ABSTRACT
The relations between the peoples inhabiting the spaces of modern-day Brazil and Angola predate the very existence of these states. Brazil was the single largest recipient of enslaved African people transported during the almost four centuries of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In his book Brazil and Africa, the historian Jose Honorio Rodrigues registers with great detail the relationship of dependency binding Angola and Brazil during the colonial period. He argues that that dependency began with the complete subordination of the [Angolan] colony to the interests of Brazil. Lusotropicalism, therefore, constitutes a State-sponsored colonial ideology deployed to ensure Portugal's political, economic and epistemological hegemony of its African colonies, which continued to be treated as such regardless of the series of reforms implemented in the 1950s and their new nomenclature. The idea of lusofonia has definitely shaken the never really settled ideas of Portuguese identity, at the crossroads of greatness and subalternity.
