|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
In the Bight of Benin, the former slaves and their descendants joined the Brazilian and Portuguese merchants who had been in the region since the eighteenth century, contributing to the formation of an Afro-Luso-Brazilian community known as “Aguda.” Several of these returnees, once established in the Bight of Benin, continued to develop trade relations with Bahia, with many of them acting as slave merchants. Their trade activities and their dual identities of “Brazilian” and “African” made them mediators between the two sides of the South Atlantic.
This book explores the public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade connecting the Republic of Benin and Brazil. Although the Brazilian slave trade was abolished in 1850, Brazilian slavery ended as late as 1888. The present-day Republic of Benin was part of Dahomey, a powerful West African kingdom that played a crucial role during the period of the Atlantic slave trade. In 1892 Dahomey became a French colony and remained one until 1960. In 1975 a Marxist-Leninist military dictatorship took control of Benin, changing its name to the Popular Republic of Benin. When military rule ended in 1991, a period of redemocratization followed. In 1995 the name of the country became the Republic of Benin.
This book also examines how Afro-Brazilian communities on both sides of the South Atlantic construct and renew the public memory of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, through a process of “memorialization,” which consists of bringing the slave past to the present, by preserving, commemorating, and staging this common past in the public space. In the region examined in this book, memorialization is characterized, first, by the valorization of slave ancestry, and, second, by the promotion of connections between Brazil and Benin. Such memorialization movement, here conceived as a transnational phenomenon, is also largely based on the development of museums, memorials, monuments, and festivals that eventually foster new forms of cultural tourism.
The idea of memory is central in this book. Since Greek antiquity, the line separating memory and history is difficult to situate. As François Hartog pointed out, “The ancient Greeks established a connection between seeing and knowing, by assuming that in order to know something it is