In the Ministry of Culture, “black is the sum of all colors”

In 1968, Gilberto Gil coined the phrase that is this exhibit’s title, which ended up being a summary for the way he conducted issues of blackness in his life—as well as his way of dealing of Africanities and diaspora as Brazilian minister of Culture (2003–2008).  

Thus, the unity in diversity, a drive in Gil’s life ever since he forged the Tropicália ideals, embedded every pore in the policy to internationalize Brazilian culture during his term.

The biggest emphasis of the “ministartist” was the transversal character of traditional and contemporary diasporic flows, needed to reposition Brazil in the global agenda.

Evoking the issue of diaspora wasn’t a new political tact adopted by Gil when he took MinC over. Rethinking diaspora, from the point of view of its wealth and the union of complementary opposites it fosters has always guided his path.

It also sedimented the path of his thinking in other contemporary issues, such as digital culture, environment, and, mainly, the democratization of cultural goods. 

Dispersion, pulverization, divide to weaken and annihilate. The etymology of the word “diaspora” is an immediate reference to these meanings and to sad, regrettable, inconceivable pages of human history.

This referred to those who were enslaved, scattered throughout the world and turned stateless, like the Jewish and black peoples. But in biology, diaspora has a more subversive and resistant meaning: 

They are powerful parts of plants—like seeds, pollen, fruits—that separate from the root organism that generated them to bear fruit elsewhere and thus continue to exist and resist.

And it was uniting these two understandings about the African diaspora that minister Gilberto Gil guided the issue as an administrator of the Brazilian Ministry of Culture during most of president Luís Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration.

Gil used the notions of multiculturalism—a branch of Cultural Studies based on the concept of unity for diversity—to talk about and address diasporic vicissitudes.

Gilberto Gil put Brazil in the international panorama of this debate “as an issuer of new messages, in the context of globalization,” as he states in his anthological inauguration speech.

A country that should appear on the international political scene “with its diasporas and their mixtures,” as he continues to address the issue in his celebrated speech. As head of MinC, Gil has engaged in a real battle for a kind of “cultural decolonization” of Brazil.

He did this by understanding his traditional culture and that of the future as strong and robust. He also fought a battle to reposition the country in relation to the world, on the path of dialogue with diversity. “In this, Brazil has lessons to give… 

"… despite what certain representatives of international institutions and their internal spokespeople say in order to try to atone for their racial guilt and frame us within a framework of hypocrisy and discord…

"… making of our people an interested but self-serving portrait, able to convince only ourselves. Yes: Brazil has lessons to give in the field of peace and in others, with its permanently syncretic, transcultural dispositions…

And we will not give up on that,” sentenced Gil, moved, in his inauguration.

For the “ministartist,” a nickname by which Gil liked to be called during his time as head of MinC, Brazil was one of the main ports to have received the infamous black diaspora caused by enslavement of African peoples.  

For this reason, the country had a historical obligation to give a semblance of tolerance and visibility to the issues of reparation regarding these diasporic movements.

He also understood them as an inescapable cultural and socio-political ebb and flow, rich and capable of awakening potentialities and bring together in geopolitical and humanistic terms that which had previously been brutally separated. 

This is no different from his attitudes in relation to his own blackness. Gilberto Gil’s understanding of himself as a black man pervades his sense of belonging in relation to the history of slavery of the black people versus the abolition that occurred on May 13th, 1888.

Such an attitude of political mockery was not assisted by social planning, and so it was far from an “union of races in freedom,” as abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco had wanted.

In this way, Gil’s diasporic experience positions him in an in-between place in debates about miscegenation. After all, it is intrinsically linked to the awareness of his African origin and of his reconnection, as an identity, to the motherland of Bahia/Brazil. 

Gil, who, in a text cowritten with friend and anthropologist Antônio Risério, calls himself black-mestizo, puts the discussion of miscegenation, one of the most apparent diasporic fruits, as necessary to revisit the past in search of the invention of a more emancipating future. 

Pierre Verger, anthropologist, ethnographer, researcher, and French photographer who was a great friend of Gil’s and settled in Bahia, played a key role in the minister’s understanding of diaspora issues.

In his travels around the world - mainly in the departures and arrivals between West Africa and Bahia -, Verger began to notice, delighted, the cultural similarities in the “acts, gestures and ways” (paraphrasing Gil in his speech) between the peoples in both sides of the Atlantic.

This compelled the scholar to become a kind of “messenger between two worlds”— as Verger was called in the documentary of the same name by Lula Buarque de Hollanda, narrated by Gil.

The photographer, trying to strengthen and renew these bonds between cultures, organized museums, healed people, carried messages, and, above all, did research on the African diaspora. 

His study on the slave trade and the return of many of them to Africa, after abolition, brought to light his main work: Flux and Reflux of the Slave Trade between the Gulf of Benin and the Bay of All Saints from the 17th to 19th Centuries, Gil’s bedside book.

In it, the minister of Culture found support for his policy of partnership with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in order to forge for Brazil a role as a global diplomatic body for diaspora issues. 

In this way, he would place national “semiodiversity” (symbolic diversity)—a term he employed in his speech at the ministry in 2003—at the service of unity between the diasporic peoples and the world.

In this way, Gilberto Gil proposed, as a political a principle of his mandate, a “great Rebuilding,” [in Portuguese, “refazenda,” which is the same title as one of his albums] that is, an “engagement of all peoples, ethnicities, conditions, and cultures for the reconstruction of a new world order,” one that stems from Africa and the diaspora.

The basis for this proposal were set in 2007, during the launch of the book A Grande Refazenda – África e Diáspora Pós II CIAD [The Great “Refazenda” – Africa and Diaspora Post-II CIAD].

The work brings together critics by intellectuals and protagonists of the process of Brazilian ethnic affirmation about the consequences of the II Conference of Intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora (II CIAD, in the Portuguese acronym), held in Salvador, Bahia in July 2006. 

In his speech on this occasion, Gil defines the CIAD as a historical moment, "when Africans and afro-descendants from various parts of the world came together for a theoretical reflection, but, beyond that, a physical, soulful experience…

“… about their being in the contemporary, globalized and challenging world, combined with a practice based on the experience of self-determination and historical struggle, towards a degree of development that is no longer just a dream, a possibility, but an inevitable destiny.”

The II CIAD gathered in Salvador, Gilberto Gil’s motherland, more than a thousand people from forty African countries and the diaspora to debate the African Renaissance and ways of connecting the two shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

The event, held by the ministries of Culture and Foreign Affairs, and chaired by Gilberto Gil and Frene Ginwala, former president of South Africa, was the gateway to this cultural policy with a view to the transversal which Gil adopted during his term. 

Gilberto Gil aimed for true socio-cultural and racial inclusion, “without fundamentalism, without hegemonies, without each branch wanting to be the owner of the truth,"” as he told the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo in August 2003. 

The II CIAD involved intellectuals, representatives of civil society, and political bodies, and at the time crystallized Brazil’s role as a leader in building this new global thinking for African nations and the diaspora.

Among other important actions in the issue of Africa during Gil’s term at MinC was a presentation in the hall of the UN General Assembly.

The invitation was made at the request of then secretary Kofi Annan to honor diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello and the victims of an attack on the organization's unit in Iraq.

The concert was also held to celebrate of International Day of Peace. On that occasion, Gil invited Annan, also a black man, to play bongo—a diasporic percussive instrument, considering its Cuban origin—on the song “Toda menina baiana,” written by Gil.

They got a standing ovation, and the symbolic strength of this image and this presentation at the headquarters of the United Nations speaks more of the diaspora than pages and pages of speech. It is the political poetic that Gil always brings to his actions.

And, among the several official trips made by Gilberto Gil to the African continent as “minister of Africanities,” the visit to the House of Slaves in Africa, in Dakar, capital of Senegal, as part of the presidential entourage, stands out.

This was the memorable occasion in which president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva asked African blacks to forgive slavery in Brazil.  

During this reparation speech, on the island of Gorée—the departure point for slave ships to the Americas—the president and the delegation were moved. Ministers and advisors cried as they heard this plead for forgiveness. 

The most moved, however, was Gilberto Gil, who, before Lula’s speech, had performed the song “La Lune de Gorée” (1982). 

In French, Gil’s lyrics, wrote in partnership with José Carlos Capinan, use the metaphor of the black skin as a flag signifying suffering.

In response to Lula’s request, president Abdoulaye Wade called his colleague “the first black president in Brazil.” At the time, minister of Foreign Affairs Celso Amorim said the request for forgiveness was symbolic, but would go down in Brazil-Africa history.

“It is the recognition of a debt. This, for sure, will leave a mark,” said Celso Amorim. Perhaps this was one of the most representative actions of the interlocutions opened by Gilberto Gil.

The path would be taken on the way to recognize both Brazilian Africanis and African Brazilianness, a proposal so dear to his ministry.

It’s “La Renaissance Africaine”—the African rebirth, a song/anthem wrote by Gil on commission for the 2005 Dakar Arts Festival. 

As Débora Dutra Fantini puts it in her Ph.D. dissertation, titled O Negro é a Soma de Todas as Cores [Black is the sum of all colors], about the building of Africanness in Gilberto Gil’s life and work (from 1942 to 2008):

“... This is the high point for Gil’s Africanities—when the songwriter’s transatlantic, miscegenated, modern identity finds a different view on African history, establishing a conciliatory link between continents, which men’s actions…

“… have separated though centuries. After all, ‘this is Africa and its mission/ the true key to building/ civilizing the world’ [part of the anthem’s lyrics]. Diaspora, here, is seen as a civilizing device…

"... Eis aí a inversão: a África não é objeto de ação civilizatória do Outro; ela é também capaz de civilizar o Outro (europeu, americano)”.