The Dispersal of the Yoruba People

Abstract

Motivated by an increase in the tobacco trade with the West African coast in the late eighteenth century, Brazilian merchants and slave traders shifted their base of operations away from their counterparts along the Mina Coast to the ports of Lagos, Badgary, and Porto Novo in the Bight of Benin.1 Soon afterward what became known as the Yoruba Wars began ensuring Brazilian ships with a seemingly limitless supply of captives bound for Salvador and points beyond. This final phase of the Atlantic slave trade, which officially ended in 1830 but remained a clandestine practice for years to come, resulted in a massive influx of Yoruba slaves. By virtue of being the last wave of mostly homogenous groupings of slaves to arrive in Salvador, they would leave one of the most visible and lasting cultural imprints on the growing Afro-Bahian community of Salvador, resulting in what Miguel Calmon called, “the brutal metamorphosis of Mangolas (Bantus) into Nagôs (Yoruba).”2 So dominant would their language and cultural customs become and so successful at assimilating others into their worldview would they be that by the middle of the nineteenth century, for many in Bahia, Yoruba culture became synonymous with African culture as a whole.