The Conference of the African Diaspora in the Americas, which takes place in the city of Salvador (BA) until this Saturday (31), should have, as one of the final proposals for forwarding, the creation of a pan-Africanist development agency by the African Union, with the capital of Bahia as its headquarters.
The information was confirmed to Brazil Agency by professor and researcher Richard Santos, pro-rector of extension and culture at the Federal University of Southern Bahia (UFSB). The pan-Africanist ideology defends the union of the peoples of that continent and their descendants in search of rights and against racism.
“At our working table, we are working to finalize the conference’s final charter. Its themes will be taken to the 9th Pan-African Congress in Togo in October. We will deliver this document to the heads of state who will be in Salvador for the official closing of the conference,” he explains. A meeting of heads of state from the African Union and the diaspora is scheduled for this Saturday.
Salvador as capital
This Friday (30), the debate addressed topics such as reparation, reconstruction and memory, particularly on how to conduct the rapprochement with Africa in the 21st century and where the diaspora of citizens from that continent occurred. “Brazil is the main country of the diaspora outside of Africa, and Salvador, as its capital, is a project for development, rapprochement and multilateral relations,” explained the researcher.
The UFSB professor considered the debate “exquisite” because members of the most varied delegations, from at least 50 countries, focused on themes related to the needs of black and African, and Afro-diasporic populations, from a perspective of “thinking about the future”.
Reconstruction
Also from this perspective of present and future, researcher and activist Igor Prazeres, from the National Coordination of Black Entities (Conen), defended the conference’s position on rebuilding pan-Africanist relations both on that continent and with the countries to which the diaspora from the Americas and the Caribbean took place.
Prazeres believes that it is necessary, in this sense, to prioritize actions to guarantee education, culture and memory. “One priority is education so that we can rebuild relationships through memory so that our knowledge is in schools and universities so that we can train teachers at the base of education who can already work with this broader concept.”
The coordinator of Conen also advocated the creation of a multilateral institution taking advantage of the occasion when Brazil is holding the temporary presidency of the G-20. Therefore, he understands that this is an opportunity to emphatically defend traditional communities, including quilombola peoples, policies for children and adolescents, and to discuss police actions in the war against drugs “which most exterminate our youth”.
He believes that these issues should be discussed at the Congress in Togo in October. “There is still a view of Eurocentrism as a matrix of knowledge. This Eurocentric view that Brazil is a racial democracy has not yet been overcome,” he says.
