Bruna Frascolla
Brazil's slavery was uniquely Portuguese - shaped by centuries of African contact, Arab loanwords, and a legal system where manumission was common.
This month, while discussing my article "Transatlantic Slavery and Africa's Influence on Europe" with Spanish speakers, I discovered that the Portuguese word alforria (manumission) is not used in Spanish. I swapped this word of Arabic origin for manumisión, derived from Latin, and was understood. Yet even that word is rarely used, so my interlocutor preferred the word libertad (freedom) to translate alforria. Now, as I write this, I see that there are Spanish versions of the word: alhorría and ahorría. However, a quick check of different Wikipedia entries reveals a difference in how the institution is treated across languages: while the Portuguese entry for alforria focuses on Brazil, the Spanish entry for manumisión refers to Ancient Rome. The English entry for manumission is more versatile, covering realities as diverse as ancient Greece and Rome, Peru, and the United States.
Any Brazilian, literate or not, is familiar with the word alforria. There is even a song stating that for the bard, only three things matter in this vain world: guitar, "forria" (freedom), love, no money. That is, a corruption of alforria appears in place of the word liberdade (freedom)-a word that would seem so obvious and natural. If Spanish speakers do not have a specific term for this institution readily at hand, it can only be because it was not as significant in Portuguese America as it was in Spanish America.
Among the concurrence of causes explaining this, one is easy to pinpoint: the fact that the former relied more heavily on African labor, while the latter relied on Amerindian labor. With the 1537 papal bull Sublimis Deus, the Church made the enslavement of Amerindians, as well as the seizure of their property, practically illegal. Thus, even though the illegal enslavement of Amerindians and the exploitation of their labor did occur, the form of slavery formally recognized by the legal systems of both crowns (Spain and Portugal) was African slavery. Where there is little legal slavery, there is little manumission.
Now, why is Portuguese more prone to adopting Arabisms ? There is another highly relevant Arabism in our history of slavery: mameluco. In Arabic, mamluk meant "slave" or "owned man" and designated a class of slave soldiers trained to serve in the royal guard; however, in the early centuries of Brazil's history, mameluco referred to the offspring of Amerindian women and Portuguese men. The Royal Spanish Academy's entry for mameluco lists no meaning linked to the Americas. Historian Eduardo França Paiva notes: "It is interesting to observe that the term was not common in the Spanish domains of the Americas during that same period, even though there are records of an army of mamluks besieging Cordova in the late 13th century. This perhaps suggests that the adoption of the term stems from the experiences of Portuguese officials, navigators, merchants, and religious figures (especially Jesuits) in various parts of the East and Africa under Muslim rule." (Como ensinar história da escravidão?, pp. 93-94).
Here, I believe, lies the most interesting cause of the concurrence: at the dawn of modernity, Portugal immersed itself in the Islamic slave-holding part of the Old World and imported its institutions to the West-which, in turn, resurrected defunct institutions from the Roman Empire (such as manumission) to accommodate them. It is in the Renaissance, rather than the medieval Umayyad Caliphate, that one must look for the origins of Portuguese loanwords from Arabic that are absent or rare in Spain.
When discussing the Age of Discovery, it is customary to turn one's gaze toward the Americas and focus the spotlight on 1492 Spain. Yet, there are other, earlier, and highly significant milestones. In 1336, still within the Middle Ages, Portugal claimed the discovery of the Canary Islands, near Morocco; this can be marked as a pivotal year for the Portuguese dream of dominating Africa-a dream that endured until the era of Salazar in the 20th century. Less than a century later, in 1415, the Portuguese conquered Ceuta, in Morocco. Portuguese possession of North African territories was recognized by the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, and Portugal would only withdraw from North Africa in 1578, following the fateful Battle of Alcácer Quibir, which claimed the life of King Sebastian. At that time, the spirit of the conquest was still rooted in the Crusades: a warrior-king of the Catholic faith sought to subjugate the infidels who had once held dominion over them.
Let us consider another highly significant milestone: in 1425, Portugal colonized Madeira, an uninhabited island near Morocco. It was there that Portugal established the captaincy system for sugar production, utilizing Arab technologies and know-how. Under this system, the Crown auctioned off the right to exploit the territory to a private agent, receiving taxes in return. The Arabs utilized slaves, and a major source was Sub-Saharan Africa-a land virtually unknown to Europe. To be precise, it was not entirely unknown; Western Europeans were aware of Ethiopia and its Black inhabitants through the Bible, and the Portuguese were searching for the mythical Land of Prester John, said to be besieged by Moors. To reach it, they would need to circumnavigate a continent of unknown extent. The logical course was to sail along the Atlantic coast, enter the Indian Ocean, and thence secure spices directly from the source. Still in the Atlantic side, another milestone occurred: the 1460 discovery of the uninhabited Cape Verde archipelago, located off the coast of present-day Senegal. Portugal thus gained a foothold near Sub-Saharan Africa.
Almost twenty years later, in 1479, Spain, through the Treaty of Alcáçovas, recognized Portugal's monopoly on trade with the African coast. A solid economic incentive was thus established for Portugal to venture among the pagan black populations, who practiced slavery just as the Muslims did. In 1483, Diogo Cão sailed up the Congo River-Africa's second-largest river-and in 1491, the same Portuguese navigator arrived in the Kingdom of Kongo (roughly present-day Angola) accompanied by numerous catechists. The Manikongo, the supreme authority among those Black peoples, was baptized and became King John I of Kongo. By the time Columbus discovered the Americas on October 12, 1492, all these events had already taken place.
In Brazil, the discovery of the Americas does not receive much attention, nor is the date even celebrated. The most important year for us is 1500, the year Cabral supposedly went off course while heading to India and discovered Brazil-all this occurring when the Treaty of Tordesillas had already secured for Portugal a small slice of America lying a bit eastward. And after discovering Brazil, Portugal spent more than three decades paying it no heed, as there appeared to be neither gold nor precious metals here: our indigenous people went naked and lived in the Stone Age, bearing no resemblance to the wealthy Aztec Empire. The only ones interested in these lands were Breton pirates, who would arrive laden with metal goods to trade for brazilwood with the natives-wood used to produce red dye in Europe.
In 1506, while Brazil was left at the mercy of pirates, King Alphonsus I of Kongo had a vision of Saint James and the Virgin Mary aiding him in an internal struggle for the throne. In 1510, the deeply devout black monarch wrote a letter to his Portuguese counterpart, the not-so-pious John III of Portugal, complaining about the greed of Portuguese slave traders who were kidnapping free men to sell into slavery, thereby causing a genuine population crisis in the kingdom. The letter did not solve the problem. This is the aspect of the history of slavery that most closely resembles the kind of journalistic folklore claiming that the "white man" appeared in Africa and kidnapped black people who lived in an Edenic state. It must be emphasized, then, that all black people of that time and place agreed with slavery, and the moving appeals of Alphonsus I of Kongo were not those of an abolitionist. It is also highly controversial whether the Europeans in question were "white men" or Marrano Jews. While it would be unwise to claim that only Marranos were involved, their presence in the slave trade is undeniable.
Let us continue with the chronology. In 1534, John III finally determined Brazil's fate: he replicated here the captaincy model established in Madeira, with the aim of planting sugarcane, producing sugar, collecting taxes, expelling the French pirates, and evangelizing the nudists. The labor force for the sugar industry would, of course, come from Africa.
In 1580, following the succession crisis caused by the death of King Sebastian, the period began during which Portugal fell under the Spanish crown. And here, to wrap up the subject for now, I quote historian Eduardo França Paiva once again: "In the early modern period, the Portuguese dominated the Atlantic trade in African slaves. Initially, they were taken to Lisbon, which supplied other markets, such as Andalusia. [...] Nearly a century [after the Treaty of Alcáçovas (1479)], the Portuguese came to control the Spanish contracts for the human trade, known as asientos. Thus, they met the high demand for African slaves in Spanish America between 1595 and 1640-the year the Portuguese Crown was restored [...], an event that stripped the Portuguese of their monopoly over the asientos. Only after that did the Atlantic trade in African slaves shift decisively toward Portuguese America, transforming it, in a relatively short time, into the most important slaver region in the Western world." (op. cit., pp. 16-17)
So, it turns out that Brazil's influx of black people and its emergence as a global hub of slavery were consequences of Portugal's independence from Spain. We must ask ourselves, then, what slavery was like under the respective crowns and why this trade intensified so dramatically in Brazil. Answering that would require a comparative study of the institution under both crowns... Something beyond the scope of this mere reader of history books.