African–Brazilian Emigration to Africa

African-Brazilian Emigration to Africa, a "return" of approximately 4,000 freed persons to Africa during the course of the nineteenth century. Although some émigrés were Brazilian-born, most had been taken as slaves from the Yoruba- and Fon-speaking areas of present-day Benin, Togo, and southwestern Nigeria during a period of widespread civil and religious warfare. Portuguese colonial law provided Brazilian slaves the opportunity to purchase their own freedom. Many Africans in Brazil participated in organized savings societies with the hope of returning to their homeland as free persons. The majority of émigrés left from Bahia, a province engaged in direct trade with the African coast in tobacco and slaves, while a smaller number left from Rio de Janeiro. Large-scale emigration began after 1835 in the wake of an attempted rebellion led by African Muslims in Bahia's capital. Backlash against Africans prompted hundreds to risk their meager savings and even their lives in the transatlantic voyage.

Most émigrés were unable to return to their original homelands, instead forging new communities in the coastal cities of Ouidah and Grand Popo, where they became known as the "Bresiliens." Because the local populations had been long established in subsistence and commercial agriculture, the returnees carved their niche in skilled trades and commerce. From the 1830s through the 1850s, several Bresilien families accumulated substantial fortunes in the illicit slave trade. They traded to Europeans in exchange for Bahian rum and tobacco, diversifying after the end of slavery to trade in palm products and other local goods. Returnees also engaged in skilled occupations such as carpentry, masonry, boat building, and barbering. Some gained positions of prominence in society and politics. Less successful were those who settled in Lagos. They found themselves in competition with resident European traders and Yoruba freed persons released from the British protectorate of Sierra Leone. They did not speak English, they were Catholic rather than Protestant, and they rarely had the necessary capital to establish commercial enterprises. The Brazilians in Lagos became artisans, using the skills they had acquired as slaves. Some Central Africans returned to small communities in Benguela, Luanda, and the Cabinda coast.

See alsoAngola; Bahia; Slavery: Brazil.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Michael Turner, "Les Bresiliens: The Impact of Former Brazilian Slaves upon Dahomey," (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1975).

Manuela Carneiro Da Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros: Os escravos libertos e sua volta a Africa (1985).

Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (1987).

Pierre Verger, Fluxo e refluxo do trafico de escravos entre o Golfo do Benin e a Bahia de Todos os Santos dos seculos XVII a XIX, 3d ed. (1987).

                                        Kim D. Butler