historians, since the beginning of the XX century, but only a few
decades ago the tools of molecular genetics and population genetics offered a more
precise delimitation of this happening, in demographic terms. One research that soon
became famous was conducted by the geneticist Sérgio Danilo Pena, of the Federal
University of Minas Gerais. The research investigated a representative sample of the
population classified as white in the Brazilian census. As expected, it was found a large
majority of masculine lineages of European origin, but feminine lineages more
distributed: 33% Amerindians, 28% Africans and 39% Europeans.

In the words of Pena: „the results obtained show the immense majority, probable
more than 90% of the masculine lineages of the white Brazilians is of European origin,
while the majority (60%) of the feminine lineages is of Amerindian or African origin‟.
In the same direction, extrapolating from information of the census, the geneticist
estimated that among the 90.6 millions of Brazilians classified as white in 2000, there
were around 30 millions of African descendants and another 30 millions of Amerindian
descendants from the side of the mother.

In Portuguese, there is not a word equivalent to the term passing. Brazil never
knew anti-mixing laws neither the one drop rule, a needful complement to those laws.
The reality of miscegenation reflected in the incorporation of the mixed in the national
image, a process that has as mark the period of political and intellectual transition
between the Week of Modern Art of 1922 and the publication of Casa Grande e
Senzala.

Nina Rodrigues already protested against the repression to the candomblés, but it
was with the modernism that the intellectuals went back to the religion of African roots
elaborated by the slaves in Brazil. At that time, it started a trajectory that culminated in
the transformation of the cult to the orixás in a multinational massive occurrence.
However, the novelty of the years 1920 was the appearance of umbanda starting from a
small group of medium class spiritualists in Rio de Janeiro. This new syncretic religion
associated the Catholic saints and the orixás in the mold of the French kardecism and
refused the black magic of candomblé and its rituals of animal sacrifices.

A purist interpretation of the racialists saw in umbanda solely the disfiguration

and whitening of the African cults. However, this opinion is blind to the grater horizon
of changes in the Brazilian religion panorama that abrades the traditional Catholicism
and introduces a medium continuum between the extreme poles of kardecism and
candomblé. As the sociologist Antônio Risério explains, it is more appropriate to
recognize umbanda as modern fusion of spiritualism in the fire of the lands of
macumba.

In the big domains of culture, the conversion of miscegenation as a defining

trace of the Brazilian nationality had many repercussions. The samba articulated as the
musical genus in the beginning of the XX century in Rio de Janeiro, e Deixa Falar, the
pioneer samba school was created in the hill of Estácio by Ismael Silva in 1928. Years
later, the journal Mundo Sportivo sponsored the inaugural show of schools of samba.
Football converted in a national massive sport in the years 1920 and in 1923, the team
of Vasco da Gama was the first club to hire black players. In 1929, the Nossa Senhora
da Conceição Aparecida, a saint mixed as the Brazilians was declared the patroness of
Brazil.
 This change was expressed under many ways. Feijoada, formerly had as an
original invention of the slaves, was transformed in a national dish. Capoeira, born
among the slaves, continuously repressed since the end of the XVIII century, written as
a crime in the penal code of 1890, got a Sports Code in 1928, an official academy in
1932, was officialized as a national sport in 1937 and declared as cultural immaterial
patrimony of Brazil in 2008. During the dictatorship of the New Estate, the terrains of
candomblé and umbanda were protected from the police. Three decades later, the gods
of candomblé were incorporated to the popular music and to the national electronic
media.

The president Getúlio Vargas, especially during the dictatorship of the New
Estate, made efforts to translate the miscegenation in the official language of the
national ideology. Samba schools and carnival parades started to receive public money
in 1935 when samba was exalted as a national style. In 1939, it was created the Day of
Race in 30th May destined to celebrate the Brazilian racial harmony. The criticism to
Casa Grande e Senzala, formulated in the post-war, presented the reconstruction of the
national identity around the idea of miscegenation as a fruit of Estate nationalism,
hiding that this process occurred before the ascension of Vargas to power and even
before the publication of the book of Freyre. Anyway, this movement signs a rupture
with the racial dogmas at that time.

According to dictionary, pardo (brown) can mean dirty, doubtful. In the course
of a study of racial identities and the imposition of binary categories in the census of
Latin America, a group of American researchers experimented to substitute the word
„pardo‟ (brown) to the option „moreno‟. In a questionnaire applied among inhabitants of
Rio das Contas, in the Diamantina Table, the option was marked not only by the self-
declared „pardos‟ but for almost half of the self-declared „whites‟ and half of the
previously declared „blacks‟. Few years after the publication of this research,
organizations of the black movement in Brazil engaged in the promotion of the idea that
browns and blacks should be classified as blacks and the blacks should look themselves
as „afro-descendants‟.

Freyre at Pelourinho

Florestan Fernandes believed that the intellectuals have a paper in the social
transformation and spite being a lecturer in the University of São Paulo he presented
himself as a Marxist political militant rather than an academic. In his sociology he was
eclectic and searched to be rigorous explaining that the sociologist doesn´t produce the
reality they live in, but, sometimes, help to understand it. The evaluation has its senses
but also distorts the vision a little bit, since the sociologist effectively creates realities.
 The thesis in Sociology of Florestan, defended in 1964, was published under the
title The Integration of the Blacks in a Society of Classes. The black emerged as a social
group clearly defined and the sociological mission was to explain the modes that
capitalism used to integrate the blacks into the society of classes. The work began in the
beginning of the decade of 1950 starting from a project financed by Unesco. Since the
antiracist declaration of 1950, the agency of UN intended to use Brazil as an illustration
of a society where the racial tension had been largely softened. Besides Florestan, other
social scientists such as Roger Bastide, Thales de Azevedo, Luís Costa Pinto and Oracy
Nogueira took part in this project.

In the perspective of the historic sociology of Florestan, a key to explain Brazil

could be found in the idea of incomplete modernization, which means, of permanence
of structural traces of the old order in the new order. This line of approaching conducted
him to see the black as the old slave, a view that highlights the economic exclusion and
the social prejudice, but doesn´t pay attention to a political construction of a racial
identity. Everything is his study occurs as if the black was a previous entity, an
uncontestable data from reality – contrary to the mixed that would be only an
ideological construction.

The studies of Florestan searched for incorporating the black in a Marxist

analysis of the Brazilian society of classes. The social inequality was his focus and he
evidenced that the abolition of slavery left the large mass of the old slaves to ostracism.
At the same time, in a line of argument separated from the principal points, he
postulated that Brazil is distinguished by a particular form of racism that is hidden and
that deny itself, but still discriminates. The idea converted in the paradoxical speech of
many organizations of the black movement to sustain that the Brazilian racism is
equivalent or even worse than the American racism with all the laws of segregation.

Casa Grande e Senzala and The Integration of Blacks in the Society of Classes
are two books that occupy two distinct points in the trajectories of trials to interpret the
formation of the Brazilian society – and it seems reasonable to study both Freyre and
Florestan as speakers of the crosses of their own times. But in the context of the
emergence of racialist policies, the first began a target and the second, a certain archer.
The heralds of the new policies, originated from USA, painted the sociologist of
Pernambuco as a voice of a conservative reaction and used the books from the one of
São Paulo to sustain initiatives radically divergent from his revolutionary beliefs.

The publication of the book of Florestan inaugurated a new period of a tireless

ideological revision of Casa Grande when it got lost the view of the difference between
miscegenation and the ideology of social harmony. The theoretical confusion resounded
even in the writing of the sophisticated analyst Lilia Schwarcz who, although
recognizing the double reality of miscegenation and of an invisible racism, saw in
Freyre the sociologist who constructed the myth an in Fernandes the one who destroyed
it. Thus, by a expedition purely theoretical, the identity project of miscegenation
converted in myth, while another identity project – the one of the race – reached the
statute of reality.

In the declaration of 1950 of Unesco, it was written that Brazil suffered less than
other nations the effects of racial prejudice and thus it was good to comprehend the
reasons of the harmony that exists in Brazil. Even recognizing the presence of racial
discrimination in Brazil, the Brazilianists of the middle of the XX century such as
Donald Pierson and Charles Wagley contrasted the American panorama, characterized
by great social mobility and unpenetrable barriers in the racial system, with the
Brazilian one, marked by obvious distances among social classes but with diffuse racial
frontiers. However, at the same time, in Brazil, a new sociological diagnosis started to
get body.

The contrast between the two countries was too obvious to be ignored, but the
sociologists of the post-war were decided to bomb Freyre and miscegenation that
seemed to them as representations of an unfair social order. The offensive was done by
importing bipolar racial categories from USA. The jump of the cat was carried out by
Oracy Nogueira, an ex-student of Pierson and affiliated to the Communist Party, in an
essay presented to the International Congress of the Americanists in 1954 in São Paulo.

Oracy distinguished the racial prejudices „of origin‟ in the American panorama
and „of mark‟ in the Brazilian one. The first had by reference the ancestry and was
materialized by the one drop rule. The reference in the second was hidden and
dissimulated and would be the appearance. In the terms of USA, the mechanisms of
segregation worked openly, establishing rigid lines of separation in the domains of law,
unions and urban space. The implicit Brazilian racism did not create a rigid segregation
but was always present and appeared in stressful situations. A crucial consequence of
the distinction was that the black Americans got conscience of the oppression and
reacted to it, while in Brazil, in the contrary, the racism deposited in the core of the
social relations and was passively incorporated by the blacks.

However, all the trustable explanation of Oracy was based on a total silent denial
of miscegenation. The sociologist could only see blacks and whites, both in USA and
Brazil. His political message is that the Brazilian racism is very cruel as it tends to sleep
the blacks. Deeply, he renounced to an ideal of a non-racialist society in the name of a
hypothetical contribution to the blacks for the fight of the exploited against the capitalist
order. To reach to the desired conclusion as noticed by Ali Kamel in We Are not Racist,
Oracy deviated the fact that in USA, as in any other place, the deflagrating light of
racial prejudice could only the mark (the appearance), as evidenced by the contrast of
the occurrence of passing.

After Oracy, it was time to Fernando Henrique Cardoso to use the imported
categories of USA to write Color and Social Mobility in Florianópolis (1960) and
Capitalism and Slavery in Southern Brazil (1962). As Florestan did, Fernando Henrique
moved around the double modernization/past and highlighted the exclusionary echoes
of slavery. In his present works in the South of Brazil, he didn´t see a degree of colors,
but only blacks and whites. The sight of the intellectual is a sense derived from the
theory: one can only see what the conceptual glasses allow to do.

The theory said the capitalist modernization tended to create a society of classes
but the old manners survived as obstacles and conserved the patterns of inequalities
typical to feudal societies. Wrongly, the young sociologist imagined that the racial
prejudice was inheritance of slavery and not a particular political and intellectual
construction. In this line, he thought that the abolition of slavery reinforced the previous
racial prejudice, converting it in a tool for the maintenance of a superiority of the whites
over the blacks. The prejudice reinforced the social exclusion of the blacks, avoiding or
lowering the total incorporation of this group into the society of classes.

Kamel called attention to an internal oscillation in the ideas of Fernando

Henrique. In the stopped economy of Florianopolis in which poor blacks and whites
experienced a similar insertion in the labor world, the racism would act as a
compensatory element to sign the superiority of the firsts. In the more dynamic cities,
racism would come from the economic superiority of the whites and would serve to
reinforce such inequality. „Which means, there are no exits, since opposite situations
provoke the same result‟.

Without any convincing argument, Fernando Henrique explicitly denied the

hypothesis that in Brazil the dominant prejudice is the one of class, not of race. But
either he or Florestan stood faithful to the idea that the social exclusion of the blacks
derived essentially from economic and historic factors: slavery and the way the
abolition was processed. Writing years later, the sociologist Carlos Hasenbalg ruptured
with this idea.

Discrimination and Racial Inequalities in Brazil, initially a thesis defended in

USA, was published in 1979. The work of Hasenbalg, who was born in the context of
the emergence of the American multiculturalism, figures as the first sophisticated
statistical study of the relationship between race and poverty. Basically, the action tried
to prove that the inequalities of income and education in Brazil are strongly related to
skin color rather than social classes. “Poverty has color and race” – the adage of many
organizations of the Brazilian black movement originated from a piece of sociology that
was intended to be empirical.

There were only few things really genuine in the work of Hasenbalg. The spirit
that animated him was the opposition to the myth of miscegenation, whose effects
served to explain the political lethargy of the blacks. Before and after, the sociologist
referred to Freyre as the responsible of the creation of the most formidable ideological
weapon against the anti-racist activists, which was the concept of racial democracy.
However, as he concluded that the inequalities observed between blacks and whites
were not inheritances of slavery, but fruits of prejudice and discrimination, he was who
sculpted a formidable ideological weapon to the leaderships devoted to import to Brazil
the American policies of racial reverse discrimination.
 From Florestan and Fernando Henrique Cardoso to Carlos Hasenbalg there was
a transition. To the firsts, capitalism and social classes were the decisive categories,
while to the last one, the only existing thing are races and discrimination. Throughout
this transition, a polar taxonomy of American inspiration got consolidated. The option
to such taxonomy should not be understood simply as mimicking neither as a simple
application of a sociological method. Yvonne Maggie observed that, in The Integration
of the Blacks to the Society of Classes, Florestan used the words black and white
according to the desires of the black activists and their speakers.

The academic offensive of three decades against Freyre buried what he

effectively wrote under thick layers of utilitarian interpretations. The main accusation,
repeated as a mantra, acquired the shape of an unarguable truth: the sociologist of
Pernambuco was the creator or, at least, the principal broadcaster of the racial
democracy. Not only ideological adversaries of Freyre but also analysts that recognized
the singular qualities of his sociology believe in that. The expression, however, doesn´t
appear a single time in Casa Grande e Senzala and doesn´t occupy a relevant place in
the thoughts of Freyre.

The formula „ethnical and racial democracy‟ appears in a small text of 1945 and
the ethnical democracy appears in a preface of 1954 where Freyre defended himself
from the affirmation that he hid racism in Brazil and that his diagnosis came from a
comparison to virulent forms of prejudice of other countries. The first essay where he
literally refers to a „racial democracy‟ was published in a British review of 1949. He
never affirmed the existence of a racial democracy in Brazil, but rather he pointed this
as an ideal to be followed.

The racial democracy as desirable goal receives several interventions of Freyre

but doesn´t appear as a significant concept in none of his principal works. In an
interview of 1980, provoked by the interviewer, the sociologist extended on the theme,
characterizing Brazil as the country more close to a racial democracy, but in the
sequence he emphasized the prevalence of blacks among the poor relating to the way
Brazil did his festive and rhetoric 13th May (day of abolition). The conclusion: there is
no pure democracy in Brazil: neither racial, nor social, nor political.

The interview had no effect. It was decided that Freyre was the speaker of an
idyllic racial democracy in the country. And that was an imperative to destroy this
myth so it could be possible to build over its ruins as conscience of race among the
black Brazilians. Soon before the translation of the thesis of Hasenbalg, appeared Black
into White, of Thomas Skidmore. The Brazilianists of the XX century were inspired in
Brazil to condemn the racial segregation of USA. Skidmore was inspired in USA to
attack, with a mixture of violence and disinformation, the Brazilian national identity.
The sociology of Florestan and Fernando Henrique illuminated significant aspects of the
social engines of Brazil. The history from Skidmore illuminated only the emerging
political force of the American multiculturalism. As it was already observed, in it was
transparent the idea that it would be intolerable that any country could have any form of
pride of identity that could turn it superior to USA.

Skidmore went back his batteries against miscegenation, showing it as a failure

of the previous project of whitening and formulated a curious comparison between the
blacks of Brazil and of USA, concluding that the firsts were in a worse position. These
two phrases of his book soon converted in discursive and intellectual keys of the
organizations of the black movements of Brazil.

The Yarn of Durban

The interventions of Skidmore and Hasenbalg are place in the point of origin of
the academic import of the bipolar categories of the American multiculturalism. In
universities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo it was created some centers for studies of
Afro-Brazilian culture and studies of racial relationships. Under the influx of
international finances, in general canalized by the Brazilian office of Ford Foundation,
they copied the model of the racialist movements of USA. The doors of the Estate
started to open in 1984, when the governor of São Paulo state, Franco Montoro, created
a council of participation and development of the black community, an initiative that
was copied by other states and several cities.

Universities, NGOs, public power. The triad of the new movement acquired a
more complex format in 1998 with the institution, by the president José Sarney, of an
advice for Afro-Brazilian issues in the Ministry of Culture. In the speech of
inauguration of his first government in 1995, Fernando Henrique Cardoso mentioned
the relevance of the racial question and in 20 th November of the tercentenary of the
death of Zumbi of Palmares he created an inter-ministerial task force for valorization of
the black population. The task force was composed by eight representatives of the civil
society, in fact, representatives of organizations of the black movement.

The federal policies of affirmative action with racial aspect started with the
national program of human rights in 13th May 1996. Further than actions against racism,
the program proposed to help the creation of councils of the black community in states
and cities, to support actions of positive discrimination of private companies and
develop affirmative action to access of blacks to professionalizing courses and
university courses. In his presidential speeches, Fernando Henrique Cardoso always
oscillated between the recognition of the value of miscegenation and the suggestion that
the skin color divided the nation in two polar groups. Due to this oscillation, the
initiatives of reverse discrimination didn´t prosper at that time. But they pointed a way
that later would have been followed.
 In the program of human rights, there was an item of big echoes and whose
relevance took some time to be realized. It was the order, dressed in quotidian
bureaucratic language: „Determine to IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and
Statistics) the adoption of the criteria to considerate the morenos, pardos (browns) and
blacks as integrants of the black population. Through this order, without any
explanation, it was cancelled to official effects the identity message sent by the citizens
at the time of the census.

The sociologist who became president, using something less than a decree,
symbolically blew up Gilberto Freyre. From that time one, if the wishes of the
government had taken a free course, the official Brazil would have left to recognize the
social reality of miscegenation. This crucial element of the program was not applied due
to internal resistances of IBGE. In the institute tasked of the public statistics, they united
those who wanted to preserve a central component of the Brazilian identity to those who
simply reacted to a threatening of breaking long historic series.

In the speech of installation of the task force group in 1996, Fernando Henrique
Cardoso said the Estate would never tolerate any form of racism, neither the „racism
destined to valorize the race that is being discriminated because this would also result in
a negative thing.‟ There was a tension between the presidential lines and the political
lines of the organizations of the black movements incorporated into the initiatives of the
program. The tension reached its highest point in the Conference of Durban. In the
meeting of UN, the positions of the Brazilian government were not in coincidence with
the proposals inscribed in the official document of the Brazilian delegation that was
concentrated in policies of reverse discrimination. The second program of human rights
and the national program of affirmative action started in 13 th May 2002 represented a
surrender of the government to the pressures of the organizations of the black
movement.

The new policies were aligned theoretically and practically to the Declaration
and to the Program of Action of Durban. If the first program used the word blacks, the
second one used Afro-descendants, a point of a large conceptual scope. Among the
goals of the second program it was mentioned the creation of funds for social repair
destined to finance policies of affirmative action, the implantation of the item race/color
in the public systems of demographic information and the review of didactic books to
rescue the history and the contribution of Afro-descendants for the construction of a
national identity. Finally, with the verb „propose‟ instead of the previous „determine‟,
IBGE was called to unify the blacks and browns in the contingent of the Afro-
descendant population.

The national program of affirmative action, instituted by decree, foresee the

adoption of percentages of goals of Afro-descendants of the commissioned jobs of the
superior direction and advise and the inclusion of a disposal of norms establishing the
minimum percentages of Afro-descendants in the hiring of companies and technicians
and consultants providing services to the federal government. To resume, Brazil was
mimicking, three decades after, the directives of Richard Nixon created under the
concept of black capitalism and added to them some portion of privileges in the high
jobs of Estate.

The government of Fernando Henrique resisted to the appeals of the racialist

organizations that had already disseminated and encrusted the adoption of racial quote
in universities. But there was the university autonomy and a way had been opened. In
the end of 2001, the State University of Rio de Janeiro adopted a system of racial quotes
to selection of candidates, creating a precedent that would echo in the next years in
other public institutions.

Between the governments of Fernando Henrique and Lula there is continuity and
rupture in the theme of racial policies. The continuity was expressed in the area of the
multiculturalist concepts that weren´t created in Brazil but in USA. The rupture was
expressed in the area of the political operation. The government of Lula conferred much
more autonomy to the racialist organizations inside the apparatus of the Estate. In the
inauguration of his first mandate, Lula created the special board for policies of
promotion of racial equality (Seppir), directly linked to the Presidency. Through this
organ, the racialist organizations negotiated consensus and printed guidelines with
impacts on many ministries.

In the representative democracies, the apparatus of the Estate is seen as an

impersonal and non-party administrative machine destined to support the execution of
government policies and the obedience to law. The golden rule is the separation
between the public sphere and the sphere of the private interests, from which take part
the pressure groups, the social movements and NGOs. This way, Seppir, idealized as a
cluster of organizations of the black movement and a factory of ideologies, defied this
rule.

The secret of the political efficiency of Seppir was in the political place it
occupied, acting as an Estate pole of articulation of the multiculturalist academics and
of the racialist activists of NGOs and social movements. This articulation was supported
by extended and diversified international connections, with the support of the finances
of Ford Foundation and of multilateral institutions. In that context, it was not relevant to
have a modest official budget.

Under the influx of Seppir, the racialist policies acquired a new scope. In the
scope of the ministry of education, they ordered a compulsory racial classification of the
students in all levels, motivated the adoption of systems of reverse discrimination for
the selection to public universities and the Program University for All (Prouni) was
created with clear racial cuts. In the ministry of health, the initiative of health to the
black population was implemented with vast identity echoes. In the ministry for the
rural development, the program of identification and delimitation of terrains of
Quilombos expanded much further than the areas effectively occupied by remnants of
the quilombos.
 The program conducted by Seppir was synthesized in the called Statute of Racial
Equality, a project of law proposed originally in 2003 by the senator Paulo Paim and
approved in the federal senate without debates as the Project of Law 6264 of 2005. The
5th article of the Brazilian constitution says: „all are equal facing law, without
distinctions of any nature‟. Without saying it, the Statute represented a new
constitutional column, as it virtually cancelled this article that is the central column of
the republican contract.

The Statute cancelled the principle of citizenship under which the citizens are
not distinguished according to criteria of race, religious beliefs of political opinion. It
determined the compulsory racial classification of all the people by the identification of
the term „race‟ in all the documents generated in the systems of health, education, work
and providence. The racial classification would not be based on categories of the census
but instead would consecrate as a juridical figure the Afro-Brazilians, a layer that
includes the self-declared blacks, niggers and browns. As in the Rwanda of the Belgians
or the apartheid of South Africa, the Brazilians would have an official label of race.

The racial layer of Afro-Brazilians generated by the Statute figured as a holder

of specific collective rights that would express by means of policies of reverse
discrimination in the public service, public universities and in the labor market in
general. A particular emphasis was carried out in the introduction of racial quote in the
exams of selection of candidates in the public universities and in the contracts of the
fund of financing the student of superior education. The racial preferences in the private
economy would be imposed by means of expeditions such as directed governmental
contracts of providers. In the terms of the Statute, it would be created a new political
and bureaucratic structure, the Councils for Promotion of Racial Equality in the federal,
state and city spheres. Such councils, financed by the Estate and composed by a joint
number of representatives of public power and organizations of the civil society
representing the Afro-Brazilian population, would concentrate particular governmental
powers and a large autonomy of action. They would have an aspect of being permanent
and deliberative and powers to formulate, coordinate, supervision and evaluate the
policies of fighting inequality and racial discrimination.

A new constitution – that was what the Statute aimed to be. Through its
disposals, the nation would not be the fruit of a political contract among equal citizens
but would be converted into a confederation of races. Articulated as a bipolar structure,
the confederation would have inside an Afro-Brazilian nation defined in law and an
implicit white nation. The concept of historic repair, directly extracted from the
Declaration of Durban, would guide the relations between the two national components
of Brazil.

The triumphant legislative march of the Statute was contained, at least partially,
by the criticisms that suffered from intellectuals, academic and activists after it was
approved in the senate. However, the project became a central flag of the racialist
organizations of the black movement of the multiculturalist NGOs. The diffusion of the
systems of quote to access public universities corroborated and stimulated the strategy
of enlarging the scope of this kind of reverse discrimination policy to the public
functionalism and the labor market in general.

Reflecting on the introduction of racial quote in universities, the sociologist

Isabel Lustosa mentioned the dilemma of a young niece that was studying to the
vestibular (the selection exams) of University of Brasília: „the policies of quotes
reduced drastically the number of places to those who weren´t included in one of the
listed categories so she had little chances to be selected. My niece is from the team of
the more dark of the family and has curly hairs, so she could easily assume his African
or Indian origin. However, she doesn´t want to be a candidate among the quote. She
never thought about herself as black or brown, but only as a common Brazilian girl of
medium class who wants to study in a public university, not only because the cost of a
private university would weigh in the familiar budget but also because she knows that
the public universities are better‟.

Nation, in the certain expression of Benedict Anderson, is an imaginary

community. The community of citizens is not equivalent to a community of races. The
first gives to all diverse identity experiences, either fluid or rigid, in the private sphere.
The second officially marks each person with a label of race, incarcerating their privacy
in an identity prison. In Brazil of the reaction against miscegenation, the niece of Isabel
Lustosa can only renounce to the label of black if she assumes the label of white. She
has no rights to be simply „a common Brazilian girl‟.

INDIO MUERTO, INDIO PUESTO (Dead Indian, deposed

Indian)

“Vale un potosí” (worths a potosi) in Spanish it means something that values a

fortune. Potosí, founded in 1546 in the altitude of 4090m in the Altiplano of High Peru
(today, Bolivia) as a mining city, had more than 160 thousands inhabitants in the
colonial epoch, being one of the biggest cities of the Americas. Between the XVI and
XVII centuries through the forced labor of Amerindians and African slaves, 45
thousands of tons of silver were extracted from its Cerro Rico, a richness that sustained
the adventure of the Spanish Habsburgs and went to the Dutch bankers, fertilizing the
floor over which the original capitalism raised.

The fortune of Potosi got exhausted in the XIX century, when the Bolivian
mining was fragmented in many centers and transited from silver to tin. One of these
centers was Pulacayo, around 130 km southwest at 3170m height. In the place, hit by
the winds that cross the Salar of Uyuni, a silver mine had been exploited until 1780,
when Indian warriors of the rebellion of Tupac Amaru II killed Spanish colonizers and
closed the mine. Tupac Amaru II was born as José Gabriel Condorcanqui in Cuzco. He
adopted the name of last Inca governor and governed the regions of Tungasuca and
Pampamarca in Peru in the name of the Spanish general-governor. In 1780, the leaded
an Indian rebellion that extended over the High Peru and was suppressed with his
capture and quartering. A legend says that the forgotten mine was re-discovered in 1833
by a Spanish colonizer who was benefited with the indications of an Indian woman and
founded the city of Pulacayo. The mine of silver of Huanchaca, opened in the
proximities half a century after, became the center of the Bolivian mining and the
support of the liberal Estate announced in the constitution of 1880.

Huanchaca was property of the Bolivian warlord and president Aniceto Arse
and, in the sequence, of Mortitz Hochschild, one of the three barons of the Bolivian
mining (the others were Simón Patiño and Carlos Victor Aramayo). Around the mine,
the first steam machines appeared in operation in the country and the silver financed the
construction of the first railway that linked Pulacayo to the port of Antofagasta, which
was annexed by Chile in 1879 at the time of the eclosion of the War of Pacific.

Hochschild bought the mine in 1927, drained the hot water and the gases that
inundated it and modernized it, getting a higher production. After about two decades in
1946 it occurred in Pulacayo an extraordinary congress of the federation of syndicates
of the mining workers of Bolivia (FSTMB), founded two years before, to decide about
its position regarding the deposed and murdered president Gualberto Villarroel López.
The directors linked to the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), the bigger
Bolivian party, insisted on they should support the exiled heirs of the president who was
the responsible for the legalization of the syndicates. But the executive-secretary Juan
Lechín Oquendo, who kept a close relation with the Trotskyites of the Revolutionary
Labor Party, convinced the majority to adopt the program of proletarian revolution,
expressed in the so-called Acts of Pulacayo. Six years later, the miners took the streets
of the cities of the Tableland and armed with bananas of dynamite, they deflagrated the
Bolivian National Revolution.

The Acts of Pulacayo are an application of the doctrine of permanent revolution

in the particular case of Bolivia. Bolivia was defined as an backward capitalist country
but where „it predominated qualitatively the capitalist exploitation and the other social
and economical formations constitute inheritances of our historic past.‟ That backward
country of an exporting economy controlled by the cartel of the magnates of tin
represented a simple bond of the worldwide capitalist chain. Such peculiarities
explained both the absence of a true bourgeoisie capable of „liquidating latifundium and
other pre-capitalist economic forms and the absence of a predominating proletarian
class in the national politics.

The way of the Revolution would be a consequence of those distinctive Bolivian

aspects. The small proletarian, with a nucleus formed by the miners, was called to lead
the exploited masses in a democratic revolution that would be transformed, along the
continuous process, in a proletarian revolution. The shadows of the dissident Bolshevik
Leon Trotski, murdered a few years before, flew over the syndicate congress reunited in
the heart of the Bolivian mining capitalism.

The Bolivian census of 1950 registered an Indian population of about 1.7

million, 63% of the total. The category of Indians was based on the mother language
and surrounded Quechuas, Aimaras, Chiquitanos and Guaranis. But the Acts of
Pulacayo passed away from the notion of ethnicity. In his language, the country was
dividede in a small dominant class defined as a feudal-bourgeoisie, in the proletarian
demographically minority and in a great and heterogeneous small bourgeoisie,
composed by small businessmen, small farmers, technicians, bureaucrats, artisans and
rural workers. The rural population summed almost 2 millions, about 74%, with a clear
predominance of Indians. There was no Indian question in the Acts of Pulcayo. The
miners were, according to the census, mostly mixed and Indians and they saw
themselves as miners and Bolivians, not as Aimaras nor Quechuas and even less as
Amerindians.

In the revolutionary program of FSTMB, the mass of the Indian population

figured under the labels of artisans and landsmen. In the march of the Revolution, the
vanguard class – the miners – should lead that small bourgeoisie. The word Indians
appears twice in the document. The first time was to say that „the workers should
organize rural syndicates and work together with the Indian communities‟. The second,
that, because they were analphabet, the Indians were excluded from elections that had
nothing as democratic. Under this aspect, the Acts of Pulacayo used the current
language of the country, which converted in official language with the National
Revolution. In a Bolivia of large Indian majority, they weren´t seen and didn´t see
themselves as political actors.

Throughout the second half of the XX century, Bolivia experienced deep social
and demographical changes. The urban population was multiplied by seven and reached
62% of the total. The Indians, - or collas, as defined by a combination of self-
identification with the mother tongue – represented 60% of the population in the census
of 2001, but half of them lived in the cities. Spanish, before and exclusive idiom of
whites and mixed, converted into the principal language of four fifths of the Bolivians
and among the Indians is as spoken as Quechua and Aimara. The total of speakers of
Indian languages became to 60% of the Spanish speakers and in the age-group of 13 to
18 year-old, to less than 43%. From 1976 to 2001, analphabetism among the Indians
reduced from 44% to 20%.

The Indian traditions blurred more quickly in the urban environment and among
the young. El Alto, the Indian city peripheral to La Paz had three thousands in 1950 and
outran 650 thousand, close to the population of the capital. The peripheral city, pulsing
center of the Bolivian social movements, works as a political and cultural link of the
triangle constituted by La Paz, the Aimara communities of the Tableland and the global
fluxes of information.
 However, ironically, at the same time the Indian experience dissolve in the
cultural pot of globalization, the figure of the Indian emerges in the center of the
Bolivian politics. Evo Morales was presented as the first Amerindian president of the
country and worn traditional Indian clothes in his speech of inauguration in 2006, when
he thanked to the Pachamama divinity, the Universe-Mother in the Incan mythology,
and to the Indian movement of Bolivia and of Latin America of the opportunity of
conducting the country. In the same speech, he qualified the Indian peoples as the
absolute owners of this noble land, of its natural resources and denunciated the
humiliation suffered by the Indians throughout history, comparing Bolivia to South
Africa and interpreting his arrival to power as a product of the campaign of five hundred
years of black-Indian-popular resistance.

Morales, in the inauguration speech, saluted mythical figures such as the lord
Manco Inca and historical characters of the Indian fights such as Tupac Katari and his
wife Bartolina Sisa. Marco Inca was one of the last Incan lords who organized 200
thousand warriors and beleaguered Cuzco during 10 months in 1536 before establishing
the last capital of the Incan Empire in Vilcabamba. Tupac Katari was an Aimara born as
Julián Apasa who leaded the rebellion of Tupac Amaru II in High Peru and with an
army of 40 thousand Indians he beleaguered La Paz in 1780. When he was captured his
wife continued in the command. The president didn´t forget the Argentinian
revolutionary Che Guevara, murdered in Bolivia in 1967, but he didn´t mention no hero
of the National Revolution of 1952 and made only an oblique reference to it to say that
the universal vote „cost blood‟. As a compensation, the listed a program of refunding of
Bolivia since the original indigenous movement trusting in a central element – the
concession of autonomy to the indigenous peoples in the Constitutional Assembly that
he invoked to reunite in Sucre, the historic capital of the country. At the time of the
inauguration of the Constitutional Assembly, the deputies of the major governor group
presented dressed in indigenous clothes. That image signalized the political force of the
program of restoration of an imaginary Indian, ancestor and original, which was
consolidated in the constitutional project of the Assembly.

The Bolivian Indians don´t use any indigenous clothes anymore. When they did
it, in the times when Quechua and Aimara were more frequent than Spanish, there were
no Indians, but workers, landmen and artisans of Bolivia. Today, in the proportion it
disappears in the social life, the figure of the Indian becomes a giant figure in the
political imagination of Bolivia. The paradox needs an explanation.

The interrupted revolution

Founded as a nationalist party by Victor Paz Estenssoro and Hernán Siles Zuazo
in 1941, MNR participated of the government of Gualberto Villaroel and was victim of
the failure of its shy reformism. Harassed by the mobilizations of the mining workers
syndicates, Villarroel responded with repression, getting away from his principal basis
of popular support and becoming an easy prey for the conservatives that expressed the
interests of the barons of tin. Inside of the political crisis, the repressive organs killed
intellectuals of opposition and the conservative parties reacted by calling a popular
mobilization. In July 1946, the Plaza Murillo, center of La Paz, was occupied by a
crowd that invaded the headquarters of the government, properly nicknamed as Burned
Palace, and captured and hanged the president.

The conservatives then governed the country in the following years, while the
directors of MNR conspired in the exile. A trial to take power with force in October
1949 reached to a river of blood. In a second trial, the nationalists experienced the way
of the voting cabins and Paz Estenssoro won the elections of 1951 but the president
refused to transmit the power and constituted a military group of government.
According their political instincts the nationalists machinated a coup d´etat, gathering
commandants of the police forces of La Paz and taking the capital in April 1952.
However, the swindlers found the state army empty and saw themselves as hostages of
an army of 8 thousand men who marched to the capital.

When everything seemed to be lost, many militias or armed miners irrupted into
the city, under the direction of Juan Lechín and Siles Zuazo. During some days, the
streets were transformed into battle fields, but soon the recruits changed side, joining
the miners. The military commandants surrendered and the capital fell in the hands of
the revolutionaries. Power was offered to Lechín who had an enthusiastic support of the
miners, but he opted to a legalist accord with MNR and gave the government to Paz
Estenssoro.

Months after the revolution, the first MNR government instituted the universal
vote and in the following elections, won by the government candidate Siles Zuazo, the
electorate jumped from 200 thousands to almost one million. In October 1952 the tin
mines of the three companies of rosca were turned into state-owner and reunited under
the holding Bolivian Mining Corporation (Comibol). The new Bolivian Labor Center
(COB), leaded by Lechín and under dominant influence of FSTMB, gained rights of
representation in Comibol and of cancelling any decision of the state-owned company.
In the beginning of 1953 a law of agrarian reform abolished the forced work and
determined the distribution of latifundia and unproductive lands to the rural workers.
Since the impulse of COB, several syndicates of rural workers were constituted as well
as rural militias that were armed by the government, as well as miner militias.

The Estate that was born from revolution was supported by the syndicate
organizations and worked in a new populist political system. The Bolivian society as
defined in this new regime was composed of social classes, not ethnical groups. From
the point of view of language, the racial notions used at the bankrupt liberal Estate were
disdained. The census of 1900 had previewed the demographic decline of the
indigenous race and the concomitant rise of the white race and the mixed race,
originated from the mixture of the white with the Indian and named in Bolivia as
cholos. But the decree of agrarian reform never mentioned „indigenous race‟ or
„indigenous peoples‟, neither words such as Aimaras or Qechuas. The syntax of the
nationalist Bolivia was ordered under the concepts of citizenship and social classes.

The divisions inside MNR reflected the conflicts between the projects of the
nationalist and communist groups and contribute for the weakening of the revolutionary
impulse. The nationalists, leaded by Siles Zuazo, conserved a precarious hegemony,
always contested by the communists, which got organized around Lechín. As a
president, Zuazo faced the leader of COB and in the name of economical stability,
eliminated the privileges of the syndicates in Comibol, reduced the salary of the miners
and took off the weapons of the militias. Re-elected in 1960 for a new mandate,
Estenssoro continued with the policy of restoring order and directly faced Lechín, his
vice-president during the first two years. In the vespers of the military coup in 1964, the
communist leader was expulsed from MNR.

In the following two decades, Bolivia knew a first cycle of military

dictatorships, initially sustained by a pact between the Armed Forces and the rural
syndicates and punctuated by the short left government of the General Juan José Torres.
The military coup leaded by the General Hugo Banzer irrupted in the city of Santa Cruz
de la Sierra in 1971, removed Torres and installed a dictatorship that lasted seven years.
In that dictatorship, the pact with the syndicates was broken after bloody battles in the
region of Cochabamba in 1974. The battles opened the path to a pioneer irruption of the
modern ethnical policy, under the form of the Katarist movement.

The intellectual Fausto Reinaga, the father of Katarism, flirted with Marxism
and nationalism before abandoning both in 1964. The notion of struggle of forces
served to Europe, not to his Bolivia, divided into two: a black and oppressor and other
indigenous and oppressed. In Bolivia, there was a fight of races that would end with the
absorbance of the Indians as cholos or by the re-foundation of the country as an
indigenous nation. In the speech of the National Revolution, „Indians‟ meant „rural‟. In
the speech of Reinaga, summarized in the Manifest of Tiahuanaco, published in 1973 by
indigenous organizations, „rural‟ meant „Indians‟, named Quechuas and Aimarás. „The
true development is based on culture. The systematic trial of destroying the cultures of
the Quechuas and Aimarás is the fountain of the national frustrations. We don´t want to
renounce to our noble integrity inherited in the name of a false development. We are
foreigners in our own country‟.

The manifest criticized the paternalist Estate, the MNR, the left parties and the
cupole of the rural syndicates. It proposed a constitution of a rural party that should be
an Indian Party. The speech of inauguration of Morales was inspired in the ideas of
Reinaga.

The Indian Party failed, corrupted since its origin by the factions and by the lack
of support of the „Indians‟. However, the ideas of Reinaga fruited in Katarism, an
ethnical Aimará movement whose name evokes Tupac Katari. The Katarists soon
divided into two drafts. Victor Hugo Cárdenas founded the Revolutionary Movement
Tupac Katari (MRTK) together with the leader of the rural syndicate Genaro Flores,
which would cooperate with COB, the left parties and MNR. Cárdenas was born in a
small village in the margins of the Lake Titicaca with an original Aimará surname
Choquehuanca that was changed during his childhood by his father to hide the
indigenous origin. Cárdenas focused in the idea of conquering a place for the Aimarás
in a unified Bolivia. In another direction, running after a radical ethnicity and without
any compromises, Luciano Tapia and Constantino Lima, leaders of the „indianists‟
founded the Indian Movement Tupac Katari (MITK) that excluded from their horizon
any alliance with non-Indian parties and rejected since the beginning the existence of a
Bolivian nation.

This fracture is relevant. MRTK participated on the coalition organized around

the MNR in the elections of 1993 and Cárdenas became the vice-president of Gonzalo
Sánchez de Lozada, whose government continued the liberal economic policy started in
the previous decade. In 1994 the government of Sánchez de Lozada promoted a
constitutional reform based on the multiculturalist program of unity in diversity of
MRTK. The first article of the constitution was re-written and defined Bolivia as a
multi-ethnic and multicultural country and conceded the ethnical organizations the
rights of participations in the local governments. The reform of Katarist inspiration was
then retaken and made stronger in the constitutional project of Evo Morales.

MITK fragmented and originated the Guerilla Armed Force Tupac Katari that
mixed the ideas of Reinaga to those of Che Guevara. The guerilla carried out some
sabotages to electric structures in 1991 and was dissolved in the following year. His
principal leader, the Aimará Felipe Quispe, passed five years in jail together with the
young warrior Álvaro García Linea, an intellectual who came from a rich medium class
of Cochabamba. When they were liberated, the ways of these two men diverged.

Quispe became the leader of the Syndicate Confederation of Rural and re-
organized the Indianist group of the Pachakuti Indigenous Movement (MIP) whose flag
is the establishment of an Aimará Republic in Qullasuyo, an old Incan province that
extend further from the actual Bolivia, through the north of Argentina and Chile, south
of Peru and the Brazilian state of Acre. Born in a small village of inland almost one
decade before the National Revolution, the leader of MIP presents the war name of El
Mallku (the prince, title of supreme authority in Aimará language) and is saluted as Don
Felipe by his parties scattered in El Alto and in a network of small indigenous peoples
of the Tableland. „Bolivia is an abstract fiction‟, as said by the warrior in an interview
conceded during his campaign to the Presidency in 2005, when he denounced Evo
Morales as a betrayer and got 2.2% of the votes.

Linera opted by the Katarist reformism who sees a future for Bolivia if not as a
single nation at least a confederation of ethnical nations. The intellectual who doesn´t
speak neither Quechua nor Aimará entered to the Moviment to Socialism, the party of
Evo Morales and in 2006 became the Bolivian vice-president, the most important figure
in the external relationships of the country and the principal ideologist of the new
government.

Katarism did not sprout from traditional indigenous social structures, but from
urban Aimarás working in universities, cultural organizations and schools for formation
of teachers. The ethnicity proclaimed by the Katarists keep little relation with imagined
pre-Colombian roots and its movement, very active in El Alto, has scarce influences in
the villages of inland. Bu the emergence of a policy of restoration of supposedly
ancestral identities signalized the failure of the ideals and the language of the National
Revolution of 1952.

Tableland and the Orient

In the colonial times, there was nothing compared to the actual Bolivia. The
northern part of its territory pertained to the Vice-Kingdom of Peru. The southern part
was subordinated to the Vice-Kingdom of the Silver River and organized around the
silver mines of Potosí. The two capitals of Bolivia express this inheritance: La Paz in
the proximities of the Peruvian frontier is the headquarters of the Executive and
Legislative; Sucre, close to Potosí, is the constitutional capital and the headquarters of
the Judicial Power.

Bolivia is a resume of the South American geography, circling Amazonian,

Andes and Platino regions. The Tableland, in the Occident, is extended since the Lake
Titicaca until the Argentinian frontier, crossing 800km of dry lowlands placed between
two parallel mountain chains and punctuated by salt mines and sometimes green
valleys. The Orient is divided into a northern portion crossed by the rivers Mamoré,
Guaporé and Beni that are part of the Amazonian basin and a southern portion cut by
the Pilcomayo River that is part of the Platino basin.

The Bolivian demographic and historic focus is the Tableland, where the two
capitals are placed and also important cities such as Oruro, and old center of mining of
silver and tin, and Cochabamba, founded in a fertile valley with the finality of
producing food to the colonial mines of Potosí. But the biggest city of the country is
Santa Cruz, the pole without rival of the low Eastern lands and the principal connection
between Bolivia and Brazil. The crisis of the National Revolution developed parallel to
the decadence of the mines of the Tableland and the economical emergence of the East.

The Bolivian economic history can be spoken as sequence of cycles of

exploitation of mineral resources. In the colonial times, the exportations were
concentrated in silver extracted from Potosí and Oruro worked by semi-slave Indians
(under the regime named as mita) and by occasional free workers named mingas. The
silver mining entered in a long decadence in the second half of the XIX century when
the mining of tin started.

At the end of the First World War, Bolivia became the second producer of tin,
exploring mines that seemed to be inexhaustible around Oruro and La Paz and
providing raw material for the expanding automobile industry. Patiño, Aramayo and
Hochschild were local businessmen who entered in the list of the richest men in the
world and created the so-called rosca, a tentacle system of influence on the Bolivian
politics based on the corruption of politicians and the aggressive work of lawyers and
lobbyers. The tin miners who summed 40 thousand in the vespers of the National
Revolution died early, before turning 50, devastated by the pulmonary diseases
provoked by the gases of the deep mines.

The technical modernization of the mines went practically interrupted with the
station-owning of the sector. In the two decades after the National Revolution, the
miners had no risk of losing their job and a great complex of mines such as Catavi-Siglo
XX employed 5 thousand workers spite the decadent productivity. In the years 1970
while the production of tin declined it was announced the discovery of reservoirs of
natural gas and petroleum in the East. At the same time, with the development of
plantations of cotton and soy in the lowlands, Santa Cruz became a prosperous
commercial and finance center.

The collapse of the state mining system was announced in the first half of the
following decade, during the government of Zuazo, when the uncontrolled inflation, the
reduction in the familiar income and the intermittent strikes and miner protests
conducted the country to chaos. The Congress anticipated the presidential elections and
in 1985 due to a dramatic fall in the prices of tin, Estenssoro won a fourth mandate. At
the age of 77 year-old, the founder of MNR started a plan of liberal reforms named as
New Economical Policy. The main goal of this policy was to re-structure the mining
sector by closing several mines, the privatization of others, the drastic reduction of
employers from Comibol and the formation of autonomous cooperatives of miners.

The legendary mine of Catavi, almost exhausted, stopped to produce in that year
and in 1987, Siglo XX went to the control of the cooperatives. Almost at the same time,
Juan Lechín, 73, left the leadership of a COB that lived form the memories of a golden
era already finished. From 1986 to 1991 21,310 miners were fired, which left in
Comibon only 7 thousand miners. From the 35 state mines in operation at the beginning
of the policy program, only 22 lasted, and still with insignificant production. The
reduction continued until in 1993 only 4,720 miners lasted in the state mines, 4
thousands in the private mines, 2 thousands sub-hired and 18 thousands working by
their own. An entire syndicate tradition went down together with the dissolution of the
nucleus of the Bolivian proletarian. In the extraordinary congress of FSTMB in Siglo
XX in 1986, there were 725 representatives. Two years later, in Chojlla, they were 237
and in 1991, in Tupiza, only 196. In the six years until 1991, 36 thousand people left the
mining villages and migrated to the cities, especially El Alto.
 Things don‟t end here. In the government of Sánchez de Lozada new mines were
closed and in 1997 the number of workers of the state mines reached the historical
minimum of 1.5 thousands. A mine such as the Unificada stood with only one
employee: the general-secretary of FSTMB who had stability in the job. The sad
National Congress of Miners of 1998, carried out in private mine of gold in Oruro,
approved a resolution that claimed by nothing less than the „liquidation of the neoliberal
model and from there of the capitalist system‟. Nobody gave attention anymore to the
declarations of the miners and the Bolivian politics were organized under a new
language, free from the notion of social classes and contaminated by the ideas of
culture, ethnicity and ancestry. When Juan Lechín died in 2001 nostalgic
congratulations of a country that didn´t exist anymore were given.

The decadence of the mining of tin was followed by discovery of reservoirs of

hydrocarbon in the lowlands of the Orient. In the beginning of the decade of 1970, the
production of petroleum reached a peak of 47 thousand barrels/day but soon it declined
due to lack of investments and the inefficiency of YPFB, the state-owned company of
hydrocarbon. Only in the end of the 1980 years, when the sector was opened to foreign
companies, big areas of natural gas were discovered in the eastern departments. Soon
after, negotiations for exportation of gas to Argentina and Brazil were carried out and in
the government of Sánchez de Lozada YPFB was privatized which attracted new
investments. Since 1999 with the inauguration of the gas pipeline Brazil-Bolivia the gas
firmed as the principal exportation product of Bolivia.

The transition from one cycle to another resounded violently in the internal
demographic and economic equilibrium. The migrations from the Tableland to the
Orient went faster, following the decadence of the mining sector. From 1992 to 2001,
the census showed that the population of the four departments of the Orient (Santa Cruz,
Tarija, Beni and Pando) grew 44% for a medium growth of 22% in the five departments
of the Tableland (La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí and Chuquisaca). But richness
migrated even faster. In 1998 Tableland was 64% of the gross product and the Orient
was 36%. In 2006, the Orient with one third of the population represented more than
45% of the total product.

Under the impact of the long economic depression, the network of political and
syndicate relations that sustained the Estate originated in the National Revolution was
totally broken. The ethnic policy of restoration of the „original indigenous nations‟
evolved in the vacuum of a legitimate power at the same time a regional influence of the
elite of Santa Cruz raised, formulate its own ethnic politics.
The Plurinational Communitarian Estate

Juan Evo Morales Ayma was born in a small Aimará village close to Oruro in
1959 and grew in small house made up of clay. Soon he started to help his father, a
Catholic breeder of llamas who, as many other Aimarás, offered alcohol and coca to
Pachamama. When he was 20, he moved with the family to the region of Cochabamba
after a dry season that devastated the agriculture and the cattle of the tableland of Oruro.

Cochabamba is 2.7 thousand meters high and is placed in the valleys of Chapare
River, an affluent of Mamoré River, in a transition area between the Andes lands of
Oruro and the Bolivian Amazonian region. Morales engaged in the cultivation of
tropical fruits and coca in times of accelerated colonization of Chapare but also of fights
for eradication the plantations of coca that were inserted in the war on drugs conducted
by USA. In 1985 he was elected as a general-secretary of the local syndicate of coca
planters and three years after, when the government reinforced the actions against coca,
he became the leader of the rural regional federation. In this position, he leaded marches
of protest in La Paz and visited Europe explaining the difference between the traditional
use of coca leaves and the handcraft of cocaine. In 1997 he was elected deputy in a
coalition of leftist parties and soon later, founded the Movement to Socialism (MAS).

The trajectory of Morales and of MAS towards power made steps in two waves
of popular mobilizations: the war on water in 2000 and the war on gas in 2003. The first
was a victorious popular mobilization started in Cochabamba against an augment of
200% in the price of water imposed the company Aguas del Tunari made of foreign and
national companies in the year before. A march of coca planters circled the city in
support to the mobilization. The protests went to Oruro and La Paz and blockage of
streets appeared throughout the country until the concession to that company was
cancelled.

The second, bigger, started with a strike of hungriness of Felipe Quispe and one
thousand rural directors against a pact of exporting natural gas to USA and Mexico
through the Chilean port of Mejillones, in the old Bolivian department of Atacama, lost
in the War of Pacific. The protests spread out to La Paz, Cochabamba and the Aimarás
villages, defying a violent repression of the government of Sánchez de Lozada. COB
was reborn from ashes and claimed for a general strike that stopped the country, while
rioters of El Alto blocked the accesses to the Capital. In October 2003 after a
governmental attack to El Alto that left 80 dead, the coalition of Sánchez de Lozada
dissolved and the president renounced.

These two crisis sealed the luck of the moderate Katarists who participated in the
governmental coalition. Felipe Quispe denounced more than once the concept of unity
in diversity and invested his interpretation of the Bolivian history as a multi-century
conflict between two Bolivias, one indigenous and one white. Anyway, Morales became
a national leadership. Between one crisis and another in the presidential elections of
2002, his Movement obtained 21% of the votes against 22.5% fo the coalition headed
by MNR and Sánchez de Lozada. In the following elections in 2005, the coca leader
won with the consecrating support of 54% of the electorate.

The Movement to Socialism was born from the syndicate movement of the coca
planters and in the beginning its platform was the nationalization of the natural
resources, particularly the hydrocarbons. Morales thought himself as a rural Bolivian,
never as an original Indian. However, when Morales reached to power, the program of
the party proclaimed a goal of rebuilding the country as a plurinational Estate based on
original nations. The ideological diffusion was originated in Katarism, a movement that
didn´t have the social force of MAS.

To the Katarists, „rural‟ meant „indigenous‟. The equivalence more than an

option of language represented a political passport so the rural men would be able to
break the limits of syndicalism and present in the national scenario as candidates to
power, since in the condition of being Indians they could invoke the statute of being the
national majority and heirs of an ancestor country not maculated by the Spanish
colonialism. But the Katarists were urban intellectuals with scarce influence over the
rural mass. Morales, in the other way around, had behind him the coca planters, which
gave him vast access to the rural community.

The Constitutional Assembly of August 2006 was the tool the new start of the
Bolivian history. The constitutional project voted by the majority aligned to the
president in December of the following year and approved in a national referendum in
2009 represented conciliation between a moderate Katarism of national roots and the
multiculturalism in fashion in the international scenario.

The Bolivian liberal Estate inscribed in the law the political equality of the
citizens but, as in the colonial times, the Indians were excluded from the rights of
citizenship. Under an implicit apartheid, they travelled in crowded third-class wagons,
were expulsed from the streets and until 1952, the vast majority of analphabets could
not vote. The new constitution in its preamble announced a radical rupture: „we left in
the past the colonial Estate, republican and neoliberal. We assume the historic defy of
construct collectively the Social Unitary Estate of Plurinational Communitarian Rights‟.
Throughout the text, the politicians compromised with unity and integrity of the country
but substitute the principles of universal rights to the concept of singular collective
rights to the „indigenous nations‟ in the areas of political representation and
administration of justice.

The plurinational aspect of the Estate gains expression in the 2 nd article that
proclaims the free determination of the nations and indigenous peoples conferring them
the senses of autonomy and self-government and guaranteeing the recognition of their
institutions and territorial entities. The logic of turning official the indigenous
ethnicities also turned official the Afro-Bolivian people that, according to the 32th
article, has the same cultural, social, political and economic rights of the original
indigenous nations and peoples. The communitarian aspect is expressed in the 11 th
article that describes three manners of democratic power: participation, representation
and communitarian, this last one defined as the election, designation or naming of
authorities and representatives by norms and procedures of the indigenous nations and
peoples.

In the Europe of XIX century, the universal education worked as a tool for the
triumphant nationalisms. The schools served to the finality of promoting national
cohesion, drawing in the mind of the children the borders of an imaginary community:
the flag, the national hymn, the money, the territory, a shared past, a language and a
common literary patrimony. The new Bolivian constitution references to the identity
tradition of nationalism not to promote the national cohesion but the plurinationalism.
The article 80th attributes to education the mission of contributing to strengthening the
unity and identity of all as part of Plurinational Estate as well as to the cultural identity
and development of the members of each nation or each original rural indigenous
people. In the schools the Bolivians will learn that there is not a single Bolivian nation,
but a collection of distinct nations, each one proud of their own identity.

The national language developed crucial functions in the production of nations.

The plurinational act in Bolivia faces the difficulty represented by the diffusion of
Spanish as national language and by the progressive weakening of the indigenous
languages, mainly among the young people. The 96 th article confers to the universities
the mission of recuperation, preservation and divulgation of the indigenous languages.
The rebuilt Estate faces against a past that it judges to be poisoning of the true original
nations by the internal colonialism.

Culture is the crucial concept in the Bolivian plurinationalism as it was in the

European romantic nationalism. The constitution makes official the original indigenous
rural cultures when it proclaims in the 99 th article that the Estate will assume the
existence of these cultures and will preserve and broadcast them. The following articles
describe the elements of the original cultures: the views of the universe, the myths, the
oral history, the dances, the cultural practices, the knowledge, the traditional
technologies, the handcraft, all of them classified as part of expression and identity of
the Estate.

Culture is understood as an essential product of the original nations and works as

a fountain of collective rights in the political sphere. The 149 th article determines a
proportional participation of these nations in the Plurinational Legislative Assembly and
previews the delimitation of special indigenous circumscriptions that will not obey to
criteria of demography and territorial continuity as the other circumscriptions. In the
212th article the project give the original indigenous rural nations the rights of electing
representatives according their own manners of election.

However, the main collective right given to the indigenous nations it to establish
a system of original justice carried out by traditional authorities. In the jurisdiction of
the indigenous autonomous entities, according to the 192th article, the decisions adopted
by the original justice can´t be reviewed by the regular tribunals of justice. The
duplication of the judicial system echoes in the done by the preview in the 198 th article
of a Constitutional Tribune composed equally by magistrates originated from the
common justice and from the original justice.

In the beginning of March 2009, the house of the ex-vice-president Cárdenas, at

Lake Titicada, was robbed by indigenous rioters. The wife and two sons of the historic
Katarist were beaten with sticks and whips. The brutal attack derived from a decision of
communitarian justice taken by Indian leaders aligned with MAS and justified under the
allegation that Cárdenas´ family didn´t fulfill traditional obligations such as the
participation in parties and in the communal harvest.

The new constitution was under validity and Cárdenas classified the act of
violence as a punishment of his engagement in the campaign of the rejection of the
constitutional project. Evo Morales rejected the criticism of international entities of
human rights before pronouncing an evasive moral condemnation of the attack. The
vice-president Linera preferred to temper a even more mild condemnation with the
suggestion that the indigenous community had legitimate business to resolve with
Cárdenas.

The Unity Estate of the new constitution will give autonomies to the diverse
territorial entities previewed: departments, provinces, cities and original indigenous
entities. These last ones, according to the 295th article, come from an act of wishes of
the original nation or people according to procedures of direct consultation. They start
not only to self-govern but also to dispose from the right of a system of original justice.
The 297th article clarifies that the autonomous government of these entities will be
exerted through their own proper norms and forms of organization.

The crucial expression of all the text is „original nation‟. The proclamation of a
community of such type by traditional authorities or political organizations of ethnical
profile will have the power to install an autonomic statute that acquits a portion of the
territory from the obligations imposed by the general laws os political representation
and administration of justice. In the end, the concept of citizenship gets empty from
universality and gets subordinated to the concept of ethnicity.

Inventing the Camba nation

„Evo Morales wants all the power, all the money and all the Indians.‟ These sour
words, of an unashamedly racism, were pronounced by Percy Fernández, the major of
Santa Cruz in December 2007 during an act of giving, by civic committees, of the
project of the Autonomic Statute of the Department of Santa Cruz. The same major
suggested, some months before, the creation of another country by the separation of the
departments of the Orient that forms the so-called Half Moon with the Tableland. The
departmental governor, Rubén Costas and the powerful leader of the local Civic
Committee, Branko Marinkovic, dissociated prudently from the separatist suggestion,
swearing fidelity to the principle of the unity of Bolivia. But those swearing, not the
declarations of Fernández, should be attributed to a tactical political calculus.

The Half Moon in the conception shared by them three is not a collection of four
Bolivian departments but the expression of an ethnical nation: the Camba nation. The
geographic country of the Cambas corresponds to the Bolivian lowlands, drained by
Amazonian and Platine rivers and semi-circled by regions with affinities: the Brazilian
states of Acre, Rondônia and Mato Grosso; Paraguay and the intermediary departments
of Chuquisaca and Cochabamba. The map of the Camba nation is broadcasted by the
Movement for Camba Nation. The historic country of the Cambas is a myth of origin
created in reaction against the National Revolution.

Until the revolutionary conquest of power by MNR, Camba was a pejorative

nickname used to refer to the Indians, majorly Guaranis, of the Bolivian lowlands. But
before this, the elite of Santa Cruz already nourished autonomist ambitions that got
colors of separatism during the War of Chaco (1932-1935). The war between Bolivia
and Paraguay was accelerated by the discovery of small reservoirs of petroleum in the
basis of the Andes Mountains, in the Southern Chaco. The Paraguayans won easily,
even having a smaller army, due to the nationalist fervor awakened in the country.
Bolivia fought with an army of indigenous people recruited with violence, lost almost
all the region and knew a national demoralization that figures among the causes of the
revolutionary rupture of 1952.

During war, intellectuals of Santa Cruz explained to an elite self-named Cruceña

and proud of their Spanish blood that history and geography traced a border between the
Orient and the Tableland. The city of Santa Cruz was founded in the XVI century by the
Capitain Ñuflo de Chávez who interiorized the Spanish colonization in a journey since
Buenos Aires and with stop in Asunción. Santa Cruz also was naturally connected to
Chaco and to Pampa, not to Andes. The best result of the war, from that point of view,
was the Bolivian lost and the secession of the Cruceña region.

Camba gained new senses soon after the National Revolution, in a time when the
owners of lands of Santa Cruz feared the expansion of agrarian reform to the lowlands.
From this fear it was born a narrative of mixing of two noble races: the Spanish
colonizers and the Guarani Indians of the Bolivian Orient. The word Camba from a
pejorative nickname converted into a generic designation (and honorific) of the
inhabitants of the Eastern regions. In this walk, the Guaranis started to be described as
brave warriors that, centuries ago, faced the imperial ambitions of the Incans.

The new configuration of the Guaranis was supported in an old essay of the
Swedish anthropologist Nils Erland Nordenskiöld published in 1917 but taken away
from obscurity only in the decade of 1950. The academic was son of a famous explorer
of the Artic and narrated a battle of Guarani warriors against Incan forces in the
beginning of the XVI century. The modern historiography shows holes in the narrative
of the anthropologist and lift up doubts about the sense of that remote battle, but the
Crucenians historians of the middle of XX century didn´t hesitate in transforming it into
an epopee of triumphant resistance of the Guaranis and in a supplementary proof of the
multi-century cultural opposition between the Orient and the Tableland.

The history review had a clear ideological direction. Instead of a brutal

subordination of the Guaranis to the Spanish colonial power (as occurred to the Incans
in the Tableland), it was a narration of a battle between strong men, with glories
distributed among winners and losers, finally resolved by a miscegenation that
symbolized conciliation. The Cambas, product of such miscegenation, should not put in
the same drawer of the unvalued Cholos and Collas of the high lands.

Two decades later, the Camba history added a new element in the narrative: the
last great Chiriguan rebellion (as the Bolivian Guaranis were nicknamed) in the end of
the XIX century. The war produced a series of battles with the colonizers of the
lowlands but only ended with the intervention of the troops of the central government of
La Paz that massacred the rebels in January 1892 in the lowlands of Kuruyuki. In 1972,
the Cruceño historian Hernando Sanabria Fernández published Apiaguaiqui-Tumpa:
Biografia del Pueblo Chiriguano y de su Último Caudillo (Apiaguaiqui-Tumpa:
Biography of the Chiriguan People and its last Leader). The book was a report of the
rebellion that, as observed by the anthropologist Kathleen Lowrey, developed
ideological papers essential to the Camba mythology. Fernández traced suggestive
parallel between the Guarani rebellion and the Sioux warrior of Sitting Bull of USA at
the same time, in order to emphasize the tragic heroism in the desperate fight of the
weak against the strong. He also described the battles with the Indians as violent but
honor meetings that involved similar forces. But, foremost, he described the
intervention of La Paz as an act of unnamed wilderness, carried out by forces outside
the universe of the lowlands.

Fernández, the most famous writer of Santa Cruz, was a combatant in the War of
Chaco and months before his death, in 1986, he was condecorated with the Condor of
Andes, in the degree of Great Comendador by the last government of Estenssoro. He
didn´t use a writing machine but only a classic fountain pen. His most important book
was about the Guarani rebellion and had as target the Cruceño readers, when it only
began the great migratory wave of indigenous and Cholos from the Tableland to the
Orient. The report was destined to sustain the Camba myth of the tragic but fructuous
meeting between the white colonizers and the Guaranis at the lowlands. The Guaranis
should be interpreted under the lights of the concept of resistance against the invader,
which means, as pioneers of the Camba resistance to the Andes power of La Paz. In the
words of Lowrey, the episode of the Chiriguana revolution is an exulted code of the
resistance against the invaders until the sour end.

The book of Fernández appeared in the beginning of the dictatorship of the

General Banzer, a man from the Orient surrounded by associated persons from the
lowlands. During his regime, while the migration to the Orient got bigger and bigger,
Santa Cruz converted into a pole more and more important of political opposition to the
predominance of the Tableland. The Camba mythology was completed in this period
that has as end point the multiculturalist constitutional reform of Sánchez de Lozada in
1994. In the new multiethnic and pluricultural country then proclaimed, the Cambas
could legally affirm their distinct aspect, their ethnic singularity and their autonomist
ambitions. More: the racism anti-Colla that followed all the construction of the power of
Santa Cruz started to figure as text very well masked by the Camba vindication of
continuity of the Guarani resistance.

The rebellion of Kuruyuki was conducted by the Avas, the most numerous group
among the more than 80 thousand Guaranis of modern Bolivia. The Avas were
dispersed and assimilated throughout the XX century. The Isoseños, a minority Guarani
group, leaded the foundation in 1982 fo the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of
Bolivia (Cidob) that gather diverse ethnic entities and presents as a representative entity
of the Chiquitans, Ayoreos Guaranis and Guarayos of lowlands. Cidob is a place of
dispute among the Isoseños (organized in the Capitany of High and Low Isoso – Cabi)
and the Avas, who control the Assembly of Guarani Peoples (APG), an entity financed
by the Catholic Church. The book of Fernández was practically unknown among the
indigenous of the Orient during two decades, but was transformed in the beginning of
the decade of 1990 in the pole of articulation of a project of Guarani unity conducted by
Cabi. In the centenary of the massacre of Kuruyuki, the report of the Cruceño
historician gave a mythical narrative of blood and honor that serves as a political tool in
the new scenario of the Bolivian multiculturalism.

Cabi approached the Cruceño elite by the Movement Camba Nation in 2001 and
three years after,the organization of the Isoseños decided to participate in the Civic
Committee of Santa Cruz that soon gave the Medal of Cruceño Merit to Bonifacio
Barrientos Cuellar, the leader of Cabi. In the sequence, the Civic Committee formed
inside a directory of ethnical peoples composed by representatives of the four
indigenous ethnicities of lowlands. Santa Cruz had a Ethnofolkloric Museum with
collections of indigenous handcrafts of lowlands, but the leadership of the Isoseños,
supported by the autonomist elite of the city, established a Guarani Museum dedicated
to an ethnical history and to show the Guarani contributions to the culture of the
Bolivian Orient.

Everything in the Guarani Museum is listed and disposed such a way to not only
stress the singularity of an ethnic group but mainly to distinguish the Guaranis from the
Indians of the Tableland. Defying the prevalent modern models of the old Indians of
South America, the original site of internet of the Museum showed the peoples of Chaco
and of Amazonia as descendants of oceanic migrations relatively recent, from about 5.4
thousand years ago, when groups from Indonesia reached America. According to this
thesis, the Guaranis and the other groups of the Bolivian lowlands don´t share a
common past with the Indians of the Tableland, whose history began with older fluxes
of migrants who crossed the Straits of Dade Behring at the end of the last glaciations.
 The thesis expressed in the internet was not limited to postulate distinct remote
origins for the Indians of the Orient and of the Tableland, but went further and ensured
that the ocean migrants brought with them techniques and culture more advanced than
the one of the ancestors of the Collas. The proposition is the opposite of the notion
diffused in the middle of the XX century and adopted by the Marxist history that
informed the predominant conceptions in the Bolivia of the National Revolution that the
Incan civilization with its complex sociopolitical system would figure as a high culture,
superior to the primitive cultures of lowland. In the decade of 1970, anthropology
started to knock down these classic cultural hierarchies evidencing their anachronism
and fallacies, but never suggested an inversion of the signs of value. As Lowrey pointed
out: „Now in the beginning of the new millennium it is registered other cycle of noxious
stratifications resuscitated under new forms and with new finalities. Who would
imagine that any indigenous Bolivian community would salute the XXI century with a
new theory of distinct racial origin, separating itself from its Indian brothers of Andes?
But, in the end, who would ever imagine that the multiculturalists of the 1990 years
would create conditions under which the white separatism could flower in an
indigenous nation?‟

Booty of War

In the new Constitution, Bolivia is defined as a Social Unity Estate of

Plurinational Communitarian Rights. Autonomies and communities are scattered in all
the text, but the unity aspect of the Estate is found established in the absolute monopoly
on the natural resources. According to the 310 th article the economic state form is the
responsible for the administration of the owners of the natural resources and of the
strategic control of the productive chains and of the processes of industrialization of
these resources. The 351st article determines that the Estate, through public, social,
communitarian entities will assume the control and the direction on the exploitation,
extraction, industrialization, transport and commerce of the natural resources.

The true power of the central government is in the prerogative of distributing

almost as the way it wants the money generated by petroleum and gas that are the
greatest richness of the country. The 353rd country guarantees the Bolivian people an
equal access to the benefits coming from the utilization of all the natural resources and
affirms that priority participation will be given to the territories where these resources
are found and to the original indigenous nations and peoples. Finally the 368th article
ensures that the department producers of hydrocarbons will receive 11% of the fiscal
budget and previews that the other departments will receive participations to be
expressed in specific laws. The resistance of the Orient to the new constitutional order is
a consequence of the central control of the money from the hydrocarbons.
 The Constitutional Assembly suffered boycotts of the most part of the
oppositionist representatives and transferred from Sucre to Oruro in December 2007
after a series of student manifestations stimulated by the opposition against the text
approved by the majority in the government. The final text of the constitutional project
was approved in a session that went through night and only ended in the morning of 9 th
December. The marathon of the final voting practically didn´t have the participation of
the opposition due to a circling of the building by protesters favorable to the
government. In the following months, it started the political battle on the popular
referendum of the constitutional project and the departments of Half Moon approved
autonomous statutes that were declared against the constitution by La Paz. In January
2009, 60% of the electorate approved the constitutional project, but the new letter was
refused by the electorate of four Eastern departments and of the ones of Chuquisaca.

The principle of plurinationality is not a motive for friction between Evo

Morales and the elites of the Orient. Six years before the voting of the constitutional
project, the Movement Camba Nation published its autonomist proposal entitled „The
New Pact with the Bolivian Estate‟. Point by point, extensively, the document contains
a series of fundamental concepts that reappeared in the constitutional project. According
to it, the pluricultural and pluriethnic Bolivia should be reconstituted as a multinational
republic. The Campa proposal imagines Bolivia as a confederation of indigenous
nations. The nations would arise from plebiscites or department referendums and would
be automatically recognized by the Estate. The governments of the autonomous
departments would have sovereignty in the quality of representative of nations.

The proposed pact by the Camba Nation would convert Bolivia in a

confederation Estate. The main difference with the new constitution is that in it there is
no place for the complex combination between the concepts of unity Estate and ethnic
autonomy. From the point of view of the Camba leaders, Bolivia would be in the
maximum a territorial mold for the coexistence of sovereign nations. Under this logic,
the nations would have controle over their territories and natural resources.

One item of the Camba document confers to the department governments the
right to prohibit initiatives of colonization and agrarian reform coming from La Paz.
Another item of strategic importance attributes to the departments, regions and nations
the original domain over all natural resources in soil and sub-soil. The autonomous
territorial entities would have ensured a participation in the money derived from the
exploitation of their natural resources as equal as half of the participation of the Central
Estate. The elites of the Orient adopted the multiculturalist program in the government
of Sánches de Lozada, much before the ascension of Evo Morales to the presidency. But
they did it for their own wishes, especially the capture of the money from the
hydrocarbons that are extracted basically in the departments of the Half Moon.

The collapse of Bolivia coming from the National Revolution could not be more
complete. Instead of a nation divided by social classes, all the relevant actors now speak
in the name of a collection of ethnical nations separated by essential cultures. In the
words of Wolfgang Gabbert, both the ethnical communities and the nations are typically
imagined communities, as accurately named by Benedict Anderson. The structural
changes in the economy and Bolivian society provoked a revolution in the political
image. From this revolution, not only ethnicities emerged, but ethnical communities that
self-declare as nations and require national rights.

The Hispanic America, as in any other part, the definition of ethnic categories is
not an objective scientific act, but a political act that depends on mutating historic
conditions. In Guatemala of the years 1930, the mixed (Ladinos) who were of high class
and spoke Spanish defined the poor Ladinos as Indians. In a research conducted in the
years 1970 in the small city of San Jerónimo, close to Huancayo (Peru), a conflicting
patter of classification of urban population was verified. While a high employee of the
government, based on linguist and socioeconomic criteria, classified the enormous
majority as indigenous, a inhabitant with high schooling who spoke Spanish but was
son of a Quechua rural man, described the same population as mixed because they lived
in the city and adopted a different style of life form the rural persons.

The contexts are important to understand the actual fabrication of the Bolivian
ethnic image. In the Tableland, half a century agor, the category of Indian was applied
almost exclusively over the rural workers who didn´t speak Spanish and in the political
language the word „rural‟ came before and over the word „Indian‟. Today, the category
surrounds a vast urban population who speaks Spanish and frequently don´t use any
indigenous language and comes before and over referenced in the concept of social
classes, such as workers or landsman. Symmetrically, in the lowlands, the category
Camba works as a surrounding totality that unifies elite and people extending
seductively over the Guaranis and excluding the migrants Cholos and Collas.

The new Bolivia of ethnic nations that are official nourish new narratives of
blood and honor, cult to ancestor heroes and claims rights of self-government looks less
and less as a nation. The constitution of Evo Morales and the autonomist proposal of
Santa Cruz doesn´t present as a contract among citizen, but as a provisory treatise of
peace of communities separated by impassable cultural abysms. However, even if it is
firmed, such peace among enemies will be unstable and precarious, since there is no
negotiation on the distribution of the richness offered by the exploitation of natural
resources, which is interpreted as booty of war.
PART III – BACK TO AFRICA

THE EMPIRE AGAINST THE TRAFFIC

The Castle of Cape Coast is a solid walled fortification with cannons pointing
towards a blue-greenish sea. It rises imposingly in front of a bay in half moon form
advancing over the sand of the beach and defying the high tide. The city of Cape Coast,
165km west from Accra, the capital of Ghana, grew around the fortification, built in
XVI century in wood and after redone in stone. The place changed of hands many
times, moving from Portuguese, Swedish and Dutch until it was finally conquered by
the British in 1664, who again rebuilt the castle. Originally, the construction worked as
stopping place of the commerce of wood and gold. Under the British, it was officially
named as a castle and dungeon, turning into a center of business administration and,
foremost, the biggest among the more than three dozens of slave markets implanted at
the so-called Gold Coast and owned by all the principal European powers.

The markets of the Gold Coast were placed in a neuralgic center of a

commercial system that linked Europe, Africa and America, stimulating the first
episode of economical globalization of history. In the so-called triangle commerce,
slave ships lifted irons in the European ports with fabric, weapons and rum that were
exchanged by slaves in the African markets. It was followed by the terror travel over
Atlantic, a way marked by the sounds of the iron chains and of the moans of the
basement, until the disembarkation of the human load, when the slaves were exchanged
by sugar, coffee and tobacco.

In the peak of the commerce of humans in the middle of the XVIII century,
about 85 thousand slaves crossed the Atlantic annually. Throughout almost four
centuries, more than 11.5 million Africans were embarked as slaves in the routes of
Atlantic and other 3.4 million went to Europe and the Arabian countries. The Gold
Coast contributed with nothing less than 6.5 million of slaves destined to America. Due
principally to the traffic, the population of Africa was stagnated almost completely,
coming from about 100 million people to 120 million people from 1650 to 1900. There
is no way to minimize the political, social and cultural impacts of the slave market.
Even today, in the villages of Ghana it remains a traditional architectonic structure
originated in the times of human hunting: houses similar to miniaturized castles in the
center of a circle of palisades configuring a shield of protection to communitarian life,
which is carried out in the internal space.

There is only one written register of the terrible experience of the thousands of
slaves who filled the dungeons of the Castle of Cape Coast. In a book published in
London, the old slave Quobna Ottobah Cugoano reported the following way the
moment of his transference to a ship that would go to America: „Our conduction to the
ship was the most horrible scene. Nothing could be heard except the sound of iron
chains, the creak of whips and the moans and shouts of our companions. Some of us
couldn´t move from the floor even when they were beat in the most cruel way.‟ Reports
of the slaves in the dungeons of Africa and in the slave ships started to be broadcasted
since the end of the XVIII century. But the suffering of those unhappy guys started
before, in the time of human hunting that very few times involved directly the European
and Arabian traffickers. The production of the slave, the capture and the enslaving of
Africans were carried out inside the African societies.

Slavery existed in Africa as well as in many places of the world, much before
the appearance of the international traffic of slaves. Beaten enemies were converted into
slaves as well as indebted people or criminally condemned people. Sometimes, the
condition of slavery was transitory. The principle of slavery was written in tradition,
such a way the capture of slaves to selling to the foreign traffickers didn´t find any
moral resistance. Cugoano described that his capture by an African seller of slaves when
he was kidding around his house: „I must admit for the shyness of the men from my
own land, in the first place, that I was kidnapped and betrayed by somebody of my own
color‟.

In Ghana, when the Portuguese businessmen appeared in the end of the XV

century, they exchanged slaves and other goods from Senegal by gold given by the chief
of the kingdom Ashanti. The new commerce stimulated the Ashanti expeditions for
hunting people that brought slaves to the work in the gold mines. The next step was the
entrance of the kingdom in the circuit of the transatlantic slave commerce.

Selling slaves gave to the African leaders the access to weapons and horses that
were decisive military instruments. The appearance of the transatlantic traffic stimulated
an intense political diversification in Africa with the formation of Estates and the
consolidation of elites that drained all the profits of the commerce and the configuration
of ethnicities that were engaged in wars for obtaining slaves. The great slave kingdoms
controlled big slavery networks that branched into inland and including state
commercial partners and independent sellers.

If the traditional African slavery act as a support to selling slaves to the

European and Arabian traffickers, it is also true that the slave traffic amplified slavery
in Africa. The slave population of Congo represented 50% of the total. In the vassal
kingdom of Ndongo (in the actual region of Angola since chte XVI century), the class
of the slaves was the fountain of power of the king and of the aristocracy.

The Ashanti kingdom dominated the Gold Coast for three centuries and selling
slaves to the traffickers represented the most important fountain of their profits that
were exchanged by goods sent by the Europeans. The places where the slave markets
were built were not owned by the traffickers but by the Ashanti govern that rented them
by a monthly payment. The British paid for the use of the Castle of Cape Coast. In the
Gulf of Guinea, before the Ashanti kingdom (whose apex occurred in the XVIII
century), the traffic business had as focus the Estate of Oyo in the actual Nigeria and
later was transferred to Dahomey in the actual Benin. The leaders of Dahomey kept
close relations of the Portuguese-Brazilian traffickers of Rio de Janeiro and when Brazil
declared its independence they even cogitated in adhering to the Empire of D. Pedro I as
an overseas territory.

The wars among African Estates became more common in the areas under the
influence of the slave markets, as the capture and enslave figured out as essential
fountains of richness to the governments. The chronic wars between the Ashanti and the
Acans gave to the governors of both sides many of the slaves who were sold as slaves in
the markets of the Gold Coast. From 1814 to 1816 the Ashanti conducted a bloody war
against a coalition of the Akins and Akwapis to restore the access to sea ports and hence
to the European traffickers. Soon before the end of the transatlantic traffic in 1840 the
king Gezo of Dahomey declared that the traffic of slaves had been the guide principle of
his people and that this was the fountain of their glory and richness. In 1872 much after
the abolition of the traffic, the Ashanti king wrote a letter to the British monarch
requesting to reinitiate the human commerce.

The African nexus of the international system of slave commerce weighs as a

rock of several African countries. „We don´t discuss slavery‟, says Barima Kwame
Nkye III, a supreme leader of the Ghanaian village of Assin Mauso, while Yaw Bedwa,
from the University of Ghana, diagnosis a general amnesia on slavery. The amnesia
concerns especially to the paper developed by the Ashanti chiefs whose descendants
still keep detached places in the Ghanaian society. An official history tries to absolutely
distinguish the traditional slavery, described as mild, and the international traffic that is
exclusively attributed to the Europeans. However, in some African regions, the
descendants of slaves have no rights on inheritance.

The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski lived long periods in Africa between
the decades of 1960 and 1970. He wrote: „Looking with attention to the African map,
the coast is punctuated by islands. Some are so small that are only present in detailed
navigation maps but others are big enough to appear in common atlas. This geological
structure had historical consequences, since for many times Africa was temptation and
terror at the same time. Those who went there entered in an extremely dangerous game
of life or death. Still in the first half of the XIX century, the majority of the Europeans
who adventured inside Africa died from malaria. However, many survivors went back
after making quick and great fortunes with the traffic of gold, ivory and, foremost, black
slaves. To this the dozens of islands scattered in the coast helped a lot the navigators,
negotiators and bandits from all nationalities. They became points of berthing, bastions,
landing-states, trading posts.

The coastal islands were separated enough to offer protection from attacks from
the continent but close enough to allow the contacts, the interchanges and the business.
Biocco, the old Fernando Pó, actual Equatorial Guinea, figured as a central market of
the slave traffic from the Western Indian Company in the Gulf of Guinea in the middle
of the XVII century that soon the Portuguese substituted by a market in the neighboring
island of Corisco. Around the same time, the Portuguese islands of São Tomé and
Prince, hit by the trade of sugar of America got specialized in the function of slave
market. In the opposite side of Africa, the archipelago of Zanzibar (actual Tanzania)
went under the control of the sultanate of Oman in 1698 and became the most important
center of the Arabian commerce of slaves.

The markets of traffic were also installed in the proximities of the mouth of
rivers that gave access to extensive inland valleys. The French established in 1659 the
fortification of Saint Louis in a narrow fluvial island, 25 km before the mouth of the
Senegal River with the finality of centralizing the commerce throughout the river.
Slaves were the most lucrative commodity and in the end of the XVIII century the city
that appeared around the fortification had 5 thousand inhabitants and figured as one of
the principal urban centers of the Sub-Saharan Africa. The British built in 1672 a
fortified castle in Bance Island, up close to the mouth of the Serra Leone River. In its
climax since the middle of the XVIII century, they embarked from the dungeons of the
islands many thousands of slaves destined to the West Indies and to the British colonies
of North America.

During the three hundred years of slave traffic to America, the physical presence
of the European powers was restricted to the coast fortifications (with the exception of
Angola). In the decadence of this long historic period, Great Britain, the biggest naval
and commercial power engaged in an international campaign against slavery and the
slave traffic. British ships had transported 2.5 million of slaves in the XVIII century, or
something as two fifths of the total. However in 1807 by the Law of Slave Traffic,
Great Britain turned into illegal the slave commerce in ships of British flag and in the
Final Act of the Congress of Vienna of 1815 the British representatives succeeded in
including a generic declaration condemning the traffic. The original proposal was as
resolution of a global compulsory renouncement to the commerce of humans, but it was
not approved due to resistance from France, Portugal and Spain.

London and Rio de Janeiro were stages of the decisive kicks in the abolition of
the colonial slavery and the human traffic. In 1833 the Law of Abolition of Slavery
freed all the slaves in all the British Empire, with the exception of the territories of the
Eastern Indie Company, Ceylon and the island of Saint Helen, where the owners should
receive a reasonable compensation by the loss of the services of their slaves. In 1850 in
Brazil the Law Eusébio de Queiroz, adopted after intense British pressures, prohibited
importing slaves in the Empire of Brazil.

Only after 1885 with the Conference of Berlin did the European powers started
an imperial running to Africa. In the fifteen final years of the XIX century by means of
a series of treatises among the powers and among them and the African governments,
Africa was split in colonial territories. The so-called split of Africa in the reality unified
the thousands of autochthonous political entities in about half a hundred of colonies.
The implantation of European administration in the African territories kicked the
traditional institution of slavery that still remained even with the end of the international
slave traffic. The imperial powers that had conducted the great business of human
commerce were now the agents of a modernization that dissolved slavery.

The principle of freedom

The transatlantic traffic of slaves in its three centuries was not a marginal
business, but the heart of an international commerce that seeded the floor over which
the modern industrial economy would rise. Great Britain firmed after the Spanish War
on Secession in 1714 as the greatest commercial power of the world and in the decades
of apogee of the traffic, British ships transported more than 40 thousand slaves to
Americas annually, equivalent to all the other slave ships summed.

The human commerce were the fundamental chain link of the greater business of
sugar and coffee, the most desired products in the European markets and the fountains
of accumulation of immense richness in America and Europe. In the British Islands the
naval construction and the handcraft of innumerable products developed as components
of the economic system based on the transatlantic commerce hence on the slave traffic.
But paradoxically the public opinion campaign that collapsed the traffic was firstly
manifested precisely in Great Britain.

Thomas Clarkson, an Anglican who studied in Cambridge, discovered the

horrors of the slave traffic in the university in 1785 in middle of a research to a writing
contest in Latin. The revelation aborted his projected career as a priest of the Anglican
Church and lightened a fire that would never stop. Less than two years after, the alliance
between that tall and red-haired man obsessed by an idea and the Quakers religious men
started a campaign that changed the world. The Committee for Abolition of Traffic
counted with the participation of the Anglican Granville Sharp, musician and maestro of
the royal band, who kept connections with the anti-slavery Quakers of USA. In the
British Parliament, his positions were represented by the voice of William Wilberforce,
a conservative protestant ad friend of the prime minister William Pit, the Son.

In the Great Britain of that epoch, only Anglicans could participate in the
political institutional life as parliamentarians or members of the cabinets. The Quakers,
due to this exclusion, became businessmen and constituted very efficient networks and
groups of pressure. Their anti-slavery fight had humanitarian motives and the
indignation against injustice was the flames that moved the interests of the committee.
However, in that interval between the American and the French revolutions it was
already present the concepts of natural rights and equality among men that not always
found evident expressions in the petitions, conferences and publications of the
abolitionists. In 1788 the committee broadcasted in logos of seals, books, pamphlets and
buttons the image of an African on his knees and fettered with hands up and the phrase:
“Am I not a man and a brother?‟. The African of the image developed the paper of inert
victim and the appeal was humanitarian, but the phrase chosen was referenced in the
notion of natural equality of human beings.

The abolitionist campaign, as Adam Hochschild observed, created techniques of

persuasion of the public opinion that were consecrated and nowadays take part of the
basic armory of organizations and social movements. In 1789, Clarkson got a diagram
of the slave ship Brookes with the basement crowed of slaves in a typical travel of the
Atlantic. The image, redrawn and amplified, was published in leaflets, newspapers,
reviews and books and provoked a strong impact.

The committee had as an ultimate goal the eradication of slavery but, tactically,
to not invest against the rights of property, concentrated on the explicit objective of
abolishing the traffic. Correctly, their members calculated that slavery would not resist
without the permanent influx of new slaves. However, by conviction or opportunity,
Wilberforce argued in the Parliament that the abolition of the slave market would
conduct the owners of the Western Indies to treat with humanity their slaves, such a
way to perpetuate the colonial slavery by the normal reproduction of the slave
population. The approach had no effect during many years, as many of the
parliamentarians were owners of plantations in the West Indies or of ships engaged in
the traffic business.

London in the aurora of the Industrial Revolution had some thousands of blacks,
mostly slaves freed by the British in incursions in North America during the War on
Independence of USA. In a period before the development of the scientific racism the
Africans figured more as target of curiosity than of victims of racial discrimination. A
proof is that „during more than five decades of defense of slavery in the Parliament, the
lobby of the Western Indies almost never argued that the blacks were inferior by nature;
instead, they spoke on how the plantations of the Caribbean were vital to the imperial
economy‟.

Among the blacks of London, Olaudah Equiano was remarkable. He had been a
slave who bought his own freedom with his own resources, worked as a sailorman in
the Royal Navy, was successful in establishing in England and became a valuable ally
of the abolitionist committee and one of the most famous publicists of those dates.
Equiano published in 1789 a voluminous autobiography that was a great editorial
success in Great Britain and USA and was soon translated to German, Dutch and
Russian. With rare exceptions, the British and American abolitionists didn´t approve the
idea of miscegenation, something that was a supreme taboo for almost two centuries.
But Equiano was special. In an open letter to an owner of slaves in the West Indies he
referred to the inter-racial marriage writing: „a fool prejudice like this never perverted a
cult mind. Why not establishing inter-racial marriages in our country and our colonies?
And stimulate the open, free and generous love, of a broad nature, without distinction of
skin color?‟ They were not only words: to the bewilderment of public opinion, he got
married to a white woman.
 The project of law of abolition of the traffic presented by Wilberforce to the
parliament were not voted in 1789 and was rejected by 163 against 88 votes in 1791.In
the following year, supported by petitions carried out by almost 400 thousand British
citizens and defended in the parliament by Pitt, the project of immediate abolition was
again refused. In its place, the House of Commons approved a gradualist law that the
traffic would be extinct in 1796, but the House of Lords rejected it. In 1793, soon before
of guillotining the king Louis XVI, the revolutionary France conferred honorific
citizenship to Clarkson and to a Wilberforce who had never hidden his hostility against
the French monarchists. The radicalization in the other side of the English Channel
strengthened the defenders of the traffic and provoked a new fail of the abolitionist
project.

Wilberforce never gave up of abolition, suffering successive fails, year after

year, until the end of the century. The anti-slave committee, feeling the effects of the
generalized political effects, practically stopped with the activities. The elitist
parliament system of Great Britain would be capable to resist indefinitely to the wishes
of the public opinion that had adhered to the abolitionist principle. The impasse was
solved far away from the Parliament, in the Caribbean islands, with the eclosion of the
greatest slave rebellion, in the French colony of Saint Dominic (Haiti).

François- Dominique Toussaint Louverture was born as a slave in the plantation

of Bréda, around Cap François in Saint Dominic. As a driver coach, he had the
opportunity to study, adopted Catholicism and became an avid reader of the French
illuminists and after being freed by the owner of the plantation he entered to Masonry.
When he was 48year-old, in 1971 he took part on the leadership of a rebellion of slaves
in the North of the colony. Soon after, the revolutionary France gave rights of
citizenship to the mulattos and free blacks of the colonies and after the execution of
Louis XVI, the Jacobin government proclaimed the abolition of slavery. At the same
time in Saint Dominic the conflict between colonizers and slaves were happening,
France was in war against Spain and Great Britain.

In that disordered environment, Louverture revealed a genius military chief and

years later he got the nickname of Black Napoleon. Leading a guerilla force of 4
thousand men, the firstly beat the French colonial troops that didn´t recognize the
Jacobin government and secondly the aligned to the French aligned to the Convention
Girondina and beat the Spanish invaders. The war continued against the British and
Louverture was designated as commander of the French Republican Forces of Saint
Dominic. In 1798, the British left away the French colony. In the following step, the
Lieutenant of Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, conducted a ferocious campaign
against the elite of mulattos of the South of the colony. Then, the Haitian revolutionary
irrupted in the Spanish Saint Dominic (Dominic Republic) that refused to free the
slaves. In 1801, with the Spanish capitulation, Louverture invoked a Constitutional
Assembly that edited a Constitution and named him as perpetual governor of the whole
island.
 The Constitution of Louverture, as it was nicknamed, proclaimed the equality
among the people and prohibited distinctions derived from the skin color. „No other
distinction exists except the ones of virtues and talents neither any superiority except the
one defined in law by the work in a public job‟. The same 5 th article concluded: „the law
is equal for all, either it punishes or protects. But Louverture was hostile to voodoo and
because of it Catholicism was declared the official religion – the „only publicly
professed‟ and the divorce was banished. Furthermore, the slaves were fixated in the
properties as members of an active and permanent family of which the owner of the
land or his representative is necessarily the father and the vicious habit of changing
home was prohibited.

The government of Louverture lasted less than one year. Spite the declared
loyalty of the Haitian leader to the French Empire, Napoleon Bonaparte decided to
restore the effective control of France over the colony and sent a great military force to
the island. Louverture was beat and assigned a conditional rendition and retired to his
farm only to be arrested few days after and deported to France together his wife and
three kids. Confined and interrogated during months in a castle of the mountains of
Jura, he died from pneumonia in 1803, weeks before the eclosion of the Napoleonic
Wars. Even so, the Haitian revolution didn´t stop. Under the leadership of Dessalines,
the rebels beat the French troops and proclaimed independence.

Haiti was the second sovereign nation in the Americas and the only of the world
that came from a revolution of slaves. However, contrary to USA, it didn´t adopt the
republican system, but the monarchic. The Constitution of the Empire of Haiti of 1805
was promulgated by Dessalines, self-named Jacques I, and previewed the succession to
the throne by imperial designation. The white colonizers were expulsed and with the
finality to reduce the political tensions among blacks and mulattos, the 14 th article
determined that the „Haitians must be, from now and forever, named by the generic term
of blacks‟. The provision didn´t work and in the following year, after the murder of
Dessalines, the country got divided in a northern kingdom governed by the ex-slave
Henri Christophe and a southern republic directed by the mulatto Jean Pierre Boyer.
Since then, the political conflicts of Haiti presented as frictions between blacks and
mulattos. However, in the Haitian panorama, the skin color works much more as
metaphor to social classes than as an indicator of real or imagined ancestry. According
to a popular dictation, Nèg rich sé mulat, mulat póv sé nèg (rich black is mulatto, por
mulatto is black).

The Haitians got free from slavery, but couldn´t escape from a succession of
tyrannies. Its revolution, however, accelerated the process of abolition of the black slave
traffic. In the Caribbean, during the years of the European wars against France, British
soldiers faced rebellions of slaves and ex-slaves that sprouted in many islands. The
rioters, inspired by the abolition proclaimed in Paris, joined to French forces and
threatened the colonial interests in Guadalupe, Saint Lucia and in Jamaica. In fact, the
British forces were seen in the position of defenders of a hated slavery system and lost
innumerable men in those conflicts. The final end of the Haitian revolution evidenced
that it was time to choose between maintaining of slavery or of the colonies.

The chose became easier by the incorporation of a geopolitical concept of

maritime power. In the apogee of the Napoleonic Wars in 1805, James Stephen, an
abolitionist lawyer and defender of the British supremacy in the seas, published a very
well divulgated book that exposed a thesis: France would only be beaten if the
prosperity of its colonies in the West Indies were strongly kicked. The Royal Marine
was cleaning the Atlantic from the French ships, but the commerce of France with the
islands of sugar persisted through ships of American flags. It was needed to interrupt
those fluxes and the combat to the black slave traffic would be the most effective to this.

Stephen knew that great part of the neutral ships of American flag were in fact
ships owned by British, staffed by British and equipped in Liverpool. In its triangle
routes, they transported slaves from Africa to the French West Indies and USA, driving
to France full of sugar. In 1806 the new abolitionist project of Wilberforce was written
by Stephen, with a text different from all of the previous ones. The project of the Law of
Foreign Traffic of Slaves prohibited British people – persons, riggers, suppliers of
equipments and insurers – to participate in the transport of slaves to colonies and allies
of France. In the defenses in the plenary of the project, Wilberforce shut up and the
abolitionists, instead of the common denunciations on the cruel aspect of the black slave
traffic, emphasized the insupportable costs of repression to the revolutions in the
Western Indies and the opportunity of isolating France from its fountains from overseas.

One of the effects of the military project would be to eliminate two thirds of the
own British black slave traffic that was carried out by ships of American flag. The
owners of merchant vessels were against the project, but the planter of the British
colonies of Caribbean interpreted it as a coup against their rivals of the French colonies.
This division in the slave field allowed the approval of the law in the House of
Commons. A more hard battle, carried out with new petitions from a re-born abolitionist
committee, was finally concluded with its approval in the House of Lords.

The final phase of the campaign was coincident to the death of Pitt and the
ascension to cabin-in-chief of William Grenville, whose adhesion to the abolitionist
cause was stronger than of his antecessor. In the elections of 1806 the theme of black
slave traffic concentrated the debate and following the tendencies of the public opinion,
many candidates went to the abolitionist side. In the Parliament, military officials who
took part in the repression to the Caribbean rebellions and in the War of Haiti
pronounced as against the slavery system. Finally, in 25 th March 1807, for the joy of
Clarkson and Wilberforce, it was approved the Law for Abolition of the Slave Traffic.
The parliamentarians approved it forced by fear and the geopolitical calculus as well as
the shame. Soon it was sanctioned by the king George III. The law abolished, prohibited
and declared illegal the commerce of African slaves in the British Empire and
determined a fine of 100 pounds for each slave captured with the transgressors.
 It is not possible to tell the history of the anti-slavery laws of Great Britain
without visiting the history of the slave rebellions of the West Indies. Jamaica, a colony
where the slaves were 20-fold the number of owners, served as a stage for many
rebellions. The biggest ecloded in the Natal of 1831 from a pacific strike leaded by the
slave and Baptist preacher Samuel Sharpe. The repression of the owners provoked a
radicalization of the rebels who put fire in the plantations of sugarcane. It was followed
by two weeks of violent attacks of the colonizers militias that culminated with the
hanging of many rebel leaders, including Sharpe. The named Baptist War ruptured the
last resistances of the slavists of Great Britain and less than two years after the Jamaican
rebellion the parliament voted the law of abolition of slavery.

A Christian home in Africa

The Serra Leon River is the estuary formed by the Rokel River and Port Loko
Creek River. Around 28 km up from its mouth there is Bance Island, of a little bit more
than 500 m length. Placed in the limit of the navigation of the oceanic ships of the XVII
century, with many fountains of freshwater and protected by rock crags, the fluvial
island was converted into a principal slave market of the Occidental Africa.

The initial operation failed but in 1750 the Londoner company Grant, Sargent &
Oswald assumed the control of the enclave, rebuilt the fortification and restarted with
success the black slave market. The rice planters of Charlestown, in the colony of South
Carolina became the best clients of the warehouse, importing slaves, ivory and wood.
Few decades after at the peak of human commerce in Bance Island, a British anti-slave
group bought the curious idea of implanting a colony of ex-slaves in the mouth of Serra
Leon.

London in the end of the XVII century had a community of about 5 thousand
blacks, the majority of ex-slaves freed during the War on Independence of the Thirteen
Colonies. Almost all of them depended on a philanthropic committee of assistance to
the black poor sustained by the abolitionists. In this committee it was born the plan of
creation of a village of ex-slaves in Serra Leon.

Granville Sharp was an enthusiast of the plan that seemed to him to show a
chance of the ability of the blacks to prosper. Important abolitionists deposited in the
project the hope to broadcast Christian principles in Africa. Also, influent
philanthropists saw in the emigration of the ex-slaves a solution to apart the blacks and
the whites, avoiding relations „contrary to nature‟. However, many consulted blacks
feared to live so close to Bance Island and only accepted to participate when Sharp
personally guaranteed them that they would never be enslaved again.

The adventure of Serra Leon lifted anchor in February 1787 in four ships of the
Royal Navy that went down Tamisa with 459 passengers including a handful of whites.
Equiano, named as supervisor of supplies embarked with the group but didn´t even
leave England, as he entered in conflict with a white superintendent and lost his
position. In Africa, the colonizers named as Granville Town, in honor to Sharp and soon
they realized the big size of the problem. The rains destroyed the first cultures, the
diseases killed a significant part of the pioneer population and an attack of natives
destroyed the village. Just a few time after, the survival of the colonizers depended on
the slave warehouse of Bance Island, which employed them as carpenters, dockyards
and even clerks.

Serra Leon started again with the intervention of Thomas Peters, an African
captured in 1760 when he was 22 year-old and sold as a slave in North Carolina. In the
War on Independence of the Thirteen Colonies he escaped and fought in the side of the
British forces, becoming a free man in New Scotland, In 1790 he travelled to London
bringing a petition of ex-slaves for the British government executed the promise of
giving them lands and found Granville frustrated by the failure of his African colony.
From that meeting it was born the plan of transference of ex-slaves of New Scotland to
Serra Leon. The philanthropists created the Company of Serra Leon to finance through
selling actions the restoration of the colony. The naval official John Clarkson, brother of
the greatest abolitionist leader, was tasked to lead the action.

Leading 1.1 thousand ex-slaves, Peters and Clarkson established in 1792 the
village of Freetown. The business between them didn´t survive to the travel to Africa. In
Serra Leon, the British guy accused the African one of pretending to govern the colony
and they publically debated their divergences. Peters soon contracted malaria and died
before the first anniversary of the village, converting into one of the mythic fathers of
the nation and in celebrated figure by the Krios, the ethnic-linguistic group of the Afro-
American colonizers.

Slowly, in the middle of terrible epidemics and accepting the shame occasional
contribution from the enslavers of Bance Island, Freetown started a business of
exporting flowers and pearls. In 1808, Serra Leon became a colony of the British crown
and a place of reallocation of the freed ex-slaves liberated in Caribbean and Western
Africa or rescued by the Royal Navy from Luso-Brazilian ships. During the first half of
the XX century, it was conserved the original vision of Sharp of a Christian experiment,
multiracial and approximately equalitarian, conducted by colonizers who represented in
Africa the virtues of the British colonization.

However, the British attitudes towards Serra Leon changed in the last third of
the century with the development of the scientific racism. The conception in part
integrative became segregationist and they dissolved the expectations that the colony
would represent a model for the rest of Africa. In the words of Leo Spitzer, author of the
biography of ex-slaves rescued from a small Brazilian ship and placed in Serra Leon,
the black elite of the colony became a target of insults to imitate the white men and of
attitudes of discrimination and exclusion based solely on race.
 In the end of the XIX century, the British broadened their domains to the inland
of Serra Leon and imposed taxes on the natives. The initiative of colonial consolidation
provoked a rebellion leaded by Bai Bureh, chief of the Temnes, who had support from
other ethnic groups. The rebels attacked also the Krio elite of Freetown, seen as part of
the engines of the British power and used smart tactics of guerilla that confounded the
British for months. Bai Bureh was finally captured but entered in the pantheon of the
Leones national hero. After the rebellion, the colonial administration tried to incorporate
the natives in the political life of Serra Leon, which reduced the power of the Krios.

Serra Leon became independent in 1960 but didn´t escape from poverty, ethnic
violence and the lords of war. The politics of the country is around the endless dispute
between the Temnes of the North and the Mendes of the South. The Krios of Freetown,
less than 5% of the population, conserve a distinct cultural identity and are the
economic elite, but don´t develop a relevant political paper. From 1991 to 2002, the
country was devastated by an inclement civil war started by the rebels of the
Revolutionary United Front of Foday Sankoh, one of the Themne lords of war. But this
tragic chapter of the Leones history has its roots in the neighbor Liberia, another
philanthropic experiment in Africa.

The real distinctions that nature did

In the Notes on the State of Virginia in 1787 Thomas Jefferson imagined a plan
of emancipation of the slaves born since then. The emancipated should be educated in
USA with public money until 18 in the case of women and 21 in the case of men and
then sent to be colonizers of a land to be chosen, with weapons, instruments, supplies
and couples of utile domestic animals. USA would declare them as a free and
independent people, being an ally and protecting them until they had got force.

In an inverse sense, Jefferson intended to encourage the transference to USA as

immigrants of an equal number of white inhabitants. And why not incorporating the
blacks into the American society? His answer: „prejudices deeply rooted among the
whites, ten thousand memories among the blacks of the injuries they supported; new
provocations, the real distinctions that natured did and many other circumstances will
divide us into parties and produce convulsions that probably will only end by the
extermination of one or other race‟.

The abolition of slavery in the Northern states and the augment of the number of
freed blacks contributed to the diffusion of the idea of definitive geographic separation
of the races. In 1800, the area of Richmond, Virginia, was shaken by a rebellion of
slaves who followed the leadership of Gabriel the blacksmith who had grown in a
plantation of tobacco. Gabriel was gibbeted with 26 companions but the episode
strengthened the conviction that the blacks should be expulsed from USA. In a period
when the British action was being more and more heard, the solution of Jefferson was
adopted by political figures of first line, such as the influent senator Henry Clay, the
famous lawyer Daniel Webster and the deputy John Randolph of Virginia. In December
1816 in a hotel of Washington there was a meeting of the founders of the American
Society of Colonization. The adventure of Liberia started.

Randolph, an owner of slaves, believed in that the plan of the American

Colonization Societywould reinforce the institution of slavery because it would
eliminate the dangerous exceeding of blacks in USA. He, however, was not expressing
the medium thoughts of the members of a society composed by rich philanthropists and
clerks who opposed morally to slavery, but they could not accept a multiracial society
of free men. The plan of emigration gained the approval of the president James Monroe
who was an owner of slaves in Virginia. Even so, due to the resistance of the southern
planters, Clay was unsuccessful in approving in the congress a project of financing the
emigration. Among the free blacks of the North, the idea got support of just a few
religious leaders. In general, the American Colonization Societywas accused to conduct
a racist operation of deportation and in 1817 three thousand blacks protested against the
plan.

The choice of the place for the installation of the colony went over the African
coast south to Serra Leon, where the British experiment started to firm. The first
colonizers set sail in the ship Elizabeth in January 1820. They were less than one
hundred ex-slaves whose freedom had been bought by the American Colonization
Societyin the exchange of the compromise of the travel. They had no luck and due to
the refusal of native chief in selling lands, they were left in Sherbro Island, nowadays
pertaining to Serra Leon. As a solution, representatives of the Society together with a
military ship persuaded a native governor to sell them the area of Cape Mesurado in the
mouth of Saint Paul River, 360 km south from Freetown. During the following decade,
more than 2.6 thousand American blacks were installed as colonizers.

Liberia, land of liberated people, was officially established in 1824 when the
village of Cape Mesurado was renamed as Monrovia in tribute to the president Monroe.
The American Colonization Societynamed as the first governor the religious and social
reformer Jehudi Ashmun who gave the blacks participation in the administration. The
initial of the people started from the creation of several separated colonies. In USA,
many state companies of colonization appeared to promote the transference of blacks or
ex-slaves. Besides, American military ships disembarked in Liberia slaves rescued from
black slave ships, many of which were Brazilian. Spite the crescent criticisms of the
American abolitionists the Liberian experiment won a broad support in slaving states
after the violent rebellion of Nat Turner.

Turner was born as a slave in Virginia and when he was young he got
alphabetized and became a fervor Christian preacher, nicknamed as The Prophet by his
companions. In 1831 the interpreted a solar eclipse as a divine signal that it was time of
the rebellion. So, he joined a small group and commanded furtive attacks against white
owners killing them with knives, axes and shovels and freeing the slaves. In two days,
55 whites died in the attacks, but Turner was captured and gibbeted with other 56
suspects. In the following weeks groups of whites hunted, tortured and killed 200 blacks
who had nothing to do with the rebellion. After that, repressive waves reduced even
more strongly the rights of the free blacks in Virginia and it raised among the blacks the
popularity of the action in Liberia. In 1850, the state created a fund to finance the
emigration of blacks.

Before this, the American Colonization Society had desisted on Liberia. Broken
by the financial weigh of sustaining the colony, the Society had forced it to declare
independence, which occurred in 1847. That declaration started with the words: „We,
the people of the Republic of Liberia, were originally inhabitants of the United States of
North America‟. The Constitution, approved at a convention, was molded by the
American Constitution, started with a declaration of rights and concluded with a 5 th
article that contained „diverse provisions‟. In the section 13 of the 5 th article, it was
written: „being the great objective of formation of these colonies to offer a home to the
dispersed and oppressed sons of Africa and regenerate and instruct this uncivilized
continent, only colored people shall be admitted as citizens in this republic‟. The section
15 announced initiatives to implement the nourished objective of promoting the
agriculture progress of the native tribes.

The American-Liberians were tasked of a Christian civilization mission and

shared the dominant concepts of USA and Europe about the backwardness and savagery
of the African natives. In Pennsylvania in 1854 the Presbyterian John Miller Dickey
founded the Institute Ashmun (thereafter University of Lincoln) with the aim of forming
leaders to Liberia. In Africa, they kept the English language and made a question of
being distinguishable from the natives, defining themselves as Americans and importing
the aristocratic manners of the planters of the South and sending their kids to study in
USA. The first Liberian president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a free mixed of Virginia,
inhabited a mansion with Greek columns in Monrovia and expanded the territory of the
country by means of treatises with local chiefs and surgical armed offensives.

The American-Liberian elite are around 5% of the population of Liberia. They

organized the oldest system of a single party of history, founding in 1878 the True Whig
Party. The constitution, that originally limited the rights of voting to the male owners,
gained amendments that restricted even more the electoral rights. The natives, excluded
from the political life, rebelled several times, sometimes against the taxes on the
commerce with European ships. Slowly, although slavery was forbidden, the American-
Liberian owners started to use compulsory work of the natives. In the decade of 1920,
Liberia sold workers to white and black farmers of the Fernando Po Island, at that time
under Spanish control. A commission of the League of Nations denounced the practice
and a commercial boycott of five years of USA and United Kingdom imposed the
adoption of laws against the forced labor.
 Before the Second World War, Liberia was transformed by Firestone in a major
exporter of rubber and railways connected the producing areas to the oceanic ports. In
the post-war, the country went back to the exportation of minerals and the cession of its
flag to ships of many origins. The regime, under crescent pressure, extended the rights
of voting to the natives, but conserved the monopoly of the single party, which was the
fountain of power of the American-Liberians. However, with the fall off the
international prices of the raw materials, the political stability was broken. In 1979, an
augment of prices of rice deflagrated riots that were repressed by bullets and left 70
dead. Months later, by a coup of Estate, Samuel K. Doe knocked down the government
of William Tolbert, murdered the majority of the ministers and ended the long
hegemony of the American-Liberians.

Doe, from the native group of Krahn, a sergeant trained by the Special Forces of
the American Army, strengthened the relations with USA. Initially, his regime tried to
promote a political opening, but soon was converted into an oppressive and corrupt
dictatorship. Each time more paranoiac, fearing real and imaginary articulations and
coups of Estate, the president defrauded elections, ordered the murder of oppositionists
and lightened the wick of ethnical conflicts. In 1989 it irrupted from Ivory Coast the
guerilla of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia of Charles Taylor, who soon took the
control of part of the country. In the following year, in the middle of the civil war, Doe
was captured by the militia of the military chief Prince Y. Johnson and crudely tortured
until death. The war continued with the opposition of the groups of Taylor and Johnson,
ended only in the middle of the decade of 1990 with an election carried out in a fear
climate that transferred the power to the leader of the Patriotic Front.

Taylor, the man who completed the destruction of Liberia, was born in the
proximities to Monrovia, in a family of mixed ascendance, partially American-Liberian
and was formed in Economy in the prestigious University of Massachusetts in USA. He
supported the coup of Doe and entered to his government until he was accused of
corruption and ran to USA where he was arrested. Soon after, with other prisoners, he
escaped from prison and reached Libya, being protected by Muammar Kaddafi and
creating the guerilla that conducted him back to power. In the elections of 1997 a slogan
said: „he killed my mother, he killed my father but I still will vote on him‟.

The guerilla of Taylor was organized around the traffic of diamonds extracted in
many mines of Occidental Africa. The profits from the smuggling allowed him to
finance vast acquisitions of weapons in the clandestine market and sustain rebelled
militias in Guinea, Ivory Coast and Serra Leon. In the scenario of the regional war of
the blood diamonds, Taylor created a privileged connection with Foday Sankoh and his
Revolutionary United Front in Serra Leon. Sankoh recruited children, decapitated chiefs
of villages and promoted campaigns of rapes and mutilations, devastating Serra Leon
until he was captured in 2000, given to tribunal of the United Nations and sentenced by
crimes of war, crimes against humanity and genocide.
 In Liberia, the regime of Taylor represented the return to power of the
American-Liberian but in a new historic time that didn´t support the political monopoly
of the old elite. The lord of war mobilized support of native clans and played the cards
of the ethnical rivalries. Foremost, his government used the secret services to terrify and
murder oppositionists. In 1999 a Liberian militia armed by the neighbor Guinea irrupted
in the North and years later a second group, supported by Ivory Coast, appeared in the
South. Taylor renounced and went to exile in Nigeria in 2003. Three years later, by
request of UN, he was captured and put into jurisdiction of the Special Tribune for Serra
Leon. In the 14 years of civil war more than 200 thousand people, or 6% of the total
was killed and 800 thousands became internal refugees.

From Zanzibar to Congo

The Law for Abolition of Slave Traffic approved in 1807 in Great Britain
assigned the beginning of a long decline not only of the black slave traffic but the
slavery. After the war against USA from 1812 to 1815, the Royal Navy created a
squadron of Occidental Africa with the attribution of suppressing the transatlantic
traffic. The ships operated with the basis on the interpretation that any ship of any flag
transporting slaves were engaged in piracy acts. From the point of view of London, the
campaign against the traffic was destined to neutralize the advantages of the sugar
producers of Brazil and Cuba, competitors of the British producers of Caribbean.

Until 1860, the squadron captured 1.6 thousand black slave ships and liberated
150 thousand slaves, impressive numbers but that probably represented less than 10% of
the total traffic of the period. Under the British pressure, expressed in the maritime
apprehensions and aggressive diplomatic initiatives, traffickers and clients were
convinced that the traffic was condemned. A consequence of this was an expressive
augmentation of the „preventive‟ black slave market. According to estimations of the
Brazilian historian Manolo Florentino, Brazil received more than 40 thousand annually
of Africans in 1838 and 1839 and an average of 50 thousand annually from 1846 to
1850. The commandants carried out an additional mission, firming more than 50
treatises on extinction of the commerce of slaves with African chiefs. Many of them
were obtained by an organized expedition that lifted the Niger River in 1841 losing one
third of their European members due to diseases contracted in the travel. But the
campaign was not limited to Atlantic and to economic motivations. In the middle of the
XIX century when the transatlantic traffic ended, the hard denunciations of the
explorers Richard Francis Burton and David Livingstone against the Arabian traffic in
the Eastern Africa re-lightened the anti-slave fire in Great Britain.

In the Somali Expedition of Burton, started in 1854, the tenant G.E. Herne,
topographer and photographer, stood in Berbera during almost six months with many
missions, including investigating the traffic of slaves and make maps the routes of the
caravans. Burton, masked of a Sind Muslim, infiltrated in the Ethiopian city of Harar,
an Islamic religious center and intersection of caravans of slaves whose walls had never
been transposed by any other European. In the report of the expedition, he wrote in
benevolent terms about the Muslim domestic slavery but emphasized that the practice of
slavery must be abolished by a philanthropic people. And concluded: „I could adorn my
repot with many pictures of horror – kids abandoned to be eaten by wild animals,
women that are submitted to extremes of brutality against their bodies, men whose
temper is managed by diabolic tortures‟.

Livingstone, already a national hero, returned to Africa in 1858 conducting by

five years investigations to the British government. In his back, his conferences
sponsored by the Geographic Royal Society had as focus the traffic of slaves in the
routes that conducted to the Indian Ocean. The immense success of public ensured him
private finances to his last expedition from 1866 and his year of death 1873. This
expedition aimed to investigate the fountains of Nile and new reports on slavery. In a
letter directed to the editor of New York Herald he explained that he considered the
abolition of the traffic in the Eastern coast an objective more important than the
discovery of all the fountains of Nile. Even so, in this last travel, the famous explorer
was obligated to recur to the help and hospitality of Arabian traffickers.

The traffic in the Indian Ocean suffered a lethal kick when, one year before the
death of Livingstone, the United Kingdom sent Henry Bartle Frere, ex-governor in
Bombay, to the sultanate of Zanzibar. The Mission Frere was destined to persuade the
sultan Barghash bin Said to firm a treatise of abolition of the slave commerce in that
principal remaining market. The British got support manifestations of Germans, French,
Americans and Portuguese but in the last minute, a maneuver of the consul of France
left the sultan to imagine that he could keep the lucrative business standing under the
protection of France. This hope disappeared at the time British ships blocked the port of
the island, imposing to the sultan the signature of the treatise.

Burton and Livingstone acted as British secret agents in the anti-slave campaign.
The British Henry Monroe Stanley, in a travel in service of the New York Herald, found
Livingstone disappeared and sick in the margins of Lake Tanganyika in 1871. He
accepted the mission of implanting the colony of Congo, based on compulsory work
(semi-slave), confined to him by the king Leopold II from Belgium.

Stanley explored Congo River in an epic terrorizing adventure of one thousand

days, sponsored by this journal of New York in association with the Londoner Daily
Telegraph since 1874. When he was back, he met the Belgian king who was organizing
an African International Society, supposedly a scientific and humanitarian association
back to the diffusion of religion and fight against the human traffic. In 1879 the explorer
returned to Congo Valley in an expedition announced as of exclusively scientific
interest but with the true finality of firming treatises with the local chiefs and install
military and commercial houses.
 A fortified house constructed in the head of the great chutes, in the first
navigable port of the river, named as Leopoldville, would become the actual Kinshasa.
The king shiftily started to create a private colony. In an instruction to Stanley, Leopold
II clarified the sense of the act: „it is indispensable that you buy the maximal of lands
you can and put under successive suzerainty all the tribal chiefs, from the mouth of
Congo to Stanley Falls‟. The treatises obtained with chiefs incapable of reading a single
line of those papers, but ready to accept gifts, not only transferred the sovereign of those
lands but also ensured the exploitation of native work by the king of Belgium.

The Conference of Berlin recognized the rights of the philanthropic society of

Leopold II to a Congo of 2.3 million square kilometers. Years later, a railway
surrounded the chutes, completing the waterway served by vapors in Congo Valley. At
the same time, it was implanted by violence and terror a vast system of compulsory
work through which the natives provided ivory and natural rubber to the Belgian king.
The colonial administration kept women and children fettered in the villages as hostages
to obligate the men to enter the forest searching for rubber. The passive resistance was
broken by exemplar murders and floggings. Hewed hands given to the officials attested
the efficient use of the bullets used in the murders.

Leopold II was the host of the Anti-slave Conference organized by the powers
and inaugurated in Brussels in 1889. Throughout months punctuated by parties and
banquets he used the meeting to broadcast his humanitarian acts in Congo and
succeeded in obtaining the rights of, contrary to the resolutions of free commerce
approved in the Conference of Berlin, charge taxes of importation in his private colony.
One year later, the horrors of Congo emerged for the first time by means of the black
American George Washington Williams, a veteran of the Civil War who got engaged in
denunciating the white supremacy of the South and the violence of Ku Klux Klan.

Williams circled in the Anti-slave Conference, got fascinated by the Belgian

king and showed him a plan to transfer black Americans to work in Africa. However,
before continuing it, he decided to visit Congo and got the sponsor of an American
investor of the railway of the chutes. In the travel, contrary to many other visitors, he
interviewed natives and missionaries, discovering to himself the Siberia of the African
continent. Wrathful, he wrote an open letter to Leopold II and a detailed report to the
American president Benjamin Harrison, exposing in details the slavery in the private
colony. Stanley defended the king as well as the Belgian parliamentarians. Williams
died in 1891 of tuberculosis and the scandal was forgotten after generating some articles
in liberal journals of Belgium.

Joseph Conrad, still with his name of baptism Konrad Korzeniowski, shipped in
Congo as an aspirant to captain in the vapor in the year when Williams registered in
paper his terrible discoveries. His six months in the river originated the Heart of the
Darkness, published as a seriate in a British review of 1899. In this classic masterpiece
of literature, the testimonial registers of Conrad transfigured into powerful images of an
unlimited oppression and a routine genocide, in hopeless world.
 According a speculation of the writer Adam Hochschild, Conrad was inspired in
the Belgian official Leon Rom, chief of the Public Force of the Free Estate of Congo to
create his character Kurtz. The brutal Rom published Le Nègre du Congo, a book that
summarizes vulgarly the racial concepts diffused at those times. Describing the black
race he wrote: „the main occupation of the black man and the one he dedicates most part
of his existence is to extend a mat under the hot sun rays as a crocodile in the sand‟.

The truth about Congo emerged at the second time under the pen of Edmund D.
Morel who lightened the spark of the ultimate great anti-slave campaign in Great
Britain. He was born in Paris and naturalized British. He was an administrative
employee of the navigation company hired by Leopold II to turn into reality, in a regime
of monopoly, the transport of handcrafts between Belgium and Congo. In the port of
Antwerp, analyzing the stuff from the embarkations and disembarks, he concluded that
Congo was an Estate founded on slavery. The ships arrived filled up with rubber and
ivory and went transporting weapons and ammunition. The effective charges were not
coincident with the fanciful registers on the books of the company and showed that the
inhabitants of Congo received nothing in exchange to the richness they exported.

From the discovery and wrath to action, some months had passed. In 1900 Morel
engaged in the journalism of denunciation and in the following year he abandoned his
prosperous commercial career. With the sponsor of John Holt, honest businessman of
Liverpool, he founded his own journal, the West African Mail that would be the
instrument of a vigorous, precise and tireless campaign. Based on innumerable
documents, in hidden fountains of the administration of Congo and in reports of
travelers and missionaries, he exposed the gut of the slave system imposed by a
European king to a whole African people. Nothing – subtle threatening, offers of bribes
– stopped the cold and calculated furor of the journalist. The campaign fruited in books,
pamphlets and articles to other newspapers, reaching parliamentarians of the United
Kingdom, France and Belgium.

The slave Estate of Leopold II started to ruin in 1903, when the British House of
Commons approved a motion requiring that the Congolese were treated with humanity.
At the same time, the young consul Roger Casement in Congo was sent to inland with
the mission of producing an official report. The diplomat went passionately into the
investigative task and soon, taken by wrath, he sent to London tons of uncontestable
information. The Ministry of Exterior, under Belgian pressure, published a reviewed
and diluted version of the report, but Casement insisted and joined Morel to found the
Association of Reform of Congo. The organization created sections in the exterior,
including in USA where it influenced the opinion of the president Theodore Roosevelt.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain and Anatole France among
several writers gave literary support to the movement that involved missionaries,
businessmen and political activists. In USA, Booker T. Washington joined the cause. In
1908 the Free Estate of Congo left place to the Belgian Congo that would be governed
by the parliament of Belgium. The horror stood in the past, but a new system of
imposition of work was implanted, based on the general charging of heavy taxes.

The Irish Casement renounced to the diplomatic service and joined the
republican rebels that fought for independence of Ireland. In 1916 when he was 51 year-
old he was arrested, accused on betrayal and gibbeted. Morel could not visit him before
the execution because his pacifist activities during the European war gave him the
accusation of being a German spy and he was converted into a target of attacks. One
year after the murder of Casement, Morel was sentenced under vague accusations to six
months of prison that was played in the same Londoner prison of Pentonville.

In 1920, two decades after the publication of The White Man´s Burden of
Kipling, Morel published The Black Man´s Burden. The book aimed to reform the
European policies to Africa and contained an anti-colonization appeal to the League of
Nations for the delivery of non-occupied lands to the control of the Africans. Facing and
imperial dogma largely accepted that attributed to the superiority of the white race the
power of the imperialist Estates over the colonial populations, the author asked: „isn´t it
mere hypocrisy to hide from us that we extended our march of subjugation from one
hemisphere to another due to our superior weapons?‟

Morel observed that the Africans survived three centuries of slave traffic and to
the lethal impact of the diseases spread in the continent by the Europeans but he feared
the results of the „modern capitalist exploitation, supported by the modern machines of
destruction: from the bad effects of this last one, scientifically imposed, there is no
escape to the Africans. Its destructive effects are not spasmodic, they are permanent. In
this permanence there are its fatal consequences. It doesn´t merely kill the body, but the
spirit. It breaks the spirit. It ruins their political system, detaches them from their land,
invades the life of their family, destroys their natural activities and occupations, takes
all their time, enslaves them in their own home‟.

These evaluations came from what Morel knew about Congo and also about
other colonies that far lived similar horrors to the private domain of Leopold II, such as
the British South Rhodesia, the German Southeastern Africa, the French Congo and the
Portuguese Angola. He had reasons about many things, but not about everything.

The effective imperial power on Africa lasted only a few more than half a
century. With important exceptions, the European administrations could not mold more
than the superficial surface of the African societies. The beliefs, the familiar structures,
many traditional systems of rules stood in the margin of the changes promoted by the
colonizers. Africa survived as a plurality of social experiences and as a persistent racial
metaphor.
THE PAN-AFRICAN DREAM

Wilberforce, Ohio, Wednesday, 1st April 1896. Dear Mr. Washington: I have
searched, since some time ago, for a free hour to answer to your gentle letter of 17 th
January, but free hours are scarce here. I feel that I would like to work in Tuskegee if
this would be utile to you. My idea is that it is possible, gradually, to develop there a
school of Black History and social investigations that could help to situate the problem
of the blacks on a serious factual basis. I think that, at the correct time, many
universities of the North such as Harvard, Chicago, Johns Hopkins and the University of
Pennsylvania would join to help this movement. What do you think about that? W. E.B
du Bois.

„Mr. Washington was Booker T. Washington, the ex-slave who became the
respected rector of the Normal and Industrial Institute of Tuskegee, an institution for
blacks with statute of university in Alabama. He was about to turn 40 year-old when he
received the answer of the young Du Bois, 28. Months before, the rector pronounced
one of his conciliatory speeches to an audience of white planters and was precisely
criticized by Du Bois who labeled him as the great conciliator.

Both Booker Washington and Du Bois had black and white ancestors but the
American racial code classified them as blacks. Du Bois however was born in
Massachusetts of a family of Dutch, French and Haitian origin and his parents didn´t
live slavery. The academic business of the exchanged letters didn´t come to real because
Du Bois was at that time a lecturer in the University Wilberforce and preferred to
transfer to the University of Pennsylvania. The two men respected each other and
cooperated in the organization of a black panel in the Universal Exposition of 1900 in
Paris. However, they were separated by an ideological fracture.

Soon before the Exposition of Paris, Booker Washington published one of his
main books, in which he strongly defended the concept of emancipation through
education. He called USA to promote the technical schooling among the blacks that
would give an enhancement in the level of life of the population originated from the
slave system and with time it would attenuate racism. „Haiti, Saint Dominic and Liberia,
although they are among the richest countries in terms of natural resources, they are
disheartening examples of what certainly occurs to any nation lacking industrial or
technical qualification‟ as he observed to criticize the emphasis on the classic education
of the belles lettres.

Booker Washington criticized the belief that the black problem would be solved
by the absorption of the blacks by the whites, pointing out an impassable obstacle: the
one drop rule. In the text of an exemplar irony: „It is a known fact that if a person has
1% of African blood in their vessels, they stop being a white person. The 99% of
Caucasian blood don´t weigh compared to the 1% of African blood. So, it will be really
a hard task for the whites to absorb the blacks‟.

At this epoch, the remnant hopes on the future of Serra Leon and Liberia went
away and Booker and Washington contested the project of Back to Africa, that
fascinated black intellectual leaders in USA: „I remember that, not a few time ago, when
about five hundred people departed from the port of Savannah toward Liberia, the
novelties crossed the country as a ray: the blacks decided to return to their own home
and this is the solution for the racial problem of the South. But these people with short
vision forgot that in the morning, before breakfast, only in the South another five
hundred blacks were born‟.

The rector of Tuskegee, similarly to all his companions, believed in the

existence of races. But, foremost, he believed in the existence of an American nation
that would be the common home of whites and blacks.

In the year of the Universal Exposition with initiative of Booker Washington it

was created in Boston the National League of Black Business, an organization destined
to the promotion of commercial and financial interests of businessmen and black liberal
professionals. One year later, in a gesture without precedents, the president Theodore
Roosevelt invited the black leader to visit the White House. When at the end of the
decade of 1960 Richard Nixon pronounced his speech on the black capitalism and
announced policies of preferences to black businessmen he gave another tribute to the
man who tried to conciliate the idea of a single nation with the reality of racial
segregation.

Du Bois interpreted the past and imagined the future in a very different way.
Until 1909 the persisted under the shade of the venerated rector of Tuskegee although
he was a detached voice. But in 12th February of that year, the centenary of birth of
Abraham Lincoln, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP) started to transfer the leadership to the hands of Du Bois. In the following
years, he wrote without stopping, assigning columns in many journals and directing the
publication of NAACP whose circulation overcame one hundred thousand issues in the
beginning of the decade of 1920.

During two decades, Du Bois personified NAACP but in the beginning of the
years 1930 he entered in conflict with the new secretary-executive of the organization,
Walter White and with the assistant secretary Roy Wilkins who diverged from the most
radical conceptions of the historical leader. Then, he left the direction of the journal and
visited the Imperial Japan and the Nazi German and got positively impressed by the
proud of race that he found in both of the countries, but criticizing the persecution of the
German Jews. During the World War, he cooperated with the Communist Party of USA
and when Joseph Stalin died he wrote an article with open eulogies to the Soviet
dictator.
 Africa represented the object of fascination of the whole life of Du Bois. In 1961
he moved to Ghana in invitation to the president Kwame Nkrumah with the finality of
organizing the African Encyclopedic, an official book. In 1963, USA refused to renew
his passport and he received Ghanaian citizenship. He died in Accra in 27 th August 1963
at 95 year-old. In the next day, Martin Luther King pronounced the speech „I have a
dream‟ that would have been interpreted as an abominable heresy by the founder of the
American black movement.

Africa as a metaphor: Du Bois

It was not Du Bois, but the missionary Alexander Crummell the father of the
pan-Africanism. Cummell was born in New York in 1819 and 35 years later, he moved
to Liberia where he lived for two decades. As many others, he saw Liberia as an
advanced place of the Christian civilization and of the English language in Africa. Spite
his personal experience with the tense meeting between American-Liberians and
natives, the never abandoned his fundamental belief in Africa as the fatherland of the
black race. A collection of his texts published in 1862 is entitled The Future of Africa.
The Ghanaian philosopher Kwame Appiah observes correctly that the intentions of
Crummell to be speaking in the name of a continent was originated not from his African
experience but from a racial image learnt in USA and United Kingdom. Appiah also
registers that the concept of racial unity of Africa would shock the Liberian natives but
it became in the XX century as a common property of great part of mankind.

If there is a true African trace, this one is diversity. Before the badly named
division of Africa by the imperial powers, the continent was the home for thousands of
distinct political entities that were reunited by the colonizers in about fifty Estates. But
the Pan-Africanism, a fruit of the racial concepts of the XIX century, interprets Africa
as a unity and a geographic metaphor for the black race.

In Liberia, the walk of Crummell crossed with Edward Wilmot Blyden, born in
Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands at that time under Danish domain from free black
parents, who arrived in the new country in 1850. Blyden served as ambassador in
European countries and as minister of two governors of Liberia. In 1887, when he
published Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, he entered in the gallery of the fathers
of the Pan-Africanism. In his book, he defended that Islam had a unifying potential
bigger than the Christian to the black Africa. Classifying the Christian religion as an
import from Europe, he converted into the pioneer of a never completed project of
Africanizing the doctrine of the Pan-Africanism.

Between word and action, the figure of Henry Sylvester-Williams was

interposed. The lawyer and writer, born in the British colony of Trinidad in 1869, knew
USA at the moment when the sour reality of the Jim Crow laws substituted the hopes of
the Reconstruction. In 1896 he migrated to England and in the following year the crated
the Pan-African Association that promoted the First Pan-African Conference in London
in July 1900. Du Bois was among the thirty representatives who participated in the
event, where he coordinated the committee for redaction of the appeal „To the nations of
the world‟. The text asked to the powers that they respected the rights of the African
descendants and the sovereignty of the black Estates, as Liberia, Haiti and Abyssinia
(nowadays Ethiopia) were named.

After the original conference, the Pan-African movement was leaded by Du Bois
who organized the Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919. Carried out parallel to the
Conference of Peace that negotiated the treatises of ending the First World War, the
meeting reunited sixty representatives and only a few were African. New congresses
were carried out in London and Brussels in 1921; London and Lisbon in 1923 and New
York in 1927. In this last one, among the 208 representatives, there was only a handful
of Africans, coming from Liberia, Serra Leon, Nigeria and Gold Coast. The colonial
administrations of France and United Kingdom had imposed restrictions of travelling in
order to empty the participation of Africans but, in fact, Pan-Africanism still continued
as a movement conducted essentially by English speaking intellectuals of USA,
Caribbean and United Kingdom.

It is not possible to understand the Pan-Africanism without understanding the

place of race in the vision of world of Du Bois. To the American leader, race was less
than a biological concept and more a historic notion. He admitted that the gross
differences of color, hairs and bones few explained about the paper developed by the
human groups in history, but he invoked subtle forces that divided the human beings
into races, not always defined by science, but clearly defined to the eyes of historians
and sociologists. He completed: „if this is true, so the history of the world is not a
history of individuals, but the history of nations; not the one of nations, but of races –
and whoever ignores or tries to smudge the idea of race in the human history ignores
and smudges the central concept of all the history. So, what is a race? It is a vast family
of human beings of blood and languages in common, always with history, tradition and
impulses in common that does efforts in common to the realization of determined ideals
of life‟.

Here it goes the best resume of the racialist thinking. Du Bois didn´t believe in
notions of racial superiority or inferiority so he was not a racist. He believed that each
race would carry a singular message, a particular ideal and that the plentiful realization
of the abilities of mankind needed the broadcasting of the messages of all races. The
German of Hitler impressed him favorably because it was concerned in giving the
message of a race, but he didn´t admit its destructive impulses against the Jews, another
race. The idea of miscegenation made no sense in the logic of his historic conception
because it tended to smudge the racial limits, distorting its messages. The preservation
of the races, a title of one of his essays, was a historic imperative of first order.
 Distinct races could live together in a same nation? Yes, answered Du Bois, with
the condition that among them it would establish a substantial business respecting laws,
languages and religions. The racial and national identities could be conciliated, but the
race was a fountain of a more vital and deeper communion: „we are Americans not only
for birth and citizenship, but due to our political ideals, language and religion. Our
Americanism goes no further. From this point, we are blacks, member of a vast historic
race that has been sleeping since the aurora of the creation, but that starts to awake in
the dark forests of its African homeland‟.

Africa, in Du Bois, is not a geological reality, but the homeland of a race that has
a message to mankind. In this crucial sense, Africa would be a culture, a way of
understanding the world, a spiritual league of a vast community, the symbol of a
destination. In The Black, of 1915, the conductor of the light of the Pan-Africanism got
even more distance from the notions of the scientific racism, denying the existence of
pure races and describing the variety of African physical types to conclude that the
black race should be seen as a historic actor. At the same time, he formulated the thesis
that the ruin of Africa, provoked by the slave traffic and the colonial division, dissolved
the African kingdoms, breaking the development of modern black Estates. The
consequences of the African ruin – the fragmentation of the race throughout the world
and colonial subordination of Africa – would only be overcome by the unity of the
blacks of the Globe.

The Black was written in a period of growth of the movement of syndicates in

USA and soon after the formation of the African National Congress in South Africa.
Also, China had just founded the Republic, an event that Du Bois interpreted as the
beginning of the affirmation of the Asiatic race. These events are reflected in a part of
the concluding chapter of the book that draws a horizon of political alliances. In that
part, he emphasized that „while the black workers are slaves, the white workers will
never be free‟ and he claimed for a „unity of working classes in all places, a new unity
of the colored races, new unity of men‟. However, the movement of changing would be
conducted by the black race: „Slowly, not only it grows a particularly strong
brotherhood of black blood in the world but it also gains the expression the common
cause of the dark races against the insupportable intentions and insults of the Europeans.
The majority of the people of this world is colored. The belief in mankind means a
belief in the colored men. The world of the future will be probably what the colored
men do. For this colored world to get established shall the earth be again wet by blood
of the combats, in a shout of human beasts, or will the ration and the good wishes
prevail? The better and greater hope that the last ones prevail are on the character of the
black race because it represents at the same time the strongest and the most lovely
human races‟.

As Appiah observed, in his approach to the theme of race, Du Bois wanted to

trust in something more elevated than the rude continuity of the human genes. His
concept of race could not be separated from Biology, but only in History, which means,
in first place, of a shared past. But if even Du Bois had African and Dutch ancestors,
how could he define his racial category? The answer he gave was simple and arbitrary:
the skin color. Because he was dark, he elected a tradition represented by the African
ancestors in detriment of the Dutch. Black race and Africa constituted the two
inseparable terms of an historic equation.

The last phrase of the book is an evocation in Latin borrowed from a Greek
proverb of the IV century before the Christian age: „Semper novi quid ex Africa (all the
novelties come from Africa). To Du Bois, Africa occupies the place of a mythical home.
He was American and shared not only the popular American culture but also the high
intellectual culture of his country. But due to his ideology he could not feel at home in
USA. Africa, note the Africas of the multiple experiences of the Africans, but an
imagined Africa, was the home of Du Bois.

The Pan-Africanism of Du Bois was, deeply, a development of his Pan-

Blackism. The black race in his conception was a diaspora race. But he didn´t defend a
return to Africa, but the opposite, as he actively searched for means to promote the
material, social and intellectual progress of the blacks in the societies of the Americas.
Africa developed two papers in his racialist vision: at the present it was a fountain of a
tradition, something as a historic memory that linked the blacks from all over the world;
in the future, it should be a pole of political and cultural power capable of inspiring the
blacks of the homeland and in the diaspora.

Slowly, Du Bois got firmly convinced that the racial segregation of USA was
not totally bad, as this indicated a way. In an article of 1935 he sustained the thesis that
the black Americans constituted, at least partially, a nation inside the nation, due to the
organization of the black church, the black school and the black retail commerce. It was
imperative to follow this way, attracting the best, most vigorous and most educated
blacks to, via a volunteer and crescent segregation, raise a great racial unity and conquer
political equality. Equality here did not mean equal rights for the citizens, but a national
pact of equality among races.

Africa as a destiny: Garvey

The leadership of Du Bois had a counterbalance in the Jamaican Marcus Mosiah

Garvey Jr. who formulated a very different version of Pan-Africanism and became the
most important enemy of the American. Garvey was born in 1887, almost two decades
after Du Bois. Under the influence of his father, a mason of a vast culture, he was a
tireless reader. However, at least according to an autobiographical narrative written in
1923, it was not in the books that the found the belief around he would organize his life:
„to me, at home, in the first times, there were no differences between blacks and whites.
One of the properties of my father, the place where I lived most of the time, our house
neighbored the one of a white man. He had three daughters and a boy. We were friends
of parties and jokes. We were innocent fools who never dreamt or felt a racial problem.
When I was 14, my small friend and I separated. Her fathers imagined that it was time
to draw the line of the color. They sent her to a sister in Edinburgh, Scotland, and told
her that she never tried to write or make contact with me because I was a nigger. After
my first lesson of racial distinction, I didn´t think on playing with white girls anymore.‟

Garvey had a brief passage by syndicalism before working as journalist and

editor. In London in the years before the great European war, he wrote to African Times
and Orient Review, a publication directed by the Egyptian Duse Mohammed Ali, an
African nationalist and broadcaster of Islam. Five years after returning to Jamaica in
August 1914, when the war broke out, he founded the Universal Negro Improvement
Association (Unia) that was defined as a movement against blacks who didn´t want to
be blacks. The declared finality of the organization was to gather all the black peoples
of the world in a great entity to establish a country and a government totally black-
owned.

In this autobiographic article, Garvey complained of the Jamaican mixed who

didn´t want a black leader and of the American black leaders who were not interested in
the poor. He also offers his version about the faction fights of the sections of Unia in
USA and he vaunted of his act of ending the First International Convention of the
Blacks in 1920 in New York in a Madison Square Garden filled up by 25 thousand
persons. But mainly he tried to present the accusations he received due to the Black Star
Line business as fruit of ivy of rival leaders.

In fact, in his travels around USA, Garvey had grown an organization of masses
based on Harlem and with hundreds of paying affiliates and that competed in influence
with NAACP. Editing the journal The Black World and working tirelessly, the
Jamaican converted into an internationally known figure. Black Star Line was a
company of navigation instituted by Unia in 1919 with the ambitious project of
transporting passengers and charges in a global black economy. The few and old ships
of the company navigated during two years, principally in routes between USA and
Caribbean in the middle of administrative disorganization, scandals of corruption and
sabotages carried out by the FBI of Edgard Hoover.

It was FBI that kicked seriously Black Star Line, conducted a vicious process
against Garvey starting from an accusation of use of the postal service to send
misleading propaganda. By means of coercion and buying testimonies the accusers
obtained in 1923 a condemnation of the leader of Unia to five years in jail. The appeals
were rejected and he carried out half of the sentence until he was freed and deported to
Jamaica by an act of the president Calvin Coolidge.

In the years of glory of the creation of a navigation company, Unia started other
projects even more ambitious but with less expressive results. The Corporation of Black
Industries was a trial to establish a great chain of industries in USA, Caribbean and
Africa to product all the goods and services demanded by the world market of Africans
and their descendants. In 1920 the organization decided to start a program for the
development of Liberia and of Haiti, destined to free them from their debts and implant
industries, universities and railways. The initiative didn´t prosper due to the opposition
of USA and the European powers that had their own interests in both countries.

Race had an essentially biological meaning to Garvey. If Du Bois translated it in

historic terms and emphasized the racial unity of blacks and mulattos of the diaspora,
the Jamaican didn´t hide his repulse to miscegenation. He considered his rivals in USA
and in Caribbean as colored blacks, which means, mixed, and extract from this fact
consequences of a large importance. The International Convention of the Blacks
adopted a Declaration of Independence, a universal canticle and red black and green
flag, acclaiming Garvey as the provisory president of Africa. In the vision of the leader
of Unia, Africa was not a metaphoric homeland but a real one to where it was an
imperative to return. The true blacks would understand this spite the false colored
leaders such as Du Bois who insisted on the idea of a racial conciliation in the countries
of the diaspora.

In the perspective of Garvey, the blacks should have a country of their own. This
country would be a decolonized Africa and without internal frontiers to where all the
blacks of the world would go back. The black separatism to which Du Bois, concerned
with the equality of rights, flirted indecisively, constituted and untouchable principle to
Garvey: „we feel that there are absolutely no reason to exist any differences between the
white and the black races if each one stops from invading one another and both
stabilize. We believe in the purity of both races. We don´t believe in that the black man
should be encouraged to think his greater objective in life is to marry a white woman. It
is a depraved and dangerous doctrine of social equality to claim as such colored leaders
do, for the acquaintanceship of blacks and whites, which would destroy the racial purity
of both‟.

The return to Africa, Garvey imagined, was a goal to which he could get the
cooperation of the white leaders either clarified or openly racist. After all, he thought,
the white men who struggled to construct their countries and civilizations are not
disposed to give them to the blacks or any other race. It didn´t make sense to wait that
one day the blacks would occupy the positions of majors, governors or president of the
white countries. But the act of the return would give to each one of the races a separated
existence eliminating the racial rivalries in each country.

The discordance between Du Bois and Garvey left the stage of acrimony to the
mutual hate. In an article of two parts published between 1920 and 1921, the American
mixed words of recognition of the leadership, honesty and idealism of the Jamaican
with criticisms (obviously correct) about his authoritative personality, his insuperable
megalomania and his heterodox methods of business. In that text, to suggest that Garvey
lived in the clouds he reproduced a text of a speech where the Jamaican showed a
parallel of his mission of redeeming Africa and the Napoleonic trial of taking the world.
Less than two years later, Garvey referred to Du Bois as a mixed hence a monstrosity.
At the same time the met in Atlanta Edward Young Clarked, one of the chiefs of the
restored Ku Klux Klan. That was too much and in 1924 while Garvey appealed against
his condemnation, Du Bois wrote an article entitled „A Lunatic or a Traitor‟ that
described the Jamaican as the most dangerous enemy of black race in USA and the
world.

In Du Bois´ Pan-Africanism the nations could be conciliated to the racial

principle and the blacks should search for a pact of equality to the whites inside USA. In
Garvey it was the contrary: the supreme principle of race collided with the one of
nation. His Africa was not a metaphor but a concrete destination. The salvation of the
blacks (and the whites) was found in the geopolitical separation. This perspective
opened a real area of cooperation between Unia and the heralds of the white supremacy
in USA, something that in Du Bois´ eyes broke any limits of the tolerable. In the article
of 1924, the leader of NAACP denunciated the pamphlets and letters broadcasted by
Garvey that called on politicians, educators and philanthropists to join the efforts of
Unia in favor of the geographic separation of races. A text reproduced in the material of
propaganda was „one of the worst articles recently written by a Southern white
defending the deportation of the black Americans to Liberia‟.

In his conclusion, Du Bois denunciated the intimidations conducted by Garvey

and his followers against judicial authorities involved in the process against him as well
as pretended scandals of corruption and even a murder linked to the fights of the
factions of Unia. Du Bois himself would have suffered physical threatening and
threatening of judicial processes. The final sentences are: „any man who from now and
ever, eulogizes or defends Marcus Garvey labels himself as unworthy to receive the
support of the decent Americans. Regarding Garvey, this explicit allied of Ku Klux
Klan must be arrested or deported to his country‟.

The prison and the hatred of Du Bois and other black American leaders corroded
the political bases of Garvey in USA. In Jamaica in 1929 he created the People´s
Political Party, a party dedicated to the social reform and the rights of workers. Six
years later he moved to London where he conducted campaigns to support Ethiopia in
war against Italian forces. The Jamaican admired the Christian Ethiopian Empire that
figured in his eyes as the future of Africa and conceded a support (not free from
criticisms) to his Emperor, Haile Selassie.

The royal Ethiopian family was Christianized in the IV century by two Greek-
Syrian explorers and Christianism became the official religion of the kingdom. In the
XIII century, under the Salomonida dynasty, the Ethiopian Empire was consolidated,
being the guardian of Christianity in Africa. In the European imperial expansion over
Africa, Ethiopia ceded to the Italians the colony of Eritrea but conserved its
independence. In 1930 the regent Tafari Makonnen assumed the throne with the title of
Haile Selassie I. His Empire would last until the Revolution of 1974 and the abolition of
the Salomonida dynasty.

The adventures of Selassie linked his figure through a special cord to the
Jamaican history and culture. In 1936, militarily beat by the Italians in the Second War
of Abyssinia, the Emperor claimed to the League of Nations that only imposed
ineffective sanctions against the invader. In the five years of exile in Great Britain he
converted into an international antifascist icon. Before this, however, he had become the
fountain of inspiration of the Rastafari Movement. This name comes from the union of
the term ras, an honorific Ethiopian title that means chief or duke with Tafari, the name
of baptism of Haile Selassie.

Garvey didn´t develop a direct paper in the appearance of the Rastafari

Movement, which in fact emanated from popular preaches influenced by the ideas of
Back to Africa and of a black supremacy. The most important of them, Leonard Howell,
„the first rasta‟ started to announce in 1933 that Selassie was the incarnation of the
Messiah returning to Earth. Among the broadcasters of the new religion, many were
activists of Garvey, which conferred to the Rastafari Movement a strong political color.

To the Rastas, both Jesus Christ and Selassie were incarnations of God (Jah).
The Occidental civilization represented only an oppressive structure, the use of
Cannabis (ganja) worked as an instrument for the group meditation and the study of the
Bible. Garvey was never a rasta and criticized Howell for the identification of the
Ethiopian emperor to Messiah, but the rastas lifted him up to the condition of the
prophet of the Return to Africa and incorporated him to their black separatism. A
speech of Garvey in 1927 in which he had done a metaphoric reference to the
coronation of a black king in Africa was taken by the rastas as a prophecy of the
enthronement of Selassie. In the rasta mythology, ships of the Black Star Line would
transport them back to Africa.

Selassie didn´t disdain of the rasta cult and received and paid homage Jamaican
religious leaders in Ethiopia in 1961 and carried out a famous visit to Jamaica in 1966.
More than one hundred thousand rastas waited him around the airport of Kingston,
smoking cannabis in a party climate. Rita Marley, wife of Bob Marley, converted to the
religion after meeting the emperor. The Rastafari Movement gained worldwide
visibility after his visit and reggae, already incorporated to the religion, reached
worldwide commercial success. Three years before in a speech to the General Assembly
of UN, Selassie condemned racism and declared that the skin color has no more
importance than the color of the eyes, cutting the tree of the black supremacy among the
rastas.

In his last years of life, Garvey carried out other strange alliances. In 1937 his
followers in USA cooperated with the Mississippi senator Theodore G. Bilbo, a
detached herald of white supremacy, in a project of deportation of American blacks to a
Great Liberia that would be formed by the union of Liberia with the British and French
colonies of Western Africa. In 1940 two strokes killed Garvey who was buried in
London. After almost a quarter of a century later his mortal rests were removed and
transferred to a sanctuary in the Park of the National Heroes in Kingston. In contrary to
his enemy Du Bois who didn´t prescribe the return but lived his last days in Ghana, the
prophet of Back to Africa never put his feet in African soil.
Pan-Africanism reaches Africa

After the interval of almost two decades, marked by the Great Depression and
the World War, it was carried out in Manchester, England, in 1945 the V Pan-African
Congress. Du Bois was present as ever but at 77 year-old he developed a paper basically
symbolic and got the homage of being the honorific president of the meeting. In the
political direction the figures of George Padmore from Trinidad and Kwame Nkrumah
from Ghana were luminous. They were leaders of left who had studied in USA and tried
to conciliate Marxism with pan-Africanism.

Contrary to the other four previous congresses, the theme of African

decolonization started to get under light and young African leaders dominated the
debates. The principal resolution denunciated the imperialism and called on fights:
„today, there is only one way to effective action – the organization of the masses‟. From
the above one hundred representatives, one fourth came from Africa, especially from
political parties organized in the British colonies. Among them were Jomo Kenyatta
who would be the first president of Kenya; Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who would be the
first president of Malawi and the Nigerians Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe, Jaja Wachuku
and Obafemi Awolowo who would occupy, respectively, the positions of president,
minister of Exterior and leader of the parliament opposition soon after the
independence. Many of the men who reunited in Manchester met after the initial great
wave of decolonization to constitute OAU – Organization of African Unity.

The Pan-Africanism of the post-war started to be molded in the years 1930

during the Italian occupation of Ethiopia. In London, it was created an International
Office for Assistance to Africa that centralized the campaign for restoration of the
Ethiopian independence. The president of the organization was Padmore, a communist
who worked in USSR to Comintern (International Communist) from 1929 to 1934 but
ruptured with Moscow and got closer to the Trotskyite opposition. He had at his side his
friend since childhood, also from Trinidad, Cyrill L. R. James, in the epoch when Leon
Trotski carried out efforts to construct a Fourth International.

The two Trinidadians were around 35 year-old and had not made contact with
the Ghanaian Nkrumah who were 10 years younger and was studying at the Lincoln
University in Pennsylvania. The meeting happened during the war by means of James
who was the director of one from the innumerable Trotskyite dissidences. The group
had also Kenyatta as a guest of Padmore. He had studied economics in Moscow and
moved with him to London and worked in the campaign of support to Ethiopia. For the
four guys, Du Bois represented merely a historic reference, but not a political or
ideological leader.
 Parallel to the articulation of the English-speaking pan-Africanists, it was
developing the political and literary movement of Negritude, born at the same period
among Caribbean and Africans of the French colonies. Under the influence of the
writers of the Reborn of Harlem, hugging the concept of African Diaspora nation, the
heralds of the movement reverenced the figure of the Haitian L´Ouverture and
prescribed the restoration of an ancestor African personality.

The label Negritude was an invention of the young fellow Aimé Césaire from
Martinique in his poem Cahier d´un retour au pays natal (notes of a return to the
homeland), published in a student´s journal of Paris with the collaboration of the poets
Leon Damas from French Guyana and Leopold Sedar Senghor, future first president of
Senegal. In the bases of that label there is the idea of a deep cultural link that unites the
Africans and their descendants from all over the world and racialist logic attached to the
stereotypes constructed by the scientific racism: „They accepted the irresponsible
thinking of Europe and objected that if the Europeans are rational, then the Africans
have rhythm and emotion. One group of myths substituted the other, since they turned
into a fetish the concept of race and gave it a historic paper that reinforced the
Eurocentrism.

The leaders of the principal anti-colonial fights in Africa formed their

conceptions of world in the English-speaking or French-speaking modes of the pan-
Africanism. A partial exception was the Congolese Patrice Lumumba, younger and who
hadn´t studied in the Exterior except for a very brief period and hadn´t participated of
the articulations of the years of the world war. But he also adhered to the Pan-Africanist
belief and went to the Conference of African Peoples carried out in Accra in 1958. After
the doctrine was finally Africanized it became the legitimacy of the independent Estates
of Africa.

Nkrumah, the host f the Ghanaian conference, became the uncontestable ensign
of the post-colonial Pan-Africanism, a condition that derived, at least in part, from the
circumstance that Ghana had been the first British colony of Africa to become
independent. In his autobiography, there is a part where he refers to a speech
pronounced five years before in Liberia: „I assigned that Providence had preserved the
blacks during their years of probation in the exile, in USA and West Indies; that it was
the same Providence that had taken care of Moses and of the Israelites in Egypt
centuries before. Africa to the Africans! – I exclaimed. A free and independent Estate in
Africa. We want to govern ourselves in this country without external interferences.

Outside Africa, the children refer to Africa as a country, not as a continent

constituted by at least half a hundred of distinct political entities. Nkrumah did the
same. The blacks formed a race and a nation: a race-nation submitted to exile and that
claimed for its promised land. It is clear that this mode of describing the world had
absolutely no correspondence to the experience of the smashing majority of the Africans
in Africa. But it reflected the long walk – in USA, Caribbean and Europe – by
intellectuals such as Crummell, Du Bois, Garvey, Padmore and Nkrumah.
 The British Gold Coast was renamed as Ghana at the time of independence, in
the first minute of 6th March 1957. In the initial words of the famous speech of
midnight, Nkrumah didn´t refer to Ghana, but to Africa: „we´ll see that we created our
own African personality‟. The flooding of African independences was in 1960. In 23 th
Sepetember Nkrumah went to the General Assembly of UN and spoke against
colonialism, neocolonialism and balkanization of Africa. Once more, Africa worked as
the name of a single entity submitted to external oppression: „Africa does not seek for
revenge. We don´t ask for the death of our oppressors, we don´t pronounce votes of bad
luck to our slave lords…‟ „Our slave lords‟ were never the chiefs of African black
kingdoms, but only of the traffickers and non-African slave owners. Through the lenses
of Pan-Africanism, the complex history of the traffic was simplified in a narrative of
racial oppression.

In the same speech, Nkrumah denunciated vigorously the coup of Estate of the
Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko in the Belgian colony of Congo in a moment when the
prime-minister Lumumba still resisted inside the country. CIA gave a hidden support to
the coup and one version affirms that Mobutu had become an informant of the Belgian
secret service before independence, when he served as personal assessor of Lumumba.
But the crisis started before the coup of Estate as a conflict between the president
Joseph Kasa-Vubu and the prime-minister and the support of USA to the swindler chief
was a reaction to the approximation of Lumumba to Moscow. Even so, the president of
Ghana described the Congolese drama simply as an interference of the great powers in
the issues of Africa. Pan-Africanism, then, started to develop a function of hiding the
political responsibilities of the African leaders, attributing to external agents the
problems that inflicted the nations of the continent.

A speech out of place

The goal of geopolitical unity of Africa seemed to be a viable hypothesis during

the vague beginning of the independences. In 1958 Nkrumah joined Ahmed Sekou
Toure, leader of Guinea who ruptured with France to form the Ghana-Guinea Union.
The new entity appeared above the division between the English-speaking and the
French-speaking Africa with the ambition of constructing the nucleus of a future Pan-
African union. Soon later, it was carried out in Accra the Pan-African conference and
Nkrumah called on the formation of the United Estates of Africa. In 1961 Mali adhered
to the block Ghana-Guinea that was re-named as the Union of the African Estates.

The Ghanaian dream had a short life and Pan-Africanism took a different way,
expressed by the Organization of African Unity. Nkrumah developed a paper of
protagonist in the convocation of the conference of the 32 African independent Estates
that reunited in Adis Abeba in Ethiopia in March 1963 but the deliberations of the
meeting frustrated the expectations. OAU would be an organization of regional safety,
not the United Estates of Africa. Ghana would continue to occupy a symbolic place in
the history of the post-colonial Africa, but would never have the same leadership of the
first years.

Hosted by the mythic Selassie and as the headquarters of the capital of an

Empire never conquered of Ethiopia, the foundation conference of OAU was a strange
meeting. At the side of the representatives of the Sub-Sahara Africa, the Black Africa
leaders seated close to the countries of the North of Africa that had nothing to do with
the tradition of the Pan-Africanism. The Arab peoples of the African North didn´t fall
into the concept of racial unity of the Pan-Africanist doctrine. Furthermore, they
couldn´t be described as victims of the black slave traffic, as they were a pole of import
of slaves. These were unresolved contradictions that acted as a corrosive substance over
a doctrine each time less and less stable.

The Letter of OAU approved in Adis Abeba mentioned a broader unity

transcendent to national and ethnic differences but never used the words race, black,
Diaspora. The document condemned colonialism and neocolonialism but had no
references to the slave traffic or slavery. In the 3rd article, which exposed the principles
of the organization, the first item proclaimed the sovereign equality of the African
Estates; the second, of the compromising of non-interference in internal issues of the
partners; the third, of the respect of sovereignty and territorial integrity of each Estate
and the right of independent existence. This way, they buried the idea of a big and
single African Federal Estate.

OAU lasted almost four decades before being substituted by the African Union
(AU) in the Conference of Lome in Togo in 2000. The constitutive act of AU starts by
the declaration that the last organization appeared „inspired by the noble ideals that
guided the founders of our Continental Organization and generations of Pan-
Africanists‟, but it is even more explicit about the theme of territorial integrity of the
Estates. In the 4th article, a list of principles stresses a second item that promises the
„respect to the existent frontiers at the moment of the independencies‟ – which means,
the frontiers derived from the European imperial expansion.

The official Pan-Africanism of OAU was manifested especially in the area of the
cultural politics. In 1969 in a cultural festival in Algiers, the Algerian president Houari
Boumedienne presented a Pan-African Cultural Manifest. According to the document,
being an African is made of a variety of origins but expresses a common inheritance and
a unity of destiny. Colonialism had distorted the African culture and nourished cultural
elite alienated and away from the people. It meant to restore and preserve an African
culture in the service of the masses. Boumedienne governed his country as a dictator
with almost absolute powers. The language of the Manifest didn´t contain the traditional
signs of Pan-Africanism because it came from an Arab leader, but in his leading there
were many obvious threatening to the free expression of the cultural producers.

The Manifest of 1969 wasn´t constituted in an official document. But in 1976

UA approved a Cultural Letter to Africa that explicitly was inspired in the text of
Boumedienne. The Letter reproduced the notion that the history and culture were an
African identity and also it attacked the elite frequently alienated from the true African
culture. Although in the same way of the predecessor the text was incapable of
suggesting a true notion of African culture, it let clear that culture was a question of
Estate. Among the objectives, there was the development of all dynamic values of the
cultural African inheritance and the rejection of any element that is an obstacle to
progress.

In spite of the repeated mentions to the African cultural community, the

document of 1976 accepted the principle of the respect of the national identities. In the
context, this meant that each regime would take care of surveying culture and the
cultural products in their own territories. A compromise of respect to freedom of
expression had to wait the Letter for the Cultural Reborn of Africa, approved by AU
three decades later, in Khartoum, Sudan. However, even this document of political
reform gives honor to the Cultural Pan-African Manifest and ritually it repeats the
concept that history is the fountain for an essential unity of Africa.

This concept is the basis of the Pan-African doctrine and has no sense away the
mold of the racialist thinking. If history of Africa is the history of a race then it becomes
possible to construct the idea of African unity that circles not only the peoples of Africa
but also the ones of the Diaspora. But the renunciation to the notion of race, forced by
the presence of the Arab countries in AU an in its successor, implodes all the logic of
the doctrine, built since the times of Crummell since there is nothing to be named as an
African history.

With the appearance of AU, Pan-Africanism converted into a doctrine of Estate,

losing its aspect of independent movement. In the beginning of the years 1970, unhappy
with this order of things, activists of USA and Caribbean vindicated the organization of
a new Pan-African congress. The fights against regimes of white minority were
intensified in South Africa and in Rhodesia (nowadays Zimbabwe) and the Portuguese
colonies of Angola and Mozambique lived the height of their liberation wars. The
Tanzania of Julius Nyerere prompted to sponsor the event that was carried out in Dar-
es-Salaam in June 1974, thirty years after the historical V Congress.

Nyerere was a singular Pan-Africanist that imbibed from the gradualist socialism
during his university years in Great Britain and believed in a fusion between the African
traditional communitarian and the modern socialism. Together with Kenneth Kaunda
from Zambia he figured in the front line of support to the African National Congress
and to the guerillas of Mozambique and Rhodesia. From his point of view, the VI Pan-
African Congress would serve to the diplomatic efforts of isolating the Portuguese
colonialism and the regimes of white minority and also it would reinforce his own
position in the concert of the African Estates.

The American and Caribbean activists were in accordance to the goal of

supporting the anti-colonial and antiapartheid wars but they didn´t expect an event
controlled by chiefs of Estate in the style of the reunions of OAU. The congress
received representatives of the dictator of Guyana, Linden Forbes Burnham, aligned to
Cuba and USSR and of the corrupt and mentally unstable Eric Gairy of Granada. In
compensation, many Caribbean activists were not allowed to participate, which
provoked a boycott of solidarity of Cyril James at his 73 year-old. From Brazil, Abdias
do Nascimento participated, as he was in a volunteer exile in USA. Among the
participants of the meeting in Dar-es-Salaam, the only remnant of the Congress of 1945
was the Ghanaian Joe Emmanuel Appiah, father of the philosopher Kwame Appiah. His
friend and future rival Nkrumah, the principal African face of Pan-Africanism, died two
years before.

At the time of the congress of Dar-es-Salaam, Nyerere, the Baba wa Taifa

(Father of the Nation), leader of independence and first Tanzanian president, completed
his tenth year in power where he would persist for more 11 years. Tanzania knew a
regime of only one party during its first three decades of existence. In Ghana, Nkrumah
governed as a dictator, manipulating fraudulent elections until 1960 when he
proclaimed as perpetual president, instituted a one-party regime and arrested the
objectors. Joe Appiah was arrested twice before the military coup that removed the
dictator from the power.

As Nkrumah, the main leaders of the V Pan-African Congress implanted

dictators of single parties. Kenyatta presided Kenya until his death in 1978 when the
chief of Estate was transferred to his ally Daniel Arap Moi. In Malawi, Hastings Banda
was declared perpetual president soon after the independence. He mounted a police
Estate, robbed without stopping the public treasure and meticulously created a system
devoted to the cult of his personality.

Banda and Kenyatta aligned their countries to the Western powers but their Pan-
Africanist colleagues preferred to cooperate with Moscow and preached the
implantation of the so-called African Socialism. The system in slightly different
versions from the ones of Nyerere and Kaunda was an ideological project with blurred
borders that interpreted socialism according to the supposed African canticle of
communal distribution of richness. Nkrumah at his side rejected the adjective African
criticizing the notion of an African Golden Age pre-colonial and stressed, provoking,
that „before colonization, diffused in Africa only after the XIX century, the Africans
were inclined to sell, in general for no more than thirty pieces of silver, the companions
of tribe and even members of the same extended family and clan‟. However, above the
divergences, everybody saw in the term socialism a justification for the imposition of
single party systems. And since each one needed to confer legitimacy of their personal
power, the African socialisms received diverse national labels: the „consciousness‟ of
Ghana, the Ujamaa of Tanzania, the humanism of Zambia.

Foremost, there is the Negritude of Senghor. The introduction of an anthology of

black and Malagasy poetry organized by the future president of Senegal and published
in 1948 is a text of Jean-Paul Sartre entitled „Black Orpheus‟. In that text, the
philosopher defined the movement as an anti-racism racism that would work as an
instrument for the abolition of racial differences. In the intellectual plan, the essentialist
concept of negritude derives in direct line from the notion of race and connects to the
romantic thinking: it is not casual that Senghor mentioned something as the black
emotion. In the political plan, the ideology of Negritude served not only to legitimate
the semi-authoritative Senegalese regime but also, far away from Africa, the brutal
Haitian dictatorship of François Duvalier, the Papa Doc, that used the witches of
voodoo and the poor of the rural areas in his campaign against the mulatto elite.

In the post-colonial Africa, the Estates experienced a destructive political

paradox. At one side, in the plan of speech, the regimes affirmed tirelessly a supra-
national Pan-Africanist compromise, expressed in the constellation of myths about the
African history unity and a cultural essence supposedly shared by the peoples of the
continent. At another side, in practical plan, the political elites were articulated from
infra-national loyalties whose references were based on ethnicity and on clans. A result
of this oscillation between universalism and particularism is the notorious weakness of
the Estate-nation that lacks a stronger legitimacy, which is frequently compensated by
recurring to violence.

The African governments made from the Pan-Africanism an efficient official

narrative. Through it, they built a mode of telling the history that is an adaptation of the
procedures of the colonizers. In the words of the Mozambican Mia Couto: they placed a
positive sign on a beforehand negative sign. It is persistent the idea the pre-colonial
Africa was a timeless universe without conflicts nor wars nor disputes, a paradise made
of only harmonies. This idealized image of the pre-colonial times converts colonialism
into the fountain of every evil, past and future, which has an obvious political function:
the single responsible people of our problems must be searched outside. Never inside.
The few from inside who are evil is because they are agents from outside.

But, since the appearance of AU, Pan-Africanism suffered an irreparable

fracture. In Africa, its nature of unifying utopia dissolved into the acid of the denial of
the myth of race, of the general adhesion to existent sovereignty and frontiers and the
political conveniences of the governors. In Diaspora, however, it conserved its old
stuffs, packed nowadays in the new forms of affirmative action of racial preferences.

AFRICAN MIX

At a morning of the end of 1963 or beginning of 1964, a train that was directed
to Salisbury (nowadays Harare) stopped in the hill of the highland of South Rhodesia
(nowadays Zimbabwe), waiting for the other train that carried out the inverse way to
pass back and had also stopped. At the window of the restaurant wagon, the young
British man, concentrated in his breakfast of egg, bacon, toasts and orange jelly looked
at the wagon of fourth class of the other train where a crowd of black men, women,
children who ate slices of bread also looked back. The European who made a first and
markedly contact with Africa of the racial segregation was the anthropologist Peter Fry,
graduated some months before in Cambridge. He was traveling to assume a job in the
British university of South Rhodesia and embarked in his train in Beira, coast city of the
Portuguese colony of Mozambique.

Established in 1890 by the Portuguese in the central Mozambican coast in

mangroves and flooded areas of the left margin of the estuary of Pungue River, Beira
was born as a passing point, bond of different worlds. The port linked the African
colony to Europe and Asia. The railway, implanted soon after, connected Mozambique
to South Rhodesia, a territory without maritime exits. Eight years before the passage of
Fry by the train station, Mia Couto was born in at that time small port center, son of
white colonizers. He described the Beira of his childhood as a city governed by the tides
that filled up the swamps, with their colonial houses surrounded by verandas, offering
weak defenses against the surrounding continent. A place of unviable separation: Africa
was there, impossible to get away or to postpone, mulattizing our souls.

Mozambique reached independence in 1975 after a long anticolonial war. It

experienced the favor to Soviets regime of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique
(Frelimo) and a civil war of 15 years, ended in 1992 by a pact between the government
and the Mozambican National Resistance (Renamo), which had lost the support of
USA, South Africa and Rhodesia. In the municipal elections of 2008 in Beira the
Frelimo candidate, Lourenço Bulha, suffered a campaign of discredit in which his rivals
appealed to people to not vote in a mixed. In a public meeting in the city, the governor
of the province of Sofala, Alberto Vaquina, argued that the fact of being a mixed should
not be an obstacle to his election. Vaquina mentioned his own marriage to a white
woman to remind that he has mixed kids. Some time ago, people told me I should
reduce the number of whites who came to visit me, he concluded ironically.

Mia Couto, as other university students of Mozambique, sons of Portuguese

colonizers, took part clandestinely in groups of support to Frelimo during the anti-
colonial war. More than three decades after, celebrating the victory of Barack Obama in
the American presidential elections, he wrote an article entitled „And if Obama was
African?‟ In the article, published while the racial controversy of Beira was bubbling,
there is the following extract: „let´s be sincere: Obama is black in USA. In Africa he is
mulatto. If Obama were African, he would see his race thrown against his own face. It is
not true that the skin color was important to the peoples who want to see competence
and serious work in their leaders. But the predating elites would make a campaign
against somebody that would be designated as a non-authentic African. The same black
brother that today is saluted as a new American president would be maligned at home as
being the representative of the others, of the other race…‟

At the pre-colonial times, the Africans were not blacks, but only members of a
clan, a community, a kingdom. Race was imported from Europe and America as a
defining concept and Pan-Africanism developed a decisive paper in its rooting in the
African politics. Today, it works as an instrument of dispute and exercise of power in
the post-colonial Estates.

Mozambique experience deep identity changes in just a few decades. At the

times of the anti-colonial war, the Mozambican identity predominated in an absolute
manner: Mozambicans were all the ones who engaged in the fight for independence or
sympathized with it. In the years 1980, the civil war lightened the fire of the ethnic
rivalries and of the resentments of the rural men against the urban inhabitants. The
Mozambicans then started to think themselves as Macuas, Macondes, Shonas, blacks,
mulattos and whites. After, with the appearance of democracy, the identities became
part of the political game based on an implicit hierarchy of African purity or
authenticity that is governed by the tonalities of skin color.

The theme of race is less strong in Mozambique than in Angola, the other great
Portuguese ex-colony in Africa. At the time of independence in 1975, around 350
thousand white colonizers lived in Angola and as the French of Algeria they never
imagined that one day they would abandon the African colony. The Popular Movement
of Liberation of Angola (MPLA), one of the three political chains that conducted the
liberation war, had its social supports stuck among the mulattos of Luanda that
dominated the Portuguese language and the European concept of nation. His principal
leader, Agostinho Neto who was the president of the country had studied in Lisbon and
Coimbra. MPLA formed the first independent Angolan government but the National
Union for the Total Independence of Angola (Unita), the rival group of basis essentially
rural and ethnic, deflagrated an intermittent civil war what would only end in 2002.

Implanted in the South in the region of Ovimbundu that constitute almost two
fifths of the population of the country, the Unita of Jonas Savimbi wrapped in the flag
of nativism and conducted xenophobic campaigns against the mulattos of Luanda. In the
presidential campaign of 1993, organized in a short peaceful interval, Savimbi ran with
the slogan „Angola for the Angolans‟ that had an obvious racial sense. The historical
leader of Unita died nine years later in battle field, few weeks before the stop-fire that
opened the doors for pacification. However in 2000 a parliament dominated by MPLA
approved the inscription of a racial label in the Card of Identity of the Angolans. By
law, since then, all the citizens are classified in the categories of white, black or mixed.

A nominal racial classification existed in the Portuguese Angola but was

cancelled by the colonial authorities in the decade of 1960. Its reinvention by the regime
of MPLA was contrary to the direction of the party but represented an instrument to
counterbalance the racial preaching of Unita. After pacification, the traditional positions
inverted: wile a reformed Unita took a hesitant position against the racialist law, the
regional directors of MPLA tried campaigns against the supposed privileges of whites
and mulattos.

The Angolan sociologist Paulo de Carvalho suggested a diagnosis for the racial
classification in the Identity Cards: „with this, it is pretended to bring to the minorities
the consciousness that they are in fact minorities and that they must stand at their own
square.‟ Maybe it is more proper to say that it is not exactly the identification of
minorities, but of its creation as an official reality, obeying to the logic of political
fragmentation of the society. In the capital, Luanda, based on the Identity Cards it has
been slowly built an informal politics of racial quotes in hiring employees to the
principal Angolan and foreign companies. In the secondary cities, the medium layers of
MPLA press the government in the direction of establishing compulsory quotes in the
labor market.

The new Angolan racism advances underground without declaring its name. In
2006 the participation of Miss Universe of Stiviandra Oliveira, Miss Angola, seemed to
be cancelled by the commission of her country under the argument that the beautiful
young lady was too clear for the taste of the black majority. Evidently, the commission
denied that the prohibition had racial motives. Anyway, the place was transferred to
Ismenia Junior, Miss Cabinda and second place in the contest of Angola, with a darker
skin.

Black Economic Empowerment

The census of South Africa did not change substantially with the end of the
apartheid regime in 1994. They continued to use the racial classification elaborated by
the British colonial administration and consolidated by the Afrikaners. However, they
created new racial labels adapted to the reality of the post-apartheid. The census of 2001
divided the population into whites (9.6%) and blacks (90.4%), subdividing the blacks
into the categories of Indians (2.5%), colored (8.9%) and Africans (79%).

This last label seems strange since all the population, independently of the skin
color, is obviously African. But it makes sense under the perspective of the Pan-
Africanism that is based on the notion of equivalence between Africanity and black
race. The category of blacks means only non-whites, serving to mark a polarity between
the smashing majority and the minority that conducted the country during apartheid.
The subcategory Africans has a strictly racial connotation, evoking purity and nativism.

After the inauguration of the first government of the African National Congress
(ANC) it was drawn an ambitious program of affirmative action not in favor of a
minority as prescribed by the model, but of a majority of blacks. Initially, they
established goals of racial equilibrium at the universities, applied to each department
and including the staff of lecturers, students and employees. Later, the process, named
as transformation, changed focus, concentrating its first efforts in the labor market and
in the business sphere. Under the title of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE), it was
completed in 2007 a vast legislation destined to construct a black economic elite.
 The Constitution of 1996 in its fundamental provisions consecrated the values of
non-racialism. However, it established the concepts of fair discrimination and unfair
discrimination. The 9th article is part of the Bill of Rights and prohibits the unfair racial
discrimination but leaves open the way for a fair discrimination. It is this juridical
column evoked by the governors to conduct BEE. The data, however, evidence that the
notion of justice in the South African case only wraps a policy of favoring a new black
economic elite whose interests are the same of the political interests of ANC.

BEE has sections devoted to the employment of blacks in the private labor
market and in public administration. However, its inspiration is found in the black
capitalism of Richard Nixon and its main goal is to promote a generalized changing in
the action control of the companies. Essentially, companies of white owners were
encouraged to sell preference actions to non-white businessmen. In thesis, it was a
volunteer process and the new partners would pay the market values for the actions. In
practice, the great national companies that don‟t engage in the program are excluded
from public contests and due to the effectively compulsory aspect of the ownership
changes the new partners acquire the actions for a fraction of its value.

The government defined the goal of transferring one quarter of the money of the
great companies to the property of non-whites until 2014. In parallel, it fixed the
objective that blacks occupied at least 40% of the executive jobs in the total of the
companies. The action transference began before the passage of the whole of legal
codes that regulated it, by initiatives of the self companies. In 2003, when the program
started, it reached 5.7 billion dollars and jumped to 8.6 billions in 2006, in about 250
transactions. Under the influx of BEE, black elite of businessmen started to appear
associated to the great companies. Below them it also appeared a rising non-white
medium class. The buppies (black up and coming professionals), a pejorative expression
that got diffusive in the country were only 322 tousand, less than 1% of the black South
African population in 2006 according to estimations of the sociologist Lawrence
Schlemmer. In the same year, 57% of the South Africans lived below the national line
of poverty and more than one quarter experienced open unemployed.

The emergence of new non-white faces in high executive jobs of the business
world and in the most elevated area of public functionalism carried out at the same time
with the maintenance of the social abysm that marks South Africa. From 1995 to 2000,
the medium income of the African families suffered a reduction of 19% and the national
inequality of income got higher. After that, throughout a long cycle of strong
development pulled up the high prices of minerals in the world market, the medium
income raised but the indexes of inequality continued to enhance and the fraction of the
people below the poverty line didn´t change.

The apartheid regime sculpted something as a capitalism of Estate. The great

South African companies were surrounded by protections against concurrence and as a
counterbalance they ensured a stable and preference labor market to the Afrikaners. The
black capitalism in South Africa retains a crucial trace of the apartheid model: the
network that connects the economical elite to the political elite. ANC beforehand
controlled by syndicates and directors of social movements, nowadays hosts powerful
investors moving in the hierarchy of BEE. The trajectory of Tokyo Sexwale, from the
resistance to apartheid to the world of business, serves as a metaphor of the black
capitalism.

Sexwale was born in Soweto and entered to the Movement of Black

Consciousness at the end of the decade of 1960, still in his adolescence. Few years later,
he changed the organization of Steve Biko to the armed forces of ANC and in 1975 he
exiled in USSR to receive military training. In 1976, back to South Africa, he was
arrested and sentenced to 18 years in the prison of maximal security of Robben Island,
where Nelson Mandela met his penalty. With the end of apartheid, he was elected as
prime minister of the province of Gauteng that includes Johannesburg and its capital,
Pretoria.

Mandela was the president until 1999. Two years before the end of his mandate,
Sexwale was present on a list of only three figures quoted to succeed the historical
leader. When the summit of ANC pended towards the direction of the vice-president
Thabo Mbeki, he and the third candidate, Cyril Ramaphosa, ex-president of the
Constitutional Assembly, went to the business universe. Sexwale founded a corporation
with activities in the sectors of mining, finances, health and realty. His companies got
concessions for exploring diamonds and petroleum in many African countries and in
Russia. In South Africa, his conglomerate of exploitation of diamonds is only smaller
than De Beers and JFPI. Besides, he has positions in the directory or the council of
other industrial and mining groups.

Sexwale, Ramaphosa and many other members of the leadership of ANC made
systematic use of BEE to climb with extraordinary rapidity the degree of the ladders of
the business world. In September 2006 Sexwale traveled to London, together with four
white businessmen to speak in an event organized by South African expatriated lawyers.
According to his testimony in the airport of Heathrow, he was selected for racial reasons
for a safety inspection, something that had never happened before. After, in the
conference, he defended BEE, arguing that the program was not destined to simply
create the Tokyo Sexwales of the world, but, foremost, to create jobs and qualify the
blacks.

The opinion of Sexwale has not many followers outside the partially superposed
circles of the economic and political elites. Zwelinzima Vavi, the general-secretary of
the Congress of the South African syndicates that was aligned to ANC declared that the
Black Economic Empowerment is part of a political orientation each time more distant
form the interests of the poor and the working classes. The Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
a mythical figure of the fights against apartheid, provoked the ire of the president Mbeki
because he classified the program as something that benefits only small elite.

When he was invested as the President in 10th May 1994, Mandela pronounced
an uncommonly brief speech, but plentiful of political meanings. He knew that the eyes
of the world were focusing his country so he defined the end of apartheid as a conquest
of all mankind, as a common victory for justice, peace and human dignity. He
confirmed the principles of democracy and of the non-racialism. Famously, he defined
South Africa as the rainbow nation. The vision of Mandela was not completely lost but
suffers a continuous questioning from directing elite that tries to compensate by means
of the racial letter its failure in reducing poverty and creating a less unequal country.

The tension between the two conceptions of the nation is manifested in heavy
disputes in the area of sports politics. The commemorations of the South African
triumph in the World Cup of Rugby in 2007 were blurred by a controversy about the
racial composition of the selection of the country, which had only two dark players and
they were only colored. Parliamentarians of ANC criticized the lack of initiatives of
transformation of the selected group, which caused the dismissal of the coach Jake
White. Butana Komphela, president of the Parliament Sports Committee, pronounced
before the games for urgent policies to integrate more „Africans‟ to the team and even
suggested to cancel the passports of the players if his proposal was not adopted. The
minister of Sports also lamented the small participation of „Africans‟ but was not in
accordance with extreme ideas and after the triumph the promised not to impose racial
quotes to the selection.

Komphela continued his campaign at the vespers of the Olympic games of 2008.
One of his declarations accused the South African Olympic Committee on being full of
whites and Indians who didn´t understand the transformation and lacked vision. He also
started a sour confrontation to Moss Mashishi, the president of the Committee. Mashishi
classified the accusation as racist and received manifestations of solidarity from almost
all the sportsmen of the country. Komphela, however, had got the support of the
deputies of ANC who form a broad majority in the parliament.

Blackness became a commercial value in the rainbow nation. But who exactly is
black? In 2000, the Chinese Association of South Africa, which represents about 200
thousand citizens, presented to the Supreme Court of Pretoria a claim for that the South
Africans of Chinese origin started to be officially classified as black. The argument was
that the members of the community were classified as colored and were discriminated
during the apartheid regime, but continued to suffer discrimination in the processes of
promotion in the companies and in business contracts with the Black Economic
Empowerment because now they were considered white. After eight years of judicial
battle, the tribune accepted the arguments and decided that the Chinese ethnics are black
for all the legal effects.
Seals of authenticity

Mia Couto wrote: „if Obama were African, he would not even be eligible in
great part of the countries because the elites in the power invented restrictive laws that
closed the doors of the presidency to sons of foreigners and descendants from
immigrants. The Zambian nationalist Kenneth Kaunda is being questioned in his own
country because he is son of Malawians. Conveniently, they „discovered‟ that the man
who conducted Zambia to independence and governed the country for more than 25
years was, in fact, son of Malawians and during all this time he had governed illegally.
Arrested due to false coup intentions, our Kenneth Kaunda (who gives name to one of
the noblest avenues of Maputo) will be interdicted of carrying out politics hence the
regime will be free from an objector.‟

In the truth, David, father of the first Zambian president, was not born in Malawi
(that was simply inexistent) but in the British colony of Nyasaland in a period when
Zambia also didn´t exist, except under the form of two British territories that would be
reunited in the North Rhodesia, where Kenneth Kaunda was born.

Kaunda governed as an autocrat, but voluntarily he organized multi-party

elections in 1991. Beaten, he gave the power to the oppositionist syndicate leader
Frederick Chiluba. Under Chiluba, the constitution was emended, prohibiting sons of
foreign citizens to dispute presidency. The amendment had a precise destiny: to impede
that Kaunda disputed the elections of 1996. The ex-president declared that he would
retire from the politic life but three years later the tribunal of Ndola, the second most
city of Zambia, declared him as stateless. In the end, Kalunda recurred to the Supreme
Court and rejoined his citizenship.

The Zambian case expresses the identity complex dilemmas that torment the
post-colonial Estates of Africa. Since the independences, the political game in the
African countries is a prey of the trap formed by three distinct levels of authenticity: the
Pan-Africanism, the national and the ethnics. Each one of these levels has its utility in
diverse circumstances but the proportional value of them changed along time.

The Pan-African seal of authenticity served to conduct the fights of

independence against the colonial powers. It expressed the polarity between us and
them as an opposition between Africa and Europe. The myth of an original African
purity and the racial narrative of the saga of the slave traffic worked as fountains of a
solidarity among the different anti-colonial movements. In each one of the African
territories, the foreigner was the European colonizer who represented the oppression of
a far away metropolis. The unity of the leaderships and political drafts involved in the
fights for independence was organized around the common opposition to the Europeans.

After the independences, Africanness served to other finalities, especially the

one of giving legitimacy to authoritative governments, most of the time extremely
corrupted and that could justify their failures invoking the colonial inheritance and the
slave traffic. The reference to the European went off from any effective fight for
sovereignty but continued to present relevant political papers. However, the
consolidation of the new Estates needed the mobilization for a seal of authenticity less
generic: the national identity.

The African nations derived from decolonization had no roots in a properly said
African tradition. Although all nations are deeply in fact only imagined communities, it
was not easy to create national histories of countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, Congo,
Zambia, Tanzania, Malawi and many others that were in fact resulted from the
geopolitics of the European powers. But since OAU proclaimed the impalpability of the
frontiers inherited from the colonial era, it was indispensable to create national identities
that worked as support for the apparatus of Estate and to the armed forces of the new
independent countries. Because of this, the governors of the initial step emphasized
loyalty to nation and denounced the tribalism and the hold to the traditional authorities
as anachronisms that retarded the march of progress.

The nationalist cycle entered into a declination whose best metaphor is the
destiny of the Zambian Kaunda. In the last decades, the African countries experienced a
re-invention of the ethnical identities and of the tribalism that are promoted by the
political elites. The seal of ethnic authenticity is evoked based on supposed pre-colonial
traditions, but an accurate examination of these narratives evidences that the ethnicities
and the tribes are, most of the time, references established exactly by the colonial
administrations.

The ethnic letter works in a political game marked by nativism. During the
colonial era, the administrations traced a distinctive line between the natives on one side
and the vassal races on the other, to whom it was conceded some limited privileges. The
vassal races, interpreted as more evolved migrants who got established before the
Europeans, included groups such as the Indians and the colored of South Africa, the
Arabs of Zanzibar and the Tutsis of Rwanda and Burundi. The actual nativism re-takes
those distinctions to articulate an opposition between the natives and the foreigners. But
now, the first would be the legitimate Africans with rights derived from their ancestry
from which the seconds would lack.

The nativism is not restricted to movements that search to define broader rights
for the African majority in detriment of the old vassal races. It is manifested also under
the form of vindication of privileges to the majority ethnic groups in each region. In this
modality, which is the most diffused, the foreigners as the members of regional ethnic
minorities, even if they in reality were established since many times ago in the places
where they live. The operation of the distinctions is done by means of the census, which
retake and consolidate ethnic classifications created by the colonial administrations.
Kenya illustrates this tendency to turn official ethnicity in the political life.

The demographic and political nucleus of Kenya is correspondent to the central

tablelands of the white earths that are fertile volcanic soils inhabited mainly by the
ethnicities Kikuyu, Masai, Luo, Kalenjin and Kamba. The North and the East are semi-
arid domains exploited by cattle breeders. In the thin coastal border, the Muslim
Swahilis are predominant. The British colonization was concentrated in the densely
peopled white lands, at the Rift valley, dividing into great farms of diverse agriculture
and creation of cattle and vast plantations of coffee, tea and sisal. In general, the
Africans were expulsed from the lands they cultivated and transferred to tribal reserves
with statute of ethnic territories. In this process of occupying the territory, rigid
administrative divisions appeared between populations of Bantu languages that had a
long history of exchanges.

The Rebellion Mau Mau, first step towards independence, exploded in 1952 as a
fruit of the modernization of the commercial agriculture. The colonizers expanded his
plantations over areas cultivated by Kikuyus and Luos, transforming them into landless
proletarians. The rebels went back against the colonial government but also against the
ethnical chiefs invented by the British. The Kikuyus, the biggest ethnicity of about one
fifth of the population, formed the basis of the movement of four years and suffered the
consequences of the British repression that left 10 thousand deaths and arrested into
concentrating fields 80 thousand suspects. The syndicate leader Jomo Kenyatta was
arrested and condemned under the accusation of directing the rebellion, although in
reality he didn´t take part in the Mau Mau Society. In the conclusion of the judgment,
the British judge didn´t avoid the following racist words: „you extracted the most
complete advantage of power and influence that you have over your people and over the
primitive instincts that you know lay underneath their character…‟

Under the British, the Kenyan census consecrated a dense system of ethnical
classification of the natives that served to determine the pertinence of each one to the
different tribal reserves. After independence ethnicity infiltrated in the political game,
converting into fountains of endless blackmails of the tribal elites searching for jobs in
the administration and public sinecures. In the government of the Kikuyu Kenyatta who
is inscribed in the nationalist circle, the ethnic letter developed secondary papers, but
emerged with violence in 1969 when the Luo Tom Mboya was murdered, probable
successor of the president, and Luo crowds promoted riots in Nairobi. The Kalenjin
Daniel Arap Moi, allied and successor of Kenyatta, tighten the screws of the dictator
regime and started to use ethnical divisions in his own support.

The ethnic crises went bigger with the reforms promoted after the end of the
Cold War. In the first multiparty elections in 1992 Arap Moi was triumphant exploring
the fear of political domain of Kikuyus. In the areas inhabited with the majority of
Kalejins in the Rift Valley, the dictator incendiated ethnic fires throwing the natives
against the foreigners, especially the Kikuyus. Seven years later, when his regime
flunked, the census abolished the ethnic classifications and it was promised that no
distinctions would be made among the Kenyan citizens. Since this time, the initiative is
contested by multiculturalist international organizations. Among them, it is detached the
Minority Rights Group that makes campaigns for the reborn of the ethnic
classifications. Financed among other by (obviously) Ford Foundation, the British NGO
formulated a complete ethnic picture of the country, visibly inspired in the scientific
ethnography of the colonizers.

Kenya is not only very poor but also extremely unequal. The agrarian reform of
Kenyatta converted him into one of the biggest land owner of the country without
changing the destiny of the immense majority of the landless rural workers. With Arap
Moi, prosper medium classes continued to rise in small numbers and have benefits
unimaginable to the common Kenyans. A report of UN of 2004 registered that more
than two fifths of the national income were concentrated in the 10% of riches while the
10% more poor got less than one cent of the richness. In the government of coalition
constituted in 2002 after the end of the dictatorship, economy ruptured a long torpor but
the growth benefited foremost the medium class and the social inequality enhanced.

The coalition was dissolved two years before the elections of December 2007,
deflagrating the fight between the president Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu and his ex-minister
Raila Odinga, a Luo. Visiting the homeland of his father, the at that time senator Obama
pronounced a speech in the University of Nairobi in which he claimed people to vote in
proposals, not in ethnicities and made an alert: „It is needed to end with the tribal
policies based on ethnicity. They are sustained over the bankrupt ideas that the goal of
politics or business is to deviate as much as possible of the cake to a clan, a tribe or a
group, instead of the public interest‟. But at that time, the old allies were already
invoking their ancestries and ethnical identities, reactivating sleepy political speeches
since the times of Arap Moi.

Odinga used statistics prepared by the multiculturalist NGOs to kick on the old
key of the economic predominance of Kikuyus, accusing Kibaki to benefit his own
ethnicity by means of an unfair tax system. The president, at his side, evidenced the
weakness of the criticisms of the tributes charged from the different regions and called
on the Kibuyus to defend from Luos. Barrack Muluka, columnist of the journal
Standard of Nairobi, worked as a marked broadcaster of the thesis that the government
promoted tributary privileges. However, he identified the name of the game that was in
course: „it is ethnicity, stupid!‟

Nowadays, the ethnic poisoning of politics does not throw away false statistic
artifacts. By geographic and historic reasons, the inhabitants of the Kenyan central
tablelands have an income greater than the rest of the population. The Kikuyus form the
most numerous ethnic group in this richest region, which gives change for all kinds of
statistical manipulation. Essentially, the argument of the economical predominance of
the Kikuyus hides the inequalities of income among the social classes of the country
that are also manifested in the abysm between the poor and the rich Kikuyus. But it
gives to the Kenyan politic elite the opportunity of keeping in power and conserving a
system of social exclusion whose roots remind to the colonial era.

The president won the elections using evident frauds. In the two following
months, ethnic militias controlled by the rival political chiefs murdered almost two
thousand Kenyans and violence left 300 thousand internal refugees. The crisis was
stopped by a pact: Kibaki persisted on the presidency and Odinga occupied the position
of prime-minister of a new government of coalition.

We had to teach how to hate

The Government College Umuhaia was among the most prestigious institutions
of education of the colonial Nigeria. Its mission was to educate the future Nigerian elite
and its model was the British public schools. After crossing its doors the teenagers left
outside their multiple mother tongues and used only English. In the immediate post-war,
the student Chinua Achebe who would become a very famous African writer, dared to
use the Igbo language to ask a friend that he passed him the bowl of soup. The act gave
him his first school punishment in the Government College, but didn´t impede him to
become an excellent student and an avid reader of the Western classic masterpieces of
literature. Achebe grew as an Igbo, a British vassal and a Christian in a country invented
by the colonial power.

At the end of the XIX century, the European powers draw in the maps the
colonial political geography of Africa. Some frontiers were drawn based on parallels
and meridians but in general it was given preference to the natural accidents, especially
divisors of waters. This way, it was ensured the integral control of the mouth of the
rivers and of the hydric networks that served as axis of transport toward inland. Nigeria
appeared according this mold: the British got possession from the coast line that
comprehends the large delta of the Niger River and used the watershed of Niger-Benue,
configured as a Y, to implant the colonial administration on the domains of forests and
savannahs from inland.

The British delimitated Nigeria as constituted by an extensive collection of

peoples. They were about 250 linguistic groups, apart from communities of Saros
(emigrated from Serra Leon) and Amaros (ex-slaves from Brazil). However, the
Nigerian political history gravitates around the three major ethnic groups: the Hausa-
Fulani of the semiarid uplands of North (30% of the population), the Yoruba of the right
margin of Niger River (21% of the population) and the Igbo of the left margin of Niger
and the inland portion of the delta of the Niger, in the Southeast (18%).

The pre-colonial period saw the powerful Empire of Oyo to rise in the Yoruba
coastal region that developed terrible techniques of war with horses and gave slaves
either for the Sub-Sahara and the transatlantic traffic. The fragmented Igbo communities
from inland, which had never constituted a central Estate, were frequent preys of the
military offensives of Oyo. Olaudah Equiano, the black abolitionist of London, was
among the innumerable Igbo slaves harvested in the hunting net of the transatlantic
traffic.
 At the moment of extension of the British power over all Nigeria, the Fulani
Muslims completed a jihad of four centuries, imposing themselves over the Hausa and
converting them into Islamism. With the impact of protestant and Catholic missionaries,
the Igbo converted as Christians soon in the first decade of colonization. The Yoruba
were split between Islam and Christianity. Beside the two greatest foreign religions, the
traditional cults continued to be practiced.

The logic of the system of indirect government applied by the British required a
formation of native elite capable to supply the demands of the colonial administration.
The British schools multiplied in the South, but not in the North due to the
predominance of the traditional Koran schools. In 1912, about 35 thousand students
carried out the British primary school in the Southern Nigeria, against less than one
thousand in the Northern portion of the Hausa-Fulani, where more than half of the
population lived. Soon the British formally unified his Nigerian territories, an act that
would be named in the independent Nigeria as the „mistake of 1914‟.

The discrepancies tended to augment with time in all school levels. As a consequence, it
was created elite of Igbo and Yoruba employees. The Christian native employees
educated according British values, occupied administrative jobs in all the colony,
including the North where they were obligated but the traditional Muslim chiefs to live
in segregated communities. The ethnic frontiers diluted in geography, but deposited in
consciences.

The first Nigerian University was inaugurated by the British in 1948. The
institution that would become the University of Ibadan received in its pioneer school
class the student Achebe approved with the highest notes. None of his colleagues was
Hausa or Fulani. Ten years later at the vespers of independence, students originated in
the North represented only 9% of the student body of the University of Ibadan.
Predictably, Yoruba and Igbo dominated the liberal professions, the qualified jobs and
the military offices.

It was never developed a genuine Nigerian nationalism. Instead, the policy in the
colonial Nigeria oscillated between the poles of the Pan-African universalism and the
ethnic particularism. Pan-Africanism influenced Igbo intellectuals such as Benjamin
Azikiwe and Jaja Wachuku and Ioruba ones such as Obafemi Awolowo but had no
impact in the North. The political organizations of the post-war period represented
ethnic and regional interests. Azikiwe and Wachuku leaded the National Council of
Nigerian Citizenz, an Igbo party. Awolowo and Samuel Akintola founded as a
counterbalance the Group of Action, a Yoruba party. In the Hausa-Fulani region, with
the accordance of the emirs, it appeared the North Peoples Congress, directed by the
military chief Ahmadu Bello. NPC was based on a defensive platform of protection of
the traditional Muslim institutions and of the regional integrity of the territory.

Independence was not derived from a fighting of the Nigerian against the
colonial administration but from pacts and conflicts that involved the great parties and
also organizations that spoke in the name of the minority ethnic groups in their
respective regions. The British mediated the long process, promulgating three
constitutions from 1946 to 1954. Those colonial constitutions amplified the political
participation of the Nigerians and sketched models of equilibrium among the principles
of federal unity and autonomy of the regions. But to attend to the demands of the North,
it was needed to postpone the independence to 1960 and to promote a new
constitutional revision. The process resulted in a Federal Constitution and three
Regional Constitutions, for the North, the West and the East.

In the first general elections of the new Estate, NPC conquered 142 seats in a
Chamber of 312 seats and formed a coalition of government with NCNC. The Northern
Muslim elite knew that for geographic reasons they would develop a predominant
political paper but also due to historic reasons the administrative apparatus tended to be
filled with Yoruba and Igbo. So, to protect their interests, they imposed since the
beginning mechanisms of ethnic reserves in the public jobs. The ethnic divisions
worsened after the British left the country. A leader of the North admitted later the price
paid in order to get support from the Muslim population for the policies of ethnic
preferences: „We had to teach the people to hate the Southerners, to see them as persons
who expropriated their rights‟. The preferences were diffused soon to the employment
in the private companies established in the North of the country.

The ethnic poisoning of the Nigerian politics culminated in the coups of Estate
and successive riots that crossed the year o 1966, reaching an apex with a bloody
pogrom against Igbo militaries and tradesmen inhabiting the Hausa-Fulani region. The
massive getaway of Igbo to the South deflagrated a separatist movement. In May 1967,
Emeka Ojukwo, the military commander of the Eastern region declared the
independence of Biafra, inhabited essentially by Igbo and named with the name of the
bay that extended to South since de delta of Niger. The separatist republic included the
area of the delta where soon before vast reservoirs of petroleum were discovered and
received the recognition of a handful of nations and the support of Catholic
philanthropic organizations, but faced a war lost before it even started.

Achebe involved himself of body and soul in the cause of Biafra, serving as
ambassador of the separatist republic and traveling to many countries searching for
supports that didn´t turn concrete. In the years of the civil war, he ruptured with the poet
and friend of long time John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, from a secondary ethnicity of
the Nigerian West that were aligned to the Yoruba. Almost at the same time, his
contemporary Wole Soyinka, the most detached Yoruba writer was arrested and
confined in a solitary jail to having met authorities of Biafra in a trial to open peace
negotiations.

Biafra existed for less than three years. A military federal government, based on
an alliance between the Hausa-Fulani and the Yoruba and having open support from
United Kingdom and USSR, imposed an asphyxiant blockage to the Igbo republic. The
military operations ruptured the defenses of Biafra and reduced its territory to a small
land inside. As fruit of the war and a horrendous crisis of starvation, more than one
million Igbo died. The final kick was done by the troops of the Youruba Olusegun
Obasanjo who would become the principal figure of the subsequent military regime.
The civil war ended in the beginning of 1970 with the exile of Ojukwo and the
reincorporation of the region.

An incomplete national reconciliation and an incomplete reconstruction of the

Igbo region were carried out. In 1979 a new Constitution, inspired in the Federal
Constitution of USA, extinguished the British parliamentary model and opened the way
to multiple party elections. The constitutional text amplified the powers of the central
government and redrew the federation, substituting three or four regions of the
constitutions of 1960 and 1963 by 19 states. It was a trial to reduce the ethnic factor,
diluting the powers of the regional elites. However, the parties continued to operate
based on old ethnic lines and the patterns of the votes evidenced the fragilities of the
reinvented federation.

Democracy lasted only five years, giving place to a cycle marked by coups of
Estate and military regimes each more time aggressive and corrupt. This cycle ended
with the end of the Northern dictator Sani Abacha in 1998 and the election of the ex-
dictator Obasanjo in the following year. The general left the place he occupied in the
council of curators of Ford Foundation to assume the presidency of the country and
summoned an official commission to write one more constitution. The not confusable
mark of multiculturalism is impressed in the new constitutional text.

The constitution of 1999 amplified the number of states to 36, continuing the
efforts initiated two decades before. But the password that singularizes it is found in the
expression „federal character‟, repeated nothing less than 15 times. The 14 th article
clarifies that the composition of the government of the federation and of all the agencies
and the conduction of the business must be handled in order to reflect the federal
structure of Nigeria and the necessity of promoting the national unity and the national
loyalty. For an absolute clarity of the aim of this provision, the sentence continues
affirming that it must be not allowed the predominance of persons of a few states or a
few ethnic groups or of other kind of government in any of the agencies.

The same principle is applied to the state governments and local instances, to the
body of officials of the Armed Forces and to the public companies. In the constitutional
text, it is established a Commission of the Federal Character that in its competences
must be not subjected to direction or control of no other authority or person. The
powerful commission is constituted by a president and a representative of each state, all
selected the President of the Republic and confirmed by the Senate. Their attributions
are to present to the Parliament an equality formula to distribution of the jobs in all
levels and surveillance of the system of nominating, promotions and contracts based on
the ethnic criteria.

Thomas Sowell observes that the principle of ethnic equilibrium orders the
access to the matters of interest and preoccupation of the more fortunate members of the
various ethnic groups, which means, precisely the persons who went away from the
traditional modes of life and entered in the modern sectors of society and economy. The
Commission of the Federal Character is the focusing point of a permanent dispute
among the ethnic elites to capture influent positions. Its functions have nothing to do
with the practical life and the most important interests of the immense majority of the
Nigerians who serve simply as demographic pretext for the vindications of the elites.

In Nigeria of the federal character the merit was virtually abolished as a

distinctive criteria giving place to what Achebe named as a cult to mediocrity.
According to him, in his country it would be difficult to identify at least an important
job that is occupied by the most competent person they have. In the circles that can aim
posts of prestige and well paid jobs, everything depends on the ethnicity of each one, for
the good and for the bad.

But a particular trace of the Nigerian system of affirmative action is that it

benefits, essentially, the ethnic majorities of each region. As the principle of ethnic
equilibrium is submitted to the interpretation of the state authorities that have
administrative and political autonomy, the quotes and numeric goals are allocated such
a way to give privileges to the dominant group. The mechanisms of favoring generate
tireless claims from all sides that annihilate ones to the others when they reach the
Commission of the Federal Character.

Census is everywhere a theme full of political senses. But the Nigerian ethnic
nativism left this norm to its most radical consequences. The first post-colonial census
in the middle of 1962 was cancelled due to accusations of fraud in many areas. In the
following years, the census takers counted a total population of 55.6 million people,
something clearly exaggerated, since it would have needed an annual growth of 5.8% in
the decade since the last colonial census. To practical effects, to count Nigerians is to
register the demographic weigh of each ethnicity, with all the stimulations to fraud it
implies.

There has never had a census without contests in the half century of existence of
Nigeria as an independent Estate. The census of 1973 that followed the war of Biafra wa
also annulled. A new census was carried out only in 1991 and the next one, in 2006.
Contests followed the divulgation of the results of both, coming from the ethnic groups
of the South. In the last one, by pressures of the Muslim leaders, they cancelled
questions about ethnicity and religion. By means of this maneuver, the Hausa-Fulani
elite, probably benefited from previous census, was able to avoid a feared reduction of
its privileges.

The mistake of 1914 (if it really should be considered a mistake in fact) defined
the frontiers of a political entity named Nigeria and imposed a common nationality to
Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo and more 250 ethnicities. However, throughout the
colonial and post-colonial periods, instead of a Nigerian nationalism, it took form an
official and bureaucratic creation of ethnic identities. The political chiefs of the ethnic
groups of the country as well as innumerable intellectuals invoke the areole of ancestor
cultures to preserve loyalties to their ethnicity. The truth is that the actual ethnic
identities don‟t come from a pre-colonial past, but as products of a succession of
political acts of the British and after, of the Nigerian governors.

Achebe wrote: „suddenly one can take science of an identity from which they
have suffered for a long time without knowing it. For example, the Igbo people: in my
region, historically, they never saw themselves as Igbo. They saw themselves as persons
from this or that other tribe. In reality, in some places, Igbo was an offensive term.
However, after the experience of the war of Biafra during a period of two years this
became a very powerful conscience. However, this had been real all the time. All of
them spoke the same language called Igbo, even though they didn´t use this identity at
all.

„This had been real all the time‟. This affirmative makes sense for an Igbo
nationalist but it is nothing more than an arbitrary calling. In history, the Igbo only
became Igbo when this ethnic identity converted into a sign of difference and a
distinctive native sign. Similarly, although the Yoruba people had pertained to a
centralized Empire and the Hausa-Fulani shared the Muslim faith, ethnicity only
became a crucial identity factor when its elites started to dispute the control of a
colonial social apparatus.

Nativist illusions: Achebe seems to imagine that the tragedy of Biafra

represented foremost a necessary experience of self-knowledge. But the ethnical
identities are not something „real all the time‟. They are, in fact, tools in a power game
outside the interests of the immense majority of the population. Here it is the motive of
its power and permanence.

THE THREE SONS OF GAHANGA

In an oral tradition of Rwanda, Gahanga figures as the father of the three

ancestors of all Rwandese: Gatwa of Tua, Gahutu of Hutus and Gatutsi of Tutsis. To
determine which of the three sons would deserve his inheritance, Gahanga gave a basket
of milk to each one in one night. In the following morning, Gahanga went back and
verified the manner his sons behaved in the original night. Gatwa was disqualified and
banished because in his shaky sleep he hit the bottle and lost the milk. Gahutu was
disinherited and doomed to work to Gatutsi because he was thirsty and drank all the
milk. Gatutsi stood awake and vigilant and conserved the milk, being designated as the
successor of Gahanga and received as inheritance all the cattle of the country and
became free from needing to work with the hands.

Myths of origin are historic narratives that by means of the selection of events
and the attribution of relevance to situations and characters turn the past intelligible and
plentiful of meanings, encouraging social cohesion. The myth of origin of Rwanda is a
particular case because it developed the function to legitimate the supremacy of the
Tutsis and instead of inspiring solidarities, it inflamed ethnic passions. The clan was the
basic social unity of the pre-colonial Rwanda. Almost all clans included Tua, Hutu and
Tutsi members – an evidence that these social groups never constituted tribes and even
less ethnicities. There are many oral traditions about the origins of the Rwandese clans
but these narratives were buried by the myth of origin that legitimated the Tutsi
supremacy.

Eight million years ago, it started the last great tectonic episode in Africa,
resulting in three long fractures in the Eastern side of the continent. One of these
episodes practically separated the Arabic peninsula giving origin to the Red Sea and the
Gulf of Aden. The other two produced great longitudinal valleys, named as rift valleys.
The Eastern rift is extended from the Gulf of Aden to the East of the Victoria Lake. The
Western rift is extended from the Low Zambezi to the West of the Victoria Lake and
includes the lakes Malawi, Tanganyika and Kivu. Molded by majestic mountains, Kivu
River nourishes the Ruzizi River and separates Rwanda from the Democratic Republic
of Congo (formerly Zaire).

Rwanda, the country of one thousand hills, is a mountain country of the region
of the Great Lakes with fertile volcanic soils, astonishing beautiful landscape and a
relief that conserved it relatively isolated. In the Conference of Berlin of 1884-1885
when the European powers deflagrated the run to Africa, Rwanda was conceded to
Germany. The first European to step on Rwandese lands was perhaps a German military
explorer: count Gustav Adolf von Götzen in 1894. But there was already a central
Estate in the East of Kivu Lake – the kingdom of Banyarwanda since at least the XV
century.

The kingdom of the Banyarwandas was organized around a mwami, sacred king
whose authority was based on an aristocracy of cattle owners, the Tutsis that
subordinated the masses of rural men, the Hutus and a minority of maids, the Tuas.
Foreigners were forbidden to enter in the domains of the Banyarwandas. All the society
was linked by clan loops and personal dependence that gave some cohesion and isolated
the region from the networks of slave hunting. Tutsis, Hutus and Tuas occupied the
place of castes in a traditional society where the prestige and richness was the property
of cattle. A possible parallel is to the system of castes of India.

Similarities effectively exist but hide the essential. Among Banyarwandas the
three classes were directly linked to patrimony: Tutsis had cattle, Hutus had cultivation
lands, Tuas had nothing. More: the Zebu cows represented the true richness, were
sacred and untouchable. The Tutsi aristocracy drank the milk and the blood of the cows.
The monarch, descendant from the mythical Kigwe who had come down under to found
the real clan, had the biggest cattle and the great festivals culminated with a parade of
his cows.

All Banyarwandas spoke the same language. There was social mobility some
way in their society of classes. It is registered that in times of disasters and epidemics,
Tutsis who lost their cattle became Hutus. Inversely, Hutus ascended the social ladder
and became Tutsis when they had the opportunity to get cattle. The myth of origin
supported a rule of inequality, but never put into question the common origin of all the
Banyarwandas.

The Tutsi aristocracy was linked by a network of clan relationships and they
kept with the Hutus relations of direct subordination. The rural Hutu gave part of his
harvest to his lord Tutsi and got protection and the Ubuhake, the cession of a cow to his
use. The social stability was achieved by these networks of dependence and by the
hierarchic structure of the classes and was reflected in the prolonged peace inside of the
kingdom.

When finally the Europeans reached Rwanda, they found and area with elevated
demographic densities with spots in the heights of 1.5 and 1.8 thousand meters, where
the mild temperatures hinder the tsetse fly, transmitter of the cow disease of the sleep
disease at the same time they favor the cultivation of the fields. Nowadays, as reflect of
its singular social history, Rwanda is the most populated country of Africa, with an
average density of 390 inhabitants per square kilometer.

Von Götzen was able to firm treatises with the chiefs of Tanganyika, Rwanda
and Urundi so that the Germans started to indirectly influence the local issues.
However, this European power didn´t reveal any further interest in the region and faced
with insufficient troops the tribal wars in different areas of what it would become the
German Eastern Coast. In 1911 the Germans helped the Tutsis to stop a Hutu rebellion
but in the First War Belgian forces advanced from Congo over the German colony and
with the help of a British offensive from Uganda, they defeated the Germans and their
Banyarwanda allies.

After the Great War, by decision of the League of Nations, the German Eastern
Africa was divided between Belgians and British. The territory of Rwanda-Urundi got
under Belgian administration in the quality of government class B. The system of
mandates of the League of Nations was destined to remove sovereignty of the defeated
powers over their colonies, put them into government of the Allied Powers. The class A
mandates in old Ottoman domains previewed a future concession of independence. This
was not previewed in the class B mandates such as the German colonies in Africa, but
the mandatory power contracted the obligation of ensuring freedom of consciousness
and religion to the peoples under their administration.

After the Second World War, by decision of the Conference of Yalta, Rwanda-
Urundi and almost all the other mandates became territories under the administration of
UN. This meant that the administration power – Belgium in this case – acted in the
name of UN and compromised to prepare the territory to independence. In the end,
under one or other label, Rwanda was subordinated to Belgium from 1916 to 1962.
From a myth of origin to another

The Belgians administered their mandate with iron hands but as the Germans
they made an alliance with the Tutsis and conserved the structuring traces of the
previous social order. Rwanda should generate profits by the culture of coffee, an
expanding product in the international market. The rural Hutus were then submitted to a
new modality of compulsory work in lands they should reserve to the coffee cultivation.
The violence routinely employed by the foremen provoked tensions and rebellions
besides deflagrating a migratory flux of great proportions towards the British
protectorate of Uganda.

Under the colonial power, the Tutsi class converted into subordinated elite. A
low Tutsi officiality formed the spine of the armed forces of the mandate; the public
jobs not occupied by Europeans were given to Tutsi employees and they gained
privileged access to superior school. The Belgian Catholic Church devoted tenaciously
to evangelize the colonial elite. Mwami Yuhi Musinga collaborated with the Germans
since 1896 and aligned to the Belgians but never accepted to convert to Catholicism.
Because of this, the administration took him off his position, sending him to exile and
substituting him by his son Mutara Rudahigwa.

The new Mwami converted to Christianity in 1931 adopting a first Christian

name and governing as Charles Rudahiga Mutara III. In his trail, a significant parcel of
the Tutsis adhered to Christianity. Even before the conversion of the king in 1926 the
colonial administration started to distribute ethnical identity cards legally segregating
the three native Rwandese castes. The property of ten or more cows, purely patrimonial
criteria, defined a person as a Tutsi. In 1933 the ethnic documents became an exigency
of the census. But, at this time, the myth of origin of Rwanda experienced a crucial
transformation.

The Physical Anthropology was the arrowhead of the transformation. Under the
sign of classical racist theories, the Belgian anthropologists discovered noticeable
anatomic differences between Tutsis and Hutus. After detailed measurements, they
concluded that the firsts were significantly taller than the seconds: the medium
difference was around 10 cm. The king Mutara III with his 2.06m seemed to be an
example very appropriate of the group. Besides being taller, the Tutsis would be leaner,
beautiful, with harmony of facial traces and their aquiline noses would distinguish them
from the Hutus and approach them to the whites. In reality, Tutsis and Hutus are
indistinguishable. But there was no difficulty in finding differences of height when they
compared Tutsis aristocrats and Hutus rural men, considering that only the firsts ate
milk and derived products regularly. This finding was amplified and novelized by the
racist imagination and inspired the formulation of the Hamitic hypothesis on the
diffusion of the Tutsis.
 In the XVIII century when the first scientific theories on the human races
appeared, it was a convention to divide the African continent in an European Africa (the
land of the Nile River) inhabited by groups close to the Europeans an in a „true‟ Africa,
separated from the first one by the Sahara desert and by an impassable racial barrier.
This idea didn‟t resist to the evidences that the desert was throughout all history a place
of intense and endless exchanges. In the end of the following century, the conventional
knowledge was changing and it was imagined that evolved peoples from the North of
Africa had established in some areas of the „true‟ Africa where they acted as factors of
progress.

An exhaustive ethnographic description of these evolved peoples – the Hamites-

was offered by the British physician and anthropologist Charles Gabriel Seligman who
traveled in Sudan from 1909 to 1912 and from 1921 to 1922 and consolidated his works
on the theme in Races of Africa published in 1930. Seligman described them as
„pastoral Europeans‟, more intelligent and better warriors than the black cultivators
from the South of Sahara, over whom they imposed from many migratory waves.

Inspired by this narrative, the Belgian sages in Rwanda decided that Tutsis could
only be one of the fruits of the Hamite migrations. In the principal version of the thesis,
the Tutsis would be originated in some point of the Horn of Africa, probably Ethiopia.
In an alternative version, they would have come from the Nile valley. However, the
Ethiopian origin was most seductive to the Europeans because it meant that the Tutsis
had Christian ancestors.

The Rwandese historiography adopted the Hamitic hypothesis without

abandoning the traditional myth of the Banyarwandas in the ancestral night. The
narrative of the sage colonizers seemed to the eyes of this historiography as a scientific
confirmation of the insuperable difference between the Tutsis and the other Rwandese.
It also offered opportunities for an audacious action of considering Rwanda as an
European region in essence. This action was conducted by the Tutsi Alexis Kagame, a
key figure in the Rwandese cultural politics.

Born in 1912 in an aristocratic Rwandese family, Kagame was baptized in 1928

when the Mwami Yuhi Musinga resisted to conversion. He entered to a seminar as was
ordered as a priest in 1941. Still in the seminar he had contact with Charles Mutara III
and started a varied intellectual career of poet, journalist, philosopher and historian.
Soon after his ordination he wrote a book in many volumes on the myth of the creation
and the history of the world in the oral traditional Rwandese narratives that highlights
multiple parallels between the Tutsi tradition and the Christian conceptions.

But his seminal book, Le Code des Institutions Politiques du Rwanda, published
in 1952, is an investigation of the political institutions of the pre-colonial Rwanda
where he develops the idea that the Banyarwanda kingdom had a support on a
sophisticated code of customary laws that limited the powers of the king such as the
pre-revolutionary France. Those laws that limited the powers of the king conferred a
modern aspect to the Rwandese society and illuminated the ways for a gradual political
evolution free from traumas or violent ruptures.

The Belgians didn´t appreciate the scholar exposition in where it was hidden the
suggestion that the Tutsis could govern Rwanda without external interference and sent
Kagame to Vatican to continue his studies. The grater of the Rwandese intellectuals
became a famous theologian, became a member of the black priests, published
important philosophical books and back to Rwanda he was protected from the atrocities
made by the Hutus against the Tutsis in the new Hutu regime established in 1959. In the
end of his life he figured as one of the most influencing voices of the movement of
Africanizing of Catholicism that started in the II Vatican Council.

Kagame planted on the Rwandese soil the imported tree of the Hamitic origin of
the Tutsis. The acceptance of this narrative provoked a distortion in the myth of origin
of Rwanda that acquired the typical colors of the scientific racism. In the pre-colonial
myth the Banyarwandas was separated by the events of the ancestral night, but had a
common origin. In the myth created by the sage colonizers the Tutsis were separated
from the other Rwandese by something deeper and essential that is race.

The idea that the Tutsis come from the Northern Africa persisted during most
part of the XX century and was accepted even by consecrated historians such as the
British Africanist Basil Davidson who reproduced it in his The Lost Cities of Africa, of
1959. In this acclaimed book, he cites the merit of the anthropologist Jacques Maquet
whose description of the dominant class of Rwanda is „they don´t do manual works and
have idle time to cultivate the speech, the eloquence, the poetry, the refined manners,
the subtle art of irony and to drink honey diluted in water with their friends‟. As a
conclusion, Davidson questions if the adequate parallel would be with the position of
the knights and poets of medieval France.

Scientific concepts present an impressive force of inertia. Less than four decades
ago, the physical anthropologist Jean Hiernaux, one of the greatest academic authorities
on Africa, produced tables of differences of height between Tutsis and Hutus and based
on archeological and blood studies he draw an alternative to the unbelievable Hamitic
history. Hiernaux proposed that the Tutsis were originated from prolonged migrations
originated in Kenya and Tanzania. Hence, although he took an explicit distance from
the racist vision formulated by the Belgians, he insisted on intepretating the two
principal castes of Rwanda under the lights of an ethnic contrast.

The recent studies evidenced a few differences between Tutsis and Hutus but
they tend to deny the idea that the Tutsis arrived to Rwanda in the XV century,
imposing themselves as elite of conquest over the local rural men. In the field of the
differences, genetic trials suggest that the prevalence of sickle cell anemia among the
Hutus is similar to the neighboring regions but among the Tutsis is significantly smaller.

This somehow supports the idea of a correlation between the Tutsi and old
migratory fluxes from malaria-free regions. At the same time, it was shown that 75% of
the Tutsi conserve a high ability on digesting lactose, a genetic aspect of populations
that drank milk for centuries. The tolerance to lactose is present in only 30% of the
Hutus, a proportion much smaller than the one of the Tutsis but still higher than of some
neighboring peoples. A possible explanation of this was the relatively broad
miscegenation and the social mobility between Tutsis and Hutus, something in
accordance to the social patterns of the pre-colonial Rwanda.

Anyway, modern genetics seem to clearly avoid both the Hamitic hypothesis and
the thesis of migrations of Hiernaux since Tutsis and Hutus are much closer between
them than of populations from the Horn of Africa, valley of Nile, Kenya or Tanzania. In
parallel, the historic investigation never found evidences of a sudden flux of rural men
in the XV century as sustained by the Belgian narrative of the conquest of the Tutsis.
Evidences suggest that the creation of cattle was disseminated in a longer period in the
region of the Banyarwandas, maybe under the influence of small and continued fluxes
of migrants –which means, in a time of diffusion of innovations, not of military
expansion of a warrior group.

The historic criticism on the colonial narrative was only started with the
publication in 1962 of a book of the Belgian historian and anthropologist Jan Vansina
on the Banyarwandas. Vansina showed that the conceptions, norms, habits and rituals of
the kingdom controlled by the Tutsis were in great part absorbed by the previous Hutu
Estates, some of them even survived with autonomy until the organization of the
Belgian administration. In his book, it appears a picture of the complex network of
cultural influences carried out between Tutsis and Hutus. Furthermore, later, with the
support of an even greater documentation of verbal fountains he evidenced that the
words Tutsi and Hutu only got generalized to reflect a social polarity in the final period
of the kingdom of the Banyarwandas: „Hutu and Tutsi are old words with exchanging
meanings. First in Rwanda and after in Burundi Hutu is opposed to Tutsi. Each one of
the words excludes the other: if one is a Tutsi, they can´t be a Hutu. But be careful: this
evolution appears only after 1800. We discovered traces of this. We know about people
who never referred themselves as Hutus and used a name of a place to identify their
origin. So, gradually, the word Hutu got disseminated in the great rural population to
describe their common social condition‟.

But the intervention of Vansina is posterior to the consolidation of the myth of

origin created by the Belgians and adopted as an official truth of history and in the
colonial schools of Rwanda. This substituting myth, pressed in the school books, draw
the frontiers of the nation imagined by generations of Rwandese, Tutsis and Hutus. It
served to perfection to confer legitimacy of the radical experiment of indirect
government conducted by the European power that reserved to the Tutsis the place of
derived colonial elite. However, it was a double-edged sword. According to their logic,
Tutsis represented a superior race but also figured as foreigners and invaders. This
would have truly tragic consequences.
Hutus in power

In the post-war, a series of factors destroyed the stability of Rwanda. Under the
influx of the new democratic ideas in fashion in the world, the Belgians introduced
political reforms that gave rights to the Hutus. The reforms were not well accepted by
the Tutsis who articulated a Rwandese nationalism of classes. At the same time, the
growth of population and cattle activated conflicts on the control of the scarce fields that
suffered quick processes of erosion. In 1949, Mutara III banished the Ubuhake and five
years later the promoted a redistribution of lands and cattle, reducing the poverty of the
Hutu rural men. These initiatives were supported by the Belgians but provoked
resentments among the Tutsis.

The Belgian public opinion started to influence in the colonial policy and the
rivalry between Walloons and Flemings infiltrated in the conceptions about the future of
Rwanda. The Walloons, French speaking, controlled the Belgian politics and were seen
by the Fleming majority, Dutch speaking, as a dominant class. Nowadays, the Walloons
constitute less than one third of the Belgian population while the Flemings form more
than 60% of the total. Notwithstanding, the industrial economy of Wallonia declined
while the Northern region of Flanders got stronger. The Flemings interpreted the
Rwandese scenario from their personal experience and favored the Hutus as a majority
subordinated to a Tutsi aristocracy.

The year of changing was 1959. In July, as he returned from meetings with the
metropolitan government, Mutara III was vaccinated by a Belgian doctor in Bujumbura,
capital of the neighbor Burundi and died soon when he was 48 year-old. The event was
read by the Tutsi aristocracy as a murder. His brother Jean-Baptiste Ndahindurwa
assumed the throne as Kigeri V. In September, the Tutsi elite founded the National
Rwandese Union, a party that vindicated independence. In November, the Hutu
revolution started and the new Mwami ran away to Uganda.

The insurrection got the form of a bloody rural riot against the Tutsi lords and
was described by the Hutu intellectuals as a French revolution in Africa. The rural men
put fire in the properties of the lords and took the cattle. Dozens of thousands of Tutsis
were killed. From a total of about 300 thousand Tutsis, the elite of the country of 2.8
million inhabitants, something between 100 and 150 thousand ran away to neighboring
countries. In Uganda a Tutsi army was formed during this Diaspora and they recruited
soldiers in the fields of refugees scattered in Burundi, Tanzania, Uganda and the East of
Zaire.

In 1960 UN intervened and a referendum was carried out when the Rwandese
voted for Republic and ended monarchy. Months later, Grégoire Kayibanda, a moderate
nationalist and founder of the Party of the Hutu Emancipation Movement (Parmehutu)
formed the government that conducted the country to independence. After the
retirement of the Belgians in the elections of 1963, Parmehutu won all the seats in the
Parliament. It started a new era in the history of Rwanda, marked with a radical and
official rupture to its past. The Hutu regime declared that the anterior history of the
country since the consolidation of the Tutsi power in the kingdom of the Banyarwandas
constituted a long age of shadows. This rupture, however, didn´t exclude continuities:
the myth of origin created by the Belgians was not abandoned, but reinterpreted. The
alliance with the Catholic Church was kept and they continued to produce ethnical
identity cards that served to new finalities.

The old system of classes with its hierarchy, institutions and rules served as a
solid rock, spite being deeply unjust, to the kingdom of the Banyarwandas and to the
colonial Rwanda. The introduction by the Belgians of new rules, a little bit more
democratic in the post-war provoked fractures in the columns of the society. After
independence, with the universal vote, these columns collapsed. The principle of
political equality could never live with the paradigm of the division of the Rwandese
into opposite castes whose fundaments are inequality. The seeds of the genocide were
watered by such insurmountable contradiction.

Kayibanda was among the nine leaders who assigned the Hutu Manifest of 24th
March 1957 in which they drew the program of Parmehutu to an independent Rwanda.
Part of this document said: „we vigorously oppose, at least at this moment, to the
suppression of official and private identity documents of the mentions Muhutu, Mututsi
and Mutwa because such suppression could impede statistics to lift up the reality of the
facts‟. Muhutu, Mututsi and Mutwa indicated the singular: one Hutu, one Tutsi, one
Twa. The Hutu leaders prepared for the universal vote and didn´t want anything that
could shade the existence of a Hutu majority.

Tutsi and Hutu only became ethnic designations along the XIX century in the
apogee of a pre-colonial Tutsi power. Before that, these words had variable meanings
and sometimes just situational meanings. The Belgians introduced the ethnic
classification in law, consolidating a fixed identity system. The Hutu regime received
from the colonizers a system of nominal identification of the ethnicity of each one of the
Rwandese. The identity cards existed since three decades ago, since it was not difficult
to define who was a Tutsi and who was a Hutu.

Under Kayibanda the Tutsis were totally excluded from the military officiality
and ethnical quotes were introduced in the universities and high schools. The ethnical
quotes became a national law and extended to public jobs in 1973 with the coup of
Estate that brought the Major Juvenal Habyarimana to power. The law limited to 9% of
the total amount that could be filled up by Tutsi candidates. In thesis, according to the
data from the census, this was the proportion of Tutsis in the Rwandese population. The
official argument emphasized the idea of compensation: it was needed to ensure to the
Hutus the ways of social ascendance that had been denied for such a long time.

The social disparity of Rwanda never stopped to get deeper. In 1963 Tutsi forces
attacked the Northern frontier starting from Burundi, the neighboring country of Tutsi
government. Two years later, a new attack was contained and in reaction the Hutu
Armed Forces slaughtered with kicks of machetes more than 20 thousand Tutsis. The
chronic conflict formed a background to the crescent doctrinaire radicalization of the
Rwandese government that described the Tutsis as a foreign people and a threatening to
the survivor of the Hutu nation. At this epoch, it started to get disseminated the use of
the word „cockroaches‟ to refer to the Tutsis.

The history of Burundi got split from the Rwandese one in 1959 with the Hutu
revolution. After that, the brother countries evolved politically in a mirrored way. In
Burundi, the Tutsis retained the power and repressed with violence the recurrent Hutu
rebellions while they collaborated with the military efforts of the exiled Rwandese
Tutsis. In 1972 it started in Burundi a new rebellion, smashed by the massacre of
something between 100 and 200 thousand Hutus, which provoked a massive getaway of
refugees to Rwanda. The influx of something next to one million Hutus worsened the
Rwandese social crisis that got catastrophic aspects. It was in this environment in the
following year that the Minister of Defense Habyarimana leaded a military coup and
knocked Kayibanda down.

Habyarimana was Hutu such as Kayibanda but has nothing of moderate. After
the coup the arrested and murdered by poisoning the closer circle of the deposed
president, his old friend. Kayibanda and his wife were arrested and three years later died
from starvation in the prison. At the same time, Habyarimana formed the National
Revolutionary Movement for Development, single party of his dictatorship in where all
the Rwandese were automatically inscribed.

The gears of the genocide

In the two decades of the regime of Habyarimana, the industry of invention of

memories completed the production of communities of fear and hate. This process was
not limited to Rwanda but got regional dimensions including Burundi, Uganda and East
of Zaire. In Uganda in 1981 the warrior Yoweri Museveni deflagrated a war against the
dictator Milton Obote recruiting a significant part of his soldiers in the fields of
Rwandese refugees. When five years later Museveni took the power it had constituted in
Ugandese lands a Tutsi army, commanded by experienced officials. This army, the
Rwandan Patriotic Front started the civil war of Rwanda in 1990, in an offensive by the
Northern frontier that was only stopped due to the help of Zairian troops and two
companies of French paratroopers to the government of Habyarimana. The French
policy form Africa in the post-colonial period was organized around the strategy of
preserving a sphere of French influence in the continent. In the picture of this strategy,
the government of Fraçois Miterrand decided to give support to a Hutu Rwanda French-
speaking against the Rwandan Front allied of the English-speaking Museveni in
Uganda.
 Intrahamwe (Together We´ll Attack), a civil Hutu militia, trained by the
Rwandese army, appeared as a consequence of this invasion. Habyarimana, his sponsor,
feared the fifth-column constituted by the Tutsis who stood in Rwanda and intended to
face it by arming his faithful supporters. Additionally, Intrahamwe was destined to scare
the many Hutus who hated the clan dictatorship of Habyarimana with his unmeasured
violence and corruption. This militia later converted in the instrument of the greatest
genocide of the second half of the XX century.

The Rwandan Patriotic Front didn´t took Kigali, the Rwandese capital, in the
offensive of 1990 but it occupied the Northeast of the country. The threatening
proximity of the Tutsi army and the living memory of the massacre of Hutus in Burundi
instilled fright not only in the circle of Habyarimana but also in most part of the Hutus
of Rwanda. The ideology of the genocide flowered in this environment, developing old
themes in an extreme and eschatological narrative. In this, once more, the intellectuals
developed decisive papers.

The genocide ideology in its last form was not born among the Rwandese Hutus,
but among the exiled Hutus of Burundi. Remi Gahutu founded of the Party for the
Liberation of the Hutu People (Palipehutu), a radical Burundian party organized after
the massacre of 1972. He formulated this ideology based on recurrent issues. The Tutsis
was originated from the Hamite race, morally depraved, perverse and untrustable. Its
historic hegemony derived not only from the use of violence but also from craftiness:
Hutus were betrayed by malefic offenses such as cows and beautiful women. The word
Hutu is a malicious Tutsi invention to erase the unity of the Bantus, fragmenting them
into tribes.

Gahutu fixed a crucial theme of the anti-Tutsi speech: the evil paper developed
by the Tutsi women in the society of the Banyarwandas. Later, this theme would be
developed. The sensuality of the Tutsi women was the original perdition of the Hutus.
The Tutsi women no matter their jobs are in support to the Tutsi ethnicity and act as
spies among the Hutus. The Hutu wives must tireless survey their husbands avoiding
them to be involved by the diabolic Tutsi hexes.

A group of academics of the University of Rwanda in Butare, members of the

same clan Akazu of Habyairmana, formed the nucleus of the ideological anti-Tutsi
production in the years before the genocide: Ferdinand Nahimana, PhD in History by
the University of Paris VII with a thesis on the origins of the Rwandese Estate; Leon
Mugesira also historian; Casimir Bizumungo, doctor with PhD in USA, ministry of
Exterior and after ministry of Health; Hassan Ngeze, journalist and editor of Kangura,
from Kigali. After the genocide, the new rector of Butare, Emmanuel Bugingo,
recognized the digital impressions of the University in the tragedy: „all the butchery in
Rwanda was carefully planned by intellectuals and these ones studied at this
University‟.

An extremist eugenism crosses the speeches produced by the group. Kangura

published in 1990 the Ten Hutu Commandments that denounced the inter-ethnical
unions, responsible for the contamination of the Hutu purity and determined the
isolation of the evil Tutsis. In 1992 in a Hutu assembly, Mugesi went step further and
evaluated that the fatal mistake done by the revolution of 1959 was to not having
exterminated the Tutsis. Nahimana concluded that the only solution to the historical
problem was to transfer back all Tutsis to their homeland in the Nile Valley, dead or
alive. Isolated slaughters of Tutsis appeared in those years. In 1994 at the vespers of the
genocide, La Medaille, another extremist journal, called on for the extinction of the
Tutsi race. The anti-Tutsi speech followed a similar trajectory to the anti-Judaic Nazi
speech, evolving from the idea of deportation to extermination.

The Ten Hutu Commandments represent the condensation of anti-Tutsi racism.

One of its items mixes and recreates the two myths of the origin of Rwanda as follows:
„you know the trick they used when they arrived in Rwanda: they pretended they had
come from the sky, but in fact they came from the North of Africa‟. Another myth says
that there is a conspiracy to install by means of Hutu genocide a vast Tutsi Empire in all
the region of the Great Lakes. Facing the imminent danger, the documents point as an
exit the rediscovery of the true Bantu identity of the Hutus: „Nation is artificial; only
race is natural‟.

The entrance of electronic media in the play of hate provoked a crucial changing
in the scenario. The anti-Tutsi propaganda hit the whole country when the Free Radio
and Television of the One Thousand Hills (RTLM) started to operate in July 1993.
Under the ideological direction of Nahimana and Bizimungu and having the journalist
Nzege as partner, RTML offered innumerable historic lessons of the betrayals done by
the Tutsis and the oppression on the Hutus. Since 6 th April 1994 during the genocide the
company called on the audience to fulfill the empty graves with more and more Tutsis.
This had a creepy meaning but in the same manner the genocide of Jews was not a
direct consequence of the Mein Kampf, the genocide of Tutsis was not written explicitly
in the long anti-Tutsi ideology elaborated after the massacre of Burundi. The distinction
between before and after the beginning of the genocide got the statute of juridical
decision of Nahimana in the International Tribunal for Rwanda. In November 2007 he
was absolved from the principal accusation of provoking genocide by the Chamber of
Appeals that cancelled the decision of first instance. The judge didn´t consider the
emissions of RTLM, previous to the genocide, as call-on to the massacre. Nahimana
was condemned to thirty years in jail to his indirect responsibility by the genocide
speeches of the company broadcasted after 6th April.

The transition from intention to gesture demanded a new trauma, which was the
assault against Habyarimana. Since the offensive of Rwandan Front in 1990 the dictator
oscillated between the radicalization of his supremacist followers and a strategy of
national reconciliation. When the enemy forces threatened Kigali the announced the
intention of canceling the ethnical identity cards but never put the idea into practice. In
1992 during the negotiations conducted with the Rwandan Patriotic Front under
surveillance of UN he cancelled the system of single party, constituted a transitory
government and called the Tutsis to participate in the general elections. In August of the
following year, the government and RPF assigned in Tanzania the Treatises of Arusha
that should end the civil war. The meeting lighted furious reactions among the Hutu
extremists who lost the confidence in Habyarimana and organized violent persecutions
against Tutsis. The Rwandese government was dissolving.

In 6th April 1994 when the dictator came back from an international travel
followed by the Burundian chief of Estate Cyprien Ntaryamira, a moderate Hutu who
leaded the transition in the neighboring country, his helicopter was hit by two missiles,
exploded in the air and fell down in the garden of the presidency palace in Kigali. The
two presidents and 10 more people died. Hours later, the Hutu extremists and RPF
changed accusations, each one accusing the other for the terrorist attack that was never
clarified. At the same time, from the calls of RTML, the genocide started.

The final solution wanted since many years by some people and conducted
throughout 100 days was a consequence of the collapse of the Hutu Estate. The fire that
consumed the presidential helicopter consumed also the political alternatives to the civil
war. Facing the decisive battle with RPF the Hutu supremacists started the operation of
extermination. If they won, improbable hypothesis, the Hutu homeland would be free
forever from the presence of Tutsis. If they lost, they imagined that they would be
slaughtered anyway. The genocide was an operation organized by the apparatus of the
Estate, as the military and administrative organs supported the logistic of the
extermination.

The militias of Interahamwe started the massacre with the help of the Armed
Forces. They were already hundreds of thousands recruited in the cities and villages.
The genocide was a massive action carried out by significant parcel of Hutu population.
Many killed to revenge of long conflicts or simply to solve banal problems of
neighbors. Many killed just to not be killed by the militia or by the soldiers: the
extremists wanted to involve all Hutu Nation in the genocide operation, sealing
common guilt and destiny. The preferred weapon was the machete but they used sickles,
knives, arrows and guns.

The ethnical identity cards had a decisive function during the genocide. The
label Tutsi in those documents almost meant a sentence to death. Soldiers and militia
had orders to take the identity cards of the murdered people and send them to their
superiors. Testimonies registered that soldiers delivered everyday those documents in
the house of the Capitan Idelphonse Nizeyimana, one of the coordinators of the
operation. But the slaughters were not restricted to Tutsis as they hit Hutus and Twas
who were openly against the regime. It was inferred a total of killed person superior to
700 thousands, among them 500 thousands were Tutsis, about 75% of the whole Tutsi
population of Rwanda.

Evil symbolisms followed the genocide. In the area of Butare, the signal for the
beginning of the slaughters was the order of the Lieutenant Pierre Bizimana, under
commands of Nizeyimana, to shoot the Queen Rosalie Gicanda, widow of Mutara III at
80 year-old, who stood in Rwanda due to health problems. In an endless influx, corpses
were thrown in the Kagera River that limits the frontier between Rwanda and Tanzania
and nourishes the Victoria Lake, one of the fountains of Nile River. This way, the
imaginary design of Nahimana of transferring the Tutsis back to their lands dead or
alive was carried out.

The international community has an indirect, but very clear paper in the
Rwandese genocide. The amount of 2.5 thousand soldiers of the peace forces of UN in
Rwanda received orders to not interfere, since their mandate was to monitor the
situation. In 21st April, ten Belgian soldiers were killed and the amount was reduced to
250 soldiers, losing any effective capacity of interference. Nine days after, the Council
of Security refused to define the events as genocide, which as consequence postponed
the arrival of forces of interposition.

The lack of action continued ashamedly until the end. In 22 nd July, reluctantly,
UN classified the murders as genocide, but sent only French troops to the Southeast of
Rwanda with the mission of establishing a safe place for the refugees that was not
effectively put in reality. In 17 th July finally the forces of RPF took Kigali, deposed the
government and the slaughters ended without any interference from the international
community.

The evil names

Paul Kagame was 3 year-old in 1960 when his Tutsi family exiled in Uganda
running away from the Hutu revolution. He grew in a refugee camp, joined the rebel
army of Museveni, from whom he became a loyal ally, founded RPF and received
military training in USA. This man entered victorious in Kigaly and stopped the Tutsi
genocide. The provisory government he implanted and which he was the true leader had
as president a Hutu, Pasteur Bizimungu who had participated from the regime of
Habyarimana but ruptured with the dictator in 1990.

The new regime prohibited MRND and, foremost, cancelled the ethinical
politics. The labels of ethnicity of all documents were cancelled and laws prohibiting
under severe sanctions were approved to prohibit any ethnical identification in the
political debates. These prohibitions were formally written in the Constitution approved
by the referendum of 2003. In its 54th article, the constitutional text determines that
„political organizations are prohibited on being based on race, ethnical group, tribe,
clan, religion, sex or any other division that could generate discrimination‟. Rwanda
should re-start its history again, tracing a future over a stone clean from the evil names
that made so much blood to flow.

History has a particular sensible place in the project of re-creation of Rwanda.

The provisory government cancelled the disciplines of History in all the school system
until the production of new books without ethnical supremacies. The discipline returned
only in 2008 after being concluded a long work of curricular reforming that was
conducted by a group of consultants from the Centers of Human Right of the University
of California in Berkeley. The finality proclaimed with the new curricular orientation is
to develop the critical thinking of the students over concurrent visions of history and
ethnicity. The slogan of the program of history could not be more explicit: „education to
reconciliation‟. Reconciliation constitutes obviously a vital goal but there is still the risk
that under this pretext, Rwanda gets again an instrumental historiography, subordinated
to the political oscillations and to the conveniences of the authorities.

The recent past can be revealed as more untouchable than the distant times. The
Tutsi genocide of 1994 is a division mark of memory of huge proportions. It is recorded
in the Constitution and assigns the year zero of the Rwandese history. But the Tutsis
both in Burundi and in Rwanda ritually keep denying the Burundian Hutu genocide of
1972. In the same line, it is strongly denied that massacres against Hutus had occurred
during the Tutsi genocide and two years after it. However there are strong evidences of
this thing called, perhaps with a certain excess, as the second genocide of Rwanda.

A trail of civil blood followed the final offensive of RPF in 1994 according to
testimonies taken by independent organizations of human rights. There is not a trustable
estimative of the total of dead people in these massacres that weren´t a systematic
genocide but can not be hidden as the new Rwandese government wants, under the fog
of the war.

Soon after the victory of RPF, two million Hutus ran away from Rwanda fearing
retaliation. The majority of them formed endless columns of exhausted figures, thirsty
and starving in the forests of the East of Zaire. Many died from cholera and diarrhea
before the implantation of refugee fields. In those camps, the direct responsible form the
Tutsi genocide mixed to the masses of homeless and started to get organized as an army
in the exile. From 1996 to 1997 the Rwandese Armed Forces crossed the frontiers,
invaded the camps and conducted operations of searching and destroying enemies.
Dozens of thousands of Hutus, many of them involved in the Tutsi genocide, were
killed in the hands of the soldiers of Rwanda.

Obviously, the regime of Kagame classifies as enemies of Rwanda all the ones
who lift up the voice to denounce the genocide of 1972 in Burundi or ask the
investigation of the crimes carried out by the Tutsi Army. Among them there is Paul
Rusesabagina, the administrator of the Hotel One Thousand Hills of Kigali, pictured in
the movie Hotel Rwanda that put his life in risk to protect more than 1.2 thousand
Rwandese, Tutsis and Hutus during the genocide. Rusesabagina exiled in Belgium in
1996 as he became persona non grata in Rwanda because he classified Kagame as a war
criminal, asking him to clarify all the massacres. In the dogma of re-invented Rwanda,
genocide is a term reserved to the massacres carried out by Hutus in 1959 and 1994.
Behind this there is the message that in Rwanda the democratic principle is not applied
as the system of government of majority would be equal to the reinstallation of a Hutu
power and this would mean a new genocide.
 The reinvention of Rwanda is an adventure full of ambiguities. The government
of Pasteur Bizimungu ended suddenly in 2000 with the forced desistance of the
president who had entered into conflicts with Kagame. The historical Tutsi leader that
occupied the vice-presidency became chief of Estate and three years later was elected
president for large majority facing only a consented opposition. The Rwandese political
system should be considered as a mild dictatorship that respects some basic human
rights and reasonably tolerates the freedom of expression with the exclusion of the
taboo themes of ethnicity and war crimes of RPF.

The trauma of the genocide is the distinctive trace of the new Rwanda. The
Constitution reserves a minimum of one third of the seats of the parliament to women as
it is believed that a strong feminine presence in politics is an insurance against the
ethnical radicalism. Since 1996, about 1.5 million of Hutu refugees returned from the
camps of Zaire and Tanzania to Rwanda. The International Penal Tribunal installed in
Arusha was tasked to sue the high authorities accused of the Tutsi genocide but the
processes against other people stood as a task to the Rwandese tribunals. In 2006, ten
thousand of people had been judged but other dozens of thousands waited for judgment
in the prisons of the country.

The abolition of death penalty in the following year reduced the tensions
between the Rwandese government and the international community. To accelerate the
judgments Rwanda implanted the Gacaca Courts that are traditional communitarian
tribunals and have as goal to reconstruct a coherent narrative of the facts, make justice
and promote reconciliation. Under the surveillance of the Supreme Court, these
tribunals give back to the formal justice system the authors of more strong crimes and
sentence the authors of crimes of second or third category to prison or to work in the
lands of victims of the genocide.

The ethnical policy has no place anymore inside Rwanda, but seems to joy the
policy of the regime of Kagame to the region of Kivu in the East of Zaire. In this
frontier border in 1996 the Hutu refugee militias reorganized and attacked the Tutsis
that had established in the region after the Hutu revolution of 1959. The intervention of
the Rwandese Army destroyed the Hutu militias and deflagrated the civil war in Zaire
that would get concluded in a first time with the end of the dictatorship of Mobutu Sese
Seko and the proclamation of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Soon after in 1998,
the new Congolese president, Laurent-Désire Kabila, went back against Rwanda and
Uganda that had supported him in the civil war and tried to impose a forced repatriation
of the Tutsis of Kivu. So, almost from nothing, by a proclamation of the Rwandese
government, the ethnicity of the Banyamulenges was created.

In the official version constructed hastily by Rwanda, the North Kivu and South
Kivu pertained in the past to the kingdom of the Banyarwandas. With the European
colonization, the Banyarwandas of Kivu stood separated from the Rwandese and
constituted a singular ethnicity inside the Belgian Congo. The narrative is totally false
except by a detail: due to the conflicts with the Banyarwanda dynasty, a small group of
Tutsi cattle raisers established in the locality of Mulenge, in South Kivu in the end of
the XIX century. This Banyamulenge community includes nowadays only about 30
thousand people but the Rwandese government extended the ethnical label to the more
than 250 thousand Tutsis of Kivu originated from the Diaspora of 1959. In the ironic
words of René Lemarchand, „there are no similar ethnogenesis so sudden and so quick
in the continent‟.

The creation of the Banyamulenges has two functions. From one side, naming
them as an ethnicity established long time ago in the modern Democratic Republic of
Congo makes difficult the intention of the Congolese government in transferring them
back to Rwanda. From another side, naming them as a population that was part of the
kingdom of the Banyarwandas evidences the spectrum of a territorial vindication of
Rwanda in the neighboring country. In the end, the ethnographic artifact in the Western
surroundings of Kivu Lake is other evidence that giving names to ethnicities constitutes
a political gesture and even an act of war.

PART IV - ORIENT

THE RESTORATION OF THE CASTES

„Our community is as underdeveloped as the old pariahs‟, explained Mansingh

Burja, a rioter who, together with other hundreds of rioters, under the strong sun of the
Indian summer, blocked the roadway to Taj Mahal in Agra. „We need the same
benefits‟, he concluded, showing a curious logic, but incontestable in his own terms.

Burja is a Gujjar, an ethnical group that inhabits predominantly the North of

India. The Indian Gujjars pertain to Kshatriya Varna, the military layer and governor in
the traditional social system. The blockage of the roadway lasted one month when there
were several acts of vandalism and fights against police, leaving forty people dead. In
the end, they got what they wanted: the lowering of his group in the official system of
castes in order to obtain reserved quotes in the public jobs and universities. A pact with
the government of Rajasthan State ensured to the Gujjars 5% of the places in the public
functionalism.

The Gujjar protest was tactically organized to coincide with the proximity of the
state elections. As the government of Rajasthan receded and conceded the demanded
privileges, it invested in the constitution of a political clientele. But this was not an
isolated episode. The politicians of India since the independence play with the
opportunity of exchanges privileges of a group to electoral loyalties. The major program
of affirmative action of the world is structured on the system of castes and is also a
fountain of sour disputes among groups and to endless political violence.

The social order of Hinduism came from pre-historic migrations of the Indo-
Arian peoples to the Ganges Valley and other parts of the Indian subcontinent from
1700 to 1300 BC. Its double fundament is the systems of class (Varna) and of caste
(Jati) that coexist and have many points in common but without being confused. Varna
is a Sanskrit word that means „to close‟ and indicate social groups perfectly delimitated.
The four Varnas are: the Brahmans (clergymen), the Chatrias (warriors), the Vaisas
(businessmen) and the Sudras (rural men, servants and workmen). According to a thesis,
originally there were only the three first Varnas corresponding to the traditional social
functions of the Indo-Europeans and reflected in a mythology with three parts: gods that
reign the cosmic order, warrior gods and gods that conserve the Universe in activity.
The Varna of the hand workers would have appeared as a result from the meeting of the
Indo-European conquerors and the native peoples of India.

Spite the appearances there is no correspondence of the Varnas to the social

classes typical of the Occident. Brahmans and Chatrias can be poor although they
pertain to the superior categories. The prosperous medium class of the big Indian cities
is not constituted in general by Brahmans nor Chatrias, but by Vaisas. Also there is no
relationship between pertinence to a determined Varna and the political orientation of
the person. Mahatma Gandhi, leader of the fights for independence, was a Vaisa.
Jawaharlal Nehru, the first chief of government of India, of the same Party of Congress,
was born in a family of Brahmans. Many left political leaders were Brahmans.

The functional hierarchy of the Varnas antecedes the creation of castes. In the
beginning, two centuries before the Christian era, the attribution to a place to each
person in a flexible system of castes derived from an evaluation of their intellectual and
spiritual aspects and of their professional abilities. Nobody was doomed to pertain to the
caste of their father or to be all the life in determined caste. With time, the castes
converted in something similar to the corporations of letter and got hereditary features.
The dissolution of the corporations of letter did not suppress the castes but transformed
them into fraternities linked by blood, by a series of manners and rules including diet
and by obligations of protection of their members.

Caste and Jati are not true synonyms although they had become interchangeable
words. The word „caste‟ is of Portuguese origin and is directly related to the notion of
race. The word Jati means community and also species with the strict sense it has in
Biology. The Jatis are related to several jobs but they can also indicate a religious sect
or a linguistic group. They appear inside the Varnas as endogamous groups: according
tradition, marriages are carried out inside the castes. The Jatis have a territorial basis
and are governed by councils that also take care of internal issues. Among the Hindus of
India there are thousands of castes and sub-castes. Hundreds of them coexist in each
region and there is not a precise correspondence between the castes of different regions.
As a rule, the surname of people evidences pertinence to a caste. Gandhi pertained to
the Bania caste and his surname means greengrocer.

The castes exist in the Terrain life but is true fundament is found in the cosmic
life. They are a central element in the building of Hinduism and are articulated around
the notion of purity. It is not regarding to the purity of a person in their biological cycle
of life, but something more complex that is expressed in the belief of karma. The body
perishes but the soul remains and is transmitted through generations. Each one is
responsible not only for the own present life but for all the past existences of the cosmic
cycle. The acts of each individual not only echo over themselves and their surrounding
environment, but also over their innumerable chains placed in the past and in the future.
The rupture of the rules of religion scatters the impurity behind and forward
contaminating the world.

Octavio Paz makes two crucial observations on the Indian caste. The first is that
it is not a conglomerate of persons, but a circle of families. The individuals are linked to
their family caste since birth to death and can only leave it through a gesture of
renunciation to society and to the concrete world, which consists in a conversion to the
religious life. There are hundreds of thousands of hermits in India dedicated to reflexion
and contemplation who live exclusively from begging. The second is that the cast lacks
historicity: its function is to oppose an unchangeable reality against the history and the
changes of the world. As the castes work as a denial of individualism, the system of
social organization of the Hindus is an element of resistant to modernization. Also, as it
requires a special loyalty to the local community, it represents a factor of disturbances
in the principle of the national cohesion.

All the Hindu castes are inserted in one of the four Varnas. However, outside the
sphere of the castes, there are the pariahs, groups considered ritually impure due to their
occupations. The workers of shambles, the butchers and workers with leather are
pariahs because they handle parts of dead animals. Pariahs are also the ones who handle
human feces, cleaning restrooms and sewers. Such groups were named as the
untouchable and should be physically avoided by the Hindus of castes. They had no
right to use the water of the fountains and wells that served to the others and even the
shadow of an untouchable could project over a Hindu of caste. When they arrived to a
village, the untouchable must announce their presence playing alert tambourines.

There is a complex debate on the pertinence to Hinduism of those excluded

groups. Many pariahs in India and Pakistan converted to Islam, Christianity or
Buddhism to overcome the social stigma. However, most of them stood loyal to
religion. Arya Samaj, a movement of reform of Hinduism conducted by Swami
Dayananda after 1875, was concerned in improving the social condition of the
untouchable and proposed the new name of the excluded groups to Dalits. The word
„hindi‟ means pariah, disinherited or oppressed. Gandhi at his time suggested calling
them Harijans, which means „sons of God‟ but the word never got a wide acceptance.
 At principle, Varnas and Jatis have no place in the constitutional order of India
that is a democratic Republic. The Constitution was promulgated in 1949 and ensures to
all people in its preamble the equality of statute and opportunity. The 14 th article of Part
III related to the Fundamental Rights, inspired in the 14th Emend of the Constitution of
USA, forbids the Estate to deny to any citizen the equal protection of law. The 15 th
article is also written in the group of provisions of the Fundamental Rights and forbids
the legal discrimination based on religion, caste, sex or birth place. Explicitly it
prohibits any conditions or restrictions to the access of stores, restaurants, hotels, public
places and joyful places and the use of wells, water reservoirs, balneary, roads and
resorts kept with public money. The 17th article abolished untouchability and previewed
legal punishment to any discriminatory act coming from this notion. The Constitution
has the clear proposition of canceling the traditional social discrimination.

However, the constitutional order includes a concept of collectivity of birth that

represents the denial of the proclaimed principle of equality of the citizens facing law.
The 16th article affirms the equality of opportunities regarding the access to public jobs,
but a paragraph confers the Estate the rights of reserving public jobs to „any sub-
developed class of citizens‟ that are not adequately represented in the public
functionalism. Besides, crucially, many constitutional articles established the
reservation of legislative seats in the Federal, State and Municipal plans regarding
„scheduled tribes and castes‟. This term –scheduled- derives from the first list
(schedule) of the castes considered as sub-developed written by the British colonial
government in 1935.

It was open the way to the introduction of emends that form the oldest and
biggest program of the so-called positive discrimination in the world. The Supreme
Court was soon provoked to manifest by a contest of the system of quotes to admission
in the medical schools of Madras State and invalidated it under the argument that it
broke the principle of equality. The Parliament reacted immediately, voting a first
emend in 1951. That emend inserted in the 15 th article a paragraph that authorizes the
Estate to carry out any special provision to the progress of any of the socially and
educationally backward classes or to the scheduled castes and tribes. This formula with
all its amplitude and ambiguity would be reproduced in other extraordinary provisions.
In 1995 by the 77th Emend, the 16th article received a paragraph that authorizes the
positive discrimination in the promotions of the public service. In 2005 by the 93 rd
Emend, it was inserted a paragraph in the 15th article that authorizes the positive
discrimination in the admission to the educational institutions, public or private.

In the Indian constitutional language, scheduled tribes and castes are the regional
groups defined as backward by the president, in an act that requires a previous
consultation with the governor of the state and is subjected to parliamentary
confirmation. Originally the formula worked as a metaphor to the old untouchable. But
under the expression „other backward classes‟ innumerable regional groups started to
get benefits from the programs of preferences. The Gujjars of Rajasthan knew when
they started their protest and made it to coincide with regional elections that the system
of positive discrimination only finds limits in the convenience of the regional political
elite.

Caste makers

Before the British, there was not a unified India. The Mogul Empire, governed
by Islamic sovereigns of Persian origin was established in Northern India by all the
Ganges Valley in the beginning of the XVI century. Taj Mahal was built under the order
of the Emperor Shah Jahnan from 1630 and 1653. The imperial expansion reached its
apex about half a century later when the power of the emperor Aurangzeb extended
through most part of India but didn´t include Punjab, the states of the Northeast and the
territory of the Maratas in the East. In the XVIII the decline and retraction of the
Moguls under the impact of the rebellions of the Hindu states opened the way to the
British colonization.

The Islamic emperors subordinated the Hindu governors less by means of

coercion than by means of collaboration. After beating the Rajputs kingdoms in the
Battle of Khanua in 1527 the emperor Babur gave them a wide autonomy since they
paid tributes. The Rajputs are warriors of caste of noble lineage. During great part of the
Indian history they had small autonomous kingdoms and resisted to trials of
centralization of power. Soon after, the Hindu leaders were co-opted to the Army and
the imperial administration. The first legal codes of the system castes were originated in
that period in the Rajput kingdoms. Later in the XVII century the first Mathara emperor,
Shivaji Bhosale, introduced the Varnas and Jatis in the law. The Brahman codes of
those Estates worked as columns of a social order founded in the primacy of the
clergymen and warriors. But they were far from producing a uniform classification of
castes, which was carried out only by the British.

As the Mogul emperors, the British took opportunities from the rivalries
between the Indian Estates to implant their power. Colonization started with the act of
the British Company of Easter Indies and was contained during a long time by the
resistance of the Marathas who controlled the Central India and were only beat after
three wars in 1818. In 1857 a rebellion of Sepoys, the Indian soldiers of the colonial
Army spread out in the Ganges Valley as a general riot. The Indian Rebellion even
being beat put an end point on the government of the Company. The Parliament
established the direct government of the Crown over the British India and a period of a
rapid growth of the colony started. In the end of the century, railways, ports, roadways,
bridges, channels and telegraphic lines favored the exchange of Indian cotton by British
manufactures.

In India such as the rest of the Empire, the British chose at the end of the XIX
century the indirect government. With two reforms, the Indians gained the right of
electing representatives to a central assembly and to provincial legislative bodies. The
electorate defined by rules of indirect government included only the high income classes
that were mostly constituted by the superior castes. Much before with the
recommendations of the parliamentarian Thomas Macaulay, it had been introduced a
school system inspired in the British public schools and destined to form a class of
Indian blood and color but British in the gestures, moral, opinions and intellect. Since
the introduction of the basis of the self-government the political reforms aimed to
diffuse the British civilization among the vassals of the Crown and ensure the loyalty of
the elite to the Empire.

The liquid ancestral system of castes in India was structured on local basis,
presenting marked regional differences of nomenclature and hierarchy. The Brahman
codes created in the Rajput kingdoms and in the Estate of Maratha had a greater
uniformity but a relatively small geographic inclusion. The British, however, interpreted
the castes as signs of social status and indicators of intellectual abilities. In the trial to
get the support of the regional elites, the British Company of the Eastern Indies
distributed privileges to the superior castes. Later, the census introduced a uniform
classification of caste that worked as a hidden fountain of the actual legal register of the
scheduled tribes and castes.

Benjamim Disraeli was the British prime-minister twice and wrote in Tancred in
1847: „race is everything, there is no other truth‟. The British didn´t took longer to apply
the European racial theories to the system of castes. The first general census was
conducted in 1872 and had already a model of classification of castes. Herbert Risely,
the supervisor of the census of 1901 explained the feeling of proud and distinction of
the Brahmans as a fruit of the scientifically proven fact that superior castes preserved
the purity of the Arian race in the Northern India.

Caste and race became almost interchangeable terms in the British imagination
over India. In 1871 the colonial administration instituted the Law of Criminal Tribes by
which „if the local government has reasons to believe that any tribe, gang or social class
is systematically devoted to unbailable transgressions he must report the case to the
general-governor and request his permission to declare such tribe, gang or class as a
criminal tribe‟. The underlying idea was that criminality constituted a collective
occupation and was an inherited trace of determined castes or tribes. The official
notification of criminal tribe imposed to all the members of the group a register in the
local magistrate. In case of nomad groups, the notification was a prelude to compulsory
sedentary at an area defined by the local government.

In the beginning to the census questions about the pertinence to a caste, the
Indians gave innumerable contradictory answers, indicating names of religious
denominations, regional sub-castes, place of origin, jobs and occupations. The census
workers, naturally, created logically consistent classification models, even if they were
irrelevant from the point of view of the identity perceptions of the Indians. The
preferred native advisors were the Brahmans and many of them saw in the British
classification an efficient way to ensure economical privileges to their caste. Religious
and political leaders also searched to consolidate a basis of support by means of a
census classification. The register of the castes generated in the British India reflected
much more the political conjuncture in which they it was produced than any ancestor
religious tradition.

A fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of the castes followed all the

British colonial experience. At the vespers of the Second World War the famous
anthropologist T. C. Hodson from Cambridge, a scholar and studious of India,
suggested that classes and castes had a similar relationship to families and species. The
castes were not originally subdivisions of social classes. However, the Estate always has
the power of transforming intellectual mistakes in political realities: the classifying
methods of the British administration made that the hierarchy of castes got more and
more similar to a hierarchy of classes.

Censuses have consequences. After the census of 1901 the Mahtons of Punjab
vindicated their reclassification as members of the Rajput caste based on history and
similarity of manners. The vindication had a clear practical sense: the most influent
parcel of the Mahtons wanted to have access to jobs in a colonial squad of the Army
that only admitted persons from the superior castes. The event signs the beginning of a
process of collective demands by changes in the official statute of castes with the aim of
getting rights or privileges. The Gujjars of Rajasthan behaved according an old patter
since more than one century ago: in the colonial times, the goal was to climb the
classification slope; since independence the goal is to descend the slope.

There are registers of resistance to the identity order implanted by the British. At
the vespers of the census of 1931, the movement Arya Samaj broadcasted in Lahore,
nowadays the capital of the Pakistani Punjab a leaflet that instructed people to declare
themselves as pertaining to the Arian race, of no caste and predictably of the Arya
Samaj religious denomination. The leaflet was a challenge to the census because further
than the rejection of the identity of caste, the names of race and religion were not placed
in the official models. However, the intellectual revolt of those reformers constituted an
exception. In the smashing majority of the cases, the contests were limited to demands
of changing the labels of the castes, subordinating to the general logic of the
classificatory system.

The British saw a static India wrapped in a monolithic and immutable system of
castes that governed the daily life of everyone. This was a false image. In its complexity
and flexibility the Indian castes never worked as a general hierarchy. There are
evidences that, with the obvious exceptions of the pariahs, the castes represented only
one of the multiple identities into which the Indians recognized themselves. But the
colonial power conferred to the system a new weigh and statute.

Karl Marx in an article written in 1853 also interpreted India as a frozen in time
civilization. He justified the British conquest arguing that if the underdevelopment and
divisions of India made their subordination to an external power inevitable then the
British constituted the best alternative because they would annihilate the old Asian
society and would establish the material foundations of the Western society in Asia. The
regenerative mission would be carried out automatically as a fruit of the economic
interests of the European power: „the modern industry that results from the systems of
railways will dissolve the inherited divisions of work over which the Indian casts lie and
that are decisive obstacles to progress and power in India‟.

In fact, railways and industries found their way to India. However, the
modernization promoted by the United Kingdom did not dissolve the castes. Instead the
uniform social classification that came from the colonial censuses started to torment the
independent India, fertilizing the soil of violence and threatening his national cohesion.

The castes and the nation

The independent fights of India, as well as in many other colonies, were

conducted precisely by the native directing class molded by the European power. The
Indian elite – British in its gestures, moral, opinions and minds- hugged nationalism,
and imported ideology from Europe, and started to require the British to leave. In great
part, such elite was constituted by Brahmans and many of them imagined the system of
castes as the distinctive characterization of the Indian society, something that should be
preserved to mark the separation between India and the Occident.

Gandhi was not Brahman but he thought exactly this way. In 1917 less than two
years after coming back from South Africa he wrote: „the vast organization of castes
answered not only to the religious desires of the community but to their political
necessities. The inhabitants of the villages administrated their internal issues through
the system of castes and through it they worked with any oppression coming from the
power or the governing powers. It can´t be denied to a nation that was capable of
producing the system of castes its wonderful power of organization‟.

Five years later in his journal Young India he went back to defend the system of
castes: „I am among the persons who don´t consider the caste as a prejudicial institution.
Originally, the caste was a healthy manner and promoted the welfare state‟. In the
sequence, he tried to conciliate the idea of national cohesion to the interdictions of
sharing the table of meals and contracting matrimony with persons from different casts.
About food: „if mankind had never in the self damage turned the act of eating into a
fetish and addiction, we would do such act privately in the same manner we carry out
the vital physiological functions‟. And about matrimony: „I keep well defined opinions
regarding religion and marriage. The more we control our appetites either eating or
marrying, the best we become from the religious point of view‟.

Obviously, a religions notion of body purity was the fundament of the opinions
of Gandhi. But it didn´t impede him to consider alternatives for the relaxing of the
hierarchy of castes, a modernizing reform that should preserve the nucleus of the
system. He fixed in the idea of reducing the categories to only four, the Varnas, which
he considered as expressions of a natural order, supported by the principle of heredity.
The untouchable seemed to him as an excrescence imposed to Hinduism and should be
banned but not the social order expressed in the Varnas. This order had in his point of
view the utile function of impeding competition and the fight of classes.

However, the conceptions o Gandhi experienced progressive changes since 1931

when he contacted Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar. He was a noticeable figure and was born
in a poor family of untouchable of Mahar caste and overcame many difficulties to enter
the university in Bombay (nowadays Mumbai) studying Economics and Political
Sciences. Later he concluded a PhD in the University of Columbia and in 1936 he
published the book The Annihilation of Caste and founded the Independent Labor Party.
At the time of his pioneer meeting with the Hindu leader, Ambedkar was already a critic
of the Indian National Congress that he judged as representing solely the interests of
exclusive elite incapable of defending the end of the distinctions of castes.

The first meeting occurred in London in a negotiation table with the colonial
power about political reforms and resulted in a confrontation of principles. Ambedkar
vindicated and obtained from the British a compromise of division of the electorate with
the institution of a separated electoral body for the untouchable. Gandhi didn´t admit it
as he judged that it would interest only to the colonial power because it would conduct
to the political division of the Indians. In the following year in a prison far away from
Bombay he started a hunger strike until death against the separation of the electorate.
Fearing the possibility that the death of Gandhi would provoke uncontrollable
slaughters against pariahs by Hindus of caste, Ambedkar accepted to exchange the
original compromise by a rule of reservation of parliamentary seats to the untouchable.
A document, named Law of Pona, consecrated the pact between the two leaders and was
after inscribed in the Constitution. This pact is considered as the initial mark of the
positive discrimination of India.

Gandhi learned from the confrontation and adopted part of the ideas of
Ambedkar. In his texts and speeches from the years 1930 he started to express his
doubts about the classification in Varnas. From one side, he diagnosed the loss of the
traditional meaning of Varnas in a society where inherited occupations influenced less
and less the careers followed by the new generations. From other, the clearly rejected
the notions of superiority and inferiority associated to the religious classification.

At those times, the public polemics between Ambedkar and Gandhi evidenced
positions still distinct but less contrasting. The first man wanted to promote a wide
reform of Hinduism, defined castes as an abomination and wanted its complete
extinction by a political act of the Estate. The second exulted the intrinsic virtues of
religion, but hated the injustices carried out in name of caste and suggested a gradual
extinction of the distinctions. In his vision, it was not related to legislate the abolition of
the castes, but to practice equality and stimulate the young people to investigate their
own personal vocations. Untouchability should be extinguished by law without delays.

Ambedkar dedicated a pronounced speech in 1936 to make ironic comments on

the idea of changing by example. Referring to what rested form the belief of the Hindu
leader in the healthy nature of the Varnas, he threw himself to offensive. Firstly he
emphasized that the ancestors and even Gandhi spite being Vaisas had abandoned
commerce in favor of political and religious preaching. After, the accused his opponent
to sustain the unjust traditional order to conserve his leadership among the Hindus of
caste: „the reason why Mahatma is always defending caste and Varna is because he
fears that if he goes back against them, he will lose his place in politics‟. Finally he
concluded in a way that excluded any possibility of conciliation: „my divergence with
the Hindus and Hinduism is not about the imperfection of their social behavior. It is
more fundamental. It is about their ideals.

The evolution of Gandhi´s thinking continued to make him to cede his old
convictions. His fundamental point was not to preserve the traditions of Hinduism,
although he found in them the origin of a historic particular and positive identity of
India. He was in fact searching for a program able to promote the unity of the new
nation, keeping off the ghost of violence between Hindus and Muslims and between the
superior and inferior castes. Slowly, Gandhi concluded that in the name of the
suppression of untouchability it would be needed to accept the disappearing of castes
and Varnas. But he feared the reaction of the superior castes to radical decisions of
removing the system as a whole.

In USA, the Jim Crow laws had the central objective to impede inter-racial
unions because miscegenation would destroy the social frontiers that conferred sense to
the myth of race. The concept of racial purity keeps an obvious parallelism with the one
of purity of caste. In India, the prohibition to inter-caste marriages worked as a nuclear
dogma of the building of social segregation.

The process of doctrine revision conducted by Gandhi reached a conclusion

when he gave up this dogma. Ambedkar always insisted that only the remove of such
interdiction would dismantle the social separations. In 1936 Gandhi declared he didn´t
oppose to shared meals and to inter-caste unions but still accepted the frontiers of the
Varnas. Years later he offered his support to a Hindu of superior caste who married to a
Dalit under strong pressures he needed to face. In the end, soon before the independence
of India he started to actively preach that Hindus of caste married to pariahs. His
solution for the problem of caste was that, symbolically, all the Indians became
untouchable. This is the sense for the call on everyone to clean each own´s restroom.
Obviously, such ideas scandalized many Hindus of caste.

The declaration of independence occurred in August 1947. Gandhi died in the

following January, shot in New Delhi by an extremist Hindu. In his interval, the
Constitutional Assembly was working thoroughly, installed from pacts with the British
and that would give origin to the Republic of India. Gandhi was not a constituent. The
Party of the Congress was leaded by the prime-minister Nehru who would govern the
country for almost two decades. But the architect of the Constitution was Ambedkar
who occupied the job of minister of Justice in the government of Nehru and in the
Constituent he represented the Federation of the Identified Castes.

The scholar jurist was the president of the Committee of Redaction of the
constitutional sketch and gave India a text with 395 articles that is the largest
constitution of the world. The absence of Gandhi facilitated the pact between Ambedkar
and the majority linked to the Party of the Congress for the introduction of articles of
positive discrimination. The chosen model was the Law of Poona that Gandhi accepted
grudgingly as a smaller bad problem.

The compromise negotiated during the political crisis of 1932 represented a

triumph of Ambedkar because it introduced caste in law. As seen, the positions of
Gandhi regarding the system of castes experienced deep changes but something was
permanent in his thinking: castes should note have implications in the political sphere.
In his perspective, the existence of nation depended crucially that all the citizens shared
a same political identity over social and religious distinctions. Nehru was a modernizer
not attracted to the Hindu traditions as he imagined that the castes were relics from the
past and should be banned in the name of the principle of equality.

In the constitutional discussions, Nehru and his followers of the Party of

Congress didn´t oppose to the positive discrimination. From one side, the majority
wanted to get rid from the stigma of being representatives of the interests of the Hindus
of caste, a frequent accusation used both by Ambedkar and by the Muslim League.
From the other side the expectations of the constituents was that the positive
discrimination would be transitory and would last short, perhaps just one decade,
extinguished in parallel to the elimination of the social prejudices against the Dalits.
There are some signs that Ambedkar had the same expectation.

In life, Ambedkar was never a really popular figure as Gandhi and Nehru were.
After the Constituent he disputed without success a parliamentary seat and got by
nomination a seat in the High Chamber of the Parliament. In 1954 he converted to
Buddhism concluding his long process of intellectual rupture with Hinduism. Two years
later, when he devoted to preach conversion of the Dalits to Buddhism he died from
diabetes. His death transformed the social reformer in an icon to the Dalits and in a
reverenced figure in all India. His birthday is a national holiday and a date when
hundreds of thousands of Dalits give honors in front a memorial in Mumbai.

India celebrates their leaders dedicating them statues. There are more statues of
Ambedkar than of Gandhi and Nehru together. A big official photography of Ambedkar
adorn the building of the parliament and according legend in each Dalit house there is a
small picture of him, a small chubby human figure with non-marked face signs, with a
glass of nerd and dressed with the semi-colonial respectability of jacket and tie.
However, the untouchable who became a jurist is still a target of noisy polemics. Many
books and historic essays present him as a caricature of a British puppet in a trial to
discredit Gandhi, Nehru and the Party of Congress. In the opposite extremity of the
political spectrum, Ambedkar is saluted as the Father of Dalits and his image works as a
fountain of legitimacy of innumerable movements that claims the statute of
representatives of the unfavored castes.

One million mutinies

The Indian constituents thought in a minority constituted by the old untouchable

and by several very poor tribes when they built the statute of positive discrimination.
However, the expression „other backward classes‟ introduced in the 1st Emend open the
gateways to uncontrollable demands that transformed minority in majority. The
scheduled castes represent about 16% of the population and the scheduled tribes, around
8%. However, with the expansion of the programs of quotes and reserves, nothing less
than 52% of the Indians were incorporated into the category „other backward classes‟, a
sociological train in which always a new group can be attached.

India is too big and diverse. In the Northern part of the country, the elites are
numerically small, express a recent past of Brahman domination and face almost
without the intermediation of medium classes the wide majority of poor that pertain in
general to the scheduled castes and tribes. In the Southwestern India, especially in the
densely occupied Ganges Valley the scenario is different. There is no historic
identification between Brahmans and the economic elites. The medium classes are
numerous. These classes can´t be labeled as „scheduled classes‟ but they resent from the
distance that separates them to the elites. As a result it configured a pattern of conflicts
between castes that concur among themselves to access to quotes and reserves.

Under Nehru, the federal government resisted with success to the pressures by
the creation of reserves destined to the „other backward classes‟ in North and East of
India, a recommendation of the First Commission on Backward Classes (Kalelkar
Commission). In the end, perceiving that the production of exceptions would go out of
control and would generate conflicting scenarios, the Parliament gave support to the
Prime-Minister. When Martin Luther King visited India in 1961 he eulogized the
policies of preferences of the country only the old untouchable and a small group of
very poor tribes were benefited from them. But the dispute among factions of the Party
of Congress that followed the ascension of Indira Nehru Gandhi, the only daughter of
the first chief of government, broke the gateways of prudence.

Nehru died in 1964 and Indira was pointed out for a ministry position. But she
was not disposed to be a merely symbolic figure in the politics of India. She was
ambitious and soon she challenged the Party leadership and constituted her own faction
that was presented as socialist. As a strategy, she introduced in the internal politics of
the Party the dissensions of caste, begin supported by local leaderships of the inferior
castes. In 1966 she beat in the internal dispute the conservative Morarji Desai to become
the first woman to occupy the head of government of India.

Indira governed throughout three successive mandates until 1977 and went to the
head of government for the fourth time in 1980. Four years later she was murdered by
two of her personal guards, followers of the Sikh religion and supporters of the
separatist movement of Punjab. The Sikh religion appeared in Punjab in the transition of
the XV and XVI centuries from the lessons of the guru Nanak Dev. Nanak was born in
a Hindu family but the religion he created expressed a rejection of the practices of
Hinduism and Islam. He postulates the equality among the human beings and denounces
any distinction of caste. This equality gave support to the cultural unity of Punjab that
nowadays is divided between India and Pakistan. The Sikhs became a warrior people
ready to defend their independence against external threatening of conquerors.

In the election campaign for the second mandate in 1971 she wrapped in the flag
of the fight against poverty, compromised with a vast expansion of the programs of
preference and asked the vote of the inferior castes and Dalits. From that moment on,
the positive discrimination advanced clearly in the states of the North and of the West
with the support of the constitutional formula of „other backward classes‟. However, the
parliamentary majority of the Party of Congress continued to resist to the use of the
maneuver in federal programs. There were also scruples regarding the confection of
these general lists of backward groups, generally very big, complex and controversial.

The cult to Ambedkar raised the myth that the actual amplitude of positive
discrimination was written in his thinking. But in fact the agents of the amplification
were the great parties and the political elites that tried to extend their social influence.
The second mandate of Indira was carried out in the middle of successive institutional
crisis and accusations of corruption. Against the Prime-Minister, the Janata Party was
formed as a heterogeneous coalition that included the dissident faction of the Party of
Congress. Janata won the elections of 1977 ending for the first time the hegemony of
the party controlled by the families Nehru-Gandhi. In power, the coalition engaged on
gaining support of the inferior castes and promised to amplify the federal programs of
preferences. To make a precise diagnosis and trace a plan in that direction, the
government created the Second Commission on Backward Classes (Mandal
Commission).

The Mandal Report was given in 1980 when the Party of Congress had already
gone back to power. It created a series of social, educational and economic criteria to
define the other backward classes and recommended the amplification of the quotes
reserved in the public service and in the universities from 22.5% to 49.5%. In practice
that meant to institute a profusion of backward groups in the North and West of India.
During one decade, under the governments of Indira and his son Rajiv Gandhi, the
report slept inside a drawer. The Party of Congress promised to apply to conserve its
influence on the inferior castes but never implanted it really to not antagonize the
medium classes that also participated of the electoral basis.
 Vishwanath Pratap Singh entered the political scenario by the doors of the party
of the family Nehru-Gandhi and became the Treasurer of the cabinet of Rajiv. Soon
after the ruptured with the government and organized the National Front, a coalition of
opposition remnant from the ruined Janata. Singh won the elections of 1989 and among
his promises of campaign it was the implementation of the Mandal Report. The first
essay of application of the new rules ended with a wave of manifestations in the
universities that reached the apex when Rajiv Goswami, a student of the University of
Delhi tried an auto-immolation. But Singh didn´t give up. In 1993 the „other backward
classes‟ won their privileges in the mold of an expanding policy of positive
discrimination. The new federal initiative represented a stimulus to the state
governments that enhanced their own reserves.

Since its beginning, in the name of the constitutional principle of equality, the
Supreme Court tried to limit the extension of the policy of positive discrimination.
Faced with successive parliamentary acts of alterations in the constitution with the
finality of consolidating and amplifying the preference programs, the judges imposed a
limit of 50% for the quotes. The Mandal Commission operated inside this large limit but
the state and municipal governments violated it routinely which provokes frequent
judicial contests. The Northern state of Tamil Nadu is an extreme example because it
maintains programs of quotes that reserve nothing less than 69% of the total of places to
the group of scheduled tribes and castes and other backward classes.

The mentors of the positive discrimination thought it as a temporary remedy and

created a rule of revision in intervals of five years. But the policy of preferences
acquired a proper dynamics converting into an electoral instrument manipulated by big
and small parties in the federal, state and municipal spheres. The quinquennial revisions
were never done and ritually the parliament and the government extended the validity of
the programs through new periods.

There is no consensus in India on the demography of the backward classes. The

Mandal Commission used old data of the colonial census of 1930 to estimate them in
52% of the total. In the end of the decade of 1990, a national research by sampling
generated the value of 32%. The federal censuses and the researches conducted by local
governments suffer a continuous attack of accusation of fabrication of statistics of
backward classes. Another way around, there are abundant evidences of a double
tendency that is paradoxical: while the castes lose relevance in the social and economic
life, they get each time more important in the political sphere.

The distinctions of caste are still strong in the rural lands but they are invisible in
the quotidian of the great cities. Below the surface, they persist in the mined camp of
matrimonies. The journals of Delhi bring advertisements of searching for wives that
almost all the time include the expression SNSC, very well known as sorry, no
scheduled castes. Even so, the endogamy of caste is a practice in slow decline at least in
the cities. A research done in 2007 in the West of the Ganges state of Uttar Pradesh, the
most populated of India, revealed a noticeable tendency: the parcel of Dalit chiefs of
family occupied in the extraction and commerce of fur reduced from three quarters of
the total in 1990 to less than 1%. The abandon of the job traditionally associated to the
untouchable derived from the enhancement of income of the poorest classes of the rural
lands indicates a modernization that advances unequally in all the country.

Soon after he came from his doctorate in USA, Ambedkar was invited to go
away from the Indian hotel he was hosted as soon as the administration got information
from his origin of caste. Things like this don´t occur anymore in India including due to
the constitutional abolition of untouchability. But the violence of caste is high. In the
small villages, romances between Hindus of caste and Dalits several times deflagrate
violent reactions and end in tragedy. Also, the Christian schools that receive Dalits are
target of attacks, commonly attributed to Sang Parivar (United Family). The group is
organized around Hindutva, the doctrine of Hindu ultra-nationalism, and occupies a
peripheral place in the Indian politics but influences the most active sectors of Bharatiya
Janata Party that is a pole of opposition to the Party of Congress.

The attacks don‟t constitute general phenomena but are far away from being
merely exceptions. According to official data, the annual number of violent acts against
Dalits stood always above 13 thousand in the decade of 1980 and jumped to more than
20 thousand in the following decade. The Institute for Control of Conflicts, an entity of
studies of Delhi, registered 27 thousand crimes of caste against Dalits in 2007. In many
places the old untouchable are passive victims of atrocities and humiliations due to their
dependence of the jobs offered by the Hindus of caste. But each time more, gangs of
young Dalits react to the attacks or promote unmotivated atrocities, producing spirals of
violence among castes.

There are strong evidences that the positive discrimination develops a paper in
these violent acts: „although there had been little public criticisms on affirmative action
in India before the years 1970, the criticisms became louder with time at the same time
violence worsened. A study of 1997 concluded that the systems of quotes eliminated
any good will that the superior castes nourished by the inferior ones in part due to a
generalized overestimation of quantity and efficacy of policies of preferences.

Positive discrimination fails in its own words. Since it was created in no year the
quotes reserved to the scheduled tribes and castes were filled up in the public services
nor in the universities as a consequence of the poverty that flagellates the immense
majority of these groups. The programs of preferences give benefits to about only 6% of
the Dalit families that compose the medium classes. This finding provoked intense
debates and proposed destined to exclude from the reserves the supernatant, an
expression to refer to groups of medium class inside the inferior castes. Some recent
decisions adopted in this direction generated strong political opposition and protests in
the streets.

Six decades after the deflagration of positive discrimination, the old social and
economical inequalities among castes didn´t modify structurally. India, in general,
became less poor and all the social classes improved their way of life but it was not
reduced the distance between the medium classes and the mass of the population. The
diagnosis represents a consensual vision among the political groups but it has not been
taken into any kind of pact for solutions. The programs of preferences converted since
long time ago in instrument of conquest of electoral clients manipulated by the regional
and national parties. Due to the network constructed around the theme, the failure of
positive discrimination is taken as a paradoxical argument for its extension and
amplification.

In the Indian political elite the divergences are concentrated on the strategies of
reproduction of positive discrimination. The Party of Congress lies on the heirs of the
family Nehru-Gandhi in the surface and on a vast collection of regional alliances. In
coherence to their interests, the Party defends the amplification of the reserves to the
other backward classes. The Bharatiya Janata Party is supported on the shoulders of the
superior castes of the Northern India and finds strong support in the emergent medium
classes of all the country. Its proposals point to a creation among the poor layers of the
superior castes of new groups to get benefits from the reserves.

Nothing means that the positive discrimination represents a social consensus. In

2006 with the approval of the 93rd Emend of the constitution, the government
announced the amplification of the system of quotes to the other backward classes in
private institutions of higher education and later in private companies in general. The
advancement of programs of preferences generated protests among students of Engineer
and Medicine and medical interns of all the country. The claimers constituted the
Young for Equality, an organization destined to fight policies based on caste. However,
spite the great size of unhappiness, the main parties declared their fidelity to the Indian
dogma of positive discrimination.

In contrary to what Marx and the leaders of the independence of India imagined,
the system of castes is more alive than ever. As Shashi Tharoor, author of an essential
biography of Nehru: „at the times of my grandparents, caste governed their lives: they
eat, played, married, lived according to the rules of caste. At the times of my parents,
during the nationalist movement, we renounced to our surnames of caste and declared
caste as a social disgrace. As a result when I grew I didn´t pay attention to caste; it was
something irrelevant in school, work, social contacts; the last thing I would ever
imagine was in the caste of somebody I met. Now, in the generation of my sons, the
wheel completed a whole circle. Caste is everything again. Caste determines your
opportunities, perspectives, promotions. You can´t go any further unless you are
backward.‟

The Constitution of Independence that formally abolished untouchability ended

tattoing the caste in the body of the Indian nation. Contrary to dreams of unity of
Gandhi and Nehru, the national parties speak to regional basis defined according
frontiers of caste and in the states the political groups that vindicate a representation of
caste grow fast. In Uttar Pradesh, one of the principal cots of the Indian nationalism and
the anti-colonial fights lay strong caste roots. In 2007 the parliamentary majority leaded
by the Party of Congress that sustained the Prime-Minister Manmohan Singh was saved
by the adhesion of Samajwadi Party whose electorate is concentrated among the so-
called other backward classes of Uttar Pradesh. In the same year, the Dalit party
Bahujan Samaj Party won the state elections and started to form alliances in other states
around the project of conducting their leader, the autocratic tacher Kumari Mayawati to
the federal chief of government.

The Gujjars constitute around 7% of the population of Rajasthan. In their fight

for lowering the classification of caste, the Gujjar claimers not only faced the local
police of the state but also the member of the Meena caste that represents about 12% of
the population of the state. Before the pact with the Gujjars, the Meenas occupied alone
the aimed inferior position in the pyramid of castes of Rajasthan. In June 2007 around
50 thousand Meenas, armed with knives and swords, concentrated in the city of Peepal
Khera shouting „no quotes to the Gujjars‟. Police hindered the programmed parade
because one week before confrontations between the two communities had left 25 dead.
Unfortunately, „caste is everything again‟ in an India that does not seem willing to
honor the principle of equality proclaimed at the moment of independence.

THE SONS OF THE SOIL

May 13th 1969 is an unforgettable and tragic date in the history of Malaysia. In
this day in Kuala Lumpur activists of the United Malays National Organization, the
biggest party of the pro-government coalition, were grouped to a commemorative
parade of their alleged triumph in the general elections of May 10th when rumors
circulated that members walking to the parade had suffered aggressions from ethnical
Chinese. At the vespers, thousands of activists of the opposing Party of Democratic
Action, whose basis was mainly concentrated in the ethnical Chinese, had done a parade
of celebration of their own alleged electoral victory and, deviating from the previewed
route, they had circulated in Malay suburbs and insulted their inhabitants. Under an
electrical atmosphere contaminated by the desires of revenge the rumors deflagrated an
uncontrollable racial mutiny. Violence took the capital and the surrounding areas.
Chinese stores, residences and cars were flared up. In the end, more than 150 people
died and 6 thousands lost their houses. Malaysia would never be the same.

In 1969 a Bumiputera could flare up a car or a store with the certain that the
owner was Chinese. Nowadays there is a reasonable probability that a great car or store
is owned by a Bumiputera. In the Malay language Bumiputera means „son of the soil‟,
an almost official category that includes Malays and other natives of the Malay
Peninsula and the Islands of Java, Sulawesi, Sumatra and Borneo. This phrase comes
from a high advisor of the government of Malaysia in defense to t he official policy of
preferences to the sons of the soil.
 The word Malay has many senses. From a tongue point of view it means the
population that speaks Bahasa Melayu, origin of the national languages of Malaysia and
Indonesia but also of dialects spoken in the ports and seas of the archipelagos of the
Asiatic Southeast. From a political point of view, the Malays were created by the British
colonial censuses of the end of the XIX century. Those censuses had among other
functions the aims of separating the British Malay from the Dutch Indonesia. The
existence of Malays as a people clearly delimitated answered to an obvious geopolitical
necessity of the United Kingdom. But the concept of Bumiputera derives from a third
sense of the word Malay that has roots in the racialist thinking.

The ineffable Johann Blumenbach was a scientific pioneer of classification of

races. He found in 1775 the four great groups that still echo in the racialist imagination:
whites, yellows, blacks and reds. Two decades later he added the Malay race (brown)
that included not only the inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula but also the archipelagos
of Indonesia, Philippines, Sonda, Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia. He thought the
Malays occupied an intermediary and transitional place between the primary white race
and the degenerated black race. The thesis of Blumenbach would gain the statute of
principle of the British colonial policy in the Southeast Asia.

Benjamin Raffles, a Captain of a ship engaged in the slave traffic in Caribbean

died in 1795. Fourteen years before his son Thomas Stamford was born on board of a
ship. The teenager soon got a job in the British Company of the East Indies and started a
successful career that would bring him to high positions in the colonial administration
of the archipelagos of Indonesia and Malaysia. In the conjuncture of the Napoleonic
Wars, he surveyed the capture of the Dutch Indonesia and before the return of the
colony to the sovereignty of Holland the prohibited the commerce of slaves. Later he
returned to the region as General-Governor of the British possessions and in 1819 the
founded in the islands of the Extreme South of the Malay Peninsula the tower that
originated Singapore.

Thomas Raffles molded the official British thinking based on the concept of
Malay race, a group nucleated by the speakers of Bahasa Melayu but that would
generically be extended to the populations of the Southeast Asia. The colonial governor
had practical motives to sustain this thesis. He dreamed to perpetuate the British domain
over the region even after the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars and the
restoration of the independence of Holland. The supposed racial unity of the inhabitants
of the archipelagos worked as an argument contrary to the division of those lands
between British and Dutch.

The Malay racial identity was largely constructed on a religious basis. Islam was
diffused in Southeast Asia since the beginning of the XV century with the foundation of
the Sultanate of Malaca that developed the strategic paper of linking the famous
Molucca, island of herbs and spices, and the European consumer market. The first
British colonial censuses classified people foremost in religious categories. As time
went by, these categories disappeard or started to be used as synonymous of racial
categories, and Muslim became an equivalent of Malay. Under the system of indirect
government the method contributed to consolidate the power of the local Muslim
authorities. Those that the regime saw as pertaining to the series Malay were left to the
tribunals of their castrated sultans that were administered mostly according to Sharia,
the Muslim law.

The constitution of the independent Malaysia in 1957 proclaims Islam as the

official religion of the Estate and spite ensuring the freedom of belief it previews in the
11th article that the law must restrict the propagation of any doctrine or religious belief
among people who professes the Muslim religion. Also, crucially, the 160 th article links
Malay to Muslim. This article defines a series of terms such as Malay as a citizen of
Malaysia descendant from a family living in Malaysia or Singapore before
independence and who professes the Muslim religion, speaks the Malay language and
acts according to the Malay manners.

It is a racial definition composed by a natural element and a cultural element.

The first is the notion of Malay blood: will be Malay only those with ancestors born in
Malaysia. The second is the Islamic faith: only Muslims can be Malay. The definition
has decisive consequences. According to it renunciation to Islam removes a person from
Malay legal identity. Inversely, the conversion to Islam gives to non-Malays the chance
of acquiring Malay identity. In the Malay language, the act of religious conversion
makes the person to be Malay (Masuk Melayu).

The 153rd article of the Constitution attributes to the king of Malaysia the
responsibility to protect the special position of the Malays and natives of the states of
Sabah and Sarawak and the legitimate interests of other communities. The word
Bamiputera does not appear explicitly in the document but its meaning is implicit in this
article that is a proclamation of inequality regarding law. In the official imagination of
the Malay Estate, Bamiputeras occupy the place of the Malay race. In this perspective,
Malay is shown as a racial nucleus and the other natives as the border of race. The
absence of a precise definition on the limits of the group of the sons of the soil provokes
inflamed polemics. The Indian minority of Tamil origin can be or not included in the
Bamiputera. The same occurs to some native ethnic groups of the Malay Peninsula.
Anyway, the ethnic Chinese are totally excluded from this group emanated from the
racial imagination.

The concept of Malay race, originally thought by Blumenbach and consolidated

by the British colonial politics, converted firstly in the constitutional support of
independent Malaysia and secondly in the legal origin of a program of affirmative
action that includes all the social aspects of the life in the country. The Malay racial
Estate separates the citizens in two groups: the true citizens, sons of the soil and the
non-legitimate citizens, considered as foreigners due to their language and/or religion.
The first group constitutes about 60% of the population of Malaysia and gets
innumerous economic and educational privileges. The second is made by basically the
ethnic minorities of the Chinese (one third of the population) and Indian (around 10%)
and are a layer of second-class citizens.

Malay supremacy

Chinese people started to live in the territories of the future Malaysia in the
beginning of the XIX century. As in other places of Southeast Asia, the European
colonization promoted the migratory flux of Chinese to supply the demand of workers
in the exporting plantations of rubber. The Indian migration gave the workmanship to
the mines of tin. Few natives subjected to the hard works in these economical sectors
linked to the European market.

The demography of Malaysia was largely molded by immigration at the colonial

times. Under the influx of the expansion of rubber plantations, the ethnic Chinese
jumped from one hundred thousand in 1881 to more than a million in the decade of
1930. In the beginning of the Second World War, the ethnic Chinese were more
numerous than the Malays in the British Malaysia although the vegetative growth of the
natives was much superior to the immigrants and their descendants. Due to cultural and
religious differences as well as the distinct insertion in the economy, the inter-ethnical
unions were very uncommon. This contributed to maintain the lines of separation of
Muslim Malays, Chinese and Indians. When Malaysia became independent, the political
life was organized on the basis of ethnical identities.

The British policy always favored the natives who were seen as secondary
partners in the colonial act. The British administration offered free education to the sons
of Malays but not to immigrants and their descendents. Malays had rights of land
property something that was restricted to Indians and Chinese. In the selection for
public jobs, Malays had preferences over the others. Even so, the Chinese community
prospered faster than the Malays.

Since the end of the XIX century, ethnic Chinese created small commercial
stores and converted in owners of tin mines. From 1911 and 1930 the proportion of
Chinese working in the fields and in the mining sector reduced from almost the half to
less than 11%. In 1920 two thirds of the tin of Malaysia were extracted by mines
controlled by Chinese. In the Chinese community, spite the lack of access to public
schools, the rates of alphabetization always outgrew the Malay ones and a superior
proportion of young Chinese concluded university studies. With time, the specialized
jobs of the colonial functionalism started to be placed by ethnical Chinese due to a lack
of qualified Malay professionals. Coming from an inferior position in the social scale,
the Chinese formed a broad and dynamic medium class.

The compromise that resulted in independence (Merdeka in Malay) represented

in large part a reaction to the economic ascension of the Chinese. The Malay supremacy
was consecrated when the Commission Reid, an autonomous commission of specialists
created by the British, produced the sketch of the constitutional text. The principle of
the Malay supremacy was the central column of that compromise between the British
administration and the native political elite. The underlying argument to sustain the
special position of the Malays was that the Chinese immigration was associated to
colonialism hence the permanence of the ethnical Chinese in the country did not result
from a right but from a privilege gave by the sons of the soil. The discourse was built on
a historic narrative carefully mounted to hide the presence of ethnical Chinese in the
Malay Peninsula and in the archipelagos of Southeast Asia much before the beginning
of the British colonization.

The political parties appeared as expression of the moderate anti-colonialism of

the ethnic elites. The United Malays National Organization appeared in 1946 soon after
the Japanese went out. It helped the British to defeat a communist rebellion and
articulated peacefully the process of independence. The Malaysian Chinese Association
was created in 1949 by the Chinese Kuomintang as a counterbalance to the Malaysian
Communist Party that was inspired in the Chinese communism. The Malaysian Indian
Congress appeared together with the United Malays National Organization under
inspiration of the Indian nationalism of Gandhi and Nehru.

The three traditional parties formed a political joint-venture properly named

Party of Alliance (nowadays National Front) that governs the country since the
independence and always ensures the election of ethnic Malays to the head of the
government. In exchange for the Malay political supremacy, whose sponsor is the
United Malays National Organization, the smaller parties of the coalition obtained a
fraction of the political power and the guarantee of economic freedom to their ethnic
communities. Outside the government alliance there are also smaller parties also
determined by ethnic lines that try to obtain advantages to their electoral basis but never
shake the columns of the social contract of Malaysia.

The history of Malaysia is linked by the line of Malay supremacy to the history
of Singapore. The United Kingdom conserved the domain over Singapore when they
gave independence to Malaysia. In 1959 the city-Estate acquired political autonomy and
the government stood with the People´s Action Party that speaks in the name of the
smashing majority of ethnic Chinese. In 1962 in a referendum the inhabitants of
Singapore chose by the fusion with the Federation of Malaysia and in the sequence they
unilaterally proclaimed their independence. At the time of the fusion, the Federal
Constitution received and emend extending to the other natives the special position
conferred to the Malays. The constitutional change that incorporated the notion of
Bumiputeras into the law had the sense of reconstitute a demographic majority lost by
the entrance of the Chinese of Singapore.

The fusion had everything to go bad. The Prime-Minister of Singapore, Lee

Kuan Yew who was also deputy in the Federal Parliament joined his People´s Action
Party to other parties and political groups in a campaign for equal rights for all the
citizens of the federal Estate. Malaysian Malaysia was the political expression of the
principle of the right to land in opposition to the right of blood consecrated in
Constitution and the hegemonic notion of Malaysian Malaysia. In 1963 in a
parliamentary session Lee directly contested the untouchable 153 rd article. He said
accurately that the presence of Malays in Malaysia had no more than seven centuries
and that one third of the Malays were recent migrants. With sarcasm he registered that
the General-Secretary of the United Malays National Organization, a convict
broadcaster of the Malay supremacy, moved in his adulthood from Indonesia to
Malaysia at the vespers of the Second World War.

Lee went further, criticized the ethnic nature of the political system of Malaysia
and dared to affirm that the interests of the Malaysian workers were not different from
the Chinese ones. The controversy soon was transformed in a crisis between the two
parties. High directors of the United Malays qualified Lee as an extremist or a
demagogic leader. Rupturing a pact firmed at the time of fusion, the Malay party gave
support to the opposition in the elections of Singapore. In the inverse sense, the
People´s Action created a section in Malaysia and presented candidates in the federal
elections of 1964.

The party conflict soon degraded in bloody confronts between Chinese and
Malay rioters in Singapore. Facing this, the moderate prime-minister of Malaysia,
Abdul Rahman, requested Lee a pact of reversion of the fusion. In the following year, to
the disgust of the leader of Singapore, the union was broken. As a fruit of the failed
union, Democratic Action Party, a party formed from the old section of the People´s
Action, appeared in Malaysia. Democratic Action Party is an element of disturbs in the
political system of Malaysia because it preserves the flag of equality of rights and
although concurring with Malaysian Chinese Association they reject the ethnic norm
that commands the official politics of the country.

The elections of 1969 represented a major success to the opposition and the peak
of the campaign for a Malaysian Malaysia. The pro-government coalition won by
narrow margin and Democratic Action Party firmed as an axis of contesting the
principle of the Malay supremacy. The reaction of the United Malays and of the joined
parties was to implement a wide program of privileges to the Bamiputeras. The New
Economic Policy, as this program was named, converted the constitutional principle in a
pretext to the application of the most varied racialist policies.

A Racial Nationalism

When the Malaysian parliament reunited again after the disturbances of May 13th
1969, the pro-government coalition revised the Law of Sedition of 1948 instituted by
the British and prohibited any criticism to the Malay supremacy. The original law
criminalized acts and words contesting the colonial regime. In the emended version it
incorporated the definition of sedition the contesting of any theme, right, status,
position, privilege or sovereignty established or protected by the provisions of Part III
of the Federal Constitution or by the articles 152 nd, 153rd or 181st. The legal dispositive
is in frontal collision with the international norms of respect to freedom of expression
and put into a permanent threatening Democratic Action Party and other opposing
political groups.

Abdul Rahman, the Tunku, a Malay noble title, governed Malaysia for 13 years
since independence leading the moderate group of the United Malays. The disturbances
of 1969 altered the internal equilibrium of the directing party and a radical nationalist
ala leaded by Abdul Razak got the control of the party. Rahman was removed from the
head of the government and Razak impose an Estate of Emergency, governing through
decrees during more than one year until he became Prime-Minister. In 1971 he founded
New Economic Policy and two years later he substituted the Party of Alliance by the
National Front in efforts to improve the social basis of the government coalition.

Razak headed the renovation ala of the United Malays since the separation of
Singapore. In his vision, Malaysia would only reach stability by the consolidation of
directing elites compromised with the goal of Ketahanan Nasional (National Power).
These elites should be constituted only by pure Malays. It must include mixed young
people and Bamiputeras in general, reflecting a non-Chinese social majority.

The National Policy on Culture was established in 1971. It aimed that the non-
Malays would assimilate the culture of the pure Malays. The directives, exposed in an
official program, define the culture of Malaysia as the fruit of the meeting of native
cultures of the archipelagos of Southeast Asia with Islam and as a flexible stuff capable
of incorporating elements of other cultures. According to this definition, the ethnical
Chinese are seen by the Estate as cultural foreigners in the country. The economic
counterpart of the National Policy on Culture was the National Economic Policy that
was destined to transfer richness to the new directing class.

Richard Nixon pronounced in 1968 his speech about the black capitalism and in
the following three years he emitted executive orders that aimed to put the idea into
practice. The National Economic Policy obeyed to the paradigm created by the
American president with the difference that it was destined to create elite of the majority
race. The central objective was to improve the participation of the Bumiputeras in the
property of companies from 2.4% to 30% throughout two decades. The underlying
thesis said this goal could be reached without reducing the richness of the ethnic
Chinese because it would accelerate the expansion of gross domestic product. The
Malay supremacy delineated the horizon of a pacific revolution and gave value to social
stability.

The principal redistributive instrument of NEP was the exigency that in the
public offer of shares the companies reserved 30% of the shares to Bumiputera
investors. A complementary provision stated the obligation of public offers with a
clause of racial reserve always that the Bumiputeras sold their shares. According to
most part of the statistics, the Bumiputeras controlled 20% of the stock market in the
decade of 1990 but their participation decreased a little bit in the following decade.
However, the shareholding of the Chinese also improved during NEP due to the
position of the foreign investors.

Together with the creation of corporate elite of sons of the soil, NEP defined the
goal of creating intellectual and professional Bumiputera elite through the concession of
racial preferences in the access to high education. From one side, the Malay language
was transformed in the only language in basic education and high school. Ethnic
Chinese and Indians who used their mother tongues at home could not employ English
anymore in the schools and started to face additional difficulties in the exams to
universities. From other side, it was created a system of quotes to entrance to public
universities that reserves 70% of the vacancies to the Bumiputeras. Throughout the first
decade of NEP the absolute number of Chinese declined in the University of Malaysia
spite the improvement in the number of vacancies. Chinese and Indian students started
to study in private universities and many of them went to Exterior, mainly Singapore.
Only to Australia, throughout the decade of 1980, more than 30 thousand citizens from
Malaysia migrated. Nothing of this, however, changed the predominance of non-
Bumiputeras in the professions of higher qualification.

Fighting poverty was among the official goals of NEP. In name of it the
privileges of race extended with time their range. Housing projects were called to
reserve houses for the Bumiputeras achieve with discounts. The Estate gives
scholarships in the Exterior to university Bumiputeras. To this racial group it was
reserved a family of financial funds administrated by the governments that pay taxes
superior to the market. Companies under equity control of Bumiputeras got benefits of
tax advantages and bureaucratic facilities in business of import. Hiring suppliers of
goods and services is given preferably to companies with majority property of sons of
the soil. This exigency generated the fraudulent practice named as ali baba, through
which Chinese or Indian associated with Bumiputera businessmen with the intention to
firm contracts with the government. The Bumiputera partner (ali) does not operate in
reality, only receiving part of the amount paid to the businessman who effectively
executes the services (baba).

In the first sketch of the constitutional text prepared by the Commission Reid, it
was previewed a clause of temporal limitation to the special position conferred to the
Malays that would end after 15 years. The clause was cancelled by pressures of the
United Malays but it prevailed in the first times a consensus that the privileges of the
sons of the soil had a transitory aspect. At the time of publishing NEP, however, the
moderated politicians had already lost the control over United Malays National
Organization and the notion that the principle of Malay supremacy would end one day
became an object of intense polemics, dividing opinions in the directing party.
 The moderate voice of Abdul Rahman, vice-prime-minister in the cabinet of
Razak dared to point the underlying danger: „Why do we fight for merdeka? To divide
the different races? This mustn´t be the right way, right? It can´t be for that that all the
great Malays and leaders of UMNO fought… Something is wrong‟. He not only
defended the racial preferences and NEP but also was the author of the original proposal
of the goal of 30% of participation of the Bumiputeras in the stock market. However, he
foresaw the risks of perpetuating the privileges and the worsening of hostility among the
ethnic communities of the country. Something was really wrong as a member of the
same cabinet of the government affirmed that the special position of the Malays would
last for centuries.

Laws of racial privileges idealized as affirmative action tend to perpetuate spite

the original intention of their creators. NEP evolved to four quinquennial economic
plans and ended officially in 1990 but in fact it continued without significant changes
for more than a decade under the label of National Development Policy. After this, spite
the elimination of some of its clauses, almost all the programs of racial privileges
continued to be implemented by ministries and government agencies.

The expansion of the privileges of race and the continuity of policies of

preference after the end of NEP occurred from the positions of the fourth Prime-
Minister of Malaysia, Mahathir bin Mohamad, who assumed the position in 1981 and
governed during 22 years. Mahathir´s mother was Malay but his father was mixed from
a Muslim immigrant of Northern India and a Malay woman. Before he completed 30
years, Mahathir entered in the UMNO becoming later one of the most brilliant young
leaders of the nationalist ala of Razak.

The political future of Mahathir was traced by the ethnic confrontations of 1969.
Soon after the great disturbances he distributed a public letter in which he accused the
prime-minister Abdul Rahman of subordinating the interests of the Malays to the ones
of the Chinese community. The gesture cost him the position of director of the party but
the recompense came soon: in 1972 by initiative of Razak, the new head of the
government, he was received back in UMNO and named senator. In the interval
between expulsion and return, Mahathir wrote and broadcasted the Malay Dilemma, a
crucial book in the elaboration of the racial Malaysian nationalism.

The small book was published in Singapore and initially banned in Malaysia. It
tells the history of the country from a racial perspective, delimitating the myths that
sustain the notion of a continuous presence of Malays in the peninsula and in the
archipelago. From the narrative, the author extracts the idea of the Malay supremacy has
an uncontestable legitimacy. However, paradoxically, throughout the colonial period,
the Malays would have been subdued by the Chinese due to the policies conducted by
the British. The first independent government of Malaysia never ruptured with the
fundamental orientation of the colonizer. The task was to restore the lost primacy of the
sons of the soil in their own land.
 The Malay Dilemma, a text with evident anti-Semite traces, had no greater
historic or academic intentions. It was a platform of political action that defined the
goals of converting the Malay language in the only language of the country and to
transform the Bumiputeras in the predominant economic elite. The pacific way to these
goals needed a diversified program of economic and educational preferences destined to
produce modern Bumiputera elite. The nuclear concept of NEP was drawn in the book
that was published one year before the beginning of the new governmental policy.

Mahathir occupied several high positions in the cabinets of the government in

the years 1970 and when the Prime-Minister Hussein Onn renunciated due to health
issues he became the first head of government who didn´t come from the aristocratic
elite of the country. Malaysia is a Federal Monarchy composed by unities that are the
regional kingdoms. Under Mahathir, the privileges of the monarchs were reduced and
the power got concentrated in the Parliament, or, for all practical effects, in the coalition
headed by the United Malays National Organization. After a dispute with the Supreme
Court in 1988 the head of government approved constitutional emends that took from
the Judiciary and the tribunals almost all the power transforming them in something
close to an appendix of the Parliament.

In the Mahathir era the political regime of the country got consolidated as a mild
authoritarianism of a clear face of nationalism and paternalism. The New Economic
Policy expanded by means of introduction of obligatory exams of Malay language in all
the levels of school and the improvement of the Estate interference in economy. The
accelerated economical growth that evolved almost without interruptions until the
financial Asiatic crisis of 1997 worked as a softener of the inter-ethnic tensions.

In this year in a meeting with Asean, the economic and geopolitical group of
Southeast Asia, the Malay Prime-Minister pronounced a famous speech defending the
Asiatic values, condemning the Western individualism and even the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. Apparently, Mahathir was directed to the external public
and his words were received with displeasure by Madeleine Albright, the Secretary of
Estate of USA. But his message had a more important address. He was alerting the
internal critics, each time more scathing, of his racial nationalism.

The Malay leader never lost sight of his great objective of racial promotion but
differently from the more radical group, he always tried to avoid a complete rupture
among the ethnical groups. As to assimilating policies, he created the policy of
Malaysian Bangsa, the Malaysian Nation that was proposed to build a single identity,
non-racial, to all the inhabitants of the country. Malaysian Bangsa means that the nation
lays on the Malay language and the Federal Constitution, but not on the Malay race.

This was a different approach from the one used at the National Policy of
Culture and although it required loyalty to all principles of the Malay supremacy, it
didn´t transform automatically all the ethnic Chinese as foreigners in the land where
they lived. The Malay word Bangsa means either nation or race so that the policy of
Mahathir was characterized by ambiguity. Even so, it suffered attacks from the radicals
who accused him to dangerously flirt with the oppositionist flag of the Malaysian
Malaysia and represent a betrayal of the sacred ideals of the Malay nationalism.

With tears on his eyes in June 2002 Mahathir announced during the annual
convention of the United Malays that he decided to renounce to the head of government
and to positions inside the party. At that time it started a long transition of 16 months in
the command of the cabinet, combined with anticipated elections. In his historical
speech he said „I feel disappointed as I reached too shortly in my principal mission that
was to make my race a respected race, a successful race‟.

The social contract in crisis

The founder of United Malays National Organization, Onn Jaafar, was born in
1895 in an elite governing family of the sultanate of Johor, one of the oldest political
entities that the British put under their sovereignty in Malaysia. Originally, the party
defended the traditional rights of the Muslim governors, opposing to the British trials of
reducing their prerogatives. Seven years before the independence, Onn Jaafar proposed
to UMNO that it became open to affiliate all the inhabitants of Malaysia. When the idea
was rejected, he abandoned the organization and founded the Independence of Malaya
Party open to all Malays, Chinese and Indians without racial or religious distinctions.

IMP hadn´t got success and soon disappeared. The historical leader died in 1962
almost forgotten. His son, Hussein Onn, participated from the frustrated act of IMP, left
the public life for some time and joined to UMNO. From 1976 and 1981 he served as
the third Prime-Minister of Malaysia. Hishamuddin Hussein, son of Hussein Onn hadn´t
inherited the political moderation of his father neither the hesitations of his grandfather
regarding the issue of the Malay supremacy. Politically formed in the atmosphere of
radicalization generated from the racial riots of 1969, Hishamuddin had career in the
directing party during the Mahathir era and converted in one of the symbols of the
persistence of racial ideology in the Malay elite.

The controversy regarding the social contract of Malaysia came back in the
autumn of the regime of Mahathir. In 1999 Lim Kit Siang, a combative leader of
Democratic Action Party who supported many seasons in prison to challenge the
official dogma of race, tried to start a new campaign for a Malaysian Malaysia.
Hishamuddin soon stopped the project alerting the oppositionist that the campaign
meant to play with fire. Six years later in the annual meeting of UNMO he pronounced
a speech full of threatening to those who dared to contest the principle of the Malay
supremacy. During the speech, the speaker brandished a kris, a traditional Malay sword,
an asymmetrical weapon surrounded by symbolic meanings in the mythologies of
Southeast Asia, provoking protests even in Malaysian Chinese Association, the ethnic
Chinese party of the directing coalition.
 The denunciations of personal favoring, corruption and inefficiency always
surrounded the programs of racial preferences in Malaysia. Newspaper reports showed
that in universities the lecturers are pressured to give undeserved high notes to the
Bamiputera students and that the networks subsidized by racial motives are in fact
controlled by politicians well placed in UMNO. Soon before Mahathir renounced,
Sharir Abdul Samad, an old political secretary of the ex-Prime-Minister Razak offered a
devastating diagnosis of NEP: „it was the deliberate creation of an oligarchy. There was
the idea that the economic success of the country depended on giant companies. It was
supposed that the businessmen would administrate the richness of Malaysia. In fact, the
sense of the Malaysia richness was subverted‟.

Under the economic direction of NEP it formed an oligarchy of Bamiputera

businessmen that are sustained in a broad network of relationships with the directing
elite and in the inverse sense they finance the political careers of their protectors in
UMNO. The critics to the system, although officially forbidden, never stopped among
the opposition parties but the strong dominant consensus only started to break with the
rumorous dissidence of Anwar Ibrahim, the brilliant leader who Mahathir prepared to
succeed him in the head of the government.

Ibrahim was born in 1947 and became a detached student leader of opposition in
the end of the years 1960. One decade later, he helped to create an Islamic
fundamentalist organization that denounced the Westernization of Malaysia promoted
by the government coalition. His first rupture was with the members of the
fundamentalist opposition when he entered UMNO by Mahathir´s hands in 1982. The
young and charismatic allied of the powerful Prime-Minister lifted up very quickly the
steps of power, occupying different ministries before becoming vice-president of the
party and vice-prime-minister in 1993. Everything indicated that he would finally be the
chosen successor.

Ibrahim was seen as a loyal, creative and efficient man. In the head of the
Ministry of Education he introduced the curricular reforms destined to favor the Malays
and renamed the Bahasa Malaysia (Malaysian tongue) as Bahasa Melayu. However, the
financial crisis of 1997 widely opened the subterranean conflict between him (as this
time the Treasurer) and the head of government. Ibrahim criticized the inefficiency, the
corruption and the favors that weakened the economy of the country, defending a liberal
position to the crisis where the Estate would not save the insolvent banks. Mahathir
unauthorized his minister and imposed a solution based on the exchange control and the
help to financial institutions. It started the second rupture in Ibrahim´s life.

Under the influence of Ibrahim, the Youth of UMNO started debates on the
corruption in Malaysia in an open challenge to the government. Mahathir reacted with
denouncing cases suspected of corruption that involved the minister, his associated
friends and his family. Especially he broadcasted the fortune accumulated by the family
of the challenger since the governmental concession of share participations destined to
the Bamiputeras. The confrontation soon went to mood and Ibrahim was separated from
the cabinet and accused of homosexualism and sodomy. In the end of a noisy process
scattered by signs of falsification of proofs and official manipulation of the
investigations, the respondent was condemned to six years and nine months in jail.

After carrying out the penalty for corruption, Ibrahim recurred with success from
the accusation of sodomy, organized an oppositionist coalition and converted in the
most famous criticizer of the authoritative and paternalist Malay regime. In 2008 he
conquered a seat in the Parliament in a dispute against a candidate of high profile of the
National Front. In an interview conceded in the year before, he offered a hard verdict
about the project of social engineer started by NEP: „I am not against helping the poor,
the marginalized, the unfavored people. But what we must ascertain after 37 years is
that the policy is really helping the Malays or Bumiputeras or if it has become a license
to steal the majority of the people in name of affirmative action. Throughout the years,
politics became an instrument of the elite Malays to get benefits at the expenses of all,
her included the poor and the medium class Malays‟.

When Ibrahim was expulsed from the vice-head of the government, Abdullah
Ahmad Badawi took his place. Years later, he reached the position of successor of
Mahathir, assuming the position of Prime-Minister. Badawi soon was distinguished
from the policies of his antecessor, cancelling expensive works and starting actions
against corruption in the public machine. The demonstrations of independence cost him
the hate of the ala of UMNO loyal to the old leader but he conserved the conduction of
the power and in 2008 the fracture was concluded dramatically with the withdrawal of
Mahathir from the party.

Race, religion, Constitution: the dogmas of forever continue to occupy the

central place of the conceptions of UMNO that doesn´t seem to be open to trials of
reforms. In 2003 due to uncertainties with the withdrawal of Mahathir, a spokesperson
of the Youth of the party declared: „In Malaysia, everyone knows that the Malays are
the lord of these lands. We govern this country as prescribed by the Federal
Constitution. Anyone who interferes in Malay issues or criticizes the Malays is
offending our sensitiveness‟.

One year later, Badawi conducted UMNO to a formidable electoral victory that
eluded him regarding his real political influence and left him to choose the inaugural
speech in the presidency of the party as an opportunity to explode his unexpected
political bomb. In his speech in front of the annual meeting he suggested that decades of
racial preferences failed in the central goal of strengthening the ability of the Malays
and called on the Bamiputeras to carry out a mental revolution. The sons of the soil
needed to get free from their crutches otherwise they would end in wheelchairs. The
representatives of the meeting didn´t share those heterodox ideas that were exposed to a
bundle of attacks. To avoid any doubts on the persistence of the officially ended NEP,
the Ministry of High Education ensured, referring to the Technology University of
Mara, a superior institution destined exclusively to the sons of the soil, that „I will never
allow that non-Bumiputera students enter to UiTM‟. A director of the party showed the
general logic of the preference policies: „If the Malay issues are strengthened, wouldn´t
be Islam strengthened as well? This is a Plan of Allah by which UMNO takes efforts
since a long time ago‟.

The economic modernization of Malaysia, the emergence of a wide medium

class of Bumiputeras and the fatigue of the political material after so many years of the
nationalist chauvinism of Mahathir instilled reformist feelings in the country. However,
paradoxically, the Malay party closed in the ideological cocoon generated more than
three decades before in the ethnic riots of 1969. In the meeting, the vice-president used
the tribune to, under a shower of applauses, send a clear message, in contrast to Badawi:
„no other race has the rights of questioning our privileges, our religion and our leaders‟.

Under the influx of Youth, the meeting of UMNO guided towards a complete
restoration of NEP. The argument used by the defenders of the restoration was that it
was reached only 18.7% of the property of companies to the Bumipteras, something
significant but still far away from the goal of 30%. In a TV program of debates, a
director of the Youth explained how he imagined his new social mobilization: „we
created the politic willing in the general assembly of UMNO to do this but we need to
unite ourselves in order to ensure that not only UMNO but the companies linked to the
government, the governmental employees, the Malay professionals and the Malay
NGOs get aligned with us. If this is not a common effort of all the layers of the
Malaysian society, the goal will never be reached‟.

The call on to a revival of the spirit of NEP was received with apprehension by
the prime-minister and by the heads of the Chinese party of the government coalition
that expressed the fear of the political use of the racial letter.

A country for all?

In USA in the middle of 2008 Barack Obama started the final step of the
campaign that would conduct him to the Presidency. At the same time in Malaysia the
Merdeka Center, an independent institute, carried out a research on public opinion with
interesting results. The researchers asked people a position facing the following
sentence: „the policy of affirmative action based on race is obsolete and should be
substituted by a policy based on merit‟. 71% of the sample agreed with the sentence.
Concordance had no ethnic barriers, with the accordance of 65% of Malays, 83% of
Chinese and 89% of Indians; both the urban population (75%) and the rural population
(61%) concurred with the sentence. The results didn´t change regarding sex or income.

The research clarified a paradoxical scenario. In Malaysia, an ideological

fracture divides not the Chinese from the Malay, but the political elite from the majority
of the citizens. The idea of a country divided into nationals of Malay race and foreigners
of other races contaminates a minority group, but still significant of the Malaysian
population. However, the old flag of a Malaysian Malaysia expresses the feelings of the
majority.

In the general elections of 2008 the National Front experienced a strong

retrocession although it has conserved the parliamentarian control. The oppositionist
coalition organized its victorious campaign around the proposal of ending once and for
all the policies created by NEP. Mahathir that would go out UMNO in the following
year took the opportunity to attack the prime-minister Badawi. Asked about the
hypothesis of Malaysia have a non-Malay chief of government, a theme that came up
with the victory of Obama, the historical leader gave an ambiguous answer. He
observed that nothing in the Constitution defined the racial identity of the heads of
government but also called attention to the obligation of loyalty of the prime-ministers
to the principle of Malay supremacy. Anyway UMNO naturally named a Malayan, the
vice-Prime-Minister Najib Razak, one of the sons of Abdul Razak, to substitute Badawi.

The first Razak, father of the National Policy of Culture and of NEP,
inaugurated the cycle of racial radicalization of Malaysia. His older son, an unpopular
politician with fame of corrupt was not molded to renew the history of the country.
However, as a surprise, he declared what had to be done at the time of his nomination of
the party to the head of government: „in a future not far we´ll assist the substitution of
all the elements of NEP. It is a great challenge. It is needed to exist a political willing
and a desire to change inside UMNO‟. The electoral loss and the decision of Badawi of
prematurely end his period of government reflected a worsening of the social tensions,
derived from the popular dissatisfaction with the persistence of the policy of privileges.
„If we don´t change, the people will change us‟, concluded Razak.

PART V – INDUSTRY OF IDEOLOGIES

Diseases of Blacks

Medicine summaries are the most famous point of intersection between the
medical literature and the great public. People read medicine summaries believing
naturally that the information published on them expresses the word of science, a
consensus free of prejudice. But science as everything else is immersed in culture.

Losartan is the generic name of the substance of the reference product Cozaar,
indicated by the treatment of hypertension and heart failure and commercialized by the
laboratory Merck Sharp & Dohme. The medicine summary brings the following
sentence: „the benefits of Losartan in cardiac morbidity and mortality compared to
atenolol are not applied to black patients with hypertension and left ventricular
hypertrophy although both therapeutic regimen effectively reduce blood pressure in
black patients‟.

Medicine summaries are not a white fly. The geneticist Sérgio Pena showed that
from 185 medications introduced in USA from 1995 to 1998, 15 had warnings
regarding racial differences about efficacy or side effects. Nowadays, the genetic
science knows perfectly that the iconic aspects traditionally related to racial groups such
as skin color, type of nose or of hair are not adequate or sufficient parameters to choose
the treatment to a specific patient. It also knows that alleged racial conditions say
nothing about the medical condition of any person: if the doctor suspects that the patient
presents a specific pharmacogenetic profile, they should solicit for the appropriate
genomic tests to confirm the hypothesis. However a past full of racial concepts still
weighs on the present.

Throughout one hundred years, all the trials to relate the traditional racial
categories to the genetically inherited material of the persons failed. During the First
World War, the Polish immunologists Ludwik and Hanka Hirszfeld studied the
frequencies of the blood groups A and B in the soldiers of the colonial armies of France
and England who were born in diverse continents and also in war prisoners of different
regions of the Northern Asia. They searched for essential differences among the human
beings but instead of the races described by the scientific racism they thought they have
found two biochemical races whose miscegenation would be responsible for the great
variety of blood frequencies in mankind. With the discovery of structure and function of
DNA, the geographic aquarelle of Hirszfeld became anachronistic. However, the
research they conducted represented a kick in the belief of races, as their biochemical
races were present both inside the white and the black race and reunite in the same
category populations separated by geography, such as the Russians and the Malagasies.
The advance of the study of the blood groups propitiated the production of the
first scientific sketches of the hereditary variation of mankind. The continental
populations present markedly differences in the percentage of frequencies of the alleles
A, B and O. The Rh factor, discovered in Europe soon before the Second World War
started, also shows differences that are related to the geographical distribution of the
human populations. But these genetic variations among the studied populations
regarding these markers didn´t help to sustain the old racial theories that fell in
discredit.

In the post-war from blood the scientists jumped into proteins. Since proteins
reflect the information present in DNA, this was an indirect analysis of the variations of
DNA. After, important secrets about genes were revealed and in the second half of the
decade of 1980 the technique of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) was developed. Then
the geneticists were transformed into the advanced multidisciplinary squad of
investigation of the origins and old migrations of the human populations. These
researches that still advances put down the remnant walls of the castle of the racial
thinking.

The pioneers Hirszfeld joined Russians and Malagasies because they didn´t have
enough information. The statistical treatment of an immense mass of genetic
information eliminated several obstacles and revealed patterns of variation that help to
illuminate the pre-historic adventure of the human beings. A consensual conclusion is
that, obviously, the genetic distance among populations enhances directly proportional
to the geographic distance that separate them, for the simple reason that people unite
predominantly to their local companions, so the genetic exchange is greater in a small
ray and lowers with physical separation. Even so, two samples randomly chosen inside
the same geographic area are only 5% more similar between themselves compared to
any random sample from another far away continent. Actually, the biggest genetic maps
produced in the recent decades showed that there is nothing similar to frontiers of race
in the broad continuum of the several oscillations that form mankind.

85% of the genetic variation occurs inside the same national or linguistic group.
Predictably, numerous groups made of several migratory waves, such as USA, present
internal variations greater than small and relatively isolated groups.

Race is a social construction based on biological phenomena. Actually, not only

the human races but also the races of domesticated plants and animals are artificial
constructions from the taxonomists or the scientists directly working with the matter.
But even the definition of species, the basis of all Biology, is not precise and clear.
Darwin in his book The Evolution of Species didn´t define precisely what a species was,
but wrote a chapter devoted to hybridism. It comes from clear experience that the
complex vertebrate animals can only reproduce by sharing genes with other individuals
from the same species.

Taxonomy is the science devoted to identify and describe species and to classify
them according to phylogenetic analysis. The recognition of wild species is generally a
hard work that requires long time of study. Even two specialists can face difficulties in
having accordance in classifying one individual as pertaining to one species or other.
Since Darwin, the main resources the scientists have to identify species are the
morphological aspects of the individuals. The form and function of the organs in
general and especially the reproductive structures are the basis of classifying an
individual as pertaining to a species, the species to a gender and so on.

With the appearance of genetics, an initial definition of a species was that of a

population of life beings that share genes, producing fertile individuals. This was a
definition to face the intriguing question of hybridism and could differentiate a species
from a hybrid related to classic cases of hybridism in vertebrate mammals such as the
tiger and the lion, the horse and the donkey, the horse and the zebra and so on.
However, for the surprise of the biologists, several clearly different species of
mammals, separated by long geographic distances, could freely cross and generate
fertile individuals. The wolves of North America showed to be able to freely cross with
the wolves of Europe and Asia and even with the domestic dog. The female mule is
generally sterile, but sometimes it can get pregnant when crossed with a stallion and
gives birth to an animal morphologically similar to a horse. Actually, sharing genes into
new generations of life beings is a complex phenomenon that has singularities regarding
plants, inferior vertebrates, invertebrates, microbes. Bacteria from different species can
share genes via plasmids and the external aspect of algae can vary enormously
according they are harvested in the environment or kept cultivated in laboratory.

As the genetic resources improved a lot, the geneticists claimed that they would
be able to precisely identify species, with several editorials in major reviews saying that
in a near future a scientist would only need a kit to identify the microbe species of one
drop of water. However, the taxonomic science didn´t confirm this idea. Genetic studies
showed a high complexity. A gene is not a simple sequence of DNA, but this sequence
and its products: the same sequence can generate completely different proteins
according to the tissue, to the species and even to the physiological status of the life
being. Sequencing „stable‟ parts of DNA showed to be an important tool in taxonomy,
but only useful to categories above genus. In fact, the study of DNA sequences help to
confirm if a high taxon based solely on morphological features is in accordance with
variations in DNA sequences. And even so the statistical analysis of these variations is
not a direct experimental result, but a complex calculus based on mathematical models
that were validated in only a few samples.

Actually, in most of the cases, the species are well described and well delimited
but there are several exceptions over which the taxonomists still face discussions on
how to solve the problems. If species is not always a solid category, the taxa below
species are even more fluid. Sub-species, race and variety are taxa inferior to species
and refer to smaller populations inside the definition of a species. Darwin had shown
that the more the species are dispersed in a territory, more sub-species and races can be
identified. These taxa are based solely on morphological classification and are in fact
most frequently used regarding domesticated plants and animals. Race is fit for animals
and variety is for plants. Back to definition of species as related to a genetic separation,
the diverse dog races created by the human breeding are sometimes incompatible
regarding crossing and producing puppies. In other words, the initial definition of
species as related to genetic crossing scared the taxonomists, because the animal (dog)
breeders would not only be creating races, but rather creating species, as, for example, a
small dog can´t cross with a big dog, unless there is an „intermediate‟ race that can cross
with both sizes of dogs. But in Biology, if sometimes the products of the crossing of
individuals from different species are intriguing, the products of the crossing of
individuals from different races or sub-species is considered a normal happening that is
not more frequent just because of some kind of geographic separation of the
populations.

The morphological description of a species will almost always take in account

the reproductive organs and the reproductive life. But the morphological aspects of a
race don´t present a similar general rule: the researchers, empirically, get the most
conspicuous differences, sometimes carrying out statistical analysis, sometimes
(actually most of the time) not, and considering sort of a reproductive separation,
describe a new race. Which means race is totally a creation from the human imagination
on observing wild life. One important feature is that two races must be somehow
geographically separated: different races of wild life beings can never occupy the same
ecological niche. When it comes to domesticated life beings, a race is defined according
to the „wanted‟ characteristics of them, such as an animal that runs faster or a plant that
produces bigger and sweeter fruits. The products of crossing between two individuals of
different races are never classified as pertaining to any of the parental races: they either
are described either as the product of the parental races or as a new race. Specifically for
domesticated animals, the label of pedigree indicates an animal whose parents were
classified as being from the same race, which improves the prices of commercialization
of them. Therefore, the domesticated life beings can only keep pertaining to a same race
if their reproduction is controlled and the products of racial crossing are discharged.

In this way, the human species, occurring in all the Earth, would naturally
present populations with diverse external characteristics. The populations of tropical
places were selected to present a darker skin in order to protect against the strong sun
and in the other way around the populations of the colder zones were selected to present
a white skin in order to capture and exploit any ray of sunlight to produce D vitamin.
Apart these clear evolutionary advantages of differences in skin color, all the other
external aspects related to the diversity of human phenotypes could never be related to
any other difference in physiology, intelligence, emotion, resistance or susceptibility to
diseases and so on. Also, considering that wars and genocides were constant throughout
all the history of the human existence, it is probable that many human races of
nowadays had come from a tribe that simply extinguished another one, so that the
external aspects has more to do with lucky in cruel wars than any successful biological
adaptation to face a harsh environment.

The denomination of the human races take into account what looks to be the
external most conspicuous differences, such as the skin color (black, white) or the
presence of an epicanthic fold in the eye (Asiatic), but, scientifically, any aspect that
present a statistically different proportion could be taken into consideration, for
example, height, size of feet, distance between knee and hip, blood group, hairy men or
smooth men, bearded women or not, etc. Which means, the classic definition of the
three major human races is a cultural construction that takes into account these three
aspects and the geographical presence of the populations: blacks, whites and Asiatic can
only be considered due to the large distances that separate the populations of Africa,
Europe and Asia. Anyway, among the peoples, there is not a single tonality of „black‟
skin and „white‟ skin, but a range of tonalities that are randomly and arbitrarily named
as black or white, since there is no way to measure skin color and the tonality of the
skin changes a lot according to if the person gets exposed or not to sunlight. Also, the
presence of an epicanthic fold is typical of Eastern Asiatic, but again this aspect
presents a range and, for example, John Lennon, a typical „white‟ British man or Björk,
a typical „white‟ Icelandic woman, have epicanthic folds so they could perfectly, via
this criteria, be classified as pertaining to a racial group of middle Asia.

Anyway, the genetic studies can never say if a single person comes from one
race or from a specific geographic place. The genetic studies of populations can point
out some specificity related to a sample group compared to another. And even these
comparisons can lift up intriguing data, in the words of a scientist of reference in the
genetic study of the human history: „if we analyze a sufficient number of genes, the
genetic distance between Ithaca and Albany in the New York State or between Pisa and
Florence in Italy tend to be statistically significant hence being scientifically proven.
The people from Ithaca and Albany will probably get disappointed that they pertain to
„different‟ races. But the inhabitants of Pisa and Florence may get happy with the fact
that science proved and old mutual suspicion by showing their genetic differences‟.

The social notion of race was built during the European imperial expansion and
had its popularity as it was based in a few morphological characteristics easily
identified. As the evolutionist biologist Richard Lewontin stated, „to the vast majority
of the human genetic variations, the classic racial categories, defined by a combination
of geographic area, skin color, shape of nose, type of hair (…) don´t generate utile
predictions of the genetic differences‟.

If the link that identifies race to genes is discharged, there is no way to sustain a
connection between race and ancestry. The genetic investigation is able to draw lines of
ancestry based on a population sample, not on single individuals. It can illuminate the
geographic origins of the inherited material of a population and suggest the great lines
of migratory movements that constituted the national or linguistic groups. But the
allegations of racial pertinence based on the external appearance of persons represent
weak predictors of ancestry therefore useless to medical finalities.

In 2000, Francis Collins and J. Craig Venter, leaders of, respectively, the public
and private teams of the project of mapping the human genome, declared together that
we are 99,9% genetically equal independently of races. Spite this declaration emanated
from the evolution of science, the National Health Institutes of USA created the
Pharmacogenetics Research Network with the aim to rationalize Medicine, substituting
the standardized approach in the prescription of medications by focusing the in the
genetic differences among the persons that in USA are translated in the terms of the
racial categories of the census. With public financing, several medical researches were
anchored in the dogma of race.

The anthropologist Duana Fullwiley conducted a field investigation following

the researches and interviewing the scientists of the pioneer laboratories of the
Pharmacogenetics Network. She stated that the concept of race in the manner
traditionally expressed by the American census was inscribed as a kind of a natural truth
in the daily practice of the pharmacogenetics researches. In their attests the scientists
and technicians assumed as operational conjectures the old fashioned notions of races
and considering the reflection on races a matter of research of the human sciences.
Asked about the sense of race, one of the chiefs of high position answered: „My
personal point of view about race is… is… I even don´t know a broad definition of race,
what is the precise definition of race. In my point of view there are three great races,
Caucasian, African and Asiatic‟.

The common sense unwittingly inspired in the scientific racism of the past
contaminated the practical work of the laboratories. In sampling the American
population, the volunteers were separated according the racial categories of the census.
In the census of 2000 people had the inedited chance to declare more than one ancestry
but it was not seen by the researchers as a difficulty or a fountain of critical reflection.
The volunteers who had declared a mixed ancestry were simply put in the racial
minority according to the traditional classification system. For example, someone that
had declared Afro-American and white origins would be automatically converted in an
Afro-American for the aims of the pharmacogenetic research.

Deeply and implicitly the laboratories were financed to find correlations of

pharmacological interest between genes and race. In science, an anticipated and specific
search means that almost all the steps to reach such findings have already been walked.
So, in spite of an explicit protocol to consider only differences with less than 1% of
statistical chance, the researchers started to consider statistically irrelevant results and
even got interested by single cases. Through this strange ways, the scientific revolution
based on the human genome started to be contaminated by scientific prejudices prior to
the discovery of the gene.

Politics and ideologies develop vital papers in the inversion of the expectations
created by the report of Collins and Craig Venter. In USA, the Association of Black
Cardiologists, an entity whose existence finds support only in the notion of race,
engaged in a campaign in favor of the drug BiDil presented as the first medication
specifically racial to heart failure. In parallel, the University Howard, an institution
historically black of Washington, started to vindicate a specific research on the genome
of the Afro-Americans. Since any strict population selected to compose a sample will
present some genetic differences compared to any other population, the research
announced by the Howard University is doomed to prove the existence of a separated
black race.

A Pan-African disease?

During a duty in the office she worked in 1993 the nurse Berenice Kikuchi met
her first patient that suffered from sickle cell disease. He was a 10 year-old boy and
suffered from strong pain in his bones. The nurse became a researcher and four years
later she founded the Association of Sickle Cell Disease of São Paulo State. In the 10 th
anniversary of the meeting of the boy and the nurse, the association published a
hornbook entitled: „Sickle cell disease: let´s travel on this story‟ and destined to
broadcast educative information on the disease. The hornbook was re-published several
times with financing of the Special Coordination of the Blacks of the City of São Paulo,
a public agency, and of the United Black Movement.

The figure in the cover of the book shows a black family made of a couple and a
child – a boy handling a soccer ball at the side of a doctor, also black. The story is
organized as a comic book and shows Africa as a „rich and mysterious continent‟ where
„the grand-grandparents of our characters lived‟ and as the origin of the disease. In the
sequence it tells the trajectory of the Africans who were brought to Brazil as slaves and
fought for freedom. The story offers an intermediate conclusion: „as descendants of this
people, it is important to know that the disease started there. However, other peoples
also suffer from this disease‟. In the end, it appears an explanation on the genetic nature
of the disease and an invitation to the readers to carry out the blood test to detect its
occurrence.

The narrative of a racial disease was used to work as a unity biological trace
between the Diaspora nation of the afro-descendents in Brazil and an African homeland
and in fact was created soon before the publication of the hornbook from the Inter-
ministry Task Force on Appreciation of the Black Population of the government of
Fernando Henrique Cardoso. In 1996 the sub-group of this group carried out a meeting
on the health of the black population when it was presented a list of diseases more likely
to affect the blacks. From the four groups of the listed diseases, the first one is made by
diseases genetically determined. In it, the sickle cell disease appears with emphasis.

Race and genes work together almost as synonyms in the language of the
program of „health of the black population‟ inaugurated in those years. In their
typology, the diseases of the first group are related to ancestry and ethnicity, which has
a clear political and ideological sense. The phrase „inherited, ethnic and ancestral cot is
in fact a euphemism for racial disease‟, as registered by the anthropologist Peter Fry.

The concept of racial diseases received an official stamp in Brazil with the
beginning of the Program of Sickle Cell Disease in the same year of 1996 by the
Ministry of Health. The program responded to a demand of entities of the black
movement and started to serve as a reference for the creation of a speech network that
transformed health in a public field for the battle of the myth of race. A mark in this
way was the publication by the Ministry of Health of a „Manual of the most important
diseases by ethnic reasons of the afro-descendent Brazilian population‟. The year of
2001 was running and in the picture of the preparation for the Conference of Durban the
racialist NGOs sprouted roots in many agencies of the public power.

The introduction of the text was assigned by two lecturers of the Department of
Collective Health of University of Brasília and characterized the Brazilian black
population as a group with genetic specificity derived from the miscegenation of blacks
coming from diverse regions of Africa and also from the miscegenation of whites and
Amerindians. From this discourse and from a mention of the poverty of the afro-
descendents the authors extract the conclusion that it is possible that from the point of
view of diseases with strong genetic determination, the afro-descendent Brazilian
population may present them with peculiar aspects. The authors were specialized in
Public Health and in Tropical Medicine but dared to freely adventure in the field of
Genetics. In the introduction they produced to the official document under the obvious
inspiration of a common sense rooted in the old scientific racism everything happens as
if race was a direct morphological expression of DNA and as if miscegenation generates
new biologic races.

From a medical science submitted to the myth of race to a racialist policy, pure
and simple, the jump was not high. The project of law of the Statute of Racial Equality
formulated in 2003, before a long 15th article devoted to sickle cell disease, states in the
12th article that the item race/color is obligatorily introduced and collected in all the
documents in use in the National Health System, authorizes in the 13 th article the
Ministry of Health to produce routinely the vital and epidemiologic analysis of the
genetically determined diseases or worsened by the conditions of life of the Afro-
Brazilians and determines in the 14th article that the Executive Power stimulates
researches on the prevailing diseases of the Afro-Brazilian population. In the project of
law it was out of question to suggest researches on the hypothesis of existence of racial
diseases. This hypothesis challenges the genetic knowledge but was simply converted in
a theoretical truth and in the starting point of medical investigations and of creation of
statistical data basis.

Sickle cell disease, which is placed in the principal strategic point of black
diseases in the racialist speech, is a disease with a large clinical variability, involving
from individuals very sick with reserved prognosis and multiple hospital stays until
patients almost asymptomatic with a normal life. The adaptative genetic mutation that
generates red blood cells with the shape of a sickle was diffused by natural selection in
populations subjected to endemic conditions of malaria, especially in Western Africa,
but also Eastern Mediterranean, Asia Minor and Northern India.

There is a crucial distinction between the falcemic trace and the anemia properly
said. The homozygote individual, who received the gene from the father and the mother,
suffers from sickle cell disease. The heterozygote is carrier of the falcemic trace and is
not a sick person but can transmit it to their kids. Apparently, the heterozygotes present
a relative immunity against malaria.

Outside Africa, several populations present a statistically significant incidence of

the falcemic mutation. In the Sub-Sahara Africa, the mutation is not present in the
populations of the high lands of Ethiopia and is also absente in many groups of Kenya,
Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda as well amongst the Khoisans and Shonas of
South Africa and Zimbabwe. It must be clear that sickle cell disease is not a disease of
blacks and neither an African disease but an eminently geographical disease, product of
well succeeded evolutionary strategy to face malaria. Similarly, other diseases
considered as racial such as thalassemia are fruits of adaptation to malaria and present a
wide geographic distribution, affecting populations of Africa, of Medium West and
Asia. The study of the DNA markers of the genes of thalassemia worked as a tool to
track old migrations of Greeks, Phoenicians, Malays and Kanakas.

Genetic diseases are not racial diseases. The use of the second expression as a
consequence of the first constitutes a gross scientific mistake. About 93% of the human
genetic variation occur among persons from the same continental region but something
as 88% of the morphological aspect „skin color‟ is verified among persons from
different continental regions. Skin color, or in the common sense language, race, is not
an acceptable marker of the differences of human DNA. The public health programs
based on this indicator have no finalities of public health: they are political tools in the
service of a racialist doctrine.

The import of a speech

The Society of Sickle Cell Disease is a foundation established in London in

1979. It was not sequestered by the racialist vision of public health. Facing a question of
an anesthetist involved in the extraction of teeth of children who asked about how to
select the patients that should be carried out to tests to the disease, the responsible
researchers pointed out two alternatives: to test everybody or to define risky groups
starting from familiar history. Anyway, „it is obviously impossible to consider foreign
names or skin color‟. However in USA, throughout decades, it seemed obvious that the
skin color represents the most solid indicator of group of risk of the disease.

Walter Clement Noel, a student of Dentistry born in Granada entered to a

hospital in Chicago suffering from anemia. Noel went back several times in the
following years and the investigation of the peculiar shaping of his red blood cells
allowed the professor James B. Herrick to make the first clinical diagnosis of sickle cell
disease, although this disease would only be named in 1922. Soon the report of Herrick
was related to diseases in black American slaves and to the African medical literature of
the XIX century. In the intellectual environment dominated by the racial thinking, the
diseased was linked to the blacks and started to be seen in USA as kind of an infallible
marker of race.

The comprehension of the disease reached a new step in 1949 when the
biochemical researcher Linus Pauling and collaborators published a scientific study that
disclosed the genetic nature of the sickle shaping of the cells. For the first time in the
history of Medicine, a mutation in a specific protein was identified as the cause of a
disease. In the same year, the geneticist James V. Neel established the distinction
between falcemic trace and sickle cell disease. These noticeable discoveries proved that
falcemic anemia is not a racial condition and should have dissolved the stigma of race
linked to the disease. In USA the stigma was not shaken and in contrary it strengthened
with time.

A medical speech anchored in the dogma of race continued to affirm that the
falcemic anemia was a disease of blacks such a way that the white people with the
diagnosis of having the disease or the falcemic trace got suspected on being blacks due
to the one drop rule. According to the weak estimations of the middle of the XX
century, the falcemic trace seemed to be more common in Africa than in USA while the
anemia would be more prevalent among the American blacks than among the Africans.
Predictably, in a time where the anti-mixing laws were in function, the apparent
difference was soon presented as a proof of the harmful effects of racial mixture.

In parallel and in a curious manner it was organized a speech of black

intellectuals that interpreted the insufficiency of public investments in the control of the
disease as a sign of official racism and, further, to call on the blacks to carry out tests for
the diagnostic of the condition. The theme of racial disease converted in a matter almost
obligatory to meetings promoted by the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People.

In the government of Richard Nixon, the Estate took those speeches,

incorporating them into the official policies of health. In 1972 while he emitted the
executive orders that started the American programs of racial preferences the president
assigned the Law of National Control of Sickle Cell Disease. More than two decades
after the discovery of the genetic nature of the disease the speech of the president of
presenting the new law pointed out the blacks as a generic risky group, affirming that
„no one else‟ could suffer from the mutation. The crucial part is the following: „It is
with special pleasure that today I am assigning the Law of National Control of Sickle
Cell Disease. This disease is particularly noxious because it reaches blacks and no one
else. An approximated number of 25 to 50 thousand black people suffer from the
disease. About one thousand children are born with sickle cell disease and an
approximated number of 2 million blacks in USA carry on the falcemic trace‟.

The new law destined funds to testing, counseling, information, education and
scientific research. In his terms, people would volunteer to submit to the tests. Due to
the racial presuppositions of the law, expressed in the speech of Nixon, the public
power called on only the blacks – „and no one else‟ to carry out the tests. The Black
Panthers, one of the most radical groups of Black Nationalism in USA, organized
communitarian programs of testing. Under the umbrella of the falcemic mutation, it was
articulated identity campaigns that asked to the blacks to develop kind of a racial
solidarity facing the deadly threatening written in the genes.

With the programs of racial preferences and the law of control of sickle cell
disease, the myth of race experienced a restoration, few years after being banished from
the legal sphere by the Law of Civil Rights. NAACP, Black Panthers and many other
groups participated as supporting figures of the act of restoration conducted by the
Nixon government under the inspiration of Arthur Fletcher, the assistant secretary of the
Department of Work. There were also the groups of the black movement that denounced
the law on sickle cell disease, but without contesting its racial fundaments. They
mistrusted specially of the word „control‟ asking the reasons why not using the work
„prevention‟ and attributing eugenic or genocide intentions to the government.

The programs of testing largely failed in distinguishing anemia from the trace
and many of the ones who submitted to the tests received wrong information that they
had the disease. Even with these mistakes, the statistics of the prevalence of the disease
were inflated and this contributed to social stigmatization of the people with a positive
result. The discrimination was manifested in the labor market by the refusal of hiring
blacks and in the business of health and life insurance by companies that denied
insurance policies or charged higher taxes both from the carriers of the trace and from
the sick people.

In New York State as a condition to get licenses to marriage they started to

require from the blacks, and only from them, the test to sickle cell disease. In 1979 the
Air Force imposed the compulsory testing of all the black candidates and refused 143 of
them because they had the mutation but hadn´t the disease. In 1981 Stephen Pullens, an
ex-candidate from the Academy of the Air Force, a carrier of the falcemic trace who had
succeeded in the physical and theoretical exams, sued the Air Force against
discrimination against blacks. As him, approximately five students were refused under
the same argument. According to Pullens at the time of the announcement of the refusal
to admission after a second positive test, „they made me to be followed by guards in
order to guarantee that I wouldn´t discuss my case to anyone and they denied me the
chance of new appellations. In the end, the action, which was supported by NAACP,
resulted in that the Air Force stopped the compulsory testing.

The worsened discrimination by the American law regarding sickle cell disease
provoked discussions among black intellectuals and activists, rupturing with the
previous consensus. Many went a step further to say the exclusive focus on the black
community constituted a clear scientific mistake and a tool of perpetuation of racial
prejudice. But all the polemics generated regarding the theme in USA seem to be unable
to change the chosen approach by the majority of the black movement in Brazil. Once
more, the disease is treated as a racial disease hence of a question of public health of
exclusive interest of the blacks.

The racialist paradigm, adopted by the Ministry of Health of Brazil, unfolds in

programs of prevention of the disease that previews the following and even the
managing of entities of the black movement. Nobody openly says as Nixon did that
sickle cell disease attacks „blacks and no one else‟. But the public policies after 1996 are
supported by this concept, even though it has never been suggested a racial cut off in
Brazil for testing the mutation.

Peter Fry pointed out an explanation for the incorporation of the American view
of the disease: „in Brazil, the apparently complete support that the black activists give to
the program means that falcemic anemia became more than a disease to be found and
treated; became a powerful tool for the naturalization of the black race, in political and
logic opposition to the white race. In other words, a marker of difference in a country
where the racial frontiers are imprecise and ambiguous.‟

AIDS in the racialist pot

Sickle cell disease works as a locomotive of a bigger train. Under the label of
„health of the black people‟, they try to risk in the stone of Medicine an unquestionable
racial frontier. The aim of the act has not true relation with health. It is to construct from
the Estate a series of identity practices that by the routine repetition write in the minds a
bipolar racial classification.

The field of political intervention of the „health of the black people‟ was
officially born in the Inter-American Convention Against Racism carried out in
Santiago, Chile, in 2000 as a preparation for the Conference of Durban. In the plan of
the meeting, feminist and racialist leaders inscribed a petition directed to the Pan-
American Health Organization with the finality to obtain the recognition of race/ethnic
group/gender as a significant variable in terms of health issues and also the formulation
of specific projects to prevention, diagnosis and treatment of people with African
ascendance.

In Brazil, however, this movement had started years before with essays of
leaders such as the psychologist Edna Roland, president of the NGO Fala Preta (Black
Speak) and relater of the Brazilian commission in the Conference of Durban; Jurema
Werneck, physician and founder of the NGO Criola and Fátima Oliveira, also a
physician and member of the Commission on Citizenship and Reproduction of the
Brazilian Women´s Union. The nucleus of their argument is found on the idea that the
attribution of the health problems to the socioeconomic discrepancies of the Brazilian
society is nothing more than a strategy to hide the peculiarities of the black people.
Some texts they produced go ahead denouncing a supposed intrigue between university
staff and administrators of the health system with the aim to deny the existence of a
frontier of race in health and disease.

The racial frontier is strongly written in the typology created in 1996 by the
health committee of the Inter-ministry Task Force on Appreciation of the Black
Population was the same frontier expressed by Abdias do Nascimento. According to
him, the black Brazilians would be subjected to a permanent genocide, started with the
slave traffic and never finished. Under the veil of racial democracy, a society
structurally racist would promote something as a silent genocide, whose manifestations
in the field of health would include supposed campaigns of massive sterilization of
black women, the negligence of the public health system to the black population and the
maintenance of social conditions proper to worsening the most variable diseases.
 In Lula´s government, the declarations of intentions gave place to action. It was
instituted in the sphere of SUS (the public health system of Brazil) the racial naming of
all the clients of hospitals and offices. In 2004 it was constituted the Technical
Committee of Health of the Black Population formed by members of the Ministry of
Health and of the Board of Racial Equality (Seppir) with the mission to check the
application of these racialist norms in SUS. Throughout this process, it was not only
trespassed the scientific knowledge of the absent relations between genes and declared
race but also they dissolved the logical problems derived from the eventual reunion of
browns and blacks in a black race or the reunion of browns and whites in a white race.
The racialist operation in the health system is stimulated solely by a political and
ideological doctrine hidden behind firm arguments supposedly scientific or, as appears
in the name of the Committee, „technical‟.

In December 1st of the same year, World AIDS Day, the act of giving racial
tonalities of public health reached a new point, of highly visibility on media. Together
with the routinely divulgation of the annual bulletin about AIDS by the Ministry of
Health, the federal government announced the Integrated Program of Affirmative
Actions to Blacks – Brazil Afro-Attitude, a partnership between the national program of
STD/AIDS, Seppir (Board of Racial Equality), Board of Human Rights of the
Presidency and the Ministry of Education. Afro-Attitude was engaged in the distribution
of scholarships destined to „contribute to formation of black students as promoters of
health and quality of life and also producing knowledge in the areas of prevention,
counseling and assistance do STDs‟.

The connection between blacks and AIDS as a social and medical phenomenum,
was built over a network of ambiguities. Pedro Chequer, director of the National
Program of STDs, went to media to clarify that AIDS was not a disease associated to
the black race, so that the majority of cases in Brazil occurs in white people. To not face
against the national program, he amended that the black population of low schooling
was naturally deflected therefore more susceptible to the disease. So, saving prudently
his technical credibility, Chequer provided a social bridge linking race to AIDS. He
omitted that all the low schooling population, no matter of skin color, is more
susceptible to HIV due to lack of information and other aspects, for the simple reason
that recognizing and broadcasting the obvious things would expose the ideological
sense of the governmental initiative.

The program of scholarships responded to a demand of racialist NGOs that act in

the area of public health. According to the logic of Afro-Attitude, the future black health
agents would have the mission to disseminate the idea of a racial cutting in health and
disease and, especially, to stick a racial flag in the sensible territory of AIDS. For the
first time, the applauded Brazilian program of AIDS went away its universalistic
paradigm, suggesting the existence of a risky group of racial borders.

One year later, this suggestion converted into an official proposition. While the
federal government elected the black population as the target of a campaign entitled
“AIDS and racism – Brazil must live without prejudice”, the Minister of Health, Saraiva
Felipe, started the campaign with the speech that „we resolved to have a special look on
the afro-descendent Brazilians because we faced an augmentation of new cases of AIDS
in this population. We decided together with NGOs, the Special Board for Promotion of
Public Policies of Racial Equality and black celebrities to emphasize, calling attention
to the relationship of racism, violence and augmentation of cases of AIDS in this
segment of the Brazilian population. They are people that, because of being in the
poorer layer of the society, have less access to information and to health assistance,
inside the context of poverty and racial discrimination of the country‟.

The minister was saying that racism and the racial discrimination of the country
had an epidemiological impact on AIDS, but not merely the poverty. According to him,
a poor white would have less chance of getting AIDS than a poor black because sort of
a racial discrimination. This accusation was never demonstrated by any epidemiological
study in Brazil but was implicitly directed to the public systems of health and education,
responsible for the diffusion of information about prevention and contagion of HIV. The
basis both of his declaration and his new public orientation of health policies was based
on a biased interpretation of insufficient statistical data.

The Brazilian data bank of health introduced the variable color/race only in the
beginning of the XXI century. In the data of the STD program, less than 4% of the
registers had data about color/race and in 2005 15% still had the field left blank, hence
considered officially as „ignored‟. Another serious difference is that in the registers of
health programs the item color/race is filled up by the health agent or the receptionist of
offices and hospitals while the statistics of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and
Statistics (IBGE) consider the self-declaration of the citizens. For a population
comparison, this difference turns any result as statistically weak. However, the federal
government didn´t think twice before adopting courageous interpretations based on such
limited statistics.

According the declarations of the minister of health, AIDS would have grown
mainly towards the „black population‟. By carefully analyzing the statistical basis of the
National Program of STD Peter Fry and collaborators found another reality. Initially,
AIDS entered Brazil via the layers of medium and superior income. In a sequence, it
expanded, reaching the poorer layers of low schooling and also women. In the interval
from 2000 to 2005, the most expressive growth of AIDS incidence occurred among
people with complete high school and superior school, totally in the contrary to the
official declarations.

The racial cutting of the interpretations of the government is sustained on a

typical racialist manipulation of data that consists on gathering browns and blacks in the
black group. From the collected data, the epidemics would have grown in relative terms,
not among blacks or whites, but only among the browns. Fry and collaborators analyzed
the data from 2000 to 2008 and regarding color/race the new cases were distributed as
follows: in 2000, 63% of whites, 10.1% of blacks and 25.7% of browns. In 2008, 57.7%
of whites, 9.8% of blacks and 31.7% of browns. The only possible general conclusion,
and even so subjected to inaccuracies derived from the data harvesting, is that the
epidemics expanded toward medium class layers that make part of the group of
color/race of browns.

Something surprising should deserve a careful investigation: the tendency of

growth of AIDS in the poorer layers seemed to be reverted. However, the influence
exerted by the racialist doctrine on the official health politics substituted an important
and relevant hypothesis to false epidemiologic conclusions. The „health of black
population‟ represents a direct threatening of the technical objectivity of the
universalistic policies of public health.

Health against miscegenation

The cooperation between the Ministry of Health and Seppir was renewed with
the organization of the I National Seminar of Health of the Black Population in August
2004 in Brasília with the participation of government employees, professionals of SUS
and racialist NGOs. The report of presentation of the conclusions of the meeting is a
political and programmatic document. It repeats ritually each one of the dogmas that
guide the intervention on the „health of black population‟.

Together with the dogmas, there is a grave accusation directed generically

against the health professionals of SUS: the register of a greater incidence of maternal
mortality among the blacks compared to the whites, to which the racism in attendance
contributes, and even cases of unmotivated aggressions against black women had been
reported. Such affirmation, taken seriously, would configure a political scandal of wide
proportions, but it was not followed by any further investigation or by any kind of
providences. Following the Nazi ideology that a lie repeated thoroughly becomes a truth
it works solely as an ideological pretext to affirm the necessity to reorganize the given
attendance by the national health system according racial lines.

The introduction of the official report of the Seminar brings something as a

political manifest where it is denounced the racism that determines inequalities in being
born, grow and die and proclaimed „there is no racial democracy in Brazil‟. The general
propositions approved in the event reveal the advancement of the racialist project in
public health. It asked for the implementation of the racial thematic in the attention to
health of the elderly. It vindicates the guarantee of racial diversity in the jobs of
direction and assistance of the health services in the federal, state and municipal
spheres. It asks the inclusion of history of black population in all the public selections
for health workers. It suggests an official national campaign about the „proud of being
black‟. There is no sick person there is no disease that escapes to a racial classification.
 Can any connection between AIDS and race be stated? In South Africa, during
an entire decade, the epidemic of AIDS was officially submitted to the filter of racial
politics. The president Thabo Mbeki suggested that the disease had no relation to HIV,
but derived from a virus created in Western laboratories hence white and introduced in
Africa. The conspiracy thesis of Mbeki was aligned to an influent draft of opinion other
parts of Africa personified in figures such as Wangari Maathai, biologist and leader of
an environmentalist NGO in Kenya winner of Nobel Prize of Peace in 2004. According
to her, a mysterious virus of AIDS would have been created with the finality to
exterminate African blacks. Spite being a biologist, she apparently never had read or
believed in several scientific articles that show the first case of AIDS in blood samples
as old as 1959 and the first clinical reports as old as 1948. As a consequence of her
thesis, supported by the racial vision of world of the Pan-Africanism, the adoption of
correct policies of health to prevention and control of the epidemics suffered
considerable delays.

The genetic investigation represents, of course, a crucial tool to define strategies

of fighting AIDS epidemic, but with the condition that the health policies will not be
contaminated by the myth of race. Sérgio Pena explains that the prolonged exposition of
human populations to toxic elements in the environment and food can be manifested in
genetic variations of the enzymatic systems to metabolize medications. One of his
researches showed the allele C of MDR1 gene, of multiple resistance to drugs, appears
among 91% of Ghanaians and 51% among Europeans. Due to complex reasons, the
homozygote to this allele may have smaller concentrations of anti-retroviral medications
in the central nervous system, which could have significant impacts in the efficacy of
the diverse drugs used for the control of HIV in the organism.

From this information relevant consequences for the treatment of the carriers of
the virus arise but none with a racial conclusion. In the words of the geneticist, „is
obvious that as a population, regarding the allele C, Ghana and Europe present
significant statistical differences, but the allele is present in both populations. So, the
simple fact of a person being born in Ghana or Europe would be a gross indicator and a
very very low trustable marker of the response to protease inhibitors and in the absence
of specific pharmacological tests it would have no clinical utility‟.

The illuminists of the XVIII century proclaimed the natural equality of all
human beings, an idea that shocked the slavery institute and worked as a silent motor of
the anti-slavery campaign in Great Britain. The genetics of the end of the XX century
evidenced that all human beings are equally different, which means, the genetic
individuality is not translated into the existence of racial collectivities. But the myth of
race, reinvented by the multiculturalism, not only survives but seeks to trace racial
frontiers in the area of public health.

In Brazil, the intervention of the heralds of „health of the black population‟,

which is an echo of the Pan-African doctrine, has no interest or the finality to point out
the ways for universalizing high quality health systems. Their explicit goal is to destroy
the anti-racialist idea of mixing, substituting it for the image of a country divided into
two polar races.

ABOLITION OF ABOLITION

The Brazilian Republic was three year-old and the abolition was four when the
journal The Example appeared in Porto Alegre as the first organ of black press in Brazil.
The editorial of the inaugurating edition of December 11 th 1892 criticized those who
judged the man through the color of skin. Almost four decades later, the first black
political organization appeared in the country. The Black Brazilian Front was founded
in 1931 by Arlindo Veiga dos Santos, a conservative Catholic of ascetic life who
studied in the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of São Paulo. The Front aimed to
integrate the blacks as a race in the national communion of the dictatorship of the New
Estate.

The founder of the Black Brazilian Front was a convict monarchist. Three years
before the black organization he created a Monarchist Center that would become the
Brazilian Imperial New Homeland Action. The patriarchal family in the base and
Monarchy in the top configured the columns of the new order he imagined: „the great
act of the black action in Brazil must start from family because it is the mother cell of
the whole civil society. Family is the union between husband and wife with their kids
under the government of the father. It is the prototype of the most perfect political
society or Estate – Monarchy.‟

In the vision of Veiga dos Santos, Republic must be kicked down and give place
to a Third Empire and to a Dom Pedro III that would protect Brazil form the foreign
imperialism and would find support in a syndicate municipal basis of corporative
nature.

Veiga dos Santos defined his movement of New Homeland as a radical, violent
and extreme right of affirmers of God and His Church and also as intolerant and
irreconcilable enemy of the bourgeoisie, plutocracy and the capitalism atheist,
materialist, exploiter, internationalist, Jew and Mason and also enemy of the Bolshevik
anarchism, of the liberal bourgeoisie tyranny. His positions were not exactly new in a
world dilacerated by the crash of New York Stock Exchange and that would experience
the consolidation of fascism of Mussolini in Italy, the foundation of the Brazilian
Fundamentalist Action and the ascension of Hitler in Germany.

The new-homeland movement of Veiga dos Santos ran as a parallel river to the
Fundamentalist movement of Plínio Salgado. They exchanged waters but never got
fused. The priest Hélder Câmara and the anthropologist Luís da Câmara Cascudo left
the first movement to adhere to the second. The Brazilian Black Front was a fruit of that
historic environment filtered by the racialist thinking. Their directors were figures of the
small intellectual and professional black elite such as the sociologist Aristide Barbosa,
the dentist Francisco Lucrécio and the journalist José Correia Leite. Their goal was to
promote the political, educational and social advancement of black people. Veiga dos
Santos was the first general-chief of the Brazilian Black Front and saw his movement
essentially as a field of diffusion of his monarchist ideology. The essays he wrote and
the speeches he pronounced helped to develop in the black organization an extreme
nationalism and the irreducible opposition to democracy and liberalism.

The Brazilian Black Front was structured in a rigidly centralized manner, under
the command of a general chief and a Great Council. It had flag, canticle and insignia. It
had even a militia of practitioners of the Brazilian black martial art, capoeira. Their
journal, the Voice of Race, brought the subtitle: God, Homeland, Race and Family.
Only the mention of race distinguished them from the Fundamentalist Action. But race
was the vital element for the Black Front. Veiga dos Santos was positively impressed by
Nazism by the same motives that impressed the American W.E.B. du Bois, leader of the
National Association for Advancement of Colored People. In 1933 he wrote in The
Voice of Race: „Is our concern that Hitler doesn´t want black blood in his land? This
only shows that the New Germany is proud of their race. We too, we, Brazilians, have
race. We don´t want to know about Arians. We want the mixed and black Brazilian that
never betrayed and will never betray the Nation. We are against the import of foreign
blood that comes to disturb the life of Brazil, the unity of our homeland. Hitler affirms
the German race. We affirm the Brazilian race foremost in its stronger element: the
black Brazilian.‟

The short history of the Brazilian Black Front is punctuated by political

oscillations and dissidences. In 1932, part of the organization supported the
Constitutionalist Revolution and formed a Black Legion that fought at the side of the
rebels. In the following year, an internal rupture originated the Socialist Black Front.
José Correia Leite leaded another dissidence of left, reunited around the journal Clarion
Call of Dawn, and that originated a Black Club of Social Culture. But the Black Front
supported the dictator Getúlio Vargas and had the sympathy of the president. The
identity card given by the Brazilian Black Front worked as a safe-conduct as the police
didn´t bother the members of the organization. The racist prohibition to entrance of
blacks in the Public Force of São Paulo was kicked down by the action of the Brazilian
Black Force that inscribed more than 400 recruits in the corporation. The black
organization saw in the European immigrants, several of whom were anarchists,
unionists and socialists the tentacles of the foreign octopus in Brazil. Because of this
belief the organization applauded the decision of Vargas to refrain by the instrument of
Law of Quotes the migratory wave of aliens that exerted Jew and anti-Catholic
influences.

From São Paulo, the Black Front went to other states. However, it continued to
express the feeling of a black medium class that nourished defined projects of social
ascension: „It prevails the imitation of the white small bourgeoisie. It is enough to
remember that the Black Front offers courses of Catechism but not of Candomblé. The
black vanguard of São Paulo is closer to the puritan black of medium class of USA than
the browns and blacks of the hills of Rio de Janeiro or the astucious practitioners of
macumba of Bahia state. I could think on the pyramids of Egypt. On the black Africa,
never.‟

The Black Front of Pernambuco state took part on the First Afro-Brazilian
Congress organized by Gilberto Freyre in Recife in 1934. Under the influx of the
sociologist and mainly of the official ideology of the president Getúlio Vargas, the
organization admitted miscegenation. This distinguished from the NAACP of Du Bois
who went toward the idea of racial purity. With confusion, the Black Front articulated
the notion of a Brazilian race of black nucleus but slurped up in a wide range of colors.
The solution subordinated race to homeland conserving the polarity between the
national and the foreigner.

The coup of New Estate represented the end of the freedom of party and of
press. Together with the Fundamentalist Action, the Brazilian Black Front and the
Brazilian Imperial New Homeland Action were dissolved. The Brazilian Black Front
came again with the name of Brazilian Black Union but lost political influence and
converted in the Palmares Recreational Club. In 1944 close to the end of the
dictatorship of Vargas, the Black Experimental Theatre appeared, founded by the
intellectual Abdias do Nascimento, an ex-member of both the Fundamentalist Action
and the Black Front. Years after, in the post-war period, Abdias would lead the great
ideological turn of the Brazilian black movement toward the racialism of Du Bois.

An African homeland?

Miscegenation was accepted, although with reserves, by the Black Front. In an

article published in The Voice of Race, mixing appeared as a fountain of prejudice and
as a concrete political threatening to the black people that was defined as follows:
„Without affirmative black values by the whitening of epidermis of old values of the
rich blacks, away from the black people by mixing and prejudice (since, generally, the
worst enemy of the black is a white grandson of black grandparents), the black people
stood without natural leaders.‟

The collapse of the dictatorship of the New Estate opened a new scenario full of
theoretical and political difficulties to the leaders of the black movement. How could
they conciliate the particular vindications of race with the wider idea of fighting poverty
and social exclusion? Among black left leaders such as Luiz Lobato, it was not possible
to separate the blacks from the general situation of the Brazilian people hence it was
needed to handle the flag for fight for the exploited class. The Black Experimental
Theatre of Abdias tested his answers in the National Convention of the Black People,
carried out in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

The Manifest originated from the meeting, directed to the black citizens
vindicated the inscription in the Constitution that the Brazilian people is constituted by
the three fundamental races: indigenous, black and white. It also asked racism to be a
crime in the penal code and formulated overall vindications of social nature. The black
must be admitted as pensioners of the Estate in high and superior schools while „school
was not turned free in all levels‟. Also, it asked for the adoption of governmental
policies aiming to improve the cultural, social and economic level of the Brazilians.

The oscillation between the principles of universalism and race continued to tear
the thinking of the black leaders. Abdias started to edit in 1948, the year of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights the journal Quilombo. The publication was
partially inspired in Négritude of the Senegalese Senghor but it brought a section
entitled Racial Democracy that was inaugurated with an article of Gilberto Freyre
devoted to explain the Brazilian attitude towards the plague of racism. In the second
number, the anthropologist Arthur Ramos used the space to talk about miscegenation in
Brazil. The number 6 denounced that Hotel Glória in Rio de Janeiro prohibited the
entrance of Abdias and other members of the Black Experimental Theatre in the Ball of
Artists. In the following day due to the repercussion of the episode, the direction of the
Hotel invited Abdias to participate to the event.

The denunciation of racism reappeared in the last edition of Quilombo – number

10. The American dancer and actress Katherine Dunham was impeded in a hotel in São
Paulo. The poet Murilo Mendes wrote about her in the section Racial Democracy and
the deputy Gilberto Freyre pronounced a protesting speech in the tribune of the
Chamber. The case provoked the indignation of the lawyer Afonso Arinos de Melo
Franco, also federal deputy at that time. In 1951 the Law Afonso Arinos was approved
and included racism among the crimes.

According to the anthropologist Yvonne Maggie, the journal represented an

effort of a group of intellectual and activists of all colors for democracy and against
racism because to that generation the notion of racial democracy summarized a search
for union of all against racism. But the utopia of racial democracy started to suffer
attacks each time stronger. The National Conference of Blacks carried out in 1949 in
Rio de Janeiro devoted to review the conventional socio-anthropologic theories about
the black represented by the Afro-Brazilian meetings of the previous decade, in the
words of Abdias, organizer of the event. It was an initial step in the trajectory of
organization of a black movement that rejects Freyre and abominates mixing.

In 1950 when Unesco published the famous declaration against the myth of race,
the First Congress of the Brazilian Black was carried out. The meeting brought to light
the differences of approaches in the wide group that worked in Quilombo and the
reorientation of the thinking of Abdias. The leader of the Black Experimental Theatre
together with other black intellectuals such as Guiomar Ferreira de Mattos emphasized
the particular necessities of the blacks in the condition of a racial group. Later, he
remembered the position adopted at that time: „the black doesn´t want the isolated and
paternalist help, as a special favor. They want and claim a high status in society in the
form of a collective opportunity to all, to a people with irrevocable historic rights (…)
the opening of real opportunities of political,cultural, social ascension to the black,
respecting their African origin.‟

This was not the vision of the anthropologists Darcy Ribeiro and Édison
Carneiro or the sociologist Luís Costa Pinto, the Brazilian assigner of the anti-racist
declaration of Unesco. Under the theoretical influence of Marxism, they emphasized the
inequalities among the social classes of Brazil and saw racism as one among many other
elements of economic exclusion experienced by the majority of the Brazilian black
population. In this line, they feared the import of the model of racial polarity of USA
that would destroy the national utopia of mixing.

The Declaration of Principles, approved with unanimity in the final plenary,

represented a compromise among the divergent point of views. A recommendation
asked for the „study of the African remnants in the country‟, another, „the inclusion of
colored men in the lists of candidates of the parties‟ and a third solicited Unesco to
sponsor an International Congress of Racial Relationships. On the other way around,
they condemned the political exploitation of color discrimination, the racial messianism
and the proclamation of race as criteria of action and the associations of white or black
citizens organized under the criteria of racial exclusivity.

The black separatism in the same style of Du Bois found resistance in Brazil and
even Abdias hesitated in declaring Africa as the homeland of the Brazilian blacks. In his
tireless activity in the post-war he suffered influences from the new step of Pan-
Africanism opened by the Pan-African Congress of Manchester in 1945 and from
figures such as Nkrumah and Padmore. The Quilombo journal supported and
broadcasted black candidates independently the political party they were affiliated and
the ideas they defended. The Black Week of 1955 promoted by the Black Theatre
devoted to criticize the anti-racist intellectuals who rejected the concept of race. In 1964
a course on black theatre and art focused the meaning of the awakening of Africa in the
modern world. However, the principal leader of the black movement still wasn‟t
disposed to hug definitely the idea that the Brazilian blacks were not exactly Brazilians,
but part of a Diaspora African nation.

Weeks before the edition of AI-5 in 1968, Abdias left Brazil and exiled in USA.
When he returned, he completed the ideological turn around started in the post-war.
Palmares, the metaphor

In the apogee of the military dictatorship of Brazil in 1971, in Porto Alegre the
Palmares Group was organized, having as chief the professor Oliveira Ferreira Silveira.
In that year, for the first time, due to initiative of the group, the November 20 th, day of
the death of Zumbi of Palmares in 1695, was celebrated. The Day of Black Conscience,
idealized by Silveira, appeared as a counterbalance to May 13 th, day of abolition of
slavery.

Seven years later, the dictatorship suffered its long terminal crisis in the middle
of students´ protests, reappearance of the syndicate movements and opposition
movements from intellectuals and public persons. In that electrical environment, a call-
on of the Socialist Convergence, a Trotskyite group with some influence among
university and high school students, originated the Unified Black Movement. The
Trotskyites of Socialist Convergence saw in the blacks the most exploited parcel of the
proletariat and a potential vanguard of the revolutionary fights. In their vision, the
modern slavery and racism were fruits of the capitalist system. As a consequence, the
solution for the black question couldn´t be other than the substitution of capitalism by
socialism. The Unified Black Movement and the fight against racism would develop the
paper of links of the anti-capitalist revolutionary movement.

In May 13th 1978, militants lifted banners and posters against the police brutality
in Paissandu Large in São Paulo. Soon after, the Socialist Convergence articulated the
creation of the Unified Black Movement in a reunion with different black groups and
entities. Abdias, still in USA, used his influence to help the new organization. The
Trotskyites imagined if as a field of recruitment of militants to form a revolutionary
party. The other participants had their own political agenda, not always consistent to the
revolutionary ideals. Under the perspective of the Trotskyites and their allies, the
Unified Black Movement linked the black movement to the fight of classes. From the
point of view of Abdias and other black leaderships the organization completed the
course, only sketched by the Black Experimental Theatre, of rupture of assimilation
movement and of incorporation of the Pan-Africanist movement. This was a precarious
coalition crossed by deep divergences that were sublimated in the name of a desire of
unity.

With the presence of Abdias, a public act in the stairways of the Municipal
Theatre of São Paulo in July 1978 marked the beginning of the United Black
Movement. Africa and USA were luminous points in the horizon of reference of the
militants that agglutinated in that year. It is revealing the synthesis of Hamilton
Cardoso, one of the founders of the new organization: „the African fights opened to the
blacks of Brazil another perspective of their existence in the white world. The
appearance of black elites in USA completed the picture. If the American black
nationalism imported from USA restored to the Brazilians their dignity of race, the
universalism of the African liberation exported political dignity, allowing the black
activists to rediscover in the popular masses the universality of the anti-racial fight‟.

The journal Versus, published from 1977 and 1979 by an alliance of the
Socialist Convergence with left journalists and intellectual, had a section entitled „Afro-
Latin America‟. The space, destined to the black socialist nucleus, elaborated the idea of
the Diaspora African nation in Latin America.

Although open to affiliation of whites, the Unified Black Movement

incorporated since its beginning the dogma of race, importing from USA the notion that
one drop of black blood defined the racial identity of the person (hence totally breaking
with any biologic definition of race). In the origin, the organization linked Africanity to
the historic goal of socialism. In a review of the history of the Portuguese America, the
quilombos of Palmares were imagined as an experiment of equality and as inspiration of
social transformation, spite the historic evidences that even inside the quilombos there
was slave work. Anyway, with such ideology, the Day of Black Conscience started to
be celebrated in opposition to the Day of Abolition.

Slavery in Brazil was not abolished because of the magnanimous wishes of

Princess Isabel in May 13 th 1888. The gesture of the Princess represented the falling of
the imperial Estate that would topple in the following year. The signature of the Golden
Law marked the triumph of the first modern social fight of national extent in the history
of the country. The abolitionist movement was shared by Brazilians with all skin
tonalities and aligned among their leaderships noticeable figures of the liberal elite such
as Joaquim Nabuco and the Mason Antônio Bento to the side of popular intellectuals
such as José do Patrocínio, son of a farmer and vicar with a black teenager slave, Luís
Gama, an ex-slave and Antônio da Silva Jardim, son of a small farmer and teacher of a
rural school.

The abolitionist societies got diffused in the country published journals and
articulated to old slaves and revolted slaves, stimulating them to run away from the
farms and helping to hide the fugitives. Besides writers and intellectuals, abolitionism
mobilized the workers of both modern and traditional sectors. Typographers of Rio de
Janeiro printed pamphlets against slavery and refused to print pamphlets against
abolition. Railroaders of São Paulo hid the fugitive slaves in wagons and train stations.
Canoeists of Ceará state in Northern Brazil refused to transport slaves sold to other
regions.

Nabuco called on the abolitionists a mandate of the black race to protest against
the malediction of slavery that hit everybody, slaves or free, including the slave owners.
„We accept this mandate as political men, by political motives so we represent the
slaves in the quality of Brazilians that judge our title of citizenship diminished while
there is slave Brazilians, which means, in our self interest but foremost in the interest of
the country‟. It can be objected against this that it was not given to the slaves the
opportunity to confer such mandate to the political men, but it can´t be hidden the sense
of the message. He was saying that abolitionism was not philanthropic but a project of
nation to extend citizenship to all.

As an exponent of the liberal abolitionist draft, Nabuco didn´t intend to include

the slaves in the anti-slavery fight. „The abolitionist propaganda is not directed to the
slaves. It would be cowardice and a political suicide to the abolitionist party to stimulate
rebellions or crimes of men without defenses to whom the Law of Lynch or public
justice would immediately smash‟. But there was another draft of abolitionists that saw
the movement as a popular fight and could salute Raul Pompéia: „mankind can only be
happy when a thinking of rebellion passes by the oppressed brain of the work cattle of
the farms. The idea of insurrection means that human nature is still alive. All violence in
name of freedom must be saluted as saint outcomes. The saddest thing of the
abolitionists is that these violent rebellions are not frequent or generally extended‟.

The gesture of Princess Isabel gave the Empire the chance to mask its defeat.
The black elite gave alive to the princess in May 13 th and the mass of ex-slaves honored
her in samba schools in the parties and terrains of candomblé and umbanda. In the Day
of Abolition in 1931 the Black Front organized commemorations in São Paulo and Rio
de Janeiro, promoting a mass in thanksgiving by the triumphant resurrection of race and
also honored Luís Gama and José do Patrocínio. But the figure of the princess never
went out from the memories and Vicente Ferreira, a director of the Brazilian Black
Front, explained that „the date of today is a memoir of freedom, partially given to the
black‟. Ferreira was the first person to proposed to change the term „man of color‟ to
„black‟ in the terminology of the Brazilian black movement. The black associations of
the beginning of the XX century used in their titles „men of color‟ or „darks‟. After the
cycle of the Brazilian Black Front, the expression „of color‟ still resisted for several
decades among some groups of the black movement. In 1943 it was even founded the
Association of Men of Color that expanded quickly and served to well succeeded public
careers and only stopped actions after the military coup of 1964.

Veiga dos Santos, maximal leader of the Brazilian Black Front, also thought that
the freedom had been given. But he conducted this logic to an extreme, attributing the
abolition of slavery to the Empire and the oppression of the blacks to the Republic. In
an article entitled The Blacks and the III Empire, he pointed and accusative finger to
Republic, which would be the responsible to the miserable situation of the black. From
this strange logic, the interpreted the Republican coup of Estate of 1889 as a retaliation
of the slavery farmers to the free act of Princess Isabel.

The criticism to abolition was the current voice among the principal black
leaderships of the years 1930. They registered that the old slaves and their descendents
never received lands to cultivate or opportunities to study, staying in the borders of a
nation that modernized in the compass of industrialization. The socialist Correia Leite in
his Clarim da Alvorada asked for a second abolition and this idea was followed by
moderate leaders. But the great fights of abolitionism continued to be too close in time
and memory for anybody ever think on discharge them.
 The first edition of Economic History of Brazil of Caio Prado Jr is dated from
1945. In this book of reference to the historiography of the post-war the narrative of
abolition evidenced the national aspect and the popular consistence of the great anti-
slavery fight that crossed almost all the decade of 1880. In a book dedicated to
economic history, the author was not seduced by the temptation of presenting the
collapse of slavery as a simple fruit of the logic of the capitalist economy. According a
very different direction, it explained the size of the abolitionist movement that put the
country in the imminence of a complete disorder. The Empire sustained slavery until the
final hour including having incorporated in the government in 1885 the political group
more strongly favorable to slavery. However, only two years later the scurry of the slave
group reflected the perception that resistance became useless and insist on it would only
lead the question to open and declared generalized violence.

The defamation of abolition started much later in the beginning of the years
1970, parallel to the import of ideas that the black race has their true homeland in Africa
and is in America as a Diaspora nation. In the interval between the first commemoration
of the November 20th and the foundation of the Unified Black Movement, abolition
stopped to be interpreted as a limited or incomplete gesture that required a second
abolition. Instead, it converted in a false abolition an even in the fountain of social
exclusion of the blacks!

Abdias was elected in 1982 as substitute federal deputy by the PDT party of Rio
de Janeiro, assuming a parliamentary seat in the following year. Soon in the tribune of
the Chamber he presented a project of law to build a Memorial of the Anonymous Slave
in the Square of the Three Powers in Brasília and defended with the following words the
institution of the November 20th as the National Day of Black Conscience: „We don´t
accept the conventional dates that symbolize our continuous exploitation since the slave
era as exampled by the May 13th, day of the false abolition‟. Ironically, the main
leadership of the black movement not only hid the popular sense of the abolitionist fight
but also retook the version created by the Empire that attributed the abolition of slavery
as a result from the personal wishes of Princess Isabel.

The false abolition walked side by side to the farce of the racial democracy that
must be revealed and denounced. In the program of action created by the Unified Black
Movement in 1982 among the minimal vindications there was the debunking of the
Brazilian racial democracy. The black directors explained against all the evidences that
the underlying Brazilian racism was worse than the open American racism. The
debunking of the racial democracy, veil that served to hide a virulent prejudice of race,
would take off the sale of the eyes of the blacks and would propitiate the diffusion of a
new political conscience. Only then the blacks would see themselves as members of an
exploited race controlled by the whites.

Abolitionism reunited Brazilians of all colors and social classes, free and slaves
in a fight for equality of the individuals facing law. May 13 th started to be stigmatized
because it is an anti-racial metaphor. In its place, the black leaderships built an
alternative data that reports to Palmares and sustains a racial metaphor. In the
parliamentary speech when he spoke against the false abolition, Abdias defined Zumbi
as „hero of fight of freedom in Brazil‟ and Quilombo of Palmares as the „first and only
true experience of freedom, racial harmony and equality in the history of Brazil‟. The
symbolic operation of substituting a metaphor by another was the password to adhesion
of the black leaderships to the idea of black separatism: Brazil was no longer seen as a
single nation to be only the name of a political entity where the white and black races
inhabited.

The metaphor of Palmares became a mythical narrative. Deise Benedito, from

Speak, Black!, a racialist NGO wrote: „the slave system provoked several escapes of
enslaved Africans to the forests where they were rescued and hosted by the brave Indian
warriors that didn´t subordinate to the acts of deforestation and occupation of their
lands. Protected by the spirits of the forests together with companions of infelicity, even
not speaking the same language, they carried out a pact in favor of survival, of fight and
of resistance against the oppression of the cruel colonizer. It appeared in Alagoas state
the first and most complex field of resistance, the Quilombo of Monkeys, headquarter of
the Quilombo of Palmares, strategically positioned. Supported by the knowledge of
agriculture, of livestock, of metallurgy brought from the African continent, applying
new manners of selling the production, Palmares became the first Afro-Indian Estate of
the Americas. The indigenous peoples absorbed the new form of government and
established partnerships and strategies of organization against invasions‟.

This paradise Palmares described by this mythic narrative was an isolated

society fighting against the oppression of the Exterior. The true, historic Palmares was a
rebel enclave that had commercial relationships with the Portuguese, the Dutch and the
neighboring Indians. The paradise Palmares was an equalitarian society. The historic
Palmares was a dissonance, but integrated to the capitalist system: in the Quilombos of
Belly Hills, blacks and Indians were captured by the rebels and lived in a slave regime.

Zumbi, a Spartacus of the end of the XVII century, didn´t live in Brazil, but in a
colonial enclave of the Portuguese America. In the glorious and desperate fight he
leaded there was no alternative in changing the world, but only to separate their people
in a world apart, named as Palmares. However, the history of the greatest rebellion of
slaves had to be diluted in the myth to serve to the new ideological orientation of the
black leaders of the end of the XX century. Celebrating Zumbi was a manner to erase
him as a historic character.

War and peace among races

In the juridical thinking, repair of damage is the notion that a fair sentence must
adequately compensate the victim of a crime. The typical repair of damage consists on a
monetary payment. In the law of war, the imposition of monetary repairs to be paid by
the defeat Estates has a long history, since the indemnifications of Carthage to Rome
until the Treatise of Versailles that imposed to Germany the transference of 132 billions
of German Marches to the powers of Entente. In general, in war, the repairs took the
place of robbery in which the winners took all the goods of the loser, a prohibited
practice since the conventions of Hague in 1907 and Geneva in 1949.

The notion of repair follows all the trajectory of the Unified Black Movement. In
the beginning of the movement, it resumed a revolutionary program that continued to
inspire the groups of radical black militants. The Africans of the Diaspora in Americas
would constitute a single nation against the white capitalism. Victory would be possible
only by the transformation of the society and by the overcome of capitalism. The
redemption of Africa and the implantation of socialism in international scale would
represent the true repair of the crimes of slavery and slave traffic.

This original version of the reparation was a political euphemism. Through it,
the fight of classes was practically identified with a war among races carried out
worldwide. With time, however, the hegemony of the black movement was transferred
from the groups of left militants to the activists of racialist NGOs. Financed by
international institutions and by the Brazilian office of Ford Foundation, the NGOs took
places in agencies created by the political power and articulated with engaged
academics in the new field of study of the racial relations. This way, the notion of repair
experience a deep re-interpretation, being adapted to the current political order.

The process of preparation of the World Conference against Racism carried out
in Durban in 2001 practically dissolved the Unified Black Movement. The previous
seminars and conferences in Brazil stood under the coordination of the Special Board of
Human Rights, directly subordinated to the Presidency of Republic. The directors of
NGOs assumed the front line of articulation, elaborating the proposals that would be
presented in the international forum. In the Unified Black Movement, spite the
resistance of some leaders, the radical line of the origins was abandoned by the most
part of the direction. The militants of basis largely stopped their works, going to the left
parties or other NGOs.

In the Day of Black Conscience in the year of the Conference of Durban, the
Unified Black Movement distributed a pamphlet in a conference carried out in
Pelourinho, Salvador. It signalized the end of a cycle, combined weakly a radical
diagnosis with the new and moderate version of repair. The first paragraph was
consecrated to the superlative radicalism: „the arrival of the Portuguese invader to the
territory known nowadays as Brazil meant a true assault to nature and humanity of those
who were already found here. Cruel, violent, rapists, betrayers and murders left behind
them devastation without precedents in the history of peoples. This genocide practice
left a historic inheritance of violence and extermination with 4.7 million of dead Indians
and 110 millions of Africans kidnapped and murdered to guarantee the conquer of
America‟.
 After the ritual offer to the historic narrative elaborated in the origins of the
Unified Black Movement, the news came. The reparation, synonym of socialist
redeeming of race, would walk in the world sphere of the programs of racial preference:
„the Brazilian Estate has a social and historic debt to the black and indigenous
populations and it is in this context that the debate about the public policies of
affirmative action is inserted‟.

In the sequence, Abdias wrote a message to the World Social Forum of 2002
carried out in Porto Alegre. The text was an ode to the official Pan-Africanism, which
means, to the dictator regimes implanted in the independent countries of Africa and had
two curious fatal mistakes. In the first, without further meaning, Abdias vindicated the
condition of the only South American representative in the Pan-African Congress of
Dar-es-Salaam in 1974. In the second, he eulogized an imaginary effort of the historic
leader Cyril James in favor of the Afro-descendent Brazilian population in Dar-es-
Salaam, which was a tricky manner to turn beautiful a controlled meeting by the
dictatorship of Tanzanian and boycotted by James.

The subterranean axis of organization of the message was the concept of

Diaspora nation. But in the new conjuncture of Durban it served as an instrument to the
proposition of an alliance of the black movement to the African regimes: „in the
preparative process and in the Conference of NGOs in Durban, I had chance to highlight
the necessity of a strategic alliance among the afro-descendents of the Diaspora and the
Estates and African peoples to prevail the thesis and act of repairs in a broad sense that
includes our collective interests.‟

In the broad sense suggested by Abdias the repairs would have two directions:
from one side, they would mean the canceling of external debts and transference of
resources and technology to the African countries. From the other side, in the multi-
ethnic Estates, the adoption of affirmative action in favor of the afro-descendants.

In his long life Abdias walked different ways and oscillated among diverse
positions, sometimes conflicting, but never stopped to believe, such as Du Bois did, that
races are the true protagonists of history. In an interview in 2001 when he approached to
get 90 year-old, the icon of the Brazilian black movement affirmed that the roots of all
Western art, science and culture are African and defended the concession of TV
channels to „us, Africans and their descendants‟. In the same line of black separatism,
he vindicated the creation of black institutions of school so the young blacks had
another version of history and truth.

Durban drained the radicalism that lived in the Brazilian black movement. The
vision of a war between exploited blacks and white explorers left place to a perspective
of a pact of racial friendship supported by compensatory policies of affirmative action.
The idea of a single nation supported by the principle of equality of citizens facing law
was practically dead among the directors of a black movement given to the control of
racialist NGOs. The revolutionary utopias of the origins of the Unified Movement had
been changed by the proposition of a confederated Brazil that would include side by
side a white nation and black nation deserving repairs.

A black movement each time more integrated to the institutions of Estate and
public agencies defined a broad agenda of collective repairs. Under the inspiration of
policies of affirmative action applied in other countries, they extended the flags of racial
preferences in universities, public service and labor market in general. Also vindications
appeared, supported by the concept of black capitalism of special programs of
supporting black businessmen. Finally in 2005 from notorious directors of racialist
NGOs it appeared the pragmatic proposition that the repair to slavery got the form of
payments to be done to black citizens, individually. A parliamentarian of São Paulo
solicited the opening of a collective sue against Union by material and moral damages
carried out by slavery and estimated the value of the payments at about 2 million dollars
per person.

The myth of race is present in all the history of the black movement in Brazil. It
is the deep trace of continuity between Brazilian Black Front and Unified Black
Movement, the compass that served as a guide to a complex political trajectory such as
the one of Abdias. He contaminated even the thinking of socialist groups such as the
one of Correia Leite and his Clarim da Alvorada that tried to conciliate the incompatible
concepts of race and social class. However, in the beginning of the XXI century, in a
declared rupture with the hegemonic racialist NGOs it appeared a dissonant voice. The
point outside the curve is the Socialist Black Movement founded in São Paulo in May
13th 2006.

Racism and capitalism are the two faces of the same coin. The founder
declaration of the Socialist Black Movement started with a declaration of the South
African Steve Biko, the leader of the Movement of Black Conscience murdered under
torture in 1977. Biko ruptured only partially with the myth of race; the Socialist Black
Movement ruptured completely. In their declaration there was a strong criticism of the
division of nations into ethnicities or races, illustrated by a mention to Rwanda and
concluded in this way: „to us, the world is divided into classes, not into ethnicities‟.

The Socialist Black Movement was born under the stimulation of the Marxist
Left, a Trotskyite faction of the Party of Workers. The international social revolution is
their horizon but their political intervention combines the denunciation of racism, of the
police violence in the peripheries and the drug traffic with an intransigent proposition
against racial laws. In an open letter directed to the parliamentarians in 2008, the
movement condemned the approval in the Chamber of Deputies of a project of law of
racial quote in the universities. The document was also an alerting shout against the so-
called Statute of Racial Equality. „No democrat that is proud of the Great French
Revolution who vindicates Republic where all hat the juridical right of equality facing
law; nobody who appreciates freedom and equality can accept such aberration – wrote
representatives of the Socialist Black Movement of six States.
 An ideologist of the racial quotes, the anthropologist of University of Brasília
José Jorge de Carvalho explained something commonly hidden: „there is no speech of
the capital, no socialist proposal, no renewing proposal of the capitalist order; everyone
can accumulate richness. But, let´s say, this celebrates diversity. At least some became
billionaire Indians, billionaire blacks, billionaire Latins.‟

The Socialist Black Movement agrees with the diagnosis and because of this
rejects the racial policies. „Peace among us, war against the lords!‟ This call-on appears
in the pamphlets of the Socialist Black Movement and refers to the unity of the working
class and the fight of classes. The new movement returned to the tradition of celebrating
the May 13th, restoring the memory of the popular abolitionist fight that destroyed the
columns of supporting the Empire in an era when under the influx of the official black
movement, the defamation of abolition converted in something close to a politics of
Estate in Brazil.

Pedagogy of race

The Brazilian Black Front was a social movement of masses, at least in São
Paulo State. The Unified Black Movement, with all the ideological relevance, was never
more than a group of vanguard militants based on university students. Many of the
activists reunited from the public manifestation in the stairways of the Municipal
Theatre followed academic careers producing thesis on racism, slavery and the black
movement. Taken together, this vast material represents the act of racialist review of the
history of Brazil.

In the year of foundation of the Unified Black Movement, Abdias published the
book The Genocide of the Brazilian Black. The genocide in his peculiar interpretation
was not a physical massacre of an ethnicity but the persistent functioning of a racism
masked by the notion of racial democracy. A speech of the black leader facing a
preparatory plenary to the Conference of Durban has as title the phrase: „We accuse
Brazil of the crime of racism, of genocide against the indigenous and afro-descendant
peoples‟. In part of the text, the concept of genocide was articulated as: „I refer to the
dissimulated racial discrimination and denied in rhetoric but firm and operating in its
practice of exclusion. They are the perverse processes of genocide that always
characterized the Brazilian society.‟

Both the book and the speech represented an absolute condemning of the
Brazilian society as a whole, understood as a society of the white race. In the surface,
Abdias searched to connect genocide, a crime against mankind, to a repair, under the
form of policies of racial preferences. Deeply, his approach consecrated a paradigm for
the construction of a historic narrative. According to him, the history of Brazil would
not represent anything more than the history of a genocidal white race. It was needed
instead to turn official a black history, the history of the African nation in the Brazilian
Diaspora.

The historian Manolo Florentino explains that the slave traffic in the Atlantic
was a mechanism that not only it structurally reproduced the work force in America but
also developed a structural paper in Africa. The proof of this is that the African offer
lasted more than 350 years without that it was needed that the European, American and
Arab traffickers directly produced the slave, which means they never needed to take
them as prisoners or took them as tributes‟.

An abundant historiography showed conclusively that the production of the

slave (the capture and enslaving of humans) was not carried out by the Europeans (with
rare exceptions). The structural paper of the traffic in Africa consisted on promoting the
ethnical and social differentiation, propitiating the appearance of native elites who
anchored their income and power in selling slaves to the traffickers. Those native elites
constituted or strengthened Estates, since the Estate was the solely manner to produce
slaves in large scale.

The traffic in the Atlantic and slavery makes part of the history of the colonial
and capitalist system that articulated its network in all the global economy, including
Africa. But Abdias and the racialist NGOs of Brazil chose to bury history in order to tell
it as racial happenings. Under such perspective, the whites as race enslaved and
commercialized the blacks, also known as a race. The crime of traffic that had the
dimensions of genocide starts to be an act of the white race and as a consequence the
black race becomes creditor of historic repairs. In the political plan, the racial narrative
of slavery works as a fundament to vindicate the production of laws of racial
preferences. In the symbolic plan it works as the function of instrument to the
production of race in the consciences.

Starting from the transference of enslaved Africans to the Portuguese America, it

is developed a line of a racial history in Brazil whose most important signs appear in a
parliamentary polemic of Abdias to a senator from Pará State: „no value has to the
blurred deputy the Malese insurrections, the Revolution of the Tailors, Balaiada and
many other episodes when the black searched for freedom and respect, including among
the slaves who participated in the War on Paraguay, of the Southern Farroupilha fights
and of consolidation of independence. We can´t admit that a nation built on the criminal
structure of slavery wants to perpetuate the privileges of one race over the other‟.

So, this way, it is known that the black participated as a race in these social
colonial and post-colonial riots and also that since slavery until the end of the XX
century the Brazilian nation is organized as a system of oppression of one race over the
other.

The abolition of slavery was followed by the great cycle of European and
Japanese immigration to Brazil. One of the original motives of the migratory project,
drawn two decades before the Golden Law was the whitening of the Brazilian
population. But indeed there were other motives of political and economical order. The
immigrants of the Southern Brazil were incorporated as owners of small lands, served to
the strategic objective of occupation and consolidation of the sovereignty on that part of
the territory. In the complex of coffee of São Paulo the immigrants served as cheap
work force in an unstable system of work relations while the exporting farms
modernized. But the racialist historic narrative interprets all this as an act of the Estate
to confirm the hegemony of the white race: „From 1890 to 1914, more than 1.5 million
of Europeans arrived in São Paulo State, 64% with the ticket paid by the state
government. However, considered not only as unqualified but also as dangerous and
lazy, the black men were practically excluded from the new industrial work labor
market‟.

The synthesis, wrote by Abdias and Elisa Larkin do Nascimento, converts the
complex trajectory of substituting the slave work to free work in the country as a simple
conspiracy of a racialist Estate against the blacks. The social exclusion of the old salves,
something true and crucial, is directly opposed to supposed privileges offered to the
European immigrants, an interpretation that is not confirmed by any test of historic
validity.

The racialist caricature is supported in the dogma of race that works as a magical
key to an implacable historic revisionism. If races are the true protagonists of history,
such as Abdias and Elisa Larkin believe, it must have existed a strong solidarity of
interests among the Brazilian Estate and the white European immigrants. And the coffee
farmers and the poorly paid colons of the farms, submitted to hard conditions of life and
work, are nothing more than functional elements of the same social and political actor:
the white race united against the black race.

Slavery and immigration, seen by the glasses of race, form the structure of a new
manner to tell the history of Brazil. But it is not enough to tell it in essays and articles. It
is needed to broadcast it, under the seal of official truth.

Racial hornbooks

The public schooling was born and disseminated together with the consolidation
of the Estate-nation after the XIX century. Since the beginning, school was seen as the
most important fountain of diffusion of national identities. The classes on History
inscribe the nation in time by a narrative of a past punctuated by adventures, dramas,
tragedies and heroic characters. In the classes on Geography, the nation is inscribed in
space and the young students learn to recognize the body of homeland figuring in the
maps. Literature offers a draft of icons that compose the national imagination. At the
time of the triumph of racialism, school appears again as an industry of identities. To its
classical functions, a new one is aggregated in the form of producing racial identities. In
Brazil of the beginning of the XXI century, this new function was ordered by a
resolution of the National Council of Education that instituted guides for the „Education
of Ethnic-Racial Relationships‟ in superior school and for teaching „History and Culture
of Africa and Brazil‟, in high and basic school.

This resolution supposes the existence of races, of an Afro-Brazilian history and

culture and also an African history and culture. This supposition implies in one
abdication: the school will not denounce race as a fruit of racism but will treat it as real
social and historical entity. The second supposition institutes the figure of the Afro-
Brazilians who would be subjects of a particular history and produce a particular
culture. The implicit but inevitable consequence is the institution of the Euro-Brazilians
and of the native Brazilians that would complete the racial panorama of the Brazilian
society. Furthermore, these suppositions would adopt the paradigm of Africa as the
homeland of a race.

The Resolution defines Brazil as a multicultural and multiethnic society,

officially consecrates the racial category of the Afro-descendants and institutes as the
objective of teaching Afro-Brazilian and African history and culture the „recognition
and valorizing of the identity, culture a history of the African descendants. Therefore, it
is not to discuss racism or the myth of race, but to create a racial identity, writing it in
history and culture. Particularly culture here appears as synonym of nature: to a race
exist objectively in a period of demoralization of scientific racism it must arise from the
untouchable deepness of culture.

The objectives of education of the Ethnic-Racial relationships include the

„broadcasting of attitudes, postures and values that teach the children regarding the
ethnic-racial plurality making them capable of interact and negotiate common objectives
that guarantee to all the respect to the legal rights and valorization of identity in the
search for consolidation of the Brazilian democracy.‟ This is the basal concept over
which the formulation is built as: „the nation is made not by citizens equal in rights, but
by distinct races that must to learn how to negotiate common objectives‟, which means,
to consider the racial interests to living in the multiethnic mold of Brazil.

There is a conducting wire in this curricular decision that reminds Du Bois. This
wire consists on the idea that the races are the true protagonists of history whose
philosophical complement is the belief in an essential inequality, incurable between the
human beings. A document of the same National Council of Education that supports
this resolution exposes this belief in a surprisingly direct manner. The text lists a series
of principles to be followed by the institutes of education and by the teachers among
them the principle of „strengthening of identities and rights‟. This principle must „guide
towards clarifying regarding mistakes about a universal human identity‟. (!!!!)

The official directive presents several other implications. In the name of cultural
essence and to affirm racial identities, the public organ responsible to guide the systems
of education is denying the philosophical nucleus that governs the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and many other international treatises which Brazil has
assigned. The schools and teachers are called on by the power of Estate to kick against
all the movement of ideas that produced the modern concept of human rights,
organizing pedagogy of race.

The governmental intervention, destined to inscribe race in the systems of

education stimulates a previous tendency, of production of school material that
delimitate a racial history of Brazil. Most part of these authors took part in the networks
that connect the academic world to the racialist NGOs. They write as militants of a
cause, not as historians or social scientists. But pedagogy of race diffused broadly and it
is ideological suppositions tend to appear as natural truths. Proof of this are the manuals
written by academic specialists who, even without a political compromise to
multiculturalism or the racialist movement, reproduce the current dogmas of
historiography review.

Maria Luíza Tucci Carneiro, historian of University of São Paulo with relevant
researches on anti-Semitism, wrote a small book of didactical support destined to high
school students about racism in the history of Brazil. The book, published in 1996,
when the government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso sketched the policies of racial
preferences of the country, had already brought the great lines of the program of
racialist rectification of the past. In the introduction, the theoretical column of the entire
text appears under a definition of a concept of race: „race is the subdivision of a species,
formed by the entirety of individuals with similar physical aspects, transmitted by
heredity: skin color, shape of skull and face, type of hair, etc. To the human species, the
most common classification recognizes three races: white, black and yellow‟.

From this surprisingly restoration of scientific racism of the XIX century in

order to paraphrase the racial classification of Blumenbach (pages 12, 231), the author
develops an interpretative story that shows Brazil as a trajectory of oppression of blacks
by the whites. The final goal is expressed since the start, in the same introduction, as a
political program: to evidence the difference between the imagined Brazil characterized
by racial democracy and the real Brazil, racist and anti-Semite by tradition.

The first step is to differentiate the imagined abolition from the real one that
appears in the text as an event practically without consequences due to the subordinated
insertion in the labor market of the ex-slaves. There is no mention to the anti-
abolitionist popular movement, probably to not bring to surface facts and data that
impugn the racialist narrative of the past. Curiously, however, the author accuses the
white majority, represented by „some historians‟ to not present the truth when showing
abolition as fruit of kindness and capacity of initiative of the dominant classes.

In a narrative where slavery appears as a racial happening and abolition is

discharged as a gesture without further consequences, the Republican Brazil is
converted in the mere continuity of the Imperial enslaver Brazil. The single change
presented in the book would have been the substitution of irrationality of the slave
regime to the scientific rationality of the new ideas of racial superiority that
consolidated in the beginning of the XX century. In this line, adopting the wrong
supposition that the scientific racism guided the policies of Estate in the Republich, the
author challenge the facts to show the Era of Vargas as a moment of triumph of
Arianism and consecration of the Germanic type as the ideal model of man.

The second step is to convert the anti-racist thinking of Gilberto Freyre in a tool
destined to elude the people, hiding the oppression and racism under the shadow of the
myth of racial democracy. The theoretical somersault carried out with such finality
consists on arbitrarily establishing equivalence between mixing and the ideological
visions of whitening. In the resulting pastiche, Freyre is magically transformed in herald
of both „brownization‟ and „whitening‟, a manner to dilute the importance of the
conflict between the identity projects represented by one side the sociologist of
Pernambuco state and by the other side, the Arianist Oliveira Viana.

The third step is to diagnose the perennial existence of a hidden but structural
racism in the Brazilian society. This racism, masked of racial democracy, figures as a
mentality as dangerous as the one where it is openly declared. The young readers would
learn that all the discussion between the racist doctrine and the anti-racist ideas of
valorization of mixing has never happened or, if so, lacks importance. In the place of a
quarrelsome and tense history by which Brazil chose to not follow the same way of
USA of producing laws of racial segregation, Brazil would be the victim of an
ingenious trap of the dominant classes. Through it, slavery would be perpetuated,
transfigured in a system as perfect as invisible of oppression of one race on the other.

The book of Tucci Carneiro never reached the status of best-seller but haven´t
gone away from the stores. Ten years after its first edition, it continued to be used in
some schools although it was far from representing a racialist orthodoxy that substituted
the blacks by the Afro-descendents and adopted the concept of African nation in
Diaspora as consecrated by the Conference of Durban. The book was not remarkable
nor created a new paradigm of the school narratives about the history of Brazil. It was
just a peripheral echo but almost pioneer of the ambitious project of racialist re-
invention of the past that gained the seal of official educational policy.

THE COLOR OF POVERTY

The year of 1968 marked the end of the initial and milder period of the Brazilian
military dictatorship and the beginning of the years of lead. But this change would only
happen in December with the edition of the Institutional Act – 5 that cancelled the
remnant public freedom. Months before the new law and of his exile in USA, Abdias do
Nascimento defined the sense of the political intervention on the Black Experimental
Theatre: „the first step is the blacks assume their blackness. They suffer and are
discriminated because of the color of their skin that the others see. It is useless the
academic rhetoric that scientifically there is not a superior or an inferior race. What is
taken into account is the popular and social concept of race whose basal stone in Brazil
is based – worst than in the declared fight of races – on a shameful ornamental
prejudice, masked as esthetical perversion. It is so strong this perversion in our
environment that even the blacks have a bad image of being blacks.‟

Abdias was already in USA before going away from Brazil. He was saying that
the declared fight of races of the American style was preferable to the shameful
ornamental prejudice present in Brazil because it didn´t left to the blacks other
alternatives than assuming their blackness.

USA interpreted themselves as a nation without clear barriers of social class,

where all people has the opportunity to economically ascend but is also a country
divided by impassable racial frontier. Neither one nor the other image is correct in
reality, but social images are cultural constructions anyway. Brazil, in the contrary, sees
itself as a mixed nation without racial barriers but crossed by marked divisions of
classes. The social inequality, not the difference of color, always seemed to the
Brazilians to represent the real political challenge in the trajectory of modernization of
the country. From this it results the difficulty found by the black leaderships in
constructing a black movement of masses.

The Brazilian Black Front, spite its ideological configuration similar to fascism,
became a celebrated symbol of the black leaders of the country who saw in it a singular
example of a movement of masses. The anthropologist Peter Fry registered the
existential dilemma with the finding that a black community conscious of itself is
restricted to the black militants and concluded that the primordial objective of the black
leaders is to create a racial conscience.

In the Brazilian conditions the production of a racial conscience pass through a

decisive conceptual instance that is to elaborate identification between race and social
class. The poor are black and the blacks are poor: here it comes the indispensable
intellectual transition for the dissolution of the supposed mistakes generated by the
popular imagination of miscegenation. The sociologist and president of Republic
Fernando Henrique Cardoso tried to carry out the transition but Carlos Hasenbalg
conclude the theoretical jump toward a sociology guided by the taxonomy of races.

In 2001 at the Conference of Durban, in a speech pronounced during a ceremony

of human rights, the president FHC reminded his times of researcher in Southern Brazil:
„I will never forget that in the many favelas where I walked in, the black families
always lived in the poorer areas. The most miserable places of the favelas were where
the black families lived. The findings of the young sociologist were already organized
around the polarity black/white but had no intentions to offer generic statistical pictures
where the social inequalities appeared solely as racial inequalities.
 Hasenbalg did exactly this. In his classical study published in 1979 one year
after the foundation of the Black Unified Movement, he invented a statistical creation to
demonstrate that poverty had color and race, an expression later adopted by the racialist
leaders. The sociologist was concerned essentially in investing against the historic
interpretation more or less consensual, adopted by Florestan Fernandes, that the
concentration of blacks in the poorer layers represents inheritance of slavery. This thesis
was that the racial prejudice and an insidious prejudice conserved the blacks in poverty.

From Hasenbalg and after, tireless statistical efforts follow the project of
reinterpretation of the Brazilian society on racial lines. Statistics illuminate, clarify,
deceive, and hide to persuade. In the words of Mark Twain of more than a century:
„numbers several times elude me, particularly when I myself organized them, a situation
in which the observation attributed to Disraeli is frequently applied with force and
justice: there are three types of lies: the little white lies, the disgusting lies and
statistics‟. The crucial operation in the statistical act was to gather the census categories
of „blacks‟ and „browns‟ (pardos) in the ideological category of „blacks‟, carried out
during the government of FHC from pressures of racialist NGOs. After, under the
presidency of Lula, the new orientation adopted by the Institute of Geography and
Statistics (IBGE) spread out to all the federal organs.

The rule of self-declaration of color/race is based on the inexistence of official

racial labels in Brazil. More than two fifths of the population declared as „brown‟ in the
census of 2000. Racialist NGOs proposed the substitution of the categories of „black‟
and „brown‟ to a same „Afro-descendent‟ category. They quickly gave up on the idea
because previous essays pointed out that this strategy would promote a sudden
significant statistical whitening of the census. The found solution was to stealthily
withhold the right to self-declaration: people can name themselves as browns to the
census and the raw data will present it. But the results would only be broadcasted
ignoring what people said. The historian José Murilo de Carvalho called it as a
„statistical racial genocide‟. The neologism „brownicide‟ was created.

In the National Survey of Samples of Houses (PNAD) of 2004, the mean income
of people with ten or more years of working reached 7.4 minimum salaries to the
„yellows‟, 3.8 to the whites, 2.1 to the blacks and 2.0 to the browns. The first had an
average of 10.7 years of schooling against 8.4 to the whites, 6.4 to the blacks and 6.2 to
the browns. An objective analysis of the information evidences a greater diffusion of
poverty among blacks and mixed of all skin tonalities. However, the rectification
propitiated by the statistical brownicide conducts to the interpretation that the country is
rigidly divided into three races separated by a deep social abyss.

An essay of Abdias do Nascimento and Elisa Larkin Nascimento characterizes

as „arbitrary and subjective‟ the distinction of the census between blacks and browns
explained that „nowadays it is a consensus the convention of identifying the black
population as the sum of the amount of both groups. Since statistical delinquency tends
to dissolve the most basic intellectual parameters of analysis, the authors went further
when they affirm that the categories of whites and browns are notoriously inflated by a
tendency of the Afro-descendent interviewed people to classify themselves as whites or
mulattos and conclude that the estimation about the total participation of the black
population reach 70 to 80% when it is taken into consideration the distortion that results
from the ideal of whitening.

Clearly the authors search to rectify the information of the census in order to
find their desired race of the Afro-descendants in the official demographic statistics.
The geneticists have shown that more than 70 to 80% of the Brazilians present African
ancestry, including many whites with blue eyes and blond hair. But also, they revealed
that the immense majority of the browns and a significant portion of the blacks present
European ancestry. Such extensive and complex mixing can´t be expressed in the fixed,
rigid and closed categories of the census. Therefore, affirming that the black population
performs four fifths or more of the total is as true or as false as affirming that the white
Euro-descendants present the same proportion. Regarding a supposed statistical
inflation of whites and browns, it would solely reflect a scorn of the Brazilian
perception of racial identities.

After those methodological observations, the authors devoted to carry out

comparisons of socioeconomic, educational and vital indicators of the groups of
race/color. The radiography is sustained only on the elemental resource of general
means. Standard deviations or other measurements of deviation were not taken into
consideration. They used tables from since the decade of 1990 and showed data by
either gathering of blacks and browns into the black category or considering just whites
and non-whites (without expressing if the Indians and Asiatic are in this or in the white
category). In no moment the authors remember that if the supposed inflation of the
white category was true would contaminate all their own comparative tables hence
destroying any reliableness of their conclusion. The basic conclusion that the authors
forcedly reached was that Brazil was not distinguishable from the South Africa of
apartheid: „Racial hierarchy and segregation are printed in constrastant landscapes of
luxury and privation, where the Afro-descendants live in favelas and stilt houses in a
proportion greater than of their participation in the general population. Visiting the
station of Central do Brasil is to testify trains dangerously dilapidated that take hours to
transport the workers, majoritarianly blacks, to the place of work in the City, scenario
that reminds the journey of the South African blacks of the segregated townships. The
racial contrast between a public school of Baixada Fluminense or the poor suburbs or
favelas of any place in Brazil and a university located in a rich place such as the South
Zone of Rio de Janeiro is too much close to copy the difference between a school of a
township and a white university of South Africa. The difference is that in the South
African townships there were black universities working even during the apartheid
period, but in the favelas and poor suburbs of Brazil they don´t exist‟.

This image is both false in describing the exact reality of South Africa and in
producing the image of an American South Africa, submitted to an even more hateful
apartheid because of being hidden by the myth of racial democracy. Such images are the
goal of the act of racialism in the sphere of the socioeconomic statistics. Almost
everything, of course, can be obtained by an efficient ordering of the data…

Statistics on the perch

The racialist project was carried out in its initial phase in interpretative essays of
known authors that reflected a selection of handling of published raw data of IBGE with
limited political efficiency. The difficulty was overcome when Ipea – Institute of
Applied Economic Research – came to the scene. In the government of Lula, the
respected Institute, founded in 1964, slowly lost its technical autonomy, in a process of
ideological subjection to the power man on duty that peaked with the transference of
Ipea from the Ministry of Planning to the Board of Strategic Matters. During this
transition, Ipea elaborated together with Unifem - United Nations Development Fund
for Women – the study entitled „Report of Inequalities‟ that received a second edition in
2006.

The Report of Inequalities is written by four women linked to the feminist and
racialist academic network, but it takes the seal of Ipea that confers an almost official
aspect. In the presentation, it is revealed that the aim of the study is to disseminate
among social movements, researchers, administrators, parliamentarians, students data of
IBGE that allows us to see in an explicit and comprehensible form the huge inequalities
that are presented between blacks and whites and men and women in education, labor
market and access to services. In other words, the presentation admitted that it was not a
sociological study but a political and ideological tool. In the words of the authors, a
powerful instrument in the fight for the construction and real guarantee of equality
between blacks and whites, men and women.

It is a shocking declaration. The authors never intended to reach people

familiarized with statistics, but only to subsidize the official racialist propaganda. As a
methodological norm, the study summarizes the differences of color/race of the
Brazilian population in only two categories: blacks and whites. All the graphs and tables
bring the important observation that „the black population is composed by blacks and
browns‟, a technical note in which a complete doctrine is condensed.

The suppression of browns produces magically a Brazil divided almost in the

middle in two polar races, and ideal model for the engineers of racial laws. Also hidden
under the mantle used before by Abdias and Elisa Larkin, the broad diffusion of poverty
among the mixed that according to the classification of the census represented 42% of
the total population and about 70% of the population of the North (Amazonian) region
where the predominant mixing is between whites with indigenous. What is shown and
what is hidden is not irrelevant. The study of Ipea was based mostly in the smaller data
of the Sample Survey (PNAD) of 2004. The same information analyzed by Ali Kamel
suggests that poverty and educational deficiencies are a little bit bigger among the
browns than among the blacks. Since there are browns of all sorts of skin tonalities, this
is a strong indication that it is not in racism the origin of the strong social inequalities of
the country.

From beginning to end, the study reveals a preferred option to the general
means. This is typical of rudimentary statistical approaches but is not derived from
technical inability, but rather from ideological passion. It works to torture the data until
extract from them the parallel confessions that the poor are poor because they have a
dark skin and that poverty never glues to people with skin with less melanin. In Brazil,
the 1% of the richer group of the population, ideologically composed by whites,
presents an income superior to the 40% of the poorest, an extreme disparity that pulls up
all the means referred to the whites. The means hide the absolute numbers of poor
Brazilians that in 2004 were divided in 34 millions of browns, 19 millions of whites and
4 millions of blacks. They also hide the masses of poor of clearer skin of the peripheries
of the great cities, of the Northeastern caatinga and of the Amazon holms.

The thesis that in Brazil the structures of social classes and of groups of
color/race are as identified as in USA or South Africa of apartheid has no support in any
investigation minimally rigorous. A statistical analysis free of ideological
presuppositions devoted to the inequalities of income of Northeast and based in raw
data of PNAD to all the decade of 1995 to 2004 showed that the differences of income
inside the groups of race are much more significant than the inequalities among these
groups in the total inequality. But information like these don´t appear in the study of
Ipea because they enter in conflict to the racialist dogma that must be proved.

The game of occultation also hits the most significant aspect to understand
poverty in Brazil that is the regional socio-economic inequalities. The emergence of the
exporting coffee complex of the XIX century and the subsequent industrial development
transformed the national economy, concentrating the modern activities in the Center-
South. Modernization, spatially unequal, reflected in very different rates of productivity
– hence the generation of richness – among the regions of the country. The vital,
educational and income indicators shows the deep disparities between the Center-South
from one side and Northeast and Amazon from the other side. Much of what is seen by
the distorted lenses of means as being inequalities among groups of color is in fact
inequality among regions.

About three quarters of the so-called whites live in South and Southeast, the
richest regions, while 53% of the so-called blacks – in fact the browns and blacks – live
in North and Northeast, the poorer regions. In general, the blacks of South and
Southeast present social indicators better than the whites of Northeast. Such crossing of
information shines by their absence in the study of Ipea certainly due to what they
reveal: the regional question is much more important than the racial question to explain
the Brazilian social inequalities.
 Even the graphics of Ipea that supposedly picture the inequalities of a nation
divided in polar races are not capable to totally hide the landscape of the differences
among the regions. One of the graphics that represent the proportion of poor, defined as
persons with familiar income per capita less than half a minimum salary, in the five
great regions of Brazil ended to evidence the fallacy of the racial presupposition.
Through this graphic it is known that the proportion of poor whites from Northeast is of
44.6%, much superior to the proportion of poor blacks from the Southeast (28.1%),
South (28.4%) and Central-West (27.6%). From this data, of course, a smart
manipulator of statistics could easily lift the flag of concession of privileges to the
people from Northeast in labor market, public service and universities.

Nobody denies that as a fruit of slavery, poverty hits a greater proportion of the
people with darker skin. However, as a consequence of the manners by which the
Brazilian economy entered in the industrial era, poverty also affects in a different
manner other groups such as the people from Northeast and the rural inhabitants. The
statistical emphasis in the color of skin has no special explanative value but responds to
well articulated political interests.

Geography has something to say about the scenario of inequalities. In a map

devoted to the disparities and territorial dynamics of Brazil, the authors constructed,
based on sample data of the census of 1991, maps of typology of poor and rich
according to skin color. Here, according to the official classification of poverty in
Brazil, families with income less than three minimum salaries monthly are poor and
riches are families with income superior to 10 minimum salaries monthly. Theoretically,
any family receiving a minimum salary should be enough for at least being „low
medium class‟, but the salary policies of Brazil clearly undervalues the workers and
purposely concentrates income, generating and reproducing masses of poor.

Anyway, these maps reveal the frontier South/North of Brazil. In the Northern
Brazil of Amazon and Northeast as well as some parts of the Central-West and North of
Minas Gerais state, the browns predominate among the poorest and also among the
richest. Symmetrically in Southern Brazil made by the South, São Paulo state, Minas
Gerais state and parts of the Central-West the whites predominate among the richest and
also among the poorest. The exceptions are punctual such as the predominance of blacks
among the poorest in Rio de Janeiro and in Concave of Bahia state and the
predominance of indigenous among the poorest in the Amazon regions.

These maps are definite proofs of the existence of a society of classes, not a
society of races. Since in Southern Brazil the whites are the demographic majority, they
are also the majority of the riches and of the poor. In the same way, in Northern Brazil,
the browns are the majority of the population, so that the majority of both riches and
poor is brown. Brazil is not another USA. Nor another South Africa.
The talented 10%

In USA with Richard Nixon and the executive orders of the black capitalism, it
was delineated several racial policies destined to stimulate the growth of black elite in
the business world. From the point of view of the American government, the strategy
would have the finality to both reduce the general unhappiness generated by the deep
economic inequalities in a society where it was not easy to differentiate social classes
from racial groups. The black elite that would emerge from the stimulations from the
public power would work as an agent of order, contributing to social and political
stability.

The multiculturalist thinking, organized by black leaders and by Ford

Foundation, was aligned to the vision of Nixon, expressing it in their own terms. If race
is the alpha and omega of history and if each race is the carrier of a singular message, as
Du Bois said, so the diverse races must have their own elites. In USA, interpreted as a
multicultural entity in where a white nation lives together with an oppressed Afro-
American nation, the goal of equality should be translated as the equality between races.
Through this point of view, the appearance of black elites would represent the initial
and decisive step of the improvement of the Afro-American nation to a step compatible
to the one of the white nation.

The American doctrine of the black capitalism worked as a fountain of

inspiration to post-apartheid South Africa. The Black Economic Empowerment was
designed with the explicit goal to create black business elites. The project ended in
practice in the interlacement of the directing elite of the National African Congress to a
new class of capitalists that got established under the apparatus of the Estate. In general,
and spite isolated criticisms, the program of racial privileges was seen with sympathy
by the world powers that say in the ascension of the new class an insurance against the
perennial rupture of the liberal economic order of South Africa.

Booker T. Washington, the adored American black leader, contributed with an

essay to the collection The Black Problem, published in 1903. Among the essays
published in the book, there is a small text of Du Bois, suggestively entitled „The
talented 10%‟: „the black race, as all races, will be saved by their exceptional men. The
problem of education among the blacks must concern about the talented 10%; it is the
question of developing the best of this race that can guide the mass away to
contamination and death, coming from the riff raffs of their own and other races‟.

The vision of black intellectual elite that would lead the race-nation rescuing it
from poverty and addiction and putting it in a step of equality to the whites inspired the
creation of black institutions of superior school in USA and later by religious hands in
South Africa. This same vision, translated in terms of multiculturalism, asseverated the
support of innumerous black leaders to the programs of racial preferences implanted in
the American universities since the years 1970. The policies of racial quote for entering
the superior school in Brazil is sustained on the old conception of the talented 10% of
Du Bois, although their heralds try to sell it as a strategy to reduce social inequalities.

A singular expression of the Brazilian social inequalities is found in the paradox

of the educational system. In basic and high school, the march of universalisation of
education produced the bipartition between the public system of school, used mostly by
the poor and of low quality and the particular schools, destined to the classes of high
and medium income. The inverse occurs in the superior school: the vacancies in public
schools are very disputed so they predominantly are occupied by high and medium
classes while the private universities, that experience a quick expansion, receive mostly
students of the inferior and medium layers. This happening is not exclusive of Brazil;
The Economist, a review of London, published an essay where it says that this is rather
fruit of liberalism in education: expensive schools of medium level of high quality and
cheap faculties of low quality. The elitist nature of the public universities evidences the
extreme disparities of income in Brazil and also the official neglect to the quality of
public basic school. However, the means of this structure are simply converted to the
racialist language as a proof of the exclusion of blacks, instead of poor, in the access to
public universities.

The PNAD (national survey on home sampling) of 2006 revealed that in the age
group of 18 to 30 years, almost 13 million people had a familiar per capita income of
equal or less than a minimum salary. Inside this group of the poorest, 60% was
classified as browns, 9% as blacks and 30% as whites. Among the two first groups, only
16% had finished high school and among the whites, only 21%. Few people, blacks,
browns or whites continued studying entering in a faculty, which indicates that the
barrier is income, not color. By obvious reasons, racial quote to universities has not the
power to modify the panorama of exclusion that is verified much before the admission
exams and with a socioeconomic nature. But they have a double objective in the project
of bringing race as a matter to the social relations.

The first objective is to create black intellectual elite in a strong ideological

sense of the term. In Brazil, as in USA, Ford Foundation and the NGOs that orbit
around their finances aim to capture the students of quote to their political cause,
converting them in activists of multiculturalism. The students of quote, in the language
used by these groups, have the moral obligation to compensate the given benefit, „going
back‟ to „help‟ their „community‟. The administration of University of Brasília, a
federal public institution that put itself in the vanguard of the racial policies, created a
Center for Black Friendship destined to facilitate the co-option of the black quote
students by the NGOs of the black movement. According to the official site of rectory,
the Center develops the functions of offering to the quote holders „information and
formation regarding the importance of their presence in university‟ and to „serve as a
space for debate to all academic community, articulating the groups of opinion of the
University in favor of the goals of racial inclusion‟.
 The second is to create a racial community conscious of itself. In USA and
South Africa, the long histories of segregationist laws marked a racial frontier.
Everybody in these countries think it is easy to define who is black and who is white,
but the data presented in this book showed that in a considerable amount of situation,
the „mixed‟ people creates serious confusion. These countries inscribed races in law and
officially classified the persons in groups defined by ancestry. In Brazil, in the contrary,
racial frontiers don´t exist in the consciences. The historical paradigm of mixing
together with the absence of segregationist laws inhibited the emergence of clearly
defined racial groups. Under a multiculturalist perspective, the production of black elite
demands simultaneously the construction of a black race, a socially delimitated group
that defines its interests in racial terms and that is organized around racialist political
leaderships.

The sphere of education is the most propitious to the construction of a racial

conscience than the world of business. The programs for racial quote for admission to
universities can´t work without to each entered candidate it is glued a label of race. The
difficulty is much greater than in USA and South Africa and consists on establishing
frontiers between blacks and whites in a country where more than two fifths self declare
as mixed. The instrument of self declaration of color/race as working in the census gives
to all candidates the declaration for the most convenient option to the practical finality
to conquer a vacancy in a public free superior school. The declared identity must be
officially audited and certified. The method tend to evolve to a national and uniform
system of racial classification of the citizens, which means, in the end, to the official
edification of a black race that shares the interest to preserve tools for privileged access
to universities.

Racial tribunals

The brothers Thomas Ewbank and Joseph Ewbank were born in Durham, United
Kingdom in the end of the XVIII century. Joseph Ewbank went to Brazil, married to a
Brazilian woman and operated Mason stores in Rio de Janeiro. Several years later, in
1819, Thomas Ewbank migrated to USA and invested in industrial segments, becoming
very rich. In 1846 he came to see his older brother and spent 6 months in Rio. He was a
scholar man and wrote several articles in physics, economics, etc. And wrote a book
entitled „Life in Brazil or a Journal of a Visit to the Land of the Cocoa and the Palm‟.
He registered cultural differences from Brazil and, in the same way Darwin did when he
visited Brazil, he got terribly impressed by the slavery in Brazil. He describes the public
drubs against slaves, the instruments of torture applied in those who tried to escape and
the daily news about missing slaves. At that time, the public transport in Rio was carried
out by cars pulled by four horses. He registered as noticeable that spite the disseminated
slavery and in contrast to USA, the free blacks used the cars normally. He then observed
that the slaves walked in bare foot, but the freed blacks used shoes, and blacks using
shoes used the cars, the stores, the confectioneries together and side by side with their
white ex-owners. Definitely, in Brazil, the slaves were slaves because they were slaves,
not because they were blacks. No matter the skin color, facing the laws and the society
in general, a free man was a free man.

Donna Shalala, an American daughter of Lebanese immigrant hadn´t completed

30 year-old in the end of the decade of 1960 when she started lecturing Political Science
in the University of New York (Cuny). She soon became an activist of the American
Federatio of Teachers, the national syndicate of the category, at that time involved,
together with Ford Foundation, in a reform of the public schools of New York that
would reveal to be catastrophic. In Cuny, Shalala started an academic and political
career that would conduct her to the position of Secretary of Health in the government
Bill Clinton. Before this, in the apogee of the affirmative action policies, she was rector
of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where she implanted an aggressive program
of preferential access in racial basis and a strict and Kafkaesque code of language based
in the norms of the politically correct that later was declared unconstitutional by a
federal tribune.

In the years in front of the University in Madision, Shalala pronounced an

implacable general accusation that at the same time despised all the fights for civil
rights: „Universities are institutionally racist. The American society is racist and sexist.
The hidden racism of nowadays is as harmful as the explicit racism of thirty years ago‟.
This accusation of Shalala appeared slightly amended to the „small‟ detail that Brazil
never knew something similar to the Jim Crow laws (see page 87) in the mouth of the
rector of the University of Brasilia, Timothy Mulholland. „Brazil is a racist country and
the University of Brasilia is a university with a racist soul‟ – proclaimed the director
whose administration consolidated the most clear racialist program of the Brazilian
superior school system.

Since the XIX century when D. João Pedro went to Brazil running away from
Napoleon and opened the first Brazilian superior schools, the Brazilian universities and
faculties carry out annual or semiannual exams for admission of students. The
curriculum of the candidates is prohibited to be taken into consideration (with the
exception of the post-graduation courses): the universities must admit the candidates
who get the higher notes on the exams. In the past, the exams included oral exams;
nowadays, only written texts are applied to the candidates. Each university is free to
settle and apply their own tests, but it is raising a national biannual system for selection
of candidates, where anyway who gets the higher notes gets the vacancies. Regarding
the admission to universities, Timothy Mulholland and his advisors never clarified how
exactly mathematic, language, scientific and writing tests could be racist: would the
correct answers change according the skin color of the candidate?

In Brazil, the first institution of superior education to adopt a system of reserving

vacancies for racial quote was the State University of Rio de Janeiro in 2003 after the
approval in the Legislative Assembly of the state. In the same year, racial quote was
approved by the Federal University of Bahia and by the State University of South Mato
Grosso. University of Brasília started one year later, from a political articulation of the
professors of the Department of Anthropology and the Board for Racial Equality
(Seppir).

Reunions of university organs generally present a powerful sedative effect,

dominated by the bureaucratic routine. But the session of the Council of Education,
Research and Extension of University of Brasília from the beginning of June 2003
represented a dramatic exception to the rule. Chaired by the at that time vice-rector
Timothy Mulholland, the reunion was open by a lecture of the chief of Seppir Matilde
Ribeiro and had concurred participation of activists of NGOs of the black movement.
The discussions were concentrated in the plan elaborated by the anthropologists José
Jorge de Carvalho and Rita Laura Segato that reserved 20% of the vacancies to black
candidates. It was not previewed a deliberation, but Seppir and the authors of the plan
pressured by an immediate voting with the support of the present activists. In the end,
with 24 favorable votes, one abstention and one diverging vote, the collegiate body
approved the implementation of the system of racial quote.

The application of the new method of admission was tasked to a university

commission and to Cespe, the organ responsible for the admission exams of the
institution. They decided to adopt routines destined to inhibit the action of „racial
fakers‟. Inspired in the model of the State University of South Mato Grosso, they
deliberated for the racial certification by means of shots of the candidates inscribed in
the system of quotes. The edict coming from this deliberation informed that the
candidate must be of black or brown color; declare themselves as black and choose the
system of quote to blacks. It also explained that a shot of the candidates would be taken
at the moment of inscription and that a commission would decide, based on the images,
about the homologation of the inscription of the candidate.

The photos deterred and confounded many candidates since the first admission
exam that applied the new method. A recurrent doubt was if the criteria would be
physical appearance or ancestry. Candidates with clear skin were rejected even having
siblings with darker skins or proved being descendents of slave grandparents. The
decision according to Romilda Macarini, at that time the general director of Cespe was
that the homologation commission was tasked to analyze phenotypes, not ancestries. In
a remnant phrase of the scientific racism she explained: „they must take into
consideration the skin tonality, the hair type and the typical facial traces of the black
race‟.

In the beginning of the adoption of racial quote, the blacks would have reserved
at least 20% of the vacancies, which means, if a black candidate were not selected
inside the reserved vacancies, their notes would still be considered for selection to the
other vacancies. With such privilege, the search for the quotes exploded. Many „brown‟
or „honeyed white‟ candidates used resources to „look black‟ such as getting exposed to
sunlight for long time and applying substances in the hair to get it curly. In reality, the
bureaucratic structure of the University could not support such demand. So, the solution
was laughable if not creepy: after some edicts, the Council of Education decided that a
candidate to the quote would have only the right to compete to the reserved vacancies,
which means, even if a non-selected candidate of the quote gets higher notes than the
candidates to the „universal system‟ of selection, they will not enter the university.
Which means, from a before open system based on merit, the maximal percentage of
blacks in the university would be 20% if all the blacks chose the quote system. What
was to include blacks to create elite quickly turned into a barrier against social
improvement.

The racial tribunal of University of Brasília in the original version was affiliated
to the thesis of Oracy Nogueira that in the years 1950 proposed the distinction between
the prejudice of origin, typical of USA and the singularly Brazilian prejudice of „mark‟,
anchored in physical appearance. In a pungent critical essay, the sociologist Marcos
Chor Maio and the anthropologist Ricardo Ventura Santos uncovered the senses of the
homologation commission created by the bureaucrats of University of Brasília. This
commission is constituted by a student of the University, three representatives of NGOs
of the black movement, one sociologist and one anthropologist and must represent the
paper of „eyes of the society‟, identifying the persons that due to their appearance may
be target of racial prejudice. The criteria for selecting these people are not clear and the
payment they receive is hidden.

In the first admission exam of the new system, some dozens of rejected
candidates appealed for a revision in the second instance of the university. The solution
was to require from the claimants an official document of proving the color and
constitute a second commission, tasked to interview them. The evolution of the racial
definition at this moment changed from appearance back to ancestry so the result was
that a candidate must look like black or, if „diluted‟ by being mixed to „whites‟, show
that they have an ancestor somewhere classified as black. According to the sour irony of
Maio and Santos, a committee of racial psychology was tasked to continue the work of
racial certification of race started by the committee of racial anatomy.

The structure of the racial tribunal of the University resembles the Nazi tribunals
against the Jews. The structure is the same. Ideologically, the University says that the
tribunal on selective exams is for the „good‟ of the blacks and „the society‟. But since
installed and working, in an eventual future conflict the structure will have already been
created, and the experiences of Rwanda and Burundi are here to prove that these
structures of power can quickly degenerate in genocide.

The pioneer universities of the systems of quote served as model to many others
that created their own program. In the way, innumerable candidates felt the strange
experience of being judged and condemned as „racial fakers‟. Some of the most curious
cases reached the pages of the journals, evidencing the dilemmas of racial identification
in a society marked by mixing. In 2003, the State University of South Mato Grosso
refused 76 candidates that in the words of the president of the State Council of the
Rights of the Blacks didn´t present the full black appearance: thick lips, „pixaim‟ hair
and short nose.

The transition from mulatto to black doesn´t present difficulties, but from brown
to black may start true identity nightmares. In 2009, the Federal University of São
Carlos cancelled the enrolment of Juan Felipe do Nascimento Gomez. The institution
rejected in a row a declaration of public faith where his mother identified herself as
brown, a birth register of his mother grandmother as black and a hospital register where
his mother was classified as brown. In the same year, Tatiana de Oliveira was expulsed
from the Federal University of Santa Maria less than a month after she had began
Pedagogy. This university inscribes candidates based on self-declaration but later it can
interview the approved candidates and reject the enrolment. Tatiana, whose father is
defined as brown and grandfather as black was not cogent enough.

Dione Moura, rapporteur of the plan of quotes of University of Brasília,

previewed with bureaucratic calm the appearance of cases where the frontier of race
would separate biological siblings. It is fact that the symbols of a culture are social
constructions that present no strict concordance with the „solid‟ facts, and the „black‟
anthropologists say that race is a social construction. But breaking all biological sense
regarding race definitely means that these racial debates hide noxious interests. Never in
Biology could siblings be of different races! Dione Moura, notwithstanding, never
expected that the frontier of race would separate monozygotic twins. Alex and Alan
Teixeira da Cunha inscribed to the exam: one was „selected‟ to the quote system, the
other was rejected.

In a mixed country, this ridiculous fact spread quickly in journals and

newspapers. Silently and quickly the University accepted the appeal of the rejected twin
and inscribed him in the racial quote system. His appealing, however, extinguished the
committee of racial anatomy at the time of inscription to the contest. The racial
certification by photo images didn´t resist to the demoralization of the case of the twin
brothers. All the process started to be surveyed only by the commission tasked to
interview the candidate approved in the system of reserve of vacancies. The institution
only informs that the members of the commission are professors, representatives of
organ of human rights, of the promotion of racial equality and of militants of the black
movement of Brasília. This commission is so powerful that the decisions are irrevocable
and the members are kept in complete secrecy. All the tribunals of exception present
these same aspects.

The changes certainly were joyful to Carvalho and Segato, the mentors of the
original plan who have declared in 2004 their discordances regarding certification by
photos. The University of Brasília went away from the paradigm of Oracy Nogueira. In
the place of the apparent mark of race, the racial tribunal searches for a mark of
conscience: the ideological blackness. The fragmented information on the first
interviews of the committee of racial psychology carried out in the time when it worked
as second instance allows us to write a terrible spectacle. According to the candidate
Alex Fabiany José Muniz that had his appeal accepted, the „interview presents a high
political consistence (…). They asked me if I had participated on a black movement or
if I had ever dated a mulatta or black woman.‟

Brasília can be a model but is not alone. The ideological blackness is also what
the racialist tribunal of Santa Maria searched when it condemned Tatiana to lose her
enrolment. In the interview in front of a committee equally composed by professors and
militants of the black movement the young lady was asked if she had felt as a victim of
prejudice before. „I told I consider myself brown, but clearer than my father because my
mother is white. I answered that I never suffered from any kind of prejudice and I chose
the system of quote because it gives a chance to us, of brown color, can enter the
university. I told them the truth.‟ She told the wrong truth. The first prejudice act she
suffered in her life was from blacks against browns.

Facing the argument that the selections to universities are neutral, the heralds of
the racial quotes stated that the racial quotes are a service of the university to the society
that would soon be seeing blacks in high positions such as doctors, engineers, lawyers,
teachers, etc and thereafter would have no prejudice against blacks anymore. According
to them, there were only a few blacks in the seats of the university, so the creation of
racial quote would change this situation. Again, such racialist argument doesn´t resist to
a simple scrutiny. University of Brasília publishes the lists of selected candidates, the
individual notes of each one and the range of notes of the selected candidates. Taking
the most disputed courses – Law, Medicine, Dentistry – the range of notes of the
„universal system‟ is approximately the same of the „quote system‟. Which means, the
selected „blacks‟ to these elite professions would have entered the university with or
without quote. It is even possible that more blacks would be entering to university if
they hadn´t to make a choice between the quote and the universal system…

A woman of white skin and blue eyes

The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 is anti-racist and defines the nation in non-
racial terms. In the 3rd article among the fundamental goals of the Republic, it appears
the improvement of all, without prejudices of origin, race, sex, color, age and any other
forms of discrimination‟. In the 4th article among the principles that govern Brazil in the
international relationships there is the repudiation of racism and terrorism. In the 5 th
article the practice of racism is defined as a crime not subject to bail or prescription.
Nothing in the constitutional text admits the production of racialist laws.

Note of the translator: in 2012, the Federal Superior Tribunal, the

constitutionalist tribunal of Brazil, declared the racial quote as constitutional. In fact,
several processes had already been carried out in inferior instances so the result was
not exactly a surprise. The position of the judges was dubious and inconclusive, as
typically occurs in Brazil. They considered the practice as constitutional because they
were under the sphere of ‘university autonomy’ since the universities adopted the
paradigms of reasonably, proportionality and temporality. This process was specifically
judging the case of University of Brasília, that declared in 2004 that the racial quote
would last 10 years and then they would be ‘re-evaluated’ regarding continuity (as seen
in this book, the tendency of racial privileges is to get permanent). In the day of the
audience, April 26th, the Indian Araju Sepete Guarani was arrested in the plenary of the
Tribunal due to ‘disturbing the public order’. He shouted that Brazil was a country
divided into three races: whites, blacks and Indians and the Indians were the most
oppressed, exploited and disrespected. He was not totally wrong: the Brazilian
Constitution considers the Indians as not reachable by the law and having some legal
privileges. In other words, they are treated as another ‘species’, not as human beings
who will experience strong cultural exchanges and will soon get integrated in the
country.

The political support of the Constitution is placed in the concept of equality

derived from the republican project of the French Revolution of 1789. Multiculturalism
presents as an alternative to this utopia. In the words of the economist Ricardo
Henriques, a herald of the policies of racial preferences in Brazil: „Our challenge is to
break up with the French republican matrix. All of us were culturally educated and the
great majority studied in a basis of this great French universalist matrix that thinks the
imperative of equality is the better matrix to carry out any intervention, treating all as
equal. This is the most cynic strategy to face the problem‟.

He is right if the „problem‟ is the production of „racial equality‟. The goal, which
supposes the previous creation of races, can only be reached by the rupture with the
„French republican matrix‟ and the substitution of the principle of equality to the
difference. But the transition from a principle to another face obstacles that are away
from the strictly political sphere. Besides approval of laws, norms and regulations based
on the principle of racial difference, the multiculturalism must persuade the Brazilians
to define themselves according the bipolar taxonomy black/white.

The methods of persuasion have always the same objective that is the conversion
of people that describe themselves as brown or black to merely census effect into
members of a black race, or better, of a black denomination. The racial pedagogy in the
expression used by Chor Maio and Ventura Santos is carried out by material stimulation
that makes difference in the practical life and expectations of the young people who
complete high school. Assuming the „desired‟ racial identity pays the return of a higher
probability of entering a public university and may open the possibility of future
benefits such as scholarships of graduation or post-graduation courses and internships in
NGOs inserted in academic and business networks.

The racial pedagogy applied by the University of Brasília, with its committees of
analysis of photo images or identity declarations given in interviews implies in
canceling the self declaration of color/race. It is a violence masked in caricatures of
science that received formal disapproval of the Commission of Ethnic and Racial
Relationships of the prestigious Brazilian Association of Anthropology: „the pretense
objective of the mechanisms adopted by University of Brasília constitutes a constraint
to the individual rights, clearly against the free self identification. Besides, it shrugs off
the conceptual structures of the Social Sciences and particularly of the Social
Anthropology and Biological Anthropology‟.

If the objectives are invariable, the methods oscillate according the

circumstances. In the Federal University of South Rio Grande, the racial pedagogy
assumed a form distinct from University of Brasília. The institution adopted racial quote
in 2007 and chose to submit to self declaration of the candidates. In a sailing-around in
the public high schools destined to explain the new rules of the game, a coordinator of
the process of selection calmed down the fears of students that described themselves as
browns but had the helpless label of white in their birth registers. She explained that it
was not any register, but the self-declaration that would decide the racial status of the
candidates, as everything depended on „appearance‟.

In University of Brasília, „appearance‟ is also what is important. But an

appearance interpreted by scholar academics and furious activists congregated in racial
tribunals. The method of the Federal University of South Rio Grande excludes the type
of violence denunciated by the Brazilian Association of Anthropology and results in a
greater racial fluidity: whites in Brasília can perfectly be blacks in South Rio Grande.
The absence of uniformity of criteria, in a first sight a weakness of the racial pedagogy,
has its efficiency. In South Rio Grande, according to the census of 2000, the browns are
only 7% and the blacks, 4% of the population, but the vacancies reserved to the blacks
in the institution sum 15% of the total. The method of self declaration and the racial
fluidity that follows the method propitiates the opportunity to rectify the demographic
profile of the state by the progressive expansion of the proportion of browns among the
pre-university group.

Spite the advantages, the flexibility of criteria can´t last longer because it
exposes the explosive tension in two interests of the Brazilian racialists. The first is to
proclaim that the blacks represent half of the Brazilian population, which needs to sum
in the racial category the browns and the blacks. The second is to trace a clear frontier
between whites and blacks, in a way to create a feeling of racial cohesion in the parcel
of the population they can represent. The back dilemma can be expressed by the
following way: what to do with the masses of clear browns that tend to inscribe
themselves as blacks in the systems of selection to universities by racial quotes in order
to dispute privileged vacancies?

The young Juan Felipe is far from being an exception. In the Federal University
of São Carlos, about 25% of the candidates selected by the system of racial quote in
2009 had their enrolment cancelled due to decisions of the commissions of racial
certification. The racial tribunals created in the universities move according their
political profile and bureaucratic logic. The racialist activists that form the majority of
these commissions believe in the dogma of race and in coherence to their belief they
reject the racial impurity. In the same direction, the inherent logic of a commission of
identity certification favors seeking fakers. Politically, the results of the process tend to
destroy the presupposition that blacks and browns are variants of the same racial group.
Practically, they generate intermittent turbulences in the system of selection to superior
education, requiring frequent intervention of Justice.

In its section of letters of readers the journal O Globo published in 2002 a small
text of César Augusto Nicodemus de Souza. His criticism is expressed in the way of a
doubt and clarifies what is in game in the laws of racial quote: „son of a family with
roots in the Northeastern agreste of Pernambuco, a poor region where it occurred a great
miscegenation, I would like to know until what point the skin tonality of my kids and
other aspects will be considered for them to be accepted in the quote of blacks who will
have privileges in universities and public contests. The color of his eyes and type of hair
will be taken into account or the standard will be with a DNA test? I am not sure if the
fact I have married to a young lady of white skin and blue eyes will impair my sons and
grandsons, now that the public jobs will not be filled up only by merit‟.

The reader of O Globo perfectly understood the laws of race. They represent at
the same time an offensive against the principle of equality facing law and a trial to
revert in the political plan, the ideal of miscegenation over the Brazilian nation was
built. Moreover, it brings to universities the experiences of state of exception via racial
tribunals of exception.

Rivers that never meet

The Austrian mission that conducted to Brazil the archduchess Leopoldina of

Habsburg to marry to the future Emperor of Brazil, D. Pedro I shipped in Trieste in
April 1817. Together the German naturalists Karl Friedrich von Martius and Johann
Baptist von Spix traveled sent in a scientific expedition of the King of Bavaria. The first
botanical collections were organized with species of the Atlantic Forest of Rio de
Janeiro, at that time the capital of Brazil. From Rio, in horses and mules, Martius and
Spix started the long journey that would conduct them to São Paulo, Minas Gerais,
Bahia, São Luís, Belém and the Western domains of Amazon Forest.

From this expedition it was born the book Flora brasiliensis, the bigger
mastership of a flora ever written in the world, to which Martius was dedicated until his
end of life in 1868 and was amplified by other researchers until 1906. In parallel to a
detailed register of an astonishing number of species and genus, the book sketched a
pioneer proposal of geobotanical regionalization of Brazil that testifies the efforts of
generalization of a naturalist dedicated to the mission of his time, of detailed description
of nature in its particularities.

The Brazilian Geographic and Historic Institute was founded in 1838. At this
time, Martius had got a chair in University of Munich and also the direction of the
botanical garden of the city. With the Historic Institute, the elite of the Empire of Brazil
was devoted to the mission of construction of the nation in the cultural plan. Aiming to
build in the tropics a civilization of European inheritance, the members of the Institute
face the challenge to elaborate a national narrative. So, they opened a contest of
monographs based on a question of methodological aspect: „How should Brazilian
history be written?‟ The award of best monograph was given to the scholar German
naturalist.

Martius was a scientist in the time when the universities didn´t know the
frontiers of disciplines and academic specializations. Beside Botany, his interests
included Language, Music and Anthropology. His awarded text published in 1845
suggested the narration of Brazilian history was written around the axis of formation of
the Brazilian people from the mixing of races. The beautiful metaphor he chose was the
confluence of three rivers that would be the symbol of the races white, black and
indigenous.

The proposal of Martius was modern and in confrontation to the pattern of a

period when the historic narratives were referenced in the historic dynasties and in the
geopolitics of the territory, not in the people. As his contemporaries, he believed in the
existence and classification of human races and in a subsequent superiority of the
Portuguese as representatives of the white European race. However, shipping in an
opposed sense to a developing scientific draft, he never linked miscegenation to
degeneration. He imagined, anticipating the concept of whitening that got predominant
in the end of the XIX century, absorption of the black and indigenous influences by the
Portuguese blood. But he positively judged the contributions of the other races and
exhaled optimism regarding the future of Brazil that would derive from the original
experience of racial fusion. In fact, Biology says that racial fusions occur wherever two
or more races meet in a same geographic area or ecological niche. The experience of
racial fusion is a common feature of all Latin America and even „racist‟ societies, such
as USA, South Africa and Australia present a significant proportion of mixed people.

Louis Agassiz, the Swiss naturalist and professor in Harvard, a notorious

defender of polygenism, traveled in Brazil from 1865 to 1866. From his reports of
travel, he wrote a point of view contrary to Martius. In the Brazilian mixing he saw the
erosion of the best quality of the three races, a sick trajectory of degradation and
degeneration. Few years later, the French Arthur Gobineau influenced the decision of D.
Pedro II to start the immigration act as a tool destined to counterbalance the harmful
effects of the racial fusion.

The myth of origin of the meeting of rivers is placed on an optimistic view of

Brazil that would generate the anti-racist thinking of Haddock Lobo, Edgard Roquette-
Pinto, Juliano Moreira, Manoel Bomfim, Alberto Torres and Gilberto Freyre. The
concept of degeneration of Agassiz and Gobineau is the starting point of a pessimist
vision of the Brazilian nation, developed by the ideas of Nina Rodrigues, Paulo Prado,
Sílvio Romero and Oliveira Viana. The firsts elaborated the narrative of mixing; the
seconds imported to Brazil the narrative of race.

These two concurrent narratives develop the function of myths. Myth in the
anthropological sense is not the contrary of reality. Myths are not lies but also are not
truths. They are historic and literary constructions that confer a sense of past and project
the future of a community. The nations choose their myths of origin not at once, but
repeatedly throughout time. In the national crisis, consolidated narratives get converted
in target of ideological offensives and they can resist, change or disappear. Brazil of XX
century chose the myth of origin registered by Martius. But the myth of race re-appears
as an alternative of national reformulation in this beginning of XXI century. The debate
on the racial laws is deeply a re-discussion on what we are and what we want to be.

Redemption without return

Jurema Werneck from the NGO Criola sees Brazil as a land of exile of Africans
in the Diaspora. The concept of Diaspora, as in the case of the Jews, would link the
Afro-descendents to the „promise of the redemption return‟. From her point of view
(and after the experiences of Liberia and Serra Leon, see pages 157-167), the
redemption return is to the physical return to Africa as the Jamaican Marcus Garvey
wanted, but a metaphoric return guided by politics. The slave transatlantic traffic, she
explains, ruptured the spatial and geographical relation of a people with their origin.
However, such relation will somehow be perpetuated from the symbolic or artistic point
of view.

There is a program of action. The black and brown Brazilians don´t see
themselves as Afro-descendents and don´t identify as a people and even less as a people
in Diaspora. The activist, inspired in the Pan-Africanism is who defines her own
identity and the blacks of Brazil. Actually, it would even be a surprise if she has ever
visited any African country. The ideological abyss that separates her from a people in
name of whom she intends to speak can only be transported by the triumph of a racial
pedagogy. It is needed to explain that Brazil is not a united nation, but a geopolitical
territory inhabited by two polar races. The persuasion by words is insufficient. The
doctrine must be imposed from the top, by the Estate, which has the powerful
instrument represented by the edition of racial laws.

The black separatism of Garvey had no hues and no ambivalences. Du Bois´one,

fountain of inspiration to Werneck is incomplete and presents an evident oscillation
since the metaphoric return is not equal to physical return. The activist describes the
African Diaspora as a nation without territory or Estate, several times in confrontation
with them and their elements of cultural affirmation and production of identities. It is
the image of confrontation of two races, one dominant and the other dominated.
However, things could not be so that simple such as the fight of arms in a battle of
trenches. To overcome a complex panorama, she points out: „an important identification
of the Afro-descendents with descriptive elements of the Brazilian nationality that in a
variable form will make the strategies of elaboration of identity to one of the parts (Afro
or Brazilian) according diversified interests put in discussion in the disputes of power in
the Brazilian society, between whites and blacks fundamentally‟.

This logic doesn´t clarify about the dilemmas of the Brazilian society, but
illuminates the singularities of racialism in Brazil. In USA, the term „Afro-Americans‟,
consecrated in the language of the black leaderships, indicates a volunteer adhesion to
two traditions: the African and the American. In Brazil, the predominant tendency is
inclined to the side of the term „Afro-descendents‟, which is not the same as „Afro-
Brazilians‟. According to the vision of Werneck, the Afro tradition corresponds to the
interests of blacks, while the Brazilian tradition corresponds to the whites.

The model of Du Bois suffers an adaptation in Brazil that get closer to a total
black separatism. The explanation can be found in the differences between the political
challenges of the American and the Brazilian racialists. In USA, the national traditional
is more suitable to the racialist thinking as it includes the myth of race expressed in the
one drop rule. In Brazil, the tradition must be totally rejected because it is anchored in
the myth of origin of rivers that is manifested as a mixing narrative.

The Brazilian black movement got „Africanized‟ under the conclusion of the
impact of the independence of the African colonies. The Portuguese colonies of Angola,
Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde became sovereign Estates in 1975 in the trail
of the Revolution of the Carnations in Portugal. Three years alter, together with the
Unified Black Movement, the Cadernos Negros (Black Notebooks) appeared in Brazil,
a publication whose goal was explicit in the text of presentation: „We are in the
threshold of a new era. Era of Africa, new life, more fair, more free and inspired by it
we are re-born removing our white masks, ending with imitation. We discovered the
brainwash that polluted us and we are assuming our beautiful and strong blackness‟.

The key words are imitation and polluted. The Brazilian tradition started to be
seen as something foreign: an invention of whites, not the fruit of a creative historic
meeting among distinct cultural elements. This alien tradition, imposed to the African
people in Diaspora, smudged the minds, not the bodies. Going back to Africa meant to
clean consciences, sanify the race.

The new attitude had a popular impact, limited in space and ambiguous in
meanings. The sociologist Antônio Risério describes a „re-africanization‟ in the
Carnival of Bahia, the re-appearance of the afoxés and the introduction of the Afro
parades in the party, such as Olodum and Ilê Aiyê. He also observed that the young
people of Salvador started to exhibit, outside the Carnival days, batas, abadás, shells and
trances in the hair.

The novelties of the cultural scenario of Bahia should not be mistaken by the
initiatives of the organized groups of the Central-South. From the Afro aesthetic, the
militants went to a recuperation of the diverse elements supposedly original of an
idealized African culture. The blacks must, as a group, substitute the Christian faith to
religions of African matrix, mainly the candomblé. It was required, also, the adhesion to
songs, dances and even food habits that would express a past almost lost. As Petrônio
Domingues registers, the most purists suggested that the blacks that the obligation to
register their kids with African names.

Domingues is an intellectual aligned with the racialist doctrine but also a

historian concerned with the reality of the facts. He relates this moment of the black
movement to a „political campaign against miscegenation, showing miscegenation as an
alien ideological trap‟. According to him, as a counterbalance of the official speech pro-
miscegenation, the activists of the black movement defended the endogamy of
marriages and the constitution of black families. In his synthesis, the black man must
inexorably marry to a woman of the same racial group and vice-versa. By this
conception, the miscegenation produced by inter-racial marriages would end in a
ethnocide.

Race has to do with ancestry. The racialist theories always conduct to a theme
place in the blurred frontier between rational politics and the romantic subterranean
emotions and feelings. This theme is one of matrimony, union and reproduction. In
USA since the end of the XIX century, state laws and codes prohibited inter-racial
unions and this only was completely vanished by the Supreme Court three years after
the approval of the Law of Civil Rights. In the German of Hitler, the Law for Protection
of the German Blood and Honor criminalized marriages and sexual relationships
between Jews and Arians. In South Africa of apartheid, the Law of Prohibition of
Mixed Marriages, inspired in the anti-mixing American laws, prohibited formal unions
between whites and non-whites. So there is no true paradox in the desire more or less
explicit of the Brazilian racialist leaderships in establishing a separation of blood
between that they define as two polar races.

Naturally ambivalent beings

Kabengele Munaga was born in the Belgian Congo during the Second World
War and became the first anthropologist formed by the Official University of Congo in
1969. With a scholarship he started his PhD course in Belgium and concluded it in
Brazil, defending his thesis in the University of São Paulo, where he became a professor
in 1980 and reached the highest position of the career, of titular professor. The
intellectual, an Afro-Brazilian in the literal sense of the expression and one of the most
respected voices of the racialist NGOs defines his second marriage as inter-racial but he
identifies in miscegenation a threatening to the existence of the Afro-descendents in
Brazil.

Re-discussing miscegenation in Brazil is a title of one of the books written by

Munaga. The preface of the edition of 2004, assigned by the sociologist Teófilo de
Queiroz Júnior, a friend of the University, presents the book as an alert to the
incapability of the Brazilian men of knowledge and power in recognizing the harms that
miscegenation has caused to the blacks in Brazil. Not being satisfied with this, the
preface goes a step further and affirms that it is necessary to equip the black to
resistance to the temptation of being mulatto. Miscegenation to Du Bois didn´t represent
a problem and was not repulsive as Garvey said. To Munanga and to the greatest part of
the Brazilian black leaderships, miscegenation is really a problem. Not exactly as a
biological contamination as the Jamaican man thought but kind of an ideological
poisoning.

The following text is impressive, but it was written by Munanga and is found in
the introduction of a book devoted to discuss the social place of the mulatto: „the so-
called mulattos have their genetic patrimony formed by the combination of
chromosomes of black and whites, which makes him naturally ambiguous beings. The
mixed are partially black but they aren´t totally black because of the blood or the drops
of white blood they carry. The mixed are also white but are only partially white because
of the black blood they carry.

„Naturally ambivalent beings‟: monsters? White blood and black blood? Racial
chromosomes? The titular professor of the University of São Paulo shares the beliefs of
the scientific racism of XIX in the biological existence of human races expressed
curiously in a genetic language. But he goes further, abandoning the domains of
Biology to clarify a political doctrine: „if in the biological plan the ambiguity of
mulattos is a fatality that they can not escape, in the social and political-ideological plan
they can´t remain „one‟ and „another‟, „white‟ and „black‟, they can´t be placed in a
position of indifference or neutrality regarding hidden or open conflicts that exist
between the two groups to whom they pertain, biologically or ethnically.

In the war of races of Munanga, the mulattos, these sad monsters subordinated
by Biology to a destiny of ambivalence must choose one side. If they choose to
disappear, assuming defining places in the bipolar scheme of races, it would be open the
way to re-invention of Brazil. Such as USA, Nazi German and South Africa of
apartheid, each one would know precisely their identity and their place.
Starting again?

The federal deputy Chico Alecar, a leader of the party PSOL, placed in the
extreme left of the party PT, reported a project of law of the authorship of the senator
Roseana Sarney, heir of the clan of the ex-president José Sarney. In the original form,
the project fixed three commemorative dates to the national ethnic segments: the Day of
the Indian of April 19th (dedicated to honor the native people), the Day of Discovery,
April 22nd (dedicated to the arrival of the white European) and the Day of Black
Conscience, November 20th (consecrated to celebrate the black). The Day of the Indian
and the Day of Discovery are already national dates and taught in the elementary
schools. The deputy didn´t change the nature of the project, but gave it war tonalities,
naming April 19th as Day of Fight of Indigenous Peoples and transforming November
20th in a national holiday.

There is a strong logic in the racialist thinking that works as a subterranean

support of the project of the improbable group Alencar-Sarney (who are in opposite
political situations). This logic can be expressed as: one race only gains existence inside
the great map of races: the black needs the white to be black and vice-versa. The black
consciousness when inscribed in the text of law conducts in some moment to a legal
creation of a white conscience. In fact, to all the effects, the novelty of the project of the
ethnic dates is founding the production of a Day of the White as an indispensable
racialist complement of the Day of the Black.

Nations, as explained the historians Terence Ranger and Eric Hobsbawn, are
industries of invention of traditions. The narrative of the meeting of the three races,
constructed throughout one hundred years between independence and the beginning of
the XX century configures as an immature myth open to the interpretation of the future.
Initially it was filled by the proposition of harmony. After, the historic criticism
evidenced pain and oppression as nuclear elements of the slave system as well as the
slow fragmentary genocide that killed the indigenous peoples. But none of this kicked
the supports of a myth fundamentally anti-racial that since the metaphor of the
confluence of the rivers gave the nation a positive utopia.

Seen in the surface, the project of law is written in the line of continuity of the
original myth. But in the truth the meaning is the opposite of this: the institution of three
ethnic dates associated to racial groups represent a denial of mixing of waters
announced by Martius. The celebrated rivers of the project of law are parallel drafts of
water that drain contiguous lands but never meet. There is nothing casual in the
proposition derived from the combined efforts of the two parliamentarians placed
apparently so distant in the political spectrum. It reflects the ideological reaction against
the narrative of miscegenation and in the end consolidates the image of a reinvented
country as a geopolitical space where distinct nations inhabit, separated by blood.
 In Brazil, the researches on attitudes facing racism offer curious results at the
same time clarifying. Several surveys reveal that the vast majority of the Brazilians
admit the existence of racial discrimination in the country, especially in episodes of
police invasion in peripheries and favelas. At the same time, expressive majorities
declare to not have racial prejudice. The anthropologist Peter Fry mentions a respected
research in which 87% of the interviewed who declared to be white and 91% of the self
declared as brown said they didn´t have any prejudice against blacks. The same research
showed that 87% of the blacks declared to not have any prejudice against whites. Of
greater interest was that 64% of the blacks and 84% of the browns declared they had
never felt as being target of racial prejudice.

The apparent paradox expressed in the researches can´t be explained by the logic
mold of racialism that can only deny the sincerity of the answers, which are against their
social theory. But out of the racialist picture and admitting the truth of the answers, the
researches indicate that racial discrimination in Brazil is perceived as a small
happening, although some of the manifestation can be intense. The notorious example is
the apparent selection by police agents of young men of darker skin as suspicious of
illicit acts.

A white interviewed person offered the sociologists Florestan Fernandes and

Roger Bastide a famous diagnosis: „we, Brazilians, have prejudice against having
prejudice‟. This affirmation, interpreted by the racialists, would be an indicator of the
harms caused by the myth – in the vulgar sense, of lie or occultation – of the racial
democracy. The task would not be to erase the racial prejudice, but instead the prejudice
against having prejudice, so that the emergence of a conflict of racial interests could
occur. But effectively the affirmation indicates that the myth -in the anthropologic sense
of collective utopia- of racial democracy really conducts to anti-racist attitudes,
stamping prejudice as something intolerable. It is an unequalled platform if the goal is
to build a democracy blind to the skin color of the citizens.

The researchers on Brazil of the post-war, stimulated by the vision of the anti-
racist declaration of Unesco of 1950 described Brazil as a country that, spite its
shocking inequalities, chose the way to not built racial walls between racial groups. The
British historian Timothy Garton Ash is not specialized in Brazil, but visited Brazil in
the apogee of the governmental enthusiasm to the multiculturalist policies and left the
following report: „I am convinced that I am under the risk to seem a rich and white
foreigner that adventures in the favelas for a few days and exclaims: How everybody is
beautiful! I myself could write the corresponding irony. But I have no alternative
instead of saying: what I saw in Brazil, including in the middle of poverty and violence
of the City of God is the beauty of miscegenation. I learned to exult it according the
example of the Brazilians. This miscegenation is precisely what contributed for them to
be among the most beautiful human beings of the planet. What is announced here – and
I insist: only and only if Brazil is capable to correct its shocking social and economical
disequilibrium and a legacy of discrimination – is the possibility of a world where the
skin color is nothing more than a physical attribute, without more, such as the color of
eyes or shape of nose and that it is possible to admire, mention or to joke about it. A
world where the only important race is the human race‟.

The polemics about the racial policies brings to a question about the Brazilian
national project. In the end, the heralds of multiculturalism are saying that Brazil failed
historically as a nation and must start again, re-inventing itself since the beginning, by
canceling the myth of origin of the confluence of rivers. They are saying that
miscegenation is a horrible lie and that Brazil was built on this lie. But as seen in this
book, in the world, all the racialist experiences only brought hate, intolerance and war,
pushing the countries away to the utopia of fraternity, equality and freedom.

Inversely, the criticizers of the racial policies think that there is something very
positive to all mankind in the national project of Brazil. The Brazilians didn´t learn how
to separate people according the myth of race. They imagine that the waters can and
must mix. That the only important race is the human race.