this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
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Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa had called for Lisbon to find ways to compensate its former colonies, including canceling debt. The government says it has not initiated any process to that effect.

Lisbon is not planning to pay reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism, Portugal's government said on Saturday.

The statement comes in response to remarks by President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who said Portugal could find ways to compensate its former colonies.

Portugal said in a statement that it seeks to "deepen mutual relations, respect for historical truth and increasingly intense and close cooperation, based on reconciliation of brotherly peoples."

It stressed that it had not launched any "process or program of specific actions" for paying reparations.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (20 children)

For a country that both established the transatlantic slave trade and was one of the last to continue reaping its profits – it was still using de-facto slave labour in its colonies in the 1960s – Portugal has been slow to reckon with its past.

The national school curriculum, museums and tourism infrastructure all amount to a grandiose rendering of the country’s 15th to 17th-century “discoveries” in Africa, Asia and the Americas, and a selective recollection of its 20th-century colonial exploits in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé & Principe, Goa, Macau and East Timor.

There are monuments and statues up and down the country dedicated to navigators, missionary priests responsible for the conversion of Africans and Indigenous people to Catholicism, or soldiers who fought against African independence in the colonial wars. Meanwhile, it is often said that “Portugal is not a racist country”, despite enormous structural inequalities and decades of documented discrimination. “There has been a silencing here of centuries of violence and trauma,” says Kia Henda.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/3/10/how-portugal-silenced-centuries-of-violence-and-trauma

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (18 children)

It was also the first country in the entire world to abolish slavery (European Portugal, that is)

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

If you're going to separate out mainland Portugal and its overseas territories like that, then technically slavery was never legal in England.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Unlike England, Portugal did not keep any overseas territory.

Gibraltar anyone?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I didn't mean to claim that the British Empire were the good guys. I was just pointing out the silliness of only looking at one very narrow fact to make a country look good, while ignoring the wider context.

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