Bone find reveals mass grave of Brazil's slaves

Ana de la Merced shows human bones and other objects found in the foundations of her home in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She was remodeling her 19th century house in Rio's old Gamboa district when laborers found thousands of human bones, a legacy of the Cemiterio dos Pretos Novos, a crude burying ground for African slaves. PHOTO: AP

When the bones started to appear at the back of his crumbling house in central Rio de Janeiro, Petrucio Guimaraes' first reaction was to call the police, not the archaeologists.

"After the first centimeter of concrete we started seeing all these bones," said Guimaraes, 58, who had been underpinning his 19th-century home. "I thought it must have been some kind of massacre."

Guimaraes and his wife, Ana de la Merced, had unearthed what is thought to be one of the world's largest slave burial grounds, a mass grave where thousands of corpses were abandoned by Brazil's slave traders in the 18th and 19th centuries.

When the archaeologists arrived at the Cemiterio dos Pretos Novos (Cemetery of the New Blacks) in Gamboa they uncovered 5,563 bone fragments and teeth. Experts say as many as 20,000 bodies may have been buried in the area, most of them African men aged 18-25 who had died during the three-month sea journey to Brazil or soon after arriving.

"In truth it was a ditch into which they threw the bodies," said Antonio Carlos Rodrigues, the former president of Rio's black rights council. "When they dug it up you could see skulls on top of other skulls, bodies piled up on each other."

"These are forgotten stories that we have to remember."

Petrucio Guimaraes, owner of a house built on a slave cemetry

Between 1550 and 1888, when slavery was officially abolished, at least three million African slaves were shipped to Brazil by the Portuguese.

The port district of Gamboa found itself at the centre of this trade. The area was also home to so-called casas de engordo (fattening houses) where slaves were fed before being sent to work in the plantations.

Civil rights activists, like Rodrigues, believe that until Brazil faces up to the realities embodied by the cemetery, the racist legacies of slavery will continue to blight its society. He compares the buried slaves to the thousand or so young Brazilians killed in the city's drug conflicts each year, predominantly impoverished Afro- Brazilians aged 15-24.

Nowhere is this analogy clearer than in Providencia, Rio's oldest shantytown. The favela, founded in 1897 by homeless soldiers and freed slaves, towers over Gamboa's mass grave and is bisected by a towering staircase built by slaves.

On the steps teenage drug traffickers, most of them black or mixed-race, loiter in the sun clutching walkie-talkies and with revolvers tucked inside their shorts.

Rio's mayor recently pumped 14.3 million Reals (US$6 million) into the creation of an open air museum in Providencia, which also contains a museum in the home of Dodo da Portela, a samba composer, who was a descendant of African slaves.

"These are forgotten stories that we have to remember," said Guimaraes, who has abandoned his small business to become the curator of a memorial museum at his home.

According to a recent UN study, Afro-Brazilians still make up 63 percent of the poorest section of Brazilian society. Faced with poverty and a vast social divide, many young Brazilians find themselves forced into the city's 750 favelas, or even into the drug trade.

"The slave owners freed their slaves and then said: `You're free. Sort yourselves out.' But in fact all that happened was that these people went back to living in slave-like conditions," Rodrigues said.

"It seems as if the story hasn't changed for Afro- Brazilians. The era changed but not the reality," he said.