Lisbon, February 23, 2026.
Wandering around Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, one of the states that, in 1986 along with Spain, joined the EEC (now the European Union), a supranational organization founded, among other things, on values that respect human dignity. We can still encounter colonial monuments that are certainly no longer in line with those values, and the debate over them has become one of the most heated battlegrounds for national and European public opinion.
For example, the colossal monument built in the Belém area in 1960 by Leopoldo de Almeida and designed by José Angelo Cottinelli Telmo during the dictatorial regime of Antonio Oliveira Salazar.
This sculptural group, the Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to the Discoveries), depicting 33 historical figures, including Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama, and Ferdinand Magellan, placed on the prow of a caravel, is a tribute to the Discoveries that between the 15th and 16th centuries made this nation great. Although small in size, it was extremely active during the centuries of maritime exploration and colonial conquest.
However, today it reflects the profound divide between those who wish to preserve the nation’s historical identity and those who demand the decolonization of public spaces.
If we venture a parallel between this legacy of Salazarian nationalism and our Fascist-era monuments that escaped demolition, such as the Obelisk at the Foro Italico in Rome (the one with the inscription “Mussolini Dux,”) we assume that both are monumental works of authoritarian regimes created to celebrate an idea of presumed power and equally presumed historical continuity.
However, while the Roman obelisk is perceived almost exclusively as a fascist relic and therefore widely rejected or, worse, removed, that is, relegated to the oblivion of a shameful past, the Portuguese monument is still today fused with the Portuguese national identity tout court, making it more difficult to criticize or remove than it is for us. Unfortunately, decolonizing minds from their negative and harmful symbols is much more difficult than decolonizing public squares from their monuments, because decolonizing minds involves a complex and profound educational and cultural process.
Unlike the Mussolini regime (Fascismo), which fell to the bombs, the advance of the Allies, and the partisan resistance that “executed” its dictator, the Salazar regime (the Estado Novo) fell through a nearly bloodless military coup. Its officials were not dismissed; they retained their positions of command. Many university professors and intellectuals who had supported dictatorship and colonialism remained in their positions without renouncing their ideas, continuing, if anything, for decades to teach that “soft” version of a history of oppression called “good colonialism,” which can be compared to self-absolving rhetoric of “Italiani, brava gente (Italians, good people)” we have in Italy.
While Italian fascism was based on Mussolini’s only idea of a “warrior nation,” albeit one made up of good individuals compared to the ruthless Germans, Salazar, to absolve his compatriots in the 1950s, adopted the theories of sociologist Gilberto Freyre, one of Brazil’s greatest authors, who theorized “Lusotropicalism” (or Lusitanian tropicalism), a vision of colonialism that depicted the Portuguese as naturally devoid of racism and favorable to the intermixing of peoples. And the Portuguese still believe it! And most of them do so without much effort, because unlike myths based on brazen malice, it’s more difficult to dismantle those based on supposedly positive values like “kindness” and love. They didn’t colonize by force, annihilating entire populations, deporting them, and enslaving them—no! They enslaved them to bring different cultures together and intermingle them, allowing them to fertilize other lands.
Decolonizing the mind means replacing such absurd narratives with terms like “invasion,” “exploitation,” “transatlantic deportation,” “slavery,” and “forced labor.” If it’s impossible to influence older generations, too strongly tied to past beliefs, we must forcefully make the new generations aware that the prosperity and progress of Portugal in the 17th and 18th centuries were not an “economic miracle” founded on the work and resourcefulness of the laborious Portuguese people, but rather the fruit of the proceeds from the trade in human beings torn from their African lands!
We must look at those lands—Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde—no longer as possessions that made us great, which we have lost and can subtly take back under the pretext of helping their people (neocolonialism), but as countries with which we owe a debt to finally establish an egalitarian partnership. We must give their many inhabitants living in Portugal more space in the media, universities, and Parliament to demolish the concept of the “good colonizer” and finally hear the desperate cry of those who lived on the other side of the empire.
Today, access to housing, work, and justice for Black citizens in Portugal is still problematic because it is simply not true that the Portuguese are “naturally not racist”; no people are racist unless they become aware of the problem. Eliminating this belief is the most difficult step. But it must be done.
Unfortunately, this process is complicated by what we might call “Portuguese neocolonialism,” a term that doesn’t refer to a specific group of people, but rather describes the “system of economic, political, and cultural influence” that Portugal has maintained over its former colonies since their independence in 1975.
This system is partly driven by large corporations that dominate strategic sectors in those countries (such as banking, construction, and energy) through systems that channel profits to Lisbon. Part of the system also involves the use of organizations like the CPLP, the Community of Portuguese-Speaking Countries, to maintain a “soft” diplomatic and linguistic hegemony based on the common language, albeit cloaked in a cooperative guise. And partly by development aid that creates long-term financial dependencies that are difficult to break free from.
And then there’s politics. Where the myth of “Lusotropicalism,” just as we believe that Italians are “good people,” isn’t enough to erase past guilt. Just as Italian colonialism is exonerated by land reclamation, the construction of cities, bridges, and railways, or the introduction of benefits that indigenous populations would never have had access to if they had not been colonized, Portugal celebrates the roads, railways, and cities built in Angola or Mozambique: infrastructures that served the exploitation of raw materials, not to benefit the populations, and built with forced indigenous labor.
These self-excusing narratives are not only historical errors, but expedients used by current right-wing politicians to rekindle, amidst general forgetfulness and ignorance, a sense of poorly formulated “national pride” to be peddled to those who, in the present, cannot find or understand valid references and motivations, or feel diminished.
For example, the Portuguese Chega (Arriva) party, like the post-fascist or post-neo-fascist right-wing parties in Italy, committed to making the misdeeds of the past (never fully acknowledged as such) acceptable and legitimizing nationalist or anti-immigration positions today, attempts to assert themselves democratically by exploiting the electorate’s inability to analyze and historical forgetfulness.
The far-right Chega party, led by André Ventura, has used colonialism as an electoral banner, even celebrating the country’s imperial past: “The world should thank Portugal,” Ventura stated, for having spread its culture throughout the uncivilized world during the six centuries it was great. Furthermore, he has labeled anti-racist struggles as “problems imported from the left,” thus denying racism, which, as we have seen, is a phenomenon genetically alien to the Portuguese, who are not structurally racist but “good colonizers.” This allows Chega to revive slogans so dear to the dictatorships of Salazar and Mussolini—”God, Country, Family”—which today resonate with Meloni’s in Italy.
To resist these pressures, the current centrist governing coalition (AD) adopts a compromise position: while it certainly does not glorify colonialism, it opposes left-wing proposals for “historical reparations” or the removal of colonial monuments, so as not to expose itself to far-right criticism of offending national identity.
Furthermore, he distanced himself from President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa’s proposal to pay reparations for slavery and colonialism, pointing out that such a financial compensation plan is not included in the government’s program. This is to avoid further fueling the far-right machine, a force that had been absent from the country for decades. Indeed, Portugal was notorious for being an “exception” in Europe in this regard. However, this myth has recently faded, and Chega has become the third, if not sometimes the second, party in the 2025 polls, demonstrating how colonial nostalgia remains a powerful draw and a powerful driver for mobilizing right-wing voters.
Why? After 1975, between 500,000 and 800,000 refugees returned from the liberated former colonies (the famous retornados), and they have been a hotbed of profound nostalgia for the colonial past, not only in their own but also in the general memory of former affluence. An affluence, however, based on the suffering of the local populations. In such a small country, this mass of nostalgics constituted a tenth of the entire population, not to mention the halo effect toward family and acquaintances that exponentially increased this relationship: a mass toward whom colonialism could not easily be criticized without appearing denigrating to people who had lost everything in Africa.
And let’s not forget the role of the Church. The fundamental role of the Portuguese Jesuits: the intellectual arm of the empire and the soul of the myth of the “good colonizer.” Understanding their role means understanding why mental decolonization in Portugal is so difficult: they provided the moral justification for colonization, and today that justification is inextricably linked to this nation’s history. They were the first to adapt the Christian message to local cultures, creating the philosophical underpinning of Lusotropicalism, the idea that the Portuguese did not want to exterminate, but rather to “merge” with the natives: “See?—today’s right-wingers might say—”We were different from the English Protestants; we wanted to understand their culture.” As if the ultimate goal were not the elimination of the original religion and, through this, the annihilation of culture, tradition, language, and ultimately, the freedom of the people.
The case that completely dismantles the narrative of the Portuguese colonizer as an ever-welcome and accepted figure is that of Japan. While in Brazil or Angola the Jesuit model worked (imposing language and religion), in Japan the Francis Xavier-style infiltration clashed with a very strong central power that clearly perceived the shadow of gunboats behind the Bible.
Initially, the Portuguese succeeded in expanding by offering military alliances and firearms to local daimyo (feudal lords) in exchange for conversion to Christianity, as practiced by the Jesuits. However, the Tokugawa shogunate (feudal leadership) was able to understand early on that conversion was not a spiritual act, but a Trojan horse for a political invasion, because the Portuguese, even in the Far East, were involved in the slave trade, in this case Japanese, sold throughout the colonial empire. Shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi was outraged by the sale of women and men, apart from the infiltration into the vital nodes of the country. Thus, Christianity, and with it the Jesuits and merchants, were banned from Japan in 1614.
The Japanese case is useful for decolonizing the Portuguese mind because it demonstrates that their culture was not “naturally superior” or “irresistible,” that Portugal used faith as a tool of military intelligence, but then used force where faith was not enough. This contradiction, beautifully recounted in Shūsaku Endō’s book Chimmoku (Silence), is proof that where local power was strong, the “good colonizer” showed his true colors: that of a repelled invader. It is rarely discussed that in Japan, the Jesuits were preparing the ground for formal annexation to the empire. This “failure” in the East is perhaps the clearest proof that Portuguese colonialism did not have a mission of peace, but rather a hegemonic, commercial, and political agenda that stopped only before those with sharper swords than their own.
This is where we should begin to “decolonize” Portuguese minds: not by demolishing monuments, but by using them to explain history better, more effectively, and durably.