Newscasts - Walking tours shed light on Madrid's hidden Black history

Calavo Growers

27/11/2025 16:41

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Source: 'Reuters - General news videos'

Description: Growing up in Spain, Kwame Ondo didn't see Black people in the history books and it never sat right with him. He began to look into what he calls a "silenced history" - and his tours help others to do the same. Lucy Fielder reports. 

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Video Transcript:

This symbol is one of the symbols for slavery in Spain.

Kwame Ondo's tours of downtown Madrid don't take in the usual sights. They focus on a black history that rarely appears in textbooks or the collective memory. Ondo's family moved to Spain from Equatorial Guinea, a former Spanish ruled territory that gained independence in 1968. Seeing no Black people in history books never sat right with him, so Ono looked into it, joining a trend in other European cities where slavery and the colonial legacy are seldom acknowledged.

So, I thought, there's something they're not telling us. And being so close, growing up in Andalusia, where I would hear places called the corner of the Blacks and such, I knew something was going on. Obviously, when you start to research, you realize it's a silenced history that has been erased.

His company, Afroiberica Tours, mainly caters to foreign tourists, especially Black Americans.

We've been on other tours-

Reginald Young says other tours he's taken haven't touched on the subject.

And so when I doing my research ahead of the tour, I saw this black Renaissance in the history of Spain. I just said, I want to find out what the black history aspect of Spain was.

A historian at NYU Madrid Antumi Toasije says there's an absolute void in Spain's historical narrative. The Madrid ***** or Black Madrid collective takes an activist approach to redressing that balance. Attendees read poems like "Still I rise" by Maya Angelou and paste plaques honoring forgotten figures from Black history. Co coordinating Nieves Cisneros links Spain's current prosperity directly to slavery.

We can't understand capitalism without linking it to our colonial and slavery past. We can't understand the industrial development in Catalonia or the Basque Country without knowing that it comes from the slave trade.

Here they light candles for Antonio Solis, a member of a brotherhood that covered funeral expenses for poor black residents in the street where he lived. For Madrid ***** member Irene Marine, who is of Haitian descent, this work is personal.

My Afro descendant’s side is touched by this because it's all very visible. And my Spanish and Madrid residents side says, why didn't I know this or study it? Why wasn't I taught this? What am I going to do now that I know this about my ancestors?