The leading German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has warned of the boom in colonialist glorification in Spain, linked to a refusal to reconsider the dark side of its history, which is, it comments, the opposite of what is happening in Portugal. The newspaper details that making a critical reading of the past is a criterion followed by Portugal, France and Belgium, but that, in Spain, the nationalist discourse goes in the opposite direction. "These countries are reconciling with their colonial pasts, but in Portugal's neighbour, in Spain, there is silence. In this country, those who speak are the apologists, and they proudly claim Spanish heritage, with the argument that the country brought civilization, language, and Christianity to Latin America," said the report. Spanish nationalism is on the offensive.
According to the newspaper, in Portugal, which had a colonial past similar to that of Spain, a critical reading of the past is being made. A monument to all those enslaved by Portugal throughout history is being built in Lisbon. "A monument to Spanish slaves in the centre of Madrid would be unthinkable," it says. The newspaper explains that a sculptured sugar cane plantation made of black aluminum will be erected in the Campo das Cebolas in Lisbon, to commemorate the 400 years of the slavery era. The location is close to where African slaves were brought ashore, the point from which the Portuguese transported them to Europe or Latin America. A total of 6 million people passed through. "The capital of the former colonial power does not lack monuments to conquerors and discoverers. But the dark side of its history had been invisible until now. For the first time, the Memorial as Pessoas Escravizadas will protect the memory of the people enslaved by Portugal," its says.
The Frankfurter details that, until now, Portugal had drunk from the colonialist narrative disseminated during the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar, a "fairy tale" which asserted that Portuguese colonialism was much more benign, and completely different from that of France or Belgium. "An uncritical view of the glorious history of the Portuguese discoverers," it sums up. But the German daily believes this is changing. "Last year, on the anniversary of the 1974 Carnation Revolution which ended the dictatorship, president Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, aged 73, the son of the last colonial minister, called on the Portuguese to accept the country's past of slavery, racism and the suffering of its colonial wars: they should look at the past with the eyes of the colonized people and not just with those of the colonizers, and he warned against falling into an "uncritical cult of glorification of the Portuguese empire."
According to the newspaper, without the colonial uprisings in Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, which forced the mobilization of one million soldiers, the authoritarian regime in Portugal would be unlikely to have ended. "By 1975 all the colonies had become independent and hundreds of thousands of people returned to their poor homeland. In Portugal it is still debated whether they were returned or came as refugees. For them too, the colonial past is much more present in Portugal than in neighbouring Spain, which lost Cuba and the Philippines in the late 19th century," it said.