Rio’s forgotten site where Brazil disposed of its enslaved Africans

It’s not entirely clear what it is. Under a glass pyramid, a small grey dome, some half the size of a deflated football. A deep fracture to the base. Below it, an assortment of shapes laid out in semi-regular repose.

At first it looks like a collection of sticks. But they are not sticks. These shapes are the remains of a child. An African child. An African child slave, denied humanity in life, and then “buried” along with many thousands of other enslaved Africans in a makeshift cemetery a short walk from downtown Rio de Janeiro.

Twenty years ago, Ana de la Merced Guimarães made a shocking discovery. She was extending her small family home when the builders found skeleton after skeleton buried in the ground.

Except they weren’t really buried. They’d been crushed, tipped, and dumped into what was once a pit. For Brazil’s African slaves – somewhere between four and 10 million of them, depending on whom you believe – endured severe cruelty before dying under horrific circumstances.

Brazil was the first stop for ships destined to sail on to north America, where slaves were disgorged, perceived as cheap and disposable manpower. Replacements from the slave ships were cheap and plentiful. The life expectancy for Brazilian slaves was unimaginably grim and short. Between four and seven years – depending on where you ended up.

Ana’s house is the forgotten site where Brazil disposed of the broken effluent of its genocidal trafficking of enslaved Africans. For decades, indeed hundreds of years before Brazil outlawed slavery in 1888, unbaptised Africans were dumped under what Ana had hoped would be extra living space for her growing family.

With the help of academics and historians, she has turned it into a shrine. And now Ana shares her home with a living homage to the dead. It has become an archaeological site open to the public: Rio’s Cemiterio dos Pretos Novos – or “Cemetery of the new blacks”. It has a small library, lecture space and carefully preserved “exhibits” capable of stopping the heart.

“I am an ordinary woman,” Ana told me. “I do not have a lot of education. I live in an ordinary house. But as soon as I knew what we’d found, this became my calling.”

The ghastly history of Rio’s exploitation of Africans is slowly being rewritten into this beautiful city’s culture and consciousness. But it is a country that is reluctant to pick at a scar that defines so much of what it is today. And it has largely been left to individuals to start digging away at the past.

I was brought to the Cemiterio dos Pretos Novos by an African American labour historian and spiritual medium, who came to Rio more than a decade ago and never left. As I hesitated to approach the glass tomb holding the twisted pile of bones, I could feel Sadakne Baroudi watching my reaction.

My response to what I saw was gestalt. Sweat. Then choking. Then tears. Sadakne hugged me – or did I hug her? I don’t remember. I circled the discarded child, not entirely sure what it was that I was seeing.

Sadakne begun to tell me a story. She told me how she once brought another journalist here, who felt upset and shocked that there happened to also be a large group of boisterous children running around and playing underfoot.

The journalist had asked Ana if the kids were hers. No, Ana had said. Local kids, who didn’t have a great deal of space to be able to play safely. (Ana’s neighbours often asked if they could use her newly extended house to host birthday parties and the like.)

Ana figured the kids who’d been buried and forgotten here centuries ago were probably lonely, and wanted some friends. To hang out with other children, to laugh and have a good time. So when asked, she obliged – and the cemetery, her home – was also now a playground.

I could taste the salt of my tears dribbling into my mouth.

Sadakne took me to the Valongo wharf, which like the Cemiterio dos Pretos Novos was recently rediscovered and partially preserved.

Sadakne has crammed Years of trawling this marvellous but tortured city for clues about its past into a project she calls the Afro Rio walking tour.

There is barely a paving stone in Rio that is not in some way linked to the history of African Brazilians. A history that is usually celebrated by tourists in their search for samba.

Sadakne takes me to the place many say is the home of samba in Rio – the Pedra do Sol, or “salt stone”.

It is where at night tourists and indeed locals flood the streets to enjoy samba and caipirinhas till the early hours, many unknowing why and how they came to be there.

Rio’s salt stone is a huge lump of hillside rock where Africans would unload and transport salt for distribution across the colony. It became something of a cultural hub for Rio’s African Brazilians – when they could, they would gather to sing and dance.

But for Sadakne it also carries the unavoidable weight of the millions of Africans who perished in the building of Brazil.  Any slave who walked up these steps hewn into the salt stone was unlikely to survive long enough to earn their freedom.

I returned to the Pedra do Sol later that night having watched Brazil beat Cameroon 4-1.  Rio was high. Wearing my Brazil shirt. I hoped to melt into the crowd and be neither visitor nor host.

I waded through the side streets thick with music and sweat and went straight to the spot where Sadakne and I had sat quietly contemplating a few hours earlier.

Tourists were perched atop the steps, looking down at the crowd. As were cariocas old and young. Watched by his parents and grandparents, a small boy, about the same age as the child I’d seen the remains of earlier in the cemetery, was having the time of his life (see picture above).

The ancient rock that had centuries ago been climbed by slaves had been worn smooth next to the steps. The boy was climbing up on his hands and knees, then sliding down again on his bottom whooping with joy. Up he climbed, down he slid. Up he climbed, down he slid. Up he climbed, down he slid.

The tourists smiled. The samba played. The small boy laughed. Rio carried on oblivious.

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