Lisbon: From Slave Port to Summit Stage

This Saturday, September 20th, Lisbon will host the Black Europeans Lisbon Summit 2025 at the Auditório Alto dos Moinhos. From 10 a.m., activists, educators and community leaders from across Europe will gather to talk about memory, racism and inequality. The public is invited — but the message is aimed at the state itself:“Conference of Berlin – 140 Years: Never Forget!”

In 1884–85, European powers sat in Berlin to carve up Africa like a chessboard. Not a single African voice was present. Portugal secured Angola and Mozambique, and with them, another century of domination. Those borders, those extractions, those silences still shape our world. To think of the Berlin Conference as a dusty episode of imperial diplomacy is a lie. Its legacy is the map of Africa. Its consequence is the discrimination Afro-descendants face daily in Europe.

Portugal’s myth of innocence

Portugal has been quick to market itself as a small, peripheral nation that somehow avoided the worst of colonialism. The myth of “Lusotropicalism” — that Portuguese colonialism was softer, more harmonious — lingers in classrooms, speeches and monuments. But Lisbon was once Europe’s biggest slave port. Its prosperity was built on forced labour. Its “Age of Discoveries” meant centuries of loss, violence and theft for others.

And yet, when Afro-descendant voices demand recognition, they are met with silence or hostility. The fight over Lisbon’s Memorial to Enslaved People showed how unwilling the country remains to face its history. The murders of Alcindo Monteiro (1995) and Bruno Candé (2020), and the recent far-right attack on Adérito Lopes, revealed that racism in Portugal is not marginal — it is structural.

Lisbon as stage and contradiction

There is no accident in choosing Lisbon as host city. It was from here that caravels sailed. It was here colonial riches were unloaded. And it is here today that Afro-descendant communities — Cape Verdean, Angolan, Guinean, São-Tomense — transform the city’s identity with music, art and resilience.

“Realising this debate in Lisbon forces the city to confront its own history,” says Miguel Cardoso, national coordinator of Black Europeans in Portugal.

“It was from here that colonial expeditions departed, but it is also here that Black voices emerge to reimagine the future. Lisbon represents both the memory of colonialism and the creative strength of racialised communities.”

That duality is the point. Lisbon is empire and aftermath, myth and resistance, silence and song. The summit is forcing Portugal to look at itself.

A movement with teeth

Black Europeans began as a grassroots initiative in London. Today, it stretches across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden — and Portugal. Its goal is to unite Afro-descendants born in Europe or migrants who came here for a better life, and fight systemic racism at a time when the far right is resurgent.

This is not another conference for bureaucrats. The programme is blunt: lectures, debates, exchanges where artists, academics and activists share strategies and solutions too often excluded from polite European panels. The aim is to amplify Black voices, pressure institutions, and remind the continent that democracy without racial justice is a façade.

As Cardoso puts it: “Discussing this past is not only memory. It is politics. It is justice. Europe was built on colonial plunder, and only through critical reflection can we build truly equal societies.”

The reckoning cannot wait

Portugal cannot continue to market itself as a cosmopolitan hub while ignoring the realities of its Black residents. It cannot keep invoking empire as nostalgia while refusing to name its violence. It cannot celebrate Lisbon’s “diversity” in tourist brochures while treating Afro-descendant communities as disposable.

The Black Europeans Lisbon Summit is not a symbolic gesture. It is a demand. A demand for recognition, for repair, for a Europe that listens to the voices it has tried to silence for centuries.

Lisbon cannot escape this reckoning. Not anymore.