'Colonial Amnesia' - Europe City Tours of Slavery & Colonialism -Paris, London, Madrid, Lisbon, Brussels, Amster, Berlin
- ‘Hidden in plain sight’: the European city tours of slavery & colonialism, The Guardian, April 2, 2024. Ed. - From Puerta del Sol plaza in Madrid to the Tuileries Garden in Paris, guides reshape stories continent tells about itself - In Madrid, Ondo’s walking tour begins to wrap up after crossing a crowded plaza where people were once sold to the highest bidder
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Dodging between throngs of tourists and workers on their lunch breaks in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol plaza, we stop in front of the nearly 3-tonne statue depicting King Carlos III on a horse. Playfully nicknamed Madrid’s best mayor, Carlos III is credited with modernising the city’s lighting, sewage systems and rubbish removal. Kwame Ondo, the tour guide behind AfroIbérica Tours, offers up another, albeit lesser-known tidbit about the monarch.
“He was one of the biggest slave owners of his time,” says Ondo, citing the 1,500 enslaved people he kept on the Iberian peninsula and the 18,500 others held in Spain’s colonies in the Americas. As aristocratic families sought to keep up with the monarch, the proportion of enslaved people in Madrid swelled to an estimated 4% of the population in the 1780s. It is a nod to the kind of conversation – one often neglected or wilfully ignored across the continent – that Ondo and his counterparts in Europe are steadily wedging into everyday life.
From Barcelona to Brussels, London to Lisbon, a cohort of guides has trained its lens on Black and African history, laying bare how the continent has been shaped by colonialism and slavery as they reshape the stories that Europe tells about itself. While California debates reparation bills aimed at compensating for generations of discriminatory policies, and the UK takes down tributes to slave traders and colonialists, similar conversations have been conspicuously absent across much of the continent.
“We’re not lifting up anyone’s mattresses,” says Ondo. “This is history hidden in plain sight.” The statement mirrors his own life in some ways.
Born in Equatorial Guinea - the last Spanish colony to claim independence, in 1968 - Ondo grew up in southern Spain, steeped in the culture of a former empire that had long ceased to remember its actions in what has been dubbed Spain's “forgotten colony.” Ondo and his family’s existence there, however, acted as a powerful counter to this forgetting. “It was a conscious decision by European powers to disconnect themselves from the history,” he says. “But history comes back to you.” 1,100 miles away, the sentiment is echoed by Jennifer Tosch, who launched Black Heritage Tours in Amsterdam in 2013...
Read More, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/02/hidden-in-plain-sight-the-european-city-tours-of-slavery-and-colonialism