Imani Tafari-Ama

There were no drum rolls or blaring bells to mark Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s pronouncement late in the day on Tuesday, April 23, that his country must apologise and assume its outstanding responsibility for colonial crimes committed against indigenous and African peoples. Portugal colonised Brazil, Mozambique, East Timor, the Cape Verde Islands, and Angola, and trafficked and enslaved over six million people. Although the notorious savagery of colonialism spanned the 15th to the nineteenth centuries, it remains the proverbial skeleton in the colonisers’ closets. The continued presence of Euro-American colonies in the Caribbean and elsewhere begs the question that colonialism continues to endanger the human rights capabilities of those unfortunate to be victims of this entrenched architecture of white supremacy. The European Union must be hopping mad that the Portuguese president decided to make this speech at the annual celebration of Portugal’s 1974 Revolution that transformed the country from a dictatorship to a democracy. This public declaration coincided with the maiden visit of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to Portugal. Lula, a former president (2003-10) and president of the G20, has long been a human rights advocate, and recently confronted Israel for the prevailing genocide in...