ABSTRACT
This
paper examines Brazil’s century return to Africa movement from both qualitative
and quantitative perspectives, identifying three main stages. The largest
single wave of voyages came after an 1835 slave uprising in the province of
Bahia, when around 200 freed Africans were deported and roughly a thousand
others left voluntarily, fleeing anti-African legislation. In the 1840s,
smaller numbers of Africans also traveled to the continent of their birth, many
as employees on slave vessels. A new phase of migrations came after 1850, with
the end of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil and the British seizure of Lagos
a year later. Previous estimates of the volume of travelers are examined in
combination with demographic data on passport recipients, in order to frame
microhistorical analysis of individual travelers. In the first and third stages,
Africans often traveled with their households, comprising not only blood kin
but also their slaves and former slaves, while in the second phase many of those
who left for Africa were men travelling alone who later returned to Brazil. The
resulting portrait of changes over time offers insights into the varying
reasons that led freed Africans to leave Brazil, also raising questions about
the continued presence of the institution of slavery in their lives.
Introduction
Beginning
in the 1990s, with the publication of works such as Paul Gilroy’s The Black
Atlantic, which drew attention to the historical importance of travels
undertaken by Pan-Africanist intellectuals and other free people of color, the
trope of the forced migrations of the slave trade began to give way to a new
scholarly interest in voyages resulting from individual agency. In the
Lusophone world, however, the travels of freed men and women have been noted
since the late nineteenth century, and by the 1950s the groundbreaking work of
Pierre Verger paved the way for the first in-depth studies.1 This scholarly
interest was sparked by the frequency of such voyages in Brazil, where freed
people of color were far more numerous than in Anglophone slave societies.2 The
city of Salvador, capital of the northeastern province of Bahia, with an
especially large black population, was a major port of departure. Evidence of
return voyages between Bahia and the Bight of Benin region dates back at least
to the mid-eighteenth century and increases substantially in the 1800s.3
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