The Longue Durée of Brazil-Africa relations (c. 1450-1960)

Abstract

Brazil established the longest relationship between a region of the Americas and the African continent. At the centre of this connection was the transatlantic slave trade, which led to the forced migration of approximately 5.5 million enslaved Africans (44% of the 12.5 million who went through the Middle Passage) between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. After suppressing the traffic, intellectual and political elites sought to forget the continent that had forcibly supplied most of the migrants responsible for settling Brazil, but multiple connections were actively sustained by Afro-Brazilians on both shores of the Atlantic in the following decades. This chapter offers an overview of Brazil-Africa relations from their beginnings to 1960, when the Independent Foreign Policy of Jânio Quadros and African decolonization started to bring significant changes to the connection between both countries.