The French Radio with us

Your African Tour has been recommended by The French Radio to the French audience visiting or living in Portugal.
Votre Tour Africain de Lisbonne relatant l’histoire méconnue de l’Afrique vous est recommandé par la French Radio à vous francophones vivant ou étant de passage au Portugal. Nous vous y attendons. Contactez nous pour plus d’information.
 
Below you can listen to the podcast / Écoutez le podcast ci dessous
https://www.lafrenchradio.com/un-tour-atypique-une-cuisine-du-monde-et-la-visite-de-musee-et-jardins-de-lisbonne-et-belem/?fbclid=IwAR2nTJqwxzVsI5pYhDZJDQ063TATOtPBHUJGN3ZP-ytsa5FXE01z9UrP1KY

Independence Day of Togo: Sylvanus Olympio the visionnaire

From this moment and Forever 
Free from any subject, any hindrance
Master of your destiny
Togo my country, here you are Free
Free to be yourself
To follow your ideas and inclinations
To choose according to your reason and your feelings
To decide according to your own will
Finally free
In the restored dignity
To prove and affirm your personality
 
These are the words pronounced by a great Man called Sylvanus Olympio proclaiming the independence of Togo on April 27th, 1960.
Who was this man??? Let us know about this man who could have changed the destiny of his country and may be the destiny of the African continent for the vision and the dream he had but who will be assassinated by France and allies: This will be the first coup d’Etat in Africa and the first assassinated in his fight against the colonial currency CFA (XOF).
Sylvanus Olympio was born on 6 September 1902 in Kpandu in the German protectorate of Togoland, present day Volta Region of Ghana into a wealthy family. He was the grandson to the important Afro-Brazilian trader Francisco Olympio Sylvio and son to Ephiphanio Olympio, who ran the prominent trading house for the Miller Brothers from Liverpool in Agoué (in present-day Benin).  
His early education was at the German Catholic school in Lomé, which his uncle Octaviano had built for the Society for the Divine Word. Following that, he began study economics at the London School of Economics  under Harold Laski. Upon graduation, he worked for Unilever first in Nigeria and then in the Gold Coast. By 1929, he became the head of Unilever operations in Togoland. In 1938, he was promoted to become the general manager of the United Africa Company‘s, then part of Unilever, operations throughout Africa.
During World War II, the colony came under the control of the Vichy France government which treated the Olympio family with general suspicion because of their ties to the British. He was arrested in 1942 and held under constant surveillance in the remote city of Djougou in French Dahomey . The imprisonment would permanently change his view toward the French and he would become active in pushing for independence of Togo at the end of the war.
Olympio became active in the domestic and international struggle to gain independence for Togo following World War II. Domestically he founded the Comité de l’unité togolaise (CUT) which became the major party opposing French control over Togo.
Olympio’s party boycotted most of the elections during the 1950s within Togo because of the heavy French involvement in the elections (including the 1956 election that made Nicolas Grunitzky, the brother to Olympio’s wife, the Prime Minister of the colony as head of the Togolese Progress Party). In 1954, Olympio was arrested by the French authorities and his right to vote and run for office were suspended.


 
However, his petitions to the Trusteeship Council led to the 1958 elections where French control over the elections were limited, although involvement remained significant and Olympio’s CUT party was able to win every elected position in the national council. The French were then forced to restore Olympio’s right to hold office and he became the Prime Minister of the Togo colony and began pressing for independence.
From 1958 until 1961 he served as the Prime Minister of Togo and also served as the Minister of Finance, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Minister of Justice for the colony. He connected with many of the other independence struggles throughout the continent; for example making Ahmed Sékou Touré, first President of Guinea, conseiller special to his government in 1960. In 1961, as part of the transition of power away from French control, the country voted for a President and affirmed the Constitution developed by Olympio and his party. Olympio defeated Grunitzky with over 90% of the vote to become the first president of Togo and the Constitution was approved.
The French initially treated Olympio with significant hostility during the transition to independence and later, after Olympio became the President in 1961, the French became concerned that Olympio was largely aligned with British and American interests. Olympio adopted a unique position for early independent African leaders of former French territories. Although he tried to rely on little foreign aid, when necessary he relied on German aid rather than French aid. He was not part of the alliances between France and their ex-colonies (notably not joining the African and Malagasy Union) and fostered connections with former British colonies (namely Nigeria) and the United States. Eventually, he began to improve relations with France and when relations with Ghana were at their most tense, he secured a defense pact with the French in order to ensure protection for Togo.
Domestic politics was largely defined by Olympio’s efforts to restrain spending and develop his country without being reliant on outside support and repression of opposition parties.
His austere spending was most significant in the realm of military policy. Initially, Olympio had pushed for Togo to have no military when it achieved independence, but with threats from Nkrumah being a concern, he agreed to a small military (only about 250 soldiers). However, an increasing number of French troops began returning to their homes in Togo and were not provided enlistment in the limited Togolese military because of its small size. On 24 September 1962, Olympio rejected the personal plea by Étienne Eyadéma, a Sergent in the French military, to join the Togolese military. On 7 January 1963, Dadjo again presented a request for enlisting ex-French troops and Olympio reportedly tore up the request.
Olympio largely pursued a policy of connecting Togo with Britain, the United States and other Western Bloc countries. In 1962, he visited the United States and had a friendly meeting with President John F. Kennedy. In many respects, he was a cultural linkage between British and French West Africa and spoke both languages fluently and connected with the elites in both circles.
It was a long and painful journey to independence. In order to obfuscate or block the hopes of emancipation and aspirations for self-government by Olympio and the Togolese people, France requested a payment of 800 million francs from the tiny West African colony with meagre earnings as the cost of France’s colonial administration.
Being a trained economist and international businessman, Sylvanus Olympio quickly understood the game. There is no real independence with “debt trap” and he quickly went to work for two years by putting Togo’s  land and human resources to work in order to come up with the funds to pay France.
Even after paying France this colossal amount and gaining nominal independence, General De Gaulle wasn’t going to let go because he believed all French colonies were France’s property independent or not.
Sylvanus Olympio’s vision of a free and self-determining Togo, free of western interference by putting the people first above all other interests didn’t go down well in Paris. The last straw was his decision to break away from the CFA francs currency which was imposed on France’s colonies in 1945 at gunpoint.
Olympio set out to issue Togo’s own sovereign currency backed by the resources of the country and guaranteed by the German Bundesbank.  Two days before Sylvanus Olympio was due in Paris at the Bank of France to sign the withdrawal agreement of Togo from the CFA francs currency, France, with the help of USA ordered his assassination.
He was handed over to his assassins by U.S. ambassador Leon B. Poullada in Togo on 13th January 1963 and the rest is history.
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Togo & Africa will remember forever the man who thought the unity of Africa is essential. He believed Africa needed to be definitely free, politically, economically etc…
Happy freedom day TOGO images-4
Below an interesting interview of this great Man

Xenephobia in South Africa: Ultimatum to non South Africans to leave the Country: True or false

A highly threatening message warning foreigners living in South Africa of impending more xenophobic attacks is making huge rounds on social media raising severe panic and uncertainty especially to people living in infornal settlements in the country.
The heavily worded message gives a thirty day ultimatum for foreigners living in the Southern Africa economic giant to leave the country or they face attacks from unemployed South Africans who claim that foreigners are grabbing their jobs.
 
WARNING WARNING
TO ALL FOREIGNERS IN SOUTH AFRICA
We are giving you a month to pack all you bags and leave South Africa, whether you have working permits or not. Just wait for us to vote on the 8th of May, then on Monday the 13th of May we will close the roads, stopping all the taxis every foreign nationals will be dealt with accordingly.

What happened in KZN are just highlights of what we are going to do on the 13th of May . We are kind enough to give you more than a month time to pack yours and go to your own countries peacefully.
We will stop all cars taxis, buses, trains, we are going to enter work places, contract sites, security sites, seaching every one , Anyone found without South African ID will be dealt with mercylessly.
It’s been long we sent our request to the government , but it seems our request is being ignored , now we will deal with it our own way.
SO PLEASE BE WARNED AND DO AS I SAY AND SAVE YOUURSELF AND YOUR FAMILIES
DO NOT SAY WE DIDN’T WARN YOU. PACK YOURS AND GO BACK TO YOUR COUNTRIES. WE DONT WANT ANY KWEREKWERES ANYMORE, WE ARE TIRED , ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
BE WARNED!

A lot of people are asking if this is true or false. Personally I don’t want to know. This won’t be t he first time so I just want actions to be taken by the South African government and politics to avoid it and at the same time ask every foreigner to leave the country.  I hope the African presidents will care about the lives of their fellow citizens and repatriate them as soon as possible and give them a better condition of life. I also hope the South African government to show to the world they are against these xenophobic actions by sueing the responsibles of this killings.
In the photos below people are proudly waving their weapons and ready to kill.


Remember Rwanda and do not stand idly by on the sidelines while another human tragedy is being prepared.
Together we can STOP this.
Spread this message!!!
 
 

Virginia Quaresma: Story of a life of struggle

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Virgínia Sofia Guerra Quaresma OSE (28 December 1882 – 23 October 1973) was the first woman to take up professional journalism in Portugal and was one of the first women graduates from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lisbon. She was openly lesbian, in a time when society dictated that sexual orientation be hidden, and a feminist, who advocated for full equality between men and women. Traveling to Brazil to write about a sensational murder case, she brought violence against women to the forefront, in a case that spanned almost a decade. In the 1930s, she relocated permanently to Brazil, but traveled internationally with her work. A street was renamed in her honor in the city of Belém and in 2010, she was honored with a stamp bearing her likeness, along with other women.
Virgínia Sofia Guerra Quaresma was born on 28 December 1882 in Elvas, Portugal to Ana de Conceição Guerra and General Júlio César Ferreira Quaresma. Her father was a regimental commander and she was the only daughter in the family. She had two brothers, Eduardo and Carlos. She graduated with the credentials for teaching from the First Normal School of Lisbon and then enrolled in the Superior Course of Letters at the University of Lisbon. Graduating in 1903, she became one of the first women to graduate from the university’s Faculty of Arts.
Quaresma, along with Carolina Beatriz Ângelo, Adelaide Cabete, Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcelos, Alice Pestana , Olga Sarmento da Silveira, among others, were the leading feminists at the turn of the century in Portugal. Beginning her career in feminist journals, such as O Mundo—Jornal da Mulher, she contributed articles discussing women’s total equality and the pacifist movement. She argued for equal rights in all arenas: access to professions, administration of property, education, equal pay, freedom of decisions, full legal and civil authority (including adoption, divorce, guardianship of children), the right to work for married women, as well as the right to vote. Quaresma was the principal editor of the journal Sociedade Futura(Future Society)  and on 18 May 1906, she reported on Sarmento da Silveira’s presentation on the Feminist Problem. That work spurred women to organize the Feminist Section of the Portuguese League of Peace (Portuguese: Secção Feminista da Liga Portuguesa da Paz), and by December Quaresma was heading the organizational committee. Quaresma was the editor-in-chief of the feminist journal, Alma Feminina (Feminine Soul), from the middle of 1907 to the early part of 1908 and then at the invitation of Manuel Guimarães went to work at O Século (The Century) to primarily cover political events. 
In an article, “Feminine Solidarity”, published 26 April 1907, Quaresma condemned the cloistered life most Portuguese women were forced to lead and argued that the country had an obligation to improve the situation of women. Though in favor of the development of the Portuguese Republic, she approached the argument for Republicanism in feminist terms, arguing in the General Assembly of the Republican League of Portuguese Women for passage of the Divorce Law in 1909, and in 1910 for the economic independence and education of women. In 1910, when Manuel Guimarães left O Século, to found A Capital (The Capital), he encouraged Quaresma to follow him there. She accepted the new post, covering the most important happenings along with her colleague Hermano Neves. These two newspapers were the most important papers in the capital city at the time, and Quaresma used the platform to argue for coeducational schooling, a radical topic at the time. She also recognized the importance of marketing and used her newspaper contacts to create the first advertising agency to be run by a woman, one of the few such agencies in the country at the time. 
In 1912, Quaresma was invited to come to Brazil to cover the story of the femicide of Anita Levy by her husband, the well-known poet, João Barreto.  She moved to Rio de Janeiro with her partner, Maria da Cunha Zorro, for whom she also secured employment with the newspaper, A Época, which had hired her.  Quaresma not only reported the details of the crime, by following the police investigation and trial, but she framed the story in feminist terms, discussing the violence, Barreto’s alcoholism and jealousy, and the lack of legal protection for women from violence. The case elevated her career and she became known as a crime reporter, though Barreto was acquitted. Da Cunha’s death on 10 January 1917, probably was the event which propelled Quaresma to return to Portugal, where she rejoined A CapitalShe continued following the case of Barreto, publishing demands for justice for Levy. In 1921, he was retried and convicted. In an interview with Spain’s ABC, Quaresma said she could not let the campaign go and needed to obtain justice for the victim. 
Soon after returning to Lisbon, around 1922, Óscar de Carvalho Azevedo, whom she had known in Brazil, asked Quaresma to head a new organization which focused on presenting news going on in the Americas to Portuguese audiences. She accepted the post, becoming the director of the American News Agency.  She openly had lesbian relationships, living for many years at the Hotel Palace and maintaining a relationship with Maria Torres. Homophobia in Portugal was severe and the new fascist state of the First Republic imposed harsh penalties for any kind of subversive behavior. Gays were routinely arrested and imprisoned, with their families and friends also facing repercussions.  Fearing that she would encounter problems since Quaresma had hired her to work for the Agency, family members of Maria Lamas  encouraged Lamas to quit her first journalism position. When her relationship ended, Quaresma began a lifelong partnership with the widow of a fellow journalist known only as “Madame Silva Passos.
In addition to her reporting, Quaresma organized events to spur Luso-Brazilian cooperation. In 1923, she organized the visit of President António José de Almeidafor a Brazilian exhibition and in 1933, organized the Rio de Janeiro Trade Demonstration Exposition centennial celebration. The latter event hosted conferences, concerts and recitations as well as documentaries, during the “Portuguese Week” of the fair. After the fair was over Quaresma relocated permanently in Brazil with her partner. During World War II, she utilized her connections with the Agency to support the charitable organization Portuguese Women’s Crusade with aid for disabled veterans, orphans and widows. After the war ended, Quaresma hosted cultural programs, featuring young musicians and literary figures, giving many young artists their first steps to fame. For the next thirty years, she traveled throughout the world practicing her craft with Silva Passos, who died in the early 1960s, leaving Quaresma bereft and unable to carry out the day to day household tasks that her partner had handled so she could work. 
Quaresma’s death was reported on 23 October 1973 in Lisbon, in the newspaper La República After her death, biographers of Quaresma attempted to erase her lesbian past and the oppressive climate that contributed to her living abroad. Fifteen years after she died, she was honored by the city of Belém, which named a street after her in the Caselas neighborhood. In 2010, the country of Portugal issued a series of stamps to recognize the women who had helped the country to develop at the turn of the 20th century. Along with other women, Quaresma’s likeness appeared on the €1.15 stamp. 
 
Virginia-Quaresma-1882-2
Source Wikipedia

Nanny, the Ashanti woman who ended up as freedom fighter and hero in Jamaica

She was declared a national heroine in 1975 by the Jamaican government and awarded the title of “Right Excellent” due to her enormous accomplishments.
Queen Nanny, born in Ghana in western Africa, to the Ashanti tribe, was brought to Jamaica as a slave and ended up being a Maroon leader in Jamaica during the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Maroons were slaves in the Americas who escaped and formed independent settlements.
Nanny, her four brothers, and several others were sold into slavery and later escaped from their plantations into the mountains and jungles of Jamaica.
Nanny eventually founded a village in the Blue Mountains, on the Eastern side of Jamaica, which became known as Nanny Town.
maroon
By 1720, Nanny had become the leader of this maroon settlement, where she trained her maroon warriors in the art of guerilla warfare due to incessant tension between her people and the British.
Nanny Town, according to history, thrived due to its location in the mountains away from European settlements and its difficulty to be attacked.
Nanny, who was said to have knowledge in traditional healing methods, became a spiritual and military leader of the people of Nanny Town.
During a period of 30 years, she contributed towards the escape of more than 1,000 slaves and helped them resettle in the Maroon community.
As the Maroons grew in their numbers, the British colonial administration became threatened and upon further calls by plantation owners who were losing slaves and crops, British forces attacked jungles in Jamaica.
In 1733, during one of the bloody battles, Nanny was killed. The war still went on until Cudjoe, a maroon leader and brother of Nanny, signed a peace treaty with the British in 1739.
The Maroons were granted five hundred acres of land to settle on; this became known as New Nanny Town.
The old Nanny Town had then been captured by the British and destroyed.
Currently being the only female among Jamaica’s seven National Heroes, Nanny is hailed by many for her active role in fighting slavery and protecting the black community.
Apart from being on the logo for the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, she is also on the Jamaican $500 note, one of the banknotes in circulation in Jamaica.
note
 

Goree Island: Goosebumps

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A decade ago, I have visited the island of Gorée in Senegal located less than 4 km from the city of Dakar. This photo took next to the memorial of the Liberation reminds me what I felt knowing details about the slave trade on the island.
Gorée was since the 15th century the center of rivalries between different European nations which used it for slave trading. Locally known as “Beer” or “Ber” or “Bir” in Wolof, it was first named “La Palma” by Portuguese in 1444, with some ancient maps also showing the name “Beseguiche” for it. The Dutch navy named it “Goede Reede” or “Good Harbor” in 1588. In 1677, the island was occupied by the French.
But the name did not match with what went on in this tiny island when wooden ships sailed from here across the Atlantic, with human beings chained in their holds.
On the island, there is a small fort known as Slave House. This was in effect one of the slave warehouses through which Africans passed on their way to the Americas.
Millions passed through the island and other similar trading posts to work in the plantations of the New World, including America.
Some ideas sustained that the island of Gorée was never really used for slave trading and that slave trading had been done in Saint Louis in the north or south in Gambia. These claims were so outrageous that the Senegalese government sponsored an international conference on the history of the island, and researched and found original archives from the French Port of Nantes showing that between 1763 and 1775 alone, one port had traded more than 103,000 slaves from Gorée; this thus shows that Gorée was indeed at the epicenter of slave trading, and stating otherwise is an attempt at falsifying history. The first slaves were taken from Gorée in 1536, and the trade continued at least until 1848.
 
Maison-des-esclaves-gorée
The House of slaves was first built by the Dutch in 1776, and is the last standing slave house on the island. At the end of the 18thcentury, the island was a prosperous crossroad of merchants, soldiers, and administrators, with at its center slave trade. Today, it serves as a museum and a memorial to humanity. The upper part of the building like most slave houses was used by the Europeans who lived there; while the bottom part was used to house slaves packed on top of each other in humid, sordid, and disgusting rooms built for 15-20 people but housing sometimes over 100 people, while waiting to be taken to the Americas. On the bottom floor, there is a room used to pack young women among which the slave traders would come every night and choose those who will be used for their sexual pleasures; if any of these women were found pregnant from these traders’ visits, they were freed on the island or sent to Saint Louis. There were also rooms to house strong men, children, and women. There was also a dark tiny room where the most defiant ones were stacked on top of each other, and salty water was seeped through the walls to force dehydration and later death. The value of a man depended on his weight and muscles; the minimum weight was 60 kg. The value of a child depended on his/her denture, while that of a woman on her breasts.
The small size of the island made it easy for merchants to control their captives. The surrounding waters are so deep that any attempt at escaping would mean sure drowning. With a 5kg metal ball permanently attached to their feet or necks, a captured African who ever tried running away would surely drown in deep sea.
From the door of no return, the slaves were loaded onto ships which took them across the Atlantic. This was their last time on African soil.
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Entire families were captured and brought to Gorée, but their destinations were seldom the same: the father could be shipped to America, while the Mother to Brazil, and the child to Haiti or the West indies. Separation was irrevocable.
The Portuguese, Dutch, French and British all fought and killed each other over the trade from there.
Converted into a museum and memorial in 1962, the House of Slaves now stands as a testament to the human suffering and devastation caused by the slave trade.
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Sarah Baartman: The black Venus and an human attraction

Sarah Baartman died on 29 December 1815, but her exhibition continued.
Her brain, skeleton and sexual organs remained on display in a Paris museum until 1974. Her remains weren’t repatriated and buried until 2002.
Brought to Europe seemingly on false pretences by a British doctor, stage-named the “Hottentot Venus”, she was paraded around “freak shows” in London and Paris, with crowds invited to look at her large buttocks.
Today she is seen by many as the epitome of colonial exploitation and racism, of the ridicule and commodification of black people.
Baartman’s life was one of huge hardship. It is thought she was born in South Africa’s Eastern Cape in 1789, her mother died when she was two and her father, a cattle driver, died when she was an adolescent. She entered domestic service in Cape Town after a Dutch colonist murdered her partner, with whom she had had a baby who died.
In October 1810, although illiterate, Baartman allegedly signed a contract with English ship surgeon William Dunlop and mixed-race entrepreneur Hendrik Cesars, in whose household she worked, saying she would travel to England to take part in shows.
The reason was that Baartman, also known as Sara or Saartjie, had what was called “steatopygia”, resulting in extremely protuberant buttocks due to a build-up of fat.
These made her a cause of fascination when she was exhibited at a venue in London’s Piccadilly Circus after her arrival. “You have to remember that, at the time, it was highly fashionable and desirable for women to have large bottoms, so lots of people envied what she had naturally, without having to accentuate her figure,” says Rachel Holmes, author of The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman.
On stage she wore skin-tight, flesh-coloured clothing, as well as beads and feathers, and smoked a pipe. Wealthy customers could pay for private demonstrations in their homes, with their guests allowed to touch her.


Her arrival in England coincided with speculation over whether Lord Grenville and his coalition of Whigs – known as the “broad bottoms” because of Grenville’s own large behind – would try to seize government. This was a gift for cartoonists. One creati, entitled A Pair of Broad Bottoms, shows Grenville and Baartman standing back-to-back, with another figure measuring their respective posterior sizes.
Baartman’s promoters nicknamed her the “Hottentot Venus”, with “hottentot” – now seen as derogatory – then being used in Dutch to describe the Khoikhoi and San, who together make up the peoples known as the Khoisan.
The British Empire had abolished the slave trade in 1807, but not slavery itself. Even so, campaigners were appalled at Baartman’s treatment in London. Her employers were prosecuted for holding Baartman against her will, but not convicted, with Baartman herself testifying in their favour.
“The question remains – was Baartman coerced, as abolitionist/humanitarian campaigners claimed, or was she acting on her own free will?” says Christer Petley, a history lecturer at Southampton University. “If she was coerced, she might have felt too intimidated to tell the truth in court. We’ll never know.
“The case is complex and the relationship between Baartman and her handlers was certainly not equally weighted, even if she had some element of choice or felt she could gain something – material or otherwise – from her performance.”
Holmes says Baartman’s show also included dancing and playing several musical instruments, and that a “sophisticated” audience in London, a city in which ethnic minorities weren’t rare even at that time, would not simply have stopped and looked at her for long on account of her race.
After the case, Baartman’s show gradually lost its novelty and popularity among audiences in the capital and she went on tour around Britain and Ireland.
In 1814 she moved to Paris with Cesars. She became a celebrity once more, drinking at the Cafe de Paris and attending society parties. Cesars returned to South Africa and Baartman came under the influence of an “animal exhibitor”, with the stage name Reaux. She drank and smoked heavily and, according to Holmes, was “probably prostituted” by him.

Baartman agreed to be studied and painted by a group of scientists and artists but refused to appear fully naked before them, arguing that this was beneath her dignity – she had never done this in one of her shows. This period was the beginning of the study of what became known as “racial science”, says Holmes.
Baartman died aged 26. The cause was described as “inflammatory and eruptive disease”. It’s since been suggested this was a result of pneumonia, syphilis or alcoholism.
The naturalist Georges Cuvier, who had danced with Baartman at one of Reaux’s parties, made a plaster cast of her body before dissecting it. He preserved her skeleton and pickled her brain and genitals, placing them in jars displayed at Paris’s Museum of Man. They remained on public display until 1974, something Holmes describes as “grotesque”.
 
After his election in 1994 as President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela requested the repatriation of Baartman’s remains and Cuvier’s plaster cast and this happened in March 2002. In August of that year, her remains were buried in Hankey, in Eastern Cape province, 192 years after Baartman had left for Europe.

In 2015, a plaque at her burial site in Hankey was splashed with white paint, causing further distress. This happened a couple of weeks after the removal from Cape Town University of the statue of Cecil Rhodes, the 19th Century businessman and politician who declared the British to be “the first race in the world”, following protests by students.
Source : BBC

Africa day : Naval Academy – Lisbon

Last month ( March) during the African Day at the Naval Academy of Lisbon, I have been invited to present the project African Lisbon Tour and talk about the History of Slavery in Portugal.
It is undeniable that the topic of slavery is difficult and sensitive and for this reason the approaches are different.
Unfortunately some of the approaches such as the silence or the adornment or lies are the most usual and result very dangerous for our societies and communities because this still digging a huge gap between the truth and the reality.
It has a pleasure and honour to have shared with all the students and also the responsible of the Academy.
All my regards to the Commanders, Captains and Director of the Academy for the warm welcome and also the students for their choice in this exchange as one of the highlights of their celebration.
 

Princess Aqualtune Ezgondidu Mahamud

SliderServeIn 1665, Princess Aqualtune Ezgondidu Mahamud da Silva Santos led 10,000 men into the Battle of Mbwila; between the Kingdom of Kongo and the Kingdom of Portugal.  It is estimated that 5,000 men died in the war.
The surviving members of the Kongo army were captured and sold as slaves in Brazil amongst other places. Those captured included the King of Kongo, his two sons, his two nephews, four governors, various court officials, 95 workers in the kingdom and 400 other aristocrats.
The princess later founded the Palmares or the Quilombo dos Palmares, a community in Alagoas, Brazil comprised of runaway slaves.  The princess was the mother of Ganga Zumba and maternal grandmother of Ganga Zumbi.
Princess Mahamud was the daughter of an unknown King of Kongo. Kongo was located in modern-day northern Angola, the Republic of Congo, the western part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and southern Gabon.  From 1891 to 1914, Kongo was a vassal state of Portugal.
After the Battle of Mbwila, the princess was transported to the Port of Recife, a warehouse and sugar mill.
 
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It is documented that the princess was purchased solely for the purpose of reproduction with other slaves.  When she became pregnant, the princess was sold to a mill in Porto Calvo, Brazil.

In her second to last month of pregnancy, the princess formulated the Palmares. She later gave birth to Ganga Zone, Ganga Zumba, Sabina and Zona. Zumba was the first leader of the Palmares.
Thereafter, the whereabouts and fate of the princess are unknown.

 
 

Chapter 14th: African Lisbon Tour

One of these days when the word HAPPINESS has no limit as you are surrounded by smiling and happy people and you end with them like friends or a family after sharing point of views and experiences about the African history of slavery and colonialism in Portugal and also from their different countries: Belgium, Netherland, United States of America, Kenya, England and Brazil.
It went beyond a simple walking tour and knowing each other and sharing our own experiences has been a blessing for all of us.
 
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We had the honour to be visited by the TSF one of the three main Portuguese radio news stations and part of the Portuguese Global Media Group.
Find below the link to listen to the program.
I would like to thank the radio for their interest in spreading the news.
Enjoy 🙂
#africanlisbontour #africanhistory #hiddenhistory #historyofslavery #colonialism #Portuguesecolonialhistory #Slaveryinportugal #Palopcountries #Portugalcolonialpast
https://www.tsf.pt/sociedade/interior/ha-uma-visita-guiada-que-resgata-a-historia-africana-escondida-nas-ruas-de-lisboa–10747708.html?fbclid=IwAR07GenIf1TcsFvsZtMJQ51NqvkadNOkhwQ3M2mgipCFQKJe6MjYs2OUOYs
Contact us to be share with us