From Puerta del Sol plaza in Madrid to the Tuileries Garden in Paris, guides reshape stories continent tells about itself

From Puerta del Sol plaza in Madrid to the Tuileries Garden in Paris, guides reshape stories continent tells about itself

Dodging between throngs of tourists and workers on their lunch breaks in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol plaza, we stop in front of the nearly 3-tonne statue depicting King Carlos III on a horse. Playfully nicknamed Madrid’s best mayor, Carlos III is credited with modernising the city’s lighting, sewage systems and rubbish removal.

Kwame Ondo, the tour guide behind AfroIbérica Tours, offers up another, albeit lesser-known tidbit about the monarch. “He was one of the biggest slave owners of his time,” says Ondo, citing the 1,500 enslaved people he kept on the Iberian peninsula and the 18,500 others held in Spain’s colonies in the Americas. As aristocratic families sought to keep up with the monarch, the proportion of enslaved people in Madrid swelled to an estimated 4% of the population in the 1780s.

It is a nod to the kind of conversation – one often neglected or wilfully ignored across the continent – that Ondo and his counterparts in Europe are steadily wedging into everyday life. From Barcelona to Brussels, London to Lisbon, a cohort of guides has trained its lens on Black and African history, laying bare how the continent has been shaped by colonialism and slavery as they reshape the stories that Europe tells about itself. While California debates reparation bills aimed at compensating for generations of discriminatory policies, and the UK takes down tributes to slave traders and colonialists, similar conversations have been conspicuously absent across much of the continent.

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    2•8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    From Barcelona to Brussels, London to Lisbon, a cohort of guides has trained its lens on Black and African history, laying bare how the continent has been shaped by colonialism and slavery as they reshape the stories that Europe tells about itself.

    While California debates reparation bills aimed at compensating for generations of discriminatory policies, and the UK takes down tributes to slave traders and colonialists, similar conversations have been conspicuously absent across much of the continent.

    As she geared up to tour visitors and locals past the gable stones that include the image of a servile, Black child and the dark-skinned figureheads with exaggerated features once used to signal pharmacies, the idea was initially met with scepticism by Dutch people of colour.

    The initiative went ahead despite widespread protests by anti-discrimination groups, Mvemba says, hinting at how Germany – a country often lauded for its efforts to deal with its more-recent past – had failed to meaningfully reckon with its history of colonialism.

    In Madrid, Ondo’s walking tour begins to wrap up after crossing a crowded plaza where people were once sold to the highest bidder and visiting a church teeming with tourists seemingly oblivious to the symbols linked to enslavement carved into its stone walls.

    It’s an ending with a dual purpose: showcasing the vibrant clutch of restaurants, including Senegalese and Equatorial Guinean, that have sprung up in recent years, and reinforcing how the stories of the past continue to colour life in Madrid today.

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