Mario E Brito

The lions' point of view Mario E Brito

The paraphrase of the title "the lions' point of view" resumes the well-known African proverb: "until the lions have their own historians, the stories of the hunt will continue glorifying the hunter". It is a formula that makes history and power inseparable: first, by establishing a consciousness of collective identity among the oppressed; second, by unfolding this oppression in the unequal access to the means of production of historical knowledge. Therein lies the problem of this book: as changing the present, was colonialism in post-World War II ( or the hunt in the aforementioned proverb) related to changing the histories that the colonizers (or hunters) promoted? The timeliness of this problem is flagrant when protests triggered by the brutality of police officers that in turn resulted in the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis (USA) give rise to iconoclastic demonstrations against slavery and colonial monuments in various urban centers of the Atlantic World.