## The establishment of Africans: time and space  
Historically, the memory of African presence in Portugal began to be organized in the thirteenth century, with the earliest references to this population in the Iberian Peninsula and more particularly in Galician territory. It is a written and iconographic memory that outlines the conditions in which some prejudices were born based on Africans' physical characteristics, their bodies devalued due primarily to colour, and negative connotations on other somatic characters such as hair, mouth, nose, smell and so forth, that set them closer to animality, opposing them to the superior normative white body (Margarido, 2003). Consequently, body and colour logic are inherent obstacles to full integration into the human (or 'white') society for Africans to be allowed to autonomously organize their lives.  
In the historical framework of the populations that arrived in the Iberian Peninsula, by land or sea, as was the case of two of the most significant settlement  
phases - the Roman and the Arab, in different and relatively short periods which left numerous marks in the country, the presence of Africans in Portugal constitutes a fundamental differentiating element, part of another civilizational logic launched by Europeans from the fifteenth century onwards. Most of the men, women and children of Africa did not come of their own free will, but were captured or bought off the coasts of the continent to be landed as slaves at the western end of the Iberian fragment of Europe (Zurara, 1973). Stripped of everything, thousands of Africans from different regions and cultures were forcefully integrated into the country from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, becoming a structuring presence of Portuguese society, leaving direct or indirect signs in its memory, imaginary, language and places.