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How they manipulate us: the methods of anti-Portuguese history
History would mean the rigorous investigation of the collective action of Humanity, or of the many humanities that compose it, completed with a prudent and dispassionate judgment that discerns the proximate and remote causes of historical development. However, it is more frequent, which tempts us to conclude that it is natural, that history is written for or against certain conceptions, parties or ideologies. Those who write anti-Portuguese history intend to reduce the intervention of our people in the general course of things to a terrorist enterprise, emphasizing this and that act of violence, inducing hastily from a certain infamy, cutting from the voluminous and very rich source of almost six centuries of Portuguese overseas activity only the slave transit in the Atlantic, seeking to present it as the definitive legacy bequeathed to human posterity from the Expansion and the Empire.
The anti-Portuguese history is sometimes written using pure and simple lies. In the vast majority of these cases, the conscientious reader or listener will be able to dislodge a book of serious historiography from his shelf, or from the shelf of any nearby public library, and guard against fraud. However, the anti-Portuguese story is almost always produced by more subtle methods. In a brief but significant essay, “Catholic Truth in History,” Hilaire Belloc described the ways in which anti-Catholic treaties and manuals were forged in Protestant England. The methods of anti-Catholic historiography that Belloc examines are applicable to any person or collectivity whose history, and identity, one wants to deform for any purpose, and are also found in anti-Portuguese historiography, which any scrutineer will be able to detect, a once the nature of such procedures has been realized.
The anti-Portuguese story begins to generate itself in the selection of materials. Any narrative requires a selection of facts to be mentioned. The chronicles of human deeds offer us an ocean of successes, personalities and contexts, among which it is necessary to sift what is thought to be recorded. Thus, the selection of material can be done so that the truth is obscured, even if each fact that presents itself is true. Anti-Portuguese history selects only from the annals of Expansion and Empire that which offers a lurid portrait of our collective enterprise.
The narrator's tone is always a non-negligible element of any work of historiography. The anti-Portuguese tone will employ irony towards our greatest deeds, will use the strongest and most emotional words to describe the verified abuses, will introduce expressions of insinuating ambiguity in paragraphs where descriptive rigor would prevail.
Finally, the proportion chosen between the different parts of the narrative competes to complete a false portrait in anti-Portuguese historiography. Two historians can select the same set of facts to be dealt with in their works. But the dimension and emphasis they give to each of the facts, the order in which they are placed in the narrative, impress the reader in different, more favorable or harmful ways. Whoever stories against Portugal will not hesitate to untie his pen, which sails at the top of his hat, to report, in grotesque detail, what infamously exists to be published about our imperial past.
The history of Portugal's overseas expansion, as a whole and in its parts, has been the subject of these multiple methods of hiding and distorting historical truth. More recently, taking advantage of the impetus projected from abroad, anti-Portuguese historiography has endeavored to reduce the history of the Expansion and the Empire to the slave trade, to the abuses practiced on Native Americans and Africans, to raids and to war. Even if any allegations related to these events, in themselves, are true, and in many cases they are not, the exposition that is built with them of the history of Portugal is false. Excluded are Portugal's decisive contributions to the progress of Humanity: the victory over distance, the foundation of a true world market, the diffusion of technology, the food revolution... for Humanity, of which, today, to a greater or lesser degree, we enjoy the fruits, unknown to the ancients for millennia.
In the next anti-Portuguese history text that he finds, the esteemed reader will be able, by looking at the selection, the tone and the proportion used, to point out exactly where the lie is.
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The Portuguese and the First Teaching Institution in Brazil.
The College of Salvador da Bahia, founded by the Jesuit priest Manoel da Nóbrega, in 1549, was the First School in Brazil. Until 1759, the Jesuits constituted the foundation of the Brazilian educational structure.
The study plan organized by Father Manuel da Nóbrega consisted of two phases: the first phase, considered as teaching elementary studies, consisted of learning Portuguese, teaching Christian doctrine and literacy. For the second phase of the learning process conceived by Manuel da Nóbrega, the student would have the option to choose between vocational education and high school, according to their aptitudes and intellectual gifts revealed during elementary education.
As a prize for students who excelled in the studies of Latin grammar, it was foreseen that they would be sent on a study trip to the great colleges of Coimbra or Spain.
One of the strategies adopted by Manuel da Nóbrega in the conversion of the indigenous people was the construction of catechization villages, which were located close to Portuguese towns and cities. These villages were inhabited by Jesuit priests and converted Indians and were intended to achieve three goals:
- doctrinal objective – which aimed to teach religion and Christian practice to the Indians;
- economic objective – aimed at instituting the habit of work as a fundamental principle in the formation of Brazilian society;
- political objective – aimed at using the converted Indians against the attacks of the wild Indians and, also, of the external enemies.
Thus, it can be assumed that the Jesuits had an educational project, which, despite being subordinated to the Portuguese Project for Brazil, had a certain autonomy, played a fundamental role and ended up contributing to the Portuguese Government to achieve its objectives in the process of settlement.
Source: Jesuit teaching in the Brazilian colonial period: some discussions. Alexandre Shigunov Neto and Lizete Shizue Bomura Maciel
Images: Detail of the Painting: "Saint Francis Xavier Preaching in Goa. André Reinoso (1610)/ Jesuit carrying an indigenous child. Painting from 1750. Basilica of Salvador, Bahia. Basilica of the Jesuits of Salvador, Bahia
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Of course, there was higher education in Brazil during the Portuguese period
One of the fallacies that repeatedly appear to denigrate the image of the Portuguese colonizers is the one that refers to the absence of institutions of higher and advanced studies in the territories they explored and colonized. At one point, it was the then president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, who launched the accusation against Portugal, accusing it of having caused weaknesses in Brazil for not having invested in education. In other versions, such a lack would be part of a deliberate strategy, which aimed to prevent the formation of leading cadres among local elites who could oppose the policies of the Empire. Even great admirers of the Portuguese civilizing task, such as Gerardo Mello Mourão, repeated such lies.
Now, nothing is more fanciful than this vision. The Jesuits, who at the time of imperial expansion were financed and under the orders of the Portuguese Crown due to the Royal Patronage, were founders of several higher education institutions. In Goa, India, Colégio de São Paulo was founded in 1548. Colégio de Salvador da Bahia was founded by Father Manoel da Nóbrega, in 1553. As early as 1573, many decades before Harvard was even inaugurated, this institution was already forming bachelors. In 1594, in the city of Macau, the first university of a western type in East Asia appeared, the Colégio de São Paulo, also known as the Colégio da Madre de Deus, whose beautiful facade is still standing.
All these Colleges, under the tutelage of the Portuguese Crown, provided courses in Theology, Mathematics and Philosophy and did not restrict their access only to those who aspired to an ecclesiastical career. Gregório de Matos, an illustrious man of letters, was one of the regulars at Colégio de Salvador.
Such institutions were closed only in the middle of the 18th century, when the Jesuits were expelled from Portuguese territories. They serve, in any case, to deny one of the great lies that are spread about Portugal.
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There were some higher schools that were built in colonial Brazil (mostly after the Portuguese court moved to Brazil) but it is also true that a University was never built in colonial Brazil. Lula da Silva was not entirely wrong when he claimed that the Portuguese Empire did not invest that much on higher education in its former Brazilian colony but we should note as well that Brazil only built its first University a century later after it got its independence and Portugal can not be held accountable for that delay.
The ironic twist of fate is that this turned out to be an advantage for the Brazilian unity. One of the probable reasons why Brazil remained unified, was not only the transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil but also the inexistence of Universities unlike in the Spanish South American colonies. The Portuguese colonial elite had to travel to Coimbra to pursue their academic career and then return to the colony, which assured they maintained their link of unity and identity with the Portuguese metropolis and crown. However, the same was not true in the Spanish colonies in Latin America, where there were universities in Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, etc. The Hispanic elite in Latin America thus progressively distanced themselves from their metropolis, and as a result, in the age of the Enlightenment currents of self-determination and more autonomy began to rise in their respective academic circles, which divided Hispanic America into several states largely because there was no common unity factor among their academic circles, unlike the Portuguese elite in Brazil that came almost exclusively from a single academic circle.
Last edited by Brás Garcia de Mascarenhas; 02-10-2022 at 02:53 PM.
YDNA: R1b-L21 > DF13 > S1051 > FGC17906 > FGC17907 > FGC17866
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What do you mean, "there was no university in Portuguese Brazil"? Exposing one of the great falsehoods of Luso-Brazilian History
Lula da Silva, then Brazilian president, once said, and commentators more or less enlightened, more or less interested or more or less honest, often reiterate that there was no university in Portuguese Brazil. Objectively, there has never been an institution in the State of Brazil with a university title. What will not be true is that Portuguese Brazil is unknown in higher education or, as is often argued, that the Portuguese Crown has despised the task of educating in the Americas.
Portugal took care of the educational work from the very beginning. In order to integrate the red race - the Indian - into the human fabric of the Empire, Lisbon tried to Christianize it and, in order to give it the Christ, it had first to be taught to read and write. In 1549, Manuel da Nóbrega opened the first Brazilian school in Salvador. In that Brazil, still unborn, still fragile and in which everything was still to be thought and built, the educational system consisted of elementary education - focused on teaching the Portuguese language, literacy and sharing Christian doctrine - and secondary education, including this learning the trivium, or grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. For this purpose, dozens of schools and colleges were built, some in towns and cities that were emerging everywhere and others in missions of the Society of Jesus.
Until the end of the 16th century, the Company would build schools in Bahia, São Vicente, Espírito Santo, Porto Seguro and São Paulo de Piratininga. After the publication of the Ratio Studiorum, a document in which Jesuit education was exposed and systematized, the educational regime of the Company in Brazil began to be submitted to it. As discussed above, elementary and middle training cycles took part in it; both were followed, for those who showed academic aptitude, a higher - that is, university - stage of teaching. As there was no formal university in Brazil that was directly dependent on the Crown, there were many institutions that, coming under the indirect authority of the King and being paid for by him, had a curriculum equivalent to that of a university. In these colleges, universities in all but name, courses in Philosophy and Science were offered, and the curricula included Astronomy, Logic, Metaphysics, the physical and natural sciences, and Ethics. Was there, then, higher education in Portuguese Brazil? Yes, of course, and with a strength and dynamism that English America would only be late to know.
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The blossoming of modern science in Portuguese Brazil - contradicting the myth of backwardness
Many spread out of ignorance, or bad faith, that higher education was not instituted in Brazil before independence. It was unequivocally demonstrated that in the State of Brazil, from an early age, higher courses in Letters and Sciences were taught, and that the flowering of high culture in that part of Portugal did not begin at a late date, which often neglected or distorted the historical evidence, and it even seeks to fix it in canon.
The scientific development cultivated in Brazil took place not only through the offer of higher studies, but also through the use of the model of scientific academies that proliferated in Europe since the seventeenth century. The slanderers of Portugal, who wish to crystallize the false image of an empire promoting the backwardness of its overseas possessions, invariably forget to mention the revealing fact that the first Portuguese scientific academy was founded in Brazil. The Academy of Sciences and Natural History of Rio de Janeiro began its work in 1772, with almost a decade ahead of the Academy of Sciences of Lisbon, which would only begin its activity in 1780, and decades before the landing of the Portuguese Court.
Umbilically linked to the Royal Academy of Sciences of Sweden, to which such famous names in the history of natural science as Linnaeus were affiliated, the Academy of Rio de Janeiro was formed with the purpose of studying the very rich Brazilian fauna and flora, with the progress of these investigations aid the refinement of agriculture and medicine. Academics met regularly at the seat of the Viceroyalty of Brazil, today Paço Imperial. The most outstanding personalities of Portuguese science at the time, such as Ribeiro Sanches, collaborated with the investigative enterprise. The Academy instructed a select generation of men of science, trained by observation, experimentation and debate, and published its findings in press sheets which were received with great enthusiasm. It was no longer Europe that taught Brazil, but Brazil that taught Europe, providing it with very useful knowledge for all fields of science.
The Academia de Ciências e da História Natural do Rio de Janeiro, being the first scientific academy, was not the first academy of higher studies in Brazil, having been preceded by the Academia Brasílica dos Esquecidos, which emerged in 1724 with the aim of supporting the work of the Royal Academy of Portuguese History. The contribution of the Academy of Sciences would be continued by the Literary Society of Rio de Janeiro, which also dealt with natural issues. The accumulated experience and knowledge would also be continued by the many Brazilians trained at the Academy who would come to teach in the courses at the University of Coimbra.
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Brazil only started really going backwards with the republican coup, then we became the spoiled son making poor use of the inheritance our parents left to us.
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É melhor escrever em Português, caso não tenha sido suficientemente explicito: não havia Universidades no Brasil. A minha premissa nunca foi a de tentar provar que não haviam estabelecimentos de ensino no Brasil, simplesmente não havia nenhuma Universidade. Escolas superiores, escolas de ensino básico e seminários para ensinar famílias sem posses, indígenas ou quem quisesse seguir a via eclesiástica não é factualmente o mesmo. Se assim não fosse, a maioria da elite colonial no Brasil não vinha instruir-se em Coimbra. No Brasil colonial era possível haver dois indivíduos separados por milhares de quilômetros de distância - um a residir em Pernambuco e outro no Rio de Janeiro - e no entanto terem algo em comum: o facto de terem sido colegas de turma na Universidade de Coimbra, no outro lado do Atlântico.
É preciso ter em conta que o Lula da Silva é um político e como tal profere discursos enviesados para agradar o seu eleitorado e ao eleitorado de esquerda cai sempre bem uma retórica victimista. Essa retórica no entanto não transparece a realidade a menos que comparemos o Brasil com outros países Ocidentais desenvolvidos, porque se compararmos com a restante América Latina o Brasil a nível académico não está mais atrasado (que foi o que Lula quis transparecer ao enunciar que os Espanhóis construíram Universidades mais cedo nas suas antigas colónias), nem os restantes países latinos têm uma academia mais ilustre por terem sido os primeiros a terem Universidades. Pelo contrário, o Brasil actualmente domina o ranking das Universidades da América Latina.
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Não me vou repetir: os colégios ofereciam estudos superiores equivalentes a uma universidade. Agora sim, em todo o Império, desde o Brasil passando pela Índia e acabando na China os melhores dos melhores iam para a única universidade do Império, a Universidade de Coimbra. Tal como acontecia dentro da metrópole, onde os estudos superiores eram feitos em Colégios e os melhores iam para Coimbra. O que faz sentido porque todos eram considerados portugueses.
Confundir conceitos usados então e no Império com os tempos actuais é apenas usar falsas equivalências.
Espero ter esclarecido.
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