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.
The government has applied for the Cuanza River corridor to be declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. “This is the place where African Americans came from,” said Márcio de Jesus Lopes Daniel, Angola’s tourism minister. “Come and see where your roots are.”
There are also hopes that this history will draw the United States and Angola closer together diplomatically.
When President Biden travels to Angola this week, he is scheduled to visit the National Slavery Museum near the capital, Luanda, to highlight the bond between the two nations that was born out of slavery. A vast majority of African Americans have Angolan ancestry, said Stephen Lubkemann, an anthropology professor at George Washington University. In the battle for influence in mineral- and oil-rich Angola, that gives the United States an ability to draw historical and cultural ties to the country in ways that China, its rival, cannot.
Mr. Biden’s delegation is expected to include Wanda Tucker, whom Angolan government officials glowingly refer to as one of their own. She traced her ancestors to the first ship that docked at Point Comfort and has visited the country several times.
When he visited Angola last year, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III, the first African American to hold the position, drew a blunt connection between himself and the Angolans he was addressing. “Four centuries ago, slavers from far away put the men and women and children of this country into shackles — people who looked just like you and me,” he said.
About a quarter of all enslaved Africans confirmed to have arrived in the United States came from a region that included Angola, according to SlaveVoyages, a digital database. That is more than anywhere else in Africa.
Because Massangano sits at the intersection of Angola’s largest river, the Cuanza, and a major tributary, it was the country’s main transit point for trafficking captives to the coast, scholars said. Today, Massangano is a quiet village of a couple of hundred residents.
Behind a wall made of mud blocks on the edge of the village is a large wooden deck covered by a thatched roof and surrounded by empty concrete bungalows — a restaurant and lodge that an Angolan businessman hopes to open by January.
Most residents live at the bottom of a hill in homes made of mud and logs. Some blast music at night, others gather beneath trees and play loto, a game similar to bingo.
At the top of the hill, European Renaissance-style stone buildings sit mostly in ruins. Each one features a hand-painted sign identifying its purpose: the old town hall, the fort of Massangano. The slave market, at the village’s highest point, is marked by a concrete cross standing about two stories tall, at the spot where enslaved people in shackles would have stood before being sold.
“They cry. Always cry,” Afonso Vita, a historian who works for Angola’s tourism ministry, said of African American visitors.
The effort to elevate Angola’s history in the slave trade has prompted new awareness and conversation nationally, local historians said. The legacy of the slave trade is rarely discussed in Angola, in part because its consequences are not as easily felt as in the United States, where many African Americans are aware of lingering racial disparities, said Vladimiro Fortuna, the director of the National Slavery Museum in Luanda.
Mr. Fortuna said that by next year he hopes to have a plan in place to construct a new, larger slavery museum. Visitors to Luanda are increasingly touring sites related to the slave trade. That includes the Street of Flowers, where slave traders once laid flowers to cover the blood of brutalized enslaved people.
Mr. Vita, the historian, said that when he gave lectures about the atrocities endured by the enslaved, Angolans became visibly angry. “The time is right,” he said, “for us to start a revolution to reclaim our history.”
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