Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic

Abstract

In this work, Ana Lucia Araujo documents multiple and conflicting memorializations of slavery among descendants of both slaves and slave traders in Brazil and the Republic of Benin. Araujo chooses these sites particularly because of the well-documented historic ties between Brazil (especially Bahia) and Benin (then Dahomey) during the period of the slave trade and after. In both countries, relatively recent initiatives have begun to acknowledge and commemorate the legacies of those connections in often contradictory ways.When Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited Gorée Island in 2005, he made an ambivalent apology. “I do not have any responsibility for what happened during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,” Lula asserted, “but I think it is a good policy to apologize to the people of Senegal and Africa for what we have done” (p. 63). The following year in Ouidah, Lula made a much stronger statement: “Our people are marked by Africa. Brazil owes a lot to the African people. Many were torn from Africa to build what Brazil is today. [ . . . ] Brazil will never turn its back on Africa” (p. 64).For Araujo, Lula’s ambivalence reflects Brazil’s own continuing, profound ambivalence about slavery. Black political organization increased in Brazil throughout the twentieth century, eventually resulting in a movement for affirmative action programs for people of African descent. Partly in response to such mobilization and presumably as a means of co-opting it, the Brazilian state has sponsored a growing number of memorializations of the slave past, such as several Afro-Brazilian-oriented museums, statues to Zumbi throughout the country, and a national park named after Palmares (pp. 252–66). Araujo leaves the impression that these efforts have had minimal impact on popular consciousness and that, to a great extent, the myth of racial democracy continues to hold sway. Indeed, Araujo’s major example of the commemoration of Africa among Afro-Brazilians deals with the images of the continent presented by samba schools during Carnival (pp. 232–52). Interviews with Afro-Brazilians about their impressions of these monuments and commemorations would have contributed another dimension to this chapter.Araujo devotes the bulk of the book to detailed discussion of memorializations of slavery in the Republic of Benin, based on extensive fieldwork. In contrast to Brazilian ones, Beninese memorializations have largely responded to international initiatives, above all the UNESCO Slave Route Project, rather than to any bottom-up popular initiatives. Concentrated in the major slave trading port of Ouidah, these commemorations convey contradictory and confusing messages. They have included the Ouidah 92 festival, which commemorated Vodun as much as the legacies of slavery; the “slaves’ route,” which begins at one of the city’s central plazas and proceeds to the sea, mixing symbols of slavery, Vodun, and the Dahomean royal family along the way; and the Gate of No Return representing the embarkation of the captives on the beach, now bookended, and its impact diluted by, monuments to the Catholic Church in Benin and the Gate of Return (chapter 4). As important as the public monuments are private memorials. The most prominent Afro-Luso-Brazilian Aguda family, the de Souzas, descend from the infamous Brazilian slave trader Francisco Félix de Souza (Chacha I), which makes their connections to the slave past problematic, to say the least. The descendants of de Souza now choose to emphasize his entrepreneurship and putative status as the founder of the Aguda community, making slight mention of the nefarious enterprise in which he engaged (chapter 6). Araujo’s own close readings of these monuments and the ways in which they are presented by Beninese elites are well done, but she includes no material on how the monuments are interpreted by ordinary Beninese (such as those pictured on the book’s cover) or the African American cultural tourists who visit them.Much of Araujo’s original research is fascinating, but several chapters rely almost exclusively on secondary sources and sometimes digress into material tangential to the author’s arguments and easily available elsewhere. Examples include the overview of the scholarship on the volume of the slave trade that makes up chapter 1, a summary history of the US civil rights movement (pp. 52–55), and a cursory discussion of “slavery and the slave trade in Brazil” (pp. 93–98). Araujo often seems compelled to include every finding of her research, such as a complete list of the heads of state who attended the 1993 African African-American Summit in Gabon (p. 71), for example, or a lengthy description of the unexpected identification of a wealthy Aguda with US country music legend Jimmie Rodgers (pp. 388–90). Scholars will sympathize with Araujo’s reluctance to part with hard-won material, but not every reader will be interested in such details.