How does a nation remember itself as Europe’s first empire and yet forget the brutalities on which it was built? We employ historical ethnographic methods to examine two data sources—one textual and one material—Zurara’s Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea and ethnographic fieldwork across Portugal’s built environment in the cities of Lagos and Lisbon; including the Vale da Gafaria mass burial site, museum exhibitions, a slave-trade walking tour, and public landscapes through which history is mobilized to express national identity. Our findings call for a reorientation of social theorizations of modernity—one that precedes 1492, foregrounds Africa and its peoples, and accounts for the cultural and epistemic mechanisms of remembering and forgetting as central to maintaining racial capitalism.