Afro-Brazilian history
The history of Afro-Brazilian people spans over five centuries of racial interaction between Africans imported, involved or descended from the effects of the Atlantic slave trade.
They mostly belong to the Ga-Adangbe, Yoruba, Igbo, Fon, Ashanti, Ewe, Mandinka, and other West African groups native to Guinea, Ghana, Benin, Guinea-Bissau and Nigeria.
The Bantus were brought from Angola, Congo region and Mozambique and sent in large scale to Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, and the Northeastern Brazil.
The people from Congo had developed agriculture, raised livestock, domesticated animals such as goat, pig, chicken and dog and produced sculptures in wood.
[3] Darcy Ribeiro estimated that, in this process, some 12 million Africans were captured to be brought to Brazil, even though the majority of them died before becoming slaves in the country.
[5] Starting around 1550, the Portuguese began to trade African slaves to work the sugar plantations once the native Tupi people deteriorated.
[1] The Clapham Sect, a group of Victorian Evangelical politicians, campaigned during most of the 19th century for England to use its influence and power to stop the traffic of slaves to Brazil.
Among them, a long-established discriminatory immigration policy made sure that previously large minorities of the African ex-slaves and large majorities of them and their direct descendants, mainly in Southern and Southeastern Brazil, were already being replaced by white European immigrants, from many origins; this was furthered by a national doctrine of racial "whitening" (or Portuguese: branqueamento), whereby miscegenation was encouraged by the state to breed out the darkest-skinned Afro-Brazilians.
Overpopulation caused uncontrolled rural exodus and urbanization and lack of infrastructure to assist the masses combined of the perpetuation of historical racial discrimination resulted in the contemporary enormous social problems caused by income disparities seen even nowadays in Brazil, which led to other negative stereotypes about the Afro-Brazilians perpetuating their condition as social outcasts.
The end of the Brazilian dictatorship in 1985 brought much more civil liberties and eventually the criminalization of racist propaganda, humiliation, harassment and discrimination; but there are still many important issues such as income gap, wage disparity, social perpetuation of racial stereotypes, crime and police brutality, sexism and religious intolerance (which can be even led by Afro-Brazilian Protestants themselves against followers of Afro-Brazilian religions).
In Salvador post-abolition Brazil, there was racial and cultural segregation between the white and African communities which helped to reveal the underlying notions of power and hegemony that existed at the time.
For instance, on the 13th of May 1888 when Princess Isabel signed the Abolition Law, there were annual celebrations of Candomblé, Maculêlê and Samba de roda.
[8] In order to clamp down some of these celebrations, the white elites started a campaign of civilization against barbarism using the police system to ban parades with African costumes and batuques from 1905 to 1913.
Capoeira or vadiação in the 20th century could have been played anytime or anywhere especially during breaks in the workplace, in squares during the annual cycles of religious celebrations and on Sundays in popular neighborhoods.
