Luanda — The President of the United States of America, Joe Biden, highlighted in the late afternoon of Tuesday (Dec 3), in Luanda, the strong historical and cultural ties between his country and Angola.
Speaking after his visit to the Slavery Museum, the American statesman referred to the solemnity of the place to highlight how much the two countries have advanced in their friendship.
To recall how it all began, he said that "young women, and men, born free in the highlands of Angola, were captured, tied up and forced into a death march along this coast, at this point, by slave traders, in the year 1619".
In his speech, he mentioned two of these young people, in this case Anthony and Isabella, who in the building that houses the current Museum of Slavery "were baptized in a foreign faith against their will, their names changed and condemned to a slave ship bound for the Middle Passage, piled up in it along with hundreds of others, of which about a third of these did not survive the journey".
He added that "when Anthony and Isabella arrived in the British colony of Virginia, where they were sold into slavery, they became two of the first enslaved Americans in a place that 150 years later would become the United States of America."
He further described that "they had a son considered to be the first child of African descent born in America, William Tucker. It was the beginning of slavery in the United States.
Cruel, brutal and dehumanizing". President Biden says that this was "the original sin of our nation, original sin that haunted America and cast a long shadow ever since".
Since then, several landmark events have taken place, such as the bloody Civil War that nearly tore America to pieces to the long battle with Jim Crow in the 1960s, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Movement, which involved him in public life during which American cities were burned, to the still-unfinished reckoning with racial injustice.
In this process, the American leader adds, "historians believe that the people of Angola represented a significant number of all enslaved Americans".
Recognizing America's Past According to the American President, although history can be hidden, "it cannot and must not be erased. It must be faced. It is our duty to face our history, the good, the bad and the ugly, the whole truth. That's what great nations do.
That's why I chose to speak here at the National Museum of Slavery today, just as I did a visit." He also mentioned the fact that the Angolan President, João Lourenço, visited the National Museum of African American Culture, in Washington, DC, the second most visited museum in the United States, in the same context.
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"He saw what I see: a glaring contradiction between my country's founding principles of freedom, justice and equality and the way we have treated the people of Angola and all of Africa over time," he argued.
"I've said many times that America is the only nation in the world founded on an idea. Most countries are founded on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, geography, or some other attribute. But the United States was founded on an idea embedded in our Declaration of Independence," he said.
According to this idea, according to Joe Biden, all men and women are created equal and deserve to be treated equally throughout their lives. "It's clear today that we didn't live up to that idea, but we never completely moved away from it either.
This is largely due to the determination and dreams of African Americans, including Angolan Americans, the proud descendants of the diaspora who helped build the U.S. while rebuilding their own families and their own sense of identity," he said.
"They were also the ancestors of this legacy: resilient, faithful and even hopeful. Hopeful that joy would come in the morning, as it says in the Bible.
Hopeful that our past would not be the story of our future. And hopeful that one day the United States would write a different story in partnership with the people brought here in chains to my nation from Africa." SC/DOJ
