Celebrating Portugal’s new found football glory while black…

On the 10th July, Portugal — the country where I have spent the most time in — became European football champions for the first time ever.

In the hours following their historic victory at the Stade de France in Paris against the tournament hosts, who were the heavy favourites to lift the trophy, my Facebook newsfeed was flooded with messages of joy and pride. After so many “almost there” moments, the Portuguese can finally call themselves the best team in Europe.

Some of my fondest memories are of a childhood spent playing football outside my house well into the late hours of sweltering summer nights. My mother would repeatedly come on the veranda to order us to come home, but there was always one more game to be played. I hated losing. Still do.

Having first moved to the north of the country when my parents decided to leave Brazil in the late 80s, the whole family became FC Porto supporters by default. It was more for loyalty to the region than for any understanding we had of football, really.

Gathering in front of the TV on Sunday evenings to watch FC Barcelona matches and marvel at the skill of Luís Figo, another Portuguese football great, also became a tradition in our household in the late 90s.

So football was always a big part of our lives. At 11 I started playing for the local club, Imortal FC, and practice days became the highlight of my week.

Now, as a 30-year-old man, whenever I watch Portugal play my feelings are more ambivalent. If one side of me wants to celebrate the fact that the country I grew up in is now Europe’s new football powerhouse — while fielding six players of African descent — , my conscious side doesn’t let me forget the harsh realities still faced by most Portuguese who look like me or Éder (the player who scored the winning goal on Sunday).

The government does not keep data on ethnicity or race. Officials and the overwhelmingly white Portuguese population will tell you that unlike America, there is no racial problem here. You won’t hear a Portuguese person, black or white, use terms such as Afro-Portuguese, or black-Portuguese. Black and brown people are simply “the Africans.”

In Portugal the word “race” is said so sporadically that it almost sounds like a curse word when someone uses it. “There is only the human race” is something I hear a lot whenever I try to broach the subject.

The silent treatment given to the issue might have its roots in the 52-year dictatorship the country endured from 1933 to 1975. While Portugal had long ceased to be an empire, it still exerted colonial rule over a number of West African countries, including Angola and Guiné- Bissau, and Mozambique in the east.

It was during this period that the government bought into the theory of “the good and the bad coloniser”, coined by Brazilian historian Gilberto Freyre. Freyre was the one who first described Brazil as a racial democracy. For that he credited Portugal’s benevolent style of colonisation or, as he called it, Luso-tropicalism.

Freyre argued that because of Portugal’s warmer climate and its pre-modern history of invasion by the Celts, Romans, Visigoths and Moors, its occupation and exploitation of brown and black people in far flung places was more humane than that of the British and French.

But any person who has been to Portugal or Brazil and has a modicum of self-awareness, soon realises that both countries are anything but racial democracies. In Portugal, empirical evidence will show that citizens from African descent are the ones living in the most violent neighbourhoods, have the lowest paid jobs, and are the least likely to move up the social ladder.

In Brazil, where there is a wealth of data on race and ethnicity, a black youth is murdered every 23 minutes, according to the latest government figures.

I watched the Euro 2016 quarter-final against Poland in Portugal among some of my long-time friends, in the town we all grew up in. I did it more out of wanting to create new memories with people I no longer see often, rather than any sense of patriotism. However, I have black friends, with a similar back story, who really ride or die for the national football team, and anything Portugal for that matter. And that’s fine, too.

The truth is, it’s exhausting to live like this — always questioning, always incensed at the injustices that permeate seemingly joyous moments which for most people are just it: joyous moments. I wasn’t always conscious of these things, and perhaps in my own little obliviousness I was also happier.

Portugal’s left-wing prime minister Antonio Costa is a brown skinned man from Goan descent. The country’s justice minister is a black woman born in Angola. Both came to power last year without any serious mention of their ethnic background — another missed opportunity to confront the country’s unresolved race issues. And with no indication a nationwide debate on the issue is on the agenda, for now the Portuguese, both black and white, seem happy to continue to bury their heads in the sand.