By Trevor Hunnicutt and Catarina Demony
LUANDA (Reuters) – Joe Biden will use his visit to Angola on Tuesday, the first by a U.S. president to the sub-Saharan African country, to mark the two nations’ shared history in the transatlantic slave trade.
Biden plans to speak at the National Museum of Slavery in Luanda, a site that includes the 17th Century chapel where enslaved people were forcibly baptized before being sent to the Americas in chains.
The first Africans who arrived to the British colony of Virginia in 1619 were captured in Angola; overall 4 million Angolans were forcibly transported to the Americas, mostly to Brazil but also to the now-United States.
Biden’s audience in Luanda is expected to include Wanda Tucker, a Black American who traced her ancestry to Angolans shipped to what is now Hampton, Virginia.
The museum where he will speak was the former property of one of the largest enslavers on the African coast. Inside, several objects that were used to torture and punish enslaved people can still be seen today, including shackles and iron weights.
The United States is announcing a grant of $229,000 to support the building’s restoration.
ALTERNATIVE TO CHINA
Biden’s Angola trip will also tout a major, U.S.-backed railway project that aims to divert critical minerals away from China. It fulfills a promise to visit Sub-Saharan Africa on what could be his final foreign trip before leaving office in January.
Washington is investing millions of dollars in Angola and gradually forging ties with a strategic country with which it was once at odds.
On Tuesday, Biden meets with Angola’s President Joao Lourenco and the two will talk about issues including security and trade cooperation, White House officials said. Angola and the U.S. are set to hold a defense cooperation meeting next year on cyber and maritime security.
Biden wraps his trip to Angola up on Wednesday with a summit with leaders from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania and Zambia.
He’ll also see part of the Lobito Corridor, the rail project linking resource-rich Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia to the Angolan port of Lobito on the Atlantic Ocean.
China signed an agreement with Tanzania and Zambia in September to revive a rival railway line to Africa’s eastern coast. Vast supplies of minerals including copper and cobalt are found in Congo and are a key component of batteries and other electronics.
China is the top player in Congo, which has become an increasing concern to Washington. Russia, meanwhile, is the major supplier of weapons to Angola.
Biden arrived in the capital Luanda on Monday to streets filled with thousands of onlookers.
REPARATIONS?
Still hurt by the legacies of slavery and colonialism, officials from Angola and its former colonial power Portugal have tried to address the issues left behind in recent years.
Portugal trafficked nearly 6 million Africans, more than any other European nation.
Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said in April his country was responsible for crimes committed during slavery and the colonial era, and suggested there was a need for reparations.
Rebelo de Sousa’s comments sparked a national debate in Portugal and strong criticism from right-wing parties.
Lourenco said his country would not ask Portugal for reparations, saying it would be “impossible” to make up for what happened in the past.
About 160 years after slavery was abolished in the United States, vast wealth gaps still exist between white and Black Americans, land ownership remains concentrated among wealthy whites and a fraught political debate is centered on diversity, equity and how to reckon with the country’s racial history.
Biden is not expected to talk about U.S. reparations over the slave trade during his trip.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt, Editing by Heather Timmons and Lincoln Feast.)
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