The first contacts with the King of the Congo were made between 1480 and 1490, with an exchange of ambassadors and the conversion of local leaders to Catholicism. King Nzinga a Nkuwu himself was converted and baptized with the name of Dom João.17 At this time there was also ritual destruction of the ‘idols’ worshipped in the Kingdom of the Congo. From then on there was a constant flow of soldiers, teachers, Christian books, liturgical vestments, European cloth, weapons, horses and even farming tools into the kingdom. The Portuguese were agile, and by 1567 they had managed to establish several stable bases of operations in the Congo and at the port of Luanda. Thirty-three years later, trade with America was greater than the trade taking place in the interior of the African continent.
In 1575, with the Portuguese colonization of Angola and the founding of Luanda, the numbers in slave-trafficking doubled. By 1600 it is calculated that a total of 50,000 Africans had disembarked in Brazil. In the 1620s Dutch records show that 4,000 slaves were imported per year into Pernambuco alone. During the sixteenth century it is calculated that between 10,000 and 15,000 Africans from Guinea, the Congo and Angola were exported as slaves to Brazil. Estimates for the seventeenth century mention 6,000 slaves per year being shipped from the Gulf of Guinea alone.18 At the same time, Luanda, Benguela, Cabinda and Ouida were the most important ports for the slave trade during the sixteenth century, with Luanda exporting a total of 2,826,000 Africans, and Benguela a total of 1,004,000, between 1502 and 1867. The numbers would increase according to the extent of the Portuguese presence in the area.19 In the early days of the colony the association between Brazil and Angola was so evident that Padre Vieira commented: ‘Say sugar, and you say Brazil. Say Brazil, and you say Angola.’20
Initially the slaves from Angola were mostly taken to captaincies in the south. In the northeast the majority of the slaves came from the Bay of Benin (the southeast of present-day Nigeria) or from the Ivory Coast. Slaves from the Ivory Coast were generically referred to as minas. African traffickers and later slave traders from Bahia imported Dagomés, Jejes, Hausa, Bornus, Tapas and Nagôs from the ports of Ajudá, Popó, Jaquin and Apá in the Bay of Benin, and later also from the port of Onim (near present-day Lagos).21 While the proximity of linguistic groups helped to build networks of solidarity and friendship, the diversity of customs added to the cultural wealth of the African diaspora in America. Brazil was becoming a kind of ‘new Africa’, or, in the words of Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, a merchant in Goa and Lisbon who established himself as master of an engenho in Paraíba, a ‘New Guinea’.22
IN BRAZIL, A MIXTURE
Although the slave trade was affected by the Spanish-Dutch Wars, in the seventeenth century they in fact only helped to strengthen the role of the traffickers who guaranteed a constant supply of workers for the colony. St George’s fortress in what is now Ghana became the centre from which vast numbers of captives from Guinea, Angola, Mozambique and the Costa da Mina were exported to America. The Portuguese created closer ties with the King of Dahomey, and they built a fortress there in São João Baptista de Ajudá, which was to become the largest supply centre for slaves later in the century. In Brazil, as previously mentioned, there was always a substantial mixture of African cultures among the enslaved: they came from Senegal, Angola, the Congo, the Costa da Mina and the Bay of Benin. There were also thousands of Jejes, Nagos (Yorubas), Tapas (Nupes), Hausas and Sudanese peoples. Nearly one-third of the slaves, however, came from the Bantu peoples of Angola and Central Africa.
The slave masters usually preferred the ‘blacks from Angola’, who were considered ‘good workers’. The ‘blacks from Mozambique’ were not so ‘highly esteemed’. One landowner went as far as to say that they rebelled so much ‘they were like the devil himself’. Nevertheless, the continuous requirement for new workers meant that the masters purchased whatever was on the market. There are many descriptions of the places where the ‘products’ were sold; their bodies, now covered in whale oil and gleaming in the sun, were submitted to a careful examination of their teeth, hair and muscles, in order to assess their value. In addition to gender and age, health was also an essential concern in evaluating the price.
Brazil received fewer women than men. Among the reasons for this was that women’s reproductive capability was not considered important. What mattered was masculine strength. Children under fourteen years of age made up 2 per cent to 6 per cent, while women accounted for 20 per cent to 30 per cent of the total number. It is not easy to calculate the exact age of the new arrivals, as this was usually rounded up or down in the registries. While the ages of children up to ten were carefully noted down, the same did not apply to the ‘old’, the term used for slaves over forty.
There was an enormous difference between the slaves who worked inside the casas-grandes – domestic servants about whom every type of personal detail was known – and those who worked on the plantations, selected on the basis of quantity rather than quality. The traffickers used a series of terms to identify the age group of their ‘merchandise’: ‘breastfeeders’ for babies of up to one year old; ‘boy’ or ‘girl’ for children up to the age of eight; ‘moleque’ or ‘moleca’ for captives between eight and fourteen; and ‘youngsters’ for adolescents.23 In the early days of the colony most of the slaves were recent arrivals. Around 1600 they accounted for 70 per cent of the total. The engenho owners preferred new arrivals who were not adapted to the customs of the country and were thus less likely to escape.
The ‘breeding’ of slaves, as occurred in the United States, did not appeal to slave masters in Brazil because the mortality rate among children was particularly high and fertility rates were low. The latter was due to malnutrition (retarded menstruation), the excessive workload and the scarcity of women. There were also cultural reasons. The Yoruba believed in postpartum abstinence because they thought a child’s health would be compromised should there be another pregnancy. It is at the very least paradoxical that, instead of the alleged ‘sexual promiscuity’, in fact there appears to have been voluntary abstention from sexual intercourse. ‘Promiscuity’ is always a term used to describe and condemn the sexual habits of ‘others’. Very few registries of marriages exist because the masters preferred not to recognize these common-law unions, so that they could sell one or the other of the partners whenever they chose.24 However, children usually lived with one of their parents or both, or in groups under the surveillance of adults.
But in practice there was usually an attempt to ignore this type of familial relationship. Slaves were generally known by the Christian names they received at baptism, as well as by their colour and place of birth. As there were a large number of slaves called João, it was common practice to identify them by their country of origin: João Angola, João Cabinda or João da Guiné. The name of their owners was often added, for example ‘slave of Antonio dos Santos’. When they were given their freedom it was not unusual for them to keep the name of their last owner – Felix Maciel had been Belchior Maciel’s slave. Actually, the adoption of the former master’s surname was an indication that, even after a slave’s release, she or he still depended on the master’s protection. This was regarded as a deep-rooted tradition of patronage that created family ties between the ‘godparents’ and the ‘godchild’. It meant that loyalty and subservience to the master were still expected, as if slavery in Brazil was an irrevocable destiny.
SLAVERY IS SYNONYMOUS WITH VIOLENCE
The creation of an institution on the scale of modern slavery can only be understood in the context of the development of overseas colonies and their vast production geared toward an external market. Monoculture demanded a large contingent of workers who were required to submit to a gruelling regime, with neither pay nor personal motivation. Slavery in the New World was thus recreated with the use of the forced labour of workers who had been alienated from their origins, and had neither freedom nor any connection with the work they undertook. They were labourers who were supposed to have no will of their own,
and to be unaware of what they produced.
Life in the tropics was depicted in this period as a burden, a punishment, a prison sentence for both masters and slaves. The discourse of the Church and the landowners held that arduous forced labour would discipline and civilize the slaves. There were even manuals – models for the application of exemplary punishments – that taught the plantation owners how to ensure that their slaves were submissive and to transform them into obedient workers. An example was the notorious ‘slave-breaker’, a punishment frequently used in Brazil to ‘educate’ newly arrived or newly acquired slaves, by means of a public whipping, to remind them that they had always to look down when in the presence of any authority.
According to Padre Jorge Benci, who visited the country at the end of the 1600s, the reason for submitting the slaves to these punishments was ‘so that they would not become insolent, nor find cunning ways of avoiding submission to their master by becoming rebellious and uncontrollable’.25 This, then, was the paternalistic and religious justification – with the promise of future redemption – for why the system could only operate through the use of force.
The repetitive, arduous, exhausting work on the plantations was in itself a form of violence. This forced labour, betokening as it did the authority of the master, instilled a constant feeling of dread, as well as terror of the collective punishments that were frequently applied.26 Public chastizement in the stocks, the use of the whip as a form of punishment and humiliation, the iron collars studded with spikes to avoid escape, the iron masks that prevented the slaves from eating earth as a way of provoking a slow and painful death, the chains with which they were tied to the ground, created a world of violence in Brazil rooted in the figure of the master and his supreme power under the law, the marks of which were constantly registered on the bodies of his slaves. As for the Africans, the moment they set foot on Brazilian soil they had to learn the art of how to survive.
Any system like modern slavery can only be maintained through the continuous exercise of violence. On the part of the masters this was manifested in a frenzy of cruelty constantly inflicted on the slaves to cower them into submission and unquestioning obedience. On the part of the enslaved it ranged from persistent small acts of insubordination to large-scale revolts and the establishment of the quilombos.27
The marks left by slavery were so deep that even today customs and expressions from the time are commonplace in Brazilian society. If the casa-grande established the border between the family and the workers, the same symbolic architecture exists today in Brazil. Residential apartment blocks all have separate lifts, not just for cargo and deliveries, but for service providers and household employees whose skin colour is often consistent with the history of slavery in Brazil. Expressions from the time of slavery are still in use, although the original meaning has often been lost. The expression ‘dry nurse’ (ama-seca) was intended to distinguish the ‘dry’ from the ‘wet nurses’, slave women who were frequently unable to breastfeed their own children as they were required to nourish their masters’ offspring. Boçal is still used to refer to a person whose reactions and thought processes are slow – a simpleton – just as ladino is still a synonym for ‘clever’ or ‘smart’. In the original sense, boçais was the term used to distinguish newly arrived slaves who, unlike the second generation of ladinos, knew neither the language nor the countryside and thus had little chance of escape.
Some of the terms used at the time, however, have completely disappeared, for example the expression ‘self-moving goods’ (bens semoventes), which was indiscriminately used in inventories and wills to describe both slaves and livestock. But today Brazilian society is still marked by a division that is rarely mentioned: one that transforms a person’s colour into an indicator of social difference. This is evidenced every day by the actions of the police, who stop and arrest many more blacks than whites. The practice is euphemistically referred to as ‘interpellation’. There are many cases in which innocent individuals who are constantly harassed by the police begin to actually believe that they are somehow guilty. The anthropologist Didier Fassin calls this ‘incorporated memory’: the body remembers before the mind has time to reflect. During the time of slavery free blacks were stopped on the streets as ‘suspected slaves’. Today they are detained in the same way for other alleged offences. This is racial profiling. Their real ‘offence’ is their ethnic origin.28
Although violence was generalized in the slave-based society, there was an internal hierarchy. The plantation slaves, who were many, were submitted to a gruelling work regime with rigorous controls, whereas the domestic slaves led quite a different sort of daily life. On the large engenhos there could be a hundred or more enslaved people working in the fields, many of whom the master hardly knew. Domestic slaves, on the other hand, were fewer and lived in close proximity to the family, working as cooks, nannies, pages and wet nurses – a body of servants who accompanied the family in its day-to-day routine.
However, apart from these relatively privileged few, there can be no doubt that all that awaited the vast majority of slaves was brutalizing work in the fields under the scorching sun of the northeast, at times for as many as twenty hours on end. The work in the grinding mills, the furnaces and the boilers could be even worse. From time to time an enslaved person would lose a hand or an arm in the sugarcane mills. There are several reports which mention that an axe was always kept close to the grinder so that if a slave’s limb was trapped in the rollers it could be quickly severed, preventing damage to the sugar or the machinery.
The heat produced by the furnaces and boilers was unbearable; in addition to withstanding the sweltering conditions the slaves often suffered serious burns. The work was so arduous and dangerous that it was often reserved as a punishment for enslaved people who were considered ‘insolent’ or rebellious. There are also records of slaves being burnt on the cheek and on the chest, scorched with hot wax, tortured with red-hot irons, and of having their noses and ears cut off.
Suffering from the arbitrary abuse of the masters was daily routine. Women were frequently victims of their sadism. Their bodies were not only fit for labour; they were also an instrument of pleasure (and guilt) for the masters and an object of hatred for their jealous wives. It was in these secret, sexual rendezvous that the despot enjoyed the ‘apparent’ passivity of his female slave. She had in fact surrendered out of terror and fear of reprisal. Padre Antonil wrote that the slaves were treated with three Ps: ‘pau, pão e pano’ – cudgel, bread and cloth. The real explanation is that the white overlords knew they were in a minority and could only control their slaves by creating an atmosphere of premeditated fear.
There was always an excess of work, always a shortage of clothing and food. Travellers to the country noted that slaves in Brazil went hungry. They were required to plant food for their sustenance, but Sunday was the only day reserved for this activity. Virtually starving, they often caught rats that infested the plantations and cooked them in the senzala. Their basic diet was manioc flour with dried meat or fish – chicken and fresh meat were reserved for slaves who were ill. There is still a popular saying that goes ‘when there’s chicken to eat in a poor man’s house, either the poor man’s sick or the chicken is’. The foreign travellers also noted that in some regions of Brazil dried codfish (bacalhau) was referred to as ‘negroes’ food’. Ironically, the whip with thongs of twisted leather that was used to chastize the slaves was also called the ‘bacalhau’.
That is why, from the start, the slave economy was accompanied by high mortality rates. The slaves brought to America died easily as they had no immunity to the diseases of the New World. They were also both physically and morally shattered after the Atlantic crossing and fell victim to opportunistic diseases. Thus their first year was the most precarious, in every sense. They not only had to get used to the gruelling work regime, but also to learn the language and adapt to a different climate. Child mortality was even more alarming: the insalubrious conditions,
lack of medical attention and malnutrition led to high rates of stillborn babies and of children who died before the age of three.
The work regime was the greatest villain. It drained the women of their vigour and killed off the ‘old’ (slaves of over forty were considered old). According to the inventories of the engenhos, 6 per cent of the slaves died of ‘fatigue’ – exhaustion, total collapse of the body. On the Sergipe do Conde engenho in Bahia, between 1622 and 1653, five new slaves a year were purchased to replenish a group of seventy because of the constant deaths. Account books from engenhos in the northeast also register numerous cases of abortion and suicide – individual forms of rebellion by those who refused to accept their enslavement. The idea that Brazil had a more benevolent brand of slavery than the United States can only be refuted. Life expectancy for Brazilian slaves was even lower than in the United States – twenty-five as compared to thirty-five – although the same discrepancy also existed between the white populations of the two countries.
This regime of privations affected every part of the slaves’ daily routine, including the clothes they were given, which were often little more than rags. Records from the time show that the slaves worked virtually naked and were thus very susceptible to changes in the weather. The men were normally bare-chested and wore thin baggy trousers that reached below the knee. To stop sweat from running into their eyes they tied a cloth or handkerchief around their heads. The women’s attire was a little more complete – corsets, petticoats, blouses and skirts. It is sometimes mistakenly thought that these were reserved for festive occasions or for when the slaves were sold. In general these clothes were made from ‘mountain cloth’, a thick fabric woven from raw cotton thread that scratched the skin. Clothes were distributed twice a year: at harvesting time and when the cane was ready for grinding.
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