Slave Life in Rio

Slave Auction, Rio de Janeiro, 1859-1861

Standing on a chair, the auctioneer dominates the scene while an enslaved woman with a child clinging to her arm is examined by a prospective buyer. Other Afro-Brazilians (slaves?) are also shown; various material goods, including household furniture and musical instruments, are apparently being sold at the same auction (see also Biard05). Biard, a French painter, lived in Brazil for two years, 1859-1861. His published account contains a number of images of slave life...

Returning from a Slave Sale, Rio de Janeiro, 1859-1861

The slave owner, leading his horse while smoking a cigar and carrying an umbrella, heads a group of four adults and one child. One of the men carries household goods, including a clock and a musical instrument while the two women, one holding onto a child, are behind; bringing up the rear is an enslaved (?) man who appears to be guarding the newly-bought slaves. The material goods shown suggest that the auction was not only for the purchase of slaves but household items as well (see also Biard04). Biard, a French painter, lived in Brazil for two years, 1859-1861.

The Story of The Legendary Icon Anastacia: Escrava Anastacia

Editor's note:  This story comes from the website, Artworks By Matt Branson. Finding Anastacia's story in English has been a challenge, but this author seems to be from the UK and has the essence of the story correct (my Portuguese is sketchy at best, but from what I've been able to translate his version of the story rings true).  I've seen this iconic image of the cruelties of slavery, but I haven't, until this day, been able to locate the backstory of the masked woman.  

From my understanding and research, it appears that the Portuguese/Brazilian slave holders possessed this strange propensity to mask their enslaved population.  One can just imagine the agony of wearing an iron bridle in the subtropic heat, day in and day out.  The utter misery and torment of enslavement coupled with an unbearable  torture devise like the "dirt eating mask" must have yielded untold suffering for those wearing these vile devices.  Add on to that the burdensome iron slave collar with prongs for extra torture, along with enslavement in perpetuity and the hopeless tyranny of enslavement seems too extreme to wrap your mind around.--Ron Edwards, US Slave Blog

Escrava Anastacia

So, on with the story from Matt Branson:  "I had lived in Rio De Janero for a few years. One day while out down town, I came across a little head of a black girl wearing an iron mask. I had already collected quite a few strange looking statues and thought she would fit in just fine with the rest of them. She pecked my curiosity and I wanted to know more about her."

The story I discovered concerning this new, small statue, was about a child named Anastacia. A black female slave brought from the west coast of Africa to Brazil. Her mother had been forcibly taken by her white owner for his physical pleasures. A child was conceived, the first black child to be born with blue eyes. The cruelty and guilt of this plantation owner drove him to have the baby sent far away, concealing from his wife his indiscretion as well as his violence.

"A man I had met in Rio first told me the tale of Anastacia and of the church in which her image is honored. The truth is that little remains to prove her existence. Two accounts exist, the one above and the following narrative, both of which explain my interest in this amazing woman. My experiences in life, and particularly in Brazil, leads me to believe she truly was a real person. " -MATTHEW BRANSON The Story of Anastacia - The Slave Girl

Based on oral tradition and translated from a Brazilian website Worshipped in Brazil as a saint and heroine, Anastacia is considered one of the most important woman in black history within the culture of Rio de Janeiro. "Her story still has the power to move us to awe and compassion and for that reason alone, I want to make her real to those that don't know about her."

Escrava Anastacia

Anastacia's birth is linked to the tale of Delminda. Some say Delminda was from the Bantu tribe (originating in about 2,000 B.C.E. in southern Nigeria and Cameroon), a daughter of the royal family of Galanga brought to Brazil in 1740 with a cargo of 112 slaves. One version of the story is as follows. Delminda was extremely pretty. She was sold in the harbour by Antonio Rodrigues Velho. She had been raped by a white man and was sold pregnant to Joaquina Pompeu. Delminda gave birth that same year on the 5th March to the blue eyed Anastacia. She was the first black girl with blue eyes in Brazil. It is at this point the two stories seem to merge. Whether or not she was separated from her mother or remained with Delminda, all seem to agree on what comes next. As she grew up Anasatcia became the obsession of the owner's son, Joaquin Antonio.

Very beautiful, It is said that all the white women around were jealous of her, so encouraged Joaquin to make her wear the slave mask. As a punishment for repeatedly refusing his advances, he raped her and condemned her to wear the iron mask for the rest of her life, only removing it once a day to eat. She lived for some years before the toxicity of the metal from the mask became poisonous.

Some accounts claim she was performing miracles toward the end of her life. It became gossip amongst the poor that she could heal because she had found it in her heart to forgive the torture she had suffered, and that she even healed her owner's son of some disease. At that moment she became a saint for many of the poor.

Some continue today petitioning Rome, to have her canonized as St. Anastacia of Rio. There is a statue and a place of worship in Vas Lobo, where pilgrims flock to worship her. She has more than twenty-eight million followers, though I was surprised to find that most of the Brazilian's I have met have never heard of her.

She is exclusive to the poor of Rio and the descendants of slaves. Some link her image with a number of paintings by Etienne Victor Arago (b. 1755 d. 1855), a French watercolourist who traveled in Brazil sometime between 1817-1820. His known works portrayed gold mining slaves who were also forced to wear iron masks, so as not to hide or swallow gold nuggets while they were digging.

She died in Rio after years of agony, her remains were housed in the Church of Rosario, in downtown Rio, but disappeared after a fire. Anastacia became a religious myth, performing miracles, even until today. Many people continue to pray to her when they are sick. Then they are healed.

Punishment for slaves. Painting of African person with neck shackled and mouth muzzled. Jacques Etienne Arago. Castigo de Escravos, 1839. English: Punishiment for slaves. Português: Castigo de Escravo. Museu Afro Brasil (São Paulo).

Her history was miraculously recovered in 1968, when an exhibition to celebrate 90 years of the abolition of slavery was held in the Church of Rosario. In the back of the church was found a portrait of her by Arago. "As you can see, there are a few different accounts of her existence, of Anastacia, the slave girl. She would have been forgotten entirely if it hadn't been for a portrait by Arago.

Mystery is part of her story as it is part of the life of this French painter who sailed the seas between Australia and South America. There are conflicting tales as to whether or not Arago is buried in Paris or in Rio itself.

Human Rights are for all of us and slavery is not a condition for humanity. I continuously lived in Brazil from 1985 to 1992. Around 1987, a television news broadcast in Rio said authorities had found a farmer in the middle of nowhere in rural Brazil, who operated his farm with all his workers in chains. He repeatedly advertised jobs through the press in Sao Paulo and when anyone arrived to work, he made a slave of them, one-hundred and ten years after the abolition of slavery. How can we be so unconscious as to not know about these things? How can we be apathetic to the conditions of others? I would like to put Anastacia into the history books, in Brazil and everywhere else. She represents the suffering of people that have been forgotten and are still being ignored today. I hope you see my point of view, and can appreciate my art, for her sake.

It wasn't until years later, that I discovered the meaning of the name Anastacia -- it means "Resurrection". (source: http://www.mattbranson.co.uk/page4.htm)

Amazon Rubber Slavery

New York Times, "Empire of Savagery in the Amazon," by Greg Grandin, 12 February 2010 -- The 19th-century doctrine of progress held slavery and capitalism to be incompatible. Coercion, liberals believed, violated the ideals of natural rights and free labor. Wage work, Marxists thought, was more profitable than forced work, and that alone would doom slavery. Then in 1904, nearly four decades after Appomattox, Roger Casement, an Irish-born career diplomat in the British Foreign Office, wrote his Congo report, revealing that King Leopold of Belgium had enriched himself by presiding over a rubber trade founded on pure cruelty. “What has civilization itself been to them?” Casement asked of Leopold’s Congolese victims, 10 million of whom, by some estimates, had perished in but two decades. He himself had the answer: “A thing of horror.”

“The Devil and Mr. Casement,” by Jordan Goodman, the author of several works of history, reconstructs the Casement investigation in the Putumayo region of the Amazon rain forest that followed the Congo report. There, the Peruvian Julio César Arana ruled over a rubber empire of 10,000 square miles, and from 1910 to 1913, Casement exhausted himself trying to force the British government to take action against Arana and his London-incorporated Peruvian Amazon Company. He twice traveled to the Amazon, collecting evi­dence of whipping, torture, mass rape, mutilation, executions and the hunting of the region’s Indians, whose population Casement calculated had fallen to 8,000 in 1911 from 50,000 in 1906.

Goodman’s book adds to Casement’s reputation as a pioneer of the human rights movement’s tactics, including the on-the-spot investigation, the gathering of victims’ testimony and the leveraging of public outrage to spur reform. Casement was one of the first to use the phrase “crime against humanity,” and he judged Arana to be guilty of “not merely slavery but extermination” — what later would be called genocide.

But Casement’s moral trajectory ran opposite to that of many modern human rights activists. France’s current foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, for example, dropped his youthful support for national liberation movements to embrace what some have criticized as “humanitarian imperialism.” Casement tried at first to use the services of a foreign office to ease suffering. Yet he veered off what he called the “high road to being a regular Imperialist jingo.” His time in Congo and the Amazon deepened his sense of anti­colonial solidarity. “I was looking at this tragedy,” he said of Congolese slavery, “with the eyes of another race” — the Irish — “a people once hunted themselves.” Knighted in 1911 for his humanitarian work, he was hanged by the British five years later for conspiring with the Germans on behalf of Irish independence.

Casement’s execution is not the climax of Goodman’s story, because this book doesn’t have a climax. It tapers off without resolution. The British directors of Arana’s company are interrogated by members of Parliament. Reports are issued, sermons are preached, politicians are outraged. Arana appears before Parliament’s committee on the Putumayo, after which he boards a steamer back to Peru untouched. The reader is left to ponder the fate of his indigenous victims.

This is an apt ending to a fine and meticulous book, for a kind of slavery still remains in force in the Amazon. Thousands of workers, for instance, trapped in conditions nearly as dismal as those documented a century ago in the Putumayo, make the charcoal used to forge pig iron, which is then purchased by international corporations to produce the steel used in everyday products, including popular makes of cars.

Arana ultimately lost his company and died broke. Yet the devil continues to get the better of Mr. Casement. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/books/review/Grandin-t.html)

Brazil Diamond Slavery

With mine officials nearby, Brazilian slaves wash the gravel from riverbeds to concentrate the denser minerals in which diamonds are found. Dependency on slave labor was an unfortunate part of early diamond mining in Brazil. "Diamond washing in Brazil." Published in 1884.

When diamonds were discovered by alluvial gold miners in Brazil in 1725, Indian diamond sources were near exhaustion and European demand for the stone continued unabated. From 1730 to 1870 Brazil was the world's major source of diamonds. Indeed, mining in Brazil was so active that by the late 1730s production far exceeded demand, and diamond prices fell by as much as 70%. Beginning in 1850, production rose again, following the discovery of rich deposits in Bahia, but after 1861 it rapidly declined as deposits were depleted, leading to a great shortage of rough diamonds in the European cutting centers in the late 1860s.  (source: American Museum of Natural History)

Slaves Diamond Mining in the Serro Frio Region, Minas Gerais, Brazil 

"Diamonds in Brazil"-- Until 1725, India was the world's only producer of diamonds. In that year, Brazilian natives tasked with washing sand as part of the gold panning process discovered the precious stones, prompting the Portuguese government to move the gold mining industry out en masse to make way for diamonds.

J. Willard Hershey, writing in his comprehensive history The Book of Diamonds, tells us that for the first few years after diamonds were discovered in Brazil, the Portuguese government allowed a few plantation owners to work the land for diamonds using slave labor. By the 1740s, the system had changed and contractors – usually in charge of teams of some 600 slaves – would receive exclusive rights to the diamonds in the land they were working. Most contractors sold the majority of their diamonds to the Portuguese crown.

In the second half of the 18th century, more diamond discoveries extended Brazil's diamond fields from Diamantia (formerly Tejuco, where the stones were first found) to Bahia in the north, Goyaz in the west, and Matto Grasso in the jungle.

As Brazilian diamonds began to infiltrate the European market, owners of Indian diamonds feared a glut that would devalue their own stones and began to spread erroneous rumors that Brazilian diamonds were inferior in quality. In fact, Brazilian diamonds – while small, averaging 1/4 to 1/2 carats – can match the quality of diamonds found anywhere, and have often been noted for their rich color. Brazil is also the only known source for black or carbonado diamonds.

Diamond Mining, Brazil, ca. 1770s

In 1772, the Portuguese government took over the diamond mining sector from the contractors, to no great success. In 1822, Brazil gained its independence and anyone who could afford to pay taxes was allowed to mine for diamonds. Slavery, however, was still legal and slaves did nearly all the actual diamond mining. Any slave who found a diamond was required to alert the overseer immediately. If the diamond was over 17 carats, the slave was handed not only his freedom, but the right to hunt for diamonds for himself. Slaves who found smaller diamonds were more modestly rewarded.

Slaves washing diamonds, Brazil

In 1818, Brazil's total diamond production stood at 3,240,000 carats. By 1850, the South American nation had produced some 10,000,000 carats. But in succeeding years, diamond production waned, and in 2009, according to the Kimberley Process Annual Global Summary, Brazil produced only 21,000 carats of rough diamonds valued at $830,000. (source: http://www.avipaz.com/DiamondsBrazil)

Cemetery for New African Slaves Unearthed in Rio, Brazil

According to the Hindu Times, on 23 Decemberr 2011, "," by Tom Phillips: Locals called it the cemetery of the new blacks, but it was a cemetery only in name. Devoid of headstones, wreaths or tearful mourners, this squalid harbour side burial ground was the final resting place for thousands of Africans shipped into slavery.

The new world greeted them with a lonely death in an unfamiliar land.

For decades the cemetery and those buried there between 1760 and 1830 were forgotten, hidden under layer after layer of urban development.

But 15 years after the cemetery's fortuitous discovery — during the renovation of Petrucio and Ana de la Merced Guimaraes's family home when builders unearthed a series of muddy skeletons — academics now believe they have evidence of the true reach of the slave trade.

The study of teeth from 30 partial skeletons has hinted that slaves arriving in Rio — many of whom were sold on to work in coffee and sugar plantations or gold mines — came from a much wider geographical region than once thought.

The figure is three million

Archaeologists and anthropologists studying bone and tooth fragments are shedding light on the horrors of a trade that saw at least three million slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil between 1550 and 1888, when the practice was officially abolished.

“It was ugly: a dump into which bodies were thrown and burned,” said Sheila Mendonca de Souza, a bio-archaeologist studying the cemetery in Rio de Janeiro, once one of the busiest slave ports in the Americas.

“People weren't buried in tombs, they were tossed away into mass graves.” Della Cook, a biological anthropologist from the University of Indiana working on the burial ground, said: “There is a lot of scholarship on slave cemeteries and the slave trade in North America but very little in South America, which is one of the things that makes this site fascinating.

Isotope analysis

“We have historical records but we haven't been able to look before at the people themselves.” Using strontium isotope analyses of tooth enamel — a technique that helps detect where a person was raised and has previously been used on samples from burial sites in the Caribbean and Mexico — academics were able to confirm the large area from where the “new blacks” came.

“What we got was essentially the entire range of strontium isotope values,” said Cook. “It surprised us that the spectrum was so broad.” The results indicated that slavers had “waded way into the interior” of Africa rather than restricting their search to coastal areas, Cook added.

Mendonca, who works for the national school of public health in Rio, said: “We were not able to pinpoint a specific place ... but we confirmed the diversity of origin of those [slaves] who were arriving in Rio de Janeiro. They came both from the Atlantic coast and east coast.” A parallel study of cosmetic tooth modifications, common in some regions of Africa, also underlined the scope of the slave trade.

Most were young people

Mendonca said her team had found tooth markings indicating some of the slaves were native to what are now Sudan and Mozambique, in northeastern and southern Africa. Archaeologists believe as many as 20,000 slaves may have been buried at the cemetery, mostly men aged 18-25 who died during the gruelling journey to Brazil or shortly after arriving.

“The majority were very young, principally young boys and girls who would adapt better to captivity than older people,” said Mendonca.

The dire conditions of the slave market and port, close to the cemetery, were captured by British writer Maria Graham, following a visit in the early 1820s.

Rescued slaves; Dated 1869, this picture is a rare snapshot of the terrible slave trafficking. The emaciated boys sit on the lower deck of a Royal Navy ship apparently have been taken from a slave vessel trading illegally off the African coast. The captain had instructions not to return the slaves. (Pictures copyright National Archives and partners.)

“Almost every house in this very long street is a depot for slaves ... In some places the poor creatures were lying on mats, evidently too sick to sit up,” she wrote.

“The number of ships from Africa that I see constantly entering the harbour, and the multitudes that throng the slave-houses in this street, convince me that the importation must be very great. The ordinary proportion of deaths on the passage is, I am told, about one in five.” The three million slaves who made the journey were previously thought to have come only from what is now Nigeria and from the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Cape Verde.

Some fled, forming autonomous cities known as quilombos. Several of Rio de Janeiro's favelas — among them the Morro da Coroa, the Morro dos Prazeres and Pereirao — are thought to have begun life as quilombos.

Impact of 2016 Olympics

With Rio undergoing a facelift for the 2016 Olympics, some archaeological discoveries have been made as the city renovates its decrepit downtown port.

In early 2010 archaeologists unearthed what they believe to be the remains of Rio's Valongo slave port, through which tens of thousands of African slaves were shipped.

Experts hope advancing redevelopment projects will help them rescue further clues about the identities of Brazil's “new blacks”, who were buried not far from the Valongo dock.

“When you start messing around with the landscape these things will appear,” said Dr Ricardo Ventura Santos, a bio-anthropologist from Brazil's Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, who is coordinating the cemetery research team.

Cook said she hoped redevelopment would permit further excavation and the inclusion of places such as the slave burial ground on the city's tourist trail, creating a “monument to the African experience in Brazil.” The excavation of a Roman cemetery under London's Spitalfields market, during the 1990s, could serve as a model, she added.

“Rio has very little history of the slave trade for either Brazilians or external tourists,” she said. (source: The Hindu)

1

The New World Cemetaary for the Esclaves de Rio

Black slaves of different nation in Brazil circa 1830.

Tom Phillips of the Sidney Morning Herald reported "Cemetery sheds light on slavery," on 27 December 2011: RIO DE JANEIRO: Locals called it the cemetery of the new blacks, but it was a cemetery only in name. Devoid of headstones, wreaths or tearful mourners, this squalid harbourside burial ground was the final resting place for thousands of Africans shipped into slavery.

The New World greeted them with a lonely death in an unfamiliar land. For decades the cemetery and those buried there between 1760 and 1830 were forgotten, hidden under layer after layer of urban development.

But 15 years after the cemetery's discovery - when builders unearthed a series of muddy skeletons - academics now believe they have evidence of the true reach of the slave trade.

The study of teeth from 30 partial skeletons has hinted that slaves arriving in Rio - many of whom were sold on to work in coffee and sugar plantations or goldmines - came from a much wider geographical region than once thought.

Archaeologists and anthropologists studying bone and tooth fragments are shedding light on the horrors of a trade in which at least 3 million slaves were shipped from Africa to Brazil between 1550 and 1888, when the practice was abolished.

''It was ugly: a dump into which bodies were thrown and burnt,'' said Sheila Mendonca de Souza, a bio-archaeologist studying the cemetery in Rio de Janeiro, once one of the busiest slave ports in the Americas.

Using strontium isotope analyses of tooth enamel, academics were able to confirm the large area from where the ''new blacks'' came.

The results indicated that slavers had ''waded way into the interior'' of Africa instead of restricting their search to coastal areas, said Della Cook, a biological anthropologist from the University of Indiana.

A parallel study of cosmetic tooth modifications, common in some regions of Africa, also underlined the scope of the slave trade.

Dr Mendonca said her team had found tooth markings indicating some of the slaves were native to what are now Sudan and Mozambique, in north-eastern and southern Africa.

Archaeologists believe as many as 20,000 slaves may have been buried at the cemetery, mostly men between 18 and 25 years of age, who died during the gruelling journey to Brazil or shortly after arriving.

The 3 million slaves who made the journey were previously thought to have come only from what is now Nigeria and from the Portuguese colonies of Angola and Cape Verde. (source: Sidney Morning Herlad)

Nazi Brazilian Slaves of the Haciendas

The UK Daily Mail reported on 27 June 2009: "Nazi slaves of the haciendas: Hitler fanatics forced orphans to build new Fatherland in Amazon," by Allan Hall, 27 June 2009: Bricks marked with swastikas on a crumbling building in Brazil have helped historians trace an astonishing plan by Adolf Hitler for a Nazi empire in South America.

They have also found some of the young men who were kept as slaves by German settlers and local Nazi supporters.

They were known as ‘ Nummernmenschen’ – the number people – as the dehumanisation practised in the concentration camps was exported.

It had long been known that fleeing Nazis moved into remote regions of South America after the war. But the story of the slaves began years earlier.

From 1933 onwards men and boys, often from orphanages, were taken to vast farms like the hacienda Cruzeiro Do Sul 150 miles west of Sao Paulo.

It was there that pig farmer Jose Maciel found the swastika bricks after buying the land. In one of the buildings, preserved in a metal cyclinder, were documents and photos showing cattle branded with swastikas and a Nazi flag flying.

Now the last three surviving slaves have been back to see the bricks they made by hand – and point out the shallow graves where many of their friends were buried after dying through neglect and maltreatment.

AloÌsio Silva, 85, was number 23. ‘Cattle and horses had more of a family tree than I,’ he said. ‘I was a slave and a boy without a name.’

Mr Silva was nine when he was taken from an orphanage by rich landowner Oct·vio Rocha Miranda, a fanatical supporter of Hitler.

‘The great landowners saw ideal workers in us parentless boys,’ he said. ‘We were lied to, told that we would ride around on horses, that the work wasn’t hard.

‘But we were put to backbreaking toil and paid with coins that could be spent only on the farm. It wasn’t until I was 16 that I got my first shoes.

‘I was tortured, made to kneel on hard grains of corn for hours on end, beaten. Two large dogs guarded our barracks.’

The slave boys were employed until the mid-1940s when the authorities clamped down.

Some 2,000 German settlers moved to Brazil after SS officers posed as naturalists to scout it out, calling the area ‘ripe for exploitation.’

There were similar-migrations to Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay.

Now the surviving Brazilian slaves are seeking reparations from the government which allowed their ordeal.

Mr Silva said: ‘I want compensation, I want an apology. But above all, I want to find out who my mother was and put some flowers on her grave.’ (source: UK Daily Mail)

Slave market at Pernambuco, Brazil

Gate and Slave market at Pernambuco, after Earle; view down street crowded with slaves, guarded by soldiers to right

Slave market at Pernambuco, Brazil. Includes black slaves sitting on the street while an auction is going on. Includes scene of beating, dwellings, sword, horse about to trample a baby, dog, and woman carrying a burden on her head.

Source creator: Callcott, Maria, Lady, 1785-1842
Source Title: Journal of a voyage to Brazil, and residence there, during part of the years 1821, 1822, 1823. By Maria Graham.
Source place of publication: London

The Slave market at Rio

The Slave market at Rio; street where buyers examine slaves, one of whom sits on ground in left foreground, child slaves being inspected by man wearing hat and striped trousers, dog to right, soldiers in distance. 1813

Down in Brazil

Brazil has a current population of over 176 million people. It was a Portuguese colony that imported more African slaves than any other nation in the Western Hemisphere and was the last to abolish slavery (l888) after almost 450 years of exploitation.

Today, Brazil has the largest population of African descendants outside the continent of Africa. Its economy is among the world’s ten largest. It is also among the world’s most unequal societies measured by income mal-distribution. The richest 20% of the population (persons whose appearance resembles a European phenotype) possess two thirds of the national income; the poorest 20% (primarily Brown or Black) receive less than 3%. (Beyond Racism)

History of the Brazilian Apartheid: The Favela

Favelas

Favela is the Portuguese name from a shanty town. These towns form on the outskirts of Brazilian cities due to massive over population. Brazilian cities were not constructed or planned to handle the millions of people that now live there. People are forced to inhabit makeshift towns in the undesirable parts of the cities. Favelas are usually built on privately owned lands and are illegal.

Most favelas are constructed from whatever material the inhabitants can find. The houses are not sturdily built and do not offer much protection from Mother Nature. Electricity is rare and there is no running water.

Rampant crime is a part of daily life in the favelas. There is almost no police presence. Along with crime, sewage and poor sanitation plague the areas. This leads to the spreading of disease and other harmful medical conditions.

(source: http://web.utk.edu/~rkirkla1/Brazil/favelas.html)

History of the Favelas

A favela (Brazilian Portuguese for slum) is the generally used term for a shanty town in Brazil. In the late 18th century, the first settlements were called bairros africanos (African neighborhoods), and they were the place where former slaves with no land ownership and no options for work lived. Over the years, many freed black slaves moved in. However, before the first settlement called “favela” came into being, poor blacks were pushed away from downtown into the far suburbs. Most modern favelas appeared in the 1970s, due to rural exodus, when many people left rural areas of Brazil and moved to cities. Without finding a place to live, many people ended up in a favela.

Some of the older favelas in Rio de Janeiro were originally started as quilombos (independent settlements of fugitive African slaves) among the hilly terrain of the area surrounding Rio, which later grew as slaves were liberated in 1888 with no places to live. It is generally agreed upon that the first favela to be called by this name was created in November 1897. At the time, 20,000 veteran soldiers were brought from the conflict against the settlers of Canudos, in the Eastern province of Bahia, to Rio de Janeiro and left with no place to live.

When they served the Army in Bahia, those soldiers had been familiar with Canudos’s Favela Hill — a name referring to favela, a skin-irritating tree in the spurge family indigenous to Bahia. When they settled in the Providência hill in Rio de Janeiro, they nicknamed the place Favela hill from their common reference, thereby calling a slum a favela for the first time.

The favelas were formed prior to the dense occupation of cities and the domination of real estate interests. The housing crisis of the 1940s forced the urban poor to erect hundreds of shantytowns in the suburbs, when favelas replaced tenements as the main type of residence for destitute cariocas (residents of Rio). The explosive era of favela growth dates from the 1940s, when Getúlio Vargas’s industrialization drive pulled hundreds of thousands of migrants into the Federal District, until 1970, when shantytowns expanded beyond urban Rio.

Raw sewage drains through the streets

Most of the current favelas began in the 1970s, as a construction boom in the richer neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro initiated a rural exodus of workers from poorer states in Brazil. Heavy flooding in the low-lying slum areas of Rio also forcibly removed a large population into favelas, which are mostly located on Rio’s various hillsides. Since favelas have been created under different terms but with similar end results, the term favela has become generally interchangeable with any impoverished area. Favelas are built around the edge of the main city so in a way they are actually expanding the city. (source: Brazil Geeks)

A History of the Samba

A History of the Samba

The word Samba, and the musical genre Samba, has for a long time being studied to uncover its origin. We are publishing here what we think it is the most accurate.The word "Samba," in Portuguese, was derived from semba, a word common to many West African bantu languages. To the African slaves brought to Brazil during the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, the word had a variety of meanings. It meant to pray, or invoke the spirits of the ancestors, or the Gods of African "pantheon." As a noun, it could mean a complaint, a cry, or something like "the blues".

In Brazil, Samba is a woman with the same function of an ekedi nagô in the Banto's temples: A sacred dancer, iaô, the daughter of the saint.

In Brazil also, the African slaves called samba a religious ceremony characterized by the rhythm and choreography of the batuque. (Batuque: the act of "batucar"; to make some kind of rhythm using any kind of instrument or object, and also a Rio's version of martial art "capoeira").

The Jongo, a variant of the Samba, until today is considered a religious dance. The first known appearance of the word Samba as a Portuguese word meaning a rhythm and a dance in print appeared in 1838, in the newspaper "O Carapuceiro", in an article written by father Lopes Gama.

In 1917, Ernesto dos Santos "Donga", recorded his song "Pelo telefone", and labeled Samba. This is officially the first Samba recording. Since then, the musicians descendants of slaves started to see the Samba as a new approach to the batuque from Angola, and determined themselves to integrate it to white society trough organizations they called Samba Schools.

A pioneer of Samba, Angenor de Oliveira, was quoted as saying "In my childhood, we played the Samba in the backyards of the old ladies, whom we call "tias" (aunts), and the police stopped us often, because the Samba, then, was considered a "thing" of bums and bandits."

Unfortunately, until today in Brazil if a "white" person dedicate himself to the samba art form, he is considered an intellectual, or eccentric, but if an African descendent does the same, he is seeing like somebody who does not want to get a job, or something in that level.

Unlike other societies that cherish the Blues, the Jazz, the Mambo, the Rumba, the Reggae and others, and sees these musical art forms as a national treasure and are proud of it, Brazilian society refuses to recognize the Samba as a culture, as Brazil's main culture and pays no respect to their masters. We do not have there a Samba museum, or any kind of award to neither people nor institutions dedicated toward the promotion and preservation of the Samba culture or even a well-organized structure of promotion of this culture to international markets. The Samba in Brazil, is still an underground culture.

However, thanks to some people in Brazil and around the world who sees the Samba otherwise, some artists with their love and dedication, Samba Schools, and to general people that gather to play, sing and dance the Samba, the culture will never die, and will continuously grow strong developing new approaches and evolving forever. (source: Brazilian Music )