S.Africa, A Generations-old Haven For The Portuguese

Johannesburg, June 6 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 6th Jun, 2023 ) :Away from the buzz of South Africa's largest and wealthiest city, generations of Portuguese diners have gathered in a one-storied restaurant in search of a rare and simple pleasure -- the taste of home.

It's unclear whether Portugal's President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, in South Africa on Tuesday for his annual international trip marking Portuguese National Day, will visit the Johannesburg taberna, a mainstay of the local Lusophone community.

But his visit comes at a time when the country's Portuguese population is at a crossroads, buffeted by the same crime and economic issues as other South Africans and drawn to Portugal by the promise of an EU passport.

The family-owned Restaurante Parreirinha has served the Portuguese community "for at least three generations," said Gloria Da Cunha, 54, who now heads the restaurant with her siblings, having taken over from her father and uncle who came to South Africa in the late 1960s.

Half a million South Africans of Portuguese descent live in the country as well as 200,000 Portuguese citizens, the government says.

The Portuguese "dribbled in from the late 1800s all the way to the 1950s," Clive Glaser, a history professor at the University of the Witwatersrand, told AFP.

Coming in three separate waves, the first group of Portuguese migrants were "Madeirans who hopped on a boat in the hopes that they could get opportunities," Glaser told AFP.

The second is the group to which Da Cunha's parents belonged -- skilled Portuguese migrants from the mainland.

And in 1975, Mozambique and Angola's independence from Portugal created the third wave.

The Lusophones are the third largest group of white South Africans after the Afrikaners (descendants of the Dutch and French Huguenots) -- and English-speaking descendants of British settlers, Glaser said.