Gendered Authority, Gendered Violence Family, Household & Identity in the Life & Death of a Brazilian Freed Woman in Lagos

Abstract

Between 1821 and 1824 the young sisters Ajifoluke and Ayebomi and their male ‘cousin’ Shetolu were enslaved in Owu, an important kingdom in the southern part of the Yoruba-speaking world located in what is today south-western Nigeria. One of the two little girls, Ayebomi, was sold to a woman in Ijebu Ode, about sixty miles away, where she lived as a slave for a number of years until redeemed and reunited with her mother. Perhaps because of their greater age, the child's older sister Ajifoluke and her male ‘cousin’ Shetolu were traded to the coast and sold to Brazilians or Portuguese. It is likely that Shetolu, who became known in Brazil as Francisco Gomes de Andrade, was bought by a slave trader either in Lagos, then the leading port in the Bahian trade, or in Salvador. The man indicated years later that between 1827, when he spent six months in Lagos, and the mid-1840s he had travelled ‘backwards and forwards’ between the West African coastal town and Brazil. Such mobility was characteristic of the significant number of Brazilian slaves who worked in the transatlantic slave trade. Although no document has come to light that definitively reveals Francisco Gomes de Andrade's owner, much circumstantial evidence points to a man named Luis Antonio de Andrade, who was involved in the illegal slave trade at Lagos probably from the late 1820s until his death in the town in 1847. Francisco Gomes de Andrade's work and transatlantic travel in the slave trade enabled him to commence smallscale commerce of his own, probably in African commodities for which there was a demand among slaves and freed people in Bahia. Through his labours he accumulated the capital to manumit himself, and around 1844 he returned to live permanently in Lagos, where he helped establish a community of Brazilian and Cuban freed slaves. There he continued to trade with Brazil, founded what grew into a large, polygynous family, and acquired land on which he built a substantial house in the area that developed into the Brazilian quarter. Although never a truly powerful man, Francisco's cultural mobility – his capacity to navigate African, Lusophone and British practices and institutions – enabled him by the 1850s to acquire influence with the local king Dosunmu as well as the British consul in the town, and to emerge as a leader of Lagos's Brazilian community.