# A reinvented Africanity  
Integrated into Portuguese society, Africans organized the conditions to ensure the preservation of their Africanity, adapting it to the new realities they faced and renewing their cultural values and their identity forms, leaving, through their social practices, structuring marks in the cultural fabric of Portuguese society. The knowledge of this process of reinvention of Africanity requires the study of the strategies thought up and used by these men and women, brutally removed from their native land, family, social and cultural space, to ensure their physical and cultural survival. The forms of adhering to Portuguese practices, complicity and syncretic creations, must be considered in two perspectives: on the one hand, they translate an intelligent way of responding to violence, integrating, reconstituting their identity and preserving fundamental values of their ancestral cultures; on the other hand, they allowed the fixation of African cultural marks in Portuguese society, sometimes in the form of syncretism, particularly in the ludic, magico-religious, linguistic, toponymic spaces (Costa, 1947), constituting, today as yesterday, intangible cultural heritage in Portugal.