November is marked by offerings of marigolds to the dead in Mexico, minutes of silence to honour fallen soldiers in Britain and turkey feasts to give thanks in the United States. In Brazil it used to be just another month. Not any more: since last year Brazilians have turned it into “Black Consciousness Month”, its festivities reaching a peak with a new federal public holiday on November 20th.
On that day in 1695 Portuguese colonists captured Zumbi dos Palmares, decapitated him and displayed his head in a public square. His crime was to have led the largest-ever settlement for runaway slaves. It harboured 20,000 people at its peak and took almost a century to defeat. Now, 300 years after Zumbi’s murder, Brazilians are increasingly interested in their country’s African roots.
Signs of this growing interest are everywhere. Between 2010 and 2022 the number of people who claim to practise candomblé and umbanda, two Afro-Brazilian religions, tripled to almost 2m, according to census data. In 2023 more tourists in Rio de Janeiro visited “Little Africa”—a rundown neighbourhood of shabby, brightly painted houses that is considered the birthplace of samba—than went to the statue of Christ the Redeemer or Sugarloaf Mountain. A new film, “Malês”, is about a big revolt led by Muslim slaves from Nigeria in 1835.
Most strikingly, Brazilians have become keener to assert their African heritage. In Brazil’s most recent census, taken in 2022 and published in 2023, for the first time more people identified themselves as brown or black than white (only a tiny share identified as indigenous). In the 1940s almost two-thirds of Brazilians described themselves as white. The change is not down to demography alone, but also to decreasing stigma around being black. Today, even some affluent white Brazilians are at pains to find a black ancestor, and increasingly call themselves mixed-race.
According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, run by Rice University in Texas, 12.5m slaves were trafficked from Africa between 1500 and 1866. Of the 11m who survived the voyage, some 5m disembarked in Brazil, compared with 400,000 in the United States (see chart). Each of Brazil’s economic booms before emancipation (sugar, gold, cotton, coffee) depended on slave labour. Ina von Binzer, a German governess for wealthy families in Brazil at the end of the 19th century, noted in a letter to a friend: “In this country, the Blacks occupy the main role. They are responsible for all the labour and produce all the wealth in this land. The white Brazilian just doesn’t work.”
For a long time slave histories were overlooked, sometimes literally buried. While renovating the port area ahead of the 2016 Rio Olympics, workers stumbled upon broken conches, used as money and in rituals, and protective amulets. Further work identified the site as Valongo Wharf, a dock used to disembark a million Africans, the biggest slave port in history. The ships that docked there carried cruel names such as Charity and Happy Destination. Nearby, an inconspicuous museum opened after builders renovating a home found a mass grave. It contained the remains of tens of thousands of slaves whose bodies were unceremoniously dumped, their bones burned or cut to pieces to save space.
For decades many Brazilians glossed over the past. They pointed out that Brazil had no civil war over race issues, did not pass segregation laws and had higher rates of miscegenation and manumission than other slave-owning societies. The country’s government pushed the idea that Brazil was a land of racial harmony.
A mixture of better historical data and local and global activism has chipped away at that narrative. In May the largest-ever genomic study of Brazil was published in Science. It showed that although Brazil is home to more people of mixed race than anywhere else in the world, mass sexual coercion probably played a role. Some 71% of Y chromosomes, which are passed down by men, came from people with European ancestry, whereas 42% of mitochondrial dna, which is passed down by women, came from people with African heritage, and 35% from people with indigenous ancestry. Portuguese colonisers often took enslaved or indigenous girls as mistresses.
As black activists decried the myth of racial harmony, they found a new ally in President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—known as Lula—who took an unusual interest in Africa and Afro-Brazilians. “Lula has this personal determination and will to have closer ties to Africa,” says João Bosco of the Brazil-Africa Institute, a think-tank in Fortaleza. During his first two terms in office, between 2003 and 2010, he opened 19 embassies in Africa and visited the continent more than any other. He usually took a coterie of businessmen. Trade between Brazil and Africa grew from $5bn in 2002 to $26bn in 2012. “My government chose Africa as a priority,” he told Namibia’s then-president in 2009.
Back home, new laws instructed schools to teach Afro-Brazilian history and granted land titles to quilombolas, informal settlements inhabited by the descendants of escaped slaves. In 2012 racial quotas were introduced in federal universities, an issue that continues to divide Brazilians. Then Brazil had an acute recession. Trade with Africa nose-dived after a big corruption scandal engulfed Brazil’s state-owned oil firm and its construction giants. Voters elected Jair Bolsonaro, a populist-right agitator who disparaged Africa.
Lula’s return to power in 2023 has rekindled relations with the continent. In December of that year he decreed November 20th a national holiday. Months later, at a gathering of African presidents in Ethiopia, he described his visit as “one of my most important trips ever”. “Brazil doesn’t have everything, but we want to share everything Brazil has with the African continent. We want to give back, in the form of possibilities and development, what you gave us in the form of a workforce for 350 years,” he said, pitching Brazilian research into drought-resistant crops as the new foundation for closer relations.
Brazil’s climate and soil are similar to those in central and western Africa. But it produces far more food thanks in part to innovations from its public agricultural-research agency, Embrapa. In May Brazil hosted some 40 African agricultural ministers and took them around Embrapa’s horticultural projects in the country’s arid backlands. The agency opened an office in Addis Ababa in September, and has received so many requests for partnerships that “we can’t attend to them all,” says Marcelo Augusto Morandi, a spokesperson. This year Nigerian businessmen lobbied their parliament to legalise the import of cattle, as well as bovine embryos and semen, from Brazil, which promptly sent planeloads of cows and bulls.
Back in Brazil, the interest in the country’s African past is seen as a reason to push for deeper reforms. “The majority of people in favelas, prisons and who are homeless are black, and that is not a coincidence,” says Ana-Paula Escarlate, a tour guide in Little Africa. In 2021 black Brazilian workers earned around 60% of the monthly income of white workers—a gap which has barely budged since 1986. (Wages are lower even when taking education levels into account.) Less than half of black Brazilians over the age of 25 have completed secondary school, compared with almost two-thirds of whites. In 2024 darker-skinned people made up 83% of those killed by Brazilian cops, one of the world’s most lethal police forces. Ms Escarlate wonders: “How much can one national holiday really change things?” ■
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