Chunk of coal, piece of asphalt, blackness that anticipates rain. They called her everything, did to her even worse and, yet, in her laughter, there is no bitterness. She lost her mother as soon as she was born and would lose much more throughout her life, but grew up among Alentejo love and fed herself with solidarity. In between the fados she sings, hasn’t yet discovered one that spells her story in the lyrics. But her signature, decided so long ago as in a prediction, says it all. Name: Rosário. Surname: Felicidade – the precise Portuguese word for Happiness.

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Rosário Felicidade

Born in Gabela, Angola

71 years old

 

It is said that she was the first black woman to live in the city of Santa Maria da Feira. Some called her “chunk of coal” and “piece of asphalt”; others said, as she walked by, that “it is going to rain”; certain women looked at her sideways, for fear that her African appeal could steal their husbands; and even children learned to repeat to her the same abuse they heard from their parents. Rosário learned to joke about herself as a form of resistance and chose not to be hurt. “One creates a cover and lets it harden, because there are persons out there who are very unpleasant, uneducated and stupid. But there are also very nice people and I prefer to think about the positive things that were done to me”, she says today.

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Rosário was born in Gabela, Angola, almost alone. Her mother died shortly after giving birth to her as a result of severe bleeding and the baby remained in the hospital pratically abandoned, raising the concern of parturient women who saw the nurse on duty being neglectful of the colored baby, stealing her the own milk which was meant to feed her. This could have been an awful start to an even worse story, but, in fact, it was this very neglect that put Fatima, a second nurse, in the little girl’s path. Rosário's father worked in the coffee plantations and Fátima was the one watching over the girl, becoming so attached to her that, shortly afterwards, she was proposing him to educate his daughter herself. The man must have been relieved and that was how the girl ended up adopted by two white women from Portugal’s southern region of Alentejo – Fátima and her mother, Joaquina. The father’s visits to the new house became rarer, two years later the genetic link lost its importance and, at a certain point, his absence was no longer a topic. That is why Rosário has little vocabulary in the Quimbundo language and barely knows the Angolan dialects: “Everyone at home was white and they were the ones who raised me. Some even said that I became convinced I was white, but the fact is that my mentality has always been European. I never liked walking barefoot like other Angolans, I never did agro hairstyles, I never enjoyed African dances… ”. Rosário has always felt like “a black woman from the European Union”, she supports the Benfica sports club and, on her karaoke nights, it is Amália Rodrigues that she most sings.

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These preferences were imprinted on her more intensely at her first effective contact with Portugal. When Rosário came here for the first time, in 1963, then at the age of 14, she loved the modernity of everything. She toured Lisbon, she fell in love with Porto, she made friends who still stand by her today and, if it is true that she was then seen as an eccentricity, it is also a fact that she was also considered a good omen. “At the public celebrations dedicated to Our Lady Senhora da Agonia, in Viana do Castelo, a couple with a bunch of children came to us – with that talk about ‘Oh The little black girl! She will give us luck!’ – and I had to kiss all of them, as I saw all the lice walking around on the kids´ heads”, she recalls. It was in 1981, on a second visit to Portugal and already fleeing from the independence war in Angola, that the way in which people threw at her the word “retornada/returned” revealed that the disdain had become more intense. Rosário still feels hurt, namely for remembering situations such as a certain Christmas Eve, when, while paying the bill in a supermarket in Matosinhos, she realized that she lacked five cents for the total amount and, asking the employee to keep the goods aside while she went home to collect the missing coin, the woman insulted her with brutal violence, in verbal terms that are not worth detailing. “A couple behind me saw everything, told the employee that they would pay for my purchases and asked if I wanted anything else,” continues Rosário. “They didn't want thanks or money back; they said they just wanted me to have a good Christmas”. (Tears have to be controlled even today ... But one must move on. To keep in mind, there’s just this: “I had so many wonderful people around me that it made me forget the others, who weren’t so. There was even a time in my life when I wasn't the most correct person – I was a little crazy and some got upset with me, but it's in the past now. Only the good things count”).

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Rosário's plans started to include Santa Maria da Feira because that's where the family got a job. In her own case, first there was a lot of domestic work in other people's homes; later, the nanny days came along. “I had three babies at home at the same time and I listened to Rádio Renascença every day, from seven in the morning until the time when the parents left work and picked the kids up. It was the happiest phase of my life”, she says. “They grew up, went on their way and made a living for themselves, but they are all doing well and everyone is still friends with me. Something remained”.

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The days are now spent taking care of small jobs and errands, baking cakes for visitors, participating in actions that hope to repay the solidarity she once received, singing with friends and also romantically dating, always in particular style combining humor, irony and a typically northern frankness. Once a year, there’s a meeting in Mogofores of African and Portuguese people who left Gabela for Lusitan lands. The black woman from the European Union always attends the party but has no desire to revisit Angola. "I'm not going back there anymore. I came here very disappointed with what was going on there. They said the change was to move the country forward but it was all just a farce!”, she assures. In an unspoken reference to Angolan business woman Isabel dos Santos and her judicial indictment on misappropriation of funds, Rosário asks: “What is her interest in accumulating so much when she knows that her people are starving? Does she need it all? Was it for this that they expelled the Europeans out of the country? To make everything worse? ”. ■​

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