Why Black Americans Searching for Their Roots Should Look to Angola

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Angola, the U.S. and a Slavery Connection Few Talk About

When President Biden visits the country this week, he is expected to highlight a largely overlooked bond between Angola and the United States that was born out of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

www.nytimes.com

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

Angola, the U.S. and a Slavery Connection Few Talk About​

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Dec. 1, 2024

A view of the Cuanza River in Massangano, Angola. Enslaved Angolans were transported by boat along the Cuanza River.Joao Silva/The New York Times

Why Black Americans Searching for Their Roots Should Look to Angola​

When President Biden visits the country this week, he is expected to highlight a largely overlooked bond between Angola and the United States that was born out of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
A view of the Cuanza River in Massangano, Angola. Enslaved Angolans were transported by boat along the Cuanza River.Joao Silva/The New York Times
They stood on a concrete platform over a cobblestone plaza as slave traders cast their final judgment, gazing westward at a bend in the mighty Cuanza River, where unknown horrors lay ahead.
For the ancestors of millions of African Americans, this slave market in Massangano, a village in Angola, was likely the place where they were sold into bondage. It was a point of no return.
Historians believe that people from the southern African nation of Angola accounted for one of the largest numbers of enslaved Africans shipped to the United States, including the first to arrive at Point Comfort, Va., in 1619.
That history has largely gone unnoticed in Angola and the United States, where many Black Americans often make pilgrimages to Ghana and Senegal in West Africa to trace their ancestors’ treacherous journeys but not to Angola.
Angola is trying to change that.
The country’s ministry of tourism is developing a global campaign to highlight the significance of Massangano. The ministry is also partnering with the United Nations Development Program and the American Chamber of Commerce in Angola to launch a crowdfunding campaign to rehabilitate the village and its historical sites. Angola’s president, João Lourenço, has asked his government to repair the lone dirt road to Massangano that becomes impassable with heavy rain.

Fort Nossa Senhora da Vitória in Massangano. By some estimates, more enslaved Africans in the United States came from Angola than any other nation on the continent.Joao Silva/The New York Times

 

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A resident waited for a boat to cross the Lucala River, a tributary of the Cuanza.Joao Silva/The New York Times
The government has applied for the Cuanza River corridor to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. “This is the place where African Americans came from,” said Márcio de Jesus Lopes Daniel, Angola’s tourism minister. “Come and see where your roots are.”
There are also hopes that this history will draw the United States and Angola closer together diplomatically.
When President Biden travels to Angola this week, he is scheduled to visit the National Slavery Museum near the capital, Luanda, to highlight the bond between the two nations that was born out of slavery. A vast majority of African Americans have Angolan ancestry, said Stephen Lubkemann, an anthropology professor at George Washington University. In the battle for influence in mineral- and oil-rich Angola, that gives the United States an ability to draw historical and cultural ties to the country in ways that China, its rival, cannot.
Mr. Biden’s delegation is expected to include Wanda Tucker, whom Angolan government officials glowingly refer to as one of their own. She traced her ancestors to the first ship that docked at Point Comfort and has visited the country several times.
When he visited Angola last year, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the first African American to hold the position, drew a blunt connection between himself and the Angolans he was addressing. “Four centuries ago, slavers from far away put the men and women and children of this country into shackles — people who looked just like you and me,” he said.
About a quarter of all enslaved Africans confirmed to have arrived in the United States came from a region that included Angola, according to SlaveVoyages, a digital database. That is more than anywhere else in Africa.

 

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Because Massangano sits at the intersection of Angola’s largest river, the Cuanza, and a major tributary, it was the country’s main transit point for trafficking captives to the coast, scholars said. Today, Massangano is a quiet village of a couple of hundred residents.
Behind a wall made of mud blocks on the edge of the village is a large wooden deck covered by a thatched roof and surrounded by empty concrete bungalows — a restaurant and lodge that an Angolan businessman hopes to open by January.

The National Museum of Slavery in Luanda, the capital.Joao Silva/The New York Times

A few hundred people live around the ruins of Massangano.Joao Silva/The New York Times
Most residents live at the bottom of a hill in homes made of mud and logs. Some blast music at night, others gather beneath trees and play loto, a game similar to bingo.
At the top of the hill, European Renaissance-style stone buildings sit mostly in ruins. Each one features a hand-painted sign identifying its purpose: the old town hall, the fort of Massangano. The slave market, at the village’s highest point, is marked by a concrete cross standing about two stories tall, at the spot where enslaved people in shackles would have stood before being sold.
“They cry. Always cry,” Afonso Vita, a historian who works for Angola’s tourism ministry, said of African American visitors.
The effort to elevate Angola’s history in the slave trade has prompted new awareness and conversation nationally, local historians said. The legacy of the slave trade is rarely discussed in Angola, in part because its consequences are not as easily felt as in the United States, where many African Americans are aware of lingering racial disparities, said Vladimiro Fortuna, the director of the National Slavery Museum in Luanda.

 

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Mr. Fortuna said that by next year he hopes to have a plan in place to construct a new, larger slavery museum. Visitors to Luanda are increasingly touring sites related to the slave trade. That includes the Street of Flowers, where slave traders once laid flowers to cover the blood of brutalized enslaved people.
Mr. Vita, the historian, said that when he gave lectures about the atrocities endured by the enslaved, Angolans became visibly angry. “The time is right,” he said, “for us to start a revolution to reclaim our history.”

Vladimiro Fortuna, the director of the National Slavery Museum. He said he hoped to build a new, larger slavery museum in the future.Joao Silva/The New York Times

A tour guide placed his hand on a wall along the Street of Flowers, where slave traders would lay flowers to cover the blood of enslaved Angolans.Joao Silva/The New York Times
Gilberto Neto contributed reporting from Massangano, and Zolan Kanno-Youngsfrom Washington.
John Eligon is the Johannesburg bureau chief for The Times, covering a wide range of events and trends that influence and shape the lives of ordinary people across southern Africa. More about John Eligon

 

[Warren Peace]

they should probably just do their genealogy actually

 

[Brolic]

 

[Black Haven]

That’s why I don’t understand why people say afram are just west African. We have ancestors from multiple parts of Africa even as far as Madagascar. Just because west Africa is predominantly in our dna that doesn’t discount the other portions of our ancestry from the continent.

 

[YaThreadFloppedB!]

I have ancestry from Angola

my grandma used say we were from there. did an ancestry kit and it confirmed we have significant ancestry from that region

 

[☑︎#VoteDemocrat]

That’s why I don’t understand why people say afram are just west African. We have ancestors from multiple parts of Africa even as far as Madagascar. Just because west Africa is predominantly in our dna that doesn’t discount the other portions of our ancestry from the continent.

A lot of it is marketing from African countries too looking to leverage deals or exploit cultural ties, that obviously exist, but put them at the front of the line for other economic opportunities.

For example, this push is linked with Angolas tourism board.

 

[Voice of Reason]

A lot of it is marketing from African countries too looking to leverage deals or exploit cultural ties, that obviously exist, but put them at the front of the line for other economic opportunities.

For example, this push is linked with Angolas tourism board.

disgusting

 

[Neuromancer]

Say family where your people originate from?

 

[Uchiha God]

since people are speaking of origins, this a good thread to repost this:

most people in places like the USA, and even Brazil, are of Angolan and Congolese descent. the West Central region of Africa got hit the hardest and accounts for the majority of slaves in North America, followed by the Senegambia region. Its a similar story for S. America.

Hell, "Angola" (Louisiana state pen) is called "Angola" because majority of the slaves that worked the fields there were brought from Angola.

In Brazil, one of their national symbols, the martial art Capoeira, is actually something Angolan slaves brought over with them and masked it under the guise of "dancing", to this day, most Capoeira masters will tell you this, the martial art actually has two branches, the more popular and practiced one, which you see in movies, festivals etc, and a more deadly/aggressive version which is used with the intent to kill, that is often referred to as the "Angolan branch", which is rarely taught or practiced.

 

[Yagirlcheatinonus]