Pan-Africanism : BRAZIL'S AFRICAN LEGACY...

Isaiah

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Jun 8, 2004
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http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1373/is_n8_v47/ai_19658856

Monster article! Be prepared to sit and do some serious reading... It's well worth the time and energy you'll spend doing it...

It was the seventeenth-century Jesuit preacher and missionary. Frei Antonio Vieira, who said that Brazil had `the body of America and the soul of Africa' and this description continues, to some extent, to hold true. In Vieira's day, Africans and their offspring -- black and mulatto, slave and free -- far outnumbered Europeans in Portugal's South American colony.

Three centuries on, although the African element in the population is much diluted, Brazil's economic, demographic, genetic and cultural debt to Africa remains inestimable. From the colony's very infancy in the early sixteenth century, the contribution of Africa to the population and development of Brazil has been prodigious and pervasive and few aspects of Brazilian society and civilisation have remained untouched by its influence.

Over the four centuries of Portuguese involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 10 to 15 million Africans were transported to the European colonies in the Americas. Of these, over 3.5 million were taken to Brazil, many arriving after the growth of the coffee industry in the mid-nineteenth century. Even after the Atlantic slave trade to Brazil was declared illegal in 1850, contraband `Black Gold' continued to be smuggled across the ocean


ckick the address above to get deeper...

Peace!
Isaiah
 
panafrica said:
I look forward to reading this! Out of the many nations which make up the African Diaspora, Brazil is one of those I find most fascinating. Thanks for the article Isaiah!

Big Pan, what's up, brother! Hey, I see at least one error in this piece from the jump - 10-15-million Africans brought to the European colonies... Seems like the number keeps getting lower each time I read an article by a Euro, bruh(smile!) Pretty soon it'll be like 100,000 of us came, and now we're half a billion... "See how good we treated them 100,000!"(smile!)

Nevertheless, it's good to get a primer on this stuff if you haven't read up... A little something to whet the appetite is good... For the record, more than 25-million is the figure I've read most often, and roughly 40% of those Africans went to one country, Brazil... That's like 10-million Africans, not no 3.5 million as the article states...

Peace!
isaiah
 
I read this entire article. And it made me proud to know what some of my ancestors did for a part of the "new world" i.e. Brasil. African Brazilians look to African Americans as an example of struggle, and there is a growing black nationalist ferver there as well. I've been reaching out to a few of our brothas and sistahs there, I encourage each of us to do the same.
 
Sekhemu said:
I read this entire article. And it made me proud to know what some of my ancestors did for a part of the "new world" i.e. Brasil. African Brazilians look to African Americans as an example of struggle, and there is a growing black nationalist ferver there as well. I've been reaching out to a few of our brothas and sistahs there, I encourage each of us to do the same.

Brothers Pan and Sekhemu, I see that you guys are deep Diaspora history buffs... The Schomburg Library now has a Diaspora history collection on the web, so check that out when you get a chance...

I've read one book on Afro Brazilians done by a beautiful sister who teaches at Rutgers University, named Kim Butler... The title of the book is Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won... I don't remember the subtitle, but the book covers the Frente Negra Brasiliera, the second independent Black political party in Diaspora history(the first was the Partideo Independiete de Color in Cuba), and it is most fascinating... African Brazilian activists were really into Garvey, and had a great relationship with Chicago Defender Publisher, Robert S. Abbott, and the great Schomburg, himself... It shows how Africans in Diaspora have been working silently with one another for as longs as we've been outta Slavery... In truth, we have a strong affinity, and a strong identity with one another... Sekhumu, yes, African Brazilians are using our struggle here as their model in Brazil... A good symbol of that is how they've managed to get Affirmative Action realized in Brazil, as no other country in the Diaspora has...

Peace!
Isaiah
 

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