The Trade in the Living: The Formation of Brazil in the South Atlantic, Sixteenth to Seventeenth Centuries

"This is an essential book. It’s dense and longer than the other books, and it covers an earlier period. It’s important for understanding how Brazil could not have existed without the region of West Central Africa, what is present day Angola . The Portuguese arrived in West Central Africa in the 15th century, and it became a Portuguese colony between the end of the 16th century and the first decades of the 17th century. What the Portuguese were doing in that region, and what they were doing in Brazil, was connected. They were transporting enslaved people from West Central Africa to Brazil. When the Dutch invaded Brazil in the 17th century, they also invaded Angola and there were Portuguese troops fighting them on both sides of the Atlantic. There are several other layers in this book that are also important. For example, it covers the beginning of the plantation economy in Brazil in the Northeast, when we still had enslaved indigenous people working side-by-side with people of African descent and born in Africa. So this book tells this story about how Angola was part of the formation of Brazil and it’s essential for understanding how Brazil owes its existence to Angola. There have been other books that have come out since. There’s the book by Roquinaldo Ferreira that Mariana Candido mentioned when she gave her interview , there is Candido’s own book of 2013, and a book by José Lingna Nafafé, published in 2022. But in The Trade in the Living Luiz Felipe de Alencastro was the first to show how the Atlantic Ocean connected Brazil and Angola instead of separating these two regions. I think in many ways people feel those connections and live them in their daily lives. There are words from African languages such as Kikongo and Kimbundu that are incorporated in Portuguese. The food that we eat, the dances, the music, the rhythms, all this is shaped by Africa. It’s something that is natural, it’s not necessarily something that people have thought about. When I was growing up, the religion, the deities, the carnival—all this was present and connected to these traditions. But in school we were not taught the history of Africa until the beginning of the 21st century. For people of African descent, they had memories of their families and what was passed down to them, they had this consciousness, but it’s not something that was officially recognized until the 1990s and the early 2000s. It has started being officially recognized over the past 25 years, I would say. This is why the work of historians is important, to give a basis to it. But in people’s lived life, in their lived experiences, it has been there all the time."