LITTLE AFRICAS

“The museum of the poor are the walls of the home.” This is how Tia Dodô, the first flag-bearer to carry the Portela Samba School’s flag, aptly expressed the feeling of exclusion she felt at the erasure of Black popular culture. Fortunately, the walls of her modest house in Providência, near Praça Onze, were full of records of her career as a sambista who had been dedicated throughout her life to a single samba school. Although they did not express the same sentiment so explicitly, many other sambistas, sensing their cultural importance, used the walls of their homes to house the tributes that society did not pay them. There you can find records of great importance to understand the universe of work, leisure and affection in which these characters lived. In histories comprised of gaps and silences, what often remains are the walls of house-museums, testimonies that survived the sea of oblivion and erasure in which society tried to drown them.