Alberto da Costa e Silva, diplomat and member of the ABL, dies – 11/26/2023 – Power

The greatest Brazilian expert on the history of Africa, Alberto da Costa e Silva died this Sunday (26), aged 92. Academic, diplomat, poet and historian, he held chair number nine at the ABL, the Brazilian Academy of Letters.

According to a statement released by the academy, the death was due to natural causes. Alberto was a widower and leaves three children, seven grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. The cremation ceremony will take place on Monday (27) and will be restricted to family members.

Of the nine books he published on the African continent, at least two quickly reached the pedestal of classics: “A Enxada ea Lance: Africa before the Portuguese”, released in 1992, and “A Manilha e o Libambo: a África e a Slavery, from 1500 to 1700”, which came out ten years later.

For the latter, the author won awards from the National Library Foundation and the Jabuti. In 2014, he also received the Camões, the highest award for Portuguese-language literature, for his work as a whole.

“I am fortunate to have received many awards, but the one I am most proud of is an honorary doctorate at the University of Ife, in Nigeria. It was in Ife that the man emerged,” he told Sheet in 2004, when he was chosen as Intellectual of the Year by the Brazilian Union of Writers (UBE) and won the Juca Pato trophy.

Born in São Paulo in 1931, he spent his childhood in Fortaleza and his adolescence and youth in Rio de Janeiro, where he published his first book, “O Parque e Outro Poemas”, at just 22 years old. He followed in the footsteps of his father, Antonio Francisco da Costa e Silva, poet and public servant.

It was, in fact, an episode that happened to his father that took him to the Rio Branco Institute, as he told the Revista de História da Biblioteca Nacional. “I decided to become a diplomat to get revenge from Baron do Rio Branco, who selected diplomats at a lunch at Itamaraty. (…) Apparently, he was a good examiner, because at the time the level of Brazilian diplomacy was very high. But I think that with my father he was unfair because, after lunch with my father, he said to him: ‘Da Costa, you are very intelligent, you speak French very well, you know English, German, Spanish, but you are very ugly.’ My father wasn’t handsome, but he wasn’t that ugly either, he was a slight northeasterner and had a squint.”

At this point, I already had a huge interest in everything involving Africa, a curiosity that arose, above all, from reading Gilberto Freyre.

“I read ‘Casa Grande e Senzala’ and it was astounding. It soon became very clear to me that one could not understand Brazil and one could not write about Brazil without knowing Africa. And we had a story that was a Portuguese transposition into the American continent. We saw ourselves as Portuguese exiled in the tropics. And we weren’t exactly that, we were much more than Portuguese exiled in the tropics. We had an African component that was clear, and later I was able to understand this when I lived in Nigeria”, he stated in the interview with the magazine.

Working at the Lisbon embassy, ​​from 1960 onwards, allowed him to become closer to Africa. Diplomatic missions from the Portuguese capital took him to countries such as Angola, Ethiopia and Ivory Coast. He traveled three times by car from Ghana to Nigeria.

He used to say that once you get to know Africa, it becomes an addiction, a good-humored comment that later gave the title to the book of essays “The Addiction of Africa and other Vices” (1989).

After Lisbon, he took up diplomatic posts in Caracas, Washington and Madrid. He would not take long, however, to return to Africa: his first country as ambassador was Nigeria, where he stayed for five years. Later, he performed this same role in Portugal, Colombia and Paraguay.

His arrival in Lagos took place at the end of the 1970s, a decade in which a conversation with politician and journalist Carlos Lacerda definitively led him to dedicate himself to African studies.

“One day, in a discussion with Carlos Lacerda about the Angolan civil war, I mentioned historical things relating to Angola’s past, and Carlos said to me: ‘Alberto, do you know all this about Africa and keep it to yourself? You have an intellectual obligation to put it on paper, to publish it, to transmit what you know!’. I went home and decided to write about Africa. That’s when I started working on the book ‘A Enxada e Lance’, in 1975 or 1976”, he told Revista Of history.

It took him more than ten years to write “Enxada”, during which time he released books of poetry, such as “As Linhas da Mão” (1978). “I follow Goethe’s maxim, which said that culture is the sum of poetry and history”, she told Sheet.

In fact, he won two Jabuti poetry awards. The first in 1997 by “Ao Lado de Vera”, dedicated to his wife, Vera Queiroz da Costa e Silva, translator who died in 2011; the second, three years later, by “Poemas Reunidos”.

At the turn of the century, back in Rio and further away from the responsibilities of his career as a diplomat, Costa e Silva intensified the production of works on Africa and was able to dedicate himself to the Brazilian Academy of Letters (ABL), an entity that he presided over in 2002 and 2003.

In the 2000s, in addition to “Manilha”, he released “Um Rio Chamado Atlântico: A África no Brasil e o Brasil na África” ​​and “Francisco Félix de Sousa, Mercador de Escravos”, a biography of the Bahian who became known as Chachá, the biggest slave trader of the 19th century. These are books that show the influence of the continent’s countries on Brazil and vice versa, with erudition and clarity.

“I never doubted that Brazil was formed through slavery, the longest process in our history, and that we cannot understand ourselves without studying Africa”, he wrote in an article published in Folha in 2000. In several texts and speeches, he criticized the racism and defended racial quotas.

In such a vast bibliography, there was still space for the memoirist, in books such as “O Espelho do Príncipe” (1994) and “Invenção do Drawing” (2007).

But posterity tends to remember the author as the Brazilian who turned his gaze to Africa at a time when very few of his countrymen paid attention to the continent. And he enthusiastically detailed the diversity and contradictions of the region.

When Costa e Silva received the Juca Pato trophy in 2004, he was honored by his friend Carlos Heitor Cony, journalist and novelist. “When Brazilians are in Portugal, they think ‘I’m close to Europe’. Costa e Silva didn’t look up. He looked down, like Vasco da Gama and Camões did.”