Cachupa with presidential honours

The practice of segregation is seen in establishments in the municipality of Amadora, where the neighbourhood of Cova da Moura was born and growing clandestinely. Here, on the outskirts of Lisbon, Maria Patriarca lives, raised three children, and follows the education of her grandchildren, without losing sight of the management of her own business: O Coqueiro Restaurant.

The space, famous for its cachupa, has already received the President of the Republic of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, and his Cape Verdean counterpart, Jorge Carlos Fonseca.
“President Marcelo came twice. He always ate the cachupa with rice because he says that our rice is out of this world. He also tried the tuna steak,” she points out.

The popularity of Coqueiro’s menu, thanks to Maria’s spice, makes the restaurant’s walls too small to document all the illustrious characters who have visited. In addition to the state figures, the house attracts other media personalities, such as Dino d’Santiago, a Portuguese-Cape Verdean musician who collaborated with Madonna.

The parade of stars helps to brighten up the potential of Cova da Moura and obfuscate stereotypes of supposedly bad neighbourhoods that are held against predominantly Black neighbourhoods.

Hate that kills

Used to take off these and other labels, Anizabela Amaral reinvents herself in the fight against discrimination. “When I left SOS Racism, I saw that there were so many people around me who needed my support, even on a legal level, so I soon realised that I’d continue my activism,”.

From family members and other close friends to friends of friends, the support network woven by the lawyer is not limited to the fight against racial discrimination, but it is the main focus of intervention. “With everything we live inside, it’s impossible for SOS Racism to come out of us,” defends the former leader, adding that the experience has taken her out of a place of naivety.

“I remember that before joining the association I thought they were all slight fundamentalists who took exaggerated positions, for example in press releases. So I said to myself, ‘I’m going to be a consensual person there, we’re going to try to build bridges, create alliances, get support, sponsorships, we’re going to spread the message, we’re going to call white people, we’re going to try involving as many people as possible.’”

Anizabela’s anti-racist strategy took only two months to hit a daily storm of macro-aggressions. “All the denunciations made against us were so serious and sick that being moderate in that context was not an option.”

The importance of strong positions became even more evident in 1995 with the assassination of Alcindo Monteiro, a black Portuguese man beaten to death by a group of skinheads. The crime sent 17 defendants to the dock, judged for murder and physical harm, but relieved of the charge of genocide, which was abandoned by the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Eleven of the accused were punished with sentences between 16 and a half years and 18 years, while the others served sentences between three and a half years and four years and nine months in prison. In reading the sentence, the racism, nationalism, fascism, and Nazism of the murderers were fully apparent.

“Salazar and his regime are pointed out as a model to follow. The racist aspect is always present. They appeal to white supremacist beliefs, considering Black people to be inferior. In general terms, according to a policy they call “racialism,” they do not condone the mixing of races; they are against the immigration of Black individuals to Portugal, namely those originating from former colonies. They defend the expulsion of all Black individuals from national territory, and in order to achieve this in the name of the “nation” and the “superiority of the white race” they find all aggressions against this group of individuals legitimate.”

Education that saves

Twenty-five years have passed since Alcindo Monteiro’s barbaric death, and other murders have been littered with evidence of racial motivation—including the recent death of actor Bruno Candé—but the denial of racism remains a common practice in Portuguese society.

“We cannot give up,” Anizabela points out, concerned about the populist offensive of extreme-right ideologies.
Firm in her fight against hatred, the jurist notes that she was pushed to act: “My life was showing me that I needed to get involved.”

First, in an association structure which she left between the challenges of motherhood, now in the education of her children and in the denunciations of discrimination cases that she publishes on social networks, Anizabela recalls that only by openly confronting the structures that sustain racism is it possible to put its disintegration into perspective.

“From the moment I was a mother and the matter came home, with my three-year-old son asking me to paint my face white, it became evident that I had to strengthen myself.” A little more than a decade after that episode requiring her pedagogy, Anizabela tells us that she renews her strength in reading, debating, and sharing experiences with other racialised people.

“I realised later that my son just wanted to protect me because he observed at school that brown people were treated differently, for the worse.” The chromatic variations in the family, resulting from the ethnic diversity of the parents—Anizabela’s husband is a white Portuguese man—soon opened the Luso-Angolan’s eyes to identity clashes.

“I know the story too well, of a friend who, when she took her 13-year-old son to school, left him at the beginning of the street because his friends couldn’t see that his mother was Black.

When my son showed up with that conversation, begging me to paint my face in white, I told my husband that I would not let this happen to me, I wouldn’t stop accompanying my son to school because he was ashamed [due to internalised racism].”

Skin shocks for the curriculum

The feeling of rejection of African ancestry that Anizabela managed to keep out of the house is inseparable from the spread of a white ideal beginning in preschool education.

Without school material that promotes and celebrates diversity, the Portuguese collective image continues to associate darker skin colour with foreign identity, a perception aggravated by the failure to collect precise ethnic-racial data.

Even without ever having experienced blatant racial discrimination [herself], Amalia Santana, the youngest of three sisters, prepares to enter the job market with increased consciousness. “I hope I won’t have to deal with someone who refuses to be treated by me,” anticipates the nursing student, aware of the obstacles Black professionals face.

“I have a friend who is a doctor and works in a private hospital, and she has had cases where patients didn’t want to be treated by her just because she is Black,” she laments. Although she doesn’t understand the bias— “only trained personnel are allowed to practice [as doctors]”—Amalia admits to giving in.

“Maybe, as a recent graduate, I’ll accept that someone might not want to be treated by me, but with a few years of experience, I can begin to answer, ‘If you don’t want to be attended by me, then you’re not sick and don’t need help.’”