Cais do Valongo will have a museum and will resume management committee

Cais do Valongo, a former slave port and world heritage site since 2017, will once again have a participatory management committee. The resumption of the organ, extinct in 2019, was marked yesterday (9), by the visit of a federal delegation to the pier, in the center of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Before its extinction, the group was composed of representatives of bodies and institutions involved in the conservation of the site and had the responsibility of directing and planning the management and enhancement of Cais do Valongo. “Unesco requires it to have a management committee, which is a participatory committee, made up of all the people who are responsible for managing that site, and also provides for a management plan”, says the attorney general Sérgio Suiama, who charges the resumption of the committee since its extinction. The entourage, formed by the ministers of Racial Equality, Anielle Franco, and of Culture, Margareth Menezes, in addition to the president of the National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), Aloizio Mercadante, and by the first lady, Janja Lula da Silva, also reaffirmed the commitment to build a museum on the site. “We are here to reaffirm a commitment to the black people, to the memory and reparation that we have in this place, a historic place”, said Anielle Franco. A project to revitalize the space should be announced later this month. A memorial will be built in an old warehouse, located in front of the property, with BNDES resources. “We are going to announce, on March 21, the entire design of the project that will be forwarded. Like the whole process of revitalizing and strengthening this territory and building a new, strategic cultural space that is a center for rescuing and preserving the memory and history of Africans in Brazil,” said Mercadante. Cais do Valongo was unveiled in 2011 during the works to revitalize the port area. During the slave regime, more than a million slaves from Africa disembarked in Brazil through the old pier, which made it, according to the National Historical and Artistic Heritage Institute (Iphan), the largest port for receiving slaves in the world. *With information from TV Brasil

Agência Brasil