I set Borba Gato on fire! A year ago, when the pioneer statue went up in flames, all racially conscious blacks lit a mental match to corroborate the 13-meter fall of the image of a figure hitherto seen as a hero, but who killed our ancestors. Many of us, like me, were not in the region of Santo Amaro, in the capital of São Paulo, nor did they plan the action, but saw the movement as part of a historic reparation that took place all over the world.
In the city of São Paulo, which until 2020 had 366 monuments, of which only seven honored black people, most of which were portrayed in a subordinate way, the Municipal Department of Culture decided to build five new statues of important black people: Geraldo Filmes, Madrinha Eunice, Itamar Assumpção, Carolina Maria de Jesus and Ademar da Guia. Most of them are already part of the city’s urban landscape, but an important detail: the statues are tiny, measuring 1.67 meters, they don’t have a base to make them bigger and they don’t even carry plaques explaining who those bronze figures are. that appeared on public roads. The descendants of Madrinha Eunice provided a plaque on their own and installed this week next to the statue of the founder of the first samba school in São Paulo, Lavapés.
São Paulo City Hall, do you swear that this is the tribute that black people deserve or was it just a handout to keep us underrepresented in the urban landscape? If the city with the largest economic capital in Brazil and also the largest black population (about 4 million or 32% of its 12 million inhabitants) does not have statues representing black or brown people, what about the others? Rio de Janeiro, Recife and Salvador, for example, have statues of Zumbi, but they are all small. There is not a big monument, a well-known square, an architectural reference about black people in any Brazilian city that is really grand and attracts tourists to take pictures with them.
In Senegal, the African Renaissance monument plays this role and yields beautiful images on social networks. In South Africa, former President Nelson Mandela alone has 15 monuments spread across the country. Some statues are gigantic and take tourists to travel just to take a picture with them (I did that). I would love for Praça (Franklin) Rooseveelt, in São Paulo, to call (Nelson) Mandela.
But around here, black heroes and heroines are still beginning to be known by the population and are far from being represented as they should. Salvador, for example, has several tributes to the Magalhães family (airport, avenue, neighborhood, convention center), but only a small bust for Luiz Gama, the greatest Brazilian abolitionist, born in the Bahian capital. When I was at an event at the Convention Center, I informally renamed the space named after the grandfather of the then mayor, Antônio Carlos Magalhães Neto, to Luiz Gama. I would love to see this name change actually taking place.
In Recife, to get to the small statue of Zumbi you have to go through Parque 13 de Maio and Avenida Princesa Isabel. The black movement knows well how much the date of abolition and the one responsible for signing the Lei Áurea, do not represent our struggles nor guarantee the real freedom of black people. Meanwhile, one of the main leaders of the period of slavery continues to have proved how important his struggle was to guarantee freedom to thousands of people in the 1600’s and he doesn’t even have a representative statue.
This, therefore, is a battle that we are still far from winning. In addition to rare representations of black people in cities, tributes to slaveholders, leaders of the military dictatorship, pioneers and the like continue in our cities. The Bill 404/2020 that deputy Erica Malunguinho (PSOL/SP) proposed and had a petition signed by Guia Negro remains stuck in the bureaucratic stages of the Legislative Assembly of São Paulo, with no forecast of a vote in plenary and much less hope of approval .
As long as we have representatives who do not represent us (in color and attitude) and we do not move forward in changing the Brazilian historical narrative, pioneers and slaveholders will continue to go unpunished and honored. The questions that remain are: how long will names, images and statues of Borba Gatos and the like continue to populate our cities? And when will black people have squares, streets and monuments that honor them in the grandeur of what they represent for our society?
