Exodus from Brazil
Movements of emigration back to Africa occurred in Brazil and to a lesser extent in Cuba as well.27 As discussed in chapter 15, a series of slave insurrections in Brazil occurred in Bahia in the early nineteenth century and culminated with the Malê Revolt in January 1835.
Bahia’s authorities quickly repressed the rebellion by arresting dozens of individuals suspected of participating in the uprising. Despite the lack of evidence against many of these suspects, the province’s government took measures to deport dozens of prisoners a few months later. Hundreds of freed men, women, and children followed the same path.28After the dismantling of the Malê Revolt, Brazilian slave owners and public authorities considered freed Africans a serious menace to Brazilian society. As a result of the rebellion, the Law Number 9 of May 13, 1835, imposed numerous restrictions on freed Africans residing in Brazil. Among these measures, Africans were no longer allowed to acquire real estate in their own names; owners could not rent their houses to freed or enslaved Africans, who now had to pay an annual tax, otherwise they were sent to prison.29 African-born residents were also required to obtain a proof of residence that had to be annually renewed. As these measures evolved, the government of Bahia started deporting the prisoners who were sentenced for participation or suspected of involvement in the Malê Revolt. In September 1835, the vessel Maria Damiana sailed to Ouidah with two hundred passengers on board. Other remaining suspects were deported in smaller groups.30
Although Bahia’s government should have disbursed the travel costs of deportation, many exiles had no other choice than to pay their own transportation expenses.31 At least six hundred other men, women, and children decided to follow these deportees.32 Other individuals traveled back to Africa as well.
Considering the climate of persecution established in Salvador, it was not surprising that even freedmen and freedwomen without any connection to the 1835 rebellion were willing to travel to the Bight of Benin, despite this voyage being a very risky journey during a period when the illegal slave trade was still operating in the region.33 As Lisa Earl Castillo has noted, freed African migrants often left Brazil with several members of their households, including children, and other dependents, such as recently freed enslaved people. Moreover, several former bondspeople traveled back to Africa with their former owners.34Most of the first exiles who arrived in West Africa settled in Ouidah. But once in the region, they moved to other coastal towns such as Little Popo (today’s Aného in Togo), Agoué, Porto-Novo, Badagry, Lagos, and even Accra (in today’s Ghana).35 Although some freedmen and freedwomen who left from Salvador resettled in West Central Africa, the greatest majority of the exiles who established themselves in Luanda, Benguela, and Moçâmedes left Brazil from Rio de Janeiro.36 In many of these regions, formerly enslaved individuals joined existing communities composed of Portuguese and Brazilian slave merchants and their descendants. Over time, as some families increased in size, their members could be found in various coastal towns from Accra to Lagos. Unlike freedpeople who migrated from the United States, British North America, and the West Indies to Sierra Leone and Liberia, most formerly enslaved men and women who traveled from Brazil to West Africa and West Central Africa were born in Africa. But like their exile counterparts who left from other parts of the Americas to Africa, the travel conditions during the Atlantic crossing were also difficult.
Migration patterns from Brazil back to Africa followed the same routes in operation during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Therefore, most returnees established themselves close to seaports where they could maintain trading connections with Brazil.
Many African-born freedpeople preferred to settle in areas far from the places where they had been originally captured. As the illegal slave trade to the Americas was still active until the 1860s, once these African returnees arrived at the motherland, not only could they face hostilities from local communities for whom they were foreigners, but they also risked being captured and sold into slavery again. One dreadful episode took place when the vessel General Rego sailed to Lagos transporting a group of forty freedmen and freedwomen from Rio de Janeiro and Bahia in 1856. On its way to Lagos, the ship stopped at Ouidah, the slave-trading port controlled by the Kingdom of Dahomey. Under the excuse that the passengers were Egba people from Abeokuta, a Yoruba state rival to Dahomey, Dahomean agents confiscated the passengers’ belongings and sent them to the Dahomean king, who killed the adults and enslaved the children.37Observers at that time reported that freedpeople from Brazil, the West Indies, and the island of Saint Helena (then a British Crown colony) in the South Atlantic Ocean continued to relocate on the Bight of Benin in the 1870s. The exodus to West Africa, including departures from Rio de Janeiro, continued even after the abolition of Brazilian slavery in 1888, until the early twentieth century. Even in these late voyages, some exiles suffered great tragedies. In 1899, the vessel Aliança sailed from Bahia to Lagos with sixty passengers on board, almost all of them elder individuals born in the Bight of Benin. But during the Atlantic crossing, an outbreak of diphtheria killed at least twelve passengers, who were thrown into the sea, and upon arrival in Lagos, the survivors had to spend time in quarantine.38 As many as eight thousand men, women, and children may have migrated from Brazil back to Africa.39 However, estimates can vary because scholars often counted these migrants only until the 1860s. Moreover, many travelers voyaged back and forth between Brazil and West Africa.
Even the African-born freedpeople who decided by their own initiative to return to the Bight of Benin could experience the Atlantic crossing as a second deportation, as Milton Guran reminds us. As we have seen in previous chapters, although enslaved men and women were baptized and forced to adopt Roman Catholicism, African-born men and women and their descendants managed to keep their own religions, cultures, and languages. Even in bondage, while in Brazil enslaved Africans started new families, created new networks, learned to speak Portuguese, and acquired a variety of skills. Like their counterparts who migrated from the United States and Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone and Liberia, African-born freedmen and freedwomen who left Brazil to resettle in the Bight of Benin had Christian names. Their customs, manners, foodways, new professions, and even the Portuguese language they spoke (although known to many people in the coastal areas) contrasted with those of the locally born population. Decades of Atlantic slave trade had transformed West Africa into a place that no longer resembled the homeland of their childhood recollections. As many avoided inland incursions, few returnees were able to find their relatives or past acquaintances.40