Emerging Burial Grounds

Until the middle of the eighteenth century, enslaved Africans transported to Rio de Janeiro were disembarked at Fish’s Beach (Praia do Peixe), the waterfront across the Carmo Square, at present-day XV Square (Praça XV), the former Imperial Palace Square (Largo do Paço), where several public buildings such as the Customs House and the Royal Palace were established during the first decades of the eighteenth century.

Portuguese officials willfully ignored the atrocious transportation conditions in overcrowded slave ships, which were floating incubators for all kinds of diseases. But they still feared that disembarking enslaved Africans near Rio de Janeiro’s main public buildings would contribute to the spread of disease on the mainland. Displeased by the sight of long lines of naked slaves entering the city, they determined that enslaved Africans should be disembarked in the Valongo region, where the market was gradually established between 1769 and 1779, and where a wharf was also constructed. Between 1780 and 1831, when the trade of enslaved Africans to Brazil was made illegal, the Valongo region and its wharf became the main site of disembarkation of enslaved Africans in Rio de Janeiro, where scholars estimate that nearly 800,000 enslaved men, women, and children came ashore.⁴⁸ After 1831, the traces of the wharf were gradually concealed by successive public works.

During the eighteenth century and especially in the three first decades of the nineteenth century, when slave ships anchored on Rio de Janeiro’s shores, health authorities were supposed to inspect the bodies of enslaved Africans. When they judged it necessary, they would put the human cargo in quarantine for eight days to avoid spreading any kind of contagious diseases.⁵⁰ Dehydrated, undernourished, and often ill, a number of newly arrived enslaved individuals died before being sold. These men, women, and children had to be buried ashore. As early as in 1722, because of the growing number of deceased enslaved persons, especially those recently disembarked from Africa, the clergymen chapter of Rio de Janeiro’s cathedral requested permission from the Portuguese Overseas Council to construct a cemetery to bury them, an initiative that led to the creation of the Santa Rita Cemetery at Santa Rita Square (Largo de Santa Rita).⁵¹

Starting in 1722, enslaved Africans who perished prior to sale were interred in the burial ground at Santa Rita Square, also located in the area surrounding the Valongo region. But residents and local authorities continuously complained about the hygiene problems created by the presence of these cemeteries in the middle of urban areas. In 1769, the burial ground for newly arrived enslaved Africans moved to another site, also in the Valongo area, known as the Cemetery of New Blacks (Cemitério dos Pretos Novos), in present-day Gamboa neighborhood. When German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Freyreiss visited the cemetery in 1814, he noticed the piles of bodies waiting to be buried in shallow graves: “Probably burial is carried out only once a week and as the cadavers have already decomposed, the stink is unbearable.

More than six thousand newly arrived Africans were buried in the Cemetery of New Blacks. Among them, however, were a very small number of African-born people who had been enslaved in Brazil for several years and some Brazilian-born persons. As in other urban burial grounds, residents complained about the horrible smell of decomposing bodies. Many people reported having to keep the windows closed all day. The number of corpses interred in the site was evidently far too high for the size of the cemetery, estimated at approximately 115 by 120 yards (about 105 by 110 meters).⁵⁴

Eventually, following the official ban of the slave trade from Africa to Brazil in 1831, the burial ground was permanently closed.⁵⁵ Given this closure, during the next two decades of illegal slave trade, we can assume that Africans who died before being sold were buried in clandestine burial grounds. Over more than a century, the urbanization process concealed the Cemetery of New Blacks. But in 1996, an archaeological excavation in a private property at 36 Pedro Ernesto Street (formerly Cemetery Street) in the Gamboa neighborhood exposed a burial ground containing bones of dozens of African enslaved men, women, and children. The site was identified as being the Cemetery of New Blacks. This new discovery allowed for an examination of the remains that revealed details about burial practices and the enslaved persons interred in the site.

Similar grounds where cadavers of enslaved persons were discarded existed all over the Americas, especially in slave-trading ports. Unlike other graveyards that were intended to preserve the memory of the dead, the continuous existence of unmarked places where the dead bodies of enslaved Africans were discarded reinforced the dehumanization imposed on enslaved people. As historian Vincent Brown observed when exploring the burial landscape in nineteenth-century Jamaica, the battles for “memorials to the dead and over burial grounds were, in turn, important elements in those claims and a critical dimension of the politics of the enslaved.”⁵⁶ Whether in Jamaica, Brazil, or the United States, these claims were denied to most enslaved people. Therefore, when bondspeople were deprived of dignified burials, not only were their connections with their ancestors disrupted, their links with the land and their descendants were brutally broken, too.

As major gatherings that involved drinking, dancing, and singing, funerals of enslaved people could be also an occasion for insurrection, which is also why in New York City, when ceremonies occurred, they had to take place during daylight and the number of attendants was restricted to twelve people.⁵⁷ During the colonial period in New York City, Africans and their descendants were not allowed to be buried in churchyards, but they had their own cemetery, the Negroes Burial Ground, which was active during the eighteenth century. The burial ground was rediscovered during an excavation to construct a new federal building at 290 Broadway, when construction workers uncovered more than 400 skeletons of persons who were either African-born or of African descent.

Enslaved people were doomed to be forgotten even in death. But as in the period of slavery, when dumped bodies thrown into the sea came back ashore or reemerged from shallow graves, during the twenty-first century, news outlets have shown that slave burial grounds have been recovered almost on a monthly basis in the Americas.⁶⁰ In 2013, during the renovation of Gaillard Center, construction workers uncovered graves of thirty-six persons in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, the largest US former slave-trading port where nearly 150,000 enslaved Africans disembarked during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. After the excavations, scholars concluded that the remains belonged to eighteenth-century men and women who were likely either born in Africa or were descendants of African individuals. As in the African Burial Ground in New York City, archaeological analysis found pins used with burial shrouds as well as a variety of grave goods, such as mother-of-pearl buttons, glass beads, and clay pipe bowls. The Gullah Society engaged the Charleston Black community in actively reclaiming the site. The organization also led the scientific study of the archaeological site, referred to as the Anson Street burial ground.⁶¹ For the populations of African descent, reclaiming the remains of their ancestors found in these forgotten graves became an instrument to reappropriate the humanity stripped from enslaved Africans and their descendants during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery.