Francisco Bethencourt (ed.), La Diaspora des « Nouveaux-Chrétiens »

In a forthcoming volume of essays (Empire in Africa: Angola and its Neighbours) the present reviewer is heard to complain that not enough is known about the role of Jews in the Portuguese African empire. Such shameful ignorance is brought to light by the brilliant volume of essays which Francisco Bethencourt edited before he ended his distinguished term of office as director of the Gulbenkian centre in Paris. This stunning tome is a dense, scholarly, wide-ranging, path-breaking collection wri..

Angola 2006: a British Parliamentary Visit

In 2006 the author acted as interpreter for a small party of British politicians who visited Angola. His own account of the expedition highlighted the then prominent questions of agriculture and rural development, of the empowerment of women in urban communities, of perceptions of national identity and the role of electoral politics. The effect of rising and falling oil wealth on legitimate investment and on corrupt embezzlement had to be delicately addressed as did the balance between presidential power and opposition newspapers. To many Angolans the thriving Pentecostal churches seemed as important in their daily lives as the non-governmental development agencies or the cash-strapped government ministries of health and education. In 2006 the first signs of China’s new interest in Africa were beginning to match the entrepreneurial dominance of Brazil and Portugal and eclipse the regional aspirations of South Africa.Em 2006, o autor serviu de intérprete a um pequeno grupo de políticos Britânicos, que estavam de visita a Angola. O seu próprio relatório da viajém destacava as questões, então, proeminentes, no domínio da agricultura e do desenvolvimento rural, da promoção do estatuto da mulher, no seio das comunidades urbanas, da percepção da identidade nacional e do papel da política eleitoral. Foi necessário abordar, de maneira bastante cuidadosa, a questão do efeito das subidas e descidas da riqueza petrolífera sobre os investimentos legítimos e sobre a corrupção e os desvios de fundos, bem como o equilíbrio entre o poder presidencial e os jornais da oposição. Para muitos Angolanos, as prósperas igrejas Pentecostais pareciam ser tão importantes no seu quotidiano como as agências de desenvolvimento não-governamentais ou os ministérios governamentais da Saúde e da Educação desprovidos de dinheiro. Em 2006, os sinais do novo interesse da China por África começavam a questionar o domínio empresarial do Brasil e de Portugal e a eclipsar as aspirações regionais da África do Sul.En 2006, l’auteur a servi d’interprète à un petit groupe de parlementaires britanniques qui s’est rendu en Angola. Son compte-rendu de mission soulignait les questions alors primordiales de l’agriculture et du développement rural, des droits des femmes dans les communautés urbaines, de la perception de l’identité nationale et du rôle de la politique électorale. Il a fallu aborder la question de l’effet de la hausse et de la baisse de la richesse pétrolière sur les investissements légitimes et sur la corruption et le détournement de fonds avec beaucoup de délicatesse, tout comme l’équilibre entre le pouvoir présidentiel et les journaux d’opposition. Pour de nombreux Angolais, les églises pentecôtistes prospères semblaient aussi importantes dans leur vie quotidienne que les agences de développement non gouvernementales ou les ministères gouvernementaux de la santé et de l’éducation à court d’argent. En 2006, les premiers signes du nouvel intérêt de la Chine pour l’Afrique commençaient à rivaliser avec la prédominance entrepreneuriale du Brésil et du Portugal, et à éclipser les aspirations régionales de l’Afrique du Sud

The Mbundu and Neighbouring Peoples of Central Angola Under the Influence of Portuguese Trade and Conquest 1482-1790.

The two major Bantu political groupings in West Central Africa centre on the Kongo kingdom and on the Luba-Lunda states. To the south of Kongo and east of Lunda live the Mbundu people who, from the end of the fifteenth century, developed contacts with the Portuguese and eventually became the main link between Western Bantu Africa and Europe. During most of the sixteenth century this relationship was based on trade in slaves. The benefits of this trade enabled the Mbundu to consolidate the small state of Ndongo, on the north side of the Kwanza River, into a moderately powerful kingdom. In the mid-sixteenth century Ndongo prosperity caused a migrant Lunda group called the Imbangala, who had camped on the eastern border of Mbundu country, to attack the Mbundu and make direct contact with the Portuguese. From 1575 the Portuguese embarked on a programme of territorial conquest. This continued through most of the seventeenth century, the great period of the Angolan Wars. The Portuguese suffered many setbacks, the lowest ebb being from 1641 to 1648 when the Dutch temporarily captured and held Luanda. By 1671, however, the independent Mbundu monarch in Ndongo had been eradicated. Thereafter the main African trading states of the area were Matamba and Kasanje on the Kwango River. After the wars the Luanda slave trade declined, North European competition from Loango and Portuguese competition from Benguela caused a serious depression in Mbundu trade during most of the eighteenth century. Only after 1790 were there signs of a revival

João Loureiro, Memórias de Lourenço Marques: uma visão do passado da cidade de Maputo

For those who frequent the internet there is alleged to be a site called postaisultramar.com.pt which tells of João Loureiro’s eleven thousand postcards which photographically span the Portuguese empire from the final days of the last Saxe-Coburg king through to the insurrection of the army captains and the subsequent decolonisation of 1975. Samples of this visual record have already been published dealing with Luanda City, with Mozambique Island, with the Atlantic archipelagos, even with lit..

João Pedro Marques, Portugal e a escravatura dos africanos

If God had not believed that slaves should be taken from Africa to the Americas he would not have created the trade winds which blew constantly from Angola to Brazil without prospect of return. So said the great Native American preacher António Vieira before going on to reassure his slave congregation that although their bodies were in chains their souls were free. You, he said, resemble Jesus Christ, suffering pain, punishment and insults down at the mill as he suffered them up on the cross...

Clara Carvalho & João de Pina Cabral (eds), A persistência da história: passado e contemporaneidade em África

Franz-Wilhelm Heimer is a scholar who richly deserves to be rewarded for his “persistent enthusiasm” with a festschrift of high-quality scholarly essays. Clara Carvalho and João de Pina Cabral have done the academic world the singular service of editing such a collection and the Lisbon institute of social sciences is to be congratulated on its publication. No country can flourish without a history to underpin its identity and self-respect and so a team of scholars met at Brown University in 2..

Carmen BALLESTEROS & Mery RUAH (eds), Os Judeos Sefarditas entre Portugal, Espanha e Marrocos

This elegantly written and meticulously researched collection of papers on Jewish history in French, Spanish and Portuguese was presented to a conference in the old city of Evora in 1999 and published five years later. The first solid evidence of a Jewish presence on Lusitanian territory dates from AD 482 when a seven-branch ritual candelabra was pictured on stone. For the next thousand years Jews were an important and integral part of both Muslim and later Christian Portuguese society. They ..

Francisco Bethencourt (ed.), La Diaspora des « Nouveaux-Chrétiens »

In a forthcoming volume of essays (Empire in Africa: Angola and its Neighbours) the present reviewer is heard to complain that not enough is known about the role of Jews in the Portuguese African empire. Such shameful ignorance is brought to light by the brilliant volume of essays which Francisco Bethencourt edited before he ended his distinguished term of office as director of the Gulbenkian centre in Paris. This stunning tome is a dense, scholarly, wide-ranging, path-breaking collection wri..

Phase and Scaling Properties of Determinants Arising in Topological Field Theories

In topological field theories determinants of maps with negative as well as positive eigenvalues arise. We give a generalisation of the zeta-regularisation technique to derive expressions for the phase and scaling-dependence of these determinants. For theories on odd-dimensional manifolds a simple formula for the scaling dependence is obtained in terms of the dimensions of certain cohomology spaces. This enables a non-perturbative feature of Chern-Simons gauge theory to be reproduced by path-integral methods.Comment: 12 pages, Latex. To appear in Physics Letters