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Image above: The Brazilian Carnival is deeply influenced by African culture; Embratur - Africans in Brazil
- Many historians estimate in 12 million the number of Africans captured and shipped to Brazil, between 1532 (the date of the beginning of the traffic) and 1888 (the date of the abolishing of slavery in Brazil). Of these 12 million people, around 1 million died on the slave boats, before even reaching Brazil. The African slaves came mainly from Angola, but also from more northward places such as Nigeria, Benim or Congo…
- Death rates were very high among the Brazilian slaves: the slave life expectance didn’t exceeded 8 years in the hard conditions of sugar plantations or in the gold mines; from the perspective of the owner, it was more advantageous to buy new slaves than maintaining the existing ones in good health, for many years.
- The African culture survived better in Brazil than in North America, due to the more liberal politics of the Portuguese. Owners didn’t separate slave families (the law prohibited it), and slaves could buy their freedom, which wasn’t a very surprising fact even in the earlier colonial times. Black religious brotherhoods, supported by the Catholic Church and Jesuit missionaries, backed the process and raised the money…
- In the seventeenth century, significant numbers of slaves escaped from the sugar plantations, and found independent «quilombos» in remote areas (the quilombo was a sort of Black Kingdom, following the lines of traditional African ones, with a king, a government council, tribal army, and a priest class). The most renowned was the Quilombo of Palmares, in the state of Alagoas. It lasted for more than fifty years, till 1697, and its leaders and followers committed mass suicide, when defeated, refusing to return to the previous slavery condition.
- The nineteenth century was the century of the slavery abolition, but also a century of spectacular insurrections, such as the 1835 ‘Male Uprising'. Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, the echoes of the Caribbean and North American black movements, and the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society founded in 1880 (with the backing of the king D. Pedro II), have inspired the slavery abolition (1888) and, in a certain extent, the insurrections.
- Today, black people represent about 5 per cent of Brazilian population, a rate far beyond the 15% of 1940 official census. That’s a direct consequence of the miscegenation of the Brazilian people. Brazil has become less and less a white and black country, to become a brown one. The rate of mixed-race has more than duplicated in the last mid-century, having attained the 40%.
- The African element in Brazil's ethnic composition is very visible, as it is the influence of the African culture, mainly in Bahia. Salvador da Bahia is, undoubtedly, the Afro-Brazilian state capital. Its music, its cuisine, its religion forms, and its way of life are largely of African origin.
SALVADOR DA BAHIA: THE AFRO-BRAZILIAN CAPITAL
Africans in Brazil - Brazil Travel Guide
Salvador da Bahia is a very singular city. The omnipresence of bahian music, the pace and rhythm of life, the cuisine, the mysticism, the warmness of the people, their joy, all these, is a constant invitation to returning.
Curiously, the features that most attract our senses are markedly African in their origin. African culture has a much larger expression than the white one in the music, the cuisine, or the people’s behaviour. Salvador is, indeed, a major representation of afro-Brazilian culture.
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AFRICAN RELIGIONS IN BRAZIL
Africans in Brazil
The way the African religion has resisted to white culture and religion is very revealing. Iemanjá, the sea goddess of ancient Angolan pantheist religion, became Our Lady; Oxumaré, the rainbow messenger, became Saint Anthony. And so on. The Catholicism and the African pantheism (in its condomblé version) were blended in this rather ingenious way. Colonialist’s efforts to catechise and integrate black religion were largely inconsequent. The religion from the Yoruba African tribe (Condomblé) has persisted and survived through Catholicism vestments. There are, today, at Salvador, around 1,000 Condomblé temples, and its penetration and social importance is so great that even white people, self-confessed Catholics, venerate Iemanjá.
Once in Salvador, you can easily arrange a visit to a Condomblé temple and attend to ceremonies. Just ask how, locally, at your hotel. Also locally, you can arrange visits to other high popular afro-brazilian expressions: a session of capoeira, a peculiar mixture of dance and martial arts.
Information about entertainment, nightlife and fun in Bahia:
Entertainment, cuisine and nightlife in Bahia
History books concerning Brazil:
History books about Brazil and Bahia – Africans in Brazil
Links between Brazil and Africa:
Brazil in... Africa
Hotel information and booking:
Hotels in Bahia (Salvador)
Information about air flights and booking:
Flights to Bahia (Salvador)
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