Meet Gonçalo César de Sá, the journalist who got the scoop on Macau’s return to China

Bobbing in and out of traffic on the broad avenidas as the light softens over Penha Hill, Gonçalo César de Sá embarks on a commentary in musical, Portuguese-accented English, overlaying the streetscape with the kind of local knowledge that only comes with decades of familiarity: that is the corner where so-and-so was shot; behold the hotel, conceived in folly, that bankrupted its developer. Then, as the Mini crests the Governor Nobre de Carvalho Bridge, César de Sá – who holds the distinction of watching the Portuguese flag being lowered three times, in Mozambique, in Angola and in Macau – starts to weave in personal asides from one of the most storied careers in lusophone journalism.

As he climbs nimbly out of the car and begins pointing out landmarks in the distance, it becomes clear that I am not simply being shown Macau by a long-time resident, but by somebody who played a part in its story. The explorer Jorge Alvares opened Macau’s Portuguese chapter when he landed in the Pearl River Delta in 1513. More than four and a half centuries later, César de Sá typed up its concluding paragraphs for a global news audience. With a life that follows the lines of Portuguese colonialism, from Africa to Brazil, Japan and Macau, he is an avatar of lusophone history. I am standing, on a hillside in Macau, with an ambivalent heir to the Age of Discovery.

As with so many stories of exploration and imperialism, César de Sá’s begins in Africa. He was born in 1947, in the Mozambican port of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo). His father, a white African, was born in Angola and went on to work for the colonial railway company. His outgoing, ebullient mother, also a white African, was a sometime actress in the 1940s who eventually became a well-known taxidermist of big game. To this day, one of her stuffed zebra heads confronts visitors at the entrance to her son’s sprawling Macau apartment, which he shares with his wife, Mércia.