Besides concealing a generalized lack of knowledge about actual Africa, this kind of discourse discourages the intensification of public debate on South-South alignments and Brazilian foreign policy at large . Indeed, Brazil’s views on, and policies for, Africa have not been nearly as thoroughly subjected to internal debate and critique as has been the case for instance of Europe’s Africa Orientalism.A debate of this kind would be important not for the sake of critique per se, much the less for gratuitously “bashing Brazil” – as I was surprised to hear once from a senior anthropologist in Brazil. If anything, an awareness of the contemporary complexity and historical density of Africa and of its relations with Brazil would be important as a “reality check” and beacon for field and office operators, as well as policymakers, involved in the provision of cooperation. I disagree however that this knowledge gap should be filled exclusively, or even predominantly, by the hiring of development experts and consultants.For the reasons discussed in Chapter 1 , I would give precedence to the learning that is already taking place on the ground, especially since much of knowledge production subsidizing Brazilian projects in Africa has occurred directly between Brazilian and African front liners, with little mediation from specialized bureaucratic apparatuses . In Orientalism, Said disparaged at the “total absence of any cultural position [in the West] making it possible either to identify with or dispassionately discuss the Arabs or Islam” . As this chapter suggested, in Brazil such passions are generally reserved to domestic debates,plastic growing bag such as the recent ones on racial quotas. In this case, cultural domination in the sense put forth by Said is less about Brazil’s relations with Africa than about internal power relations. His assessment therefore does not necessarily hold for Brazil’s nation-building Orientalism on Africa.
My experience with cooperation front liners convinced me, on the contrary, that it is possible to have a less fanciful and passionate view on Africa and its problems. Whether this virtuality will be in any way actualized, is a whole other story. In order for this to happen, relations with Africa will have to multiply and become robust enough to outgrow the discursive hold of nation-building Orientalism – in other words, to create more of a context for itself. Indeed, this is how the remainder of this dissertation will look at cooperation activities at the front line. The next chapter will suggest how early steps in this context-making direction were being taken by contemporary cooperantes working in the domain of agriculture, during capacity building trainings and other technical cooperation activities implemented by Embrapa. Significantly, in this case there was a discursive privileging of dimensions other than culture, such as natural environment and developmental temporality. And even though Embrapa’s official discourse remains, as Itamaraty’s, fundamentally based on an affinities idiom, as one moves to the front line of its cooperation activities analogies between Brazil and Africa turn from Orientalist assumptions detached from practice into the very “stuff” on which the cooperantes work.If culture has been the object of ample investment by Brazil’s official discourse on Africa throughout the decades, in contemporary South-South cooperation its ontological double – nature – has joined it on center stage. This chapter will discuss how these two sides of the modernist divide have been articulated in the case of a particular socio-technical sector, agriculture. In this regard, official discourse has been also based on claims to similarity and sharedness, but privileging two other domains: natural environment and the temporality of peripheral development. Many of these assumptions are also shared by other emerging donors , but in the case of Brazil-Africa relations the focus has been on a particular developmental experience: agriculture tailored to the tropical savannahs, the Brazilian version of which is called cerrado.
This chapter will begin by looking at how narratives about nature and the temporality of development appeared in official cooperation documents and studies, and in the capacitybuilding trainings held in Embrapa’s new center in Brasília. Here, the work of cooperantes largely involved demonstrating Brazil’s agricultural experience, and proposing a comparison with its African counterparts. For the most part, this exercise did not take the form of taken-forgranted analogies based on long-held imagined affinities, such as in much of Itamaraty’s discourse on culture. But neither was it based on standardized methodologies framing African realities according universal expert knowledge aimed at planned intervention, as with much of traditional development aid . It involved, rather, the demonstration of a situated experience: that of Brazil’s cerrado agriculture, in which Embrapa itself played a major part. As will be argued, more than “rendering technical” , these demonstrations ended up rendering explicit much of the heterogeneity that underlays any developmental experience, through necessarily selective and situated context-making and scaling operations grounded in the Brazilian cooperantes’ own experiences and politics. For this, they drew less on general guidelines found in cooperation policy than on Embrapa’s own domestic experience as a public research institution. As will be suggested, this experience has sedimented particular strategies, based on demonstration, for dealing with its main sponsor , the public at large, and various kinds of Brazilian farmers. These demonstrations were not mere contemplative exercises, however. In the case of South-South cooperation, they had a performative intention: to entice the African partners to join in and extend the comparative effort being proposed from their own situated perspectives. Therefore, rather than inscribing a divide between “trustees” and those “subject to expert direction” , this modality of engagement requires the active participation of recipients in order for it to gain any robustness – something for which Brazilian cooperation’s “hands off” approach shows mixed possibilities.In Brazil-Africa cooperation materials, the highest currency of the natural similarities assumption refers less to geology than to edaphic-climatic conditions.
The latter are normally cast under the rubric of tropicality, of a tropical environment shared between the two regions and expressed in arguably similar patterns of soil, vegetation, and climate. Like most everything else in contemporary discourse, the pervasiveness of the trope of the tropics is not something new. During what Saraiva called the golden years of Brazil’s Africa policy in the seventies,wholesale grow bags the idea of tropicality was extensively deployed in both political and commercial forays. Brazilian manufacturers, for instance, would target Nigeria’s burgeoning consumer market by advertising domestic appliances especially suited to tropical areas. According to one of the ads from that period, which brought soccer star Pelé as poster boy, these appliances, “tested at the source: a tropical country, Brazil”, were made to work “no matter the conditions of heat, humidity and voltage fluctuations” . The notion of tropicality to qualify natures and peoples existing at a certain latitudinal range of the globe is, as many have shown , part of Europe’s “discursive construction of tropical nature” during its colonial outreach to the New World, and then to Asia and Africa. This has involved a view on the tropics as an environment radically different from that of Europe, “where the superabundance of nature was believed to overwhelm human endeavor and reduced the place to nature itself” , and whose inhabitants were closer to nature than those living in temperate regions. Even if, like in Freyre’s lusotropicalismo , when appropriated by the colonized the notion of tropicality may have been pressed into a different kind of service, this has not meant a clean break with the colonizer’s view. It is remarkable for instance how, even in today’s cooperation discourse, claims to similarities between Brazil and Africa typically evoke dimensions similar to those foregrounded by their European predecessors: either nature, or “softer” social spheres like culture. This movement of postcolonial re-appropriation of the tropical can also be found in the domain of agriculture, especially in Embrapa’s status as a world-class institution in research and development of technologies appropriate for tropical agriculture – a reputation for which the institute has made not only significant investment in technical training and research, but also in PR and communication. Since much of Sub-Saharan Africa shares Brazil’s tropical nature, Embrapa’s singular R&D achievements are promoted as a comparative advantage of Brazilian cooperation not only over Northern aid, but also over other emerging donors that are not situated in the tropical strip such as Russia, Arab countries, Eastern European countries, or, in part, South Africa and China. But while the emphasis of Stephan’s remarkable account of Europe’s Orientalist views on tropical nature is on Latin American forests, where nature is mysterious, sumptuous and overwhelming, in Brazil’s cooperation the pride of place is reserved to the tropical savannahs. And the reason is no mystery: it was on the Brazilian savannahs – the cerrado – that the biggest expansion of the country’s agricultural frontier happened, during the last quarter of the past century. Here, views reproduce, again, Europe’s “nature Orientalism”, for instance in their ambivalence: tropical nature is both generous and plentiful, and unruly and wild. Thus, while early colonial investments in cotton and other cash crops in Sub-Saharan Africa were based on a poorly grounded “belief in tropical abundance” , Europeans quickly learned about the great effort required to make agriculture succeed in tropical environments. By the mid-twentieth century, on the eve of Embrapa’s inception, there were even doubts as to whether a high-productivity kind of agriculture along the lines of that found in temperate regions could ever thrive in tropical areas. As Embrapa’s PR extensively highlights, Brazil’s experience would prove it wrong: differently from the rainforest, the Brazilian savannah has been fully conquered by technique, turning from a barren wasteland into Brazil’s thriving breadbasket.
Even if Brazil has run agriculture projects in all corners of the African continent, the savannahs have been indeed the privileged biome, both discursively and practically. Discursively, it has been the preferred locus of assumptions about natural similarities and the possibilities of reproducing Brazil’s developmental experience in Africa. It has also been the stage for Embrapa’s two largest projects in the continent: the Cotton-4 in West Africa and the Pro-Savannah in Mozambique. It is in a recent Embrapa study on the Nacala corridor in Mozambique called Paralelos that we find what is probably the most outstanding expression of the spatial dimension of such claims to similarities . The book itself is an interesting hybrid of technical and political document; different from regular scientific works, its hard copy design is beautifully designed, and indeed it has been the object of much ritual gift-giving between Brazilian and African officials since it was released in 2010 . As the picture below, reproduced from the book, elegantly.Each map included in the book brings a spatialized overview on soils, relief, climate, land use and cover, accompanied by ground level pictures of landscapes found in Mozambique. These spatial paralleling devices, especially in the form of comparative maps, were quite common in official documents and power point presentations showed in CECAT. Rural landscapes in Mozambique and elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, such as in the numerous ground level pictures displayed in Paralelos, can be remarkably similar to those found in many parts of Brazil. An Embrapa researcher once told a group of Ghanaian trainees about a trick he played with his friends after returning from a trip to Angola, where he would show pictures of natural landscapes and have them guess whether they had been taken there or in Brazil; according to him, they would often be clueless. Indeed, as a Brazilian myself I could not avoid sharing such sense of déjà vu, especially when travelling by road in West Africa. If, as remarked in the previous chapter, even the human landscape in rural areas sometimes evoked impressions of familiarity, resonances in terms of topography, plants, animals, waters, and weather were almost absolute. Such comparative exercises were quite common in informal conversations between the Brazilians in all West African countries I visited. “It’s the same thing, the very same thing”, one of the Embrapa researchers put it categorically. He paused. “But only there [in rural areas]. When we come to town, it’s all different.” These micro-impressions expressed by Brazilians working in Africa echo a macro-trend formulated by academics: as one moves from nature to society, from rural to urban areas, similarities become less evident and may, at certain points, turn into sharper divergences.