Introduction
For almost seventy years, since the inaugural contest in 1956, the Eurovision Song Contest has provided a platform for European nations to perform their nationality on an international stage. These expressions of nationhood take the form of ‘playful nationalism’ which allow each participating country the opportunity to ‘flag-wave and dress up’, engage in stereotype and – through a three-minute pop performance – define itself to an audience across the world.1 Eurovision becomes a ‘constitutive process for the construction of the idea of a united Europe.’2
Katrin Sieg states that the contest is often used as ‘a particularly conspicuous cultural venue where performances not only embody changing gendered and racialised ideals and aspirations but also act out individual nations’ imagined relation to the larger European community.’3 By engaging with ideas around decolonialisation and migration, the contest challenges traditional European tropes of ‘supremacist ideologies of colonial rule, racial hierarchy, and ethnonational homogeneity.’4 The result, once all performances are seen as a whole, is a Europe that – on the surface – ‘imagines a multiracial Europe based on solidarity and equality.’5
Indeed, as of 2023 Eurovision adopted a permanent slogan for the contest – ‘United by Music’ – which, the organisers at the European Broadcast Union (EBU) claim, ‘encapsulates the core values of the Eurovision Song Contest, which has a rich history of promoting diversity, inclusivity and artistic expression; bridging differences and igniting a sense of shared community, regardless of nationality, language or background.’6 However, Catherine Baker describes how the contest’s ‘moments of multi-racial inclusion actually offer audiences an illusory, comforting moment of thinking about Europe as post-racial – somewhere that has overcome racism.’7 To explore this idea, this paper intends to demonstrate how an international televised song contest, was utilised as a ‘dynamic site for imagining the nation’ creating such illusory, comforting moments and in so doing re-defining and reinforcing the Portuguese national narratives around race and colonialism.8 Alison Lewis states that Eurovision offers ‘nations with a troubled history of aggression, occupation and violence (…) a powerful symbolic means of making amends for [these] histories.’9 To this end, by being represented at the Eurovision by two singers of Cabo Verdean heritage in 1994 and 1995, Sara Tavares and Tó Cruz, Portugal was able to ‘use the song contest’s immense symbolic power to overwrite, correct and manage their public image.’10
Using their 1996 Eurovision entry, O meu coração não tem cor [My heart has no colour] – from which this paper takes its name – Portugal was able to go further, offering a vision of itself as a country with ‘peaceful and harmonious relations […and] an absence of prejudice [… with an] ability to adapt to the tropics.’11 Singer Lúcia Moniz offers to dance the Brazilian samba or the Mozambican marrabenta, claiming that ‘everyone is welcome through this open door’ [‘P’la porta aberta pode entrar sempre alguém’]. With the chorus’s refrain inviting the listener to join in the dance, adding their own culture to the tastes of a ‘heart that has no colour,’ the Eurovision audience is presented with an example of an illusory celebration of post- and multi-racial national identity. This coincided with the formal establishment of the CPLP (Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa) in 1996, considered the ‘formal embodiment’ of the Portuguese postcolonial project.12
This paper intends to explore Portugal’s attempts to portray itself as a multi- (or post-) racial nation both within and outwith Eurovision in the 1990s. First, in ‘Eurovision: The Muse of my Themes,’ this paper will contextualise racial diversity and inclusion within the Eurovision Song Contest in the 1990s.13 Secondly, in ‘A “Cordial” Colonialism’ it will define the concept of Lusotropicalism, examining the readily adopted Portuguese narratives that placed the Portuguese as ‘the most humane of colonialists [perpetuating a] myth of a non-racist culture [in order] to claim ideological legitimacy for colonialism.’14 In the section entitled ‘Inventing a Ritual,’ this paper will use Sara Tavares’s 1994 Eurovision entry, Chamar a música [Call the music], to analyse the formation and expression of Black Lusophone identity in 1990s Portugal – a society that had begun to consider itself as multi- and post-racial.15 Next, in ‘Sweet and musical people,’ this paper will draw on a close reading of the 1995 Portuguese entry, Baunilha e chocolate [Vanilla and chocolate] by Tó Cruz, to interrogate Portugal’s attitude to Lusotropicalism, its history of colonialism and post-colonialism.16 Finally, in ‘What’s far away remains closer in songs,’ this paper will use Portugal’s 1996 entry O meu coração não tem cor, to consider the extent to which Portugal in the 1990s could claim to be a post-racial society whose ‘heart had no colour.’
Eurovision: The Muse of my Themes
Jesper Verhoef states that despite being ‘pivotal decades’ in defining how the public’s relationship to the media evolved, the 1980s and the 1990s ‘have largely been forgotten in media-historical research.’17 This is true in Eurovision studies too, with much scholarly attention paid to the early days of the contest (1956 – 1974) and an even greater amount of focus placed on the contest as it – and the European Union – expanded eastwards in the new millennium. However, the 1980s to mid-1990s remains a period that is largely neglected by Eurovision scholars.
There is a similar lacuna in Portuguese studies. As will be discussed in later chapters, the 1974 Carnation Revolution that signalled the end of the Portuguese Empire brought with it, for many, the end of Portuguese colonialism. Doing so provided ‘the necessary foundation to redeem Portugal’s young democracy’ with post-colonialism ‘intimately linked to post-Salazarism.’18 As a result, until recently little interrogation had been given to Portugal’s post-colonial media attitudes throughout the 1990s, with Viana writing that attempts to be ‘more attentive to the perspective of the former colonised’ only became more apparent following ‘the editorial surge in memory and postcolonial studies in Portugal in the 2010s.’19
Nina Serrianne writes that: ‘Mainstream culture in the 1990s reflected the changing political climate (…) Popular culture embodied progressive social changes […and] represented an integration of social issues of marginalised communities into mainstream entertainment.’20 However, Verhoef states that not only was media key to better understanding this wide array of sociocultural developments, ‘many of these developments, at least partly, owe to media.’21 Indeed, as Lopes and Soeiro explain, Eurovision is ‘one of the best examples through which we can analyse the relationship between music and media, as well as the relationship between music and society’ and as a result was well placed to reflect the rapidly changing Europe of the 1990s.22
Whilst in the mid-1990s the American and (Western) European music scene had turned to grunge, the Spice Girls, Riot Grrrl and hip hop to break new barriers in expressions of youth disillusionment, sexuality, and feminist, queer and Black identities, the Eurovision Song Contest remained almost defiantly parochial. Whilst Eurovision has always been a platform for social commentary offering an ‘immense scope for putting national or regional musical traditions on display and for asserting diverse forms of identity’ and ‘bringing societal issues to the public realm,’ even into the 1990s the contest was still presenting an image of Europe as – for the most part – inoffensively family-friendly, straight, white and chaste. 23
Therefore if Eurovision can be viewed ‘as part of the broader history of European integration since 1950,’ then Portugal’s mid-1990s expressions of supposedly harmonious post-colonial diversity demonstrate a ‘revision of historic imaginations of Europe as presumptively white,’ acknowledging the presence of non-white Europeans within that history.24 It wasn’t until 1964 – the year that Portugal first entered the contest – that the Netherlands, represented by Anneke Grönloh from the Dutch East Indies, ‘broke the [contest’s] spell of whiteness.’25 Many countries have now sent Black or minority ethnic performers to Eurovision which whilst ‘long been widely perceived as the last fortress of whiteness in mainstream popular music’ began radiating ‘a more “international” identity, bound less by national characteristics.’26 Unlike other former colonial European nations, however, for Portugal this process did not begin in the 1990s, sending the first black performer to the Eurovision Song Contest, Angolan-born Eduardo Nascimento, in 1967.
However, analysing the 2021 contest in Rotterdam, which saw a record number of Black performers, from backgrounds that represented a wider range of Afro-European histories than ever, Baker suggests that any moments of multi-racial inclusion at Eurovision create ‘a fantasy of inclusion that distracts us from seeing ongoing racial injustice in Europe.’27 Baker identifies ‘uncomfortable evidence that every single Black entrant [in the 2021 contest] appeared to have underperformed on pre-contest predictions, especially on the public televote.’28 There is therefore the need to ‘confront the likelihood that racism is having an effect on how audiences react to Black performers at Eurovision.’29 So despite the EBU’s claims that the contest has diversity and inclusivity at its core, Baker observes that the Europe presented at Eurovision is one ‘commonly, though wrongly, thought of as a historically white place, where people of African descent have only recently started living and so are not part of its cultural traditions.’30
A “Cordial” Colonialism
The concept of the Portuguese heart ‘[having] no colour’ is linked to the theory of Lusotropicalism developed by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre in 1933, which suggested that as colonisers, the Portuguese were more humane and adaptable than those from the other European colonial empires. Freyre’s assumptions originated from claims made by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in 1822 that ‘it was easier on the coast of Brazil than elsewhere for [enslaved people] to gain their freedom, and large numbers of free [black people] were to be found in this region.’31 Pedro Schacht Pereira interrogates the validity of the providence of Hegel’s claims in great detail, noting that any observable lack of racial prejudice in Brazil in the nineteenth century was the result of ‘an awareness that economic necessity rather than humanitarian imperative.’32
However, despite their tenuous providence, these ideas became part of Portugal’s national narrative, with explanations based on the Portuguese people’s own long history of emigration, exploration and Otherness, as well as the more problematic history of colonial miscegenation. Lusotropicalist theory suggested that the Portuguese colonisers had ‘a special ability to adapt to the tropics by easily intermingling, intermarrying, and interchanging cultural elements with different peoples, given that they were themselves the result of multiple mixtures.’33 These sexual elements are similar to German colonial desires described by Susan Zantop in Colonial Fantasies, framing ‘conquest as courtship, colonisation as marriage, and the “civilising mission” as good parenting.’34
Lusotropicalism was then adopted as part of a major propaganda operation by the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933 – 1974), combining ‘older imperial themes of grandeur – the pioneering colonial conquest, bravery in battles, conversion of the heathen (…) with Freyre’s glamorous miscegenation, which erased or obscured histories of colonial conquest, plantation violence, and slavery.’35 At a stroke, in fact, the Portuguese empire, which had originated in the fifteenth century with the Conquest of Ceuta, was no more. Instead, the nation became pluri-continental, and the former colonies now became overseas provinces. According to Minister of Foreign Affairs Caeiro da Mata, five centuries of colonisation – ‘of which we should be proud’ – now became ‘five centuries of relations between different cultures and peoples.’36 In deeming itself less brutal, less barbaric and less overtly racist than other colonial powers, Portugal granted itself the belief in its own ‘benign colonialism.’37 This belief in an exceptionalist Portuguese colonialism was ‘based on a unique sense of understanding and tolerance for the otherness of others.’38
There is, however, a truth to the notion that Portugal’s empire was exceptional. For whilst the other imperial powers had withdrawn from their colonies in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s, offering them independence in order to stave off costly wars against anti-colonial liberation movements, Portugal was exceptional in its ‘vigorous reluctance to decolonise its overseas territories.’39 As a result, Portugal under Prime Minister and dictator António de Oliveira Salazar’s regime, then the poorest country in Western Europe, ‘still subjugated vast swathes of southern Africa that totalled 22 times its size’ and ‘found itself, as the only European imperial power that maintained dictatorial rule, facing increasing international isolation.’40
In order to ‘suppress incipient African liberation movements’ in Angola, Mozambique, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Guinea-Bissau Portugal ‘waged an anachronistic colonial war’ between 1961 and the overthrowing of the dictatorship in 1974.41 Lusotropicalism proved politically expedient in propagandising resistance to decolonisation, for example through denying ‘any ethno-centric definition of national identity’ the Estado Novo was able ‘to legitimise [its] colonialist ideology especially after the 1950s [in the face of] anticolonial movements.’42 For the regime the colonial wars were not ‘wars’, instead Portugal was ‘merely exerting its sovereignty [over] integral parts of [the country].’43 So if Portugal engaged in ‘cordial colonialism,’ this was also a ‘cordial war.’ 44 The cordiality of the war is borne out in the numbers. Whilst it is difficult to estimate the number of dead as a result of these brutal wars, even ‘the most conservative estimates for the total number of victims exceed 100,000’ a majority of whom were African civilians.45
That Portugal was a colonial dictatorship engaged in colonial wars was cause for concern when they first entered the Eurovision Song Contest in1964. The inclusion of Salazar’s Portugal (and Franco’s Spain) served as ‘an uncomfortable reminder of the deeply persistent conservative/religious authoritarianisms of Western European political experience in the latter half of the twentieth century.’46 The 1964 contest in Copenhagen saw a protestor take to the stage with a placard reading ‘Boycott Franco and Salazar’ demanding Portugal’s exclusion from the contest.
As the Portuguese authoritarian regime ended in 1974 – one of the signals being that year’s Eurovision entry E Depois do Adeus [And After the Farewell] – and its colonial rule in Africa was dissolved in 1975, one would expect Lusotropicalism to become a curiosity of the past. ‘Yet,’ Bastos notes, ‘it keeps reappearing.’47 Into the 1990s, whilst Portugal retained strong relations with the former colonies in Africa, ‘the dominant thrust of Portugal’s policy aims in these areas [continued to be] developing lucrative markets for the Portuguese to exploit.’48
For most Portuguese ‘democratisation and decolonisation were simultaneous and mutually determining processes.’49 To that end, Portuguese national conversations regarding post-colonial reconciliation and recognition of their colonial history were – for the most part – already settled. By the 1990s, Portugal had become one of the European countries with the biggest proportion of African migrants and South American immigration (mostly from Brazil).50 Therefore, as Portuguese society became increasingly diverse, Lusotropicalism was responsible for a ‘multicultural blindness’ that ignored institutional and/or systemic racism.51
Lusotropicalist interpretations of history contributed to a foundational notion of Portugal’s sense of identity that managed to survive the introduction of democracy: its pioneering role as a mediator between worlds.52 Portuguese colonialism was referred to rather benignly as the ‘Discoveries’ [Descobrimentos] and for Almeida and Corkill this language of ‘discovery’ glorifies and pacifies ‘the brutality of conquest (…) and the traffic in humans’ that Portuguese colonisers had engaged in.53
Inventing a Ritual
Sara Tavares and Tó Cruz were both born in Lisbon to Cabo Verdean parents, part of the wave of immigration from the overseas provinces in the sixties and seventies. The perhaps reluctant beneficiaries of the Portuguese Empire’s transformation into a pluri-continental nation, the wars of independence in mainland Lusophone Africa, and mass emigration of Portuguese workers to northern Europe, Cabo Verdeans were encouraged – through both an active recruitment initiative and a drought and subsequent famine across the Cabo Verde archipelago throughout 1968 and 1970 – to migrate to the metropole for work.
Like many Cabo Verdeans in Portugal, Tavares’s father worked in the construction industry whilst her mother worked as a cleaner. Raised by ‘an older, churchgoing woman’ after her father left Portugal, and the family, to find work in the United States, and her mother moved to the south of Portugal, Tavares was only sixteen when she sang Chamar a música at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest in Dublin.54 There are no explicitly Lusophone influences in the song or the staging. Instead, the lyrics and melody recall a dull but rousing generic mid-tempo ballad found on a Disney soundtrack, with the chorus declaring ‘I’m going to call the music, [and] Find arising from me, A satin poem’ [‘Vou chamar a música / Encontrar à flor de mim / Um poema de cetim.’] The song finished 8th out of 25 with 73 points which as of 2025 remains Portugal’s fifth best performance at Eurovision.
It is Tavares’s soaring vocals, which are reminiscent of Whitney Houston’s, that really make the song a success. Tavares had received her first recording contract, which led her to Festival da Canção – the Portuguese national selection – and eventually to Eurovision, after winning the first edition of TV talent show Chuva de Estrelas throughout which she had sang a series of cover versions of Whitney Houston songs. Further comparisons to Houston can be made in the way that Tavares’s racial difference is sublimating through the inoffensive mid-tempo ballad and plain costuming to both sound and appear as palatably Black as acceptable to white European audiences.
As Robert J. Patterson writes, ‘in order to be beautiful, innocent, and elegant, [Houston] had to embody and perform a regulated version’ of her identity and perform ‘appropriated expressions of blackness that were black enough, but not “too black”.’55 All of which the viewer sees in the production of Chamar a música, a generically inoffensive ballad which, like Houston’s earlier work, ‘downplays certain elements of black musical production (…) that rendered black music [too] black’ to appeal to white aesthetic preferences.56 Like Grönloh thirty years earlier, Tavares’s performance leaves ‘references to her cultural background out of the picture’ and does not offer Europe a particularly revealing glimpse into Afro-Portuguese identity, nor Black European identity, merely a sort of Portuguese re-interpretation of pre-existing African American identities.57
Indeed, alongside Houston, Tavares’s early inspirations were Black American singers Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner and Stevie Wonder, rather than Afro-Lusophone or Cabo Verdean singers. Emulating these influences, she sang gospel, ‘launching the first Portuguese gospel choir [Shout!], with people from Portugal’s African community.’58 Perhaps, however, it is here that Tavares’s Blackness intersects with her Portugueseness, in an expression of Black Portuguese identity formed in opposition to – rather than as a result of – Lusotropicalist assumptions. Since Cabo Verdeans are of both African and Portuguese descent, Gina Gibau writes that they experienced a ‘constant negotiation of identity along racially ascribed and culturally defined lines’ leading them to actively challenge ideas of racial categorisation.59
With a lack of representation of Black Portuguese singers to emulate in the 1990s, ‘a whole community of young second-generation Africans born in Portugal (…) felt fragilely represented.’60 Furthermore, growing up in Portugal, Tavares found ‘no connection to traditional Cabo Verdean music as a living person.’61 So Black Portuguese youth looked to Black American stars to conceptualise and express their racialised identities. For all of the Estado Novo’s ambitions to create a pluri-continental Portugal, it is perhaps the North American continent that proved to be the most influential in the formation of Black Portuguese identity in the 1990s.
Much like Houston, Tavares would allow ‘the sound of blackness to emerge throughout [her] career’ and her later music would draw on rhythms and musical styles from across the Lusophone diaspora, containing lyrics ‘rich with multilingual slang – Portuguese, Creole, Angolan.’62 Tavares would incorporate not only traditional Cabo Verdean music, but a wide variety of Afro-Lusophone musical styles into her music. But, with a distance that comes with diaspora, Tavares was not interested in making traditional music in a traditional or authentic way: ‘I use traditional instruments, but I don’t use them at the same time, because that’s not my role.’63 Instead, Tavares and her contemporaries used traditional instrumentation to ‘make something fresh’ and in doing so ‘created [a] musical identity of their own’ separate from – but influenced by – their ancestors, which would replicate similar expressions of distinct identity by Black Americans.64 In turn, these hybrid, intersectional, Luso-African musical identities were considered ‘whole and authentic and genuine.’65
Promoting her album Balancê in 2005 Tavares said: ‘When I walk around with my friends, it’s a very, very interesting community. We speak Portuguese slang, Angolan slang, some words in Cabo Verdean Crioulo, and of course some English. In Crioulo there are already English and French words.’66 One of the fundamental elements of the myth of Lusotropicalism is the ‘light identity of Lusophony (…) bolstered by the merchandising of language’ which creates unity through the Portuguese language.67 Lusotropicalism celebrates Portuguese adaptability, but it is actually linguistic adaptability that unites Black Lusophone diasporas in Portugal. The assumption that all citizens of Lusophone countries would necessarily be fluent in European Portuguese, once again emphasises the Eurocentricity of the concept. For example, Tavares’s mother could not speak Portuguese and growing up Tavares ‘always answered [her mother’s Crioulo] in Portuguese,’ because ‘it’s easier for integration to master the target language well.’68 Part of Tavares’ Cabo Verdean identity involved grappling with a ‘“métisse culture” in which different traditions and languages are mixed together.’69
But Tavares remained a reluctant representative of Cabo Verde, instead seeing herself as ‘part of a generation of young people from the Cabo Verdean diaspora.’70 Despite Lusotropicalist claims of multi-racial, post-racial Lusophone harmony, Tavares noted the absence of real intersectional Cabo Verdean-Portuguese or Black Portuguese identity, lamenting, ‘it will be a long time before the people from my generation do not have to choose between being African or European.’71 For Tavares, then, in this Luso-African diasporic identity there is a degree of loneliness and isolation: linguistically isolated from parents; geographically isolated from ancestry; and remaining an isolated and unrepresented Other in Europe.
Returning the focus to the Eurovision stage in 1994, Tavares – who passed away aged 45 in 2023 – was eventually able to express a form of pan-African, pan-Lusophone Black European identity through a mixture of musical styles and languages. In Chamar a música as she sings ‘I’m going to call the music, Whisper a madrigal, Invent a ritual’ [‘Vou chamar a música / Murmurar um madrigal / Inventar um ritual’] Tavares seeks to escape into music. Her music would go on to belong to ‘the social universe of “world music,” which sells exoticism’ but would allow her to formulate her own sense of Black European identity, that is difficult to place.72 Somehow neither truly Cabo Verdean, nor truly Portuguese: ‘I’m Cape Verdean because of my skin colour, language and history, but I’m also Portuguese. I was born here.’73 Here then, as she sings in Chamar a música, Tavares calls to the music for her escape and, somewhere in between these identities, was able to invent a ritual for herself, mixing Whitney Houston’s gospel vocal style with Cabo Verdean morna, sung in Angolan Crioulo, and reinterpreting them for Portuguese audiences.
Sweet and musical people
The next year, once again in Dublin, Portugal sent another singer of Cabo Verdean descent to Eurovision. This time, however, there would be a more explicit representation of Lusotropicalism and a much more direct statement about the perceived attitudes of multi- and (post-)racial Portugal. Tó Cruz’s Baunilha e chocolate is, at face value, a standard mid-1990s soul-infused pop song celebrating a multi-racial relationship. Unlike Chamar a música a year earlier, it failed to make much of an impact on the contest, finishing 21st out of 23 entries, only receiving points from France and Greece. Much like Chamar a música, however, there are no distinguishable traditional Afro-Lusophone or Cabo Verdean influences in the song’s musicality, costuming or performance. As the previous year, the song’s influences seem much more rooted in Black American identity – rather than Luso- or European blackness – beyond the soul-pop sound of the song itself, including the five white backing singers on stage dressed in choir robes, resembling a gospel choir.
With Baunilha e chocolate audiences experience a song that truly celebrates Freyre’s vision of Lusotropical Portugal, complete with intrepid explorers traveling oceans, ‘sweet and musical people’ [‘Gente doce e musical’] waiting to be ‘found’ and references to crossings of new frontiers. In Baunilha e chocolate, there are each of three pillars of Lusotropicalism identified by Pimenta et al. in Lusotropicalism: Tropical geography under dictatorship, 1926 – 1974, those being: ‘miscegenation, cultural fusion and absence of racial prejudices – all of which were articulated with the historical evangelic mission of Portugal.’74
The reference to miscegenation is present even in the song’s title and the ‘mixing of vanilla and chocolate’ in a harmony that ‘tastes sweeter than honey’ [‘Tem mais paladar que o mel / Casar baunilha com chocolate.’] This represents Freyre’s vision of ‘East and West be[ing] brought together on equal footing. A union that is only possible, as it would seem, by means of miscegenation and the blending of cultures.’75 The multi-racial nature of the relationship being celebrated in the song is made explicit: Cruz’s ‘sweetheart with white skin’ [‘Amada de branca pele’] is the ‘cream in his dark tea’ [‘És nata no meu chá mate’] and whereas ‘[her] perfume is moonlight’ [‘Tens perfume de luar’] – dazzlingly white – his ‘taste is coffee’ [‘Tenho gosto de café’] – dark and exotic.
However, there is a stark reimagining of the history behind what Freyre glamorously calls ‘miscegenation’ as Cruz sings that ‘each kiss tastes like peace.’76 In doing so, the song, as per Freyre, ‘erase[s] or obscure[s] histories of colonial conquest, plantation violence, and slavery.’77 Cruz’s song is clear about the gender dynamics involved in such historical ‘kisses of peace.’ Cruz sings ‘Your [white] grandfather was there / My [black] grandmother set foot here’ [‘E o teu avô andou por lá / A minha avó pôs cá o pé.’] As Pimenta et al. write, ‘the sexuality of male (European) masters and female [enslaved people] centrally underpinned Freyre’s Lusotropicalism [… and] was explicitly borne out by liaisons between the European male and the indigenous (…) female.’78
The second pillar of Lusotropicalism identified by Pimenta et al. is cultural fusion. As seen in the song’s title, cultural fusion and celebration of ‘discovery’ runs central to the Baunilha e chocolate’s theme. The song begins by celebrating ‘those people, yours and mine, who spread their roots wherever they went’ [‘Que povo é este, teu e meu / Onde passou deitou raíz?’] This spreading of roots can be seen not just through miscegenation or the introduction of the Portuguese language, but also the introduction of Christianity and ‘the ecumenical Christian vocation of the Portuguese.’79 Indeed, Cruz sings that ‘those people’ – in the song’s narrative represented by both the colonisers and the colonised – ‘changed the sea [and] changed the sky, where there was no dawn, they made the world their own’ [‘Mudou o mar, mudou o céu / Onde não era amanheceu / Fez do mundo o seu país.’] These lyrics indicate that even in 1995, the Portuguese held firm to notion that their colonialism, ‘based on a unique sense of understanding and tolerance for the otherness of others,’ was a colonialism that had civilised the colonised and illuminated the ‘where there was no dawn.’80
The idea of ‘making the world their own’ can also be read as a reference to the history of the Portuguese as – depending on the specific historical and politico-economic circumstances – ‘the navegador in the age of discovery, the colono in the age of settlement, the emigrante in the postcolonial period.’81 Indeed, throughout history emigration to the overseas provinces and former colonies had ‘served as an escape mechanism for millions of rural Portuguese in search for a better life, at the same time as it served as an economic strategy to rid the country of its poor.’82 Rural underdevelopment left Portugal ‘a country of Two Nations’ with ‘depopulation of the more remote areas [leaving] some country areas with an ageing, poorly educated sub-class eking out a subsistence existence.’83 As a result, the emigration out of Portugal from rural areas which continued throughout the 20th century – predominantly to France, the United Kingdom and Switzerland – could be somewhat misleadingly provided as yet more evidence of the Portuguese ‘willingness to search for new worlds.’84
The fifth verse also commemorates the Descobrimentos celebrating ‘those who set sail and rounded the Bojador’ and in so doing, ‘fell under the spell […and] invented a new love’ [‘Que povo é este que partiu / E foi dobrar o Bojador? / Este povo que sentiu o feitiço / [… E] inventar um novo amor.’] The passing of the previously insurmountable Cape Bojador in 1434 by Gil Eanes was considered one of the landmarks in the history of Portuguese exploration, setting off Portuguese navigators into uncharted waters and the beginning of the Época dos Descobrimentos [Age of Discoveries]. The Cape is remembered in Fernando Pessoa’s grand poem Mensagem, in which the cost of conquering the sea – ‘So many sons prayed for in vain, So many brides remain unmarried, That you might be ours, oh sea’ – is deemed necessary as ‘He who wants to go beyond the Cape [Bodajor], Has to go beyond pain.’85 In Cruz’s song, any sacrifices and costs made by the navigators during the Descobrimentos were rewarded with a new love – presumably with racialised bodies. This new love, the chorus reminds us, is sweeter than honey.
The final pillar of Lusotropicalism identified by Pimenta et al. is absence of racial prejudice. Whilst this also remains central to the song’s themes, the final verse is particularly important. Cruz sings:
| Quando a alma sente o amor | When your soul feels love |
| Tenha o corpo qualquer cor | Whatever the colour of our body |
| Preto ou branco tanto faz. | Black or white, it doesn’t matter. |
The perceived absence of racial prejudice was fostered by a widespread culture of denial in which ‘violent colonial elements [were] described in euphemisms and are almost dismissed.’86 Speaking triumphantly in the Portuguese Parliament, centre-right Partido Social Democrata (PSD) [Social Democratic Party] politician João Granja da Fonseca declared in 1993 that ‘there has been an absence, if not a total absence (…) of racial prejudice, in sharp contrast with other peoples who have followed in our wake along the routes of the globe.’87 However, the brutal murder of Portuguese Cabo Verdean Alcindo Monteiro and several other attacks on black men perpetrated by a neo-Nazi group in Lisbon in June 1995 – a month after Eurovision – demonstrated how misguided these ideas had been.88 The utopia of post-colonial, multi-racial Portugal free from racial prejudice promised in Baunilha e chocolate still seemed some distance away. The Carnation Revolution and the end of Salazarism had brought with it the supposed end of Portugal colonialism, but it became clear that politicians had been ‘ready to close that chapter of national history without debating it properly.’89
The October 1995 legislative elections saw the centre-left Partido Socialista (PS) [Socialist Party] defeat the PSD which had been in government since 1985. Whilst the national framing of remembrance of Portuguese colonialism as the ‘descobrimentos’ did not radically change, the PS government did seek strengthen diplomatic relations with countries with which Portugal shared ties of history, language and culture. None of the new government’s programmes explicitly mentioned the celebration of the Descobrimentos ‘as a political priority.’90 That being said, under the PS, Portugal did still commemorate two major events in Portuguese colonial history – the fifth centenary of the establishment of the maritime route to India in 1998, and the so-called discovery of Brazil in 2000.
What’s far away remains closer in songs
Twenty-two years after the Revolution that brought an end to the colonial wars and granted independence to the Portuguese colonies Africa and Asia, the 1996 Portuguese Eurovision song celebrated a Lusophone community that was united in amiable, multi-racial, multi-cultural harmony. Certainly, at a glance, the celebration of a harmonious Lusophone community in O meu coração não tem cor appears to be a joyful resolution to Portugal’s former empire which, true to the EBU’s ‘United By Music’ mantra sees singer Lúcia Moniz declare ‘what’s far away remains closer in songs’ [‘O que está longe fica perto nas cantigas.’] Moniz offers to ‘throw a tri-continental party’ [‘Que fazem uma festa tricontinental’] in which a wide range of dances and musical styles from across the Portuguese-speaking world are celebrated.
O meu coração não tem cor refers to a number of genres of music and dance from around the Lusophone world: Cabo Verdean coladeira and funaná, Azorean sapateia, Brazilian baião and chula, Madeiran bailinho, Mozambican marrabenta, Angolan merengue alongside folk cultural practices from continental Portugal such as corridinho and vira. Combining these practices is a part of a process of pan-continental cultural fusion that serves to – true to the EBU’s mantra – unite Lusophones from across the world by music. Through Moniz’s performance, Portugal of the mid-1990s presents itself at Eurovision as a European country which places Lusophone African and Afro-Brazilian cultural traditions at the centre of its national identity. This idea was well supported with a report from the British Embassy declaring in 1994 that, ‘Portugal’s head is in Europe, but its heart is in Africa.’91
The song’s title, declaring that the white singer’s heart ‘has no colour,’ helps to perpetuate the idea of post-colonial, multi-racial unity in Portugal, in which racial diversity is celebrated in a completely colourblind society. Such sentiments would be rewarded by the Eurovision juries, who placed the song sixth with 92 points, which was Portugal’s highest placing in the contest until Salvador Sobral’s win in 2017 and remains their second best performance in 56 appearances.92 In O meu coração não tem cor the Eurovision audience witnesses an example of Portugal’s supposed ‘special appetite for intercultural coexistence’ as Moniz describes how Lusophones have ‘in [their] mouths an unruly longing for fig, papaya and guarana’ [‘Na nossa boca uma saudade desordeira / De figo, de papaia e de guarana’].93 Ultimately, O meu coração não tem cor appears to combine all the flavours of the former empire to make a cultural equivalent to the delicious canje de galinha, a chicken soup popular across Portuguese, Brazilian and Cabo Verdean cuisine.
But as Michel Cahen explains in his critique of the ‘new interstate organisation’ CPLP [Comunidades dos Paises de Língua Portuguesa / Community of Portuguese Language Countries] set up in July 1996, institutionalising ‘centuries of fraternal bonds’ between Lusophone countries, ‘the Portuguese imaginary has only been partially decolonised.’94 The official inauguration of the community was greeted with ‘impassioned speeches from the Portuguese and Brazilian leaders’ speaking enthusiastically about their connection to what they referred to as ‘a África nossa’ [‘our Africa.’]95 Inevitably, institutionalising this imagined supra-national Lusophone community served to alienate many – like Tavares’s family – who ‘[had] kept their national languages’ and to whom Portuguese remained ‘either second or foreign.’96
This continued belief in the myth of Lusotropicalism indicates that there was ‘never really signposted a cultural end to the Portuguese Empire.’97 Instead, the ‘protective myth’ of Lusotropicalism and the concept of a ‘heart that has no colour’ have permeated into mainstream Portuguese thinking.98 Social psychologist Jorge Vala acknowledges that Lusotropicalism protected Portugal from accusations of racism, but ‘today, it is a myth that legitimises the view of our past.’99 As such, Lusotropicalism is a process of ‘rehabilitation and appreciation of the indigenous and African contribution to the nation and culture’ but remains ‘a colonial way of writing history which highlights the white and European contribution.’100
Conclusion
There is clearly an undeniable ‘lasting seductive power’ to Lusotropicalist ideology that allows Portugal to forgive itself for centuries of colonialism.101 This is despite evidence showing that Portuguese society still has some way to go before it can achieve the post-racial harmony Lúcia Moniz sang about almost thirty years ago. Ultimately, there are limits to Eurovision’s impact and whilst performances can embody ideals, they ‘cannot negotiate real (political, social, economic) challenges to these ideals.’102
As this paper has discussed, many of the central tenets of Lusotropicalism – ‘universalist and humanist character of Portuguese national culture’ – adopted by both the Estado Novo dictatorship and the post-Revolution democratic governments have been based on assumptions that have little to no evidence to support them.103 Subsequently, this has led to a ‘a culture of denial, where prejudice and racism are perceived as non-existent problems in Portugal given its supposedly tolerant and non-racist culture.’104
Indeed, when a 2017 European Social Survey found that a much higher percentage of Portuguese respondents (52.9%) were found to hold racist views than the European average (29.2%), the findings were reportedly dismissed because ‘everyone knew that the Portuguese were not racist.’105 The 2020 European Social Survey found similar numbers with 62% of Portuguese respondents agreeing with at least one form of racist statement. Even worse a concerning 32% of respondents agreed with all the racist statements in the survey.106 Writing in Visão in 2024, José Pedro Monteiro explains that this can be blamed in part on a significant portion of the population having been educated ‘during the Estado Novo, in an education marked by (real) ideological indoctrination and in a society in which censorship and propaganda went hand in hand.’107
Portugal’s use of black performers and references to Black and/or African cultural traditions at Eurovision was no coincidence. Instead, the country’s apparent desire to not only acknowledge but also celebrate its colonial history and post-colonial diversity can be seen as a rather astute attempt to acquire cultural capital from these cultural practices and ‘underscore their uniqueness and set themselves apart’ from other former colonial European nations.108 Perhaps then, as Sieg suggests, rather than necessarily exemplifying Europe’s commitment to social inclusion, ‘the choice of black performers (…) points to the way in which blackness in European popular culture has become a signifier of cultural hipness, and thus certifies a modern image of the nation.’109
On the Eurovision stage in the 1990s, it appears Sara Tavares and Tó Cruz were still searching for an authentic sense of Black Portuguese identity. Representations of blackness distinct from existing expressions of African American identity had not yet been actualised on stage. Nor had representations of a Black Portuguese identity that was Portuguese in its own right, without having to invoke (or absolve) colonial history.
Crucially though, it is Lúcia Moniz’s O meu coração não tem cor that most accurately represented Portuguese attitudes to race and colonial legacy in Portugal in the 1990s. Portuguese colonial history is framed from the perspective of the European coloniser: whilst the colonisers benefitted from cultural fusion and the addition of ‘tropical’ flavours, the colonised are assumed to have benefitted from a language, a religion and minimal levels of inclusion. Meanwhile, whilst Portugal (and Brazil) have been the main beneficiaries of the Lusophone community, the African states alongside Timor Leste ‘wait expectantly for the actual dividends to be gained from belonging to such a community.’110
Notes
[1] Maria Kyriakidou, Michael Skey, Julie Uldam and Patrick McCurdy, “Media events and cosmopolitan fandom: ‘Playful nationalism’ in the Eurovision Song Contest,” International Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 21 (2018): 604.
[3] Katrin Sieg, “Imagining Diversity in an Age of Migration,” German Politics & Society 35, No. 4 (2017): 23.
[6] “All Aboard! A journey through the slogans of the Eurovision Song Contest,” Eurovision.tv, published November 6, 2023, https://eurovision.tv/story/journey-through-eurovision-slogans.
[7] “(Part 1) Your rhythm is rebellious: the struggle for racial justice and Eurovision 2021,” Catherine Baker, May 21, 2021, https://bakercatherine.wordpress.com/2021/05/21/your-rhythm-is-rebellious-the-struggle-for-racial-justice-and-eurovision-2021-part-1/.
[8] Alison Lewis, “Germany as Good European: National Atonement and Performing Europeanness in the Eurovision Song Contest,” in Eurovisions: Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest since 1956, ed. Julie Kalman, Ben Wellings, Keshia Jacotine, (Macmillan, 2019), 21.
[11] Joaquim Pires Valentim and Ana Maria Heleno, “Luso-tropicalism as a social representation in Portuguese society: Variations and anchoring,” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 62 (2018): 34; O meu coração não tem cor, written by José Fanha & Pedro Osório and performed by Lúcia Moniz (1996, Portugal).
[12] Maria Basto Viana, Neither forgiven nor forgotten: The analysis of the memory of the Portuguese colonial past evoked in Portuguese political discourse from 1990 to 2020 (Utrecht University, 2021), 27–28.
[14] José Carlos Ameida and David Corkill, “On Being Portuguese: Luso-tropicalism, Migrations and the Politics of Citizenship,” in Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, ed. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Anne Tate (Liverpool University Press, 2015), 158.
[15] Chamar a música, written by João Carlos Campos de Sousa Mota Oliveira and Rosa Lobato de Faria and performed by Sara Tavares (1994, Portugal).
[16] Baunilha e chocolate, written by António Vitorino d’Almeida and Rosa Lobato de Faria and performed by Tó Cruz (1995, Portugal).
[17] Jesper Verhoef, “A 1980s and 1990s Media History Manifesto,” TMG Journal for Media History 26(2), (2023): 2.
[18] Margarida Calafate Ribeiro, “Between Europe and the Atlantic: The Melancholy Paths of Lusotropicalism,” in New Dangerous Liaisons: Discourses on Europe and love in the Twentieth Century, ed. Luisa Passerini, Liliana Ellena, and Alexander C.T. Geppert (Berghahn, 2010), 226.
[22] Sofia Vieira Lopes, and João Soeiro, “Between Concepts and Behaviours: The Eurovision Song Contest and Ethnomusicology,” The Eurovision Song Contest as a Cultural Phenomenon: From Concert Halls to the Halls of Academia, (Routledge, 2023), 249.
[23] Alison Lewis and John Hayek, “Teaching European History and Memory through the Eurovision Song Contest during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” in The Eurovision Song Contest as a Cultural Phenomenon, ed. Adam Dubin, Dean Vuletic, and Antonio Obregón (Routledge, 2023), 249.
[24] Ben Wellings and Julie Kalman, “Entangled Histories: Identity, Eurovision and European Integration,” Eurovisions, Identity and the International Politics of the Eurovision Song Contest Since 1956 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 2; Sieg, “Imagining Diversity,” 27.
[25] Lutger Mutsaers, “Fernando, Filippo, and Milly: Bringing blackness to the Eurovision stage,” in A Song for Europe: Popular Music and politics in the Eurovision Song Contest, ed. Robert Deam Tobin, Ivan Raykoff (Routledge, 2007), 61.
[27] “(Part 2) If you don’t get it, if you, if you don’t get it: Eurovision 2021 and the struggle for racial justice,” Catherine Baker, May 26, 2021, https://bakercatherine.wordpress.com/2021/05/26/if-you-dont-get-it-if-you-if-you-dont-get-it-eurovision-2021-and-the-struggle-for-racial-justice-part-2/; Baker, “(Part 1)”.
[31] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, “Appendix 1b,” in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Introduction: Reason in History, trans. H. B. Nisbet, (Cambridge University Press, 1975), 165.
[32] Pedro Schacht Pereira, “The (In)Tangible Legacy of ‘Generic Lusotropicalism’: Unexamined Links in the Textual History of ‘Portuguese Humane Colonialism’,” Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies 36/37, (Tagus Press, 2022): 65.
[33] Cristiana Bastos, “Luso-tropicalism Debunked, Again: Race, Racism and Racialism in Three Portuguese Speaking Societies,” in Luso-tropicalism and Its Discontents: The Making and Unmaking of Racial Exceptionalism, ed. Warwick Anderson, Ricardo Roque, and Ricardo Ventura Santos (2019), 243.
[34] Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family and Nation in Precolonial Germany (Durham, 1997) in Sieg, “Imagining Diversity,” 24.
[39] Grégoire Ming, The ethics of comedy in the representation of political violence in post-1945 European fiction (UCL, 2021), 114.
[40] José R Pimenta, J. Sarmento, and Ana F. de Azevedo, “Lusotropicalism: Tropical geography under dictatorship, 1926 – 1974,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, no. 32, (2011): 227; Ming, The ethics,” 114.
[42] José Carlos Almeida and David Corkill, “On Being Portuguese: Luso-tropicalism, Migrations and the Politics of Citizenship,” in Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations, eds Encarnacíon Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Anne Tate (Liverpool University Press, 2015), 163.
[45] Raquel Varela, A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution, trans. Sean Purdy (Pluto Press, 2019), 54.
[46] Luisa Pinto Teixeira and Martin Stokes, “‘And After Love…’: Eurovision, Portuguese Popular Culture, and the Carnation Revolution,” in Empire of Song: Europe and Nation in the Eurovision Song Contest, ed. Dafni Tragaki (Scarecrow Press, 2013), 223.
[48] Neill Lochery, Out of the Shadows: Portugal from Revolution to the Present Day (Bloomsbury, 2017), 186.
[49] António Costa Pinto, “O fim do império colonial português,” Público, January 22, 2015, https://www.publico.pt/2015/01/22/culturaipsilon/noticia/o-fim-do-imperio-colonial-portugues-1682883.
[54] Sue Steward, “Careful whispers,” The Guardian, November 30, 2007, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2007/nov/30/worldmusic.
[55] Robert J. Patterson, “‘Didn’t We Almost Have It All?’: Reading Whitney Houston,” in Destructive Desires: Rhythm and Blues culture and the Politics of Racial Equality, ed. Robert J. Patterson (Rutgers University Press, 2019), 132.
[59] Gina Gibau, “Contested Identities: Narratives of Race and Ethnicity in the Cape Verdean Diaspora,” Identities 12, no. 3. (2005): 433.
[60] Rodrigo Pinto, “Após vencer ‘The Voice’ de Portugal, cantora larga gospel e volta às origens,” BBC Brasil, January 26, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/videos_e_fotos/2015/01/141210_lisboa_saratavares_rp.
[61] João Bonafacio, “Sara Tavares, uma mulher do seu tempo,” Público, May 1, 2009, https://www.publico.pt/2009/05/01/culturaipsilon/noticia/sara-tavares-uma-mulher-do-seu-tempo-230065.
[64] Bonifacio, “Sara Tavares.”; Jon Pareles, “Sara Tavares, Portuguese Singer Who Prized Her African Roots, Dies at 45,” New York Times, December 12, 2023, https://archive.ph/4z6Ch#selection-724.0-732.0.
[67] Michel Cahen, “‘Portugal is in the sky:’ Conceptual Considerations on Communities, Lusitanity, and Lusophony,” in Imperial Migrations: Colonial Communities and Diaspora in the Portuges World, ed. Eric Morier-Genoud and Michel Cahen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 308–309.
[75] Gilberto Freyre, The Portuguese and the tropics (Executive Committee for the Commemoration of the Vth Centenary of the Death of Prince Henry the Navigator, 1961) 226.
[82] Fernando Arenas, (Post)colonialism, Globalization and Lusofonia, or ‘Time-Space’ of the Portuguese Speaking-World (University of California, 2005), 7.
[83] Freedom of Information Documents, FIA/NL/FO/AR1997/, Portugal: Annual Review for 1997, (Foreign Office, 1997), 3.
[87] João Granja da Fonseca, Catálogos Gerais da Assembleia da República, Diário da Assembleia da República of January 6th 1993, Reunião plenária, January 5, 1993.
[88] Fábio Monteiro, “A vítima perfeita,” Observador, June 9, 2014, https://observador.pt/especiais/alcindo-monteiro/.
[91] Freedom of Information Documents, FIA/NL/FO/AR1994/, Portugal: Annual Review for 1994 (Foreign Office, 1994), 4.
[93] Jose Pedro Monteiro, “Racismo: ‘Uma discriminação que não nos cansamos de repetir que não existe’,” Visão, April 20, 2024, https://visao.pt/atualidade/sociedade/2024-04-20-racismo-uma-discriminacao-que-nao-nos-cansamos-de-repetir-que-nao-existe/.
[98] Joana Gorjão Henriques, “Portugal é dos países da Europa que mais manifestam racismo,” Público, September 2, 2017, https://www.publico.pt/2017/09/02/sociedade/noticia/portugal-e-dos-paises-da-europa-que-mais-manifesta-racismo-1783934/amp.
[100] János Riesz, “Raças, Miscigenação e o Futuro do País: Relatos Franceses de Viagens no Brasil em Meados do século XIX,” Luso-tropicalismo: uma Teoria social em questão (Vega, 2000), 105.
[106] Joana Gorjão Henriques, “European Social Survey: 62% dos portugueses manifestam racismo,” Público, June 27, 2020, https://www.publico.pt/2020/06/27/sociedade/noticia/european-social-survey-62-portugueses-manifesta-racismo-1921713.
Biography
Greg Cotton completed an undergraduate degree in BA Media & Modern Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London from 2006 to 2009, Greg returned to academia in 2022 completing an MLitt in British Studies with the UHI Centre for History. His current PhD research builds on Greg’s dissertation – “Leading Me Home Again: Celtic Tiger Identities in 1990s Eurovision” – which explored how Irish national identity and expressions of Irish nationhood in the 1990s Celtic Tiger boom were manifested in the Irish entries, hosted events and interval acts in the Eurovision Song Contest 1992–1996.