ABSTRACT
When Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva (Lula) came to power in 2003, one of his first cabinet appointments was Gilberto Gil as Minister of Culture. Gil, an Afro-Brazilian singer-songwriter and huge star in Brazil, was born in Salvador in Bahia and has always been closely associated with Afro-Brazilian culture: with its 80% non-white population, Bahia is the Brazilian state with the highest concentration of people of Afro-Brazilian descent. Along with high-profile (white) counter-cultural singer-songwriters such as Caetano Veloso and Chico Buarque, Gil earlier in his career had suffered censorship, and particularly post-1968 and the so-called “coup within the coup” which ushered in a period of intense political repression. Like Lula, Gil had been imprisoned during the dictatorship, and together with fellow Bahian singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso, he spent two years in exile in London.
