Antonio Oba

Ceilândia, DF, 1983

Chico Rei, 2020

oil and gold foil on canvas

Chico Rei

(18th century) [Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais]

A member of the Kingdom of Congo’s royal family, the African Francisco was enslaved and shipped with his wives and children to Brazil. He ended up in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, in the first half of the eighteenth century. After years of hard work, he not only achieved his own freedom but also started to buy the manumission of other people. It is said that Francisco used to convince the enslaved to hide gold on their heads, in the middle of their hair. All donations were used by the fraternities to free more and more people and organize the Congadas. It is also said that, out of devotion, Chico Rei, as he was called, ordered the construction of the Chapel of the Rosary, where he placed an image of Saint Ephigenia.

Ayrson Heráclito

Macaúbas, BA, 1968

Portrait of Domingos Sodré, 2020

watercolour on cotton paper

Domingos Sodré

(Lagos – Nigeria, c. 1797-1887) [Bahia]

Domingos Sodré was born in the West African kingdom of Onim, modern-day Lagos, Nigeria. Together with his parents, he was sold at a very young age to a buyer in Bahia. Over the course of the nineteenth century, he won his freedom and became a very prestigious Nagô (Yoruba) priest in Salvador. He established a well-known Candomblé on the outskirts of the parish of São Pedro, becoming famous as a prosperous African freedman and landlord.

Ayrson Heráclito

Macaúbas, BA, 1968

Portrait of José Martins (Mandingueiros), 2020

Portrait of Mateus Pereira Machado (Mandingueiros), 2020

Portrait of Luiz Pereira de Almeida (Mandingueiros), 2020

Portrait of João da Silva (Mandingueiros), 2020

watercolour on cotton paper

The mandingueiros José Martins, Mateus Pereira Machado, Luiz Pereira de Almeida and João da Silva

(18th century) [Bahia]

José Martins, Mateus Pereira Machado, Luiz Pereira Almeida and João da Silva were free and freed men persecuted due to religious intolerance. They lived in a gold mining region in Jacobina, in hinterland Bahia. The major charges against them were that they carried talismans and “mandinga (charm) bags.” They believed these instruments gave them luck, protection and wealth, in addition to curing harms and diseases afflicting the soul and the body. Many of the so-called mandingueiros ended up being arrested, flogged in public squares and incarcerated in the prisons of the Inquisition of Bahia.

Ayrson Heráclito

Macaúbas, BA, 1968

Portrait of Luiza Mahin, 2020

watercolour on cotton paper

Luiza Mahin

(19th century) [Bahia]

In 2019, Law No. 13816 was enacted determining that the name of Luiza Mahin be included in the Book of the Heroes and Heroines of Brazil. It is said that Luiz Gama stated that this African freedwoman was his mother and that she had been persecuted in Bahia after the Malê Revolt, in 1835. Either deported or as a refugee, she disappeared. Gama sought her out in Rio de Janeiro and learned that she supposedly had been expelled from Brazil along with other Africans accused of witchcraft. There is no doubt about Mahin’s historicity, although her life story remains shrouded in a mist of fiction and historical speculation.

Castiel Vitorino

Vitória, ES, 1996

When the Secret Is Revealed, The Mistery Is Not Guarded (Francisca Luiz), 2020

digital photograph, digital print on semi-pearl paper

Francisca Luiz

(16th century) [Salvador, Bahia]

In the sixteenth century, during the religious persecutions conducted by the Inquisition in the Northeast (1591-1595), dozens of women were accused by the inquisitor Heitor Furtado de Mendonça of being “sodomites.” A scandalous case involved Francisca Luiz and Isabel Antônia. Francisca was a forty-year-old “freed Black woman” who was born in the city of Porto. After a complaint, Francisca was summoned by the Envoy, who asked her to declare “all her faults.” She confessed, among other things, that for thirteen years she had maintained a “friendship” with Isabel Antônia, “a woman who does not have a husband, who was said to have been deported from Porto for practicing the nefarious sin with other women.” She was sentenced to pay ten cruzados and to spiritual penance, such as confession and fasts. As Isabel Antônia had already passed away, the Inquisition decided not to punish Francisca with exile.

Juliana dos Santos

São Paulo, SP, 1987

Bernarda de Souza and Her Mother (Bernarda de Souza), 2020

digital print and ink on paper

Bernarda de Souza

(18th century) [Rio de Janeiro]

Bernarda de Sousa bought her manumission with the money she managed to save selling green groceries in Rio de Janeiro. Aiming to increase her income, she acquired an enslaved woman to serve her. Shortly after, she also bought her own mother, Marta de Sousa. In 1755, already widowed, without heirs and sick, Bernarda went to the local registry office to finally free her mother. She knew that under then-current laws the property of a dead person without a will would go to the state. In that case her mother would be auctioned off. Bernarda then went to the registry office and registered that she had bought her mother because she felt obligated to protect her. She said that if she had kept her mother in captivity, it had only been “to keep her mother in her company, treating her with due veneration.”

Juliana dos Santos

São Paulo, SP, 1987

Caetana Our Noes (Caetana Says No), 2020

digital print and ink on paper

Caetana

(c. 1818-?) [Vale do Paraíba, São Paulo]

Caetana was Brazilian, the daughter of African parents who possibly arrived in Brazil between 1810 and 1820. She lived with relatives on the Rio Claro farm, a large coffee plantation with hundreds of enslaved people. In 1835, at the age of seventeen and working as a housemaid, she was forced to marry Custodio, a tailor. Both were part of an “elite of enslaved people,” as their occupations gave them access to the big house. However, she decided to resist the masters’ command to live a marital life and filed a lawsuit asking for the marriage’s annulment. Caetana said no!

Juliana dos Santos

São Paulo, SP, 1987

The Hand-Writing of Quintilhano Avelar (Quintiliano), 2020

digital print and ink on paper

Quintiliano Avellar

(19th century) [Rio de Janeiro]

Avellar was the first signatory of a letter sent in April 1889 to Rui Barbosa, then a republican journalist. He signed the letter with the Paty de Alferes Freedpeople Commission, which tried to enlist the prestige of political leaders to offer education to the children of freedpeople. The group explained in writing that “in order to escape the great danger to which we are exposed due to lack of education, we have come to ask for [education] for our children and so that they do not raise a murderous hand to slaughter those who want the Republic, which is freedom, equality and fraternity.”

Lidia Lisboa

Guaíra, PR, 1970

Teodora, She is a Woman… (Teodora Dias da Cunha), 2020

crochet, plastic and fabric on wood

Teodora Dias da Cunha

(19th century) [São Paulo]

In January 1867, Teodora Dias da Cunha was subjected to questioning. She claimed not to know her age, stated that she was married to Luís and was the daughter of Balanger, a carpenter. She did not know her mother’s name but said that her parents were both from the Congo Coast. She said that she was a cook and did not know how to read or write. Brought to Brazil, she went to work in rural São Paulo, near the city of Limeira, enslaved to João Rodrigo da Cunha, whose surname she adopted. Around 1862, she was sold in São Paulo and separated from her husband and son. In these circumstances, she met the enslaved Claro Antônio dos Santos and asked him to write letters, which were never sent but help to reconstruct parts of her life story.

Micaela Cyrino

São Paulo, SP, 1988

A Look at the Life of Father Joaquim de Souza Ribeiro, 2020

acrylic on canvas

Joaquim de Souza Ribeiro

(c. 1755-?) [Belém, Pará; Rio de Janeiro]

Probably the son of a black or mixed-race woman, Joaquim de Souza Ribeiro received an ecclesiastical education in Brazil and also earned a law degree from the University of Coimbra, Portugal, in 1788. In the early 1790s, he was appointed Vicar General in Maranhão. Involved in allegations of misconduct, he returned to Portugal and traveled throughout Europe and the Caribbean, where he settled down as a priest. After being accused of stealing silver pieces from local churches, he fled again. In 1814, he was arrested in Cayenne, French Guiana, and brought to Rio de Janeiro on charges of campaigning in favor of Haiti among the black population.

Michel Cena 7

São Paulo, SP, 1985

Justina Maria do Espírito Santo, 2020

acrylic and spray paint on canvas

Justina Maria do Espírito Santo

(? – 1855) [Campos de Goytacazes, Espírito Santo]

Justina Maria was an African woman enslaved to Father João Carlos Monteiro, a speaker of great fame in the Imperial Chapel, councilor, deputy of his city and main figure of the clergy in Campos de Goytacazes. At the age of 54, the priest fell in love with Justina, who was then thirteen years old. José do Patrocínio (1853-?), the well-known abolitionist, was her son with the priest. The father did not recognize him as a son, however. After being freed, Justina earned her living as a greengrocer. She died in 1855.

Michel Cena 7

São Paulo, SP, 1985

Liberata, 2020

acrylic and spray paint on canvas

Liberata

(c. 1780-?) [Santa Catarina]

Liberata, an enslaved woman, struggled to obtain freedom for her and her children, as well as to escape her master’s sexual harassment. At the age of ten, already working in Desterro, she found herself the victim of abuse and persecution. In 1793, she had a son with her master, who had promised to give them both their freedom. Liberata ended up persecuted by the master’s wife. She married João, a mixed-race man, who offered her money to buy her freedom. Motivated by jealousy, her master did not admit such marriage and did not agree with the payment offered for her manumission. A long criminal process then began, in which she sought to uphold her projects for a family and freedom in the courts.

Moises Patricio

São Paulo, SP, 1984

Portrait of Salustia (Salustia), 2020

acrylic on canvas

Salustia

(19th century) [Paraíba]

The enslaved Salustia lived in the hinterland of Paraíba when she filed a lawsuit against her master, owner of the Curral Grande sugar cane mill, in 1885. She demanded that he present to the court the “legal title by which he maintained her in a captive state.” She also asked that he provide her “letter of freedom,” as the law had determined that slaves should be declared freed if they were not registered until the end of September 1873. Salustia knew that her registry did not exist and denounced the fact that she had been kept “for more than thirteen years in the barbaric state of slavery in an unjust and illegal way.” Towards the end of the 1880s, her letter of freedom was finally issued.

Monica Ventura

São Paulo, SP, 1985

Dona Afra (Afra Joaquina Vieira Muniz), 2020

acrylic on canvas

Afra

(19th century) [Salvador]

Afra Joaquina was an African woman married to her former master, the freedman Sabino Francisco Muniz, also of African origin, who paid for his wife’s freedom at the same time in which he became the owner of other enslaved people. Sabino died between 1870 and 1872, leaving all his possessions to his wife and giving freedom to two enslaved women, Severina and Maria do Carmo, as long as they remained with Afra until her death. However, they filed a lawsuit asking for their freedom on the grounds that they were being punished by the widow and her son, Leôncio. Defense lawyers asked for unconditional freedom, but the judge dismissed the lawsuit in 1874, and the two enslaved women were eventually forced to serve Afra.

Mulambö

Saquarema, RJ, 1995

Rosa Fronteiras, 2020

acrylic on cardboard

Rosa

(1831-?) [Uruguaiana – Rio Grande do Sul]

Rosa crossed the borders towards her freedom with her sons Eugênio, Francisco, Flaubio and Domingos and “one still suckling in the breast.” When her masters, cattle breeders in Uruguaiana, Rio Grande do Sul, refused to grant her manumission, she and her family fled to the Uruguayan border. Rosa was part of a larger movement which saw many enslaved people fleeing from different areas of Rio Grande to the neighboring country and also to Argentina between the 1840s and 1870s.

Rebeca Carapiá

Salvador, BA, 1988

Martinha, Ouvem’s Message. Great-Pará 19th century. (Martinha Santa), 2020

copper on canvas

Martinha

(19th century) [Pará]

Born in Brazil, the enslaved Martinha was a mystical character in the mid-nineteenth century Amazon. It was said that she had supernatural powers, commanded processions and possessions, and called herself Saint Mary Martyr. Claiming to be possessed by spirits, she was accused of forcing Maria do Nascimento dos Santos’ heirs to present hers and her mother’s letters as if they were supernatural orders. An uproar erupted among devout Catholics in Ourém, province of Grão-Pará, around the public appearances of Martinha, often “out of her senses and speaking with a supernatural voice asking for certain actions.”

Tiago Sant’Ana

Santo Antônio de Jesus, BA, 1990

Inácio Monte, 2020

acrylic on canvas

Inácio Monte

(? -1783) [Rio de Janeiro]

The African Inácio Monte was baptized in 1742 after disembarking in Rio de Janeiro and became an important leader of the Black colonial fraternities. In 1757, he managed to buy his manumission with the help of other freed Africans. In 1759, with the name “Mina-Mahi”, he married the African Vitoria “Mina-Coura.” In addition to participating in the Fraternity of Saint Elesbaan and Saint Ephigenia, the couple also joined the “Congregation of Black Minas,” which was led by a group of “Dahomeys” (Africans from the Kingdom of Dahomey). Between the 1760s and 1780s, disputes erupted over leadership in the fraternity and the congregation. Africans from the “Makii, Agolin, Iano and Sabaru nations” chose to leave “the Dahomey yoke” and choose “Their King,” which as it happens was Inácio Monte.