Artigo Da Atlantic Studies - Negros Retornados para A Africa

Atlantic Studies
Global Currents
ISSN: 1478-8810 (Print) 1740-4649 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjas20
Mapping the nineteenth-century Brazilian

returnee movement: Demographics, life stories
and the question of slavery
Lisa Earl Castillo
To cite this article: Lisa Earl Castillo (2016) Mapping the nineteenth-century Brazilian returnee
movement: Demographics, life stories and the question of slavery, Atlantic Studies, 13:1, 25-52,
DOI: 10.1080/14788810.2015.1110677
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2015.1110677
Published online: 08 Jan 2016.
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Download by: [187.86.54.105] Date: 18 January 2016, At: 00:32

ATLANTIC STUDIES, 2016
VOL. 13, NO. 1, 25–52
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2015.1110677
Mapping the nineteenth-century Brazilian returnee

movement: Demographics, life stories and the question of
slavery
Lisa Earl Castillo
Department of History, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil
ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This paper examines Brazil’s century return to Africa movement Brazilian returnees; freed
from both qualitative and quantitative perspectives, identifying Africans; slave trade; Lagos
three main stages. The largest single wave of voyages came after colony; Bahia; Malê Rebellion
Downloaded by [187.86.54.105] at 00:32 18 January 2016
an 1835 slave uprising in the province of Bahia, when around 200

freed Africans were deported and roughly a thousand others left
voluntarily, fleeing anti-African legislation. In the 1840s, smaller
numbers of Africans also traveled to the continent of their birth,
many as employees on slave vessels. A new phase of migrations
came after 1850, with the end of the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil
and the British seizure of Lagos a year later. Previous estimates of
the volume of travelers are examined in combination with
demographic data on passport recipients, in order to frame micro-
historical analysis of individual travelers. In the first and third
stages, Africans often traveled with their households, comprising
not only blood kin but also their slaves and former slaves, while in
the second phase many of those who left for Africa were men
travelling alone who later returned to Brazil. The resulting portrait
of changes over time offers insights into the varying reasons that
led freed Africans to leave Brazil, also raising questions about the
continued presence of the institution of slavery in their lives.
Introduction
Beginning in the 1990s, with the publication of works such as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlan-
tic, which drew attention to the historical importance of travels undertaken by Pan-Africa-
nist intellectuals and other free people of color, the trope of the forced migrations of the
slave trade began to give way to a new scholarly interest in voyages resulting from indi-
vidual agency. In the Lusophone world, however, the travels of freed men and women
have been noted since the late nineteenth century, and by the 1950s the groundbreaking
work of Pierre Verger paved the way for the first in-depth studies.1 This scholarly interest
was sparked by the frequency of such voyages in Brazil, where freed people of color were
far more numerous than in Anglophone slave societies.2 The city of Salvador, capital of the
northeastern province of Bahia, with an especially large black population, was a major port
of departure. Evidence of return voyages between Bahia and the Bight of Benin region
dates back at least to the mid-eighteenth century and increases substantially in the 1800s.3
CONTACT Lisa Earl Castillo lisa.earl.castillo@gmail.com

© 2016 Taylor & Francis
26 L. E. CASTILLO
In this paper, using a wide spectrum of archival sources and ethnographic data from
field work in Benin and Nigeria, also re-interpreting data collected by other scholars, I
examine changes over time in the flow of travelers between Bahia and West Africa, iden-
tifying three distinct phases. The most intense period occurred from 1835 to 1837, in the
aftermath of a major slave uprising in Bahia, with most travelers settling in coastal areas of
the kingdom of Dahomey, where they were absorbed into existing Lusophone commu-
nities known as Agudás. A second phase in the 1840s was dominated by men and involved
far fewer travelers, many of whom eventually returned to Brazil. During a third stage,
which began after Brazil’s withdrawal from the Atlantic slave trade in 1850, the number
of travelers increased somewhat and Lagos became the most important port of arrival.
In each of these three stages, I use estimates of the numbers of passports issued in
Bahia to frame a micro-historical analysis of individual trajectories. The latter provide
texture and nuance, providing insights into the motives for leaving Brazil and demonstrat-
ing the existence of highly developed social networks among the travelers, also pointing
to the existence of relations of patronage and dependence.
The rebellion of 1835 and its exodus

A census conducted in 1808 suggests that free people of color constituted 43 percent of
the population of Bahia.4 Although those of darker skin tones faced discrimination, they
nonetheless were considered citizens, with certain political rights. Former slaves were
more limited in their upward mobility, especially Africans, who were classed as foreigners.5
In November of 1831, Brazil passed a law upholding a treaty signed with Great Britain in
1826, demanding the end of its participation in the Atlantic slave trade.6 Significantly, the
Brazilian legislature added an article – not required by the treaty – also banning Africans
who were not enslaved from entering the country.7 Legally, they had no recourse, for, as
the Bahian chief of police put it a few years later, they were “the subjects of nations with
which Brazil is not bound by any treaty, and when they fall under suspicion or prove them-
selves to be dangerous they may be expelled with no injustice whatsoever.”8
The police chief’s statement was made soon after the defeat of a major uprising of
enslaved and freed Africans, mainly Nagôs (as Yoruba speakers were known) in the city
of his jurisdiction, Salvador, Bahia, in January of 1835. Because of its leaders’ ties to
Islam, it became known as the Malê Rebellion, from the Yoruba word for Muslim,
ìmàle.9 In the wake of the insurrection, existing prejudices against freed Africans inten-
sified and a series of repressive measures were hastily enacted by Bahia’s provincial gov-
ernment. The most significant was a law passed on 13 May 1835, which further curtailed
freed Africans’ possibilities for economic ascension and brought them under close sur-
veillance.10 The new legislation created a steep annual tax that only applied to Africans,
barred them from buying real estate and required them not only to register with the
police but also to report any change of address. Moreover, landlords now needed to
obtain police authorization before renting to Africans. These were seen as temporary
measures, pending implementation of the law’s most ambitious clause, which mandated
the deportation of the entire freed African population. As historian João José Reis has
noted, the large number of people involved made the cost of the scheme so exorbitant
that the authorities were forced to scale it down drastically.11 Still, the law’s other pro-
visions – although in the end erratically enforced – posed a clear invitation for freed
ATLANTIC STUDIES 27
Africans to leave of their own accord, and, importantly, at their own cost. Once they
were outside Brazil, the law of 1831 mentioned earlier legally them prevented from
returning.12
The clause on deportation remained on the books and could be arbitrarily invoked when
convenient. In September 1835 the government began taking steps to deport a group of
around 200 prisoners, originally accused of taking part in the rebellion but eventually
absolved for lack of evidence. As the news spread, freed men and women came flooding
into the passport office, clamoring for permission to leave Brazil.13 In October alone 271
passports were issued. By the end of 1837, approximately 925 people, mostly Africans of
both sexes but also many Brazilian-born children and young adults, had been authorized
to travel. With few exceptions, the “African Coast,” as the Bight of Benin region was
termed, was their chosen destination. For groups traveling on a single passport, men
were more frequently listed as the main applicant (61 percent men versus 39 percent
women), but their companions were often mostly women and children.14
The anti-African sentiment sparked by the rebellion was particularly directed against
Yoruba speakers but also extended to other African “nations” that included followers of
Islam, such as Hausa, Kanuri (referred to as Borno in Brazil) and Nupe (known as Tapa,
from the Yoruba takpa). Of 386 Africans whose passport records include ethnonyms
(Figure 1), Nagôs were the largest group (32 percent), followed by Hausas (23 percent). Cur-
iously, although the Jeje (Gbe-speaking peoples of Dahomey) did not participate in the
rebellion and were not Muslims, they were the third most common nation among passport
recipients (17 percent).15 However, as we will see in the section of this paper dealing with
the period of the illegal slave trade, some of these Jeje travelers were involved in maritime
commerce and were going to Africa for reasons unrelated to the rebellion.
The surviving records are fragmentary, but they do show that 160 voluntary travelers
left Bahia on 25 January 1836, aboard the Nimrod, chartered by two freed Africans,
Antonio da Costa and João Monteiro Viegas. The Nimrod’s departure was delayed for
two months because of British suspicions that the voyage was a ruse to camouflage
Figure 1. “Nations” of returnees, 1835–1837.

Source: Fundação Pierre Verger, Notas de pesquisas no Arquivo Público da Bahia/Passaportes.
28 L. E. CASTILLO
participation in the slave trade.16 As for deportees, a group of about 150 left on 12 Novem-
ber 1835 – just before the Nimrod had originally been scheduled to depart – aboard the
Maria Damiana.17
At the request of the government of Bahia, slave merchant Francisco Felix de Souza,
established in Ouidah, agreed to receive the deportees in that city, already home to a con-
siderable Lusophone population. According to local oral traditions, De Souza provided the
new arrivals with land where they could build houses. To this day many of the oldest
Agudá family compounds are in the vicinity of the De Souza estate, a fact that would
seem to support the oral traditions.18 Some family traditions state that their ancestors’
slave voyages began in the very city in which they eventually settled after returning
from Brazil. While it is difficult to specifically confirm such claims, their recurrence in
oral memory highlights the undisputable fact that rather than returning to their original
homelands returnees tended to congregate in ports where the slave trade was an impor-
tant economic activity. Agoué, a coastal town slightly to the west of Ouidah, also received
significant numbers of settlers from Brazil, while others, apparently in smaller numbers,
went to Porto Novo, Accra, and Lagos.19

Having been catalyzed by the rebellion in Salvador, this exodus was primarily a Bahian
phenomenon. A notable exception was a group of 234 returnees who left Rio de Janeiro
for West Africa in 1836. It is unclear where they landed or to what extent their departure
was related to the events in Bahia.20 As Monica de Lima e Souza has noted, these travelers
included many households consisting of combinations of blood kin, agregados and slaves.
The term agregado could refer to dependents in a broad sense, such as poor relations, but
it was also frequently used to describe freed people who continued to live with their
former masters.
In Bahia, too, a considerable number of voluntary returnees were slave owners or had
been in the past. Even some of the deportees owned slaves. Reis mentions two, Luis
Xavier de Jesus and José Vidal Monteiro. However, when the names of prisoners slated
for deportation are compared to notary and parochial records from the preceding
decades, it becomes apparent that there were many others who held slaves, such as
Vicente Xavier, a Hausa who had 10 slaves (African women and their Brazilian-born chil-
dren), André Lino, also Hausa and master of one African woman, and Ignacio José de
Santa Anna, a Nagô who was master of at least three African women and two Brazilian-
born children.21
As for voluntary returnees, passport records show that 22 percent of the groups ident-
ified as such by the authorities included slaves and/or agregados.22 The descriptor cria,
referring to a dependent child who was not a blood relative, usually either enslaved or
originally so, is also recurrent in these groups. For children, the need for an adult protector
is self-evident, but for adults the reasons to remain close to their former masters is less
clear. An affective bond is one possibility; however, examination of individual case his-
tories reveals that many agregados had conditional manumission whose terms required
them to remain with their masters, as we will see in the next section.
Social networks among returnees

Although the passport records often provide important clues about the social relation-
ships that joined different returnees to one another, there were also many other travelers
ATLANTIC STUDIES 29
whose interrelationships went unnoted. Reconstructing the intricate webs of social

relations – involving ties of kinship, friendship, master-slave bonds, and combinations of
these factors – uniting the different voyagers is a laborious enterprise, requiring the com-
parison of numerous fragmentary bits of data from diverse sources. When passport data is
integrated with information obtained from other sources, particularly parish and notary
records, previously indiscernible nuances come clearly into focus, revealing complex inter-
relationships among apparently isolated individuals.
For example, on 25 May 1836, Nagô freedwoman Anna de Christo received a passport.
The lack of any commentary about companions in her record would appear to suggest
that she was traveling alone, but parochial records reveal that she was married to Nagô
freedman, Antonio Pereira dos Santos, who is listed in the passport records for 24 May.
A few months before, the couple had sold their house and in the weeks before their pass-
port requests they freed a number of their slaves. One of these captives, Isabel Nagô, paid
for her manumission at market value on 19 May 1836. The same day, her infant son
received unconditional freedom at no cost.23 At the same time that her former master
received his passport, Isabel – now using his surname, Pereira – obtained travel permission
for herself and her son. The week before, on 15 May 1836, two more of the couple’s former
slaves, Rosa and José, had also obtained permission to travel to Africa.24 Like Isabel, in their
passport requests they used the surname Pereira, signaling their continued relationship to
their former master.
Despite the lack of information in the passport records about the ties linking these indi-
viduals, cross-referencing with other sources makes it clear that they were a group that
planned to travel together and to settle in the same place, probably as a single household.
The recently freed Africans’ decision to remain in the company of their former masters may
suggest an affective bond, but it may also have resulted from a more pragmatic desire to
remain under the protection of a couple whose comparatively greater wealth and power
was augmented by their participation in an extended social network of other well-to-do
Africans who left Brazil at the same time.
Indeed, on the same day that José and Rosa Pereira’s passports were issued, their
masters’ neighbor and friend, Maria da Gloria de São José, a wealthy Nagô freedwoman,
also received a passport. She was traveling with six crias, all her former slaves.25 The
same day, a passport was conceded to a freedwoman identified only as Antonia Nagô.
Although there is no indication in the record, other sources show that Antonia was the
mother of two of the crias listed on Maria da Gloria’s passport, Adriano and Francisco.26
The boys’ father, Daniel Nagô, received a passport two days later, on 17 May 1836. Both
he and Antonia had served Maria da Gloria as slaves, and in 1831 had received manumis-
sion letters that would only go into effect after her death. Over the last two weeks of May,
nearly 20 other Africans legally bound to Maria da Gloria by conditional manumission also
received permission to travel to Africa.27 Because of their conditional status, they could
only leave Brazil if she also went, and if she traveled, they were obliged to go with her.
It is worth noting that all the members of this group, including Maria da Gloria herself,
had already received passports in January, but their voyage was delayed because she
had not managed to sell her house. It was only after the property was finally sold that
the mistress and her household returned to the passport office to renew their
applications.28
30 L. E. CASTILLO
The voyage of these two interrelated households ended in the town of Agoué,
where they became influential members of the Agudá community, playing important
roles in local history. The first president of independent Togo, Sylvanus Olympio, was
Antonio Pereira dos Santos’s great-grandson, while the Da Glorias contributed three
successive generations of imams to the Nagô mosque of Agoué: Daniel da Gloria
(whose Muslim name was Mamadou Bello), his son Adriano (Abubakar), and the
latter’s son, Gregorio (Mamadou Lawani). The friendship between the two households
was cemented by intermarriages in the second half of the nineteenth century,
among them the union of Adriano da Gloria with Andreza Eburei, daughter of
Antonio Pereira dos Santos.29
Examples such as these – opaque when passport records are analyzed without consult-
ing other sources – demonstrate that many more people traveled in groups than the offi-
cial records indicate. They also reveal that members of a given household were not
necessarily blood kinfolk, often being linked by relations of subordination and depen-
dence stemming from the master-slave bond. But regardless of economic status and
whether or not they owned slaves, all were threatened in some way by the discriminatory
legislation introduced in Bahia after the insurrection. For Africans who had not yet attained
financial stability, the annual head tax was a heavy burden, and the constraints on renting
to Africans made finding housing more difficult. The more affluent could easily afford the
head tax and their lodging was secure, since they usually owned their homes, but their
economic security depended on income from slaves and real estate. The lingering
threat of deportation raised the specter of losing these investments, the fruit of years,
even decades, of hard work. As we have seen, it was precisely as the government
began taking steps toward deporting the 200 prisoners mentioned above that the rush
to leave Brazil voluntarily began.
Solidarity with friends, neighbors and relatives who were suffering persecution was
another factor motivating the decision to leave. This is evident in the case of Francisco
Moreira, an affluent Nagô who had been free for over three decades before leaving Bahia
in January of 1836, probably aboard the Nimrod.30 Moreira was close to Antonio Pereira
dos Santos and was godfather to many of Maria da Gloria de São José’s slaves, including
Antonia’s two sons.31 His social circle included a number of other Muslims, such as
Ignacio José de Santana, who, as mentioned earlier, was deported.32 But non-Muslims
were also affected by the political backlash. José Pedro Autran, a Nagô freedman who
was godfather of two of Moreira’s slaves is one example. Autran’s wife, Francisca da Silva,
was the high priestess of an important Afro-Brazilian religious temple, Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô
Oká, which exists to this day. The couple owned two houses and more than twenty
slaves. Their decision to leave Brazil came after neighbors denounced Francisca’s sons for
holding “large gatherings of Africans in their home,” actually Afro-Brazilian religious cer-
emonies but interpreted as meetings to plan the uprising. Francisca successfully petitioned
the authorities to commute her sons’ prison sentences to deportation, and late in 1837 she
and her husband followed them to Africa, accompanied by over a dozen of their former
slaves. Their Atlantic journey resulted in the foundation of another temple in Ouidah.33
Only a systematic investigation of the life stories of other returnees of this period
could show whether the profiles presented here are truly representative. Nonetheless,
it is clear that the people who crowded into the passport offices after the rebellion
were not randomly grouped, nor were they homogenous. Some had been free for
ATLANTIC STUDIES 31
decades and lived comfortable, economically stable lives, while others had been freed
very recently, were struggling financially and accompanied their former masters in
making the return voyage. For some of those who left Bahia, family or friends had
been directly affected by the witch hunt after the rebellion, while for others, economic
livelihood was at stake. Whatever the case, the decision to return was often taken in
the context of complex social networks. Traveling with patrons, friends and family
was surely helpful in facing the privations of a voyage that lasted for three weeks or
more. Maintaining these networks surely continued to be important during the
process of adaptation and resettlement in lands that were often culturally and geo-
graphically distant from returnees’ original homes.34
Travelers of the 1840s: a back and forth movement of seafaring men

João José Reis has estimated that in 1835 there were fewer than five thousand freed Afri-
cans in the city of Salvador.35 Thus, those who left after the rebellion probably constituted
more than 20 percent of the freed population. Still, there were many who remained
behind. Ethnicity was an important factor. Central Africans, for example, had not been
involved in the rebellion and very few of them applied for passports, as Figure 1
shows.36 But there were also West Africans, even Nagôs, who remained in Bahia. We
can only guess at their reasons, but it is likely that a lack of resources to pay for the
passage or having kinfolk who were still enslaved were some of the factors.
Although most of those who chose to journey to Africa between 1835 and 1837
planned to settle there permanently, there were others who intended to return to
Brazil. One such voyager was Nagô freedman Domingos Fortunato José da Cunha, who
received a passport to the African Coast on 26 August 1837. The record observes that
he would be allowed to return to Bahia, “since he qualifies for the exception included in
Article 6 of the provincial law of 13 May 1835.”37 That article authorized fines to be levied
on the masters of ships that attempted to bring freed Africans into the port of Bahia, with
the exception of Africans “who already reside in this city and who are not under suspi-
cion.”38 Few were as clearly qualified as Domingos Fortunato, who had notified his
former master of the conspiracy just before the rebellion was scheduled to begin, thus
playing an important role in its defeat.39
The reason for Domingos Fortunato’s Atlantic voyage is not stated in the record, but
evidently it was not his only one, for a few years later, on 13 September 1842, he was
granted a new passport, once again with permission to return. This time, his request
was made together with a Mina freedman, 50-year-old Antonio Mendes dos Santos,
whose application was supported by statements from local justices of the peace confirm-
ing that he had no criminal record.40 Recently married, with three young children, Antonio
Mendes dos Santos was a barber by trade and had been sailing to Africa since the first
decade of the century, even before obtaining his freedom.41 His social network in Bahia,
involving client-patron relations with several prominent slave merchants, was undoubt-
edly helpful in obtaining approval to re-enter the country.42 His case illustrates that
despite the laws prohibiting Africans from re-entering Brazil, those who earned their liveli-
hood in maritime commerce often managed to circumvent them.43 In the 1840s, the slave
trade formed a large and extremely profitable part of this commerce, despite the putative
ban placed on it in 1831, and slave voyages were an important source of employment in
32 L. E. CASTILLO
this sector, including for Africans.44 While some, like Antonio Mendes dos Santos, had per-
sonal connections that enabled them to re-enter Brazil legally, others probably landed
secretly, like the tens of thousands of African captives who arrived in Bahia during the
1840s.45
A week after receiving his passport, Mendes left Bahia on 20 September 1842, aboard
the French brig Philanthrope, bound for the African Coast.46 It would be his last Atlantic
crossing. Six months later, when the ship returned, it carried “diverse objects and
money belonging to the African Antonio Mendes,” who had died during the voyage.47
The Philanthrope claimed to have brought only legal merchandise, but this is doubtful,
considering that its consignee, Edouard Gantois, was a regular client of the slave
markets of Ouidah and Lagos. In all likelihood, the ship had proceeded to the port of
Bahia for inspection by customs officials only after having secretly unloaded her human
cargo at a secluded spot on the coast, like so many other vessels engaged in the illegal
slave trade.48
The records for this period describe most applicants for passports to Africa as traveling
“on business,” leaving the exact nature of their work to the reader’s imagination.49 For
example, Joaquim d’Almeida, a Jeje freedman whose well-known career in the slave
trade began during captivity under the auspices of his master, also a slave trader, received
a passport on 16 December 1844, also taking with him a slave, Marcelino Jeje. Two days
later, they left Bahia on the schooner Emilia, with a cargo of cachaça (Brazilian sugar-
cane spirits), tobacco and textiles, products commonly used in trading for captives.
However, all that was recorded about the reason for the journey was that Joaquim
planned to “tend to his business.”50 In the context of his involvement in the illegal slave
trade, such vagueness can be read as a deliberate smokescreen by authorities feigning
ignorance of the continued arrival of newly enslaved Africans into the province.
In the few cases where the passport records offer more detailed information about
applicants’ professions, barbers, cooks and carpenters are the most frequent.51 Since
Brazil’s colonial period, most barbers were black, and many were African-born. In addition
to being trained in shaving beards and cutting hair, barbers were also knowledgeable in
certain curative practices of the times, such as bleeding, applying leeches, extracting teeth
and setting bones, which made them valuable on slave vessels, where they performed
many of the same procedures as surgeons for much lower salaries.52
It was common for employees of slave ships to purchase captives to bring back to Brazil,
either for resale or for their own use. This was the case of Rufino José Maria, a Nagô freed-
man who worked as a cook on slave vessels in the 1840s. Rufino invested his earnings in
merchandise to be traded in Africa for small numbers of captives.53 Jeje barber Innocencio
de Araujo Santa Anna seems to have followed a similar path.54 His employment on slave
ships began in the 1820s and continued after 1831, when the slave trade was illegal under
Brazilian law. There are records of three passports: one to Luanda, on 22 October 1835, and
two to the African Coast, on 22 April 1836 and again on 27 March 1843. By the mid-1840s
Santa Anna was master of at least seven captives, most likely purchased on his slave
voyages.55 Some of these slaves accompanied him on his Atlantic travels, either assisting
him in his duties as a barber-bleeder or in some aspect of his involvement in buying
captives.56
In 1844, Santa Anna appears in the records of a ship condemned by the Mixed Commis-
sion Court of Sierra Leone. The 290 slaves found aboard when the British navy intercepted
ATLANTIC STUDIES 33
the vessel had been purchased in Lagos. Most were consigned to large-scale slave mer-
chants, but Innocencio de Araujo Santa Anna, the carregador (loader) of two female cap-
tives, was one of a few petty traders involved in the voyage. The following year, a note
from Innocencio de Araujo Santa Anna was one of a series of incriminating papers
found on another ship. Written in Lagos and addressed to a client in Bahia, it explained
that the “bales” (i.e., captives) were ready, but that the embarkation point had been
changed unexpectedly because of pursuit from the British squadron.57
Another barber who appears to have worked on slave vessels during the 1840s was
José “Pequeno” Abubakar Paraiso, a Muslim Nagô who later settled in Porto Novo and
whose life has attracted attention from generations of researchers. Paul Marty, who inter-
viewed his descendants in 1926, gives 1 December 1849 as the issue date of the passport
Paraiso used on his return voyage to West Africa. Also according to Marty, in January 1850,
Paraiso settled in a coastal town near Porto Novo, near “his friend Domingo,” an allusion to
slave trader Domingos José Martins, who was established in Porto Novo.58 Pierre Verger,
who interviewed the family decades later, states that Martins hired Paraiso as his own
personal barber and had him brought him to Africa.59

The date of Paraiso’s passport and his profession are confirmed by the records in Bahia,
which show that Nagô freedman José Pequeno Paraiso, a barber, was one of two Africans
who received passports on 1 December 1849. Paraiso’s companion, Salustiano Francisco
Adaens, also a freed Nagô, was a cook who had already crossed the Atlantic, having
received a passport for travel to West Africa two years before.60 The fact that both men
had professions common in maritime commerce suggests they were travelling for work,
perhaps employed on the same vessel. That month, three ships belonging to Joaquim
Pereira Marinho, Domingos José Martins’ partner in Bahia, left Salvador for Africa, all
slavers.61 Given the memory that Martins was responsible for “bringing” Paraiso to
Africa, it seems likely that Paraiso worked on one of these ships. Some years earlier, in
1843, a Bahian newspaper had carried an announcement that “freedman José Paraiso”
was about to depart for Africa, “on business,” which suggests that the 1849 trip was not
his first return to Africa.62
At the end of 1854, José Paraiso reappears in documentation from the other side of the
Atlantic, in a letter to the British consul in Lagos from an informant residing in Dahomey.
The letter begins with an update on Domingos José Martins’ most recent slave shipments,
going on to comment about a returnee in Porto Novo, “José do Paraizo [sic], that was
barber to Mr. Martins,” but currently employed by slave traders at Ouidah, “to buy
slaves for them under the pretense of buying them for hammock men.”63 This letter con-
firms the memory that Paraiso worked for Martins, but it also shows that he was an inter-
mediary in the slave trade, a subject that is absent from oral traditions. Paraiso’s
involvement in slaving activities calls into question an idea put forth recently by one
family member that he was an opponent of slavery and a leader of the Malê Rebellion.64
In any event, the historical relationship between José Pequeno Paraíso and Porto Novo’s
most powerful slave trader serves as a reminder of the pervasive presence of the slave
trade in the lives of freed Africans who traveled between Bahia and their home continent
during the 1840s. It also highlights the selective processes of remembering and forgetting
that shape oral traditions across generations.65
The evidence suggests that Africans employed in maritime commerce served as go-
betweens for returnees, carrying messages, packages, and written letters to Africans in
34 L. E. CASTILLO
Bahia. For example Gil Antonio de Almeida, a Nagô cook who obtained his freedom in
1840, crossed the Atlantic numerous times between 1846 and 1855, while maintaining
residence in Bahia.66 In 1853, upon returning to Bahia, he delivered a letter and gifts
sent by freedman Luis Xavier de Jesus, of Ouidah, to the latter’s former slave, Antonio
Xavier de Jesus, resident in Bahia.67 Luis Xavier had been deported from Bahia in 1836
under suspicion of having been involved in the Malê uprising. From Ouidah, he shipped
small numbers of captives to Bahia, where they were received by Antonio Xavier. Their
communication about business affairs was facilitated by voyagers such as Gil Antonio
d’Almeida.68
Passport records suggest that many other freed Africans who crossed the Atlantic east-
ward during the 1840s were, like the individuals described above, directly or indirectly
involved in the commerce in human captives. This was a shift from the late 1830s,
which largely involved permanent migrations. Moreover, the African voyagers of the
1840s were far less numerous than those who left Bahia the decade before. Verger ident-
ifies only 360 Africans who received passports during the six-year period from 1845 to the
end of 1850. Souza’s total for the entire decade, at 287, is even lower.69
Another significant difference between the 1840s and the Malê period is the relative
proportion of freed Africans to all travelers to Africa. Between 1835 and 1837, freed
Africans comprised more than half; in the 1840s they were less than 20 percent of the
total.70 The evidence suggests that most were either Jeje or Nagô. The African travelers
of the 1840s also differed in that they were almost all men. This lends further credence
to the suggestion made above that most freed Africans who received passports in
Bahia during the 1840s were either employed on slave ships or engaged in the illegal
trade in human captives, as petty traders or go-betweens for other merchants, for these
were economic sectors in which female workers were almost nonexistent.71
Very little data on passengers disembarking in the port of Bahia has survived from this
period, so it is impossible to know with certainty how many of those who left eventually
returned to Brazil. However, the available records suggest that, as in the case histories
described above, many were able to circumvent the laws barring freed Africans from
coming into Brazil, in some cases repeatedly. This raises questions about to what extent
the travelers of this period can be considered “returnees” per se, for although some,
such as José Pequeno Paraiso (and, as we will see, Innocencio de Araujo Santa Anna), even-
tually settled in Africa, they had been crossing and recrossing the ocean for years.
The rise of Lagos as a destination

At the end of 1850, in the face of increasingly difficult relations with Great Britain over the
Atlantic slave trade, Brazil finally implemented legislation that put a definitive end to the
importation of new slaves from Africa. In December of the following year, this was com-
plemented by the British seizure of Lagos, then the most important slave port north of
the equator.72 These events marked a period of transition in the geography of the Brazilian
returnee movement. As historian Elisee Soumonni has noted, during the 1850s the Daho-
mean coast received fewer and fewer returnees and by the 1860s Lagos emerged as the
most frequent destination.73 Whether because of this, or because of the demographics of
the African population in Bahia, in which Nagôs comprised a very significant majority by
ATLANTIC STUDIES 35
this time, the number of Yoruba speakers among the migrants of this period seems to have
been even higher than in previous periods.
Cunha views the rise of Lagos as a destination in relation to the dynamics of the slave
trade, arguing that Lagos became popular because it was the only place where returnees
ran no risk of re-enslavement.74 While this is undeniable, it seems likely that other factors
were also at play, including economic ones. With Lagos no longer shipping slaves to the
Americas, the West Africa squadron of the British navy focused its efforts on suppressing
the trade from Dahomey, where captives continued being embarked to Cuba until 1867.
Because of this periodic blockades were set up at Ouidah and nearby ports.75 This may
explain the severe economic inflation in Ouidah reported by Burton, who, in describing
a visit there in 1864, stated that prices had more than doubled over the past decade.76
For returnees seeking economic stability, this may have entered into their decision on
where to settle.
The geographic shift in returnees’ destination once they had arrived in Africa was
accompanied by similar changes in Brazil. As discussed earlier, the returnees of the late
1830s were mainly from Bahia. After 1850 increasing numbers came from other places
too, especially Rio de Janeiro, Recife and Rio Grande do Sul. But Bahia still remained an
important focal point. Most returnees from other provinces made the voyage in two
stages, traveling first to Bahia and from there catching another ship bound for West
Africa.77 Some even came from other countries, such as Maria Joaquina Borges, who
had been a slave in Uruguay but later migrated to Bahia, where she lived for five years
before requesting a passport to Africa in 1854 at the age of 44.78 Her story illustrates
yet another demographic shift: beginning in the 1850s, women and children once again
constituted a significant proportion of passport recipients, as they had during the
exodus of 1835–1837.
Souza’s data suggests that during the 1850s adult males dropped to around 45 percent of
all freed people who obtained permission to travel to Africa.79 The total volume of travelers,
although lower than during the post-Malê period, was higher than it had been in the 1840s.
According to Verger, 511 Africans received passports between 1851 and 1860, while Souza,
also including Brazilian-born adult people of color, gives a total of 597 (see Appendix). Both
these figures, however, are undoubtedly lower than the real number of travelers. For
example, on 13 February 1854, British records show that 224 freed men, women and chil-
dren left Bahia on aboard the Portuguese barque Linda Flor, arriving in Lagos around a
month later.80 Yet Verger estimated only 18 passports issued to Africans that year, while
Souza found 91 adults and 26 children (a total of 117).81 Such discrepancies point to the
need for a careful recount of the available passport records.
Consul Campbell and the Agudás

It is clear that Lagos attracted freed people from Brazil before the 1850s, but there is less
data available than for the Agudá communities of Dahomey during that period. Data
from1853 refer to approximately 130 “Brazilian” families in Lagos, for a total of some
200 people.82 In 1863, when a visiting group of Catholic priests baptized more than
sixty children of Lusophone African freedmen, seven were adolescents born before the
British arrival. One girl, born in Lagos in 1848, was the daughter of Innocencio de
Araujo Santa Anna, the itinerant barber and small-time slave trader discussed above.83
36 L. E. CASTILLO
During this period Lagos was also receiving returnees from Cuba, albeit in much smaller
numbers than from Brazil. The Cubans tended to be absorbed into the Agudá community.
There was also a steady stream of people known as Saros, who had been living in Sierra
Leone after being freed from slave vessels captured by the British. For the local population
of Lagos, the influx of these various groups of outsiders engendered some tensions, but in
the assessment of Benjamin Campbell, who served as consul from 1853 to 1859, between
the Saros and the Agudás they preferred the latter.84 A series of measures were taken
during Campbell’s tenure, with his active support, to encourage Agudás to remain and
facilitating the arrival of others.85 As a result, the Agudás became an important base of pol-
itical support for him at a time when British influence over the native population of the city
was still tenuous.
When Campbell arrived in 1853, Lagos was facing an attempt by the deposed obá
Kosoko to retake it by force. In the midst of this upheaval, the Agudá leaders met with
the new consul and declared their lack of sympathy for Kosoko, under whom they pro-
fessed to have suffered greatly.86 A deal for mutual support was struck, which was put
to the test early the next year, with the arrival from Bahia of the Linda Flor, the Portuguese
barque mentioned above. Claiming outstanding debts on shipping fees, the vessel’s
supercargo refused to surrender the belongings of the ship’s numerous passengers, but
Campbell intervened on their behalf and notified his superiors.87 The following year,
after two other incidents involving Portuguese ships, Campbell complained again to the
British Foreign Office, and diplomatic action was taken.88 The Agudás responded to Camp-
bell’s support by coming to his assistance at crucial moments. Early in 1855, for example,
information from Antonio Ojo Martins, chief of the “Brazilian” repatriates, was crucial in
foiling a plot to assassinate the consul.89
Campbell’s last and perhaps most important act in favor of the returnees was to intro-
duce a policy permitting them to obtain British passports. He initially envisioned this as a
way of assisting those who wished to resettle in homelands in the interior rather than
remaining in Lagos. But the journey inland was often dangerous, with the possibility of
being kidnapped by slave-raiders or caught in the violence of regions torn by war. In
1858, Campbell began issuing passports to such travelers, requesting safe passage in
the name of Great Britain. He soon extended the practice to repatriates going back to
Brazil or Cuba.90 At the end of 1859, his successor, Consul Brand, wrote to his superiors
inquiring whether he should continue this, noting that it seemed irregular, given that
returnees were not, technically speaking, British subjects. The response from the
Foreign Office was emphatic: Brand was to continue the policy. Not only had it enabled
“many hundreds of Africans” to arrive safely in their homelands, it also provided those
returning to Brazil or Cuba with a “certificate of their freedom” that permitted “our
consuls to protect them in any difficulties they might get into.”91
Even before this reply reached Lagos in early 1860, Brazilian returnees were using these
passports not only for international voyages but also for domestic travel within Brazil,
much to the local authorities’ displeasure. In November of 1859, two freed Africans, a
married couple, were detained by the Bahian police for attempting to use British passports
as they boarded a ship bound for another province.92 In Brazil at this time, all passengers
were required to have passports for interprovincial travel, and Africans planning voyages
had always turned to the Brazilian authorities for travel documents. But the 1831 law men-
tioned in the first section of this paper, which prohibited freed Africans from disembarking
ATLANTIC STUDIES 37
onto Brazilian soil, was still in effect (although irregularly enforced), even for journeys
between domestic ports. Africans who traveled to other provinces by sea – the most
common means – ran the risk of not being allowed reentry into Brazil. But British passports
gave them a clever way of rebutting the Brazilian government’s claim that they were “sub-
jects of nations with which Brazil is not bound by any treaty.”93
The evidence suggests that Africans in Brazil were keenly aware of this and that some
may have even gone to Lagos specifically to obtain passports. For example, on 11 Novem-
ber 1876, the patache Alfredo arrived in Bahia, with 32 freed Africans who had been slaves
in Brazil, all with British passports. Many of these “black British subjects” as the Bahian
police described them, had left for Lagos just a few months earlier, on the same ship.94
Less than a year later, on 8 August 1877, the question generated a legal debate, when
the patache Paraguassu arrived from Lagos with fifteen Lusophone freed Africans.95 The
Brazilian authorities refused to allow them to disembark and confiscated their British pass-
ports. Although Her Majesty’s consul in Bahia, John Morgan, defended their right to enter
without impediments, they were eventually deported.96 In 1879, however, when another
ship arrived, carrying eight Africans with British passports, the group was permitted to
enter Brazil. Although the police initially took away their travel documents, those who
had the perspicacity to protest were able to get them back.97
Whether because of pressure from Great Britain or because of the difficulty of control-
ling what had become a constant stream of travelers, after the 1879 incident there are no
more records of police incidents arising because of the use of British passports in Brazil. By
the 1880s many of the African-born freed men and women who embarked from the port
of Salvador, not only for Africa but also for parts of the Brazilian Empire, are identified in
the passport records as “black British subjects.” This draws attention to the fact that many
of those who sailed for Africa later came back to Brazil. Some had settled permanently in
Lagos and were coming to Bahia for short visits, while for others Bahia continued to be
their main place of residence.
Social, commercial and religious networks: the case of Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká
A number of freedpersons affiliated with the Afro-Brazilian temple Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká,
today also known as the Casa Branca, traveled back and forth between Lagos and Bahia in
the second half of the nineteenth century. As discussed above, the temple’s founders,
Francisca da Silva and her husband José Pedro Autran, had resettled in Ouidah in 1837.
Two years later, one of their former slaves who had accompanied them, Marcelina da
Silva, returned to Bahia, where she assumed leadership of the religious community.
From the late 1860s onward, a number of other people associated with this temple also
crossed the ocean, now gravitating toward Lagos, which would seem to illustrate
Ouidah’s decline in attracting returnees during this period. Like other Agudá travelers,
they played an active role in facilitating dialogue between Africans and their descendents
on either side of the ocean, carrying news and packages, even assisting in more significant
ways. At the same time that these voyages confirm anthropologist J. Lorand Matory’s argu-
ment that Atlantic travelers played a role in the nineteenth-century reconfiguration of
African religions in Brazil, they also indicate that the trans-Atlantic dialogue was initiated
decades earlier than Matory suggests.98
38 L. E. CASTILLO
Two men associated with Ilê Iyá Nassô Oká, Rodolfo Manoel Martins de Andrade, a
native of Oyo, and Eduardo Americo de Souza Gomes, who was Egba, both escorted
groups of children and adolescents to Lagos, at the parents’ request. On returning to
Brazil, they visited various cities, certainly carrying news of Lagos. Andrade, a babalawo
(Ifá diviner) and devotee of the thunder deity Shango, whose Yoruba name was Bamgbose
Obitiko, crossed the Atlantic at least four times before his death in Bahia in the first decade
of the twentieth century. With descendants in Lagos, Bahia, and Rio de Janeiro, he is
remembered as having played a crucial role in the development of Afro-Brazilian
temples and ritual practices, especially at the Casa Branca.99
Another well-known Atlantic traveler, Martiniano do Bonfim, was linked to Ilê Axé Iyá
Nassô via his father, Eliseu do Bonfim.100 Although Martiniano is remembered today as
a babalawo, during an interview recorded late in his life he stated that during the 11
years that he lived in Lagos he participated in a temple dedicated to egúngún (ancestor)
worship and that his father had also been an egúngún worshipper.101 It is not clear
whether Eliseu do Bonfim met Rodolfo Manoel de Andrade through their mutual involve-
ment in Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká or whether their friendship first grew in Lagos. On at least
one occasion, in 1878, they traveled back to Bahia together, on the patache Garibaldi,
which carried 21 other Lusophone African freedmen and Creoles. Among the Africans
was Antonio Alexandre Martins, godfather of Andrade’s infant grandson baptized in
Lagos earlier that year.102 Another passenger, Augusto José Cardoso, had first traveled
to Lagos in 1869, bringing three of his Brazilian-born children. One of his sons, Marcos
Augusto Cardoso, worked on the construction of the city’s first Catholic church, together
with Martiniano.103 The friendship between these families seems to point toward Cardoso
as the probable leader of the egúngún temple Martiniano mentioned.104
Like other Agudás of the period, for Andrade and his fellow travelers, investments in
merchandise not only paid for their travels but may have even motivated them.105
Customs records in Bahia show that all four men brought large quantities of African pro-
ducts into Brazil that were typical of the kinds of products brought by other returnees.
Andrade and Eliseu brought around 40,500 and 43,000 kola nuts, respectively. In addition,
Andrade imported smaller quantities of gourds, African pepper, country cloths, and palm
oil, while Eliseu brought two cages of birds. Antonio Alexandre Martins is listed as having
brought 19,000 kola nuts, 126 kilos of black soap, two sacks of shea butter and 34 kilos of
ink. Augusto José Cardoso may have had less capital than the others or perhaps was less
interested in trading, for he brought only 5000 kola nuts and 16 country cloths.106 In Brazil
today, nearly all these products, especially kola nuts and country cloths, are used mainly in
Afro-Brazilian religious rituals, and the religious affiliation of Andrade and Bonfim certainly
put them into contact with potential customers from that segment of society. But in nine-
teenth-century Brazil, kola nuts and country cloths were used much more widely by Afri-
cans and their descendents. Because of their commercial value, even mixed-race and
white merchants in Brazil traded in them.107
Martiniano do Bonfim returned to Bahia to live in 1887, but he later traveled to Lagos
twice for visits. Andrade’s daughter Julia, who had accompanied her father to Lagos in
1873 and was the mother of the grandson mentioned above, also traveled back to
Bahia several times. In September of 1886, Julia went to Bahia with her son, and ten
years later, she made a trip without him, accompanied by one of her co-wives, Querina
da Silva. The two women had doubtlessly known each other since childhood, for
ATLANTIC STUDIES 39
Querina had been born into the Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká community, as a slave of the high
priestess, Marcelina da Silva. Querina received her freedom shortly before going to Lagos
in 1872, as part of the group led by Eduardo Americo de Souza Gomes, later her
husband.108
The various ties of friendship and kinship that linked these different members of the
Casa Branca community were surely strengthened in Lagos, continuing well into the twen-
tieth century on the other side of the ocean. Martiniano do Bomfim returned to Bahia in
1886, followed a decade or so later by 1900, Julia and her son, Felisberto. In 1908 they were
rejoined by Marcos Cardoso and his family. Even after Julia’s death in 1925, Martiniano
maintained a close friendship with Felisberto, until the latter’s death in 1940. At the end
of that same year, when Martiniano gave the interview mentioned above, a daughter of
Marcos Cardoso was present, contributing her own memories of the Agudás of Lagos.109
Slavery and the Agudás

After 1850, there are no more references to slaves travelling with freed Africans who
received passports, but as during the 1830s, the composition of groups tended to be het-
erogeneous, including agregados and crias as well as blood relatives and friends. For
example, when a Nagô couple, Severa de Jesus and her husband Felipe Simões
Coimbra, received passports on 15 May 1867, two minors, Leocadia and Serafim, described
as crioulos livres, were included on Severa’s passport. The use of the term livre (free), rather
than liberto (freed), would seem to indicate that they never experienced captivity, but
other records show that they were born into slavery and that Severa and her husband
had been their masters. Significantly, later in life both Leocadia and Seraphim would
omit references to their enslavement, describing themselves instead as Felipe Simões
Coimbra’s children.110
Although other Brazilian repatriates sometimes brought their former slaves to Lagos,
there is no evidence that they actually brought captives from Brazil. However, they did
acquire slaves locally after arriving. Most returnees had farms where the field labor was
performed by slaves, and Antonio Ojo Martins was said to own over 200.111 In 1854, Camp-
bell wrote that “the mass of the population have been and still are slaves” and in an 1856
letter, he was even more emphatic, stating that “in a strict sense there is no such thing as
free labour in Lagos.”112 As Kristin Mann has shown, slavery was a fundamental form of
social organization in Lagos before the British intervention, and it continued to be one
long afterwards.113 However, as in other parts of Yorubaland, the unfree had some
degree of upward social mobility. Royal slaves could become palace chiefs and accumulate
considerable fortunes, including large numbers of slaves, as in the case of Oshodi Tapa,
one of obá Kosoko’s most influential advisors.114
Citing British records, historian Adeniyi Oroge has argued that returnees were harsher
masters than the indigenous residents of Lagos.115 Still, it is unclear whether this was actu-
ally the case, or whether the British simply were more critical of Agudá slaveholders,
expecting that having experienced captivity themselves they would support the cause
of abolition.116 One Brazilian freedman who held slaves in Lagos was José Francisco da
Conceição, who probably first arrived in the city in the mid-1840s.117 In 1863, when the
baptisms mentioned above were performed, his nine children, born between 1851 and
1863, received the sacrament. Former slave trader Pedro Martins Jambo, a white Brazilian,
40 L. E. CASTILLO
was godfather to two, while Francisco Gomes de Andrade, a Nagô freedman who also
seems to have been involved in the slave trade, sponsored three others.118 As discussed
earlier, the parent-godparent bond was an important one, implying an existing personal
relationship or the desire to form one. José Francisco da Conceição’s choice of slave
traders as godfathers for five of his nine children thus suggests that he was part of their
social circle, also implying that he may have had a similar history himself. In any event,
the records point to at least three male captives under his dominion who were redeemed
through intervention of the British consulate between 1857 and 1861. No Christian names
are given, which indicates that they were acquired locally rather than being brought from
Brazil.119
With time, the slaves of Agudá masters could come to be considered Agudás them-
selves, whether or not they ever lived in Brazil. A reexamination of the evidence about
the life of one of Lagos’ most prominent Agudás, Joaquim Francisco Devodê Branco,
suggests that he may have been a case in point. According to information collected in
the 1960s by Brazilian writer Antonio Olinto and later cited by various scholars,
Joaquim, of Mahi origin, was born in 1856 and taken to Bahia as a slave at the age of
eight, where he served a Portuguese master, João Francisco Branco. According to Olinto
he remained there for 30 years before becoming involved in commerce between Bahia
and Lagos and finally settling in the latter city toward the end of the century. He died
in Dahomey in 1924.120
The date of birth, ethnic origin and master’s name given by Olinto are confirmed in Joa-
quim’s will.121 The account of his enslavement, however, is difficult to reconcile with his-
torical fact. Since the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil ended six years before Joaquim’s birth, it
seems doubtful that he could have been taken there as a slave in 1864. Moreover, docu-
ments show that from the mid-1860s until 1873, his master lived in Ouidah, where he was
active in defending Portugal’s foothold in the city against the first encroachments by the
French.122 In 1874, however, his master acquired a ship which he used for trading with
various ports in Africa, Portugal and Brazil, including Bahia.123 If Joaquim were employed
on this ship, a “Brazilian” identity first acquired in Ouidah may have been consolidated
during these visits. Whatever the case, Bahian records show that as a freedman he
made at least seven trips between Bahia and Lagos between1884 and 1889. Significantly,
the earliest of these records describes him as “a black Portuguese.”124
Since the early nineteenth century at least, Ouidah’s Lusophone community had assimi-
lated agregados, children and slaves who were locally born. By the 1870s, when it was
already common for Lusophone Africans in Lagos to receive British passports, “black Por-
tuguese subjects” also appear in the records, with passports issued by the governor of the
Portuguese fort in Ouidah.125 In view of the other evidence, the description of Joaquim
Francisco Branco as a black Portuguese strongly suggests that his first passport was
issued in the city where he had grown to maturity as part of his master’s household. By
1887, however, he was using a British passport, which would seem to indicate that by
then Lagos had become his new base. In any event, it seems likely that his decision to
settle there, interpreted by Olinto as a “return” to Africa, was actually a migration from
Dahomey, in search of refuge from the French military incursions that culminated in
that kingdom’s subjugation in 1893.126
Another example of an African whose Agudá identity was shaped outside of Brazil is
Francisca Modupé. Enslaved during a Dahomean attack on the Egba, probably sometime
ATLANTIC STUDIES 41
in the early 1840s, she ended up in Agoué, the slave of Antonio Pereira dos Santos, the
Nagô freedman whose migration was discussed in the first section of this paper. After
her husband’s death (c.1860), Francisca Modupé rose to prominence in the local Agudá
community as a powerful slave merchant. The neighborhood where she lived, in the
city’s Brazilian quarter, is known as Iyakomé in her honor.127 Still another Agudá with
no direct link to Brazil was José Rustico, an ancestor of the Aguiar family of Porto Novo.
Originally named Akutola, Rustico was an Egba captive redeemed and baptized in
Ouidah in 1868 by French missionaries who employed him in their mission, where the par-
ishioners were mainly Agudás. There is no suggestion that Rustico ever left Dahomey.128
In local usage the word Agudá applied not only to those who had returned after ensla-
vement in Brazil or Cuba: it also applied to Lusophone whites, as well as locally born chil-
dren, spouses, and agregados of Agudás, who learned their language and customs.129 As
other scholars have noted, the use of the Portuguese language and participation in Cath-
olicism – albeit often perfunctory – were fundamental to Agudá collective identity. By
assimilating individuals whose membership in the group developed locally, without
experiencing captivity on the western side of the Atlantic, nineteenth-century Agudá com-
munities acquired an additional mechanism of growth that continued after immigration
from Brazil and Cuba dwindled away.
Conclusion
Neither Verger nor Souza collected data for the period after the 1860s, but my own esti-
mates, pieced together from lists of passengers leaving from the port of Salvador suggest
that at least 600 people traveled to Lagos during the 1870s, but that by the mid-1880s
the number of travelers was in decline. The drop coincided with a period of stagnation in
the exportation of oil palm products, which had substituted human captives as West
Africa’s main export. The diminishing number of travelers also reflected the economic
demands of colonial rule, which shifted trade with British West Africa away from Brazil,
toward England. By the end of the century, only one or two ships a year traveled
between Bahia and Lagos.130
In any event, although the passport records make it clear that the post-Malê period
(1835–1837) represented the peak of the returnee movement, it should be remembered
that this source has inherent limitations for calculating the number of travelers. The fact
that someone received a passport does not prove that he or she actually traveled. Passen-
ger lists can be more reliable in this sense, but the earliest reliable records of this sort only
begin in the 1870s. Moreover, both passport records and passenger lists include people
who traveled more than once, as several of the case histories examined in this paper
reveal. Although some back and forth travelers eventually made Africa their home,
others did not, a fact that should be taken into consideration in estimating the volume
of the returnee movement.
Micro-historical analysis of individual life stories complements the quantitative data
supplied by passport records, revealing the existence of complex social networks
among those who returned to Africa and suggesting that these affective bonds were
often maintained after resettlement. Tracing the lives of individual travelers also helps
to elucidate their motives for leaving Brazil, showing that during the post-Malê period,
a fair number of travelers belonged to a privileged class of freed people whose standard
42 L. E. CASTILLO
of living was jeopardized by legislation that sought to reduce Africans’ possibilities for
economic ascension. Although the travels of Brazilian returnees are sometimes envisioned
as being motivated, like those of Pan-Africanist voyagers, by ideological questions includ-
ing a rejection of the institution of slavery and the yearning for a homeland, the data pre-
sented here suggest that many of those who returned to Africa had been slaveholders in
Brazil, and that during the 1840s many freedmen who traveled were involved at least per-
ipherally in the Atlantic slave trade.131 Even after resettling in Africa, prosperous returnees
acquired slaves locally. Such captives often acquired “Brazilian” identities, constituting an
alternate source of growth for Agudá communities. While these complexities in the
Agudás’ relationship to the institution of slavery stand in contrast to the abolitionist senti-
ment that motivated many Pan-Africanists, they also point to possible differences between
the chattel slavery of the Americas and the experience of bondage in African and Afro-
centric contexts.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Kristin Mann, Ana Lucia Araújo, Elisee Soumonni, Okezi Otovo, João José Reis and two
anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions on drafts of this paper, as well as to Luis
Nicolau Parés for ongoing discussions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
The research for this article was supported by successive grants from the Conselho Nacional de
Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq), the Coordenação do Aperfeiçoamento de
Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES ) and the Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São
Paulo (FAPESP), all in Brazil. Field research in Benin in 2012 was sponsored by a CNPq grant to
the project Famílias Atlânticas and by the Fondation pour le Patrimoine Afro-brésilien au Benin.
Notes on contributor
Lisa Earl Castillo holds a Ph.D. from the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Currently a postdoctoral
fellow at the Centro de Pesquisa em História Social da Cultura of the State University of Campinas,
São Paulo, she is the author of Entre a oralidade e a escrita: a etnografia nos candomblés da Bahia
(Edufba, 2008) and various articles published in Brazil and abroad.
Notes
1. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Rodrigues, Os africanos no Brasil, ch. 4.1; Assumpção, “A colônia bra-
sileira”; Verger and Freyre, “Acontece que são baianos”; Olinto, Brasileiros na África; Cunha,
“Estrangeiros libertos.”
2. The large percentage of freed people of color in Brazil is attributed to relatively high manumis-
sion rates, especially in urban areas. See, for example, Mattoso, “A própósito”; Russell-Wood,
The Black Man, 31–49; Nishida, Slavery & Identity, 74–84, 124–130; Klein and Luna, Slavery in
Brazil, 253–260.
ATLANTIC STUDIES 43
3. Law and Mann, “West Africa,” 317–320; Verger, Os libertos, 9–18. Freed people from Cuba also
resettled in Africa, but in lesser numbers than their Brazilian counterparts. See Otero, Afrocuban
Diasporas.
4. Mattoso, Bahia, século XIX, 85–86. According to the same census, the captaincy of Bahia had
approximately 411,100 inhabitants. Enslaved people of color constituted 33.9 percent of this
total.
5. Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros, 99.
6. A newly independent Brazil had signed the treaty under duress, in exchange for being recog-
nized as an autonomous state by Britain. See Bethell, The Abolition and Alencastro, “Brazil in the
South Atlantic.”
7. Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros, 93–100; Albuquerque, O jogo, 48; Chalhoub, A força, 159–160. For
the text of the law, known as Lei de 7 de novembro de 1831, see www2.camara.leg.br/
atividade-legislativa/legislacao/publicacoes/doimperio/colecao3.html. Accessed 13 May 2015.
8. Francisco Souza Martins to the Ministry of Justice, 14 February 1835, apud Cunha, Negros
estrangeiros, 100.
9. Reis, Slave Rebellion; Verger, Trade Relations, 294–309; Turner, “Les Brésiliens,” 28–45.
10. For discussions of this law, see Reis, Rebelião escrava, 498–503; Turner, “Les Brésiliens,” 45–53.
11. Reis, Rebelião escrava, 454–457, 479–483.

12. Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros, 101. For decades to follow, freed Africans who purchased property
often did so in the names of their Brazilian-born children as a precaution. For examples, see
Castillo and Pares, “Marcelina da Silva,” 19; Reis, Domingos Sodré, 244–245.
13. Reis, Rebelião escrava, 479–483; Lyon and Parkinson to Palmerston, Bahia, January 1836. The
National Archives of Great Britain (hereafter TNA), Foreign Office (hereafter FO) 13/121, apud
Verger, Trade Relations, 316.
14. Verger estimates that 818 freed Africans received passports between 1835 and 1837: Verger,
Trade Relations, 563. Mônica de Lima e Souza, who also included the Brazilian-born, identified
only 671 adult travelers of color for the same period. She also found 161 children, for a total of
832: Souza, “Entre margens,” 125. For a comparison of their data, see Appendix. The estimate of
925 travelers and the groups’ gender components are my own, based on re-analysis of Verger’s
transcriptions of passport records: Fundação Pierre Verger, Notas de pesquisas no Arquivo
Público da Bahia, Passaportes.
15. Reis, Rebelião escrava, 308–319, 327, 333–349. On ethnonyms used in Brazil, see Law, “Ethnici-
ties of Enslaved Africans,” esp. 256–260.
16. Verger, Trade Relations, 317–320; Reis, Rebelião escrava, 482–483.
17. The only other ships known to have carried deportees are: in 1835, the Anibal e Oriente, on 15
November, with an unspecified number and the Funchalense, on 21 November, with three; in
1836, the Vingador, on 18 June, with four and the Alliança, on 10 October, also with four; and in
1838, the Heroina, on 5 April and the American Eagle, on 19 October, with five each. Verger,
Trade Relations, 317, 388; Reis, Rebelião escrava, 482–484; Diário da Bahia, 18 June 1836,
Arquivo Público da Bahia (hereafter APB) Polícia, Registros de passaportes de navios (1838–
1849), maço 5889.
18. Law, Ouidah, 8, 73, 181–82; Law and Mann, “West Africa;” Agbo, Histoire de Ouidah, 196–203;
interview with Théophile Villaça, Ouidah, Benin Republic, 20 February 2012. On Francisco
Felix de Souza, see Soummoni, “Afro-Brazilian Communities,” 184–185; Araújo, “Forgetting
and Remembering.” Between 1828 and 1832, priests from the island of São Thomé performed
over a hundred baptisms in Ouidah. By 1860, the number was over a thousand, a considerable
figure for a city whose total population was under 18,000: “Liste des baptisés d’après les regis-
tres de S. Thomé, 1828–1861.” Archive de la Société des Missions Africains (hereafter SMA),
2H50, Liber baptismalis Ajudae, 1861–1892, 151ss.
19. Strickrodt, “Afro-Brazilians”; Law, Ouidah, 182, n. 169; Interview with Farouk Sant’Anna, Agoué,
Benin Republic, 22 February 2012. For overviews of returnee communities in different parts of
the Bight of Benin, see Law, “Yoruba Liberated Slaves,” and Amos, Os que voltaram. Nagô retur-
nees in particular faced difficulties in travelling to their homelands due to the wars engulfing
much of Yorubaland. For an analysis, see Law, The Oyo Empire, 268–299.
44 L. E. CASTILLO
20. Souza, “Entre margens,” 136–140; Hawthorne, “Being as it Were,” 68–70. Hawthorne states that
they left in February on a British vessel, the Porcupine, bound for Lagos, however Souza gives
the ship’s name as Maria Adelaide, a later departure date and a more general destination,
“Costa da Mina.”
21. Rebelião escrava, 461, 473, 484–90; APB, Chefes de polícia, 1835, maço 2949; Livro de notas
(hereafter LN) 254, fl. 151v; LN 257, fl. 87v; LN 240, fl. 235v; Arquivo da Cúria Municipal de
Salvador (hereafter ACMS), Freguesia do Passo, Batismos 1817–1859, fls. 66, 83, 102; Fregue-
sia da Sé, Batismos 1816–1829, fl. 281v; Freguesia da Sé, Batismos 1829–1861, fl. 54v. In this
paper, I have followed the norms of the period in spelling Lusophone names from old
documents.
22. APB: Polícia, Registros de passaportes (hereafter RP) 1834–1837, maço 5883.
23. ACMS: Freguesia de Santa Anna (hereafter FSA), Casamentos 1819–1873, fl. 37v; Batismos
(hereafter Bat.)1830–1848, fl. 138; APB: LN, 251, fl. 177v; LN, 257, fl. 92; LN, 253, fls. 22–23v.
24. APB: RP, 1834–1837, maço 5883; ACMS: FSA, Bat. 1821–1830, fl. 148; Bat. 1830–1848, fl. 2v.
25. ACMS: FSA, 1821–1830, fl, 215; Bat. 1830–1848, fls. 24, 87v; APB: LN, 242, fl. 132v; LN, 251, fl.
161v; LN, 253, fl. 52v.
26. Francisco and Adriano, were born in 1829 and 1833, respectively: ACMS: FSA, Bat. 1821–1830, fl.
215; Bat. 1830–1848, fl. 87v.

27. For example, Maria da Gloria’s slaves Margarida (baptized in 1822), Agostinha and Rita (both
baptized in 1830) also received conditional freedom on 5 October 1831. Margarida and
Agostinha received passports on 16 May1836. Rita, whose godfather was Antonio Pereira
dos Santos, obtained hers the next day. ACMS: FSA, Bat.1821–1830, fls. 25, 140, 215; Bat.
1830–1848, 3v; APB: LN, 242, fl. 161v; LN, 236, fl. 213; LN, 237, fl. 78, LN 244, fls. 87–87v;
Polícia, RP 1834–1837, maço 5883. On godparenting and social relationships, see sources in
note 31.
28. Castillo, “The Exodus.” In nineteenth-century Brazil, passports lost their validity unless they
were used within a certain period after receiving them, similar to the rules for some types of
visas today.
29. Castillo, “The Exodus,” 42–43; Amos, “Afro-Brazilians in Togo,” 295; interviews with Yessoufu da
Gloria (Agoué, Benin, 6 February 2014) and Afoussa Pereira (Porto Novo, Benin, 18 February
2012). Antonio Pereira dos Santos is remembered by his descendents in Benin by his
Muslim name, Yacouba.
30. Castillo, “The Exodus.”
31. ACMS: FSA, Bat. 1821–1830, fl. 215; Bat. 1830–1848, fl. 87v. On the institution of godparenting,
see Mattoso, Bahia, século XIX, 174–75, 213–214; Butler, Freedoms Given, 18–19, Parés and Cas-
tillo, “José Pedro Autran.”
32. ACMS: FSA, Casamentos, 1819–1873, fl. 6v; Reis, Rebelião escrava, 340, 403, 412–414; APB:
Chefes de polícia, maço 2649.
33. For a discussion of this temple and its founders’ return to Africa, see Castillo and Pares, “Mar-
celina da Silva;” Parés and Castillo, “José Pedro Autran.”
34. Soummoni, “Afro-Brazilian Communities,” 182.
35. Reis, Rebelião escrava, 24.
36. On West Central Africans’ lack of participation in the rebellion, see Reis, Rebelião escrava, 326–
333.
37. APB: Polícia, RP 1835–1837, maço 5883.
38. APB: Legislativo, Registro de leis e resoluções, maço 2902.
39. On Domingos Fortunato José da Cunha’s betrayal of the uprising, see Reis, Rebelião escrava,
126, 288.
40. APB: Polícia, Correspondência recebida sobre passaportes (1821–1842), maço 6349.
41. APB: Livro de testamentos 33, fl. 32v–35. Mendes was certified as a barber/bleeder in 1812:
Requerimento para habilitação como sangrador do escravo Antonio Mendes, 4 September
1810. Arquivo Nacional, Registros da Fisicatura-mor, 1201/472–3. I thank Tania Salgado
Pimenta for this information.
ATLANTIC STUDIES 45
42. For example, one slave trader, Joaquim Alves da Cruz Rios, was godfather to Mendes’ son, and
another, Caetano Alberto da França, was his children’s guardian. ACMS: Freguesia do Pilar, Bat.
1838–1846, fl. 66; APB: Livro de testamentos 30, fl. 33.
43. Rodrigues, De costa a costa, 160–161; Reis et al., O alufá Rufino, 138–141.
44. APB: Polícia, Correspondência recebida sobre passaportes (1821–1842), maço 6349.
45. According to the Slave Voyages database, some 65,000 Africans disembarked in Bahia alone
between 1841 and 1850. Cf. slavevoyages.org/tast/assessment/estimates.faces. Accessed 14
December 2014.
46. Porter to Aberdeen, Bahia, 30 July 1843. Irish University Press series of British Parliamentary
Papers relating to the Slave Trade, (hereafter BPP), vol. 26, Class B: Correspondence with
foreign powers, Brazil, Consular, Bahia, no. 281, encl. 1, List of vessels which have sailed from
Bahia for Africa, 1 January 1838–31 December 1842, 335.
47. O Commercio, 15 April 1843, 2. Mendes’ possessions were delivered to the French consulate for
safekeeping until they could be claimed by his heirs. The newspaper does not mention the
cause of death, but his will, written shortly before the voyage, reveals that he had been con-
sidering suicide. APB: Livro de testamentos, 30, fls. 32v–36v.
48. O Commercio, 31 March 1843, 4. This voyage of the Philanthrope is not in the Slave Voyages
database, but there is another one, in 1840, showing it carried slaves. Cf. voyage no. 34699.
Accessed 27 October 2014. On falsified and misleading cargo declarations, see Verger, Trade
Relations, 355–368; Reis et al., O alufá Rufino, 112. On Edouard Gantois, see Verger, Trade
Relations, 399–401, 456, 510.
49. Here and elsewhere in this section, in my analysis of passport records I used data collected by
Emanuelle Maia Moreira of the Famílias Atlânticas research project, coordinated by Luis Nicolau
Parés of the Federal University of Bahia.
50. APB: Polícia, RP 1844–1845, maço 5887, Policia do Porto, Entrada e saída de embarcações
(1823–1846), maço 3194–1; Correio Mercantil, 18 December 1844, 3, and 20 December 1844,
4. On Joaquim d’Almeida, see Verger, Os libertos, 43–48, 116–21.
51. Rodrigues, De costa a costa, 164–167; Rediker, The Slave Ship, 229, 349. On black barbers, see
also Russell-Wood, The Black Man, 56–67.
52. Pimenta, “Barbeiros-sangradores e curandeiros;” Rodrigues, De costa a costa, 271–279. See also
Parés, “Militiamen,” 22–24.
53. Reis et al., O alufá Rufino, 167–171. Another example is African freedman Francisco Nazareth, a
barber employed on the galera Fortuna during the late 1820s, who took “merchandise proper
to the African trade,” presumably to exchange for captives: APB: Inventários, 05/2011/2484/04,
fl. 4v. In the case of the schooner Emilia, detained by the British in 1821 with 397 slaves aboard,
five crewmembers had captives in the hold. Hayne to Londonderry, Rio de Janeiro, 21 Septem-
ber 1821, Enc. 1, Copy of the Emilia’s matricula, TNA: FO, 84/12, fls. 150–151.
54. Rodrigues, De costa a costa, 275; Requerimento para habilitação como sangrador do preto forro
Innocencio de Araújo Santa Anna, 23 August 1826. Arquivo Nacional do Brasil, Registros da Fisi-
catura-mor, 1208/477–3. My thanks to Tania Salgado Pimenta for this document.
55. APB: RP 1834–1837, Maço 5883; RP 1843–1844, Maço 5886; ACMS: Freguesia do Pilar, Bat.
1824–1830, fls. 83v, 84; Bat. 1830–1838, fl. 32, 35v; Freguesia da Sé, Bat. 1829–1861, fl. 207v;
FSA, Bat. 1846–1865, fl. 5.
56. Parkinson to Aberdeen, Bahia, 13 October 1830. Enclosure, Return of slaves imported into Bahia,
Jan–Jun 1830. BPP 12, Class B, Brazil, Consular, Bahia, no. 62, 114.
57. Her Majesty’s Commissioners to Aberdeen, Freetown, 27 April 1844. BPP 30, Class A, no. 26,
enclosure 2, Case of the Pilot-boat Schooner Santa Anna, 33–38; vol. 29. Her Majesty’s Commis-
sioners to Aberdeen, Sierra Leone, 17 March 1845. Class A, no. 26, enclosure 1, Case of the Bri-
gantine Esperança, 201–208. The Portuguese term fardo, here translated as “bale,” was a code-
word for captives, utilized during the illegal slave trade.
58. Marty, Études sur l’Islam, 51–52, 89.
59. Verger, Os libertos, 33–34.
60. APB: Polícia, RP 1847–1850, maço 5890. I am grateful to Emanuelle Maia Moreira for this infor-
mation. Salustiano Adaens’s first passport was issued on 2 September 1847, and he eventually
46 L. E. CASTILLO
settled in Agoué, where he continued to be employed as a cook: APB, Polícia, Pedidos de pas-
saportes (1847–1872), maço 6354; Byll-Cataria, “Histoire d’Agoué,” 13.
61. Porter to Palmerston, Bahia, 31 December 1849. BPP 39, Class B: Correspondence with foreign
powers, Brazil, Consular, Bahia, no. 68, Enclosure 2, List of vessels which have sailed from Bahia
for the coast of Africa for the quarter ending 31 December 1849, 123; Verger, Trade Relations, 412–
418, 398–399.
62. Correio Mercantil, 16 March 1843, 4.
63. Campbell to Clarendon, Lagos, 19 December 1854. TNA: FO, 84/950, no. 44, Enclosure 2, Bar-
retto to Campbell, Lagos, 6 December 1854.
64. For critical analyses of this claim, see Reis and Guran, “Urbain-Karim Elisio da Silva”; Araújo,
Public Memory, 363–368.
65. See Araújo, “Forgetting and Remembering,” for an analysis of this process in another Agudá
family.
66. APB: LN, 270, fl. 7 (my thanks to Urano Andrade for sharing this document); APB: Polícia, RP
1844–1845, maço 5887, 26/11/1846; RP 1850–1852, maço 5892, 5 July 1851; RP 1854–1856,
maço 5895, 31 May 1855; Registro de chegada de estrangeiros (1855–1856), maço 5669, fl.
36v, 28 January 1856; Pedidos de passaportes (1868–1869), maço 6335; Polícia do Porto, Regis-
tros de saídas de embarcações (1853–1855), maço 5961, 30 June 1855. In 1856, Gil Antonio de
Almeida was detained by the police upon returning from Africa, but was eventually allowed to
enter Bahia: APB, Polícia do Porto (1850–1859), maço 6426.
67. Falheiros, “Luis e Antonio Xavier,” 61. For another example of an African voyager who carried
news between Bahia and West Africa, see Mann, “The Illegal Slave Trade.”
68. Verger, Os libertos, 55–65; Reis. Rebelião escrava, 485–495; Falheiros, “Luis e Antonio Xavier.”
69. Souza found 109 passports issued between 1842–1844, a period for which Verger gives no
data. And for 1849, when Verger located 55 passports, Souza found none. Neither adjusted
to correct for voyagers who received passports more than once. Souza, “Entre margens,”125;
Verger, Trade Relations, 563. See also Appendix.
70. Verger, Trade Relations, 563.
71. Preliminary data from the Famílias Atlânticas project shows that between 1842 and 1846, less
than 2 percent of the people of color who received passports to Africa were women. From 1847
to 1850, the rate increased to approximately 15 percent.
72. Smith, The Lagos Consulate, 18–33; Mann, Slavery and the Birth, 91–93.
73. Soummoni, “Afro-Brazilian Communities,” 182–183.
74. Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros, 137.
75. On these blockades, see Law, Ouidah, 140, 193, 239.
76. Burton, A Mission, 49.
77. Souza, “Entre margens,” 133, Karasch, Slave Life, 324. In 1867, for example, when Verger esti-
mates that a total of 74 Africans received passports in Bahia, more than half had come from
other provinces: 33 from Rio de Janeiro, 10 from Recife, and 9 from Rio Grande do Sul. APB:
Polícia, RP 1864–1868, maço 5901.
78. APB: Polícia, Correspondência recebida sobre passaportes (1854–1855), maço 6317. The date of
her passport, 7 January 1854, suggests she traveled on the Linda Flor, mentioned below.
79. Verger, Trade Relations, 563; Souza, “Entre margens,” 125.
80. Campbell to Clarendon, Lagos, 4 May 1854. BPP HCPP 41, Class B, Correspondence with British
ministers and agents in foreign countries, Africa, Consular, Bight of Benin, no. 2, 2; and Morgan
to Clarendon. Bahia, 31 March 1854. Brazil, Consular, Bahia, encl. 1, List of vessels that have
entered this port from the Coast of Africa for the quarter ending 31 March 1854, 186.
81. Verger, Trade Relations, 563; Souza, “Entre margens,” 125.
82. Smith, The Lagos Consulate, 39; Campbell to Clarendon, 28 December 1853. TNA: FO, 84/920/
20; Ajayi, Christian Missions, 50.
83. Archive de la Paroisse de la Immaculée Conception de Ouidah, Baptêmes 1861–1891, records
260–324. I thank the Atlantic Families project for access to these records.
ATLANTIC STUDIES 47
84. Campbell to Clarendon, Lagos, 2 June 1854. TNA: FO, 84/950; Campbell to Clarendon, Lagos, 6
June 1857. TNA: FO, 84/1031; Campbell to Clarendon, Lagos, 7 April 1857. TNA: FO, 84/1031.
See also Lindsay, “To Return,” 37.
85. Lindsay, “To Return,” 26–27.
86. Campbell to Clarendon, Lagos, 28 December 1853. TNA: FO, 84/920, no. 20; Verger, Trade
Relations, 544.
87. Campbell to Clarendon, Lagos, 4 May 1854. TNA: FO, 84/950, no. 5.
88. Campbell to Clarendon, Lagos, 21 January 1856. TNA: FO, 84/1002, no. 29; Verger, Trade
Relations, 545–547.
89. Campbell to Clarendon, Lagos, 12 February 1855. TNA: FO, 84/976, no. 2. On Antonio Ojo
Martins, see Payne, Table of Principal Events, 17. In 1855 and again in 1856, petitions circulating
in support of the consul, gained many Agudá signatories. Petition by merchants, traders and resi-
dents of Lagos, 1 April 1855, enclosure in Campbell to Clarendon, Lagos, 25 May 1855. TNA: FO,
84/976; Petition to Commodore Adams by Sierra Leonian, Brazilian and Cuban traders, 10 October
1856. TNA: FO, 84/1002.
90. Verger, Trade Relations, 549.
91. Brand to Russell, Lagos, 30 December 1859. TNA: FO, 84/1115; Russell to Brand, Foreign Office,
13 February 1860. TNA: FO, 84/1088. My thanks to Kristin Mann for these documents.
92. APB: Polícia do Porto. Visitas do porto (1850–1859), maço 6426, 19 November 1859.
93. Souza Martins to the Ministry of Justice, 14 February 1835, apud Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros,
100.
94. The Alfredo had left Bahia for Lagos on 14 April 1876. APB: Saídas de passageiros, 1873–1879;
Entradas de passageiros, 1873–1879; Entrada de embarcações, 1876, maço 5959–3.
95. APB: Polícia do Porto, Visitas do porto (1850–1859), maço 6426.
96. For a detailed analysis of this incident, see Albuquerque, O jogo, 47–81.
97. The ship, the Boa Fé, arrived in Bahia on 26 November 1879. APB: Correspondência recebida
sobre passaportes (1878–1879), maço 6344; Pedidos de passaportes (1878–1879), maço 6379.
98. Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 97, 100, 120, 122, 126.
99. Castillo, “Between Memory, Myth and History,” 212–222. See also Verger, Os libertos, 66; Matory,
Black Atlantic Religion, 47. In Brazil a Lusophone spelling of Andrade’s Yoruba name, Bamboxê
Obitikô, is used.
100. Castillo, “Between Memory, Myth and History,” 208, 211.
101. The interview, recorded in 1940 by Lorenzo Turner, was only recently transcribed. See Omidire
and Amos, “O babalaô,” 240–241. Some of the interview data appears in Turner, “Some Con-
tacts,” 60. Martiniano’s life has attracted attention from numerous other researchers. See, for
example, Lima, “O candomblé,” 202–208; Braga, Na gamela, ch. 2, Butler, Freedoms Given,
158, 200; Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 46, 60, 62, 63 ss.
102. Castillo, “Entre memória, mito e história,” 72, 97. Antonio Alexandre Martins should not be con-
fused with Antonio Ojo Martins, the chief of the Brazilian residents mentioned earlier, who died
in 1857: Payne, Table of Principal Events, 17.
103. Turner, “Some Contacts,” 61.
104. The egúngún temple was on Tokunbo Street. Martiniano gave only the high priest’s Yoruba
name, Adébáyò, but records show that Augusto José Cardoso lived on that street. Moreover,
some documents suggest a particular friendship between him and Martiniano’s father,
which reinforces the idea that he was involved in egúngún worship too. Omidire and Amos,
“O babalaô,” 240; Archives of the Archdiocese of Lagos, Book of the Dead, 1891–1917; APB:
RP 1868–1870, maço 5902, 11 May 1869; RP 1873–1874, maço 5903, 7 February 1874; Notas
de despacho de importação, 030, 4–9 October 1878, receipts no. 603–605.
105. For discussions of Agudá merchants, see Turner, “Some Contacts,” 60; Cunha, Negros, estrange-
iros, 152–164; Lindsay, “To Return,” 28–31; Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 91–92, 95–99, 118–
121; Santos, Economia e cultura.
106. Santos, Economia e cultura, 241, 242, 243.
107. See Lovejoy, “Kola in the History;” Torres, “Alguns aspectos da indumentária,” 418–420; Rabelo,
“Os percursos.” Many of the largest importers of kola nuts and other items were white, such as
48 L. E. CASTILLO
José Cardoso e Silva, who brought in 483,300 cola nuts in 1878, and former slave trader
Joaquim Pereira Marinho, who imported 420 country cloths in 1852: Santos, Economia e
cultura, 239–240, 263.
108. APB: Entradas de passageiros, vol. 4 (1883–1888), 20 September 1886, and vol. 8 (1896–1898), 5
April 1896. Castillo, “Entre memória, mito e história,” 98.
109. Turner, “Some Contacts,” 59–63; interview with Irene Sowzer Santos, Salvador, Bahia, 26 August
2008.
110. On Severa de Jesus and Felippe Simões Coimbra, see Mann, “Court Records.”
111. Oroge, The Institution of Slavery, 290–291, 295.
112. Campbell to Clarendon, Lagos, 1 May 1854, apud Oroge, The Institution of Slavery, 294–295.
113. Mann, Slavery and the Birth, 160–199.
114. Ibid., 63, 73–75.
115. Oroge, The Institution of Slavery, 137.
116. Mann, Slavery and the Birth, 164–169.
117. African freedman José Francisco da Conceição received a passport in Bahia for the African
Coast on 29 May 1844, “for business,” and the next day, a local newspaper carried an
announcement about his trip: APB: Polícia, RP 1843–1844, maço 5886; Correio Mercantil, 30
May 1844, 4.
118. Archive de la Paroisse de la Immaculée Conception de Ouidah, Baptêmes 1861–1891, records
276–278; 284–289. I thank the Atlantic Families project for copies of these records. On Pedro
Martins Jambo, see Mann, Slavery and the Birth, 99. On Francisco Gomes de Andrade, see Mann,
“The Illegal Slave Trade.”
119. The slaves’ names and ethnicities are given as Ahtartoro (Benin); Ogoome (Yoruba); and
Sarbena (“Idoko”). Brand to Russell, Lagos, 18 January 1860 and Lagos, 31 December 1860.
TNA: FO, 84/1115, apud Oroge, The Institution of Slavery, 430, 431, 434.
120. Olinto, Brasileiros na África, 213–215; Matory, Black Atlantic Religion, 95–99; Lindsay, “To Return,”
31. The Mahi are an ethnic group of the central region of the present-day Republic of Benin.
121. Cunha, Da senzala, 180–184.
122. SMA, 12/802.00 20154, Etat des lieux dressé par les portuguais, 16/3/1865; Fundação Pierre
Verger, Livre de baptêmes de Ouidah, 1866–1884 (transcription), record number 328, 9 Novem-
ber 1873.
123. Mano, “O patacho Zaida;” Jornal do Recife, 28/1/1880, 3; O Monitor (Bahia), 27 October 1880, 2;
O Globo (Rio de Janeiro), 13 November 1876, 4.
124. APB: Entradas de passageiros, vol. 4, 1883–1887, 30 December 1885; Saídas de passageiros, vol.
52, 1882–1886, 11 February 1886; and vol. 55, 1886–1890, 19 September 1886, 21 October
1887, 5 January 1889 and 22 December 1889; RP 1885–1890, maço 5910, 8 February 1886
and 28 December 1888.
125. For example, José Julião Pires dos Santos, “a black Portuguese subject,” was approved for a
passport in Bahia on 3 November 1859, and in 1873, Virginia Antonia Monteiro, born in
Ouidah, arrived in Bahia with a passport issued by the governor of Ouidah’s Portuguese fort.
Figueiredo to the Chief of Police, Bahia, 20 June 1873. APB: Polícia, Legitimações de passa-
portes (1850–1864), maço 5876, Policia do Porto, Visitas do porto (1870–1879), maço 6428.
On Lusophone identity in Ouidah, see Law and Mann, “West Africa.”
126. Law, Ouidah, 263–280. On another Agudá who migrated to Lagos from Porto Novo around the
same time, see Cunha, Estrangeiros libertos, 261, 265, 270.
127. Guran, Agudás, 56–57; Byll-Cataria, “Histoire d’Agoué,” 23; interview with Georges Olympio,
Cotonou, Benin, 15 February 2012. The estimated date of her enslavement is mine, based
on the fact that her oldest child by Antonio Pereira dos Santos was born in Agoué in 1843.
Parish of Agoué, Baptêmes 1846 –1874, record no. 175.
128. Statement by Madame Edith Aguiar during the Atelier de recherché sur le patrimoine afro-bré-
silien du Benin, Agoué, Benin Republic, 13 February 2014; SMA: 2E10, Philibert Courdioux,
Notes et documents sur le Dahomey e quelques pages de son journal; SMA: 2E13, Courdioux,
Notes et documents, 89.
129. Law and Mann, “West Africa,” 327.
ATLANTIC STUDIES 49
130. APB: Entradas e saídas de passageiros, 1873–1900. The estimate of 600 does not correct for
repeat travelers. Records of arriving and departing ships show 12 departures and 6 arrivals
in 1876, 5 arrivals and 1 departure in 1886, and 2 departures and 1 arrival in 1996, a decline
of more than 50 percent per decade. APB, Polícia do porto, Saídas e entradas de embarcações,
maços 5966, 5967, 5968, 5973. On oil palm exports from colonial Lagos, see Mann, Slavery and
the Birth, 117–59; on trade with Brazil see Cunha, Negros, estrangeiros, 138–160.
131. Otero, Afrocuban Diasporas, esp. ch. 2; Souza, “Entre margens,” 14–17, 22–23, 109–110; Turner,
“Les Brésiliens,” 54.
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Appendix. Estimates of passports to Africa issued to freed men and women in

Bahia, 1834–1870.
Period VergeraSouzab Comments

1835–1837 818 671 Adjusting Verger’s data to eliminate duplicate passports issued to the
same person and to include children gives a total of 925 people approved
for travel during this period
1842–1850 360 287 Verger gives no data for 1842, 1843 or 1844
Souza gives none for
1849.
1851–1860 511 597 Souza includes no data for 1859
1861–1870 455 309 Verger gives no data for 1869 or 1870
Souza gives none for
1865, 1866 or 1867
Total 2144 1864
Sources: Souza, “Entre margens” 125; Verger, Trade relations, 563.
a
Africans only.
b
All adult travelers of color.

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Atlantic Studies

ISSN: 1478-8810 (Print) 1740-4649 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjas20

Mapping the nineteenth-century Brazilian

Lisa Earl Castillo

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Mapping the nineteenth-century Brazilian returnee

an 1835 slave uprising in the province of Bahia, when around 200

CONTACT Lisa Earl Castillo lisa.earl.castillo@gmail.com

The rebellion of 1835 and its exodus

Figure 1. “Nations” of returnees, 1835–1837.

went to Porto Novo, Accra, and Lagos.19

Social networks among returnees

whose interrelationships went unnoted. Reconstructing the intricate webs of social

Travelers of the 1840s: a back and forth movement of seafaring men

personal barber and had him brought him to Africa.59

The rise of Lagos as a destination

Consul Campbell and the Agudás

Slavery and the Agudás

11. Reis, Rebelião escrava, 454–457, 479–483.

215; Bat. 1830–1848, ﬂ. 87v.

Appendix. Estimates of passports to Africa issued to freed men and women in

Period VergeraSouzab Comments

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