Angola’s National Museum Of Slavery Aims To Unite The Diaspora

Angola’s National Museum of Slavery seeks to help descendants of enslaved people reconnect with their enduring history of resilience.

With the National Museum of Slavery, Angola is positioning itself as a destination for descendants of enslaved people who want to reconnect with their roots.

Located on the outskirts of Luanda in a former chapel on the estate of Álvaro de Carvalho Matoso—a Portuguese colonizer who enslaved so many people he reportedly received a commendation—the Museu Nacional da Escravatura preserves the legacy of Angola’s enslaved population, CNN reports.

The museum displays registers documenting the forced transport of people not only to what would become the Southern United States but also to New York, Rhode Island, and other locations. It also houses relics from that era, including a wooden crucifix and a baptismal font used by Portuguese colonizers to erase the identities of enslaved Angolans through forced baptism before sending them across the Atlantic.

“They were baptized here, in the chapel,” said Marlene Ananias Rodrigues Pedro, head of the museum’s department of scientific research. “It was during baptism that enslaved people had their names changed. Their actual names were taken away, and they were given names of Portuguese origin.

“Most of them took ‘Angola’ as their surname to designate the origin of the enslaved people,” she added. “The Portuguese didn’t want them to keep their identity, to keep their personal name.”

At least 1.6 million Angolans were forcibly shipped from Luanda, mostly to Brazil. The first enslaved people in Britain’s American colonies in 1619 also came from Angola. The museum depicts the brutal methods used to force people into slavery: guns, chains, manacles, and drawings showing beatings with spiked paddles.

Some images depict wealthy white colonists feeding Black children scraps while adults served them from silver platters. Alcohol was also used to control captives, with metal stills on display showing how enslaved people were kept drunk to make them easier to pack into ships.

“It was also the colonizer’s idea to make the enslaved people drink,” Pedro said.

The museum doesn’t only depict Angolans as victims. Exhibits also highlight their fierce resistance to slavery and colonialism, with a room displaying weapons like poison arrows and showing how locals traded goods for guns to fight back.

”They fought. And hard. Independence in Africa was not handed over on a silver platter. There was resistance,” Pedro said.

That spirit of resistance persisted from the slave trade to the Angolan War of Independence (1961–1974), culminating in independence in November 1975. Museum director José António Fazenda and Pedro aim to share this history with visitors and are working with U.S. and Brazilian researchers to make Angola’s archives widely accessible, including a digitized version of the Luanda records.

“We want to create a functional library in this room,” Fazenda said. “We are currently working with a group of professionals to prepare a campaign to collect materials for this library. This is our dream. We want people who are here and want to learn more to have a place where they can.”