The day after his inauguration in January, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva met with Umaro Sissoco Embaló, the president of Guinea-Bissau, a West African nation of just over two million people. Lula called Mr. Embaló’s nation “an important African country that also speaks Portuguese,” adding “that Brazil will once again make Africa a priority in its relations with the world.”
Lula has long emphasized Brazil’s deep ties with the African continent as a whole, a relationship rooted in the slave trade, and with specific countries like Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique — which share Brazil’s experience of Portuguese…