This paper asks how coffee waxed and waned as the material grounds between Brazil and the Maghreb, namely Morocco and to a lesser extent Algeria and Tunisia, from the 1860s to the 1960s. Coffee stimulated possibilities between global peripheries and stirred up risks of replicating asymmetries with the metropoles. Nearly a century before the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung and the idea of a “tiers monde” (Third World),[1] now called the Global South, Brazilian coffee was variably savored, sold, and spoken about in Arabic and French across Algiers, Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier, Tunis, and elsewhere. Whether promoted as “al-bun al-brazili” or “café du Brésil,” Brazilian coffee in the Maghreb preceded and played off of, but was precluded by, what became an Afro-Asian-led Third World. During the mid-twentieth century, decolonizing African and Asian states increased coffee exports that came to undercut Brazil’s global dominance. Accordingly, this paper materializes a Global South before it became an ideal and idealizes coffee as an unresolved source of power between what Hisham Aidi calls the “connected histories” between the world’s margins.[2]
Drawing upon new materialism and transimperial history, my first aim is to outline a “common geostory” where coffee has the “capacity to establish more or less numerous relationships … especially reciprocal ones,” as conceptualized by Bruno Latour.[3] Coffee acted upon, and was acted upon by British, French, Luso-Brazilian, Moroccan, Ottoman, and Spanish imperial crowns and subjects. Overwhelmingly produced in Brazil, consumed and traded by Euro-America, as well as initially rapt and resold across the Maghreb (as well as the Mashriq and Misr), coffee beans “make imperial history visible in ways that … transnational history has not,” to paraphrase Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton.[4] In the nineteenth century, Brazilian coffee planters and government authorities saw their country as the world’s largest coffee-producer while the Maghreb came to be debated as one of coffee’s abiding consumer markets. From the 1860s to the 1960s, coffee connected a Lusocentric Brazil to the Maghreb through and not in spite of British, French, Moroccan, Ottoman, Spanish, and other imperial orders.
This paper’s second aim is to bridge heretofore separate bodies of literature regarding coffee and the Global South. On a south-north vector, scholars of coffee rightly examine production in the tropics, namely Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and focus on consumption in mostly temperate zones such as Europe and North America.[5] Meanwhile, scholars of the Global South attend to shared struggles for decolonization, epitomized by the aforementioned 1955 Bandung conference that led to the 1961 inaugural summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM).[6] My paper puts coffee at the center of this Third World. Though connecting Brazil to the Maghreb since the nineteenth century, coffee beans were exported in greater amounts by African and Asian powers that came to lead the Third World in the mid-twentieth century. At the same time, Brazilian beans in Morocco mattered less amid more competitive African- and Asian-produced coffee imports. Without the historic grounds that had given rise to them, Brazilian-Maghrebi connections attenuated amid a still unfinished project of a “Third World.”[7]
Transimperial Fields, 1860s - 1890s
In 1861, Dom Pedro II, the Brazilian emperor, wrote to Mawlāy Abbas, prince and “brother of Mohammed IV,” the Sultan of Morocco.[8] Dom Pedro expressed gratitude to Mawlāy Abbas for rescuing the survivors of a Brazilian navy frigate that had sank near Tangier. The Moroccan prince responded by taking note of the Brazilian lives spared as well as thanking the Brazilian emperor for the gift of a cannon. In return, the “emperor of Morocco” sent “six magnificent horses” to Dom Pedro.[9] This exchange brought about Brazil’s formal diplomatic representation in Morocco, headed by José Daniel Collaço, whose family led Portugal’s delegation in Tangier for the prior two generations.[10] Indeed, in 1807, his grandfather, Jorge Pedro Collaço, had been the Consul-General of Portugal in Morocco when the Portuguese royal court requested and received a loan of 100,000 piasters from Morocco’s Sultan Suleiman, aiding the Portuguese escape from the French invasion, fleeing on British ships to Rio de Janeiro.[11] The elder Collaço received a letter from the “Prime Minister of the Emperor of Morocco,” Mohamed Salavis, who applauded the move to safeguard what he called an “independent and sovereign” Portuguese crown (Figure 1).[12] At the margins of Anglo-French rivalries, Dom Pedro and Mawlāy Abbas renewed nineteenth century Luso-Brazilian and Moroccan connections.
Figure 1At the time, Brazil was gaining global prominence for coffee production while the Maghreb was becoming variably associated with coffee consumption. Since 1800, coffee plant branches appeared on the Brazilian royal coat of arms and imperial flags. From 1850 to 1900, Brazilian coffee exports grew six-fold, representing between half and three-quarters of the entire world’s supply.[13] Meanwhile, the “café maure” (Moorish coffeehouse) became a staple in the Anglo-French and Luso-Hispanic orientalist repertoire. Ruy da Camara, mentioned it in Viagens em Marrocos (Travels in Morocco) printed in Portugal’s Porto in 1879, and read in Brazil’s Recife, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo.[14] Camara related that, in Morocco, “There are many cafés with low benches, covered with mats and cushions,” frequented by “low and middle-class folk.”[15] He added, “The Moors boil the coffee with water and do not strain it, so that half the cup is filled with grounds. It is almost always very strong.” Though green tea was dominant on Morocco’s Atlantic coast and most of the interior, coffee was becoming more common in the northeast, “along the corridor from Tlemcen and Oujda to Taza,” brought in from Algeria.[16] Though green tea reflected British power, coffee suggested Ottoman influence in Morocco too.
Nonetheless, “the infrastructure” of the nineteenth century global coffee economy lay in the hands of “French, English, and American companies,” as studied by Steven Topik.[17] In the second half of the century, Brazilian coffee from Rio de Janeiro appeared in Algiers, Tunis, and the “northern coast of Africa,” traded by French firms.[18] A French bulletin in Algiers noted that “Algeria buys about 10 millions worth of coffee from Brazil,” but “buys it elsewhere, from the warehouses of France, which has bilateral relations with Brazil.”[19] In France, “Brazilian coffee” was said to constitute the bulk of consumption and even came to be “sold under the names of Reunion, Martinique, Zanzibar, etc.”[20] In Morocco, specifically, Belgium’s Legation and General Consulate noted that coffee was sold by England and France.[21] Mid-nineteenth-century salesmen from the US in Brazil likewise emphasized that British imports of coffee” were not for “home consumption” but rather for “re-exportation.”[22] In London, the US consul-general repeated that “Brazilian coffee exports” were “made through Great Britain.”[23] Though Morocco’s makhzan began denominating “Jewish merchants” as “the tujjar al-sultan, in an attempt to “challenge the power of European merchants operating in Gibraltar, Tangier, and Mogador,”[24] coffee from Brazil and elsewhere passed through Euro-American intermediaries during the nineteenth century.
Nonetheless, some small-scale efforts to directly commercialize Brazilian coffee in Morocco were led by return migrants from Brazil, overwhelmingly Moroccan Jews. Through the Alliance Israélite Universelle that established its first school in Tetuan in 1862, among other factors, Moroccan Jews migrated to Brazil and elsewhere, sometimes returning to the Maghreb with citizenship papers issued by the states where they had sojourned.[25] The makhzan generally understood return-migrant requests for consular protections from Brazil and other imperial powers as attempts to skirt local authorities and orders. Nonetheless, amid greater numbers of Moroccan Jewish return migrants, Brazil’s imperial government supported the aforementioned Collaço and expanded diplomatic staff across the Maghreb. One such Brazilian commercial attaché in Morocco, Octavio Fialho, noted that “…the main trade of the Brazilian colony in Morocco is coffee…”[26] As a brief example, Jacob Muniz, returned to Morocco to “introduce Brazilian products such as coffee…”[27] Migrant-led coffee promotion even drew the attention of Brazilian navy admiral, José Carlos de Carvalho. In Brazil, he wrote, “Turkish or Moroccan immigrants... acquired the habit of drinking coffee and they take some coffee with them when they also return to their home country, and what is even more remarkable... they now make small shipments of coffee directly from Rio and Santos to the small ports of their respective countries..”[28] In the late nineteenth century, coffee and migration stimulated connections between the world’s margins.
Some Brazilian elites attempted to directly export coffee to the Maghreb around the time of the Spanish American War of 1898, which they saw as potentially opening the Spanish imperial market once dominated by beans grown on the island of Puerto Rico that the US seized. A couple years previously, Adonyram Maurity de Calimerio departed Rio de Janeiro for Tangier, with “his main mission” to “introduce to the Empire of Morocco, coffee and other agricultural products from Brazil.”[29] Eventually named as Brazilian Consul in Tangier,[30] Maurity de Calimerio requested a Brazilian export tax exemption for five-thousand sacks of coffee, weighing sixty kilograms each, “dispatched from the port of Santos to Gibraltar, Spain, Morocco and Algeria.”[31] His request was initially denied, “for violating… free trade…”[32] He repealed the decision, requesting reimbursement for taxes paid in exporting ten-thousand sacks of coffee, “sold in Spain, Gibraltar, Morocco, and Algeria.”[33] In support of his request, a parliamentarian from São Paulo, José Luis de Almeida Nogueira, proposed a motion to reimburse Maurity de Calimerio, who sought to introduce “the commercial brand – coffee of São Paulo or Campinas” that would “open new markets” for Brazil in Spain and Morocco. In Brazil’s parliament, Almeida Nogueira reasoned that the beleaguered Spanish empire would likely revoke the “prohibitively” high tariffs on coffee imports that once protected Puerto Rican colonial production, potentially facilitating the entry of Brazilian beans into Iberian and North African markets.[34]
Whether in opposition or support, the Brazilian parliamentary debate regarding direct coffee exports to Morocco evoked Anglo-French orientalism. In opposition to the tax exemption, one parliamentarian rhetorically asked if the “semi-barbaric people, such as those of Morocco” are the sort of public to savor “our coffee” from Brazil, doubting that “a nation like Morocco” would be “a desirable market for our products…”[35] Almeida Nogueira responded that “It is not about promoting coffee consumption, because in Morocco people drink a lot of coffee, but rather to introduce Brazilian coffee, which is little known.”[36] Hardly viewing Moroccan counterparts as allies or partners, Almeida Nogueira continued, “Arabs and Moors drink a lot of coffee, they even eat it. They appreciate it so much that they even ingest it in its solid form.”[37] These Eurocentric representations of Arabs, Moors, and Moroccans were evoked at a time when coffee producers in Brazil variably attempted to associate Brazilian-grown beans with civilization and modernity, and diminish their actual origins in slavery and monarchy, respectively abolished in 1888 and 1889.[38] It is not clear whether Maurity de Calimerio was successful, but the Anglo-Íbero-French orientalist impulses continued. The political cartoon, “Preciosidades Marroquinas” (Moroccan Treasures), in the satirical magazine, João Minhoca, lampooned Maurity de Calimerio, identified as the Brazilian Consul in Tangier, when he briefly returned to Rio de Janeiro, caricatured as showering the then Brazilian president, Campos Salles, and his Minister of Foreign Relations, with “luxurious and valuable gifts” from the so-called “Orient.”[39]
Coffee beans traversed imperial fields informed by British, French, Moroccan, Ottoman, Portuguese, and Spanish powers. In particular, Brazilian-grown coffee was being consumed not only in Iberia but also across North Africa. Between the 1860s and the 1890s, coffee and coffeehouses had become drinking habits and spaces in not only the Ottoman provinces of what today are Algeria and Tunis, but also increasingly in the Kingdom of Morocco. Not sent directly from Brazil, coffee beans were being acquired by European commercial intermediaries, who re-presented and re-sold them in the Maghreb and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Moroccan migrants as well as Eurocentric visions of coffee-drinking Arabs and Moors reached Brazil. Brazilian elites were less aware of the Moroccan Jews in their midst than the European literature they read about the so-called Orient. But since coffee beans made up more than half of Brazil’s export earnings, and an ever more valuable import in the Maghreb, coffee producers and coffee consumers would re-evaluate the European intermediaries profiting off them.
Al-bun al-brazili / Café du Brésil in a French-Hispano Maghreb, 1900s - 1930s
“Consular reports,” reported the São Paulo state government in the first decade of the twentieth century, “show….large tendencies toward greater coffee imports in Morocco.”[40] The US Department of Agriculture likewise reported that coffee “imports into Morocco have more than doubled” between 1900 and 1910, mostly originating in Brazil and sold by Euro-American firms.[41] By the 1920s, a French agricultural bulletin declared “the conquest of Algeria and Morocco by Brazilian coffee is ... an indisputable fact,” as Brazilian beans made up at least three-quarters of the region’s coffee imports.[42] Nonetheless, the French agronomist and veterinarian, Maurice Piettre, critiqued that “the entire coffee trade from Brazil is in the hands of a few large American and German firms, which handle these matters as bankers…”[43] He regretted that the few French firms that gained a foothold during WWI had lost market share to German counterparts “due to lack of financial agreement from our main importers from Le Havre, Bordeaux and Marseille…” Between 1920 and 1923, Piettre was a professor at what become the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, befriending Miguel Calmon who was Brazil’s liberal-minded Minister of Agriculture.[44] Sharing his Brazilian colleague’s concern that excessive production may undercut long-term competitiveness, Piettre denounced the abusive commissions charged in such arrangements, “in particular on exports of Brazilian coffee to Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria.”[45] Before decolonization began in earnest, the coffee produced in Brazil and consumed in the Maghreb invited critiques of a Euro-American-centered global economy.
With significant growth in the worldwide consumption of coffee in the first decades of the twentieth century, the São Paulo state government, and the Brazilian federal government, planned global campaigns to market coffee as Brazilian. Generally, coffee beans had been classified in a grading system based on color, quality, and size, and once exported from Brazil, labeled as “Rio” or “Santos,” based on the port where they were shipped from. In the late 1920s and 1930s, the Brazilian government awarded France’s “Havas” advertising and news agency the contract to publicize coffee as Brazilian in not only France but also Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.[46] In France, in 1930, a Havas ad declared that the “delicious Café du Brésil” will ensure “bright days that give the joy of living” as well as “adorable frolics full of charm and the unexpected, from which there will be no fatigue,” thanks to “this incomparable entertainer, this powerful stimulant of physical and intellectual activity” (Figure 2).[47] The text was accompanied by an image of a couple taking coffee at a table next to a golf course. In an art deco style, the urbane gentleman seemed to stir his cup while the elegant woman with a hat and scarf looked in the same direction. Distancing coffee from its origins in enslaved labor and monarchical governance, this advertisement associated the bean with civilization, modernity, and above all, Brazil.
Figure 2In 1928, the campaign featured Brazilian coffee in the French-language Moroccan newsweekly, La Terre Marocaine, an agriculture-focused supplement of La Vie Marocain Illustrée.[48] Brazil was portrayed as the pinnacle of coffee production. Numerically, Brazil was said to produce 72 percent of the coffee consumed globally, with the state of São Paulo alone producing 50 percent of worldwide consumption. This meant that “15 million sacks of coffee weighing 60 kilograms were annually taken from Brazilian soil.” It was stated that Brazil offered the coffee plant the kind of “soil and climate condition that suit it exactly,” evoking the image of lands occupied by coffee plants “as far as the eye can see,” in perfect alignment with “vigorous branches and blue-green foliage.” The piece mixed orientalist paintings and photographs of coffee-drinking, from Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Café maison, Le Caire,” to an image of a “Moorish coffeehouse in Rabat, where you can drink excellent Brazilian coffee” (Figure 3). La Terre Marocaine praised Brazil as possessing the ideal natural environment for the coffee plant, as well as forging the logistical and technological infrastructure to export coffee. “Morocco deserves to … increase its economic links with South America…” it concluded, “One need not be a prophet to say that one of these first connections will be through coffee.”
Figure 3A year later, “a grand party” at the café that the French architect Maurice Tranchant de Lunel designed at the Kasbah of the Oudayas in Rabat “inaugurated the consumption of Brazilian coffee with the assistance of European and national personalities” (Figure 4).[49] The photograph’s byline read that “A brilliant indigenous festival preceded the inauguration” of “these famous Cafés du Brésil.”[50] Brazilian coffee likewise supplied a so-called Café Maure in Alger (Figure 5). According to Brazilian news coverage, actual coffeeshops called “Cafés do Brésil,” were also being opened in Alger, Casablanca, and Rabat.[51] The Correio Paulistano noted that “the coffeehouses are installed in European and Moorish styles, depending on the location.”[52] Whether adopting a more rustically Arab and Moorish design, or a more sleek European vibe, Brazilian coffee promotion in Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia did lean into Arabic and Islamic markings, releasing a calendar to be used to advertise local businesses, such as the “Café Maure de Si Mohamed M’Sbai” that promoted “qahwat al-brazil” in Casablanca (Figure 6).[53]
Figure 4Figure 5Figure 6Who was connecting Brazilian beans to Maghrebi coffee drinkers and coffeeshop owners? Moroccan return-migrants from Brazil or elsewhere, mentioned earlier, did not explicitly appear in Brazilian coffee promotion, though they still held some diplomatic posts. In 1929, Haim Samuel Bendelac had been named “Honorary Consul” of Brazil in Tangier.[54] Bendelac was a Moroccan Jew, born in Tetuan in 1890.[55] According to his daughter, Bendelac had migrated to Venezuela and “returned home with a little bundle of gold coins.”[56] His appointment may have been due to the provenance of his spouse, Celia, who was born in Borba, near Manaus, part of the large Moroccan Jewish community in the Amazon.[57] In 1931, whether to assist with return-migrants, or coffee promotion, the Brazilian state appointed another honorary consul in Casablanca, Antonio Porciuncula. A year before, Porciuncula set up a coffee roastery in the same city, and after a few years following his consular appointment, Le Petit Marocain referred to him as the “director of the large coffee firm, ‘Champion.’”[58] In 1935, he and a partner, José Salomao Marques (sic), founded the limited liability company, “Les Cafés du Brésil,” appropriating the promotional campaign’s language.[59] Son of a Moroccan Jewish migrant couple, Salomao Marques was born in Rio de Janeiro, in 1899, and could have been a gatekeeper.[60]
Whatever was the case, in 1936, Porciuncula provided a photographic and textual update about the “advertising for Brazilian coffee, made in Morocco, by the firm, ‘Les Cafés du Brésil.’”[61] He explained that the firm carried out publicity campaigns in “open-air markets,” including Bou-Znika in Rabat and Medina in Casablanca.[62] Porciuncula explained that his firm set up demonstrations of how to prepare Brazilian coffee as well as handed out free 125 gram packages of Brazilian coffee. In Casablanca and Rabat, large signs in Arabic and French announced “Coffee of Brazil, renowned as the best throughout the world. For advertising purposes, free distribution today” (Figure 7). Indigenous Arabs and Bedouins appeared in photographs that accompanied the report published in Brazil (Figure 8), but nothing was said of how they actually reacted to the coffee or the marketing ploy.
Figure 7Figure 8In the same year, another French-language newspaper in Morocco, La petit marocain, covered Porciuncula’s efforts to promote Brazilian coffee. It began that “the natives of Tunisia and Algeria have been drinking and loving coffee for many years, (but) their Moroccan brothers are a little less used to it.” [JSS2] With an editorial line that generally defended France’s imperial interests across North Africa and beyond, La petit marocain continued that “in order to make them (the natives) appreciate this invigorating, stimulating drink … we have been seeing in the surrounding souks, free distributions of roasted coffee to village inhabitants.” La petit marocain concluded that “this is how we were able to observe in Médiouna, Bou-Znika, Ber-Rechid, the pleasure with which these distributions of coffee packets were received, made by the Brazilian consul, whose efforts tend to amplify the trade between Morocco and his country.” French colonial settlers seemed to welcome Brazilian coffee in Morocco.
Indeed, Brazilian coffee in the Maghreb sought to appeal to Arab and Berber publics without undermining French or Spanish colonial orders. Whether referred to as “al-bun al-brazili (the Brazilian [coffee] bean, in Arabic), or as “Café du Brésil,” (Coffee from Brazil, in French), Brazilian export promotion in the Maghreb offered a taste of a wider world that the future struggle for decolonization inspired, entangled with and not as an alternative to northern or western metropoles. Neither replicating the existing asymmetries nor offering decolonial options, Brazilian coffee exports significantly increased to the Maghreb between 1930 and 1939 (Figure 9). According to Brazil’s national coffee bureau, the number of 60 kilogram sacks of beans sent to French Morocco quadrupled from under 9,000 to 36,000 within the decade.[63] Sales to Tunisia doubled from 15,000 to over 30,000 sacks. Algeria remained relatively stable at above 200,000. At this time, Affonso de E. Tauny wrote that “Marrocos e Tunisia,” in a period of about 15 years, “increased their purchases of Brazilian coffee.”[64] Would this developmentalist or economic interface preclude or precipitate greater political rapprochement?
Figure 9Third World Tastes and Tensions, 1940s - 1960s
“Les Cafés du Brésil” in Morocco continued after the São Paulo state government’s contract with Havas ended. In 1945 and 1946, a textual announcement appeared in Le Petit Marocain: “The world-renowned Cafés du Brésil guarantee you, as always, perfect roasting, with warehouses in the main cities of Morocco.”[65] In 1949, “Les Cafés du Brésil” adopted a new logo (Figure 10). Under the block letters of the brand name was a two-dimensional side portrait of a horse’s head and mane with a decorated harness and blinkers that featured the pentagram from Morocco’s national flag, framed by an Andalusian-type of horseshoe arch. Though probably not meant to evoke the memory of the equestrian gift that Morocco’s emperor made to his Brazilian counterpart some nine decades previously, “Les Cafés du Brésil” began to advertise Brazilian coffee mindful of a more independent Morocco. Below this design was written “Les Anciens ETS Porciuncula,” with the firm’s address in Casablanca. Indeed, the aforementioned Antonio Porciuncula continued commercializing Brazilian coffee in a Morocco at the twilight of French and Spanish rule. In 1949 and 1950, his ads declared, “Coffee is free, but you are also free to buy good coffee. Demand our brand.”[66]
Figure 10Though coffee could appeal to progressive sensibilities, Brazil’s foreign ministry proceeded with greater caution in the Maghreb. In the early 1940s, it divested the title of “Honorary Consul” from both Antonio Porciuncula in Casablanca and Haim Samuel Bendelac in Tangier, part of a broader institutional move to appoint career foreign service officers to such posts, and avoid past perceptions that honorary designations could be used to skirt local authorities.[67] Subsequently, career Brazilian foreign service officers were assigned to “Spanish Morocco” and “French Morocco.”[68] At the time, Moroccan national aspirants vied with French and Spanish overseers over the International Zone of Tangier, the port city managed by European powers, the Sultan of Morocco, and after WWII, the US.[69] In Brazil, the conservative Correio da Manhã supported the status quo, declaring “…Brazil's interests in French Morocco still depend on the Consulate in Marseille, while Brazilian interests in Spanish Morocco depend on Madrid…[70] Similarly, in 1952, a Brazilian reporter for Francophone newspapers specified that “Brazil is also interested in the fate of Tangier… because nowadays the ships from Loide (sic) stop there and unload coffee …”[71] Besides, he added, the career “consul of Brazil in Tangier is part of the legislative commission of the city.” Brazilian coffee, and other goods, still needed the infrastructure that had been set up by British, French, Spanish, and US powers.
In the 1950s, sugar and not coffee became the single largest Brazilian import into Morocco, as Brazilian-grown arabica beans in Morocco faced stiffer competition from the robusta variety, grown in and shipped from Belgian-, French-, and Portuguese-colonized parts of Africa (as well as British-, Dutch- and French-colonized parts of Asia). Despite the relatively lower amount of Brazilian beans, total coffee imports into French Morocco became “larger than tea.”[72] Likewise in Tangier, “robusta coffee, particularly from Côte d'Ivoire (including the Kouilou variety) … were supplemented by robusta coffee from the Belgian Congo and, more recently, small quantities from Angola.”[73] A contemporaneous Luso-African colonial report noted that “the exportation” of robusta beans “de Angola” reached “1.5 million sacks in 1956,” which put colonized Angola in fourth place “among the world’s top exporters, after Brazil, Colombia, and French West Africa.”[74] African (and Asian) colonial producers of “coffea robusta” disrupted “the virtual monopoly that Brazil” maintained since the previous century, as Steven Topik argued.[75] Having been overwhelmingly produced by the world’s peripheries for mostly the centers, coffee also became a contested source of power between the globalizing margins.
Connections between these margins became more direct and frequent too. In April 1955, the Brazilian president, Café Filho, made a stopover in Morocco.[76] O Estado de S. Paulo and Britain’s Foreign Office mentioned the visit in passing, overshadowed by what was the official destination, Portugal.[77] In Lisbon, Café Filho declared, “we stand by the Portuguese in any part of the world,” renewing the Luso-centrism of Brazilian foreign policy.[78] Nonetheless, Brazil’s Diário Oficial reported that Café Filho received “military honors” in Casablanca made up of “a battalion of Morocco’s Army and Navy” with “troops lined up in his honor.”[79] The welcoming party included French Resident-General Lacoste, a representative of Mohamed Ben Arafa (who the French put in the place of Sultan Mohammed V), Casablanca’s military commander, “Pachá Anm Ben Korchi” (sic, Ahmed Ben Korchi), and others. That night, a banquet was held for the Brazilian president at the Hotel El Mansour. The next day, Café Filho “visited Rabat where he again received tributes from the local government and people.”
The Brazilian president’s visit to Morocco positioned him within a colonial status quo, but was it ambiguous enough to appeal to national struggles as well? His visit coincided with the “Afro-Asian Conference” in the Indonesian city of Bandung which established the “Third World” as a global force.[80] Despite his longer stay in Portugal, Café Filho’s administration had dispatched an “unofficial diplomatic observer” to the Bandung meeting between twenty-nine Arab, Asian, and African representatives who condemned “colonialism in all of its manifestations,” including the exile of Morocco’s Sultan Mohammed V.[81] For the unofficial observer, “Brazil had the possibility of becoming one of the great world powers if it could relate well with the new countries of Asia and Africa.”[82] But Brazil remained as an observer and not signatory of Bandung’s ten-point declaration that called for noninterference in Afro-Asia, precisely at the moment when robusta beans were increasingly exported from African and Asian producers that jeopardized the historic dominance of Brazil in the global coffee market.
The provenance of coffee beans did not appear to matter much in the mid-twentieth-century Maghrebi café culture that expanded amid colonial and national politics, especially after Sultan Mohammed V returned from exile in November 1955, paving the way for independence less than a year later. During French rule, European-style cafés proliferated, including the “Café de France” in Casablanca, the “Gran Café de Paris” in Tangier, “Les Négociants” in Marrakech, and Café Balima, part of the hotel in Rabat, where Che Guevara once “had a cup of coffee” as he puffed on his “Havana cigar.”[83] With Ottoman origins, as noted earlier, “qahwi,” or what Said Graiouid called “traditional cafés,” had been part of Maghrebi souks and medinas. In the 1940s and early 1950s, Graiouid pointed out that qahwi were “frequently used by nationalist leadership to transmit information to local residents.”[84]
Coffee was served in an independent Morocco’s own rapprochement toward Brazil. In 1960, Morocco’s Minister of Justice, Abdel Khalek Torres, led a diplomatic mission “to almost all of the countries of Latin America.”[85] Some eight years previously, Allal al-Fassi had led a similar mission.[86] Though outwardly meant to “strengthen the bonds of friendship,” Torres sought “to obtain the support of Brazil” and other Latin American states in the United Nations (UN) in order to collectively counter French “neocolonialism” in North Africa.[87] Born in Tetouan under Spanish rule, Torres was characterized as a “scion of noble Andalusi lineage” (Figure 11).[88] Over coffee with a reputable writer in Rio de Janeiro, Torres remarked that direct relations between Brazil and Morocco would be soon “re-established,” because “Morocco had already maintained such relations … with Brazilians before the time of foreign domination…,” referencing Morocco’s recognition of Luso-Brazilian independence.[89]
Figure 11The common grounds between Brazil and the Maghreb blended, and further attenuated, in the “Non-Aligned Movement.”[90] In 1961, India’s Nehru, Ghana’s Nkrumah, Egypt’s Abdel Nasser, Indonesia’s Sukarno, and Yugoslavia’s Tito convened the states that attended Bandung, among others, to institutionalize non-alignment. Jânio Quadros, Brazil’s president at the time, sent official observers, not delegates, to NAM’s preparatory meeting in Cairo and the inaugural summit in Belgrade.[91] Brazil called itself a founding observer state while Morocco became a founding member state. In the same year, the famous cronista, Rubem Braga, became Brazil’s ambassador to Morocco (Figure 12). Not a career diplomat, Braga implied a shared anti-colonial sentiment in one of his short stories.[92] Writing about a soccer match between Uruguay’s Peñarol and France’s Reims in Casablanca, Braga identified with Arab crowds, not French fans making colonialist jeers. Held back from confronting a Frenchman who kept taunting a Chilean friend, Braga wrote that the latter declared, “because of this stupidity the French had been thrown out of Morocco, Indochina, as they will now have to leave Algeria …”[93]
Figure 12Notwithstanding a shared anti-colonial sensibility, Brazil-Morocco relations remained uneven economically. With the intention of reducing Morocco’s trade deficit with Brazil, former minister and sugar importer, Abdelouahab Laraki, led an official government mission in 1968.[94] Welcomed by the Brazilian foreign minister and his general-secretary for Africa and the Middle East, Laraki pointed out that Brazil exported to Morocco several fold of what it imported.[95] Laraki’s mission met with Brazil’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce, the Commercial Association of Rio de Janeiro, the Institute of Sugar and Alcohol (IAA), and the Brazilian Institute of Coffee (IBC).[96] Though Laraki proposed the “possibility of installing an instant coffee plant in Tangier,” Morocco attracted greater interest as the “the world's leading exporter of phosphates,” with an estimated sixty percent of the “world’s reserves.”[97] As coffee lost its top position in Brazil’s export earnings, the grounds of the Global South would continue to shift.
Just a year after the Moroccan mission departed Brazil, in 1969, the Brazilian ambassador in Rabat served “a cup of coffee à brasileira” to “King Hassan II.”[98] The setting was a trade fair in Casablanca’s Grand Palais. As part of the “general program aimed at promoting the prestige of Brazilian coffee abroad,” Brazil’s foreign ministry had a stand that prepared actual Brazilian coffee. With more than five thousand “cafezinhos” (small coffees) served in a single day, the stand “also received a visit from almost all of the Moroccan ministers and ambassadors present.”[99]
Coffee, though, never reclaimed its status in Brazil’s export portfolio. But as can be gleaned in this example, the increased affect and energy it stimulated may, in part, account for the “joi de vivre” that Brazil stirred across and beyond the Maghreb. From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, much of the coffee savored and traded in the Arab world came from Brazil. Indeed, as early as 1841, the French consul in what he called “le Liban” noted that “the coffee we drink in Beirut is from Brazil …”[100] For the next century, coffee from Brazil grounded a connection to the Maghreb too.
Though eclipsed by a more progressive project between the world’s margins, coffee beans from Brazil in the Maghreb ground this nearly forgotten history of a Global South. From the imperial 1860s to the Third World 1960s, Brazilian coffee in Algiers, Casablanca, Rabat, Tangier, and Tunis reveals the materiality of a Global South before it became an ideal, and reconsiders coffee as an unresolved source of power between the world’s margins. The 1960s were not simply the start of new global connections, but also the culmination of century-long imperial logics and legacies across Brazil and Morocco.