It went beyond a simple walking tour and knowing each other and sharing our own experiences has been a blessing for all of us.

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

The document was written by the British Labour MEP Claude Moraes and was inspired by the racist behavior allegedly experienced by Italian socialist MEP Cécile Kyenge, who served as Italy’s first black government minister, according to The Guardian. The resolution was approved with 535 in favor, and 80 against with 44 abstentions.

The resolution urges member states of the EU to form and execute anti-racism strategies within their home nations, specifically focusing on “the fields of education, housing, health, criminal justice, political participation and migration,” according to the European Parliament website. It also seeks to address “racial profiling in criminal law and counter-terrorism.”

The resolution also clearly endorses action regarding reparations made to Afro-Europeans for “crimes against humanity during European colonialism.

The European Parliament’s press release about the resolution reads, “Additionally, people of African descent should be taken into account more in current funding programmes and in the next multiannual financial framework (2021-2027).”

The resolution encourages EU institutions and member states to address and rectify past injustices and crimes against humanity, perpetrated in the name of European colonialism. These historic crimes still have present day negative consequences for people of African descent, MEPs claim.

MEPs suggest carrying out reparations, such as apologising publicly and return stolen artefacts to their countries of origin.”

The European Parliament also calls for nations to declassify their colonial archives and to provide a “comprehensive perspective on colonialism and slavery” in academic curricula.

Between 1814 and 1863, De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB) and its former directors were involved in slavery. This emerges from by independent scholarly study conducted by Leiden University, which was published today. We deeply regret these findings. To us, the study marks the start of a process of reflection and dialogue.

Understanding our links to slavery

As DNB’s Executive Board, we realised some time ago that we needed to gain a more objective understanding of DNB’s links to slavery. This was triggered by the growing historical awareness about slavery and the ongoing fight against racism in society,  combined with a desire from within our own organisation to gain a better insight into this matter. We do not wish to ignore this part of our own history, which is linked to the Netherlands’ history of slavery. This is why we decided to commission an independent historical study, which was conducted by Leiden University’s Karwan Fatah-Black, Lauren Lauret and Joris van den Tol.

DNB was involved in slavery in three ways

The study shows that DNB was involved in three ways.

1. Part of DNB’s start-up capital came from business owners with direct interests in plantation slavery in the Atlantic region, for example in Suriname. Of the 16 initial major capital providers, 11 have now been linked to slavery.
2. As an institution, DNB was indirectly involved in Dutch colonial slavery and slavery in non-Dutch areas, such as British Guiana. Having no branches in the colonies, it did not play a role in the day-to-day slavery-related financial transactions there. However, DNB did support the Ministry of Colonies in its day-to-day payment transfers and provided services to trading houses involved in slavery.
3. To a greater extent than their contemporaries, several prominent DNB officials were personally involved in colonial slavery. Several of them had direct links with slavery-related businesses and some were also involved in the management of plantations. A number of prominent DNB officials organised themselves to represent the interests of slave owners in the political arena. Only one or two were involved in organisations working to abolish slavery.

Starting a process of reflection and dialogue

Our first step is to disclose and acknowledge our links to slavery. We believe it is important that everyone in the Netherlands and everyone in the Caribbean and Suriname has access to the study through our website. The facts that emerged from the study and the deeply racist beliefs that underlie them affect us deeply. DNB as it is in 2022 does not wish to disregard its past. The suffering of the enslaved people in the past is indescribable. DNB’s Executive Board deeply regrets this. While we cannot undo the suffering that has been caused, we can, as DNB, try to contribute to healing by making this history visible, and by acknowledging the facts and the suffering they have caused.

Secondly, we will soon be talking to our employees and representatives of civil society organisations, in particular with those who are especially affected by this history and the impact it has to this day. To this end, an external focus group will be set up, to be headed by Freek Ossel, former alderman of Amsterdam, former mayor of two municipalities including Beverwijk, and chairperson of the Steering Group for the National Transatlantic Museum of Slavery.

Our follow-up from the dialogue

We wish to find an appropriate manner to make a gesture of lasting value to those affected and Dutch society at large. In doing so, we choose to adopt a careful approach, and that takes time. The dialogue will produce follow-up actions, which we will share with you later this year.

Our historical links to slavery are a constant reminder that we must never cease to contribute to a society in which every person counts and in which no one is excluded.

February 3, in the year 1953, the “Batepá massacre” took place in São Tomé and Príncipe, an episode of terror and colonial violence that will result in the death of hundreds of São Toméans, following protests and the refusal of forced labor in the fields.

The events were rooted in the working conditions of the archipelago, in the hierarchy and in the socioeconomic and racial divides of São Toméan society. The productive regime in São Tomé and Príncipe was based on contracted and forced labor, as a rule ensured by a labor force compelled by Angolans, Mozambicans and Cape Verdeans. The natives of São Tomé, on the other hand, the “forros”, part of the local political and economic elite, not covered by the Indigenato Statute, refused wage and forced labor. However, complaints of raids and kidnappings of natives for forced labor, whether in public works or in the fields, were recurrent.

In view of the shortage of labor, the Government of São Tomé, although denying it, intended to compel the “liners” to work under contract in the cocoa and coffee fields, subjecting this population to the status of the indigenous people and to the forced labor regime. , which leads to the protests that will provoke the slaughter perpetrated by the colonial power.

On the night of February 2nd to 3rd, in the village of Trindade, the “forros” pull a Government Official Note from the walls of the village, denying the intention of subjecting the São Toméan natives to the work contracted in the fields. The next day the repression of protests begins, with record of confrontations with Portuguese authorities who respond with firearms. The death of a white ensign will ignite repression. The reports reveal heinous episodes of terror and persecution of the native population.

Sãotomean tortured

The “cleaning operation”, as was mentioned by the Portuguese authorities, continued in the following days, extending from the town of Batepá and the village of Trindade to other parts of the island.

In a maelstrom of violence, raids, murders, arrests, violations, torture (from beatings to electric shocks), burning houses, purges in the civil service, deportations and the sending to forced labor camps were so violent that it caused death of several natives whose bodies were thrown into the sea by order of Governor Carlos Gorgulho, the person responsible for the “Batepá massacre” or “Guerra da Trindade”, which included the participation of the Indigenous Police Corps, the white population and some contract workers, aggravated by the relative privilege of “linings”.

The violence was justified by a somewhat credible communist and separatist revolt with international ramifications that even predicted the assassination of the Governor himself.

The regime tried to silence the massacre, but opposition lawyer Manuel João da Palma Carlos took up the case and defended the prisoners in Batepá, securing the release of many of them.

Carlos Gorgulho, pressured by Salazar, asks for his resignation from office and in February 1954 he will receive praise for the way he contained the revolt and, for other reasons, the Grand Cross of the Military Order of Avis in 1956.

Almost 70 years have passed since the “Batepá Massacre”, there is no certainty as to the number of deaths. The date is marked as the symbolic and founding moment of São Toméan nationalism and, being before the beginning of the colonial war (1961), it is very representative of the violent character of Portuguese colonialism.

Some 130 Cape Verdeans involved in the clashes have been taken to the Santa Margarida airbase, near Abrantes, north of here, it was announced tonight. Representatives of the Cape Verde Embassy will go there tomorrow to decide what is to be done with them.

The violence occurred among workers at the wolfram—tungsten—mines of Panasqueira, in the Estrela Mountains, 18 miles west of Fundāo in central Portugal. The mines are owned by the Beralt Tin and Wolfram Company, which has British, American, South African and Portuguese capital.

“The problem was basically racial,” a company source said in a telephone interview today. “The Cape Verdeans and the Portuguese really despise each other, although there have been some mixed marriages here.”

Racial tensions have been building up in Portugal for 18 months with the influx of refugees from Lisbon’s former African colonies.

The Cape Verdeans, who are mostly racially mixed, often resented Portuguese workers, who generally had less education but better jobs.

There have always been minor troubles at the mines between the two groups. according to company sources.

The British general manager of the mines, Martin Watts, issued a brief account today of the fighting, which began at 1 A.M. According to his casualty list. there were two black Cape Verdeans dead, seven blacks and one white seriously injured, and seven whites and one black with minor injuries.

Eyewitnesses reported that the trouble began when a group of Cape Verdeans with knives invaded the single men’s quarters and began fighting the Portuguese workers. The Portuguese were held prisoner until dawn. Yesterday afternoon, the Portuguese retaliated with pitchforks, poles, axes and hunting rifles.

Josephine Baker was a dancer and singer who became wildly popular in France during the 1920s. She also devoted much of her life to fighting racism.

Who was Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker spent her youth in poverty before learning to dance and finding success on Broadway. In the 1920s she moved to France and soon became one of Europe’s most popular and highest-paid performers. She worked for the French Resistance during World War II, and during the 1950s and ’60s devoted herself to fighting segregation and racism in the United States. After beginning her comeback to the stage in 1973, Baker died of a cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1975, and was buried with military honors.

Early Life

Baker was born Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, 1906, in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother, Carrie McDonald, was a washerwoman who had given up her dreams of becoming a music-hall dancer. Her father, Eddie Carson, was a vaudeville drummer. He abandoned Carrie and Josephine shortly after her birth. Carrie remarried soon thereafter and would have several more children in the coming years.

To help support her growing family, at age eight Josephine cleaned houses and babysat for wealthy white families, often being poorly treated. She briefly returned to school two years later before running away from home at age 13 and finding work as a waitress at a club. While working there, she married a man named Willie Wells, from whom she divorced only weeks later.

DANCING IN PARIS

It was also around this time that Josephine first took up dancing, honing her skills both in clubs and in street performances, and by 1919 she was touring the United States with the Jones Family Band and the Dixie Steppers performing comedic skits. In 1921, Josephine married a man named Willie Baker, whose name she would keep for the rest of her life despite their divorce years later. In 1923, Baker landed a role in the musical Shuffle Along as a member of the chorus, and the comic touch that she brought to the part made her popular with audiences. Looking to parlay these early successes, Baker moved to New York City and was soon performing in Chocolate Dandies and, along with Ethel Waters, in the floor show of the Plantation Club, where again she quickly became a crowd favorite.

In 1925, at the peak of France’s obsession with American jazz and all things exotic, Baker traveled to Paris to perform in La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. She made an immediate impression on French audiences when, with dance partner Joe Alex, she performed the Danse Sauvage, in which she wore only a feather skirt.

Baker and the Banana Skirt

However, it was the following year, at the Folies Bergère music hall, one of the most popular of the era, that Baker’s career would reach a major turning point. In a performance called La Folie du Jour, Baker danced wearing little more than a skirt made of 16 bananas. The show was wildly popular with Parisian audiences and Baker was soon among the most popular and highest-paid performers in Europe, having the admiration of cultural figures like Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and E. E. Cummings and earning herself nicknames like “Black Venus” and “Black Pearl.” She also received more than 1,000 marriage proposals.

Capitalizing on this success, Baker sang professionally for the first time in 1930, and several years later landed film roles as a singer in Zou-Zou and Princesse Tam-Tam. The money she earned from her performances soon allowed her to purchase an estate in Castelnaud-Fayrac, in the southwest of France. She named the estate Les Milandes and soon paid to move her family there from St. Louis.

Racism and the French Resistance

In 1936, riding the wave of popularity she was enjoying in France, Baker returned to the United States to perform in the Ziegfeld Follies, hoping to establish herself as a performer in her home country as well. However, she was met with a generally hostile, racist reaction and quickly returned to France, crestfallen at her mistreatment. Upon her return, Baker married French industrialist Jean Lion and obtained citizenship from the country that had embraced her as one of its own.

When World War II erupted later that year, Baker worked for the Red Cross during the occupation of France. As a member of the Free French forces, she also entertained troops in both Africa and the Middle East. Perhaps most importantly, however, Baker did work for the French Resistance, at times smuggling messages hidden in her sheet music and even in her underwear. For these efforts, at the war’s end, Baker was awarded both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honour with the rosette of the Resistance, two of France’s highest military honors.

Children

Following the war, Baker spent most of her time at Les Milandes with her family. In 1947, she married French orchestra leader Jo Bouillon, and beginning in 1950 began to adopt babies from around the world. She adopted 12 children in all, creating what she referred to as her “rainbow tribe” and her “experiment in brotherhood.” She often invited people to the estate to see these children, to demonstrate that people of different races could in fact live together harmoniously.

Return to the U.S., Civil Rights Advocate

During the 1950s, Baker frequently returned to the United States to lend her support to the Civil Rights Movement, participating in demonstrations and boycotting segregated clubs and concert venues. In 1963, Baker participated, alongside Martin Luther King Jr., in the March on Washington, and was among the many notable speakers that day. In honor of her efforts, the NAACP eventually named May 20th “Josephine Baker Day.”

After decades of rejection by her countrymen and a lifetime spent dealing with racism, in 1973, Baker performed at Carnegie Hall in New York and was greeted with a standing ovation. She was so moved by her reception that she wept openly before her audience. The show was a huge success and marked Baker’s comeback to the stage.

Death

In April 1975, Baker performed at the Bobino Theater in Paris, in the first of a series of performances celebrating the 50th anniversary of her Paris debut. Numerous celebrities were in attendance, including Sophia Loren and Princess Grace of Monaco, who had been a dear friend to Baker for years. Just days later, on April 12, 1975, Baker died in her sleep of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was 68.

On the day of her funeral, more than 20,000 people lined the streets of Paris to witness the procession, and the French government honored her with a 21-gun salute, making Baker the first American woman in history to receive French military honors.

First black woman in the French Pantheon

Joséphine Baker, will enter the Pantheon. The French President, Emmanuel Macron, has decided to pantheonize this artist, activist for freedom and equality, learned, Saturday August 21, franceinfo, confirming information from Parisian. Joséphine Baker will thus become the first black woman to rest in this republican temple, installed in the 5th arrondissement of Paris.

The ceremony will take place on November 30.

The file in favor of the interpreter of the famous song “I have two loves” had been examined for the first time at the end of June by the Elysee, still according to Le Parisien / Today in France. A petition in favor of the pantheonization of the artist, launched two years ago by Laurent Kupferman, had gathered 38,000 signatures.

In mid-20th century Canada, Viola Desmond brought nationwide attention to the African Nova Scotian community’s struggle for equal rights. An African-Canadian businesswoman, she confronted the racism that Black Nova Scotians routinely faced by refusing to sit in a segregated space in a public theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia in 1946. After her arrest and conviction on spurious charges that concealed racial discrimination behind the arrest, Desmond fought the charges with the help of the Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NSAACP). Now a symbol of the struggle for equal rights, Viola Desmond’s defiance in the face of injustice became a rallying cry for Black Nova Scotians and Canadians determined to end racial discrimination.

Viola Desmond was born in 1914, the daughter of a middle-class mixed-race family in Halifax. When Desmond graduated from high school she worked as a teacher in Black schools, one of very few employment avenues open to her. Black women in Nova Scotia were restricted from going to beauty salons and studying beauty culture (hair-styling, cosmetics, or wig making), so Desmond attended schools in Montréal and New York. When she obtained her diplomas she opened a salon and eventually a beauty school beside her husband Jack Desmond’s barbershop in Halifax. As an entrepreneur, she achieved financial independence and became a role model to African-Canadian women through the success of her enterprises, which included skin and hair care products for Black women that had previously been unavailable to Nova Scotians.

In November of 1946, Viola Desmond was travelling on business from Halifax to Sydney, Nova Scotia, when car trouble obliged her to stop overnight in New Glasgow. She attended a local movie theatre where she encountered segregated seating rules. When told to move to another seat, she refused to comply. She was forcibly removed from the theatre, arrested, held in jail overnight, and then charged, tried, and convicted with tax evasion. That charge, based on the one cent difference in tax between floor and balcony seats, was the only legal infraction that could be invoked to justify placing her in jail.

The physical injury, humiliation, and injustice that Desmond suffered outraged the Nova Scotian Black community. The newly established NSAACP took her case on and engaged a lawyer to contest her conviction. Although they did not succeed in overturning her conviction, the case became a rallying point for Black Nova Scotians seeking to end discrimination in their province. Viola Desmond’s act of defiance has since become iconic for Canadians, representing a turning point in the struggle for rights in Canada.