Africanos Livres and the Making of Black Abolitionism in Brazil

The contested phasing out of the transatlantic slave trade over the nineteenth century profoundly influenced the emancipation politics of Africans and their descendants. In Brazil, even if unable to precipitate the end of slavery itself, this decades-long process ending in the 1850s signaled a break in white rule while ushering in new forms of coerced labor and alliances among marginalized peoples. In this context, liberated Africans or africanos livres played a crucial role. Released from slave ships through British intervention during a surge in illegal human trafficking to Brazil, they embodied the limits of an abolitionist process controlled by those committed to racial domination. Africanos livres were caught in the webs of seignorial power in Brazil, laboring alongside the enslaved, forming families whose status were even less clear than their own, and living under the permanent threat of being racially profiled as escaped captives. As their terms of apprenticeship frequently expired without a change in their legal condition, they had, in effect, to self-emancipate. This paper looks at the role of africanos livres in shaping Black abolitionism in Brazil. It foregrounds their interactions with insurgent slaves for whom slave-trade refugees personified the expectation that freedom should be extended to all bondspeople and that the British could be of assistance. I argue that abolitionism was also made of such exchanges, in which Black peoples redirected humanitarian claims, revolutionary ideologies, and diplomatic pressure into a tradition of diasporic struggle against enslavement.