Black Images Matter

Rescuing African Lives from the Portuguese Imperial Archive

Abstract

Until 2023, the finding aids of the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon, Portugal (Overseas Historical Archive) did not provide information on the scope and content of the archival series “files of settlers and the repatriated” (“processos de colonos e repatriados”) created by the Ministry of the Colonies. While doing research on Portuguese settler migration to Africa, the author came across identification photographs of Black people who were applying for free passage to their birthplace as “repatriates”. The photographs in the files, taken for reasons of visual identification and included for bureaucratic requirements, alerted me to a paradoxically invisible reality: Black people inhabiting the imperial archive and the metropole geography. In this paper, I reflect on this chance encounter — in which image played a central role – taking into account contemporary discussion on decolonial archival and historiographic practices. I acknowledge that those files open new opportunities for historical analysis of Black lives in Portugal and intra-imperial migrations throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Looking closely to concrete cases, I argue that the visual record makes them even more real and human.