On a warm summer Saturday, January 24, 1835, rumors that Africans, especially of the Nagô “nation,” were organizing an insurgence for early the next morning started circulating in the commercial area of Salvador’s lower city in Brazil.
The news quickly spread among enslaved people and freedpeople, ultimately reaching the ears of white residents. Informed about the plot, the president of the province moved fast and alerted the police chief, who deployed contingents of officers to inspect the houses of suspected African individuals.
As these events unfolded, news emerged that several Africans had attacked parts of the city: “In few minutes, they appeared in numbers of 50 to 60, armed with swords, some spears, and even pistols and other weapons.”1 The battle continued for several hours. Led by Muslim Africans, the insurrection became known as the Malê Revolt, the largest urban slave uprising in the Americas.Whether on plantations or in the dark and stinking streets of urban areas, bondspeople plotted rebellions. On the sugarcane plantations on the island of Hispaniola, as early as 1521, enslaved Africans organized the first slave uprising in the Western Hemisphere. As slavery expanded in the Americas, bondspeople planned a slave rebellion in New York City in 1712, and then again in 1741. Several other revolts followed during the eighteenth century. The Stono Rebellion in South Carolina in 1739 was the largest insurrection led by enslaved men and women in colonial North America. In 1791, in the context of the French Revolution, a great slave revolt broke out in Saint-Domingue. The insurgence led to the decree of 1794 that abolished slavery in the French colonies in the West Indies and the Indian Ocean. But when slavery was reinstated in 1802, insurrection intensified. The insurgents eventually defeated the French army in Saint-Domingue and cut their ties with France, creating the first Black independent nation in the Americas.
The political transformations brought by the French Revolution contributed to the rise of the Saint-Domingue slave rebellion.
But European revolutions were not the only ones to influence rebellions in the colonies. Ongoing transformations on the African continent also impacted the events unfolding in the Americas. Starting at the end of the eighteenth century, several wars broke out in large areas of Yorubaland in West Africa, eventually leading to the fall of the Oyo Empire and the emergence of new urban centers such as Ilorin, Ibadan, and Abeokuta. As we noted earlier in the book, West African social actors involved in these conflicts became war captives and were sold into slavery in the Americas. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the echoes of these conflicts continued to resonate in the rise of slave rebellions in Cuba and Bahia, regions with large concentrations of enslaved individuals born on the African continent. After exploring the multiple ways through which enslaved men and women resisted against slavery throughout the era of the Atlantic slave trade, this chapter considers the larger context of Atlantic revolutions to explore the rise of slave revolts in the Americas.While considering several slave rebellions in North America, South America, and the West Indies, as well as on slave ships, I will pay particular attention to the broader impact of the Malê Revolt of 1835 in Bahia. Whereas a combination of internal and external factors led to the emergence of this revolt, the repression that evolved in the aftermath of the uprising seriously affected the daily life of enslaved people and freedpeople in Bahia and other parts of Brazil. As newspaper articles show, Brazilian slave owners and government authorities in various regions of the country closely followed the rebellion’s aftermath. Several European and US newspapers also paid attention to the news about the insurrection. Moreover, the rebellion also contributed to the first large movement of former enslaved individuals back to West Africa.