There's No Hiding an Elephant: Notes on the Last Africans and Memories of Africa in the Paraiba Valley

Studies undertaken throughout the 1990s in the Paraiba Valley region of Brazil among descendants of slaves revealed a remarkable range of memories of enslaved African ancestors, usually the grandparents of those interviewed. Considering that the definitive end of the Atlantic traffic with Brazil occurred in 1850, the presence of people who lived for a good portion of their lives alongside Africans deserves reflection, and this is the objective of this paper. The Paraiba Valley, which from the 1820s began to receive the lion's share of African slaves for coffee cultivation, was the chosen locale for the study. The paper examines the status of Africans via estate inventories for the great plantations at two junctures: the period 1855-58 (shortly after the end of the slave trade) and 1870-73. At these two junctures we can calculate the median age and family status of Africans of different nations. The body of documents used to conclude the investigation consisted of civil birth registries of black children born in 1889, the year after slavery ended. In these we find Africans mostly as grandparents of the babies, and still alive. We also find many Africans registering their children, and furthermore, many Africans listed as godparents of newborns. The paper concludes that the fact of intergenerational contact made possible by African longevity not only played a large role in black family and community life during and even after slavery, but also caused the memory of the last Africans disembarked in Brazil to endure for more than a century.