Two notes regarding repairs.

Last month saw the release of the fourth collection of chronicles on colonial history issues that I have been publishing in the press since 2017. Like the previous collections, it was published by Guerra e Paz and its title is Reparations and Other Historical Penitences . The cover shows Seh-Dong-Hong-Beh, a commander of the Amazons, or warrior women of Dahomey, holding the decapitated head of a black man, in a drawing by Frederick E. Forbes (see image).

Forbes, a Royal Navy officer, visited the Kingdom of Dahomey in the mid-19th century, resided there for many months, and left us, in a memoir published in 1851 , an account of his stay as well as several illustrations of the inhabitants of the African kingdom. The Expresso magazine very kindly mentioned my collection in its books section, for which I am grateful, but surprisingly, instead of reproducing the cover image, as is usual, it replaced it with a photograph of irons and other implements presumably used by Europeans to restrain slaves. In other words, it replaced the image of African brutality with an allusion to European brutality. Was it a simple pagination choice, or was there a politically correct reluctance to expose the violence that Africans inflicted on each other? I can't say, and I don't want to speculate on intentions, but it is certainly unusual…

Images aside, Expresso states that reparations are "one of the major topics of discussion today" and rightly asserts that I am against them. And why am I against reparations for people who claim to be descendants of slaves? For a number of reasons that I have explained over time, some of which are found in this collection, and above all because I believe that the reparations that needed to be made were already made in the 19th century, when Western peoples, especially the British, prohibited and suppressed the transatlantic slave trade and ended slavery. I defended this position in writing and live, in a debate on the program "É ou Não É?" on RTP, which greatly annoyed the woke crowd. Some of these people reacted immediately. With a clear propensity to go on and on about what she doesn't know, Público columnist Luísa Semedo even made a curious parallel. She wrote the following: “And how does he (João Pedro Marques) expect us to take him seriously when today, in a television debate, he is able to use with complete conviction such extravagant arguments as 'we have already repaired the crime of slavery because we stopped it and because it cost us so much to stop,' which we can summarize as” — and the comparison is by Luísa Semedo — “if a man stops hitting a woman, this is already reparation for the crime, and the woman only has to be grateful, especially since it cost the man so much to stop hitting her. When it is said that one cannot look at the past with the eyes of the present… Then what eyes does JPM have?”

Well, Luisa Semedo, these are the eyes of someone who doesn't have ideological blinders preventing them from looking both left and right, someone who thankfully doesn't have diplopia, which makes them see images that duplicate and complicate abolitionist problems with gender issues—no, I don't subscribe to the intersectionality agenda—and above all, the eyes of someone who knows something about history. And it is mainly for this last reason that I tell you that the analogy with a man beating a woman can only come from someone who hasn't the slightest idea what they're talking about. It's a useless analogy because that's not how things happened. Westerners didn't just stop practicing a condemnable and condemned activity, that is, they didn't just "stop beating"—to use Luisa Semedo's unfortunate comparison—they also tried to prevent others, namely many African chiefs and kings, from continuing to do so. Yes, there were countries—Denmark, the Netherlands—that simply stopped their slave trade. But the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, and other Western countries did not simply abolish this practice; they also sought to suppress it. Prohibiting and suppressing are not synonymous, they are not the same thing, Luisa Semedo. To suppress the transatlantic slave trade, and also the Indian Ocean trade, it was necessary to pay compensation, carry out military interventions on land, and deploy warships to patrol those oceans.

It was an effort sustained over decades, the cost of which was extremely high. The United Kingdom, for example, spent around 12 million pounds on it. Portugal, whose cruise ships began operating later than the British, had spent, until 1860, that is, in the first twenty years of its suppression action, around 4 million contos, an enormous expense given its financial resources at the time. To this must be added the cost in lives. The coast of Africa was highly deadly due to tropical fevers (malaria, yellow fever) and other diseases. It was so deadly that Sierra Leone and, by analogy, other parts of the coast, became known as "the European's grave"—or " the white man's grave ," in English—an expression coined in 1819 by the Portuguese César de Figanière y Morão. Let me give three or four examples: in 1841, 25 of the 140 men in the crew of the Wolverine died on the coast of Biafra; 46 sailors out of the 50 who entered the Pongos River died in half a dozen days; according to British statistics, mortality from disease on ships serving in Africa was five times higher than that on ships cruising the seas of Europe; and anyone who reads the novel Eugénio , written in the mid-19th century by Navy officer Francisco Maria Bordalo, will immediately understand the sacrifice and extremely high risk to life that service at the Naval Station in Luanda entailed.

What was the practical result of this effort and risk? The British seized 1,575 slave ships; the French, 214; the Portuguese, 168; the Americans, 68; etc. The policy of suppression required the use of many military and financial resources and cost lives, not only from disease but also in combat with the slave traders. Portugal participated in this suppression. I addressed this aspect of Portuguese history in Africa in 1999, in a work that is now out of print , but fortunately there is, for those interested in the subject, a good and more recent book that narrates in great detail the intervention of the Portuguese Navy in the fight against the slave trade.

In short, what is most important to emphasize, in the context of this note, is that, with regard to the African slave trade, Western countries—including Portugal—did not have a merely passive attitude of "stopping the beatings," as columnist Luísa Semedo and other woke voices imagine. And with regard to the end of slavery, it suffices to consider what the American Civil War was like, which involved the death of more than 600,000 people, to understand that in that case too there was no passivity, it wasn't just "stopping the beatings." Therefore, there are no more reparations to be made. The end of the slave trade and slavery constitutes sufficient reparation, and that reparation was made in the 19th century, about 200 years ago.