Version imprimableBorn in 1974 in Kolda, Senegal, Mamadou Ba, leader.of SOS Racismo (Portugal) s one of the most prominent figures in anti-racist activism in Portugal. He studied Portuguese Language and Culture at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, and completed a translator’s course at the University of Lisbon. He is a leader of SOS Racismo and was an adviser to the Bloco de Esquerda [1], a party from which he resigned at the end of 2019. The Luso-Senegalese man now lives in Canada, where he is doing a doctorate and master’s degree at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, where he also teaches.
His intervention in the public space has not been immune to controversies or the creation of antibodies. In January 2019, after criticising the actions of the PSP [2] in the Bairro da Jamaica, he was the target of physical threats by far-right groups. Later, he had police protection, due to the threats to which he continued to be subjected. He also faced legal proceedings, such as the conviction for defamation of Mário Machado — subsequently annulled — after having stated that the neo-Nazi activist was "one of the main figures in the murder of Alcindo Monteiro" [3]. More recently, he was the target of a complaint from the prison guards’ union, following social media posts in which he associated violence in prisons with the deaths of inmates. He is the author of the book Antirracismo — a nossa luta é por respeito, amor e dignidade (Anti-racism — our struggle is for respect, love and dignity). It was by videoconference to Vancouver that PÚBLICO spoke with Mamadou Ba.
PÚBLICO - Why did you go to Canada?
Mamadou Ba - The need for security in the broad sense of the word: to feel safe with myself. To feel free. The experience of police protection was very traumatic. I felt tired and needed to protect the people around me. I wanted to return to studying and doing research. I was interested in putting activism and academia into dialogue. I thought it could also be a contribution to leave the scene. It’s important that the movement learns to recycle itself. If you don’t have the humility to understand that you have to fade a little so that other figures emerge, we don’t broaden horizons. I wanted to breathe and I’m very happy in Canada, because no one knows me.
From what moment did you have police protection and how long did it last?
I asked for it for the first time when I was the target of an ambush by the PNR [4] in front of Picoas Plaza [Lisbon], in January 2019. I was lucky, because I could have died that day. But they didn’t give me protection, they thought I was exaggerating. The following week, I was attacked at Barreiro train station by five skinheads, before going to a debate at the Setúbal School of Education. After participating in this initiative, I went straight to the Judicial Police to file a complaint and ask for police protection, which again was not given to me. I felt completely abandoned in that period, from the point of view of the parties. On the one hand, the Bloco de Esquerda was running away with its tail between its legs so as not to be stuck with me; on the other, the PCP [5] and the PS [6] said they were on the side of the police. Except for the social movement, I was left alone. The political parties completely abandoned me. In February of the same year, two skinheads tried to assault me on bus 727.
There were many people worried about me. For my children, it became a very annoying thing. They would phone to know where I was and if I was accompanied. When you don’t have freedom, the people around you don’t either. That wasn’t pleasant to live with. It happened several times that people would come to my house, escort me with two or three cars, we would do an activity and return. I’m very grateful to everyone because there was a very strong current of solidarity.
In the summer of 2020, there was graffiti on the walls of the SOS Racismo headquarters saying "War on the enemies of my land". Following this, there was a Ku Klux Klan parade in front of the SOS headquarters and then threats were directed at several people, including Joacine Katar Moreira and Mariana Mortágua. I think because people representing organs of sovereignty were involved, in this case two deputies, the State woke up and gave us police protection.
It lasted about five months, but I couldn’t stand it anymore and I did everything to end the police protection. I stopped complying with the protocol. I had to say where I was going, how, what time to what time, with whom. It was an immense unhappiness not being able to walk alone in the street or use public transport. When, for example, I was on the IndieLisboa jury, it was a very painful experience. Both in the viewing of a film, and in the meeting and discussion afterwards, I always had those police officers behind me. When they held the evaluation meeting, they thought I didn’t want more protection and the threat had diminished, so we ended it.
And what was the experience like after you stopped having police protection?
It was a mixed feeling. I freed myself from the weight of police protection, but there was always a feeling of imminent danger. Due to the distrust I have of the presence of far-right elements within the police, who knew that I was no longer under police protection, I had some stress. And because there were several episodes in which I was insulted on the street or in cafés. Social pressure increased on people close to me who didn’t want me to walk alone. I always had to use Uber, I couldn’t use a [traditional] taxi.
Once I got an Uber and the driver asked if I was Mamadou. Afraid of being recognised, I said no, but he insisted on asking. During the journey he revealed himself, saying he was from the Roma community, and wanted to show solidarity. Until he said that there was doubt whether it could be, for example, a skinhead. Because I often got taxis, whose drivers would later insult me or refuse to take me. All this became a burden because the people around me were always wanting to know how I was and what I needed. I had big arguments with friends who were angry when they knew I had gone out alone because I was putting my life at risk, even when it wasn’t justified.
On the last 10 June [7], an actor from the A Barraca theatre was assaulted by neo-Nazis, as were volunteers distributing food to the homeless in Porto. Sheikh David Munir was also insulted. Given your experience, you have been involved in legal proceedings and had to move house three times after your address was exposed on social media. In the current political moment, what effect can these episodes have on people’s willingness to show their faces and be active in movements, parties or other organisations? Can fear paralyse?
That’s the objective. I’m not saying I’m not afraid, that would be too pretentious. We all are. Fear is a weapon when we know how to mobilize it, because it catalyses the alert, the awareness that something is not right and that we need to rise up against what goes against our dignity. Intimidation has an effect, because it has devastating consequences for mental health. There’s a whole negative energy and tension that arises around any activist. And when one is the target of public attention, it reverberates in our environment and contaminates all aspects of our life. Our children, partners, friends are all affected by that circumstance.
This creates doubts about what’s most important — to fight back or to shrink. The purpose is for people to shrink out of fear or fatigue. That happened to me. I moved house three times. This has an impact on the people you live with, who start to ask: "Is it really worth it? Are we safe from this?" When these questions appeared at home, I used to use a phrase from Ondjaki’s father [8], Commander Juju, who said at the time of the Colonial War to his comrades: "We’re surrounded, but we’ll get out of this."
I think they do this so that we’re afraid, to create entropies and gears in the movement, but when we look at the history of the black radical tradition, we realise that we didn’t come from nothing. Each of us is the result of a piece of struggle. We are a continuity, always. That’s why the project of creating fear can’t succeed. There’s a cyclical capacity for regeneration.
A 2022 report by a consortium of journalists denounced the hate speech of 591 security force agents. You were, after André Ventura [9], the person most targeted, in this case being the target of hate speech. What is your perspective on your public persona and having been the target of mockery?
I was just a pretext. I symbolised what those people who feed on hatred of what is different carry within themselves. They created this idea of Mamadou as a character hostile to institutions. This is a way of diverting the debate and prevents us from seriously discussing the race question. Hatred in the police is a very old thing. It’s a colonial heritage. There just wasn’t anyone who denounced it in the public square, as I and other people began to do at the end of the last century.
Just go and read the records of the first prosecution notes from the Public Prosecutor’s Office about young black people from the peripheries, from the late 1990s until now, to realise that this hate speech that the police mobilises against black people is real. We had the death of "Toni" in 2005 and "Kuku" in 2014, who was a 14-year-old child, but was treated in the press as if he were the greatest gangster in police history.
Today there is greater visibility of denunciation and it is more instantaneous and accessible because of social media. The capacity for political confrontation in the public space by black people against institutions in general and the police in particular has increased.
What made you want to study again?
There’s a need to dispute the hegemonic discourse on the race question which is highly colonial. It’s necessary to decolonise knowledge. To combat white privilege, we have to combat epistemic privilege and doctrinal privilege.
There is a strategic impasse on the left over the race question, because whiteness is something that cuts across the entire Western political spectrum. Anyone who wants to understand the unease that people like me feel, who are affiliated with the left, just needs to read Aimé Césaire’s letter of resignation from the French Communist Party in 1956. It’s a clear letter that could be transported to today’s reality.
Often, people who are in the anti-racist movement are unjustly accused of being identitarian, of not having ideological density, of being sectarian. All these accusations led me to want to put into dialogue what I learned as an activist and black political subject with what is being produced as hegemonic narrative.
If we want to combat the advance of the far-right that uses identity to exclude, we — anti-racists from all over the world — have to know that identity is an addition, not a subtraction. Why does a female employee of a factory unit in the Lisbon metropolitan area, Setúbal or Porto detest a non-white colleague of hers when, in theory, they are subjected to the same order?
Because in that person’s head a fallacy has been installed: because she’s white she has an advantage over the non-white person beside her. This is symbolic privilege. The idea of superiority is a certificate of savings for certain people. We live in a society of competition, in which a hierarchy was created.
I’m very obsessed with categories, because they are necessary to demonstrate how structural the race question is; and so that we can identify where, how and when inequalities operate; and understand how to create public policies to respond to these inequalities, especially when they have a racial factor behind them.
How is it possible, through the existing vocabulary, to overcome the categories themselves?
It’s the political content that we apply to them. We gave a political charge to the category "worker", for example. Fanon [10] said that the white person doesn’t exist and neither does the black person, in that sense of racialism. Being black doesn’t define me as a person, but determines the place I occupy in a society that is racist. Therefore, I may not be able to access a nightclub or I may not be able to rent a house because the owner may not like black people. There’s a whole hegemonic force within which each category was assigned that needs to be deconstructed — and that academia is lazy about doing.
In 2018, you wrote a critique in PÚBLICO of the book Políticas de Inimizade (Politics of Enmity), by Achille Mbembe [11], where you recall the Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt stating that "enmity has become a central aspect of contemporary political life where the search for the enemy is an integral part of the life of democracies". Why are anti-immigration discourses, which target an enemy, having so much success?
It’s a question of power. Xenophobia, anti-immigration rhetoric, identitarian racism, has to do with who controls what. We see what’s happening in Palestine, and we realise that all the rhetoric about "shared humanity" is a sham. There is no shared humanity before the barbarity that is happening before our eyes.
I was in Lampedusa [12] in 2013, at the time when hundreds of dead bodies were arriving on the beaches every day. One thing that caught my attention was a boat cemetery, which was very well maintained. They took me to a thicket inside the cemetery. There were no plaques, names, nothing. It looked like a mass grave. Even in death, immigrants don’t belong. Europe’s borders place an important part of the world outside humanity. The normalisation of the indignity committed in relation to "different" people is what explains something that isn’t talked about much: the West is haunted by the idea of the end of history.
It’s no coincidence that the Western far-right mobilises the idea of the "great replacement" — it’s obsessed with it. In Portugal, when we hear populist far-right politicians talk about being proud of their history, about not having to apologise for anything, it has to do with that, it has to do with that obsession. We created an idea in Portuguese society that we were exceptional from the point of view of our colonial history. All this Lusotropicalist chimera [13] explains the issue of anti-immigration rhetoric discourse, because, according to this rhetoric, it’s necessary to ensure that national citizens have access to resources that are being disputed by an order of invaders. It’s the perfect enemy.
When we accuse immigrants, we are absolving the elites of responsibility for the lack of housing, the degradation of public services. It’s a counterfire strategy in the face of the failure of neoliberal policies. That’s why anti-immigration discourse will continue. It proceeds from an inability to assume the political failure of the current economic model, which has already shown its limits. The elites want to save themselves.
Chega grew quite rapidly from 2019. Was it something that surprised you?
Not at all. Fascism left very deep marks on Portuguese society. Its symbolic defeat in 1974 was a political defeat, but it was not an ideological defeat. There’s a specific phenomenon that few people talk about in Portugal that is only identical to France: the returnees [14]. There’s a ghost of return [from the ex-colonies] that marks spirits and is obsessively present in the Portuguese collective imagination.
There has never ceased to be a large space for fascism in Portugal from a political point of view. What didn’t exist was someone capable of mobilising it and disputing it in power. This strategy was very well assembled. He started with what is a common denominator in Portugal, which is anti-Roma prejudice. When he installs and normalises this anti-Roma discourse, he fetches the rhetorical resources of the Estado Novo [15] and modernises these discourses around security, corruption and ethics to attack the political system that has largely failed.
This discourse also succeeded through a very important pillar which was the mobilization of police discontent. André Ventura’s launching ramp was Movimento Zero [16], a para-union organization within the security forces. It’s no coincidence that he’s friends with the most reactionary sectors and those affiliated with far-right forces within the security forces. Either we face this issue of fascism that wants to use democracy to reverse it or it’s a matter of time until we very soon have a fascist government.
What is your perspective on how the rest of the political-party spectrum, namely the Government, has coexisted with the far-right?
At this moment, those who determine the Government’s policy on migration issues and ethnic diversity are the far-right. In the 1990s, in France, the right imploded because it thought it could sanitise the discourse of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front [17] and that by doing so it could recover the discontent mobilised by the far-right to defeat the left. That’s what the Portuguese right is doing. That has already proven not to work. People prefer the original to the copy. The prospects are bleak and we have to mobilize.
On 10 June, the writer Lídia Jorge [18] made a speech that addressed the Portuguese colonial past and stated: "The fallacy of single ancestry has no correspondence with reality: each of us is a sum, has blood of the native and the migrant, of the European and the African, of the white and the black and of all human colours." What is your opinion of this speech?
I value the speech and understand its strategic and political reach, but I was not among those who acclaimed it. To understand that no one is pure in Portugal, we need to assume the consequences of what crystallised the idea of racial purity: the deficit of equality with which black or non-white people live in democracy, which results from this idea that colonialism has passed, it was a pain, and now we have to think about the future. This wound needs to be healed and it’s still very open.
I also don’t forget the circumstances in which it was pronounced and who pronounced it.
This country has a problem with memory and politics cannot be made without it. When the debate about the Museum of Discoveries [19] was raised, Lídia Jorge was part of the group of public figures who were outraged with those who rose up against its construction and the debate around the legacy of colonial history. We cannot make this leap into the void as if there were nothing in between.
It’s not about judging history. It judged itself. Responsibilities are also more than established. There are crimes that are imprescriptible. We must organize society so that this crime is not repeated.
How can this new wave of immigration, namely from South-West Asia, and the Portuguese perception of it be creating new dynamics and conflicts with ethnic and religious minorities, in the way racism manifests itself in Portugal?
What is happening with Indo-Asian communities is a historical continuity. In the 1970s/80s, the focus was against black communities, essentially Lusophone, because there was a bond and historical circumstance that determined they were more numerous. At the end of the 1990s, the focus changed, it became Brazilians — everyone remembers the episode of the "mothers of Bragança" [20]. Now it has changed. The logic of importing cheap labour has turned more towards people from the Indo-Asian space.
It also has to do with economic cycles. If we look at the sectors where there is greater labour precarity: distribution, agriculture and hospitality. In the past, it was construction and hospitality. Those who criticise identitarian movements should understand why the far-right, the conservative right, and the hygienic right manage to mobilize the idea of danger to national identity. The far-right says it clearly, but the rest of the right says it in a subtle way.
The presence of these people can be a threat to national identity. The "Portuguese White of Fonseca" [21] no longer exists and hasn’t for a long time. The world is a mosaic composition of various archives of humanity. All people obsessed with ethnic purity will suffer and create more suffering, because they will mobilize their obsession with purity against people who have nothing to do with their existential pains and their fear of the end of history.
It will be difficult to combat this discourse if those who fight for democratic values begin to relativise these attacks. We are experiencing things very close to what was experienced in the 1930s. The pogroms started like this. What happened in Spain (in Torre Pacheco) [22] has already happened in France and happened in Portugal, but on a smaller scale. In Montemor, immigrants were persecuted; in Setúbal, an immigrant was killed at home; in Porto, immigrants were hunted and persecuted. The hunt for the Jew and the hunt for the black person continue in the hunt for the immigrant.
In recent years, the discussion about racism has gained new protagonists, whether through music, politics or movements like Vida Justa [23]. What is your perspective on what has changed in the capacity for political and cultural affirmation?
Much has changed for the positive. Our organisations have stopped being just folkloric remnants of a condescending gaze from certain sectors of Portuguese society that had some concern with ideas of social justice. The organisations have political personality, capacity for confrontation and proposals. They gave programmatic content to the struggles. It was a taboo for many years and today it is discussed openly. People agree, disagree, but there is a debate. That’s important.
But people think that having black women in politics is a novelty. It’s not. The leaders of the largest immigrant associations in the 1990s were women. Alcestina Tolentino was the president of the Cape Verdean Association, which was the largest immigrant association in Portugal; Amina Lawal, who was the president of the Mozambican Association; Carla Marejano, who was president of the African Cultural Centre; Olga Santos, from the Moçambique Sempre association. All these figures were very important in the 1990s. They are women of weight and great political capacity who marked the political struggle of the anti-racist social movement.
I take this opportunity to pay tribute to a figure who has disappeared and who isn’t talked about much: Fernando Ka, who was a PS deputy. He was one of the first columnists at PÚBLICO and signed his columns as a black Portuguese. He and Manuel Correia of the PCP were very important people. Then came the wave of new generations of public black women — Joacine [Katar Moreira], Beatriz Gomes Dias, Romualda Fernandes. But also figures from the intellectual debate, such as Cristina Roldão, Kitty Furtado, Sheila Khan, Sónia Vaz Borges and Raquel Lima. We began to fill all the fields. Before them, there was Inocência Mata or Iolanda Évora.
All these characters were filling the spaces of theoretical and political debate. Each of them showed themselves in their field and at the same time integrated the struggle in activism. This is fundamental, and I think it opened up adherence to artists. Hip-hop had a very important role in the consolidation of this movement. In the 1990s, we had General D, who deserves a national tribute that hasn’t been made yet. Few people know that he was one of the first black candidates for the European elections. Before him, there was Lena Lopes da Silva, who was the first black woman to be a candidate for European elections in democracy; and after her, Anabela Rodrigues, who also ran.
Another figure who stood out in hip-hop was Xullaji, for his propositional but also disruptive capacity. After that came the more highly regarded, mainstream people: Dino, for example, who did a courageous act at PÚBLICO’s 31st anniversary, when the then Prime Minister António Costa compared me to André Ventura. He dedicated the entire concert to me and to the anti-racist struggle.
All this shows the progress of things. Vida Justa is now the new space where struggles for dignity meet and which embrace other aspects: police violence, access to housing. This is the paradigm that must prevail so that struggles are not captured. Why does the police kill in the neighbourhoods? Why does it kill black people? Why are spaces and bodies inhabited by black people targets of State violence? Why is it that when people’s houses are demolished as happened in Talude [24] it doesn’t provoke any collective commotion? Because it is very selective when it comes to black or Roma people. It’s racism. There cannot be any political struggle agenda, however deep and structural it may be, in the current Portuguese context, that doesn’t take the race question into account. The future will involve having the capacity to understand the intersectional dimension of this condition.
You wrote in PÚBLICO in 2019 that "the debate in Portugal about strategies and alliances in combating racism is increasingly marked by a tension between racialised activists and white supporters". What is your analysis of the alliance of anti-racist movements with parties, namely those on the left?
It’s a weak, disloyal and, to a large extent, politically dishonest alliance. But it’s indispensable. The left has to understand that because it’s our first ally, it’s with it that we are most demanding. Often there’s this lack of perception. I have no hope of making any alliance with the right that results in a substantial change in the condition of racialised people. In my perspective, the left is an ally, but sometimes it can be an adversary. The right is always an adversary, when it’s not an enemy. All left-wing parties have an anti-racist agenda, in very different degrees and forms, but they don’t yet have an anti-racist programme. Without a programme, there is no politics. The agenda is of the order of dispute, rhetoric and discourse; the programme is of the order of practice and effective combat against inequality with a racial factor. The left needs to have the capacity to expose itself to the doctrinal fragilities that mark our space of thought without falling into the temptation of immediately accusing those who raise it as identitarian or sectarian.
There needs to be sincerity in our alliance and understanding that the defeat of capitalism will never come from the centre, but from the peripheries. And who occupies the peripheries? Non-white people. I am deeply anchored in the left and, if there’s a social segment in the West in particular that doesn’t need lessons about what it is to be left-wing, it’s non-white people. Because they live the meaning and impact of class inequality in daily life: in access to work, to goods and services and to the territory itself.
There must be a willingness not to instrumentalise struggles. The left has become accustomed to looking at the movement as an obstacle. It’s neither one thing nor the other. The anti-racist movement is one of the essential devices that the left has to combat inequality. The anti-racist movement must not be an appendage, but a force.
What led you to choose the master’s degree in Communication? How does this relate to the current context marked by the impact of social media and these new communication dynamics?
If there’s one person in Portugal who has been the target of mockery, persecution through communication, it was me. The media and social media were mobilised to create a persona that coincides with an agenda that the far-right and the system wanted to exist.
We live in a kind of plutocracy, which is the main vehicle of digital capitalism, which is also racial capitalism. The large digital corporations completely control communication and determine how classic journalism behaves, tethering it to new forms of communication, and construct a whole narrative repertoire of consolidation of a fascist idea of society. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google itself are weapons of mass destruction of democracy; and they are planetary spaces for normalisation of absurdity, indecency, violence and impunity. No one ever thought we would live in a time when we could watch a genocide live. It’s in this normalisation that one of the most racist discourses we have heard in the last 40 years about Palestinians is constructed. All this led me to want to better understand these phenomena.
I also wanted to dialogue with myself. Often, we want to speak with other people and we forget to speak with ourselves about what we think is a way, a form of thought, our certainties and our uncertainties. This course has an interesting thing because it allows two options: to write a thesis; or a final product based on a reflection based on concrete cases, on your life story or on the lives of other people — a circumstantial analysis of some phenomenon that can be related to broader reflections.
Returning to Mbembe. In Políticas de Inimizade (Politics of Enmity), the author suggests the alteration of a democratic paradigm which he calls "the democracy of the living", in which all living beings fit, human, animal, vegetal, so that the ecosystems that sustain them can be preserved. How to get there?
Two things: to definitively get rid of the ideology of possession and the idea that we need to extract everything and more from nature; the second is to understand that we are a tiny part of the ecosystem. Until now, as Mbembe said, what has guided the models of social organization is the idea that we resemble each other, where we can treat each other well. But we need to treat well everything that is around us. Instead of the "democracy of the similar", which is only among those who think they are alike and close, the "democracy of the living" is an idea of horizontal coexistence and the need for self-preservation and preservation. That’s why I always say that climate justice, racial justice and economic justice are completely interlinked. One without the other is unviable.
7 September 2025
