This blog has been temporarily "turned off".
It will still be here, but i don't think there will be any posts for now.

You can follow me on www.leonafinlandia.blogspot.com mainly in Brazilian Portuguese, sometimes in Finnish and English as well.

Things you notice when you are hanging quietly in a summer cottage in the middle of the woods by a lake in the surroundings of Lahti:

Butterfly: Sleep well, sweet.
Flower: See you next summer!

Things you hear from the nature when the mosquitoes and flies and the other boring bugs have given you a break while you are in a summer cottage in the middle of the woods...

by Léo

"I have no clue", I replied.

Not once. The same answer came every time my Wife (or anybody else) asked me about my African roots. Back home, we never really think of it, but here in Finland the issue is somewhat closer to me than ever before.

"Hi", he said and smiled while we shook hands in the first time I entered the main building of the University of Tampere. I don't know how or why, but when I introduced myself as Brazilian I noticed him looking doubtfully at me with the corner of his eyes soon before they blinked as if the flash of a camera had brought him back from his probable imaginary scenario. "I am Nigerian", he said. The talk went on and faded as well as his initial excitement.

The only thing about my past I know is that the parents of my paternal grandparents were children of African slaves. Here in Finland - and I suppose in other Western European countries as well - it is common to trace the family tree back to centuries ago. In my case, the search would probably end in some 19th century trader book. I am not sure, though. Maybe because I never tried. I had been interested, but I never really did anything to find out where my family came from.

"Hey, brother!" At first it took me time to realize the black guy in the gift store at the center of Lahti was talking to me. "Hello!", he came and we shook hands. "It is nice to meet you", he continued before letting it slip through his barely open mouth: "There doesn't seem to be so many of us coloured people here." He smiled. I nodded timidly and introduced myself. "Oh....you are Brazilian...." he sighed trying to hide his disappointed look. We talked briefly about the length of our stay, he told me he had just arrived from Nigeria to be with his Finnish girl. After that, I never saw him again.

It is funny, if you stop and think about it. In Brazil, my friends and I barely talked seriously about Africa. I mean, we are Brazilians. Africa, according to the news, is the poor continent with very skillful and not very tactical football players. Since most of us did not use to have BBC, DW or other international channels, we rarely heard anything about the land of our ancestors that differed from poverty, ebola, dictatorships, apartheid, that stuff. Brazil culture is deeply rooted in African cults and music, we are geographical regions pretty much tied to one another by the chains that locked the slaves and dragged them accross the Atlantic Ocean to the largest Portuguese colony. Still, if any of my black friends and I were asked, we would certainly not manage to name more than 5 African countries. Let alone know where our family trees had roots in.

"Excuse me, where are you from?", the middle-aged Finnish man in Nastola asked me while we were watching the historical match between the low-division local team and MyPa, one of the Veikkausliiga ("premier league") teams in Finland. I could tell he was pretty interested in me, which scared me certainly. It is not so common that Finns go starting conversations with strangers in public places like that. I timidly introduced myself. "Where are you from?", he asked. "Brazil!?! I thought you were from Nigeria or some other West-Coast African country..." He said half surprised, half apologizing. When he was about to turn around, I started talking and soon I discovered that he had been there for missionary reasons and was wondering if I knew how to play some Nigerian percussion instrument. And there I was, talking about Africa with a Finn as I had never talked with any of my African-descendent friends. Game over, we left.

"I have no clue", I would say now if my Wife or any other person asked me about my roots in Africa. However, it took me almost thirty years until I came to Finland to realize that it is important that I know where I came from. I need to know because it is a bit embarrassing that I cannot explain to people the reasons for me to be black in Brazil, you know what I mean? I got so used to answering "My grandparents were kids of slaves" and people getting convinced of that. It was in Finland that challenging complements like "Really? From which part of Africa?", or "I have been to Mozambique/Nigeria/Ruanda/Luanda/Mali/etc. Where were the Brazilian slaves from?" started popping up. It was here that I started to think of Africa as the complex and diverse continent it actually is, that Africans from the East can be very much different from the Western ones.

Finland became my eye-opener to look at my past as part of my personal life and not only as a faraway story from the history books of the school times. It is here that I was seen as a Western African "brother" for the first time in my life.

It felt good.