Equator by Miguel Sousa Tavares,
translation by Peter Bush (Bloomsbury)
From the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Prize last month, in the annual competition organised by The Times Literary Supplement for translations into English, in this case from the Portuguese, comes a first novel that would seem rather distant from the usual South African concerns.
But not that far off, as the title Equator suggests, for in large part it is situated right in the armpit of our African continent, where these days South Africans enjoy conspicuous holdings (a pleasure resort, plans for a duty-free harbour).
The author is Miguel Sousa Tavares of Porto, who obviously felt the inheritors of that vast Portuguese empire of old could do with a memory-jog or two about how the sources of their ill-gotten wealth functioned overseas. His centre-piece is an actual historical visit of the heir apparent to the throne of the House of Braganza to one of those stricken colonised territories in 1906. It is the first such royal tour of any of their overseas territories in more than 500 years.
The prince’s mission is to placate and repatriotise the local planters, who are showing signs of disaffection into business-minded republicanism and there is a slave rebellion to be put down as well. According to Tavares, he proceeded thereafter by packet steamer to Cape Town, en route to Mozambique, also simmering from a recent peasant revolt, probably to acknowledge the assistance of South Africans in putting the boot in.
Tavares’s scandalous examples of pillage and brutality may always have been off the official record. But for Portuguese-language readers their importance weighs in once we realise that, given another year or so, that curly-haired Prince Dom Luís Felipe, with his marvellously portrayed father, the king himself, will be assassinated in broad daylight.
So their system of seigneurial privilege was indeed aborted in favour of the new commercial exploitation.
As if he were setting up a laboratory case, Tavares uses as his spectacularly lush setting the minute pair of islands of São Tomé and Príncipe, today comprising the smallest independent African country after the Seychelles.
The statistics are mindbogglingly grizzly: not just a few captives were uprooted from Angola to serve under compulsion, but about five million of them. They were destined for Brazil, with whoever was needed auctioned off at this hellish way station.
Since this scenic estate lies slap in the tropics, it is suitable for cultivating the cacao bean, the product of which — because it melts in a steamy environment — may be enjoyed only in the cooler regions of our planet. Cadbury, Fry, Rowntree, manufacturers of chocolate, play as dark and hypocritical a role in the background here as any villains imagined in serious fiction.
Then Tavares’s central character, the upstanding Governor sent out to dispel the rumours of there being a system of forced labour in that agricultural jungle, tries to enforce a new law stipulating that what are now called employees may freely return home at the expiration of their supposed contracts. What says it all is that — of hundreds of thousands of abused human beings — only 28 have the bravery to want to.
For the rest it is more parallel stripes on the back, the bludgeon. Not that Tavares ever overworks such atrocities, even in the central trial scene, which rivals EM Forster’s in A Passage to India for social resonance. But, still, it is a haunting bedtime story to go with the Bournville cocoa.
Peter Bush’s translation of this extraordinary work is indeed fluent and unruffled, without any recourse to those italicised trapwords such as fado and saudade, for which others can never find English equivalents. The sex scenes are also so understated that one glides through them, to be as astounded on completion as their participants.
The denouement is caused by a reversal of the usual pleasure-seeking, when a black male actually goes at it with a white female, none other than the British consul’s wife, for their mutual pleasure. Of course, this is what brings the whole appalling colonial edifice to ruin.
Equator is a frightening read about forbidden topics brought daringly close to hand. It also happens to be one of the masterpieces in the world literature of our time, well deserving the recognition its prize confers.