Death is a crucial dimension of life itself in many West African and West Central African societies.

In West African societies of the Loango coast, a region stretching north of the Congo River, funeral ceremonies could last months, especially if the deceased person was a prominent individual in the community.¹ But funeral rites varied over time, according to regions and the religious practices of each African community.

In West African Vodun and Orisha religions, as well as in African-based religions in the Americas such as Candomblé and Santería, deceased ancestors continue to play important and ongoing roles in the world of the living. They become deities to whom living persons must pay homage by performing rituals that often involve the sacrifice of animals and offerings of food and drinks. As a result, funeral rites and burial grounds were and are still central to the survival and cohesion of African societies and groups. Throughout the era of the Atlantic slave trade, this was well known to slave merchants, ship captains, and other crew members who traded on the coasts of Africa. In their journals and travelogues, they describe long, sophisticated funeral ceremonies, which they witnessed during the time they were trading in African ports.

Death was a constant threat for African captives who were taken from their homelands and confined in slave ships.

Until the nineteenth century, especially in Brazil and the West Indies, enslaved persons often had no access to a proper burial. Africans who endured the Atlantic crossing as captives knew that their time at sea was only one of the several tragic stages of their journey. Although the exact numbers are impossible to determine, many enslaved men, women, and children perished soon after disembarking on American shores. Others survived for a few weeks but died before being sold; their bodies were often discarded in common graves and waste dumps.

Even after the inhumane trade and slavery were abolished during the nineteenth century, this erasure continued. Public buildings, parking lots, squares, paved avenues, and highways gradually covered the old burial sites, condemning those interred there to oblivion. Probably the most well-known among these forgotten burial sites is the African Burial Ground in New York City, where the remains of enslaved Africans and their descendants were put to rest starting in the seventeenth century. In slave societies and societies in which slavery existed, such as colonial British North America, and later the United States, in addition to Brazil, Portugal, Mexico, Guadeloupe, and Barbados, enslaved people were buried in a variety of sites, including churches, churchyards, and plantations, quite often in unmarked tombs. Drawing from travel accounts, newspaper articles, parish records, and recent archaeological reports, as well as research on plantation and urban heritage sites and churches in Brazil and the United States, this chapter brings attention to the history of these burial grounds. I argue that, even in death, the humanity of enslaved Africans (and their descendants) persisted in being systematically devalued.