Cachaça was so popular that the importation of the product to Portugal was banned, and restrictions were even imposed on the amount that could be produced in the colony, in an attempt to protect the interests of Portuguese wine-growers. However, as an essential item for barter in the slave traffic, the spirit remained a very important product in Brazil. In the eighteenth century the city of Rio de Janeiro exported more cachaça than sugar. It was the city’s number one export, a large amount of which was destined for use in the slave trade in Angola. In fact, every by-product of the sugar-making process was utilized, including rapadura, a form of unrefined cane sugar, similar to jaggery. Along with dried meat and coarse flour, with which it is often associated, it formed the basis of the workers’ diet.
It is important to bear in mind a crucial and very characteristic aspect of Brazil’s sugar economy: the lack of refineries. There were none in Brazil, nor in Portugal. This meant that not only the trade in sugar but also the final production stage were left in the hands of the Dutch. Brazil was best known for its unrefined sugar (the pardo or muscovado). This type of sugar, also produced in the Antilles, accounted for most of the country’s production and provided the raw material for the refinery industry of northern Europe.67
As a matter of fact, Brazilian sugar was always treated with suspicion in Europe. The weight of the crates was frequently falsified, as was the declaration of the product’s quality. The price of the sugar varied according to colour. Since the crates were sealed and thus the contents could not be verified, it was common practice to put stones in the bottom to increase their weight. European traders constantly complained about these forms of deception, saying that its ‘dark sugar’ and ‘darker practices’ would be the death of Brazil’s sugar trade. The comparison between white sugar – the whiter it was, the purer – and the darker varieties, reputed to be of lower quality, became a metaphor that was to endure for many years in Brazilian society.
Soon the social hierarchy, with white landowners at the top and black slaves at the bottom, was seen as stemming from nature itself. The contrast between the status of the two groups was not explained by historical, economic or political arguments, but rather by comparison to the two colours of the sugarcane and the supposedly ‘natural’ supposition that white was superior to darker shades. Even today Brazilians are inclined to describe each other according to gradations of colour that correspond to different levels of the social hierarchy, in expressions such as branco melado, branco sujo, quase branco, puxado para branco and mestiçado.68 The use of these terms shows that perceptions of social status according to colour still exist in Brazil today.69
Thus the combined forces of sugarcane and slavery had both an extensive and intensive impact. The cultivation and harvesting of the sugarcane took up half the year, while fabricating the sugar took up the other half. Both entailed continuous, arduous work. To give an idea of the size of the undertaking, at one seventeenth-century plantation, Sergipe do Conde, located in the Recôncavo in Bahia, there were approximately 203 tasks undertaken every day – all related to the production process. These same tasks would have taken a single worker around three hundred working days to complete. The workers toiled day and night, in two shifts, grinding and boiling the sugarcane. The purging, drying and packaging only required one shift, which, however, lasted for eighteen hours or more. On Sundays and holidays, on most plantations, the slaves worked to grow food for their own consumption or fish in a nearby river. These provisions were essential additions to a diet that was not only rationed but also had very little nutritional value.
In every sector a single day’s work pushed the slaves to the edge of exhaustion. To alleviate the fatigue and maintain the frenetic rhythm, the work was accompanied by singing, which, as well as uniting the group, helped to raise morale during the long hours of uninterrupted labour. According to the Reverend Wash, a cleric who visited Brazil at the time, the slaves woke at five in the morning, said their prayers, and went straight to the plantations. Without leaving the fields they had a small breakfast at nine, followed by lunch at midday. Then they took to their hoes again and worked until nightfall. During the harvest everything had to go faster. At that time the engenhos operated for twenty hours non-stop, of which only four were allocated for rest and cleaning equipment.
There were four basic sectors: processing the sugarcane, transport, maintenance and administration. The engenho was administered by the master with the aid of a priest and the chief overseer. The master very rarely left the engenho during the harvest period, during which he required the help of professionals to verify legal documents and the accounts. As mentioned above, it was usual for the second son to graduate as a lawyer in order to protect his family’s commercial interests and to deal with legal papers and other administrative matters. The ‘royal’ engenhos often employed a surgeon and a local clerk, who dealt with the commercial side of the operation.
Non-slave labour was used for specialized tasks, and these individuals were considered technicians. The chief overseer acted as manager, dealt with any ‘personal’ problems, and was responsible for applying collective and individual punishments. The slaves were terrified of him. He was also in charge of the upkeep of equipment. As the master’s right-hand man, he earned the highest wages on the engenho. Next in the hierarchy came the clerk from the local town, who acted as a commercial agent: he received the sugar, deposited it in the warehouse on the docks, and was responsible for its sale and embarkation. Then came the ‘income collector’ who was responsible for receiving the rent money owed by the farmers who leased their land from the master. The copyist and stock-keeper, who controlled expenses, were paid a similar amount, as was the solicitor who acted as a sort of legal representative for the engenho.
Then there were the ‘men of letters’ who were hired to deal with lawsuits, and the ‘cauldron skimmers’ responsible for skimming the foam off the sugarcane juice. But perhaps the most valuable of all the sugarcane professionals, the one on whom the success of the engenho depended, was the ‘sugar master’. Virtually an engineer, he was in charge of all the technical procedures. He oversaw the grinding, avoiding any excess of liquid, and attempted to achieve the ideal conditions for boiling. He was responsible for overseeing the entire boiling process, as well as the work of the boilers and the other mill workers. He was a highly respected professional, hard to find and very well paid.
With so many areas of specialization, the Brazilian engenhos adopted the manufacturing standards of the time, which tended to involve sequences of interlinked, complex activities. The requirement for large-scale production obliged Brazil to organize its sugar production units within a rigid hierarchical structure. But the rigour of the enterprise should not be overrated: documents from the period attest that scientific methods were ignored in favour of individual and group experience. Travellers used to comment that in Brazil everything was ‘done by eye’. This was the way that the volume of sugarcane transported by boat or by ox-drawn cart was assessed. Tools were rudimentary: pickaxes and hoes were used for preparing the soil; ploughs were not regularly used. Ultimately, the productive cycle depended on the sweat of the slaves and the use of the whip.
This type of organization gradually evolved across the seventeenth century as slaves took the place of the few free workers. Actually, the sugar production in Brazil’s northeast led to the population of African slaves outnumbering that of the Native Americans. In the 1550s and 1560s there were virtually no Africans working on plantations in the northeast. The workforce was made up of Indian slaves, and, to a lesser extent, Indians brought from the Jesuit villages. But this situation was to radically change as African slaves began to replace both the Indian slaves and the free Indian villagers. In 1574 Africans represented just 7 per cent of slave labour; in 1591 they represented 37 per cent, and by 1638, together with Afro-Brazilians, they accounted for virtually the entire workforce.70 In 1635, for example, the aforementioned Sergipe do Conde engenho had eighty slaves and thirteen p
aid workers. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the number of slaves had risen to 200 and the number of paid workers had declined to just six. The predominance of African labour also created a paradox: the most prestigious and essential positions could be highly beneficial to slaves capable of fulfilling them, with freedom being the most valuable form of payment.
Investment in these establishments was spread between the construction of buildings, the grinding mill and the ‘coppers’ (boilers), as well as being used for the acquisition of cattle, carts, boats, pasture, land for planting and, most importantly, slaves. Investment in slaves varied between 7 per cent and 37 per cent of the landowner’s total capital, with the majority spending around 25 per cent on the acquisition of slaves. These purchases thus represented a significant part of total expenses, and the imperative was to make the maximum use of resources and to avoid any possible ‘losses’.
By the seventeenth century, the slave traffic had become a highly profitable business, and many slave-owners began to take more interest in ‘replacing’ their dead slaves than in helping in the long and costly task of rearing any child that ‘belonged’ to them. The popular assumption that slavery in Brazil was less harsh than in North America, where special ranches for ‘breeding’ slaves existed, is more hypothetical than true. The behaviour of Brazilian slave-owners was in no way humanitarian; it stemmed from commercial and pragmatic considerations. Maintaining a child slave until she or he had reached a productive age was expensive. Thus it was better to purchase a ‘new one’ in one of the open markets, where slaves were put on display alongside household goods and items of decoration. Prices also varied according to ‘use’: women and children were cheaper than adult men. Slaves were classified as children until they were eight; after thirty-five they were seen as old and of little use for the heavy work on the engenhos. Ageing occurred early, as did the end of adolescence: by the age of eight, or at most twelve, a slave’s childhood was over. There are records that show slaves of eight years old being registered as fully grown men. The excessive workload aged them prematurely, depriving them of a normal lifespan. As we shall see in greater detail, the sugar culture produced a land of extremes. A genuinely new world was being created. A world that extracted the sweetness demanded by Europe from the bitter toil of those it enslaved.
3
Tit for Tat: Slavery and the Naturalization of Violence
THE TRAFFIC IN HUMAN BEINGS
The Italian Jesuit Padre Antonil was famous for making statements that were as logical as they were cruel. He defined the slaves as ‘the hands and feet of their masters. Without them it is not possible to create Brazil, maintain and increase its revenues, or to keep the sugar mills running.’ The slaves, who in regions like the Recôncavo in Bahia constituted as much as 75 per cent of the population, were the real foundation of society. From the sixteenth century until the prohibition of the slave traffic in 1850, the decline in slave numbers – due to premature deaths and the low birth rate – meant that new slave labour had to be constantly imported from Africa. This led to the rise of an influential class of human traffickers headed to America, and an increasing demand for products to sell on the African coast, including tobacco and aguardente.
Since antiquity, various forms of slavery had been known in Europe, a system that was far from extinct at the time of the great navigations, albeit less intensive and widespread than the slave trade adopted from the sixteenth century onwards. Almost all societies had coexisted with slavery at one time or another, with the common denominator that they treated their slaves as ‘foreigners’, as individuals who had no history or family. And it is true that peasants and serfs in Europe also lived in conditions very similar to slavery. However, it was the lack of roots, of rights and of ties to the community that distinguished slavery from these other forms of forced labour.
The Greek cities and the Roman Empire can be considered the most significant examples of slave societies in antiquity – at the height of the Roman Empire there were between two and three million slaves, representing 35 to 40 per cent of the entire population. Nonetheless, unlike slavery in modern times, forced labour was not the main source of production for goods and services. Even with the decline of the Roman Empire and the concentration of slaves in domestic duties, the system remained in place. In the fifth and sixth centuries, during the barbarian invasions, there are constant references to the existence of slaves and the use of slave labour. The practice of slavery increased with the Muslim invasions of the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean islands, assuming a more significant role particularly in Spain and Portugal. It was only with the Crusades, however, from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, that the use of slave labour became more generalized. Also between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, with the arrival of the Genoese and the Venetians in the Black Sea, the Balkans, Syria, Palestine, Cyprus and Crete, there was another wave of slave labour, a flourishing trade in captured Slavs, from where the word slave originates.
At the end of the Middle Ages, slaves were already working in sugar production on the Mediterranean islands, the region of Europe where the use of slave labour was at its most intense. It should be noted, however, that although a number of peoples adopted the use of slave labour, it was very rarely used in agriculture. The slaves were above all artisans. Local peasant labour remained essential for agricultural production,1 that is, until the Portuguese arrived on the coast of Guinea in the fifteenth century.
Slavery was also used in Africa, but within a very different context: one of lineage and kinship. Without any far-reaching political or religious systems, Africans were free to sell, buy and even export their slaves. Caravans undertook the long journey into the Sahara Desert, where, since the seventh century, Islamic merchants had traded in human beings. The main trade routes were to the north of Africa, as well as to the Red Sea and to the east of the continent, where slavery also existed, although it was not fundamental to the local economy. In general, slaves were mostly used for household tasks; only in a few cases were they used for the production of goods or for agricultural labour. They also carried out domestic and religious tasks. Female slaves were often forced into working as concubines and at times were subjected to acts of ritual sacrifice. In spite of this, the slave trade flourished for eight centuries, not only domestically, but also on the international market, where Europeans were its largest clientele.
Portuguese contact with black Africa has an equally long history, pre-dating the colonization of Brazil by almost half a century. In 1453, for example, in his Crônica de Guiné, the Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara described the activities of the Portuguese at the mouth of the Senegal river. At this time the Portuguese were mainly interested in gold, with only a secondary interest in slaves, ivory and pepper. When they first began to traffic in slaves it was to meet the demand for domestic labour in Europe. However, this was to drastically change with the growth of sugar plantations. Portuguese interest in pepper was entirely superseded by the demand for human beings. Trafficking now became the priority. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Lisbon was the European city with the largest number of African slaves, followed by Seville. Out of an overall population of a hundred thousand inhabitants, ten thousand were either black or mulatto captives.2
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries veritable Luso-African societies developed in Cape Verde, São Tomé and Madeira. The Portuguese presence grew out of transatlantic commerce, and, after 1492, the sudden increase in contact between the continents. By 1582 the population of these islands was around sixteen thousand, of whom the great majority were slaves, who accounting for 87 per cent of the total. Due to the new maritime routes and the discovery of favourable currents, the oceans that had previously separated peoples and cultures now brought them together. By 1520 the Portuguese had established a number of trading posts in Africa, from where slaves from Benin and the lower Congo river were taken to São Tomé and, from around 1570, to the flourishing market in Brazil. Th
e traders, most of whom were Sephardi, began to take charge of the ‘Brazilian sugar trade’. On the other hand, the enormous plantations in America saw the Portuguese creating a large-scale market to supply that ever increasing demand.3
Furthermore, at that time the concept of ‘Africa’ as a territorial reality did not exist, not even for the inhabitants of the continent. Prior to nineteenth-century pan-Africanism, Western societies viewed the populations residing to the south of the Sahara as ‘waiting to be enslaved’. In truth, for at least six centuries Africans were exported to Asia, Europe and the Middle East. It is estimated that the number of Africans sold into slavery was around six million.
The arrival of the Portuguese on the sub-Saharan Atlantic coast in the early fifteenth century was to radically alter the slave trade, both in terms of scale and the increasing resort to violence. The Portuguese presence also affected the domestic wars between Africans, and their network of relationships in the interior of the continent. If, as we have previously noted, Portugal was initially only marginally interested in obtaining slaves, the Portuguese radically altered their position when sugarcane became one of the major products of the empire – notably after the occupation of São Tomé and the establishment of friendly relations with the Congolese. The Portuguese maintained a strong presence in the region, acting as clerks, soldiers and traffickers. They were also missionaries for the Catholic faith, which was embraced by the Congolese royal family, the region’s elites and its urban population. This friendly relationship, however, was only to last until 1665.4
In the early years of colonization, black workers, who had been converted to Christianity and had adapted to the culture of the Iberian Peninsula, were re-exported to work on the sugar plantations in Brazil, but with the rapid expansion of sugar production slaves began to be exported directly from Africa to the New World. The numbers also increased: whereas in the first half of the sixteenth century the number of Africans brought to Brazil was just a few hundred, this number soon increased to around a thousand ‘imports’ a year, and by the 1580s had reached three thousand.5 From then on Africans who had no privileged position, who were not Christians and who spoke none of the Romance languages, nicknamed boçai, were exported en masse to Brazil. The new trading post that the Portuguese established in Luanda on the west African coast played a central role in this increase in trade, becoming a major centre for the transport of slaves after 1575. The Portuguese trade centres were to be concentrated in Luanda for another two centuries, in the region of the Cuanza and Benguela rivers. The number of white men employed in the area never exceeded five hundred.
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