Brazil

The enslavement of Africans in Brazil had begun by 1550. The first enslaved Africans were introduced to Pernambuco and São Vicente, in the modern state of São Paulo. The centers of African slavery evolved not in colonial São Paulo, however, but in the Northeast of Brazil in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Mato Grosso in the eighteenth century. Only in the nineteenth century did African slavery supplant Indian slavery in São Paulo. African slavery also existed in the far north in Amazonia, as well as in the far south in Rio Grande do Sul. How many Africans were imported to be enslaved in Brazil over a little more than three centuries is uncertain; some estimates are 3.5 to 4 million. Nor do we know how many Africans served in Brazil, except for specific areas in which censuses were taken in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Several censuses reveal that black and pardo slaves comprised 40 percent or more of the total population.

The Africans who journeyed to Brazil on the slave ships came from many parts of West and west-central Africa. Those traded from the Costa da Mina of what is now Ghana were known as Minas in Brazil, and by extension Mina often defined a person from West Africa, also known as Guinea. The second major region of export was the modern country of Angola, hence many Africans were known in Brazil as "Angolans," or "Congos" for the old kingdom of Kongo in northern Angola (and by extension all those exported from the mouth of the Congo River). A minority of Africans originated in East Africa, principally Mozambique.

African slavery was the foundation of the coastal Brazilian export economy until its abolition in 1888. The Africans provided the labor to produce the wealth based on plantation agriculture and gold mining. Those who aspired to wealth and status owned slaves, and slave ownership was dispersed among all strata of society throughout Brazil.

The conquest and settlement of coastal Brazil was a joint Luso-African project in the colonial period. The Portuguese first brought their African slaves from Portugal to assist them in the conquest of Brazil. Lacking enough Portuguese soldiers, the Portuguese employed soldier-slaves to protect themselves from Indian and French attacks or to wage offensive wars against the coastal Indians. Black troops termed "Henriques," in honor of Henrique Dias, the black hero in the Dutch wars of the seventeenth century, were essential thereafter to the defense of colonial Brazil.

Also introduced to Brazil in the sixteenth century was the sugar plantation (the engenho), which was worked by African slaves, and most of the Africans in Brazil labored as slaves on the engenhos in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries or in support positions, such as food production, cattle raising, and transportation of sugar to the port cities, such as Salvador and Olinda. The first engenhos were established in São Vicente and Pernambuco in the 1530s and 1540s, and by 1570 an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 blacks lived in Brazil. As sugar became the dominant export, Africans grew in number, replacing Indian slaves who died or fled the plantations. In the last decades of the sixteenth century, Bahia and Pernambuco imported 30,000 Africans from the Guinea coast, but the dominant era of sugar cultivation was the seventeenth century, when a half million Africans were imported, mostly before 1640. They were forced to plant and harvest sugarcane for the great senhores de engenho, who owned large plantations, hundreds of slaves, and the sugar mills; or for the Lavradores De Cana, who owned or rented smaller plots of land, employed fewer slaves, and sent their cane to a nearby mill for processing. Because of the extraordinary labor demands of the sugar harvest, slave mortality was high, leading to the importation of more Africans.

Africans also labored in other areas of agriculture, such as the production of staple crops, tobacco, cotton, rice, and coffee. Small farmers, often free people of color, employed their slaves in raising tropical fruits, beans, corn, manioc, and small animals for sale in nearby towns, while others worked patches of land near great plantations. Others cultivated tobacco in Bahia for export to Europe and Africa. Further inland, especially in the backlands of the Northeast and Goiás, slaves raised cotton, spun it into thread, and wove cloth on wooden looms and made lace. Africans also labored on rice plantations, utilizing methods familiar to them in West Africa.

Experiments with coffee plantations in the early nineteenth century soon led to the rapid expansion of coffee plantations worked by African slaves, first in the Paraíba Valley of Rio de Janeiro, with subsequent expansion into São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Goiás. While slavery was being abolished elsewhere in Latin America, African slavery actually expanded on the coffee plantations of the southeast in the nineteenth century. By the time of abolition in 1888, the majority of slaves labored in the coffee regions.

Although plantation labor dominated African lives in Brazil, some Africans escaped the harsh labor demands of plantations in pastoral activities, such as raising cattle, horses, and goats. Africans, familiar with such animals in their homelands, quickly took to animal husbandry in the Northeast, central Brazil, and the far south. From the interior, black and mulatto cowboys drove cattle for slaughter to the coastal cities to be converted into dried beef on charqueadas, especially in Rio Grande do Sul. As muleteers and drivers, slaves also conducted mule teams and oxcarts between cities and plantations.

African fishermen also transferred their skills to Brazil and went deep-sea fishing using rafts with triangular sails. They were also the whalers of colonial Rio and Bahia, returning to warehouses to cut up and process the whales, extracting whale oil. Their familiarity with the sea meant that many Africans were also put to work as slave sailors, boatmen, and oarsmen, who were essential to the coastal and river trade of Brazil.

The African tradition of head porterage was also important in Brazil, and slaves moved heavy loads on their heads, including jars of water from wells and rivers. They were also the stevedores in port cities and loaded Brazil's exports of sugar, tobacco, and coffee and imports of Asian textiles and English manufactures on and off ships in the harbors. In addition, slaves had to carry their owners in sedan chairs or in hammocks. In the absence of large animals, enslaved Africans served as "beasts of burden," being particularly important in the transportation infrastructure.

African slavery was also essential to the mining sector of the Brazilian economy, especially in the eighteenth century in the mining captaincies of Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Mato Grosso. Miners who aimed to strike it rich purchased young Africans in Rio and Bahia and led them to the gold-rush camps to work as garimpeiros, who panned for gold and diamonds in the rivers. Young women worked as the cooks of the mining gangs or as domestic servants as the camps evolved into towns. Although a few black women mined gold, most acquired gold through retail trades. With what they earned from the trade in foodstuffs, they purchased their freedom or that of their children.

The retail trades and domestic service were closely linked in Brazil, and female slaves usually did both. Not only did they care for customers, serving them food or drink, but they also prepared the meals for the household, did the cleaning, and took the laundry to wash in nearby rivers. In larger households there was more labor specialization, with ladies in waiting known as mucamas, a housekeeper, an ama de leite to nurse the children, cooks, buyers, seamstresses, and laundresses. Male slaves served as coachmen, footmen, uniformed sedan-chair porters, and stablemen. Additional slaves attached to large urban households were sent into the streets as negros de ganho (blacks for hire) to earn wages for their owners as tailors, shoemakers, carpenters, and street vendors.

Most African slaves, however, did not serve in luxurious houses as elegantly dressed domestic servants or as skilled craftsmen in the towns and cities. The vast majority of enslaved Africans, including the women, were forced to work in the fields or at hard menial labor as porters. They were the indispensable labor force of the Brazilian economy without which Brazil would not have developed as quickly as it did between 1532 and 1888. Most of this labor was not done willingly; it had to be coerced, and only fearful punishments forced the Africans to work against their wills, although some slaveowners used the promise of manumission to "persuade" their unwilling captives to labor for them. Thus, just as hard labor was one aspect of the history of African slavery in Brazil, the other side was implacable resistance to escape the slave status, symbolized by the great seventeenth-century quilombo of Palmares.

See alsoSenzala; Slave Revolts: Brazil; Slavery: Indian Slavery and Forced Labor; Slave Trade.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, translated by Samuel Putnam (1946).

Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras: A Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900 (1957).

Warren Dean, Rio Claro: A Brazilian Plantation System, 1820–1920 (1976).

Gerald Cardoso, Negro Slavery in the Sugar Plantations of Veracruz and Pernambuco, 1550–1680: A Comparative Study (1983).

Robert E. Conrad, Children of God's Fire (1983).

Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (1985).

Mary C. Karasch, "Suppliers, Sellers, Servants, and Slaves," in Cities & Society in Colonial Latin America, edited by Louisa Schell Hoberman and Susan Migden Socolow (1986), and Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (1987).

Katia M. De Queirós Mattoso, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550–1888, translated by Arthur Goldhammer (1986).

Additional Bibliography

Bergad, Laird W. Slavery and the Demographic and Economic History of Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1720–1888. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Carvalho, Marcus J M de. Liberdade: Rotinas e rupturas do escravismo no Recife, 1822–1850. Recife: Editora Universitária UFPE, 1998.

Graden, Dale Torston. From Slavery to Freedom in Brazil: Bahia, 1835–1900. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

Higgins, Kathleen J. "Licentious Liberty" in a Brazilian Goldmining Region: Slavery, Gender, and Social Control in Eighteenth-century Sabará, Minas Gerais. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999.

Klein, Herbert S. The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Lauderdale Graham, Sandra. Caetana Says No: Women's Stories from a Brazilian Slave Society. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Nishida, Mieko. Slavery and Identity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Salvador, Brazil, 1808–1888. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003.

Reis, João José and Flávio dos Santos Gomes. Liberdade por um fio: História dos quilombos no Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996.

Silva, Maria Beatriz Nizza da. Brasil: Colonização e escravidão. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2000.

                                              Mary Karasch