Lisbon, ANGOLA, February 11 - Some Angolan individuals living in Portugal on Sunday rejected the name of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa to be the patron of a university exchange project in the Portuguese-speaking world.,

  It is a project aimed at the education, training and mobility of young people in the Portuguese-speaking area, offering them opportunities to study, gain experience and volunteer for a short period in one of the Portuguese-speaking countries of their choice.

Selected by the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP), Fernando Pessoa is considered by some literary critics, alongside Luís de Camões, "the greatest poet of the Portuguese language and one of the greatest of the universal literature".

However, his name has been marked in history by being a staunch defender of the most heinous crime against humanity: slavery.

For the Angolan community, the choice of a Fernando Pessoa to be the patron of this project represents an "attempt by Portugal to try to impose a non consensual figure".

According to the president of the Platform for the Development of African Women (PADEMA), Luzia Moniz, Fernando Pessoa was a racist and slavery defender, “who cannot be indicated as patron of a project whose beneficiaries are mostly young descendants of the enslaved."

Speaking to ANGOP, she recalled that, at the age of 28, Pessoa considered slavery to be logical and legitimate, emphasizing that he even wrote that "a Zulu (black from South Africa) or a landim (Mozambican) do not represent anything useful in this world ".

Quoting the work "Fernando Pessoa: An (almost) autobiography" of the Brazilian researcher José Carlos Cavalcanti Filho, Luzia Moniz recalled that the Portuguese intellectual also wrote that "The legitimate thing is to oblige him (the African), since he is not the type of people that serves the ends of civilization".

She argued that at the age of 40 fernando Pessoa "consolidated his racist ideology," writing: "No one has yet proved that the abolition of slavery was a social good."

From his point of view, "the figure chosen by the CPLP to be the patron of a university exchange project in the Portuguese Language Space is an insult to Africans."

She therefore regretted the fact that there was acceptance by the African countries, which were the real sufferers of slavery. "If it was for this that Portugal struggled to take over the Executive Secretariat of the CPLP, everything indicates that the thing begins badly", she lamented.

"If it is intended to create a community involving the population and not limited to politicians, more or less distracted, it is imperative that the name of Fernando Pessoa does not figure in common projects", Luzia Moniz  defended, adding that in its replacement it could have been indicated the late Angolan academic Mário Pinto de Andrade, "one of the most brilliant intellectuals" of the Portuguese-speaking world (Lusophony).

From the African member countries, the president of PADEMA hopes that they choose to reverse this situation, opposing the name of Fernando Pessoa.

Similarly, the Angolan physician Miguel Kiassekoka considered the choice of Fernando Pessoa's name as "an intention of Portugal to continue as a guide to the new empire, under the cloak of a community that maintained its decision-making centre in Lisbon."

He believes that the Executive Secretariat should consult with the member countries before unilaterally imposing a "Portuguese name unworthy of African common history".

According to him, one of the names that could be attributed to the project is that of José Saramago, Nobel Prize for Literature, or, if it is intended to convey to young people the common African history, Mário Pinto de Andrade.

Angolan sociologist Manuel Luís Dias dos Santos stressed that the assignment of Fernando Pessoa's name to a project/programme of mobility and academic exchange at CPLP "is part of Portugal's strategy as a member state of this community to seek to lead and name common processes of the same organisation ".

For them, in a community mainly composed of Africans and African descendants (Afro-descendants) and women, it is urgent to think of a figure whose personal, intellectual and human trajectory represents mobility in the member states of the CPLP.

On his turn, Angolan researcher Eugénio Costa Almeida said that he would consider "acceptable" the assignment by the CPLP of Fernando Pessoa's name if it had been the will of all members of the community.

"I recognize that one of the reasons that some people have to express their indignation is because Fernando Pessoa has written in text something that can be indicative of some racial prejudice against the black African population”.

He pointed out names like Jorge Amado, Corsino Fortes, Alda Lara, Alda Espírito Santo, among others, as alternatives to Fernando Pessoa.

In the opinion of Ana Maria Guerra Mário, Angolan social worker, the choice of Fernando's name was "abusive", representing an "affront" to the Africans.

"We cannot agree to this choice," she stressed.