Luanda - The US newspaper 'The New York Times' highlights, in its Sunday online edition, the visit to Angola by President Joe Biden, stressing that when looking for their roots, black Americans should look to Angola.
'When President Biden visits the country (starting Monday afternoon), he is expected to highlight a large part of the forgotten link between Angola and the United States, which was born from the transatlantic slave trade,' reads the report inserted in the newspaper.
They stood on a concrete platform as slave traders cast their final judgment, looking west to a bend in the mighty Kwanza River, where unknown horrors lay ahead, the article emphasizes in its first paragraphs.
He adds that for the ancestors of millions of African Americans, this slave market in Massangano, a village in Angola, was probably the place where they were sold into slavery.
The report notes that it was a point of no return and that historians believe that people from the southern African nation of Angola made up the largest numbers of enslaved Africans sent to the United States, including the first to arrive in Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619.
According to the writer, this story has gone largely unnoticed in Angola and the United States, where many black Americans often make pilgrimages to Ghana and Senegal, West Africa to trace the treacherous journeys of their ancestors, but not to Angola.
He points out that Angola is trying to change this, and the Ministry of Tourism is developing a global campaign to highlight the significance of Massangano and in partnership with the US has designed a campaign to rehabilitate the village and its historical heritage.
The journalistic article reads that 'the president of Angola, João Lourenço, has asked his government to repair the dirt road to Massangano that is impassable with heavy rain'.
The government has requested that the Kwanza River corridor be declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 'This is the place where African Americans came from,' said Márcio de Jesus Lopes Daniel, Angola's Minister of Tourism,' the newspaper stresses.
President Biden's visit to the National Museum of Slavery in Luanda will serve to highlight the bond between the two nations that was born from slavery, the publication highlights.
George Washington University anthropology professor Stephen Lubkemann states in the piece that the vast majority of African Americans have Angolan ancestry.
According to the article, President Biden's delegation is expected to include Wanda Tucker, who traced ancestors of the first ship that docked at Point Comfort and visited the country several times, as well as Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, the first African-American to hold the position.
The report, which features testimonies from historians, scholars, as well as the director of the Museum of Slavery, portrays that Massangano is located at the intersection of Angola's largest river, the Kwanza, and an important tributary, and was the country's main transit point for trafficking to the coast. ADR/ART/DOJ
