Portuguese colonialism was a project of oppression and submission of many peoples

The writers Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida and Gisela Casimiro, the artists Ângela Ferreira and Francisco Vidal, the curator and researcher Nuno Crespo, like other creators interviewed by the Lusa agency, converge on the need to bring the history of the oppressed to mainstream history, to show that Portuguese colonialism was as violent as any other, repairing the damage of centuries since school books, “reversing suffering, even if it requires suffering.”

“We will not evolve if we continue to put on the table that with us it was different from what it was with others” colonialisms, guarantees the writer and ‘rapper’ Telma Tvon, author of “A black very Portuguese”, who sees in the arts and Culture, the possibility of “putting your finger on the wound”, talking about what you don’t dare to talk about.

Essayist Eduardo Lourenço pointed to “Colonialism as our unthought” in the volume of essays written over decades, since the years of the dictatorship, in which he “criticized colonialist mythology” and also addressed the “living legacies” of this present past.

Portugal reveals itself “in all its complexity” through colonialism, wrote the essayist in the preface to the first edition of the work, published ten years ago, and now revived “revised and expanded”. Here he addresses “the supreme sin of racism”, confronts colonial reality with its mythology, explores its contradictions and exposes “this astonishing silence” of a country that, “for most of its history, was built from the outside, avoiding assuming […] what it was like inside.”

Visual artists such as Ângela Ferreira, Francisco Vidal and Zia Soares have addressed the violence of this silence in their works, in installations such as “Amnésia” (1997), “A tendency to forget” (2015) and “Fanun ruin” (2022).

Ângela Ferreira, born in Mozambique and living in Portugal since the 1990s, believes that Portugal will only be able to “decolonize minds, culture and society” when it can “overcome the difficulties” it has had in reflecting on its colonialist past , including the account of the Discoveries.

“The core of the problem is that we have not worked on the decolonization of our minds and our society”, he declared to the Lusa agency regarding a topic that in recent years has become increasingly topical, namely through the return of works of art and artefacts from nations colonized by countries such as France, the United Kingdom and Belgium.

In the same vein, the visual artist and performer Francisco Vidal, born in Lisbon, son of an Angolan father and a Cape Verdean mother, said he was convinced that the marks of the Portuguese colonial past “remain alive” in ideas, emotions and actions, and argued that “decolonizing contemporary Portuguese thought” continues to be important.

“We have to do this, after 50 years, because there are still brands alive and active”, assured the artist born in 1978, already after the Carnation Revolution, giving an example of the murder of actor Bruno Candé, in 2021 in broad daylight, by a former colonial war combatant, who was accused and convicted of a racial hate crime.

Angolan artist Zia Soares created the performance “Fanun ruin”, presented in 2022, in Lisbon, which had as its starting point a collection of 35 Timorese skulls, from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Coimbra.

“Fanun ruin” (“To call bones”, translated from Tetum into Portuguese) aimed, according to the artist, to prolong the reflection on the colonial past and its impact on the present, around issues of memory, identity and mourning.

The creator, who works in Portugal, Guinea-Bissau and São Tomé and Príncipe, openly asked a series of questions on stage: “What were the faces of the severed bodies like? Where are the remains of the bodies? When will the usurped bones return? Who waits for them? Who still remembers? Who wants to forget?”

The writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida, born in Angola, representative of a literature on race and identity, notably the novels “Esse hair” and “Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso”, also states the evidence that the signs of colonization are perpetuate in the present, and in such a way that he prefers to call them “open wounds”, seeing his work as that of “rewriting History, to the limited extent” in which it is possible.

“It would be good if what we wrote in the books could change the course of things, but I still feel confident that part of what is important to do is collective work in the sense of this rewriting, in a sense that is not only artistic but also civic”, he argues.

Regarding the idea that Portuguese colonialism was milder than others, the writer completely rejects it, stating that “there is no colonialism without violence” and that it is just “a myth, in which some insist on believing. “

Writer, activist and artist Gisela Casimiro, born in Guinea-Bissau, has a similar idea, for whom this topic “is not open to discussion” and, if there were a hierarchy of colonialism, “Portugal would be in the first or top places”, a fact widely documented.

“Unfortunately, a crystallized idea persists, too much misinformation and romanticization of colonialism. People refuse this colonial legacy or find justification for what they don’t have”, argues the author of “Estendais”, considering that the “colonial fantasy” and “colonial imaginary” they start from “one’s own superiority and the subjugation and infantilization of others”, which is not real, but “something that people learned in history books, which to this day have not been updated with the truth.”

Neither do mentalities. Tells Telma Tvon: “When I go to Angola I feel that the Portuguese have a presence with a very colonizing mentality. They have an attitude ‘I came to show you how it’s done’, ‘I’m in charge of this’. ‘We, the Portuguese, are the ones who let’s teach how to live and be, within your proposed land’.”

“I also see this here in Portugal, on a daily basis”, continues the rapper, with a degree in African Studies. “I live here, I can tell if I see something bad, the first thing they tell me is that I’m not from here. [Mas] I’m here because they paved the way. They are so happy for the Discoveries – in quotation marks -, this glory, but they forget that Diogo Cão and all these people were the ones who paved the way for me to be here.”

Researcher Nuno Crespo, director of the School of Arts at the Catholic University of Porto (UCP), argues that, 50 years after the 25th of April, “there is still a huge amount of work to be done, not only in approaching the colonization process and the of decolonization, but also of integration of other communities into our own current community.”

Nuno Crespo, who was speaking to Lusa at the opening of the cycle “It Wasn’t Cabral: Reviewing Silences and Omissions”, concluded this week, assures: “We have very little awareness of the violent way in which the Portuguese colonial project was developed.”