Brazil Celebrates 120 Years of the Abolition of Slavery

by Rachel Cantave

           On May 13th Brazil celebrated 120 years of the official abolition of slavery.  The Portuguese Princess Isabel signed the Lei Aurea, or Golden Law, in 1888, officially abolishing Brazilian slavery.  The slave trade in Brazil began earlier than that of the United States, in around 1532 and increased rapidly after the liberation of Haitian slaves through the Haitian Revolution of 1804.  Brazil imported an estimated 3.6 million Africans into the country, six times more than the U.S.  As a result Brazil has the second largest African population in the world outside of Nigeria.  Although Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, slave trafficking had been forbidden since 1850 and some laws had already abolished new born Blacks and seniors from slavery since 1885; however, it was during the Portuguese Emperor’s absence from Brazil that Princess Isabel signed the Lei Aurea officially ending slavery.

         Celebrations took place all over Brazil from Rio de Janeiro to Brasilia; however, perhaps the oldest and most culturally significant celebration took place in Santo Amaro, Bahia.  Santo Amaro, famous for being the birthplace of Brazilian singers Caetano Veloso and Maria Bethania, is a town in the interior of Bahia where annually the descendents of slaves hold a two week “Bembe” or candomblé religious ceremony with dancing, drums and offerings of thanks to the orixas (sometimes referred to within candomblé as Afro-Brazilian deities), recognizing them as the true liberators of Afro-Brazilians – not Princess Isabel.

          In fact, many Afro-Brazilians do not celebrate May 13th at all because of what they call its false pretense of equality and justice.  The Golden Law, like most other abolitions of slavery, including the United States’ Emancipation Proclamation, was encouraged not out of moral enlightenment nor out of historical remorse, but out of economic obligation and a shift from colonizing in the Americas to the colonization of Africa which was initiated by the Berlin Conference of 1885.  By the time Princess Isabel signed the law in 1888, only about five percent of Afro-Brazilians were still enslaved, most having been self liberated and living in various quilombo communities.*

          Edson Santos, the secretary of Brazil’s Special Secretariat of Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR), summed up the sentiments of many Afro-Brazilians by releasing a public statement on May 13th stating “Our Black ancestors though freed from slavery, did not receive from society or the state the means that would grant them true emancipation.”  Thus the day that many Afro-Brazilians choose to celebrate instead is November 20th, the day of Black consciousness, which is the anniversary of the death of quilombo leader Zumbi of Palmares.

           Regardless of whether Afro-Brazilians celebrate in a terreiro (a house of worship for candomblé practitioners) in Santo Amaro on the 13th of May or in the annual “day of Black consciousness’’ parade in the Salvador, Bahia neighborhood of Liberdade, the focus is the same: to serve as a reminder of Afro-Brazilian history and anticipation of a bright future.

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 Rachel Cantave is an alumnus of New York University with a degree in individualized study of anthropology and Latin American/ Caribbean studies.  She is currently volunteering with the Levantamos office in Salvador, Bahia Brazil.

* Quilombos are Brazilian maroon societies or autonomous communities of self liberated ex-slaves, one of the most famous being Palmares.