The wall and its bricklayers

A documentary recently premiered in Lisbon about the cemetery or burial ground for the bodies of black slaves in Lagos. It's called "Tales of Oblivion ," and its director, Dulce Fernandes, speaking to Expresso , rebuked us all with the following: "We still can't talk about Portugal's role in the transatlantic slave trade, the scale, duration, and consequences of which are as violent and profound as they are omitted from our collective memory." This is the well-known and false thesis of silence or taboo that, according to many on the left, exists in our society and against which, in their fantasy, the intrepid and enlightened woke have been called upon to combat. It is truly incredible that after eight and a half years of public debate on this topic, a period during which dozens of books and interviews were published, and hundreds of articles written in widely circulated newspapers and magazines, there are still people who have the nerve to claim that the Portuguese cannot talk about their role in the slave trade and that the country continues to sweep this matter under the rug of its collective memory. The director's statements are even more incredible when we realize that, rather than being hidden or shrouded in secrecy, the beginning of the slave trade to Portugal was reported in great detail, right at the time, by Gomes Eanes de Zurara in the Crónica de Guiné (Cronic of Guinea ).

But it's not just Dulce Fernandes's statements that are surprising in the Expresso article. Indeed, another woman, Vicky M. Oelze, from the University of California, who is studying the remains of Africans buried at that site in Lagos, considered that "the Portuguese slave trade was massive and far greater in number than the human trafficking in which any other nation engaged." In other words, we are faced with a new manifestation of the thesis of the gigantic scale of Portuguese evil, a thesis that aims to accentuate our country's culpability and which many North American institutions and researchers—I believe that the director Dulce Fernandes also lives or has lived in the United States—have insisted on for years, despite it being a false or grotesquely exaggerated thesis. Portugal was, in fact, politically responsible for the transport of 4.5 million African slaves to the Americas. It was, therefore, the largest transporter across the Atlantic. But the British, who began this trade after the Portuguese, transported 3.4 million black slaves, which isn't such a huge difference. More importantly, however, other political entities and nations trafficked slaves in equivalent or greater numbers. The Roman Empire's slave trade involved at least 100 million people. Therefore, to claim, as the University of California researcher does, that the Portuguese slave trade was "far larger in number than the human trafficking in which any other nation engaged" is either bad faith or a distraction.

As if these errors weren't enough, Christiana Martins, the Expresso journalist who wrote the article, stated that "the first enslaved Africans to arrive on the European continent disembarked in Lagos in 1444." This error, similar to that made by Lídia Jorge in her June 10th speech, aims to place Portugal in the unfortunate role of a pioneer—or, if you prefer, a European pioneer—in the enslavement of Africans. But this is not true. Let's set aside the date error—the first African slaves arrived in Portugal in 1441—and focus on Europe's relationship with Black slavery to emphasize that, although they were a relative rarity, Black slaves already existed in Rome and other cities in the European part of the Roman Empire. It's also important to remember that the Muslim peoples (Arabs and Berbers) who, in the 8th century, conquered much of the Iberian Peninsula and other regions of Europe, such as the islands of Crete and Sicily, and held these possessions for centuries, possessed some black slaves, who arrived via the Sahara Desert and North Africa. In other words, it wasn't the Portuguese who brought the first African slaves to Europe. In fact, some of them arrived in Europe long before the Portuguese arrived in Africa. What the Portuguese did, however, was open a new channel that, bypassing the vast desert mass by sea, allowed them to reach regions of Africa little or not at all touched by the slave trade that Muslim traders had long engaged in there.

Having arrived here, and corrected the errors, what is important to emphasize is that these three examples place us once again before a current of opinion that consciously or unconsciously tends, through error, exaggeration, or distortion, to accentuate the culpability of the Portuguese in the history of slavery. According to this current of opinion, Portugal was, in the past, the most sinful of all sinners, and, in the present, guilty for supposedly wanting to hide or silence this sin. This current of opinion has erected a kind of defensive wall and obstinately repeats the same discourse and ignores historical knowledge. No matter how much they explain and correct their errors, historical knowledge does not penetrate because the wall, being essentially made of ideology and emotion, rejects it. The problem, however, is not limited to the rejection or the wall. There is, upstream of them, a more important issue that has to do with how this ideology is produced and reproduced. In other words, it is a Sisyphean task to demolish the wall, or to open holes in it, because there is a battalion of bricklayers permanently committed to repairing it and keeping it standing.

Many of these stonemasons are teachers, and this brings us to the teaching of history—considered here comprehensively, from elementary school to university—and to the way in which accuracy has ceased to be a priority for many of those tasked with teaching. These people have agreed to forgo historical rigor in favor of false or fanciful narratives, but nonetheless capable of serving so-called good causes and fulfilling the political objective of giving space and prominence to those who, in the past, were defeated, conquered, exploited, and enslaved. This is why, in the United Kingdom, history teachers are advised to tell their students that the Vikings were not all white and that it was Black people who built Stonehenge.

Here in Portugal, there are also those who defend this hammering of history, or those who don't oppose it. I'll give you an example that happened to me. About a month ago, I presented Haiti , my latest historical novel, and one of the people who kindly attended its launch was a fellow left-wing historian who has taught at a university in Lisbon for many years. During the presentation, I explained that my novel was also part of a fight for historical truth, a fight I've been waging for a long time and which seems increasingly necessary to me, given the two British aberrations I mentioned above and many others of the same nature. In her speech after I spoke, my colleague stated, to the astonishment of those who heard her, that teaching these lies to students wasn't that important or serious. In other words—and these are my own words and interpretations—she implied that historical truth could be distorted a little, as long as it was for a noble cause.

This is an absolute perversion, since history deals precisely with documented truth—that is, it is knowledge through documents, not theories, ideologies, or political objectives. History is not a lever for changing the world, nor is it something we can paint in whatever politically pleasing or convenient color we desire. But I will return to this important issue of history teaching in my next article, in which I will focus on a minor incident between an African man and MP André Ventura during a pre-election campaign event in Cacém.