Freedom and Self-Fashioning: The Politics of Memory and Mobility for Afro-Brazilian Returnees in 19th-Century Lagos, Nigeria

This paper will explore the ways in which the Amaros—Afro-Brazilians who emigrated to port cities along the Bight of Benin coast during the nineteenth century—experienced, and asserted their understandings of what it meant to be “free” in the British colony of Lagos. Many of these Amaros were African-born, Yoruba-speaking individuals who returned to their region of origin after years of enslavement in Brazil. However, they did so with a difference; they understood their world through a Yoruba cultural lens, refracted by their time in Brazil, and then refocused under the contemporary conditions operating in Lagos. Drawing from their voices in courtroom testimonies, this paper explores the ways in which returnees articulated this difference through their employment of tropes surrounding slavery, freedom and migration. It argues that mobility (both social and geographical), social and commercial networks, and memories of enslavement were inextricably linked for returnees as they attempted to forge alternative spaces of social and economic distinction in both the nascent colony of Lagos and the larger Atlantic world.

Through an examination of the relationship between enslavement and freedom with memory, networks, and mobility, this paper raises important questions regarding the ways enslaved and liberated Africans understood the Atlantic world and their place within it. As these courtroom testimonies illustrate, many of these returnees continued to travel back and forth to Brazil even after their emigration to Lagos. Hence, this paper also reconsiders how the Amaros understood return; at times, the Atlantic itself served as a space of economic, social, and cultural freedom, while it served as a barrier to mobility at other moments. In this way, this paper also serves as a methodological intervention surrounding the importance of West African understandings, articulations, and exertions of freedom to a historical comprehension of the flexibility of the Atlantic system.