Angola’s Nationwide Museum of Slavery Goals To Unite The Diaspora

With the Nationwide Museum of Slavery, Angola is positioning itself as a vacation spot for descendants of enslaved individuals who need to reconnect with their roots.

Situated on the outskirts of Luanda in a former chapel on the property of Álvaro de Carvalho Matoso—a Portuguese colonizer who enslaved so many individuals he reportedly acquired a commendation—the Museu Nacional da Escravatura preserves the legacy of Angola’s enslaved inhabitants, CNN stories.

The museum shows registers documenting the pressured transport of individuals not solely to what would turn out to be the Southern United States but additionally to New York, Rhode Island, and different areas. It additionally homes relics from that period, together with a wood crucifix and a baptismal font utilized by Portuguese colonizers to erase the identities of enslaved Angolans by way of pressured baptism earlier than sending them throughout the Atlantic.

“They have been baptized right here, within the chapel,” stated Marlene Ananias Rodrigues Pedro, head of the museum’s division of scientific analysis. “It was throughout baptism that enslaved folks had their names modified. Their precise names have been taken away, they usually got names of Portuguese origin.

“Most of them took ‘Angola’ as their surname to designate the origin of the enslaved folks,” she added. “The Portuguese didn’t need them to maintain their identification, to maintain their private title.”

No less than 1.6 million Angolans have been forcibly shipped from Luanda, largely to Brazil. The primary enslaved folks in Britain’s American colonies in 1619 additionally got here from Angola. The museum depicts the brutal strategies used to pressure folks into slavery: weapons, chains, manacles, and drawings exhibiting beatings with spiked paddles.

Some pictures depict rich white colonists feeding Black kids scraps whereas adults served them from silver platters. Alcohol was additionally used to regulate captives, with metallic stills on show exhibiting how enslaved folks have been stored drunk to make them simpler to pack into ships.

“It was additionally the colonizer’s thought to make the enslaved folks drink,” Pedro stated.

The museum doesn’t solely depict Angolans as victims. Displays additionally spotlight their fierce resistance to slavery and colonialism, with a room displaying weapons like poison arrows and exhibiting how locals traded items for weapons to combat again.

”They fought. And laborious. Independence in Africa was not handed over on a silver platter. There was resistance,” Pedro stated.

That spirit of resistance continued from the slave commerce to the Angolan Warfare of Independence (1961–1974), culminating in independence in November 1975. Museum director José António Fazenda and Pedro intention to share this historical past with guests and are working with U.S. and Brazilian researchers to make Angola’s archives extensively accessible, together with a digitized model of the Luanda information.

“We need to create a purposeful library on this room,” Fazenda stated. “We’re at present working with a bunch of execs to organize a marketing campaign to gather supplies for this library. That is our dream. We would like people who find themselves right here and need to be taught extra to have a spot the place they will.”

RELATED CONTENT: Caribbean Reparations Leaders Launch First-Ever UK Mission To Press Historic Claims