Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South ...

diverse Bantu-speaking groups. The “cycle of the Mina Coast,” covering the region between the river Volta and present-day Cotonou, progressed throughout the eighteenth century until 1775 and was followed by the “cycle of the Bight of Benin,” comprising the east of the Mina Coast, between Cotonou and Lagos. During this last cycle, which lasted from 1770 to 1850 during the period of the illegal slave trade,¹³ a large number of Yoruba were brought to Brazil.¹⁴ In the course of the “cycle of the Mina Coast,” the slave trade did not follow the traditional model of triangular voyages. Brazilian slave merchants traveled directly to the Bight of Benin to sell tobacco and to buy slaves. These commercial relations allowed the development of privileged cultural and economic exchanges between the Kingdom of Dahomey and Bahia.

Even today the presence of Yoruba-speaking groups in Bahia explains many of its cultural and religious traits. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century, most of the 7,000 Africans who arrived each year in Bahia were Yoruba-speaking individuals from the Bight of Benin, a region that covers present-day Nigeria and the Republic of Benin.¹⁵ Yoruba and Hausa were mainly captured during the wars opposing the Fulani and the states dominated by the Kingdom of Oyo. In Bahia, Muslims were a minority, but to some extent they had religious freedom and were able to organize themselves within various groups. Despite belonging to distinct ethnic groups, these Africans were called “Malês,” a word deriving from the Yoruba word imale, signifying Muslim. The large Yoruba presence contributed to the organization of the Malês uprising of 1835 in Bahia, the most important slave rebellion that ever occurred in Brazil. After the rebellion's failure in 1835, deportation to the Bight of Benin was the most widely imposed penalty on freed Africans alleged to have participated in the rebellion but against whom the Bahian government did not have any evidence. Over the course of the following years, a spontaneous movement of return continued, and until the end of the nineteenth century about 8,000 Africans traveled back to West Africa. In the Bight of Benin, they settled mainly in the coastal towns situated in the region between modern Togo and Nigeria, such as Agoué, Grand-Popo, Ouidah, Porto-Novo, and Lagos.