São Paulo – Representatives of the National Archives and Records Authority of Oman should visit Brazil late this month to discuss cooperation with the Archives and National Library, in Rio de Janeiro, and with Archives of the State of Bahia, in Salvador. The visit is a result of the trip that Brazil’s vice-president, Michel Temer, made to the Arab country in early April.
According to the head of the Middle East II department at the Brazilian Foreign Office (Itamaraty), Carlos Leopoldo Gonçalves de Oliveira, apart from establishing a channel for cooperation between the institutions, the mission objectives will be to establish a work group to identify points in common in the history of both countries and to assist in the translation of documentation in Arabic that is in the hands of Brazilian public organisations, especially the archives of Bahia.
Brazil and Oman have in common the Portuguese presence since the sixteenth century. At the same time in which colonisation was starting in Brazil, Portugal established an advanced point in the Arab nation to inspect navigation routes in the Indian Ocean. Forts built at the time in Muscat, the capital, are remnants of this occupation.
It is also said that Omani navigator Ahmed Bin Majid helped Vasco da Gama sail around the Cape of Good Hope, finding the route to the Indies. But there is controversy regarding the veracity of this story. The fact is that Majid became renowned as a great navigator and cartographer.
With respect to the documents, Bahia received a great number of Muslim African slaves in the colonial period, and they left many Arabic manuscripts. The script, however, is ancient, according to Oliveira, and it is hard to translate. He added that the National Archives in Oman has a group of specialists in archaic texts that may help in this work.
“This delegation may have a good multiplying effect,” said the diplomat. The idea is for the awakening of interest by other Arab countries in similar cooperation actions. He mentioned as examples an initiative that has already been promoted with representatives of Lebanon, who had a hard time identifying the Lebanese who established themselves in Brazil in their own archives, but managed to trace the origin of the immigrants based on the entry records of Brazilian organisations.
The delegation should include the director of the Special Documents Division of the National Archives and Records Authority of Oman, Hammoud Salem Al Hinai, and the organisation’s technical advisor and translator, Saif Abdullah Al Kalbaini. They will travel in the company of the ambassador of Oman in Brasília, Khalid Salim Al Jaradi, the business attaché at the embassy, Omar Said Al-Kathiri, and by Oliveira.
*Translated by Mark Ament
