Africans In 16th Century Portugal: “1 In 10 Of Lisbon Were Africans”?

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[millergail]

The narrator on the clip you showed is David Olusoga who is also an author of ... Black and British: A Forgotton History. Great book!

[kimberly]

The painting you reference I actually saw at an exhibition in Baltimore at the Walters Art Museum. The exhibition was called "Revealing the African Presence in Renaissance Europe." They have a PDF version of the accompanying book from the event.

[davidjoro]

My great x5 was born in Portugal, His mother from Lisbon and his dad from Warri Nigeria, his dad being my great x 6 grand dad was a student from the royal court of the king of the Warri kingdom.

[LionClanChief]

Fun fact the Vatican holds most of the letters written in the Kongo kingdom going back to this period. For all we know there could be a Kongo Chronicle in those archives. But, for whatever reason those leaders of the Vaticans don't like sharing what's in their archives.

[gordonmahon]

Great show and great analysis. As always.

[TheBruntje]

Well the Portuguese were the ones that initiated the transatlantic slave trade, decades before Columbus made it to the Americas! The very first slave raids took place in the 1440's in modern day Mauritania...Then Portuguese were actually trying to expand the so called reconquista to north west africa! When they captured Adahu ( possibly a touareg), Adahu promised the Portuguese gold and slaves if they brought him to cape blanco ( modern day Mauritania )... The very first sub saharan africans that arrived in Portugal were actually sold by moorish africans... So it can be said that transatlantic slave trade was a direct consequence of the reconquista... The painting showed in this video is called : Chafariz d'el rey and wasn't painted by a Dutch man, but it was painted by a flemish guy ( modern day Belgium)... The place where this painting was made still exists in Lisbon

[fmgaming]

Thank you brother. You truly are doing good work. 🙏🏿

[judahawakens]

The reason for so many black people in Portugal is because of the huge number of Spanish and Portuguese Jews who lived there during that time and also before that. The books written during that same time period state the Spanish and Portuguese Jews WERE BLACK.

[Specialeena]

Fun fact, the Warri and Benin Kingdoms in the South south of Nigeria had similar interactions with Portugal around the same time. Their royal houses also intermarried, I think.

[rjmckenzie]

I've seen that painting many times and I was shocked when I saw it for the first time. As a nerd of world history I've been curios if there were any blacks in Medieval and Renaissance Europe and my answer from this is yes they were. Our people were all over, we need to teach our people we were kings, knights, priests, etc before slavery. Peace and black power brother.

[grapeshot]

Yeah a lot of people focus on the British, Spanish and the French empires not realizing that the Portuguese were in the game also. They have much blood on their hands too.Can we all say Henry the Navigator.

[ohdude]

In the XVI there was a Noble African woman called Dona Simoa Godinho. She and her husband (D. Godinho, a white Portuguese Noble) were Merchants and build many places of worship in Lisbon. When she died she had memorial service like any other noble.

[thebrokenrecordofhistory]

The early interactions between the Portoguese and the Kongo were as equals. The Vatican is filled with paintings of Kongolese diplomats…

[bertramdavis]

How in the world did we become slaves to these Europeans that did not even believe in water to wash up in? This is amazing.

[toniaI]

My thoughts on this is that I read somewhere when it comes to Nigeria, the first person to go to university in the 16th century in Portugal was the son of the Oba from the Benin empire of what is now modern day Nigeria. It’s somewhat vague but the claim is that the Oba’s son married a Portuguese princess and had a son with her, but returned to the Benin kingdom to assume his role as the heir and become the next Oba. When the time came, emissaries were sent to fetch his son to be the next Oba who were referred to as the “fair” Oba on account if his light skin tone. The Edos referred to the Portuguese as “Potoki” because they couldn’t pronounce the name properly. I’m from the Edo tribe of the Benin empire and I live in NYC. Could you research and find out the veracity of this claim? I’m really interested in Edo history.

[BWC...]

Hey Bra, Great Work.
Thanks.
MUCH LOVE

[alangervasis]

Portugal reached Kongo as early as 1470s, that is 20 years before columbus reached the americas. The first Church in Kongo was bulit in 1491. The Kongo Kingdom even had a Coat of Arms and even sent emissaries and University students to the Pope in the 1500s.

[joelfaustino]

The Portuguese Empire has so much blood on its hands. We had a revolution here in Portugal which, among other things, was anti-colonialist in nature (the revolutionaries stood with the independence movements of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe in their fight for freedom), and yet our media and even our education system, to this day, extol the Empire as an adventure of exploration instead of what it really was: an enterprise of enslavement.

[yvonnetaylor]

Portugal also started trading in West Africa in the 1490s. Thanks for so much information

[matthewmann]

Portuguese, Greeks, Italians, And Spanish were some of the earliest Europeans to be in The African Continent and made great documents, recordings, charts, chartings, listings, and documentations of there encounters with various peoples yeah