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chapter five Nagô and Mina: The Yoruba Diaspora in Brazil João José Reis and Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian The extension and volume of the Brazilian slave trade, and the special connection between Bahia and the Bight of Benin made Brazil, along with Cuba, home to one of the largest concentrations of Yoruba-speaking peoples in the Americas. This chapter addresses the distribution of the Yoruba diaspora throughout Brazil, focusing primarily on Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in the nineteenth century. In those two areas, because of the particular conditions of the slave system and the different ethnic composition of their African population, Yoruba identity took distinct forms under the local terms “Nagô” (mainly in Bahia) and “Mina” (in southern Brazil). The slave trade to Brazil, which spanned from the mid-1500s to the 1850s, brought approximately three and a half million enslaved Africans to the Portuguese territories in South America that became, after 1822, independent Brazil. Although Central and Eastern Africa contributed more than threequarters of this total, the trade from West Africa constituted an important branch of the Brazilian slave trade. While most slave trading was conducted from the ports in and around the Portuguese colony of Angola, merchants in Bahia established in the eighteenth century a direct exchange with the Bight of Benin that would change the profile of the slave population in the colony.1 The forced migration of Yoruba-speaking peoples to Brazil can be traced to the slave trade conducted in the “Mina Coast” during the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, and mainly to business with the Bight of Benin from the 1770s through the 1850s. During the latter period Bahian merchants consolidated their existing network in the region and concentrated their trade east of Ouidah in the ports of Porto Novo, Badagry, and Onim (later, Lagos). They defied a ban on the Portuguese slave trade north of the equator imposed by 77 Falola_Childs,Yoruba Diaspo 2/2/05 1:34 PM Page 77 Britain in 1810, and continued importing “new Africans” into Brazil after the slave trade was prohibited by the Anglo-Brazilian treaty in 1830 and by national law in 1831.2 Recorded figures of the volume of the Brazilian slave trade are unsatisfactory, particularly for the eighteenth century. For the best-documented period, 1801 to 1856, it is estimated that West Africa supplied just under 10 percent of the total number of slaves imported by Brazil. More certain is the peculiar geographic concentration of this diaspora: 88 percent of slaves leaving the Bight of Benin for Brazil landed in Bahia.3 The mission to follow the Yoruba on the Brazilian side of the Atlantic takes us along the slave routes within the country and poses an additional question of identifying them among the other African slaves. In Brazil, West African slaves were identified by the general term “Mina,” after the name the Portuguese slave traders gave to the coast where they had embarked. Originally from various ethnic groups in the hinterland or on the coast, they left Africa from Grand Popo, Ouidah, Porto Novo, Jakin, Badagry, or Onim, and all became “Minas” in the eyes of the traders and masters once they were in Brazil. Distributed from Bahia, and, on a smaller scale, from Rio de Janeiro and other ports that entertained trade with the West African coast, Mina slaves could be found everywhere in Brazil in the mid-eighteenth century. A very important flow supplied slaves to the mining boom in the interior captaincies of Minas Gerais, Goiás, and Mato Grosso. Africans would travel from Bahia to the mining regions in Central Brazil, or by sea to Rio de Janeiro and from there to Minas Gerais and Goiás. In the eighteenth century the trip from Rio de Janeiro to Goiás through Minas Gerais took at least three months for armed convoys; the trip surely lasted longer for the caravans of trade goods, cargo beasts, and new Africans. The presence of Yoruba speakers is positively documented for Bahia and Minas in the first half of the eighteenth century. Many “Courana” (Kuramu) slaves are listed in a census taken in 1748 – 49 in the Bahian mining region of Rio de Contas, which also registered the presence of just one “Nagô” slave. These slaves were also described as “born on the Mina coast,” their more specific ethnonym—in this case Courana and Nagô—being registered as part of their names: Joana Courana and Francisco Nag...

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