Atlas

The cross was present throughout the process of transatlantic colonisation, as the Christian religion was used as a justification for the invasion of territories and the enslavement of non-Christian peoples.

From forced baptism to the standards planted as a symbol of territorial conquest, the cross is the symbol of Catholic violence and the forced evangelisation of other peoples, particularly the indigenous peoples who already lived in the lands occupied by the colonisers.

In Portugal, the myth of the ‘divine mission of colonisation’ is still used today.

Figures such as Father António Vieira, José de Anchieta and Manuel da Nóbrega, Jesuits who took part in the process of evangelisation in Brazil, are remembered as ‘defenders of Indian rights’ because they believed in the liberation of indigenous peoples through evangelisation and religious conversion.

It was a process of violence that forced indigenous peoples to cut their hair, change their languages, their clothes, their customs, in exchange for survival.

On the other hand, this religious ‘protection’ didn't apply to everyone, since the Jesuits didn't seem to have the same empathy for the enslaved blacks, who were seen by the holy faith as “savages” ‘without a soul’.

To call the Jesuit priests of colonisation ‘defenders of human rights’ is to perpetuate a violent erasure of the suffering of colonised peoples and an error of historical anachronism.

This myth helps to reinforce racist and imperialist ideas, which ignore the violence of forced religious conversion, genocide and the cultural and identity erasure of colonised peoples.

The cross, loaded with the symbolism of guilt and suffering, was the first object to be planted whenever the colonisers arrived in a new territory of the so-called ‘New World’.

It redeemed some and massacred others.

To this day, it personifies the binary division of the Western world: good/bad, sacred/profane, light/dark, savage/civilised, man/woman, natural/human.