History has grown accustomed to speaking from above. It raised its voice, refined its vocabulary, and surrounded itself with method and erudition. In doing so, it distanced itself from what it claimed to understand and recount: lived life. It became a vertical discourse about the past, when it should have been a horizontal listening to the human condition. It confused rigor with detachment and authority with truth, as if the complexity of existence and of people’s lives could be contained within chronologies, dates, genealogies, dynastic successions, and episodes selected to legitimize an idea of greatness.

By organizing time into straight, progressive lines, History ignored the fact that processes are cyclical, unstable, made of trials, retreats, and adaptations. Biology knows this well: no organism evolves through uninterrupted triumph. It survives through error, cooperation, and resilience. Human societies are no different. Yet historical narrative has preferred spectacular moments of rupture—wars, conquests, foundations—and, in a rhetoric of victory, has silenced the slow rhythms of labor, care, oral transmission, and everyday subsistence. It chose the victors as the measure of reality and treated the ordinary as mere noise or background. This choice is not innocent. By transforming the past into epic, History became complicit with power. And thus, History traded observation for ornamental discourse, doubt for instituted authority, the question for a closed and transmissible version. It forgot that knowledge begins only when it renounces reverence and accepts confrontation with what contradicts its own accounts—and that no form of knowledge is legitimate if it is unwilling to listen to what was silenced because it did not serve the established order.

Perhaps this is why Africa was, for centuries, excluded from History. The cradle of humanity—where the first tools, the earliest forms of symbolic art, the first complex systems of social organization, the first religions emerged—was reduced to a prologue or a footnote. In its place, textbooks erected a comfortable genealogy populated by Greeks, Persians, Romans, as if science, mathematics, astronomy, or medicine had suddenly sprung forth in the Mediterranean, severed from millennia of African knowledge. This amputation is not merely an academic injustice. It reveals symbolic violence that impoverishes our understanding of humans and reinforces hierarchies that continue to shape the world today.

To bring History back into proximity with people’s lives requires a profound change of attitude. It is not enough to add new chapters or forgotten names. The gaze itself must be altered. The obsession with exceptional events must give way to rigorous attention to long processes. Knowledge from anthropology, archaeology, biology, climatology, and oral memory must be integrated. The illusions, fears, and hopes of communities must be taken seriously—not as folklore, but as historical data. We must recognize that houses that collapsed without a record, anonymous migrations, silent forms of resistance, and everyday beliefs often say more about an era than reigns, treaties, and battles.

A History more attuned to life will necessarily be humbler. It will accept error, constant revision, and incompleteness. It will not present itself as a definitive narrative, but as an open process of interpretation. It will draw closer to science than to the literature of power, without renouncing language, yet refusing the empty ornament that obscures rather than clarifies.

In an archipelago like the Azores, where History was forged on the margins of great centers and far from triumphant narratives, this reflection is no abstract exercise. Here, for more than five hundred years, life has been shaped by isolation, uncertain crossings, persistent scarcity, and adaptation as a rule of survival. Life was rarely made of heroic deeds or memorable exploits. It was made of community, of waiting, of repeated labor, of solutions invented at the limit, of emigration, of the unspeakable suffering of a people who learned early that resistance is a collective and silent act—knowing, from the outset, that the continuity of life depends more on cooperation than on glory, more on resilience than on conquest. Perhaps it is precisely from these peripheral, forgotten islands, so often subtracted from History, that one can demand a way of writing the past that is less monumental, less celebratory, less submissive to power: a History capable of recognizing the value of the anonymous, of failures and repetitions, of fears and hopes that sustained these isolated communities in the middle of the Atlantic.

Only a History that recognizes human fragility as foundational matter—and certain historical events as errors not to be repeated—can aspire to touch the living truth it claims to pursue. For historical truth is not built from triumphant abstractions or elevated discourses, but from what endures when everything else fails: the body that labors, the community that resists oppression, the collective intelligence that learns how to survive.

It was the popular classes who, in silence and continuity, made History, while others fixed it in writing in a distorted manner, seeking to distance the people from recognizing their own power to constitute memory through accumulated experience. The writing of History has never been neutral; it has aimed to fragment consciousness, to dissolve the collective into scattered episodes, naturalizing inequalities as if they were destiny. Thus, real History never belonged to those who proclaim it from the pulpits of power. It is the work of anonymous people, of hands without signature, of lives that do not fit into illustrious genealogies. They are the ones who sustain the long durée, resisting the violence of imposed ruptures, turning everyday life into a continuous exercise in survival and creation. Even when silenced and excluded from official names, people continue to produce History. Their epic is not one of immediate triumph or spectacular victory. It is the epic of duration, of permanence against erosion, of ethical insistence against oppression. It is not found on conquest or on the blood of glorified wars, but on the capacity to remain, to transmit, to care, and to rebuild. It is in this collective, discreet, irreducible persistence that History finds its true greatness. And it is there—far from the rhetoric of power and elitist academies—that the demanding truth reveals itself: the future only opens when the people recognize in themselves the subject of History they have always been.

Only a History that affirms human fragility as a constitutive substance, rather than an anomaly to be corrected, can approach the living truth it declares it seeks. That truth has never allowed itself to be fixed in grand discourses or normative compendia, because it does not arise from abstraction but from concrete, shared experience. It concerns how people organize life, establish bonds of care, and construct ethics of survival and justice. From this patient, collective, and historically situated ethics emerges a real horizon of liberation capable of guiding societies toward more just and peaceful forms of coexistence.

All progress that claims legitimacy ultimately depends on the recognition of this shared condition and on a balanced relationship with Nature—understood not as a resource to be exploited, but as the living matrix of human history itself.

Translated by Diniz Borges