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Angola President’s Emotional Response After Touring Smithsonian African American History Museum

Angola President’s Emotional Response After Touring Smithsonian African American History Museum

Angola president

Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/ftmeade/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Angola President João Lourenço toured the Smithsonian African American History Museum on Monday in Washington, D.C., and described his experience seeing the exhibits on slavery and the middle passage as “profoundly emotional”.

Accompanied by his wife Anas Dias Lourenço, he visited the premiere U.S. museum of African American history for the first time as president.

“The suffering that our brothers went through in the time of slavery touches us deeply. For this reason, we have to establish a closer relationship between our African countries and our diaspora, part of which is here in the United States of America,” President Lourenço said through an interpreter after a private tour.

Lourenço met with Vincent A. Tucker, the president of the William Tucker 1624 Society, and other members of the Tucker family, who are believed to be descendants of the first Africans to arrive in the Virginia colonies in 1619 on a ship that left from Angola.

“This is history that is part of our common history,” he said. “As Africans and Africans in the diaspora, we’ve seen the whole suffering that our ancestors went through in the time of slavery and that was very touching and profoundly emotional.”

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The Angolan president said he was surprised and moved by the museum’s collection and invited the Tucker family to visit Angola soon to share their experience with the country’s National Archive, universities and Angolan communities.

“The idea is really to keep connection on both sides,” Lourenço said.

The tour included an exhibition exploring the history of the skills and trades of people on the African continent and the history of European appetites for resources there.

Lourenço and his entourage were guided by Mary Elliot, curator of the museum’s Slavery and Freedom exhibit, through an exhibit on the Middle passage showing the names of ships that brought millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas.

She explained how European nations such as Portugal, England, and France, and generations of Americans profited from the slave trade.

Elliot also showed them the image of Queen Njinga Mbandi who fought to free Angolans from slavery during her mid-1600s reign.

The queen’s depiction by French illustrator Achille Deveria is the first image visitors see at the start of the museum’s slavery exhibits, centering Angola’s position at the beginning of that part of the American story.