Explaining Brazil #68: Discovering Rio’s Little Africa (Podcast)
First-time visitors to Rio de Janeiro inevitably follow a similar routine: taking a stroll on Copacabana, and climbing Corcovado to take a picture with the famous Christ the Redeemer statue — usually with their arms wide open — trying to avoid the massive crowd around them.
But few, if any, know anything about Little Africa — a region in the heart of the city that represents black heritage.
The name Little Africa, Pequena África in Portuguese, has been featured in books, songs, and lyrics of famous samba schools. But it remains unknown to most people — Brazilians included.
That’s not by chance. In a conscious effort to erase Rio’s black traits, the city has literally paved over places where black intellectuals, artists, and runaway slaves once walked. This week, we dig up that history.
My name is Gustavo Ribeiro, editor in chief of The Brazilian Report. This is Explaining Brazil.
Gustavo: In the São Francisco da Prainha Square, the statue of Mercedes Baptista, the first black ballerina to perform in Rio’s Municipal Theatre, symbolizes black culture and resistance in Brazil’s Wonderful City.
Marks of that ancestral presence can be found in nearby spots, a region that is also called Little Africa. Edmund Ruge, you are a collaborator of The Brazilian Report in Rio, and you visited Little Africa recently.
Edmund Ruge: So Little Africa is located in Rio’s you could say it’s the city center, the downtown but its principally in the neighborhoods of Gamboa, Saude, and basically these neighborhoods that are concentrated in the commercial district, not too far from the central train station. And really in plain sight which is the scariest part of it. I was thinking about the neighborhood because I’ve only been there during work hours or during Carnival, and that’s when the majority of people get their exposure to it, without knowing the history
Gustavo: Most of us Brazilians don’t know anything about the neighborhood’s history. But you did a sort of private tour. Professor Mauricio Santoro, a political scientist at the State University of Rio, took you there.
Edmund: Taking this tour with professor mauricio was such a privilege because it’s areas of the cities I’ve visited before without knowing what I was getting into. Pequena africa is historically the center of Afrobrazilian black resistance, culture and thought. You have a mixture of elements in there.
Gustavo: Edumund started his tour at Largo da Prainha
Professor Santoro: So Largo da Prainha used to be the heart of Little Africa, this old neighborhood in the city of rio. Which congregated former slaves and people who were born in africa or born in Brazil and had this common african heritage. And this was also part of a very big network against slavery in the 19 century. We can think of these as underground railroads, but located in the middle of the biggest city of the Brazilian empire. When we think of quilombos we think about them as being as in the countryside, far away from the big cities. Some of them, like Quilombo dos Palmares was exactly like that. But we had quilombos inside the big cities, in the urban neighborhoods. And quilombos very close to the city. For example, which today is an upper-class neighborhood of Leblon used to be a quilombo in the 19th century. And actually they used to cultivate Camellia flowers, which was a symbol of the political movement for the emancipation of slaves in Brazil. So people would pick these flowers cultivated in Leblon and use them in their lapel or give them to friends, it was a political system.
Here in Little Africa, we had many small restaurants and small hotels owned by former slaves. The were meeting points for people who were part of political campaigns for emancipation. And also for slaves who during their breaks would come to talk to friends, exchange information, and gossip a little bit about what’s going on in the city. So it was a political space, and also a place for culture, and a place to talk about Africa, talk about Brazil. It was a very busy and lively neighborhood in the 19th century in Brazil.
Edmund: How would you describe the area now?
Professor Santoro: In the 19th century the sea would come up to here, so it was part of the seashore. And then there were some big urban reforms in the beginning of the 20th century and this neighborhood became more isolated from the rest of the city and it stopped being such an important meeting point. But in the last 10–15 years, this area has gone through a revitalization process and it has become important again. So if you look around this square today, you’ll see many technology startups and many places dealing with social movements, there is graffiti on the walls talking about important characters in the Afro-Brazilian political struggles.
And there is a very interesting statue in the middle of the square of Mercedes Batista. She was the first black dancer in the Rio de Janeiro municipal theater. So this place that was the symbol of upper scale culture in Rio, she was the first black dancer there. So it’s important to see here in this place. So what we’re seeing here in rio is the rediscovery of Little Africa — although there is still a lack of important museums and places of memory in this part of the city. It should be much more important than it is right now.
Edmund: What led to the revitalization and recognition of Little Africa?
In part it is because of the stronger black movement in Brazil right now, but also because the port zone of rio, where little africa used to be located, has also gone through a revitalization process in the last few years. We’ve had many public reforms here, many public works, including the Valongo Wharf, which we are going to visit today. So it was part of a general trend in the city.
Gustavo: The tour continued through Pedra do Sal, and then the suspended gardens of Valongo.
Professor Santoro: So Pedra do Sal is a strange name, it means something like the salt stone, but there’s an explanation to that. Like I was telling you, until the beginning of the 20th century this part of the city used to be the Rio de janeiro seashore. And in this neighborhood there were lots of people who used to work on the docks, or sailors. The live of this neighborhood was linked to the port of rio
And the Pedra do Sal was where the dock workers would bring the products from the ships to redistribute them, to sell around the city. So they used to bring food or clothes or whatever. So it gets its name because of that, because of the salt trade that was linked to the port. But it was also a meeting place after work for the people who were busty at the docks. So they would spend their days loading the ships and then they would come here at night to sing, to dance, to meet their girlfriends. So it was a place of music, culture, and work.
And the majority of people in this neighborhood used to be black. Some of the were slaves, former slaves, some were born free. But the had in common the african heritage and black skin. So this place is very important for afrobrazilian memory. And it was part of their recovery of this neighborhood, to say how important this place is to Brazilian history. People meeting here to play samba, people meeting here to discuss afrobrazilian politics.
There is a political and judicial struggle going on right now to declare this place an urban quilombo. To say that the building around here should be considered part of this culture heritage. This is a political struggle, something that has been going on for years. And the neighborhood changed a lot during the 20th century, and became more or less a Portuguese immigrant neighborhood. You can still find many old portuguese women and men who came to Brazil as immigrants.
But it’s also very important for the history of the city, for the history of black culture in Brazil, but sadly there has been a big lack of interest for city administrations in Rio about this place. It’s hard to find to find something around here that tells you how important this neighborhood is to the city — no official note, no official plate. So basically it’s a neighborhood that has been important for social mobilization, that has been important for civil society, but not so much for the government, not so much for public authorities.
Gustavo: So, Edmund, during this tour. Are passers-by able to see landmarks showing just how historically important the whole area is to Rio, and to Brazilian history as a whole? Or would you need a guide to properly grasp what you’re seeing?
Edmund: No I think for this kind of visit, you absolutely need a guide. Like I’ve said, Pedra do Sal, people frequent on a Monday night to party basically. You notice the graffiti on the walls…a plaque that used to be there was stolen. So this place that used to be a center of black cultural resistance composed of former slaves and runaway slaves in the late 1800s and 1900s . Now it’s just been completely taken over. You could walk right by it without having any idea what it was or what it is now.
The hanging gardens that overlook the Valongo market. They’re full of exotic plants and european statues. So it’s bizarre the first time you see it. But as the professor explained to me, it’s a project of beautification around 1910 / 1911
Gustavo: In Brazil, beautification in Brazil usually means white-washing …
Edmund: When you have greek and roman statues standing out in a part of the city that is historically black, it becomes very clear what the intention was in undertaking this sort of beautification and it’s funny because I had actually have other tours of the city before where a tour guide had explained that Pereira Passos was responsible for attempting to turn rio into a tropical paris. So you walk through cinelandia and the lapa neighborhood and you see the municipal theater. The Museu das Belas Artes. You see a number of europaen building that were clearly constructed to establish a Euroepean center within Rio. Which he dismissed it as one of the greater mayors Rio has had.
But looking at it from a more critical standpoint you can really understand what the intention was in dismissing some pieces of history.
Gustavo: Edmund, you come from the United States, a country where racial tensions are very present. How would you compare the ways in which racism manifests itself there and here in Brazil?
Edmund: It’s an interesting comparison to make and it’s difficult because we don’t have the same kind of makeup. For example, my cousin asked me “what’s something that Brazilians have trouble understanding about the U.S.? And I said well they have difficulty understanding what we’re so segregated in terms of family friends couples and in general. The word interracial is so used in the U.S. because it’s something bizarre. You don’t see many interracital couples versus in Brazil where it’s so common.
You have a much starker division in the U.S. and you can more easily highlight and point to racist practices because we had it codified it into law for so long. We had Jim Crow on the books, so you can point to specific instances to preferential treatment for whites. Whereas in brazil it was explained away very early as part of the rainbow myth.
And you hear it still in Brazil where people will say “We don’t have racism here, everything can be explained by socioeconomic class and status, these are things that happen to coincide with race but are not specifically racist.”
The same way we explained away racism in saying that if we have ablack president in Barack Obama, then racism doesn’t exist, the same logic is used in Brazil. To say that when we have a black supreme court justice or some of the top congressional deputies are black. This is pointed to as evidence that racism doesn’t exist but it’s the same sort of glossing over, but it doesn’t hold up once you dig deeper into history and question more deeply the motive behind certain policies and certain attitudes.
Gustavo: The Rio de Janeiro City Council is about to vote on a law to recognize Little Africa. But decay is everywhere to be found, right? I mean, take the gardens. Their main access has been shut down by authorities, part of the lamp-posts have been stolen, there is graffiti all around, and it has become a sort of unofficial residence for homeless people.
Edmund: When you walk through this neighborhood now, it’s full of graffiti. Most of the neighborhood is abandoned, closed buildings even during the day. So part of the disrepair seems attributable the state’s finances and the city’s finances following the recession of 2015 and 2016. However, for me, that was the only explanation I had for why the neighborhood looked like that beforehand. But the idea that it used to be an urban quilombo. That it used to be the equivalent of the saloons. These were centers of black thought. Literally the resistance following the abolition of slavery.
So walking through these neighborhoods now, I feel like it’s so important for people to know that there was something there before. That it wasn’t just storefronts that fell into disrepair during the recession. These storefronts are relatively new, they are less than 100 years old, they were placed over existing historical sites. So it’s important to know when you walk through abandoned or rundown neighborhoods in Rio, it’s not just because of the recession hit, it’s not because of hyperinflation in the 90s. There were things in these neighborhoods before the 90s.
And with the coming and going of different mayors you have so many different social projects and urbanization projects that it’s easy to forget what was there before. That’s important too.
Gustavo: Edmund, I purposely left maybe the most important part of the tour for last. What is the Valongo Wharf?
Edmund: It was the largest slave port in the world following the fall of the Roman Empire. It’s situated in the middle of rio’s city center basically covered over. Even where the slave market itself was is now just a regular plaza, cemented over, has a bus stop, has regular stores around. With no commemorative plaque or anything to mark it as a destination. Valongo, the actual wharf itself, the point of entry for slave ships, has now been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it has a plaque but that’s about it.
Professor Santoro: We are now about one mile from the hanging gardens and about one mile from the former slave market. So this whas the wharf during the 19th century that received the slaves that came to Brazil. They would disembark here and walk up the last mile until the slave market where they were going to be sold.
So when I bring my students here, many of them make a comparison of slavery in Brazil with the holocause or genocide. If we use this comparison Valongo Wharf is our Auschwitz. Something around 1 million people passed through this wharf as slaves. Many of them died in the slave market because they were so weak from the crossing of the Atlantic. Many of them have their lives destroyed because of slavery, because of the brutality of the system. And the wharf was underground for over one century. When we had the big urban reforms in Rio at the beginning of the 20th century, the maybor decided to put the wharf underground. It was part of the process to erase the memory of the city. And it was rediscovered during the last reforms of the city to make the port zone the new business district of Rio. Part of the campaign to host the Olympic games and modernize the city.
And because of the new importance of social movement anti-racist movements and the black movement in Brazil, they put a lot of pressure of the mayor and he was also sympathetic to their views. They said ok lets rediscover the Valongo Wharf and give it the importance that it deserves as a place of memory in the city. So it became once again visible, you can come here you can see it. There are some official plates telling you the history of this monument, but even so it still gets much less attention that it deserves. This is a place every school child in Rio should visit people should bring flowers here, pray here, like the do in concentration camps in Europe. That’s the important of this place for us.
It’s interesting cause you can see two layers of brick work in the wharf. The first one, the more simple used to be the wharf for the slaves. But after Brazil signed an international treaties with Great Britain, this wharf was closed. The slave trade continued, but it contineued as a smuggling business. Officially it was not allowed any more. And instead of that the Brazilian authorities built a second layer of the wharf, more carefully designed, because it was the wharf that received the italian princess who became the empress of Brazil during the reign of Peter II. You can see that as the first mega event in Rio. There was this big make up in the city. They said lets erase again our past of slavery and let’s receive this new European princess that is going to be our empress.
It was this big make up operation in the wharf. And this is very typical of how we deal with our brutal and violent past. How difficult it is for Brazilian to address this difficult history that we have and how this is still a process that’s going on. We still have work to do.
For example, it’s really a shame that we don’t have a big museum about slavery. A big museum about Afro-Brazilian culture. We have the museum of tomorrow in this neighborhood, but this is so typical of Brazil, we are discussing the future and the tomorrow, but we are not addressing our past. We are failing to come to terms with our violent and difficult history. How can we have a bright future if we do not address these issues?
For example, if we look across the street there is this big warehouse built by Andre Reboucas. Recboucas was perhaps the first black brazilian engineer in the 19th century. He was also an important leader in the emancipation movement. He created this warehouse which is now part of a social movement, there’s a discussion of turning it into a museum.
This neighborhood was also one of the birthplaces of samba. Sambe was created in many places in Brazil — not just in Rio but also in Bahia, Mina Gerais. So there’s a lot of interesting stories to tell about his neighborhood. Not just about slavery but about samba and resitiance also about all the important and beautiful things that Afro-Brazilians created in this country.
-End-
This podcast was written and prepared by Gustavo Ribeiro. Euan Marshall edits the final script. Edmund Ruge produced this show. A special thanks to professor Maurício Santoro, who made himself available and took reporter Edmund Ruge for a tour in Little Africa.
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