Guido Melo

Dec 5, 2024 | africasacountry.com | Ana Lucia Araujo |Guido Melo |Tom Devriendt

It’s Carnaval Monday night in Salvador, Bahia—Brazil’s “Black Rome.” Dressed in yellow, red, black, and white, a huge crowd of ordinary people, artists, and politicians are gathered in the Liberdade neighborhood. Under the balcony of the Candomblé temple Ilê Axé Jitolu, they attend a brief religious ceremony that opens the procession of the Carnaval group Ilê Aiyê. Africa is not a country. Yet, if there is a country in the Americas where we can find Africa, it’s Brazil.

Nov 6, 2024 | thejewishindependent.com.au | Guido Melo

I remember arriving in Paris for the first time as if it were yesterday. It was the last week of the 2001 northern hemisphere summer, just a few days after the tragic events in Manhattan that, unfortunately, brought those two towers down. The Charles de Gaulle airport was surrounded by French secret intelligence and CIA agents. As the only Black man on the plane, I was deemed suspect and interviewed as soon as I stepped onto the tarmac. I was in my early twenties and infatuated with the city.

May 22, 2023 | africasacountry.com | Guido Melo

A central tenet of African spirituality is that memory saves. To be remembered is to be alive and to be forgotten is to die. This idea is foundational to ancestral veneration and animates the very life of a community. In fact, in African spirituality, it is memory that makes ancestors because ancestors are those whom the living remember. Those who are not remembered slowly drift into the realm of nonbeing, the realm of nothingness, the final death. Death is therefore kept at bay through memory.