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Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. It was a big week in Brazil, where Black Consciousness Day on 20 November was a public holiday for the first time. I spoke to Tiago Rogero, our South America correspondent, about the significance of the day and the big changes happening in Brazil’s approach to race. But first, the weekly roundup.
Weekly roundup
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Fertility ‘miracle’ rocks Nigeria | The BBC World Service has investigated a cryptic pregnancy scam in Nigeria, in which fraudsters convince vulnerable women to pay for an expensive “miracle fertility treatment” supposedly guaranteed to get them pregnant. One woman says she was led to believe she had given birth after being pregnant for 15 months.
Band Aid backlash | As Do They Know It’s Christmas? by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure’s charity supergroup Band Aid is revamped and rereleased for its 40th anniversary, critics are again expressing frustration over the patronising lyrics, stereotyping of Africans and distraction from questions about economic justice. The author Nels Abbey argues that Band Aid has “turned out to be a western soft power coup and an assault on Africa”.
Gabriel Moses designs Brit award trophy | The British-Nigerian artist was revealed as the designer for the 2025 Brit award trophy. Moses, who has collaborated with the likes of Skepta, A$AP Rocky and Tems, joins an alumni of Black Brit award designers including Olaolu Slawn, Yinka Ilori and the architect David Adjaye.
Kendrick Lamar’s surprise drop | The West Coast rapper has surprised fans with the unannounced release of a 12-track album. With production by Jack Antonoff and contributions from SZA and Roddy Rich, GNX rounds off a year in which Lamar released three diss tracks against his former Poetic Justice collaborator Drake. And, in the latest plot twist, Drake has begun legal action against Universal Music Group, accusing the label of artificially inflating streams of Lamar’s diss track Not Like Us.
In depth: A long history of Afro-Brazilian resistance
Black Consciousness Day goes back as far as the 1960s in Brazil. But the movement behind it has a much longer history with origins in the bloody resistance to slavery in the country. It was informally celebrated on 13 May, the day slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888. In 1972 the date was changed to honour the death of Brazil’s most famous resistance leader, Zumbi, who was killed by Portuguese colonial forces on 20 November 1695. When Black Consciousness Day was centred on the abolition of slavery it was bittersweet, Tiago tells me. “All the celebrations used to focus on the white princes who signed the abolition. So in the 1970s, a group of students decided to establish a date to counter the one in May.”
The establishment of the day as a nationwide public holiday for the first time is, Tiago says, “the result of the struggle of the Black movement” over the past five decades. Today, the date is one where a thriving grassroots network of groups that form the Black movement in the country come together to play music, dance and hold educational events to boost pride and connection with Brazil’s Black heritage. But it is also an opportunity to make broader political demands. Alongside Afro-themed parades, capoeira circles, samba extravaganzas and art exhibitions, a march in São Paulo celebrated the public holiday and supported calls for an end to the six-day working week.
‘We are a majority Black country’
The first publicly observed Black Consciousness Day is a breakthrough, Tiago says, but it is also a culmination of many years of social progress. In the early 00s, affirmative action integrated more Black people in higher education, resulting in a burst of activism that became focused on November. “All of November is our unofficial Black consciousness month – and 20 November is the cherry on top,” he adds. This year there were 38 activities in São Paulo alone that day. “In November, the TV channels and newspapers remember that we are a majority Black country.”
TV Globo – Brazil’s biggest TV channel and the most watched in Latin America – gave Black Consciousness Day a prime spot this year. “Soap operas are a huge thing here,” Tiago says, “and after the main soap opera, there was a 50-minute special about Black Consciousness Day that focused on Black people who are arrested wrongfully based on photo recognition, which is a huge problem.”
Not everyone wants to celebrate
Despite the celebrations, the day is still “a [powerful] demonstration of how Brazil is divided; there is still a lot of resistance and backlash”, Tiago says. Every 20 November, there is criticism from the far right – and even “the average Brazilian” – who claim “talking about racism brings more racism and that ‘Brazil is not a racist country’”. This commonly held view becomes more “aggressive” in November, Tiago says, especially amid the growing backlash over the fact that, in Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil has a “progressive president who has been important for the Black movement”. This year, one mayor refused to comply with the law and did not observe the national holiday.
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I suggest to Tiago that this appears to be a contradictory situation, one where there is an incredible legacy of Black resistance and a vast population of African descent – the largest outside Africa, in fact – but even the most basic conversation about racism has not begun. Tiago agrees, and attributes this to Brazil’s unique history and specific type of racism, one that is rarely expressed publicly but manifested through prejudice and discrimination. “Unlike the US and South Africa, Brazil did not have segregationist laws – yet segregation here happens on a daily basis. In every single socioeconomic indicator, Black people occupy the worst positions: violence, education, health. At the same time, if you look at who runs the companies and who is in Congress, it is mostly white people.”
Tiago says Brazilians will not be openly racist in most cases, only in private spaces. “It’s not easy to talk about racism because we always face arguments that Black people are still the ones trying to divide the country. It’s weird and difficult to compare to other countries,” Tiago says. “We have made so many advances” but are still so far from achieving equality. He says the most heartbreaking thing is that “a lot of Black people in Brazil still believe that talking about race only makes things worse. They think this way because of history, the media, and the money [used for propaganda] that help feed into this idea.”
An inevitable march towards progress
I ask Tiago if Black Consciousness Day is part of a pattern that over time will make Brazil appear, and think of itself, as a country with a large and increasing Black population, or if such a step will be challenging because the elites and establishment are not Black. “This is already happening,” Tiago says, adding that more needs to be done to achieve equality. In the meantime, he points to the importance of fighting against a sense of alienation, something I found so moving. Even as someone who has never visited Brazil, I immediately recognised what can only be described as an atmosphere of dispossession. Which is why Black Consciousness Day and its associated events are so crucial – they lay claim to public spaces. Tiago lays that claim through Black walks, a growing cultural movement of strolling through the Black areas in your town. These are physical and metaphorical steps of reclamation: “We fight for the right to feel comfortable in our own skin, our own cities, in our own country. We are the ones who literally built this country and we should be the ones who own it.”
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