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Racial Politics In Contemporary Brazil
By Michael Hanchard Duke University Press
Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-8253-9
CHAPTER 1
FREE AFRICAN BRAZILIANS AND THE STATE IN SLAVERY TIMES
Richard Graham
Most African Brazilians today are poor and most of the poor in Brazil are African Brazilians (Hasenbalg 1985; Soares and Silva 1987; Lovell Webster 1987). There is an active debate in Brazil over how to explain this situation. On the one side are those who say that the plight of African Brazilians does not derive from racial prejudice but from poverty. They point to the fact that slavery existed in Brazil until just over 100 years ago and that there are still people alive who knew former slaves; they conclude that a century is too short a time for the descendants of slaves to have emerged from poverty, no matter how accepting or racially unprejudiced the rest of society may be. The contrary view is that a century is long enough for much more social mobility to have occurred than is evident and that racial discrimination is the only persuasive explanation. Discrimination does not result from poverty, it is argued; rather, poverty stems from discrimination. There are also some defenders of Brazilian exceptionalism who agree with this last position, but insist that at least in Brazil, the state does not share in the blame for the plight of African Brazilians; that although it maintained slavery far too long, the Brazilian state has not, unlike government institutions in the United States, formally discriminated against free African Brazilians.
What all sides in this debate forget is that African Brazilians have been free for much longer than one century. Attitudes and behavior patterns toward free men and women of color were built up over centuries and had sunk deep roots well before the abolition of slavery. Moreover, in preserving and building prejudice toward free African Brazilians, the state always played an important and pervasive role. Present-day cultural responses and practices must be understood in relationship to this past, and we should be skeptical of any suggestions that they may be significantly altered merely through the recent process of democratization and the end of authoritarian rule. This essay, then, focuses on the period from the mid-eighteenth century to the abolition of slavery in 1888, and on the role of the state in maintaining free African Brazilians in subservient positions.
How many free persons of color were there in Brazil before the end of slavery? By 1872, there were 4.25 million free blacks and mulattos, and they accounted for at least three-quarters of all African Brazilians (as compared to a mere 262,000 or 6 percent of all African Americans in the U.S. South on the eve of emancipation). Furthermore, at that same time, free blacks and mulattos made up more than two-fifths of the total Brazilian population (Cohen and Greene 1972, 314, 339). Nearly a century before that, in 1775, over a third of all African Brazilians in the city of Salvador (Bahia) were free, in this, the largest entrepot of the slave trade in the Americas. In the province of Minas Gerais, a region of gold and diamond mining that had imported thousands of Africans in the eighteenth century, 41 percent of African Brazilians were free in 1786. And evidently, free blacks had been present in Brazil long before that. Even in the mid-sixteenth century, when the slave trade to Brazil was just beginning, over 7 percent of all blacks in Portugal were already free (Russell-Wood 1982, 48–49; Saunders 1982, 60).
These demographic features resulted from frequent manumission practiced over many years, and not just of the old and infirm, but of the newborn and the prized as well. Both cultural understandings and legal provisions made the granting of freedom to children and adults normal; such acts were regarded as praiseworthy, and foreign visitors were invariably startled to discover its frequency (Koster 1817, 2: 191–96, 215; Walsh 1831, 2: 342, 350–51, 365–66; Kidder 1857, 133; Williams 1930, 328–34). Lest we get carried away with admiration for the Brazilian slave owner, it is essential to note that between two-fifths and one-half of the adult slaves who were freed paid for their freedom in cash or with the promise of cash. Thus, many masters, while granting some slaves the opportunity to accumulate savings of their own, also demanded as payment for granting freedom the rough equivalent of the price of a new slave. And not just any slave could purchase his or her freedom; even when paid for in cash, manumission was still considered a concession on the part of the master, granted to the obedient and loyal, from whom gratitude was expected (Schwartz 1974, 623; Nishida 1993, 361–91; Mattoso 1972, 23–52). Furthermore, the relatively openhanded freeing of children can be partly explained by the high cost of credit, which made the investment in childrearing too high in comparison to the low cost of buying a slave just off the boat from relatively nearby Africa (J. Reis n.d., 11, 16; Mello n.d.). As well, far fewer Europeans went to Brazil than to North America, so there were insufficient numbers of whites or at least too few who were willing to perform those innumerable tasks that could not be properly carried out by bondsmen (Harris 1964, 79–94).
Still, the rate of manumission was impressive. During the first half of the eighteenth century, women were freed twice as often as men, despite an overall predominance of males in the slave population as a whole. The bulk of these women were of childbearing age. Approximately 45 percent of all those freed in Bahia were under age thirteen, and relatively few were freed after age forty-five. Whereas mulattos accounted for only 10 to 20 percent of the slaves, they were freed in equal numbers to blacks (Schwartz 1974, 603–35). In the city of Rio de Janeiro in the early nineteenth century we find the same patterns. Two-thirds of the freed persons in the period 1807–1831 were women and, whereas African-born men there outnumbered women almost two to one, freedwomen somewhat outnumbered freedmen even among Africans (Karasch 1987, 349). Remembering that the free-or-slave status of a child depended on that of the mother, it is no wonder that free African Brazilians came to account for such a large proportion of the population.
In considering the position of free persons of color in Brazil from the eighteenth to the late-nineteenth century, it is essential to examine the general structure of that society and the changes it was undergoing.
Colonial Brazil, as was true for most ancien régime societies, was conceptually divided up into estates, reflecting the then general view that society was not formed by individuals equally protected in their rights and mobile in relationship to one another, but by castes, ranks, corporations, guilds, and brotherhoods, layered one atop another or arranged side by side. Under this system, the individual had multiple identities and multiple loyalties without a single, truly all-encompassing one, except as a Christian (and only marginally, as a subject of a king)—never as a citizen of a nation. It was what Roland Mousnier (1973) would have described as a "society of orders," and what Brazilian historians refer to as a sociedade estamental. Yet interfering with that conceptual construction was the reality of slavery driven by a profit-oriented mentality. The New World had provided to a few the opportunity to accumulate wealth, form classes, and gain power measured by their financial resources, not their status; the tragedy of the slave trade had introduced a group who had to be controlled by violence more than custom. So even in colonial times, Brazil does not entirely fit the estamental model.
By 1822, at the very end of the colonial period, and even more so in the ensuing years, a new philosophy emerged. Nineteenth-century elite Brazilians, at least in the cities, were not immune to the changes sweeping Europe since the mid-eighteenth century, and keenly felt the pull of a new system of ideas emanating from the world centers of political and economic power. With the overwhelming impact of the "Age of Revolution" came the tenets of liberalism and individualism. A new paradigm of the individual and society informed new political practices. Every free person was now to be a citizen—at least in theory. A constitutional monarchy was instituted with a parliament as well as an emperor, and a long list of individual rights were enshrined in the Brazilian constitution. The new understanding contrasted sharply with the older corporate one.
The intermingling of these two contradictory views of society, always in tension, had direct repercussions on the fate of free persons of color. On the whole and in practice, despite the new ideology, the acceptance of a multilayered social hierarchy continued to be a characteristic of the Brazilian polity throughout the nineteenth century. The hierarchical paradigm provided a means of assuring social order, for it diffused social tension, allowing almost everyone to be (and feel) superior to someone else. There is no equivalent word in current English usage for the Brazilian concept of condição (literally, condition), a term used to indicate social quality and precise social place. The nuanced distinctions of social ranking restrained the threat that freedmen might otherwise pose, and this partially explains why the manumission of slaves could be encouraged: freed blacks would easily fit into one of many possible social niches. Nor were all of them deemed equal to each other. Those born in Africa and those born in Brazil were clearly distinguishable. Attention to variations of skin color further contributed to locating people along a continuum of status, some being either darker or lighter than others. Brazilians took it for granted that people could generally be distinguished, as one writer put it, "according to the order, scale, or category into which [they were] placed within society" (Werneck 1855, 28). This view meant that no one—black or white—thought himself equal to anyone else; all met within a hierarchy and found themselves either above or below everybody else.
One proof of the continuity between colonial and national periods is found in the variations in sentencing for criminal convictions. In colonial times, there was no presumption of equality. An identical crime would by law be punished differently if committed by a black or mulatto, even a free one, than if committed by a white person. The same was true for "New Christians" (descendants of forcibly converted Jews), and commoners were treated differently from nobles. Still today in Brazil, a university graduate is legally entitled to better quarters and preferential treatment in jail than the rest of the population.
Nor did national independence end the authority that the male head of household held over everyone within his domain. It is important to note that a father could, legally at least, imprison even his own sons, no matter their age, if they lived with him and if he did it to "punish or correct bad habits or behavior." The law also treated the property of unmarried sons, again regardless of age, as belonging to their father. Moreover, a freedman remained in relationship to his or her former master as if in that household and, thus, under his authority. The law did not consider these two parties as equal; far from it.
As we look at the legal status of freed and free persons of African descent, we have to bear in mind this seeming ambiguity that juxtaposed the practices of hierarchy with the philosophy of legal equality. Historians can draw some initial and general conclusions, but they will not be clear-cut ones, for the dominant groups in Brazilian society have always dealt with racial issues through a complex mixture of force and co-optation.
Take, for instance, the issue of arming free blacks and mulattos. In colonial times, there were two simultaneous policies on this matter. On the one hand, laws were passed forbidding them from carrying any weapon. On the other, separate militia units—bearing arms—were organized for free blacks and mulattos, commanded by officers of their own color (Mott 1973, 129; Morton 1975, 263–68). In short, it was believed that some could loyally serve in this corporate body, one so typical of the system of estates, but that individuals outside such corporations were a threat. After independence, militia units segregated by race were abolished in the name of egalitarianism, while in practice, men of color were all relegated to the lowest army ranks. This change was one of the stimuli to a virtual race war that broke out in Bahia in 1837 (Kraay 1992, 501–27), to be discussed below. While one institution characteristic of the corporate society had been abolished, equality did not take its place.
For, regardless of any law, state officials now acted discriminatorily toward free African Brazilians in carrying out the military draft.
Conscription was used throughout the nineteenth century (and well before) as a means of disciplining the poor. Although under nineteenth-century Brazilian law all men of a certain age were legally subject to forcible recruitment, the list of exempt occupations was long and left only the poor as truly subject to it. It was common practice both before and after independence for a judge or chief administrative officer of any locality (capitães mores in colonial times; delegados after 1841) to round up allegedly unsavory characters and send them to the army or navy. So it would be significant if the army's rank and file were predominantly made up of African Brazilians early on. We do not yet have direct evidence on this point, but in an 1827 list of 271 captured deserters, 222 (82 percent) were free men of color (Morton 1975, 258). Even though a judge who sent in three recruits in 1840 described each one in terms of his malfeasance, he casually noted that two were mulattos and the other a black. Such examples could be multiplied at length. An Englishman in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1880s could still report that "the greater part of the privates in the army are Negroes or mulattoes" (Dent 1886, 287).
The fate of the draftee was a sorry one. Conditions in the army and navy remained so deplorable that the minister of war had to tell a provincial president in 1856 that recruits should march to Rio de Janeiro "with all security, but not in irons." Food was inadequate and lodging crowded; floggings were common (Morton 1975, 258). Desertion, therefore, can better be understood as a jail-break, and the fact that African Brazilians were disproportionately represented in the ranks can only be seen as the result of prejudice and a state policy based on racism. Still, the state relied on blacks to fight its wars, even as it feared them. During the war with Paraguay (1865–1870), for instance, many slaves were purchased by the government and promised their freedom if they fought loyally. Since the bulk of the ordinary recruits were also black and mulatto, one can conclude that color determined who would be used as cannon fodder in that long and bloody struggle. This was the prize offered to free men of color; this was the benefit of citizenship.
If liberalism undid the color-specific militia units and demoted their officers, it also weakened one of the principal institutions that built black community in the old society of estates: the irmandades. These lay brotherhoods and sisterhoods had, since the sixteenth century, provided a means for people of color, often from particular language groups in Africa, to maintain solidarity. Like their white counterparts, these organizations were formed to venerate a specific saint and perform charitable acts, but they also functioned as mutual aid societies. In Portugal, they often grew up around individual guilds; in Brazil, even without a strong guild system, they continued to project the notion of a corporate society. Many were organized exclusively for blacks or mulattos, some excluded slaves, and some did not allow the African-born; others were open to all comers, provided they were of "good character." African Brazilian irmandades tended especially to honor Our Lady of the Rosary. They received state recognition through royal charters and their leaders were seen as spokesmen for the black community before government agencies. Members elected their own officers from their ranks. Frequently, they created funds to purchase the freedom of enslaved members. Irmandades usually had their seat in an established church where a side chapel was dedicated to "their" saint; sometimes, however, they acquired enough funds to build their own church, as happened in Salvador with Our Lady of the Rosary brotherhood. Religious processions were occasions to demonstrate the ranked order of society, with each irmandade in its predetermined social place, and each brother or sister ranked ahead or behind someone else according to the same principle (Mulvey 1976; Russell-Wood 1982, 128–60; Saunders 1982, 150–56).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Racial Politics In Contemporary Brazil by Michael Hanchard. Copyright © 1999 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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