Slavery

How Portugal silenced ‘centuries of violence and trauma’

References to Portugal’s epic, seafaring past like these litter this city – there is even a Vasco da Gama shopping mall. But until now, there has never been a single explicit reference, memorial or monument in Portugal’s public space to its pioneering role in the transatlantic slave trade, nor any acknowledgement of the millions of lives that were stolen between the 15th and 19th centuries.

Games Without Borders

15.03.2021 | by Ana Naomi de Sousa

Uncovering Lisbon’s Forgotten History of Slavery

Despite the importance of chattel slavery to the making of Portugal and its overseas empire, this terrifying history of black bondage is entirely muted in the public memory of Lisbon. In contrast to the (recently established and far overdue) National Museum of African American History and Culture in the United States or the Museu Afro Brasilin São Paulo, Brazil, there are no such museums or reckoning public memorials in Lisbon along the lines of the Mémorial de l’Abolition d’Esclavage as in Nantes, France. More recently, however, a slavery museum was established in the historic “Mercado de Escravos” (Slave Market) of the southern Portuguese port of Lagos, which is said to be the site of the first trade in enslaved Africans in Europe. Yet, Lisbon remains largely silent on its legacy of white terror and black captivity.

City

04.02.2021 | by Yesenia Barragan

How Britain is facing up to its hidden slavery history

For Romero, this is one of the points of art: to help us face up to our own part in slavery and its legacy, and a powerful way to reveal, and explore, our past. “With this story, we wanted to tell the British angle – this is British history,” says Romero of The Whip. “We’re in constant dialogue with our past: we have to be.”

Afroscreen

22.10.2020 | by Holly Williams

The injustice of slavery is not over: the graves of the enslaved are still being desecrated

The cumulative individual tragedies on slave trails to the coast, in the barracoons, and on the beaches: no one can even count. So the four centuries of African enslavement by Europeans remains an abstract story. The need to make it real, to find things that you can see, touch and feel is what most motivated me to participate in the ambitious documentary series Enslaved with Samuel L Jackson, to be broadcast on the BBC starting on Sunday. It’s an attempt to get away from the numbers and statistics and instead focus on the real people who endured this era – their flesh and bone, dreams and legacies.

To read

16.10.2020 | by Afua Hirsch

Europe, periphery of the creole islands

They are stories from which the narrator takes on the ambiguities of the discourses of negritude and whiteness, racism and antiracism, the plasticity of discrimination, the trap of stereotype, and the awareness of prejudice. These are stories that point us to a common past made up of very different memories.

To read

02.10.2018 | by Margarida Calafate Ribeiro

The Promised Land

For centuries enslaved Africans were taken to Europe and America to serve as workforce. These individuals were forced into submission and considered sub-human. They were brutalized and treated worse than animals by other individuals, and their institutions, which thought of themselves as civilized and modern. These enslaved men and women suffered and despaired, and dreamt of a life before, and of a land more familiar and kind. So, out of the insanity of misery and helplessness, they would eat the soil in the hope of being taken back to that time and land of before.

I'll visit

10.11.2016 | by Ana Rita Canhão

Making cultural inheritance the theme for contemporary artistic creation

he ROOTS project approaches the slavery theme through/from a contemporary vision inspired by an archeological discovery in 2008 in the “green circle” in Lagos at the location which was known as the “Vale da Gafaria” (Valley of the Leper Hospital). In the area rescue archeological excavations that preceded the construction of one of the city’s underground car parks enabled the methodological investigation of the whole area affected by the enterprise - one of the ex-libris of urban regeneration that the municipal administration was able to carry out in the decade of the XXI Century.

I'll visit

15.02.2012 | by Rui Parreira

The moral economy of witchcraft: an essay in comparative history - I

Witchcraft, as used here, is also an abstraction, but one intended to represent directly the terms used by African and other societies to describe their own beliefs and practices. The introductory section of the essay will attempt to identify an African witchcraft idiom which gives broader meaning to texts such as the Beninois oral account of slave-cowry transactions. The concluding section will examine the early-modern European "witch craze" in order to consider how the elaboration of common elements in European and African culture both reflects and mediates differing trajectories into the modern world

To read

19.06.2011 | by Ralph A. Austen

QUEEN NJINGA’S MILONGAS The ‘dialogue’ between Portuguese and Africans in the Congo and the Angola wars (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries)

When the Africans discovered that the mato inspired such horror in the Portuguese, they made it their habitual refuge, patiently negotiating from there with the intruders. Queen Njinga, in Angola, played this game to perfection, thus provoking the increasing anger of the Portuguese. Referring to the subterfuges the Portuguese governor opposed to the liberation of her sister, prisoner in Luanda, she wrote on 13 December 1655: “For these and other betrayals I took shelter in the matos, far from my territories” (Cadornega 1972, II: 501). By withdrawing to the forest, the queen was not only obeying a military imperative, but also putting pressure on the Portuguese.

To read

17.05.2011 | by Martín Lienhard

Memories of the Angolan slave trade

The triangular trade relationship liking Africa and Europe is well known. The “dark continent” supplied the slave labour that America needed, and indeed contributed to its growth, expansion and development. Slave labour also fed into European commercial interests, also generating economic, social, technological, cultural and other development. It is an issue which had repercussions in the relationship between the three continents and its consequences are still the subject of debate, as demographic studies illustrate.