The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic

Abstract

Three of the finest Brazilian historians of slavery of their generation have combined their scholarly talents and their varying regional expertise to bring to us an innovative and imaginative biography of a transatlantic enslaved sojourner whose life and travels reveal the complexities of the slave system in the South Atlantic. The book is deceptive because while it seems to be a microhistory, a biography of an obscure African man caught up in the slave trade to Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century, the authors have used his life to illumine the realities of some of the most important and most interesting aspects of the slave trade's final decades and the ways in which slavery as a social and economic system touched everyone—enslaved, freed, and free—who lived within it. Rufino José Maria's odyssey from his native Oyo in Yorubaland carried him across the South Atlantic as a slave to Bahia in about 1822, where he worked as a cook and apparently helped in the apothecary shop of his master. He then accompanied his master's son far to the south to Porto Alegre, where as a cook he came into contact with resident enslaved Muslims and where, in 1835 under a new master, he secured his manumission by self-purchase. Caught up in the regional civil war, the Guerra dos Farrapos, he moved to Rio de Janeiro just at the moment when news of the Muslim Malê Revolt in Salvador had put Brazil's capital on edge, but he found employment again as a cook on a slaving vessel, and so the ex-slave now returned to Africa aboard a slaver to Luanda. Further voyages on slavers brought him to Sierra Leone after a British cruiser suppressing the slave trade intercepted his vessel, and while there Rufino lived with Muslim Yorubas like him and studied the Koran before returning to Brazil to reside in Recife. There, he lived as an alufá, an Islamic spiritual adviser and healer, drawing on his knowledge of Islam and his apothecary training and providing charms, amulets, advice, counseling, and prayer to his clients. In 1853 he was arrested under suspicion of involvement in a slave revolt, and the documents in Arabic in his possession were used as evidence of his complicity.The travails and travels of this former slave, who himself became involved in the slave trade and an owner of at least one slave but also ably circulated between religions and empires, provide the opportunity for a vivid microhistory of the South Atlantic in the nineteenth century. Of course, there are gaps and absences in the documentary trail of this somewhat ephemeral personage, but rather than detracting from the biography, they allow the authors to fill in the lacunae with illuminating discussions of the social, political, judicial, and economic contexts that make this extraordinary biography a masterful general transatlantic study of Brazilian slave society in the crucial decades when British pressure was bringing the trade to an end.The world that Leslie Bethell had outlined with treaties and incidents, diplomats and politicians in The Abolition of the Brazilian Slave Trade (1970) is populated here with the people most affected by that change. The authors have used the peregrinations of Rufino as an opportunity to discuss the rise of the popular press in Rio de Janeiro, the settlement patterns in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the corruption of officials involved in the seizure of the slave ships, the residence arrangements and ethnic associations of the Yoruba-speaking Nago in Recife, and the theological debates within the Islamic Afro-Brazilian communities. In other words, they have provided a vision of the quotidian world of a slave society. Perhaps best of all, despite the considerable archival challenges, they have been able to provide a nuanced image of the life and thought of this African traveler, sometimes accused as a sorcerer, his Arabic writings suspected as seditious, but a man devoted to his faith yet tolerant of the beliefs of others; like Carlo Ginzburg's Menocchio, he told his interrogator that the question of which religion is best “will only be decided when the world ends” (p. 215).As part of the biographical turn in slavery studies, the authors wisely underline the moral and ethical complexities of slave societies and the fact that Rufino's story was not typical. But even so, Rufino's life story provides a guide to a larger history in which he played “a small but interesting, and sometimes nefarious, part” (p. 244). Fluidly translated, rarely does a book so impressive in its research and conceptualization convey its message in so accessible a narrative that it can be used to great advantage by both graduate and undergraduate students. This is one of the finest books to date on slavery and its complexities in the nineteenth-century South Atlantic.