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.
PHOTO: AP
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."
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.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
ENTERTAINMENT: Rio officials have a history of organizing massive concerts on Copacabana Beach, with Madonna’s show drawing about 1.6 million fans last year Lady Gaga on Saturday night gave a free concert in front of 2 million fans who poured onto Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro for the biggest show of her career. “Tonight, we’re making history... Thank you for making history with me,” Lady Gaga told a screaming crowd. The Mother Monster, as she is known, started the show at about 10:10pm local time with her 2011 song Bloody Mary. Cries of joy rose from the tightly packed fans who sang and danced shoulder-to-shoulder on the vast stretch of sand. Concert organizers said 2.1 million people attended the show. Lady Gaga
SUPPORT: The Australian prime minister promised to back Kyiv against Russia’s invasion, saying: ‘That’s my government’s position. It was yesterday. It still is’ Left-leaning Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese yesterday basked in his landslide election win, promising a “disciplined, orderly” government to confront cost-of-living pain and tariff turmoil. People clapped as the 62-year-old and his fiancee, Jodie Haydon, who visited his old inner Sydney haunt, Cafe Italia, surrounded by a crowd of jostling photographers and journalists. Albanese’s Labor Party is on course to win at least 83 seats in the 150-member parliament, partial results showed. Opposition leader Peter Dutton’s conservative Liberal-National coalition had just 38 seats, and other parties 12. Another 17 seats were still in doubt. “We will be a disciplined, orderly
RSS