In a recent interview with Comunidade Cultura e Arte, Angolan artist and conceptual provocateur Kiluanji Kia Henda laid bare a national contradiction: while Portugal celebrates its seafaring past and imperial imagery in grand plazas and textbooks, the violent foundations of that empire—forced labor, racial domination, and transatlantic slavery—remain largely unspoken in the public realm.

As Kia Henda puts it, debates on colonization remain trapped in a cultural “bubble”, limited to art galleries, academic panels, or heritage-themed exhibitions. But true reckoning, he insists, must break this enclosure and enter school curricula, city planning, and collective rituals.

A Structure of Memory, Not a Symbol

At the heart of his call is the Memorial to the Enslaved People, a project he has been leading since 2017. It was democratically chosen through Lisbon’s participatory budget, proposed by the Associação de Afrodescendentes (Djass), and approved by thousands of citizens who voted to anchor memory where denial once ruled.

And yet, five years later, the memorial still does not exist.

The delay tells its own story—a mix of bureaucratic inertia, artistic obstruction, and political discomfort. Originally planned for a larger public space, the memorial had to be relocated to a smaller, less ideal site in Ribeira das Naus, a historic embarkation point for slave ships. This spatial change forced Kia Henda to redesign the entire installation—from the layout of 400 aluminum sugarcane stalks to the scale of the contemplative circle they were meant to form.

What should have been a bold civic intervention became a bureaucratic quagmire, with unclear timelines, shifting institutional responsibilities, and limited financial flexibility. Despite being publicly approved, the project languished in an “adaptation phase,” slowed by city planning protocols and perhaps more so by Portugal’s hesitation to carve difficult truths into its urban landscape.

Kia Henda’s frustration is quiet but firm.

“Decolonization isn’t about raising flags or composing anthems, it’s about celebrating memory in public space.”

The fact that this project—funded, approved, and designed—is still stalled reveals just how far Portugal is from that goal.

Decolonization Is Not a Ceremony

Portugal, the first European power to establish a transatlantic slave economy and among the last to abolish it, still narrates its colonial past through the language of heroism, not horror. Schoolbooks euphemize. Monuments sanitize. The few public artworks acknowledging African lives—let alone lives lost—are dwarfed by stone tributes to navigators and kings.

What Kia Henda proposes is not decorative memory. It’s a structural act of repair. A disruption of the national narrative. A physical and conceptual intrusion into the city’s commemorative geography.

His concept for the memorial, titled Plantation – Prosperity and Nightmare, captures this duality. The aluminum sugarcane stalks rise not to glorify the past, but to symbolize the burned, sterilized plantation fields—a circle of absence, of lives stolen and systems built on their backs. It is an anti-monument in the best sense: one that forces reckoning instead of nostalgia.

Public Space, Public Responsibility

The irony is bitter. Lisbon has no shortage of colonial statues—praising conquest, maritime reach, and empire. But when asked to create one memorial for the millions enslaved and displaced by that same empire, the state stalls.

It is not a matter of funds. Nor of artistic logistics. It is, more profoundly, a question of who gets remembered, and how.

Kia Henda reminds us that the burden of decolonization cannot fall solely on the formerly colonized. Portugal, too, must learn to grieve, to remember with integrity, and to break its silence.

This means:

• A curriculum that tells the truth.
• A public sphere that includes Afro-Portuguese voices as architects of history.
• And monuments that do not decorate, but interrogate.

The Mirror Is Still Waiting

The Memorial to the Enslaved People is not just a sculpture project—it is a mirror. One that, if installed, would force Portugal to look at what it has long refused to see. Its delay is more than administrative. It is symptomatic of a national discomfort with historical accountability.

Still, Kia Henda believes the memorial will be built. And when it is, it will mark not only a step toward justice—but a rupture with amnesia.

Portugal must decide: Will it continue to mythologize empire? Or will it begin to excavate the memory beneath its cobblestones?

Because the mirror is ready.
And the silence cannot hold forever.