Throughout the 19th century, thousands of freed Brazilian slaves returned to Africa from Brazil, retracing the journey that had originally sent them, their parents or their grandparents to slavery decades earlier. Current estimates suggest that around eight thousand freedmen returned to Africa between 1830 and 1888, the year that the slavery was abolished in Brazil. This number was a very small portion of the Africans brought as slaves to Brazil, of Brazil’s enslaved population, or even of Brazil’s free population of color. Still, the numbers are impressive when we remember that there was no formal program designed to send these freedmen back to Africa, and that they not only returned spontaneously but were responsible for raising the funds for the voyage and their own resettlement.

This Brazilian phenomenon resembled the similar one in the United States during the same period, although it was not identical to it. The American project was more organized, receiving formal support from the American Colonization Society. It also involved more people, resulting in the return of some 40,000 Americans of African descent to the continent. Nevertheless, the “returnee” phenomenon in Brazil stemmed from the same basic difficulty that free blacks experienced in the United States when they tried to establish themselves in white slave-owning societies: there was no place for them.

In the nineteenth century, Brazilian freedmen were attempting to find a place for themselves in a Brazil newly emancipated from Portuguese control, politicaly dominated (in demographic terms, the population of color was the majority) by a white elite who saw African slaves solely as labor and freed men as potential subversives. This elite had two principal concerns: the first, that freedmen might revolt themselves or encourage slaves to do so (the years 1820 and 1830 witnessed a series of bloody revolts which stimulated the fear that Brazil might become another Haiti) ; and the second, that Brazil’s plantations, homes, and port cities required labor to survive and to grow. A free black population had no place in this Brazil, and, indeed freedmen were treated with suspicion, if not outright hostility.

The elite-controlled government did not systematically expel freedmen (some of the accused of participation in the revolts were sent to Africa; the majority was killed), but a number of measures taken by provincial governments between 1830 and 1850, mostly as a reaction to the revolts, placed them in untenable situations. These policies aimed to remove them from cities, where the slave revolts had occurred, and to encourage their migration to the countryside, where they could serve as a supplement to the enslaved labor force, which had become extremely difficult to maintain because of British pressure on the transatlantic slave trade after 1830.

	The Fragoso family at Lagos, circa 1910

With their freedom of movement restricted and their prospects for a better life hampered, many freedmen took to the sea, heading for the ports from which they or their parents or grandparents had been sent to the New World. Retracing in reverse their earlier diaspora, they boarded ships in cities like Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, and settled in African cities like Lagos, Uidah, Porto Novo and Agoué, where they settled and, in many cases, prospered..

In these African cities these men created distinct communities, with their own customs and traditions resonant of the Brazil they left behind. They are called Agudas in Benin and Nigeria, and Tabom in Ghana. In Lagos, Porto Novo, and Uidah they built neighborhoods in the Brazilian colonial architectural style, calling them the Brazilian Quarter or “Quartier Brésil”.

Their influence in the cities and regions in which they settled was remarkable. They returned from Brazil with well-developed ideas about commerce and capitalism, and training in colonial artisanry. They were the first to plant dendê (from which palm oil is extracted), which they exported to Brazil, and in turn they imported cassava (mandioca), beans, jerky, cotton, tobacco and furniture, incorporating these into local habits. They were skilled carpenters and builders, as well as traders who became involved in legal commerce as well as in the illicit slave trade, reproducing the cycle that had cost them their freedom. In sum, they constituted the first expression of a bourgeois elite in the region, in a time and place where the concept itself was still unknown.

The Souza family at Uidah, Benin

These men included people like Francisco Félix de Souza, the first Chachá, a title granted by King Guezo of Abomey, whose blood brother he was. Souza, a Bahian adventurer, set himself up in Uidah in 1788, seeking his fortune, and ended up becoming one of the richest men of his time, profiting from a monopoly of the slave trade. Upon his death in 1849, he left a fortune of around 120 million Spanish dollars, along with 53 wives, and 80 male children.

Domingos José Martins, illegitimate son of the martyr of the failed 1817 republican revolution in Pernambuco, Brazil, went to Uidah on Chachá’s invitation, and ended up succeeding him, making millions out of trading in slaves and in palm oil.

Ignácio Paraíso, who went to Porto-Novo as the slave of Domingos José Martins, and there became his barber and confidant, inherited part of his plantations and made a fortune of his own. He is considered one of the founders of the Moslem community in the country.

João Esan da Rocha, a free black man who returned with his son Cândido to Lagos in the 1860s, who helped found what is now the the “Brazilian neighborhood” in the city and made a fortune there, first selling water, which he drew from an artesian well dug in the patio of his house, the “Water House.”

Sir Adeyemo Alakija, baptized Plácido Assunção, the son of freedman Marcolino Assunção, a returnee to Lagos in 1870. Adeyemo studied in England and was one of the most active political leaders in his country, founding the first Nigerian political party, the Action Group, and contributing to Nigeria’s emancipation.

Azumah Nelson, legendary founder of the Brazilian Tabom community in Ghana, settled in Accra in the first half of the 19th century along with seven Brazilian families, sowing the seeds of what is now an immense community.

Olympio and Amorin families, Cotonou, Benin

Some of their descendants have played important roles in the history of their nations. Sylvanus Olympio, for example, the first president of Togo, was the grandson of Francisco Olympio da Silva, who sailed from Rio de Janeiro to Agoué in 1850. Sylvanus entered politics after the Second World War. Along with his uncle Octaviano Olympio, he founded the Togolese Unity Party, and negotiated the terms of his country’s independence from France in 1961. He was in the forefront of the movement for African independence, along with leaders like Kwame N’Krumah, Leopold Senghor, Julius Nyerere, Patrice Lumumba and Sekou Touré. He died in January 1963, murdered during a military coup in which then sergeant Gnassingbé Eyadéma, still dictator of the country, was a participant.

Whether successful or not, thousands of Africans spread among cities in Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Ghana, today trace their ancestry to these Brazilian retournees. Few speak Portuguese any longer, or have any explicit understandings of the culture that their ancestors left behind, but Brazil nonetheless echoes through their traditions and practices. Their old mansions resemble those of colonial Brazil and their mosques the churches of Bahia.

The dates and celebrations from Brazilian religious traditions remain part of their calendar. They celebrate Catholic saints with folk dances from Brazil, like “bumba-meu-boi,” created by slaves on northeastern plantations. They still sing songs in Portuguese, and greet each other on the streets with Brazilian expressions, even though they no longer speak the language of their grandparents. Their cooking mixes their Brazilian heritage with African flavors. Finally, they have preserved Brazilian surnames: Pereira, Silva, Souza, Santos, Assunção, Nascimento, Monteiro, Sant’Anna, Oliveira, Medeiros, Almeida, Conceição, Cruz, Pio, Marinho, Soares, Lopes, Gomes, Rocha, Gonçalo, Machado, etc..

About The "Letters from África" Project

In four trips to Africa, between 1999 and 2001, I retraced part of this history that is buried in the memories of the returnees. I interviewed members of 50 retournee families in the cities of Lagos, Porto Novo, Cotonou, Uidah, Agoué, Lomé, and Accra, reconstructing genealogies and comparing them with written sources. It was thus possible to recreate the biographies of these people who created this diaspora within a diaspora. I titled the resulting project, “Letters from Africa,” which originated as a series of stories for Brazilian newspapers and magazines.

Three complementary elements make up the core of the Letters from Africa project. The first is photographic, in which I have tried to show how the descendents of the first returnees live today. Second, through historical research, I traced their genealogies and recorded the memories that remain, which are being lost as the older generations die. The third, more anthropological element, involves seeking out the Brazilian influences the returnees brought with them, traditions their descendents still preserve from a Brazil that most don’t remember.

"Letters" from the Amaral ans the Sabino families, in Benin

Finally, the project records sentiments, put down in messages (the “letters”) addressed by the returnees to Brazilians in general and to their “relatives” (people with the same surname who live in Brazil) in particular. In the photographs, they pose holding these letters, as a way of “sending them” to Brazil.

The concept of relationship with which I worked in the project is clearly more symbolic than real, though some families still recognize branches in Brazil and Africa (like the Rocha, Bangboshê Martins-Sauzer and Alakija families, in Lagos and in Bahia). The initiative to write and show the messages in photographs came from the interviewees themselves in 1999. It soon became one of the central aims of the project.

The material produced during the trips to Africa now includes hundreds of photographs of returnees and the influences they carried with them to Africa, interviews with members of 50 families, video and audio recordings of Brazilian music, culinary recipes for dishes of Brazilian origin, and other similar material. Some of this material has been published in Brazil in newspaper and magazine articles in 1999 and 2000.