## Introduction  
The reconstruction and consolidation of an unprecedented Africanity that marked the lives of African populations settled in Portugal, in a situation of subordination resulting from a slave trade that stretched from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, requires not only the study of the integration strategies used by Africans, but also a very particular attention to how these populations brought from Africa sought to preserve their Africanity, their values and practices in the framework of an inevitable process of social and cultural change, in Portuguese society and the new European world in which they were forcefully integrated.  
Refusing the most archaic elements of a 'traditional' Africanity incompatible with the new social situation, adhering to Portuguese practices, men and women organized themselves to maintain control of their lives, remaking their cultural identities, and recovering and Africanizing values of modernity; that is, developing a process of modernization of their Africanity and thus contributing to the reconstruction of an innovative and participative global Africanity.  
These populations, enslaved and free, who constituted the first African diasporic movement in Europe, played a key role in the renewal of Africanity, even if prejudices, images and negative representations of Africans marked a  
long Eurocentric and European vision that excluded Africa from the history of the world, from the history of civilizations, from global history.