Before this monument—raised like a body made of transparency and silence—memory stands upright. Gungunhana, king of Gaza, does not fit inside the display cases of a history written by the victors. He was a fighter, a sovereign, a man torn from his land to serve as a trophy for an empire that confused domination with civilization. His imprisonment, his exile, his public humiliation reveal more about the violence of Portuguese colonialism in Africa than all the speeches of feigned gentleness ever crafted to justify it.

What was done in Mozambique, as in other African territories, was the systematic denial of human dignity, the plunder of sovereignty, the imposition of force as law. The capture of Gungunhana was not a heroic feat. It was an act of colonial brutality—a symbol of a power that feared the freedom of others and therefore felt compelled to chain it.

Yet history, when it is just, knows how to recover its threads. That is why this monument in Angra do Heroísmo carries such rare ethical weight. The people of Terceira—heirs themselves to memories of isolation, exile, and resistance—refuse the comfort of forgetting. In preserving the figure of Gungunhana, they do not celebrate his imprisonment; they expose it. They do not glorify empire; they dismantle it. They turn this place into a site of conscience, honoring all political prisoners, the banished, the deported, and the exiled who passed through the Fortaleza do Monte Brasil, from different geographies and struggles, bound together by the same violence of power.

Here, Gungunhana ceases to be the “defeated” figure of colonial narrative and becomes what he always was: a symbol of African resistance, a fighter for his people’s autonomy, a name that challenges the present. And Terceira—an island of living memory—reminds us that remembrance is a political and moral act. To remember, in this case, is to do justice

Henrique Levy, poet

Translated by Diniz Borges