Until recently, very little was studied about the history of Africa, which was typically reduced to Classical Antiquity and the Egyptians. However, the growing interest and importance of this continent shone some lights over the forgotten sub-Saharan Africa. Surrounded by forests, grasslands, mountains, the sea and the desert, and living alongside a rich fauna, these Africans lived in small kingdoms, much like the city-states of Classical Antiquity.
They dominated farming, metallurgy and mining techniques. They worshipped many gods and the nature, believing in a higher, creator god, whose name changed amongst the tribes. Wars were avoided by strengthening ties through marriage.
However, when the conflict was unavoidable, it did not seek territorial expansion. With the European exploration of the coast of Africa, the natives began to be captured and shipped to Europe, as slaves. The slave trade’s route changed with the colonization of the New World and the trading of human beings reached major proportions due to the need for labor force in these new lands.
The Portuguese had divided the Africans into three major groups: The Sudanese, the Muslim Guinean-Sudanese and the Bantu, all representing certain regions of the continent and bound for different destinations. Brazil received about 40% of all African slaves brought to the American continent, since it required a work force in the sugarcane fields in the Northeast, the gold mining cycle in Minas Gerais and the coffee plantations of Rio de Janeiro, during the 19th century. The transportation of these people, piled up inside the holds of slave ships, was done in inhumane conditions, and many ended up dying along the way, having their bodies thrown overboard.
Once they landed, the slaves were sold and driven to their destinations on farms, where they were forced to work from sunrise to sunset, with poor quality clothing and food. They slept in dark and damp rooms, the slave quarters, or “senzalas”, and they were often chained to prevent them from escaping. Physical punishments were commonplace, the scourge being the most commonly used.
Due to the constant slave trade, there was no concern for their well being, since they could be easily replaced with new African slaves, which, in turn, led them to have a very low life expectancy in Brazil. They were forbidden from practicing their religion and forced to adopt Catholicism and the Portuguese language. Their culture was kept alive by performing their African rituals in hiding, and even developing a martial art: capoeira.
Most Africans trafficked to Brazil were men, since they were better suited for forced labour. Women who were not exploited in the crops became domestic slaves known as “mucamas” (maids). At that time, regardless of their origin or ethnicity, women lived at the mercy of men and their whims.
Black, slave women faced a situation that was even more degrading, being viewed as mere sexual objects of white men. The miscegenation between Africans, Europeans and the Indigenous people was key for the formation of the Brazilian population. Riots were very common on farms, causing groups of organized slaves to flee and form the famous quilombos in the forests, where they could live in freedom in communities similar to those that existed in Africa.
Some slaves also managed to buy their freedom by acquiring their manumission papers. With the constant growth of the abolitionist sentiment, the end of slavery was a matter of time. Unfortunately, while promoting their legal freedom, the abolition of slavery failed to ensure decent living conditions to former slaves.
The reality they encountered was cruel, since they had no housing, economic conditions, or assistance of the State, causing many black people to experience difficulties after their release. Prejudice and discrimination prevented them from finding jobs in the cities. While on the plantations, they had been replaced by the new free European immigrants, most of them, Italian.
Slavery has left deep scars. Black people still live under conditions that are inferior to those of white people, due to the great process of social exclusion. They have lower levels of education, less qualification, lower salaries, less representation in the media and in government entities, as well as fewer management and leadership positions.
It is a degrading situation, given the immeasurable participation of black people in Brazilian life. Unfortunately, the little that is learned in schools about African heritage reduces black people to stereotypes linked to the origin of musicalities such as samba and manual, slave labor. This line of thinking leads to many misconceptions or incomplete ideas about black populations.
There is much more under that surface. Africans were, above all, a source of information for the Portuguese, who had no knowledge about the cultivation and exploitation of products from tropical regions. It was the African technology, with its agricultural knowledge improved through millennia, in addition to its mining techniques, which made possible Brazil’s main economic cycles, such as sugarcane cultivation, mineral extraction, cotton and of coffee, generating wealth and transforming the country's geography and history into those we know today.
It is estimated that about five million Africans arrived in Brazil between the years 1500 and 1850, out of a total of six million who were forced to leave Africa and come to the country. It is a shame that even today their descendants go through various types of deprivation and violence, in a country whose African colonization was much greater than the European. Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of the black movement, several historical injustices are being corrected, envisioning a future of hope, inclusion and equality for a people who bleeds but still stands.
