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A small museum housed in a centuries-old white house on a hill outside Luanda documents one of the greatest horrors in human history. Luanda, the capital of Angola, was the center of the Atlantic slave trade. Today, the National Slavery Museum is working to become a place of return for descendants of slaves. Not only to learn history, but also to delve into archives that may help trace their ancestry.
The Museu Nacional da Escravatura (National Slavery Museum) is located on the grounds of the former residence of Álvaro de Carvalho Matoso, a Portuguese man who is said to have enslaved so many people that he received awards for his work.
From the 1400s to 1867, an estimated 12.5 million people were enslaved across Africa and transported across the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers believe that almost half (about 45%) came from areas around modern-day Angola.
At least 1.6 million people were forcibly shipped from Luanda, mainly to Brazil. However, the first slaves to arrive in Britain’s American colonies in 1619 were also from Angola. Registers reproduced on the walls of the museum show the people who were sent as slaves to what would become the southern states, as well as New York and Rhode Island.
Several slave museums dot the coast of Africa, from Senegal to Ghana to South Africa to Tanzania. Like most other museums, the Luanda Museum was once a prison for enslaved Africans, a point of no return, perched on a cliff overlooking the ocean and designed around impressive geography to prevent any chance of escape.
Today, the sea side of the museum is as desolate as it was centuries ago. The other side is no longer a colonial mansion, but a large paved parking lot for tour buses, with a craft market and a helipad for VIP visitors.
But what is particularly disturbing about the Luanda Museum is that part of it is housed in a former Catholic chapel in De Carvalho’s former mansion. Relics from the period are on display, especially the wooden cross and baptismal font. The font was a tool used by Portuguese colonists to strip enslaved Angolans of their identity by forcibly baptizing them before boarding ships across the Atlantic.
“They were baptized here in the chapel,” said Marlene Ananias Rodríguez Pedro, the museum’s head of scientific research. “It was during baptism that enslaved people had their names changed. Their real names were taken away and they were given names of Portuguese origin.”
“Most of them took their surname ‘Angola’ to indicate their enslaved origins,” she says. “The Portuguese did not want them to retain their identity or personal names.”
She added that before being forced onto the ship, the Portuguese tried to twist Bible verses to justify slavery and persuade Angolans to accept it.
A room next to the chapel displays brutal methods of forcibly enslaving people, including guns, shackles, and chains. A painting from the time shows a slave trader hitting an Angolan on the palm of his hand with a nail-tipped paddle. Other images show a wealthy white woman with a metal collar around her neck feeding scraps of food to black children under a table like dogs. Adult Angolans, perhaps their parents, serve whites food on a silver platter.
If beatings and religion were not enough, alcohol became another means of forcing Angolans into submission. Two metal stills sit on a balcony overlooking the sea.
“It was also the idea of the colonizers to make the enslaved people drink alcohol,” Pedro said. It was thought that keeping them intoxicated would make them easier to control and pack them shoulder to shoulder into a ship’s cargo hold.
This museum is unique in that it does not only display Angolans as victims. The exhibits also document the long and fierce resistance to both slavery and colonialism. Weapons used by the Angolans are lined up in one room, showing how they used poisoned arrows and traded local produce for guns to fight back.
“They fought. And it was hard. African independence was not handed over on a silver platter. There was resistance,” Pedro said.
That spirit of resistance lasted for centuries through the slave trade and into the colonial era, followed by the Angolan War of Independence against Portugal that lasted from 1961 to 1974. Angola finally gained independence in November 1975.
Pedro and museum director José Antonio Fazenda are part of the story that they hope visitors will take away from. And they are working with researchers in the United States and Brazil to make Angola’s archival records accessible to anyone who wants to find them.
In a modest building at the foot of the museum’s hill, Fazenda and Pedro are working with the government to create a digital version of Luanda’s archives.
“We want to create a functional library in this room,” Fazenda said. “We are currently working with a group of experts to prepare a campaign to collect materials for this library. This is our dream. We want to give people who want to come here and learn more a place to do it.”
Although the African names of the enslaved people are not recorded, the documents do state where they were taken and what ships they were on. With enough research, we may have clues as to where they were captured. Hidden between the lines is a richer story about how Angolans fought back.
These records are currently housed in the National Archives in central Luanda and can only be accessed with special permission under less-than-ideal conditions.
When Pedro last visited there, “she came home with red eyes and a cold due to the freezing conditions,” Fazenda said.
“The university and the minister’s financial team don’t have enough funds to pay the necessary costs and do everything. The department needs a budget that exceeds what the museum has,” he said.
So they are collaborating with American and Brazilian researchers to pool talent and resources, and hope to raise money from private donors to support their research.
“We want to preserve this collection for future generations,” Pedro said.
