António Fournier, Portuguese colonial Africa as seen by Emilio Cecchi

“In summer of 1939, on the Portuguese ship ‘Colonial’, Emilio Cecchi made a journey of several months around Africa, with stops and excursions inside: in the Cape Verde islands, in San Tomé, in San Paolo of Loanda, (…) in Lorenzo Marquez, Beira, Quelimane, Mozambique and minor places”.
This brief introduction to the book Circumnavigation of Africa is sufficient to summarize the importance of the testimony of the Italian intellectual which covers the whole Portuguese colonial Africa just before the Second World War. The comparison between this careful analysis, sometimes amused and sometimes cruel, of the vices of Portuguese colonialism and the other African travel narratives, often propagandist, show the contradictions of a system which has already been condemned by History, like that dinosaur described by Calvino – “ most excellent dinosaur” using the epithet given to Salazar by José Cardoso Pires – who doesn’t know to be the last survivor of his species.

 

Published on: The Wretched of the earth? N. 24 New Series – Year XII 2016