Deep and Old Scars

The reverberations of the early violent encounters between Portuguese sailors and West Africans in the fifteenth century could still be felt four hundred years later, when the slave trade to the Americas ended.

Although slavery and the trade in slaves had existed in various parts of the world for many centuries, with the rise of the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans, for the first time the trade in human beings specifically targeted Black African men, women, and children. The Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas created the idea of race while giving birth to global merchant capitalism and fueling the rise to industrial capitalism during the nineteenth century.⁴ The rise of this inhumane trade became the largest transoceanic forced migration in history and also accentuated divisions among African communities who spoke different languages and adhered to different religions.

In some areas, such as the Kingdom of Kongo in West Central Africa, the first encounters with Portuguese explorers and colonizers even led local kings to adopt Roman Catholicism as a religion of state. Over time, the presence of Portuguese and then Brazilian merchants in West Central Africa, in the Bight of Benin, and in Upper Guinea also propelled the emergence of communities who spoke Portuguese or idioms resulting from the mixture of Portuguese and local languages. These mixed communities of intermediaries were central to the rise and development of the Atlantic slave trade.

Beyond the losses occasioned by the division and killing of members of local communities during raids and wars, many of these captives perished in these journeys to the coast and during the dreadful period during which they were kept in captivity in the coastal areas. Forced into ships sailing to the Americas, the tragic trajectories imposed on these men, women, and children was just starting. Along the paths of the Atlantic slave trade, African women were separated from their children and kinfolk. Stories of captive African women who were physically abused and raped by ship captains and crewmen in the hold of slave ships have been well documented. Distressed, traumatized, dehydrated, and malnourished, women who carried their babies or who gave birth during the Atlantic crossing often witnessed the death of their newborns. African men, women, and children who did not survive the Middle Passage had their bodies thrown into the sea, deprived not only of their lives but also of the traditional funeral rites that linked them to their communities of origin.

Family separation followed by forced displacement and long periods spent in warehouses in African coastal areas as well as the long and horrific Atlantic crossings all were part of the broader picture of the inhumane trade in Africans and its catastrophic impacts on local communities in Africa. Despite extreme individual and collective suffering, during the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade, most men, women, and children managed not only to survive the horrors of forced migration and enslavement but also to accomplish unimaginable things. Women gave birth to babies in the hold of slave vessels. African men and women led revolts on board slave ships as well.

The rise of sugar plantations in the Americas fueled the Atlantic slave trade. Planters purchased most enslaved Africans disembarked on American shores to cultivate cash crops on large, medium, and small estates. But soon other crops such as rice, tobacco, coffee, and cotton also became extremely profitable, leading the trade in enslaved Africans to the Americas to reach its peak in the eighteenth century.

Approximately half of the nearly 12.5 million African captives transported to the Americas between 1501 and 1866 were embarked in West Central African ports. In general, it is safe to state that the ratio of African men to women transported to the Americas was two to one. Approximately 4.8 million enslaved Africans came ashore in Brazil, a number representing nearly half of the 10.7 million African captives who survived the Middle Passage and were disembarked alive in the Americas.⁵ Numbers convey very little about the experience of the victims of this inhumane trade, but here statistics call our attention to the crucial role of Portugal as well as colonial and independent Brazil in the trade of enslaved Africans.

The emphasis on Brazil is important because most general histories of the Atlantic slave trade, academic books, conferences, television documentaries, and even motion pictures tend to emphasize the trade in enslaved Africans in the North Atlantic, with a special focus on Britain and the United States. Challenging this view, this book has shown that we can only fully grasp the magnitude of this inhumane trade by recognizing and understanding the central role Brazil and West Central Africa played in this long, tragic history. Yet, centering the role of Brazil and Africa in the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery does not mean erasing the importance of other regions of the Americas, as well as the North Atlantic world, the Spanish-speaking Americas, and the British and French West Indies.

Plantation slavery was central to the development of slavery, but slavery also existed to a lesser or greater extent in urban areas. In these spaces, enslaved women occupied important roles by preparing and selling food and performing domestic labor, which in many cases included cooking and taking care of the children of slave owners. Working in urban areas certainly offered bondspeople greater mobility. Circulating in the city allowed enslaved men and women to create networks to run away or organize revolts. In Brazil and the rest of Latin America, the city was also the space where bondspeople could join Catholic brotherhoods to obtain assistance of all kinds. More important, in urban environments, enslaved people could perform a variety of tasks that permitted them to amass funds to purchase their freedom. However, manumission by grace or through self-purchase was much more widespread in Brazil than in any other region of the Americas. Even though both types of manumission existed in British North America and later in the independent United States, few slave owners freed their enslaved property through any of these means in comparison with Brazil and other regions of Latin America, such as Cuba and Peru.

Still, opportunities for manumission must not be understood as deriving from the benevolent nature of slavery in Latin America. When slave owners freed enslaved people in Brazil, they were also making an economic decision that was profitable for them. Therefore, most manumissions were not acts of generosity or gratitude but were provided in exchange for payment and occurred in urban areas. Because the price of enslaved women was usually inferior to that of bondsmen, in urban areas such as Rio de Janeiro and Salvador or small towns in mining regions, bondswomen were also much more successful than bondsmen in purchasing their own freedom as well. But despite these various paths to freedom, most bondspeople who toiled in Brazil—and the same can be said for the United States—died in bondage during the many long decades before the final abolition of slavery in these countries.