Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa created discussion and discord: on Tuesday night, during a dinner with foreign journalists in Portugal, the President of the Republic stated that “we have to pay the costs” of colonialism. He had already touched on the subject in 2023, also at the time of the Portuguese Revolution, but then without the prominence that it now has.
On Saturday, and politics was already boiling, especially on the right — which disagreed with Marcelo —, and the President came to delve deeper into this issue of colonial “reparations”, suggesting that “this should not be put under the carpet”, looking for solutions such as financing, forgiveness of debt and cooperation.
Furthermore: he advocated that Montenegro and the Government continue the previous work, of surveying the heritage assets of the former colonies in Portugal for later return.
The Government, which had not reacted since Wednesday, reacted on Saturday, in a conclusive statement: “No process or program of specific actions with this purpose was and is not at issue”.
But he recalled work already done: “The Portuguese State financed, in Angola, the Museum of the National Liberation Struggle; in Cape Verde, the museumization of the Tarrafal concentration camp; in Mozambique, the recovery of the slave ramp on the Island of Mozambique”.
Yes it is true. How true it is that the “cooperation” and “financing” that Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa proposed already exist. And they are the responsibility of previous governments.
The so-called Strategic Cooperation Programs, for example, currently being implemented, foresee the payment by 2027 of almost 1,200 million euros. These millions for projects in PALOP (Portuguese-speaking African Countries) and East Timor: 750 million for Angola, 170 for Mozambique, 95 for Cape Verde, 70 million for Timor-Leste, 60 for São Tomé and Príncipe and 19 for Guinea-Bissau.
The value includes a part in credit lines, but also projects in priority sectors, such as job creation, infrastructure modernization and, of course, Education and Health..
Even so, Portugal and Portuguese governments are lagging behind other European countries when it comes to “reparating” colonialism. At the forefront is, therefore, France and Macron — who has introduced the topic since 2017. And the action.
He was the first and greatest driver of the movement to restitute art objects and artefacts taken from the former French colonies.
Precisely in 2017, newly elected and on an official visit to Burkina Faso, Emmanuel Macron would say: “I belong to a generation for whom the crimes of our European colonization are indisputable and are part of our history. African heritage cannot be trapped in our museums”. They wouldn’t stay.
To the ancient kingdom of Benin (today