By Eunice Masunungure 

IT is worthwhile to compare slavery in Brazil with that in the other countries.

Like North America, this Portuguese colony ‘lacked hands’ to grow her economy and found solution in enslaving Africans.

Around 1530, the Portuguese came to Brazil in search of land and natural resources, especially sugar.

As the Portuguese and the indigenous people battled for land, the natives resisted being enslaved.

As such, large overcrowded ‘coffins’ called ships found their way to Brazil with one third of slaves who were taken from Africa under unimaginable cruelty like that experienced by those carried to North America or the Caribbean.

Oliver Ransford (1971) argues in The Slave Trade, Brazil became the largest economy in the world, with 10 times a greater number of slaves as were trafficked to North America and the Caribbean combined.

He also points out that, in 1550, slaves were one third of the population of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s capital city.

By 1800, half the total Brazilian population were slaves.

Brazil had thriving agriculture while sugar farming was her central business besides cotton, tobacco, gold and diamond mining. 

Understanding Slavery website reveals that when the number of sugar plantations grew in Pernambuco, the need for workers increased.

Most of Brazil’s slaves were taken from Angola since other Western states had encroached on upper Guinea. 

John Chrysostom in Catholic Narratives of Slavery argues slavery was considered normal by the agents.

The Portuguese saw no crime in slavery because they regarded it rather as a misfortune which they themselves suffered.

Due to their experience of slavery in Portugal during the Moorish occupation, they perceived slavery as ‘affecting outer man, not the soul’.

Oliver Ransford (1971:154) writes: “The Brazilian masters regarded their slaves as members of a Christian community (…) and a people with souls who could hope to recover their freedom and rise in the social scale,” an aspect which was not prevalent in other countries.

Masters considered the marriages of their slaves as valid. 

Unlike in other countries, marriage between the slaves from different plantations was permitted and celebrated even by priests.

There were also serious sexual relationships between the blacks and the indigenes and ‘the children of the alliances between white and coloured sexual partners took on the status of the father’ instead of the mother, as was the case in the US.

Over-harsh proprietorship was softened by marriage to slave women.

Inevitably, this meant a freeborn community of half-breeds grew up in Brazil and bridged the gulf between black and white.

Concubinage was well recognised and accepted in Brazil.

Colour prejudice was never strong and it disappeared entirely with the acquisition of social status.

Anyone with the smallest trace of European blood was treated as white.

In contrast, in North America, a drop of black blood condemned a person to slave status at law. 

Thus, the blood ties between slaves and Brazilians was a central fact which gave peculiar structure to slavery and its effect in Brazil.

The Brazilian racial attitude stressed assimilation rather than divergence, such that the blacks in slavery grew to feel that they had a stake in their new country.

However, sexual immorality was rampant in Brazil, with most of the whites believing that sexually transmitted diseases could be treated by having sexual intercourse with slave virgins (Ransford).

What differentiates slavery in Brazil from that in other countries is that: “Masters did not make the same attempt to break up tribal units on their plantations as did their counterparts in Anglo-Saxon America, and there was less emphasis on separating ‘human chattels’ from their native culture.

(Being necessitated by their nostalgia for Africa), the slaves continued in their Nago language, tribal ceremonies, traditional songs, dances, polygamy, ancestor worship, critical rites of passage such as initiation at puberty, (and religion),” more than those taken to other states, argues Ransford (1971).

Of course, Christianity was highly valued.

Slaves who came from Angola to Brazil were baptised before they entered the ship and on arrival, they learnt the prayers, doctrines and teachings of the Catholic Church. 

God forbid!

Joel Panzer in The Popes and Slavery (www.churchinhistory.org) argues conversion to Christianity and regular attendance at mass was mandatory for slaves in Brazil.

Ransford adds that in church, ‘master and slave were equal’ such that ‘a slave would kneel side by side with masters,’ which was unheard of in America.

The enslaved Africans believed in a god of war and their perception was that their African gods lost a battle and helplessly abandoned them while they were carried into slavery.

This kind of belief created deep reverence and worship in the hearts of the slaves for this ‘god of their conquerors’ who had shown himself ‘victorious’ and ‘aided’ slave trade!

Many slaves in Brazil became increasingly attached to Catholicism, thus became more docile compared to slaves elsewhere.

“Their daily tasks were touched by the Christian faith: their labours in the fields were regularly blessed by the clergy and each year before harvesting cane and proceeding to milling, they would sprinkle the mills with the holy water and make the sign of the cross,” writes Ransford (1971).

This extreme commitment to faith is not found elsewhere in the narratives of slavery.

Another outstanding aspect as accounted in the website Understanding Slavery is that the slaves who came to Brazil felt themselves culturally superior to native Indians.

Their hardworking nature made it easy for them to be employed to supervise any Indians working on the plantations.

Slaves who gained freedom sought employment to be merchants, priests and bishops.

The free slaves asserted themselves and established clans better than Indians.

Actually, the slaves who escaped to jungle villages quickly established ascendancy over Indian inhabitants.

Slaves in Brazil thought of themselves as having come to the host land as members of a successful Christian host, who were able to look down on the weak indigenous people of the country. 

There was not much mobility of slaves from farm to farm as was the case for those in the North America, for instance.

After being auctioned, slaves had permanent homes, unlike those in America.

Plenty of laws spoke against the abuses in Brazil but like in the Anglo-Saxon system, they were not observed.

However, Ransford argues while Brazil lagged behind other nations in criminalisation of slavery, apologists for the system in that country were firm adherents to the protective laws enacted to mitigate the more serious evils of the institution. 

If assaulted, a slave had leeway to defend himself/herself against his/her master. 

Writes Ransford: “The human instincts and the religious tenets of the people are strongly opposed to this act of barbarity: Manumission is held to be a Catholic duty and priestly communities are ashamed of holding slaves.

One clause allowed slaves 85 holidays a year and this was time enough for many of them to earn sufficient money to buy their freedom.”

In Brazil, slaves could legally inherit property and had the right to complain to the authorities about unjust treatment.

Compared to other countries, manumission was frequent and it put the owner in good standing with the church.

Mothers were not ‘reproduction cows’ as the case in North America, and the birth of 10 children in Brazil automatically gained a mother manumission.

Although slavery in Brazil was less harsh compared to the Caribbean and North America, it was so enormous that in a 2010 Brazil census, it was found that African Brazilians were the official majority.

Today, Brazil’s descendants are racially mixed compared to America’s because the North Americans did not consider slaves as humans. 

At the abolition of slavery, immigrants were brought in to work in coffee fields in Brazil, but the production drastically dropped when slavery ended.

What a surprise to learn that economies were sustained by slavery!

Fear and Hope in Brazilian culture (n.p.r parallels, 2013) reveals that slavery imported four million to Brazil and lasted for 300 years.

Being property and instrument of work to another human has never been good for Africans. 

No matter where they were taken, Africans suffered.

Less grim in Brazil does not mean right!