Brazil and Africa

Abstract

This article is centered on the connections between Africa and Brazil during the era of the slave trade. Luso-Brazilian vessels transported as many as five million enslaved African men and women, which corresponds roughly to 40 percent of all captives shipped to the Americas. In Brazil, enslaved and freed Africans recreated ethnic, political, and cultural communities, but political and religious events in Africa continued to play an important role in shaping patterns of slave resistance. Throughout this period, a multiracial crew formed by traders of different ethnicities and legal status (enslaved, freed, and free) circulated across the Atlantic. Politically speaking, African and Luso-Brazilian authorities on both sides of the Atlantic engaged in diplomatic exchanges in order to guarantee the operation of the slave trade beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century. These diplomatic actions intensified in the first decades of the nineteenth century in the context of British measures to abolish the transatlantic slave trade. The bilateral approach expressed in some works listed in this bibliography challenges the Triangular model, very influential in English-speaking historiography, placing the connections between Brazil and Africa in the South Atlantic at the center. The article covers mostly the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, although a few (very important) works stress the formation of these links as early as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The discovery of mining regions intensified the trade in enslaved Africans to Brazil in the eighteenth century as well as the commercial activities on the African coast, particularly in places such as the Bight of Benin and Angola. In this period the active participation of African freedmen can be observed in the business of slaving, and their role increased in the nineteenth century with the high demand for African labor due to the expansion of sugar and coffee plantations. But numerous freedmen and freedwomen returned to Africa to escape political and religious persecution, especially after the 1835 Muslim uprising in Bahia. Many others established Atlantic communities in West Africa. Brazilian historiography is well represented in the list due to the growth of the Brazilian production regarding Brazil-Africa links since 2000. The Bahian-based research group Escravidão e Invenção da Liberdade has been one of the most prominent in examining the connections between Brazil and West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.