Brazil colonizes Africa

We are raised and we raise, to the sound of the drums, handclaps, samba, immersed in the African roots of our music, rites and rhythms. We are Whites, Blacks and Indians, proud of the energy and beauty of our miscegenation. Melancholy, longing for times and places we have never been.

Descendants of slaves or masters, each of us is a synthesis of the other.

From Portugal we know our history, thence came our language now Brazilianized from the meeting with the native inhabitants and the Negroes brought from Africa; but what Africa is this? It continues an abstraction. If on the one hand we hark back to archetypical Mother Africa, mistress of our affection and dear to our hearts, on the other it remains distant but eternal, trapped in time by the imaginary without past, without present and without future.

Our contact with the history of African immigration starts with the slave ships that brought their human cargo to our shores, nameless, deprived of language, home and memory. This is not how we learn of the Portuguese, Spaniards, Italians. We do not call them generically Europeans.

We, Brazilians, still see ourselves through European cultural formation. Blacks and Indians of various nations served as the manual laborers of the great civilizing project built by European rationality. Our identity is still in the formative stages. It is necessary for all, not just specialists, researchers and academics, but all the people of the nations that participated in one way or another to form the slaveholding society, whether of African, European or American heritage, to have access to their own history from another point of view.

Leila barbosa
leila@baixosantadoaltogloria.com

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