Lisa Simone on loving and fearing her mother Nina: ‘On my 16th, she cursed the day I was born’
Lisa Simone doesn’t sugarcoat her relationship with her mother, the legendary singer-songwriter and pianist Nina Simone. “On my 16th birthday, she sent me a card and it said: ‘I curse the day you were born.’ I was with my aunt at the time. I didn’t react. It was my aunt that got angry. I was like: ‘Why are you angry? This is normal.’” Lisa, also a singer-songwriter and a Broadway star, has spent a lifetime making sense of her mother.
Sometimes she despised the woman who bullied, rubbished, physically abused and neglected her. At other times she adored the woman who could be fun, loving and nurturing. And she was always in awe of the inspirational artist and activist who represented the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s like nobody else. Now, 90 years after Nina was born and 20 years since she died, Lisa regards herself as keeper of the flame. Next week, she is in London to play a tribute concert, singing songs made famous by her mother.
It is hard to overstate Nina Simone’s influence. She wrote one of the great protest songs (Mississippi Goddam, about the 1963 murder of the civil rights activist Medgar Evers), one of the great celebratory songs (To Be Young, Gifted and Black, written in memory of her friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, with lyrics by Weldon
Irvine) and one of the great narrative songs (Four Women). Her interpretations of classics such as Ain’t Got No/ I’ve Got Life, My Baby Just Cares For Me, Mr Bojangles and Stars are so definitive we think of them as the originals. Her music segued from ecstasy to despair – just as she did.
Nina, born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in North Carolina, was the most uncompromising of the celebrity civil rights activists. In the wonderful film Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem festival that became known as the Black Woodstock, we see her inciting the crowd to violent revolution. Her radicalism, unpredictability and mental health (she was diagnosed as bipolar) cost her so much commercially. And at one point it almost cost her Lisa.
She personified all that was possible at the time for a brilliant Black woman – international fame (and infamy) in the mainstream and heady influence in the counterculture. She also personified what was impossible at the time for a brilliant Black woman. Nina was a child prodigy, earning a one-year scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York City that should have led to a full scholarship at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. She wanted to be the first African American classical concert pianist, not a popular music star. But the Curtis Institute rejected
her, destroying her dream. Nina, who became known as the high priestess of soul, believed she was turned down because she was Black. Two days before her death, it was announced that the Curtis Institute would award her an honorary degree.
Lisa is speaking from Arizona where she lives with her husband. Despite the bleakness of her story, she is radiant. She was the only child of Nina and her second husband, Andy Stroud, a former police officer who became her manager, and her happiest memories are of playing in Nina’s bedroom as a young child. “My mother had a three-way mirror, so if I angled the sides I could see about 10 of me on each side, and she let me put on her wigs and high heels. We were always playing music, whether it was hers or Miriam Makeba or Otis Redding, so I’d sing and dance with my selves in that mirror in her bedroom. It was heaven for a little girl.”
Often Lisa and Nina would sit at the piano, Lisa singing, her mother playing. “Harmonies came very easily to me, and I always sang and danced. Mommy told me she never considered herself a singer. I looked at her like she had two heads. I thought: tell that to the millions of fans who love you.” Nina encouraged her in so many ways. “She had roots, she was building a life, and life was calmer.”
But the calm didn’t last. With success and activism came pressures. “She paid a huge price to be the woman we revere.” And so did Lisa. When she was eight, her parents separated. She moved with Nina to an affluent part of Manhattan, overlooking Central Park. Materially, they wanted for nothing. But her mother had changed. “She was angry.” She had lost both her husband and manager and chaos ruled. “She was dealing with the pain that goes with a messy divorce, and she lost the business foundation she had relied on and that’s a lot. You’re just so raw.”
Nina began to take her anger out on Lisa. She became violent. Lisa didn’t know what had come over her. “I internalised a lot of things. I was very calm on the outside but on the inside I wasn’t.” Her mother would beg her to cry when she was beating her, but Lisa refused to give her the satisfaction. “She called me Robot. If you let Mommy know you were hurting, she would take advantage of that. I became numb to a lot of things.”
Lisa asked herself what she had done wrong, and provided herself with the answer. “I think my biggest mistake was to grow up … As you begin to ripen, as girls do, that relationship with your mother can shift. And if your mother is not in a secure position herself, it’s very difficult to watch your daughter start to look like a woman and not feel challenged, like there was a competition. That’s how she felt, so that’s how she treated me, as opposed to a young girl asking questions because she’s curious.”
Did she feel threatened by Lisa’s beauty? “My mother was a very beautiful woman, outside and inside. Period. No matter what she went through, what she carried, how she exhibited it, she was beautiful. My dad was half Black and half white with smaller features, and I inherited those features. A lot of Mommy’s unresolved issues with her features and how she was treated and what she was told as a child would come out on certain days when she was looking at me.”
Did Nina want to be lighter skinned? “I never heard Mommy say she wanted to be lighter skinned. But in her book I Put A Spell On You, she wondered what life would have been like had she been born a white man. And if she had been born white, especially a white man, then her genius would have been celebrated and rewarded.” And it wasn’t? “Of course it wasn’t. She had to fight for everything. And now that she’s dead, she’s more famous than she ever was when she was alive.”
Nina faced trouble over unpaid taxes and in 1974 she left the US with Lisa for Liberia, then Europe, calling it a self-imposed exile. As Nina became increasingly unpredictable and violent, Lisa started to fear for her life. The more time she spent with her mother in Switzerland, the more she idealised her father back in America. Nina told Lisa that he didn’t love her. “Finally, I said to her: ‘I’m going to see Dad in New York and I’ll prove to you that he loves me like I’ve been telling you all this time or I’m going to prove to myself that he doesn’t like you’ve been telling me.’”
After three days in New York, her father asked when she was returning to Switzerland. Lisa was desperate. “I felt if I went back to Switzerland I wouldn’t survive. He went out one evening with his girlfriend to the opera and I just felt everything come down on me. I was looking through the bathroom medicine cabinet for something I could take because I thought that would be the best option. I had pushed so many things down, then this avalanche of emotion descended. I had allowed myself to feel and I didn’t want to feel. In that moment I just wanted everything to stop.”
Did she take the pills? “No, I had the presence of mind to phone my mother’s designer, Carolee [Prince], who was more like a family friend. She talked me out of it.” Lisa told her father what was happening at home, and spent a year with him in New York. From there she went to live with her aunt upstate.
From the age of 14 to 18, she didn’t see her mother. “I could count on two hands the amount of times we spoke in those years, and when we did speak on the phone she wasn’t very nice. There was a lot of putting me down and putting other people down in an attempt to lift herself up. And she could curse, honey!” Now she’s laughing. “It sounded like iambic pentameter, baby, in terms of the poetry, but she could use some vernacular!”
Nina surprised Lisa by turning up at her graduation. Lisa had been a top student, but not surprisingly her marks had slipped and she didn’t make the grades for university. She told Nina she was joining the airforce. Was that her way of rebelling? “I didn’t do it to spite her, but the more I saw her discomfort the more I enjoyed the moment, and the more I talked about it the more it was like she was swallowing broken glass.”
Lisa says she was her own worst enemy. By the time she was 20 she was married and the mother of her first child (she now has three adult children, whom she adores). “I wasn’t ready to be a parent, and I didn’t even allow myself a chance to be a young adult because I went from being under the thumb of other people to being under the thumb of the military to having the responsibility of children. I spent 10 years sleepwalking through the military.” She finally quit to become a professional singer. When she told her mother, Nina responded with an anguished yelp of “Why?”. Lisa found success on Broadway in the musicals Rent, The Lion King, Aida and Les Misérables.
She re-established regular contact with Nina, who had moved to France then Holland, and was heavily medicated for her bipolar disorder and making a living by playing small jazz bars. Nina had attempted suicide, shot (and missed) a record producer she claimed owed her royalties and shot a teenager in the leg with a pellet gun because he had disturbed her music practice. But Lisa, now in her 30s, was no longer scared of her. She was tired of being Nina’s punchbag, and was determined to change the dynamics of their relationship.
“All these years I’d been trying to live in her world on her terms and I made a decision that it was now time for her to live in mine. Because in my world everyone feels appreciated. So I put her into what I considered a training programme on how to love me.”
This involved teaching Nina that it wasn’t all right to be abusive or to bring Lisa down. “If I called her and she was being the way she’d always been, I would simply not continue the conversation. I’d say, call me back when you feel better. And tell her to be nice to family members, otherwise people are not going to want you to be in the family. All these years I’d been absorbing things like a sponge and I’d never told her: ‘When you step on my foot, it hurts. Please don’t do that.’”
The training programme lasted 10 years, until Nina died, and transformed their relationship. Nina watched Lisa on Broadway and roared her approval. They played music together again – Lisa singing, Nina on the piano. “She was like: ‘OK what d’you want to hear?’ And I said all the songs I wanted her to play. She was so touched that I knew them. She said: ‘All these years when we were at odds I thought that you didn’t play my music.’ And I looked at her and said: ‘Mommy, that is the part of you I always had with me. And I played them over and over and over again. Of course I know those songs.’”
Nina invited her to open for her at the Royal Albert Hall in 1998. She remained a diva, refusing to watch Lisa’s performance and banning her daughter from watching her, which Lisa ignored. But it still made for a great memory.
Despite their rapprochement, Lisa never saw as much of her mother as she would have liked. But now it was because Lisa was too busy – raising her children, performing on Broadway and making albums with the acid jazz band Liquid Gold. Nina suffered from breast cancer and died in 2003 at home in the seaside resort of Carry-le-Rouet, southern France.
Lisa was devastated. “When she died we were on very good terms, but there was still so much unresolved stuff in my heart. I was angry with her for a long time for dying before my vision and fantasy of what our relationship could be was real.” Lisa marked her death by adopting the singular stage name Simone. Why did she lose the Lisa? “When Nina died, Lisa died too.”
Five years after Nina’s death, Lisa made her first solo album. She had hoped to record her own songs, but the executives insisted she make a bigband tribute album to her mother. “I was not thrilled,” she says. But eventually she agreed. “I was still grieving my mother, so I was afraid when I got into the singing booth. But I just loved it. It was so cathartic. And I’ve been enjoying singing her ever since.” The album Simone on Simone starts with Nina introducing her and ends with her saying: “That’s my baby.”
Ten years after Nina’s death, Lisa moved into her old house in France to experience the life they never shared there. She wrote songs and recorded three albums, living there for eight years. Eventually, she says, she felt healed and reclaimed the name Lisa. Professionally, she is now Lisa Simone, but she is keen to stress the differences with her mother. Take politics, for example. “I don’t mix my artistry with politics. I keep them separate. My music is for humanity.”
Does she think Nina respected her in the end? She smiles. Yes, she says. “My husband was next to her every time she saw me in a Broadway show and she was one of my biggest fans.” Lisa tells me about the greatest endorsement she gave her. “I once said to her: ‘I’m going to sweep the awards, Mommy, watch, I have that much talent.’ And a few years after that I wasn’t feeling particularly talented, and she said to me something I’ll never forget. I’ll try not to get emotional.” But it’s too late – the tears are already falling. “She said: ‘I look forward to seeing you sweep the awards and walk down that red carpet, my baby girl, because you are that talented, and I believe in you.’ That meant the world to me and it still does.”
For so much of her life, Lisa struggled with their relationship, but finally she is at peace with Nina. “I’m the only person on this entire planet who calls Nina Simone, Mommy. And I do so with joy and with pride – and with a sense of knowing who I am, where I come from and how I carry on this legacy today.”
• Keeper Of The Flame: A Daughter’s Tribute to Nina Simone is at Cadogan Hall, London, on Monday 9 October
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is at 800-273-8255 or chat for support. You can also text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis text line counsellor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found atwww.befrienders.org
If you let Mommy know you were hurting, she would take advantage of that. I became numb to a lot of things
Each house is headed by a mother, who leads a group referred to as her children.
Smile is a towering figure of the Parisian ballroom scene, quite literally: his 6ft 6in frame and stylish flair make him an impactful figure irrespective of circumstance. Balanced on a small chair outside a dance studio in central Paris, he recalls the first Parisian “miniball” he helped establish over a decade ago. “I wish I had that space when I was younger and I wanted to expand it to more people”, he says. “Either I’d be a proud Black man or I’d just be gay. I was never allowed to be both at the same time.”
A muffled house beat – essential for ballroom voguing – thuds through the wall from where we are seated. Inside the dance studio, members of his house, Gorgeous Gucci, busily prep. It’s a fantastically chaotic scene: some stretch and pirouette, one wheels large suitcases across the room, dodging the spins and dips of their peers, while others fit their wardrobe. It’s hard work and there’s much to-do: Ball preparations are not taken lightly.
While the US remains the nucleus of the scene, ballroom has blossomed in Paris relatively quickly: arriving in the late 2000s with French pioneers Lasseindra Ninja and Mother Nikki Gorgeous Gucci, who began to dance vogue in legendary Parisian queer club night, BBB. “The French were so racist for so long that gay spaces didn’t like having Black people, Arab and Asians in their spaces. So BBB was created for us,” says Kiddy Smile. “Voguing resonated; it was built by two Black trans women. We had the opportunity to have a scene that was Black and Queer.”
Kiddy Smile was affected when he saw Lasseindra and Nikki dance. “They were finally breathing the air they needed.” The scene attracted an increasing amount of Paris’s LGBTQ+ community from marginalised ethnic backgrounds. Over a decade later, the city has dozens of houses that compete in balls twice a month – by far the largest, and most active ballroom community in Europe. “We built a scene up from zero. The ELB ball is about celebrating the people that paved the way.”
Harper Owens is a voguer and a champion in the vogue femme category – an evolution of the Old Way vogue dance famously captured in Madonna’s Vogue. Vogue Femme is far more bombastic and physically strenuous than its predecessor, based on five elements: hand/arm performance, catwalk, duckwalk, spins and dips, and floor performance. But Harper is unsure she’ll make the ELB – Paris fashion week is a particularly busy time for her, and she’s booked to walk the runway of French-independent label Asquin.
“There is a connection here in Paris between designers and the ballroom scene. We see European inspiration,” says Harper, who is a child of The Legendary Maison Rick Owens, which collaborates with Parisian-based designer Rick Owens for garments and looks. It proudly brands itself The First
French House, rather than an offshoot of an American house, more typical of the Parisian scene.
It’s understandable that ballroom has taken on a life of its own in the French capital. A culture partly modelled on haute couture and French glam now informs the very world it used to imitate. Fashion brands have taken full advantage of the city’s wealth of ballroom talent: Harper Owens has modelled for Jerome Dreyfuss and Vivienne Westwood. A Black trans model who has grafted for years in the fashion industry, she’s enjoying her success, but remains wary of tokenism.
“We will never know if the brand really changed or if they are just filling quotas,” she says, explaining that she assesses whether a brand usually only works with “white, skinny models” before taking on a job. “Ballroom defends totally different things, made for people who don’t fit the fashion world. If someone does not support the values of the ballroom scene, it’s not OK.”
Kiddy Smile, who recently fronted a Lancôme lipstick campaign, summed up the industry’s demand for ballroom culture: “It’s a trend. Fashion is about trends. The only thing we can do is be there, get your money and bounce.
Enjoy it while it lasts.” Despite this, he stresses that ballroom is positively disrupting a hegemonic, discriminatory industry. “They used to book straight white people, and now they are booking people from the community, who are so incredibly talented.”
Yet, more significant to the professional opportunities ballroom has opened – the heart of the culture remains grounded in community. “The ball is cool as people can show how fabulous they are, but that’s not the essence of ballroom,” says Kiddy Smile. “The essence of ballroom is being there for one of the kids when they get kicked out of their house after they come out and don’t know where to sleep.”
Harper, who was raised in Marseille by Madagascan parents, has said her house helped her when she experienced loneliness. “The scene comes from LGBT people who were rejected by their family – and we need community.” She doesn’t want to elaborate on her personal struggle, but says her house helped her “create a family and feel supported”.
To be a mentor and provider is a role that house mothers assume with responsibility and care. Across town, in an arts centre in eastern Paris, Ritchy Cobral de la Vega blows kisses at each of his children as they arrive to training, pausing our interview to make sure he greets each child personally. Mother of the Paris chapter of the House of Nina Oricci, Cobral de la Vega has helped children in his house find apartments and secure jobs. His house is proudly diverse and inclusive of trans men, trans women and cis queer walkers.
He said racism in Paris “is a fact” which is constantly harmful to the LBGTQ+ community of colour. From Guadeloupe, Cobral de la Vega said as a light-skinned Black man, he has not experienced the same prejudice as members of his house with darker skin. “I’ve seen it in my house – people who are in a bad situation just because of their skin colour.”
France continues to grapple with racial tensions, exemplified by the police shooting of Nahel, a 17-year-old boy of Algerian descent, which ignited weeks of riots across the country. Last week, a rights groups took the French state to court over widespread racial profiling, although French officials have refused to admit systemic racism.
Kiddy Smile is a renown queer activist. In 2018 he attended an event hosted by Emmanuel Macron donning a plain black T-shirt with words that said “Fils d’immigrés, noir et pédé,” which he translates as “Immigrants’ son, Black and faggot.” The move infuriated the right and shocked the French political establishment: it is now considered a landmark moment of civil rights in modern Europe.
Despite Kiddy Smile’s own emblazoned approach to activism, he said it is “unfair” to expect the ballroom culture to assume an outspoken political stance. “Sometimes people are political just by existing and saying who they are”, he says. He makes sure that his house welcomes conversations about “racism, transphobia, colourism, consent” and “all the things that affect us outside this bubble we call ballroom”.
For him, having balls like the ELB is the ultimate form of fight: “Every time we step foot on the catwalk, this is our riot, this is our statement.”
had their work removed from the Porto Photography Biennial because it highlighted the slave-trading past of the philanthropist whose money funded the exhibition space.
A room displaying the installation Adoçar a Alma para o Inferno III (“Sweeten the Soul for Hell III”) by Dori Nigro and Paulo Pinto was closed off on its opening night on 19 May by administrators of Porto’s Conde de Ferreira hospital centre, a psychiatric unit whose disused 19th-century panopticon hosted an exhibition at this year’s photography biennial in Portugal’s second city.
The room had contained a table carrying a small sugar bowl bearing the image of Joaquim Ferreira dos Santos, 1st Count de Ferreira, a 19thcentury Portuguese slave trader who bequeathed his fortune to the religious charity that built the hospital, as well as several primary schools.
Writing on two mirrors in the room spelled out previously known facts about Ferreira’s life, including his role in trafficking about 10,000 slaves from Luanda and Mozambique to Brazil. A third mirror was inscribed with three questions: “How many enslaved people does it take to build a psychiatric hospital? How many enslaved people does it take to build 120 primary schools? How many enslaved people does it take to gain the titles ‘noble’ and ‘benefactor’?”
The hospital reopened the room a week later – after removing the three inscribed mirrors that directly referenced its founding patron.
In a statement, the hospital’s administrative board said it had censored the artwork because it had caused discomfort to its patients and health workers through “offensive references to [Ferreira’s] memory”, while insisting it remained committed to engaging its history “in an adequate way.”
Nigro and Pinto are both from the Brazilian state of Pernambuco, one of the centres of the trade in enslaved people used by Ferreira. Nigro says that while the count’s philanthropy is amply commemorated in Portugal through statues, street names, squares, schools and hospitals, the sources of his wealth are altogether less celebrated.
“It would be fair if Portugal changed the name of the statues, the streets, the squares, the schools, and hospitals to pay homage to the 10,000 people dehumanised and commercialised by Count Ferreira to build the country,” he says.
His partner points out that their work has been informed by their own experiences as Portugal-based Brazilians.
“When we arrived in Porto for our studies in 2012, we discovered a denial of Portugal’s colonial past everywhere we looked,” says Pinto. “Even today there is still a widespread assumption that the slave trade was an exclusively Brazilian problem, a legacy that modern-day Brazilians have overcome. But colonial Portugal exploited the slave trade for almost 400 years. The consequences of slavery and racism in Brazil is a Portuguese legacy.”
Kia Henda believes much of Portugal’s inability to face the past lies in the incomplete image it presents to the world – and to itself. Just as the UK thrives on its castles, kings and queens, he says, “Portugal today lives essentially from tourism” and on a “romanticised” and sanitised interpretation of its past.
Isabel Almeida Rodrigues, secretary of state for equality and migration in Portugal’s socialist government, argues that the Salazar dictatorship of 1933-74 – during which the Padrão dos Descobrimentos was built – had a profound and enduring effect on the country’s self-image.
“To understand our role and our past, we must first understand that we lived in a nationalistic-conservative dictatorship for around 40 years,” she says.
“Abolishing the dictatorship meant throwing off the yoke of colonialism, which is why the revolution can be seen as a movement against racism. However, throughout that 40-year period, not only did our education system unfortunately transmit an excessively nationalistic perspective regarding our history but the dictatorship, as a whole, also instilled several prejudices in people regarding our former dependencies.”
Almeida Rodrigues insists education is now at the forefront of the government’s efforts to tackle racism and combat the colonial myths that help underpin it.
“The curriculum nowadays includes works by authors not only from Portugal but from the wider Portuguesespeaking world and, since 2017, pupils from the age of 10 have been learning about colonialism, slavery, historical memory and the importance of interculturality,” she says.
She also points to the national plan to combat racism, approved in 2021, which “fully recognises that there is systemic and structural racism in Portugal, which is a legacy of colonialism and slavery”. As well as setting up an official observatory on racism and xenophobia to improve the collection and analysis of data and help develop anti-discrimination policies, the government has invested in diversity and awareness training for police officers and regulated the use of bodycams to bring more scrutiny and transparency to law enforcement.
“I think there’s a direct link between education and tackling not only present-day racism, but also future-day racism – in Portugal and everywhere in the world,” says Almeida Rodrigues.
The sentiment is shared by Dino D’Santiago, one of Portugal’s bestknown musicians. D’Santiago, who is of Cape Verdean descent and who sings in Creole and Portuguese, says education, a proper explanation of the past, and a full and meaningful apology from Rebelo de Sousa are all desperately needed.
“A real sorry from the president of the country for what we did would be the first affirmation and a way of humanising the victims,” he says. “People don’t know what was done. Instead of talking about the discovery of Brazil, we need to talk about the genocide of millions of people … They weren’t clapping us when we arrived. But if you look at the drawing in the books, people are smiling. We need to tell people everything about what we did; about how many people died in the boats.”
Such efforts are not always easy – as D’Santiago discovered for himself in January when he suggested that Portugal could rethink the words of its national anthem, arguing that all the talk of cannons in verses written during a 19th-century colonial showdown in Africa between Portugal and the UK may not be wholly relevant to the country today.
“When I said that, the reaction was: ‘Go and do the Cape Verdean anthem,’ or :‘Go do the Guinean or Mozambican anthem, because you don’t have the right to touch our history.’ And I was like: ‘I was born here in Portugal and I feel 100% Portuguese and 100% Cape Verdean. I’m 200% of a person.’”
Although the backlash and threats led the singer to head to Brazil for a while – “even on the way to the airport, I was wondering whether someone would try to do something” – he views the episode as further proof of the need to confront the past. But he also takes heart in Portugal’s postcolonial diversity and in the open minds of its young people.
“All my investment is in the new generation and not in trying to change the minds of older people,” he says. “Children are so fertile when it comes to knowledge and we now have something that we never had in the past: pride. My niece, who’s 10 years old, wants to be the president of Portugal. There’s a big difference between her ambitions and mine. She sees her uncle on TV and getting prizes, which is now normal for her. That wasn’t normal for me when I was her age.”
The question now is what form an apology could take – and where it could lead.
Paul Gardullo, a historian and curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, was part of a delegation that travelled to Lisbon at the beginning of the year to take part in an international symposium on slavery, museums and racism. He says that while each country’s approach to its own history is different, there are some similarities between Portugal’s situation and that of the Netherlands.
“I think the way the broader official memory in Portugal operates is similar to the way memory around ‘the golden age’ existed, until pretty recently, in the Netherlands – this sense of an era that was a golden age of discovery,” he says. “In Portugal, it’s the ‘age of discovery’; in the Netherlands, it has a different terminology but there’s such a longstanding and fierce desire to protect that – without fully understanding it and without acknowledging the pain that comes along with that for a lot of people. Why? Because it’s caught up in national identity.”
At the end of last year, the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, offered a formal apology for the Netherlands’ historical role in the slave trade, saying that while the past “cannot be erased, only faced up to”, he firmly acknowledged that his country had “enabled, encouraged and profited from slavery”. Rutte’s remarks followed Denmark’s 2018 apology to Ghana, which it colonised from the mid-17th to the mid-19th century, and King Philippe of Belgium’s “deepest regrets” for abuses in Congo, expressed in June last year.
In April, the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, refused to apologise for the UK’s role in the slave trade or to countenance reparations, saying: “Trying to unpick our history is not the right way forward, and it’s not something that we will focus our energies on.”
Gardullo says he was disturbed to hear that some people of African descent who were born in Portugal feel they are not recognised as Portuguese. Such feelings, he adds, show work needs to be done to embrace a more complex understanding of Portugal’s history and of how the African presence has contributed to the country’s identity.
“Portugal should not be narrowly and falsely focused on looking toward a mythical past from 500 years ago as some golden age,” says Gardullo. “It should be thinking about itself now and about its role in the world and how a more full past, inclusive of slavery and colonialism, has made it what it is today. How do you make it a place that is reflective of its full history but which also embraces all the people who live there and are citizens?”
But first, inevitably, there needs to be an apology that acknowledges a wound that is old and deep. A few genuine and well-chosen words, says D’Santiago, could provide a vital first step.
“Pain follows you,” says the singer. “If you’re hurt as a child and you don’t get that damage repaired, it will be with you until you die … If you say sorry about the millions of people who died, you’re showing respect for their memories and for the people who are the descendants of that tragedy. I’m one of those descendants, but I’m a descendant with a lot of hope.”