Kola San Jon de Cova da Moura: an Instrumental Case of Intangible Cultural Heritage Safeguarding in the African Diaspora in Portugal

Abstract

This essay approaches the trajectory of a Cabo Verdean traditional popular festivity, and its implications in the contemporary urban scape of Lisbon, when figured out as a transnational phenomenon that has become one of the greatest challenges in the field of Contemporary Anthropology in current Portuguese society. The Kola San Jon de Cova da Moura is construed as one of the several outcomes of an immigrant associative phenomenon which occurred in the metropolitan area of Lisbon since the 1990s, and whose mobilization has generated a diversity of strategies of struggle, among these, the political and pedagogic use of traditional cultural practices kin to the African immigrants. Throughout an ethnographic immersion, for a period of seven years, the author has apprehended a complex mesh of individual and collective trajectories, experience and individual narratives from persons and social actors committed to the decolonial principle of annulment of prejudice by means of social conviviality, music, and dance, as well as, through the construction of place.