29/01/2024
Pongo was eight when her family left Angola in the 1990s during a period of civil unrest there. In Portugal, her mother worked as a cleaner, her father in construction, and the family of five lived in a single room in a hostel for a year, she said. She shared a bed with her two sisters.
When the family moved to a largely white area of northern Lisbon, they found integration difficult, Pongo said, adding that she experienced discrimination from her classmates in school. “It was difficult to have friends because they saw me as different, something strange,” she said.
At home, her strict father wouldn’t allow Pongo and her sisters to have a social life, she said. Her life took an even darker turn when, at just 12, she threw herself out of a seventh-story window.
“It was a mixture of everything: the difficulty of integration, the lack of friends to talk to and the dictatorship imposed by my father,” Pongo said.
