Trilogy recalls slave trafficking in Rio de Janeiro

By Patrizia Antonini - Discovered by chance in 1996, a historic site in the center of Rio de Janeiro turned out to be the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos, which operated between 1774 and 1830 as a burial place for slaves brought to Brazil, where an estimated 40,000 people were buried.

In total, there were more than 4 million, according to calculations by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), Africans brought in chains to the South American country between the 16th century and the mid-19th century, equivalent to more than a third of the world slave trade and the highest number in absolute terms.

The historical memory is now also kept alive by a trilogy published by the Instituto Pretos Novos, organized by researcher João Carlos Nara Jr., on the initiative of Merced Guimarães, the owner of the house where the remains emerged during renovation works and which has now been transformed into a museum.

The three volumes, "Death in Valongo", "The Wharf and the Cemetery", "Silences that Scream", are striking testimonies of African slavery in Rio de Janeiro, where adolescents between 15 and 20 years old, coming mainly from Angola, Congo and other countries in central-west Africa, disembarked at Cais do Valongo, in the city's port area.

The parish responsible for the area was the Church of Santa Rita, a jewel of Rococo architecture in Latin America, which, with no space available to bury the bodies, rented a plot of land where the slaves were buried in layers, to the point that many bones were covered by just a handful of earth, as reported in 1814 by the German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Freyreiss, who mentioned "burials on the surface of the earth, insufficient to guarantee the hygiene of the places".

In a herculean reconstruction effort, Nara digitized the two church books preserved by the Rio de Janeiro Curia, which recorded information about the dead (1812-1818 and 1824-1830), from which, in addition to age, sex and origin, it is also possible to extract the causes of death, in most cases due to illness. Nameless remains, identified in the books only by the mark of a hot iron on the skin.