Helena Monteiro da Costa’s father was brought from Angola to Brazil as a slave in the 19th century.
Next year the 99-year-old hopes she can take part in a first-of-its-kind cruise making the reverse journey back to her father’s homeland.
“My father was enslaved and he obeyed … everything they (the enslavers) told him to do he did,” Costa says at her home in Santos, the coastal Brazilian city where her father ended up after the brutal voyage across the Atlantic.
From the 16th to the 19th century, Brazil received around five million enslaved Africans, more than any other country.
Most were forcibly transported in inhumane conditions from Angola, in southwestern Africa, aboard Portuguese vessels.