As the country with the largest Afro-descendent population—53 percent of Brazil’s total population of 210 million—Brazil has always attached particular importance to Africa. Brazil both embraces and represses its African heritage. The official ideology of “racial democracy”—the idea that all Brazilians descend from miscegenation and that racism as such cannot exist—operates with the reality of social exclusion and brutal violence that the country’s Afro-descendent population disproportionately suffer. With the election of Jair Bolsonaro, an avowed racist who promises to unleash a wave of violence to “clean up the country” that will see thousands of black Brazilians murdered by security forces, it is worth examining what Bolsonaro will mean for Africa both culturally and politically and what Africa means for Bolsonaro.

Afro-Brazilian culture and religion from samba to capoeira and Candomblé have all been repressed by the state at various points during the country’s history. Despite the rhetoric of racial democracy, Afro-Brazilian culture has often been criminalized. However, in one of the many paradoxes that define Brazilian history—it has also been officially adopted as defining national identity. Samba is the official musical genre, Carnival the cultural expression, and most of Brazil’s footballing heroes are Afro-descendants. But knitted into this is a paternalistic racism: Brazil is a country where a white elite Brazilian, such as former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, claims to “have one foot in the kitchen” referring to black ancestry and Bolsonaro’s vice-president General Mourão boasts of how handsome his grandson is because of “the whitening of the race.”

Brazil is defined by a particular type of “informal apartheid.” Although official legal racism did not exist in the same way it did in South Africa and the United States, Brazilian society continues to be defined by a system of social exclusion in which the poorer and blacker sections of the population are kept in line through force and excluded from the public sphere. Young Afro-descendant Brazilian men form the majority of the 64,000 persons murdered last year, particularly, the 5,000 of whom were killed by the police. Police violence has always been employed as a tool by Brazil’s elite to keep the population in line, especially the Afro-descended.

Following 14 years of center-left governance that sought to expand social citizenship, Bolsonaro represents the return of reactionary racist elites to power. His supporters include those who view Afro-Brazilian cultural expressions as an embarrassment, who view Brazil’s African heritage as a cultural and genetic defect and who openly fantasize about a Brazil without “samba, Caipirinha and Carnival.” The desire of many on the right to “Americanize” Brazil (by which they mean remaking it into a white American, rabid capitalist country) is based partly in a sense of shame and hatred of Brazil’s African heritage.

Beyond what lays in wait for Afro-descendant Brazilians with the election of Bolsonaro, what does his victory mean for Africa?