‘We need to tell people everything’: Portugal grapples with legacy of colonial past

One morning towards the end of June, the monolithic hulk of the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, which has loomed over the Tagus River for six decades, its stony prow forever poised to cast off from the Lisbon quayside in search of power, glory and riches, woke, once again, to find itself altered.

“The nation that killed Africa,” read the graffiti scrawled on the monument to Portugal’s pioneering role in the age of discovery. Then came a contemporary afterthought: “Wakanda forever.”

A similar, if more poetic, sentiment was expressed in the blue and red spray-paint applied to the side of the landmark two years ago. “Blindly sailing for money, humanity is drowning in a scarlet sea,” it said.

The terseness of the latest message reflects the anger and frustration many people feel as Portugal considers the difficult task of confronting its colonial and slave-trading past.

Almost six months ago, Portugal’s president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, suggested the time had come for the country to “assume responsibility” for its past and apologise for its actions.

If Rebelo de Sousa’s words were tentative, they nonetheless appeared to represent a shift from the views he expressed six years ago during a visit to the island of Gorée off Senegal, which was, for centuries, one of the key slavetrading centres on the African coast.

When he visited in 1992, Pope John Paul II implored “forgiveness from heaven” for what he termed “this African sanctuary of black pain”. In a speech on the island in 2005 Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, apologised for what his country “did to black people”.

In 2017, though, the Portuguese president chose to focus on the fact that his country had set about abolishing slavery in the 1760s after recognising its “injustice”. He did not mention that Portugal was the European country with the longest historical involvement in the slave trade, kidnapping and forcibly transporting about 6 million African men, women and children across the Atlantic between the 15th and 19th centuries. Nor did he mention that his country had only abolished slavery to the Portuguese mainland in 1761 – the trade to Brazil continued and slavery was not completely abolished across all the territories Portugal controlled until 1869.

“[What the president said in 2017] was a lie – and he knew it was a lie,” says Evalina Dias, a project manager at Djass, Portugal’s Association of African Descendants. “He’s a very intelligent man but he still said it because it was a way not to acknowledge what happened. He was saying: ‘Yes, we did it, but we were the first to abolish it.’ I think they didn’t want to talk about it back then.”

Dias says people find it hard to admit that the racism fostered by slavery and colonialism still exists – let alone acknowledge how thoroughly it has come to permeate Portuguese society.

“The problem here is the structural racism that doesn’t allow black people or Africans to do a lot of things like having the same rights as other people,” she says. “Even if it’s written [in law], they try to avoid it. If you go to a health centre and you’re not legalised, you’re still entitled to be treated. But when you get there, they’ll tell you that you’re not – even if you have documents. I’ve lived here all my life and it’s happened to me. It’s a way of frustrating people every day when it comes to employment and health and education and housing.”

What does she think may have changed Rebelo de Sousa’s mind? “I don’t know – that was the first time he’d talked about confronting the past,” says Dias. “But it’s just been words; there’s been no action.”

For Djass and for many others, there are few better examples of that inaction than the delays in creating a memorial intended to stand in stark contrast to the Padrão dos Descobrimentos.

Plantação (Plantation), a permanent piece conceived by the Angolan conceptual artist Kiluanji Kia Henda, should long since have appeared on the quayside a few miles from the discovery monument. But bureaucratic delays, feasibility studies and arguments over where it should be located have dogged the project’s progress since it began in 2017.

According to Kia Henda, its 540 blackened metal sugarcanes are intended to evoke a burned plantation as a way of honouring enslaved people while also reminding visitors that the system that relied on slavery is still ubiquitous and all powerful.

While remembering the millions of victims, he adds, it is also important to recall those who rose up, set fire to the plantations and established the quilombos – the settlements where escaped enslaved people lived.

Kia Henda says: “Sugarcane plantations are the matrix of the capitalist system, the main economic pillar that has sustained transatlantic trafficking since its beginnings, so this act of rebellion not only takes us back to the past, but also speaks of the need to fight against it and the various types of oppression that still exist today.”

Lisbon city council says the €185,000 (£159,000) work is intended to help ensure the tragedy of the slave trade never fades from memory, buts adds that the project has been “a lengthy, demanding, and intensive process, which has been a highly challenging endeavour for the municipality” – not least because of the Covid pandemic.

Kia Henda is not the only one struggling to get Portugal thinking about its past. In May, two Brazilian artists