AFRICA SEEN BY A BLACK BAIANO: NOTES ON MILTON SANTOS' INTERPRETATIONS ABOUT AFRICA

Abstract

In this paper we discuss the interpretations of the geographer Milton Santos about Africa and the Africans. We seek to articulate the intellectual's debates on Africa to his trajectory of life. The analyzes here comprise two moments in Milton Santos' trajectory: the first one concerns the 1950s and early 1960s, a period in which he produced his thesis on the settlement of Bahia, one of the groups addressed is the Africans, and he undertakes political and study trips to countries in Africa and produced the book Marianne em preto e branco (1960) and the journalistic articles L'afrique vue par un noir américain (1962) and Nossos irmãos africanos (1962). The second period comprises the year 1964 until the end of the 1970s. In this moment, the intellectual became globally recognized because of his research on “third world” countries and went to live in Tanzania (1974-76) with the task of found the Department of Geography at the University of Dar es Salaam. During this period, we highlight the analyzes of African cities present in the book Manual de Geografia Urbana (1981). We can notice with this research that Africa played a central role in the production of a complex geographic theory and "imaginative geography" in Milton Santos.