Under Our Skin

1570: A street teems with activity in Renaissance Lisbon: boatmen unload passengers as jugglers entertain the crowd and vendors hawk their goods. The crowd is large, and more than half of it is Black. Most are enslaved African people performing an array of duties, but there are free Africans too, and somebody else: a Black knight astride a horse.

Four hundred and fifty years later, novelist and journalist Joaquim Arena stands in a museum, transfixed by the character depicted on this canvas ...