Preventing “Second Slavery”: Afro-Brazilian Emigrants’ Understandings and Assertions of Freedom in Lagos, Bahia, and the Larger Atlantic, 1850–90

This paper examines the Atlantic dimensions of freedom among manumitted African and African-descended individuals who emigrated from Bahia to Lagos during the second half of the nineteenth century. Indeed, between 1850 and 1890, approximately 4,400 formerly enslaved African and African-descended people purchased passports in Bahia and repatriated to West Africa; many of these individuals disembarked in Lagos, in present-day Nigeria. I argue that these returnees’ decisions to return specifically to Lagos were based not only on their ethnic and familial ties in Yorubaland, but also on the burgeoning colony’s unprecedented practice of issuing British passports to emigrants.

This paper uses port records, letters of manumission, passport registers, judicial documents, and colonial correspondences from archives on three continents to explore the nexus between mobility and freedom in the Atlantic world. It begins with an examination of the precariousness of liberty for people of African descent. I contend that these travelers went to great lengths to maintain their freedom as they understood it; their notions of liberty were inextricably intertwined with their freedom to move between geographical spaces. I then investigate manumitted Africans’ strategic use of the British passports that they obtained in Lagos to protect and perform their freed status as they traveled back and forth across the Atlantic. As such, I argue that Lagos served as an important locale for provocative articulations of liberty, which informed Africans’ assertions of freedom in both West Africa and Bahia. Finally, this paper analyzes the ways in which African and African-descended individuals in possession of British passports instigated trans-imperial debates about what liberty meant for the increasing number of free and freed Africans in the Atlantic world during the age of abolition.