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 His parents raised him to be a conductor of men.
He graduated in Law from Universidade Federal da Bahia
in 1948, but decided to change his area after reading
Geografia Humana (Human Geography), by Josué de Castro.
By Francesco Neves
He was one of the world’s top geographers and one of Brazil’s top thinkers.
In an area in which scholars are not known for discussing ideas and philosophy, Milton
Almeida Santos helped to develop the notion that Geography is a life and society changing
experience. Santos in 1994 became the only intellectual outside the Anglo-Saxon region to
receive the Vautrin Lud prize, considered the Nobel of Geography. He was Doctor Honoris
Causa from several famous universities including Toulouse in France and Barcelona in
Spain. He died at age 75 at São Paulo’s Public Servant Public Hospital, June 24,
victim of prostate cancer.
For Emir Sader, a professor at USP (Universidade de São Paulo), and Santos’s
colleague, the geographer’s life was a huge success in several fronts: "He
looked for space in life and in the sciences. It’s impressing that he has
accomplished what he did being Baiano (from Bahia), black, poor and a public school
student." Muniz Sodré, professor at UFRJ’s (Universidade Federal do Rio de
Janeiro) Escola de Comunicação, a friend of Santos has also commented on him being
black: "Although he was a black connected to the elite, accepted by it, French
speaker, Santos was a black and this should bother a lot of people."
Born in Brotas de Macaúbas in Bahia, on May 3, 1926, Milton Santos revealed his genius
at a very early age. Son of a couple who were elementary school teachers, he was already
reading and writing in good Portuguese at age 5 and dealing with algebra problems at 8.
That same year he also started to learn French. At age 10 he was already in Junior High.
Student leader, Santos helped to found the Associação dos Estudantes Secundários da
Bahia (Bahia’s High School Students Association) where he fought against the Getúlio
Vargas’s dictatorship and for the country’s re-democratization.
"Since my teens I wanted to touch the world in some way," he declared
recently. His parents raised him to be a conductor of men. He graduated in Law from
Universidade Federal da Bahia in 1948, but decided to change his area after reading Geografia
Humana (Human Geography), by Josué de Castro. In 1958 he got his doctorate in
Geography from the Strasbourg University in France. At that time a deep mark was left in
his way of thinking. Said he: "The French influence on me is very strong, although I
try to get rid of it with some brutality. It is responsible for an independent style,
which I learned with Sartre, far from all kinds of militancy, except that of ideas."
Santos, every time he had some days to spare, would take a plane to Paris just to spend
sometime leafing through the books at the Sorbonne University Institute of Geography.
The scholar discovered his interest for Geography while studying Law at the end of the
40s. After graduation in geography in Brazil he went to the University of Strasbourg in
France where he got a PhD in 1958. He went back to Bahia and worked as a professor at the
University there and as an editor at the daily A Tarde. He soon became a vocal
defender of policies to help the poor and presented controversial proposals like a tax on
wealth.
Antagonized by the military, which took over the country in 1964 he was fired from the
University and jailed for three months, being released only due to health complications he
suffered. The professor then left Brazil invited by friends to teach overseas and lived in
Tanzania, France, Canada, Venezuela, England and the United States before returning to his
homeland in 1977. Back in Brazil, Santos went to teach at USP’s (Universidade de São
Paulo) Instituto de Filosofia e Letras.
He wrote more than 40 books, but it took him a long time to start dealing with
blackness and racism, although he was a victim of racism himself. His last book Por
Outra Globalização (For Another Globalization), with several of his essays, was a
bestseller during Rio’s Bienal do Livro (Book Biennial) last May. Through his
articles in newspapers and books, he became an inspiration for several intellectuals in
Brazil. Composer Gilberto Gil and poet, producer and actress Denise Stoklos confessed to
have been inspired by him. In 1998 Jornal do Brasil gave him the title The Year’s Man
of Ideas. The following year he received the Chico Mendes award for his resistance.
In his last for Brasília’s daily Correio Braziliense he wrote: "By
definition, intellectual life and the refusal to assume ideas don’t match. This, by
the way, is a distinctive trait among the true intellectuals and those scholars who
don’t need, cannot or don’t want to show in the sunlight, what they think. The
true intellectual is the man who searches, doggedly, the truth, but not only to rejoice
intimately, tell it, write it and publicly sustain it. The intellectual activity is never
comfortable.
"In the big crisis that the country faces now the absence of a more intense and
deeper discussion is evident, coming from Academia, in several instances… Apathy is
still present in the larger part of the docent and student body, which is not something
that leads us to cheer about the civic health state of this social layer whose first
obligation is to constitute, as spokesperson, the first line of an attitude of
non-conformism with the present course of public life."
Santos was against the idea that urban centers destroy the human experience. "What
destroys it," he said, "is the civilization that we adopted because the city
appears as a manifestation that represents it." According to him city and country
people are getting more similar everyday and in some cases the difference has already
completely disappeared.
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