The forced immigration of the slave trade in Brazil

This Thursday marked the 133rd anniversary of the so-called “Golden Law,” which abolished slavery in Brazil. While widely discussed in the country’s schools, Brazil has yet to properly reckon with its long and bloody history of forced labor — the effects of which can still be seen today.

It is a little-known fact that Brazil took in more African slaves than any other country during the Atlantic slave trade. Some 4.9 million people were forcefully brought from West-Central Africa to Brazil and put to work on sugar plantations and mining operations — 40 percent of the total number of African slaves taken to America.

Furthermore, Brazil was the last country in the west to legally abolish slavery, waiting until 1888 to do so. Even then, the emancipation process was highly flawed and left a massive cleavage in the country’s social classes.

A shadow over Brazil

Up until the 20th century, every economic cycle in Brazil’s history was powered and maintained by slave labor. When the Portuguese crown sought to export the country’s famous Brazilwood trees in the 16th century, they used indigenous slaves to do the heavy lifting.

Attention then turned to sugar, and massive plantations were filled with African slaves, the trafficking of whom generated further wealth for the economy and sugar barons. Then came the gold rush, the cocoa cycle, and the coffee economy — all of which relied heavily on forced labor.

While the period is given some attention in Brazilian history, the country’s slave trade past has often been glossed over and relativized, with a persistent myth that Brazilian slavery was somehow more “benevolent” than in other countries.

Important anthropological works such as Gilberto Freyre’s Casa-Grande e Senzala (The Masters and the Slaves) gave crucial accounts on the inner workings of slave labor in Brazil, yet overly romanticized the idea of “miscegenation,” suggesting that slave and master would mix freely, without coercion and violence.

In fact, rape was commonplace in master-slave relations, and even Freyre touched upon the bizarre belief of syphilitic masters, who swore “there was no better remedy [for syphilis] than a little black virgin … transmitting the virus to a pubescent woman was the safest way to rid of it oneself.” Renowned abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco wrote that the most valuable element of slavery was what he called the “reproductive womb.”

The imagination of miscegenation is rooted in another myth, that after slavery Brazil was able to become a grand racial democracy — something easily refuted by consulting today’s statistics on average income, prison population, or victims of homicide, showing a stark difference between different ethnicities.

Slave trade abolition “for the English”

With countries around the world abolishing slavery around the turn of the 19th century, Brazil’s elites — mainly farmers and owners of other latifundia — began to get nervous. Brazil’s delay in moving away from slavery earned the country a terrible reputation globally, which the upper classes feared would affect future trade relations.

Thus, when Brazil began commercial negotiations with Great Britain in the 1820s, the elites pushed for some sort of legislation to save face against their new trade partners — who, by that time, had long abolished slavery and sought to do the same in other countries.

Under pressure, the government issued the Feijó Law in 1831, which said that all slaves arriving in Brazil from overseas would be freed, but the legislation was hardly ever enforced. The measure was called a lei para inglês ver, which literally translates as “a law for the English to see.” It may have looked good on paper, but it was useless in practice. The phrase is now a common expression in Brazil.

In the decades that followed, more laws arose for the English to see: one ordered all slaves to be freed when turning 60 (an average slave in Brazil only lived for 30 years), while another proclaimed that all children of slaves would be born as free citizens — though, tucked in the fine print, it also stated that these children would be enslaved as soon as they turned 8 years old.

Finally, Brazil abolished slavery once and for all on May 13, 1888, with the so-called “Golden Law.” However, once again, it was more of a public relations exercise than a move to correct historic injustices.

When developing the law, politicians ignored the input of abolitionists who demanded land reform, reparations, and other mechanisms to integrate freed slaves into society. And it showed: the Golden Law had only two lines, one saying “slavery is now illegal” and another that “all laws saying otherwise must be repealed.”

The Golden Law freed Brazil’s slave class but gave it no mechanisms or assistance to integrate into productive society. Many were illiterate and relied on their masters for food and lodging, causing the creation of a large destitute class across the country.

And soon after abolition, many of Brazil’s slaves were left without labor, as productive sectors began attracting a new wave of migrant workers — this time, not forced — coming from Europe.