The outgoing American President has had his last weeks in office travelin from continent to continet….
This week he visits Angola, In Africa, someplace Trump is NOT expected to want anything to do with….
US Sec of Defense Austin has also visited the place….
Angola WILL get a fleeting light shown on it …..
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…..
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“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.
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