In my various trips to all corners of the world, there were several places that brought back memories of what I spent my whole life seeing at home. Even though I come from an Italian family and from the interior of São Paulo, my vocation as a traveler took me from an early age to the most diverse states of the world. , and as our nation flourished in its cultural identity through miscegenation and multiculturalism, inevitably in many countries I saw “lost pieces” that are also found in the enormous Brazilian puzzle. Maybe because I’m not black, I don’t have the slightest idea of what it means to be black in a country that was born with a slave soul, but the story of resilience and liberation of the majority of our population has always fascinated me. Unfortunately, history courses in Brazilian schools, filled with precious details and memorization of dates and names, make us go through very important chapters, without understanding the origin, situation and results of certain historical periods.
We all know the enormous stain on Brazilian history that was slavery, but few of us know the real dimension of Brazil’s participation in the slave trade for more than three centuries. The most precise estimates in relation to the Atlantic, place the number of enslaved people in the range of 12,521,339 men and women who were forced to forcibly leave their continent of origin. The cruel and long voyages with almost non-existent hygienic conditions, illnesses on board and violence meant that more than 1.8 million individuals did not even reach the Americas.
Of the more than 10.7 million enslaved people who actually arrived on our continent, an impressive 4.8 million came to Brazil, more than 44% of the total number. When we realize that our country received practically half of all enslaved Africans between the 16th and 19th centuries, we realize not only how great the Brazilian state’s debt is to the black population, but how extremely relevant the African roots in our people are. and culture.
In 2024, I had the privilege of visiting the African nation of Ghana in the west of , one of the locations that was the final stop for hundreds of thousands of Africans before leaving with no return for the worst trip of their lives. In the city of Elmina, a former Portuguese fortress, which later fell under British control, functioned for several decades as one of the largest prisons for slaves on the West African coast, a building marked on its walls with the human remains of men and women who With no choice, they waited inside those tiny enclosures for the arrival of the boats. Passing through the narrow “gate of no return” marked the last steps taken on African soil and symbolized the beginning of a completely different life thousands of kilometers away.
When we analyze the ethnic composition of the Brazilian people we see that the African roots are the most diverse, with many having ancestry from the people of the south center of that continent along the Angolan coast and Loango coast, from where more than 5.6 million enslaved people left . Many others from the Bay of Benin and the Bay of Biafra in present-day Togo, Benin and Nigeria, from where 2 million left, thousands destined for Brazil. Even though they often boarded from the same points, there were dozens of different ethnicities, with different languages and different beliefs before entering the same ship of suffering.
Thousands of Yorubás, Ashantis, Minas, Mandingas, Fulas, several different Bantu peoples and so many others that I could list that today are still present in the blood of millions of Brazilians. When I walked through the streets of Lomé or the beaches of Benin, the faces I saw, the features of many of those men and women, reminded me of the same features of my Brazilian brothers and sisters, separated by an ocean of stories and centuries chained together by blood, sweat and lots of tears. Let today not be to exalt Isabel de Bragança and Bourbon or Zumbi dos Palmares, but to value each of the millions of black men and women who make Brazil so Brazilian.
