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.
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
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