Eliana Alves Cruz and Branca Vianna grew up at a similar time in different neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro. But the two Brazilian women had very different experiences of their family history.
Cruz, 57, was always surrounded by elderly relatives, yet struggled to get them to recount stories about the men and women who had preceded them. In contrast, Vianna remembers the omnipresent figure of her grandmother’s great-grandfather, who died in 1868. There was even a painting of him hanging in the family home where Vianna, now 61, spent her holidays as a child.
Cruz is Black and, she has since discovered, descended from a west African woman who was trafficked to Brazil in the early 19th century. Vianna is white and her great-great-great-grandfather was an enslaver who made a fortune in coffee.
Their stories reflect a common pattern among Brazilian families: while European ancestry tends to be remembered and celebrated, institutionalised silence around how the African diaspora shaped the country has robbed its descendants of their personal history.
Many Black Brazilians feel keenly the absence of this history – but attempting to recover it can be the work of a lifetime.
“Everyone, one day, wonders about where they come from. And in Brazil, for the Black population especially, it’s something of a thorny issue. It’s uncomfortable,” said Cruz.
Helton Simões Gomes, 35, was never given answers to his questions about where his grandparents came from – a lack of knowledge that “always hurt”, he said.
“Whenever I found myself in conversations about our origins with people with different heritage, it was glaringly obvious that I had nothing to say,” he said.
Brazil has a long history of silencing the experience of its Black citizens, who account for the majority of its population.
Africans trafficked across the Atlantic had a new identity forced upon them when they arrived in Brazil. Two years after slavery was finally abolished in 1888, the abolitionist Ruy Barbosa, then finance minister, ordered the destruction of documents related to slavery as a way of simply moving on.
Post-abolition, the new Brazilian republic had no policies to integrate the newly freed Black population into paid labour, and African cultural practices such as samba and capoeira were criminalised.
“[Brazil] is a country that always wanted to whiten itself, that never appreciated its Black roots. This desire for whitening is, in my opinion, the root of all this historical erasure,” said Cruz.
Cruz, a journalist and novelist, spent six years painstakingly gathering oral and documentary information on her family going back seven generations. She turned her findings into an award-winning historical novel. First published in 2016, Água de Barrela (Bleached Water) was her first novel and there are now plans to translate it into English.
But few Afro-Brazilians succeed in tracing their family tree in the way Cruz did. Many, like Gomes, simply assume they lack the time and resources to embark on what may end up being a hopeless quest for answers about their past.
As a tech reporter working for the website UOL, Gomes saw an opportunity for an alternative source of information about his ancestry in the rise of affordable DNA tests. As well as taking one himself, he helped launch a series of reportages on high-profile Black Brazilians’ search for their roots as he felt he was probably not alone in his “need for memory”.
Gomes’s DNA test told him that his ancestry was 70% African, of which 24% from Benin. He felt “relief” at “having maybe figured out where we came from”, but the test results also opened up a new source of anguish. “So I have a starting point in Africa, and an arrival point in Brazil, but the journey between – from one point to the other – the DNA test doesn’t tell you that story.”
Cruz succeeded in piecing together her story in part thanks to documents obtained through the family whose ancestors had enslaved her forebears.
“White people are very well documented,” said Cruz. “I think [Brazilians descended from enslavers] would have a great contribution to make if they opened up their private archives, if they looked at this past and revealed certain things – because that’s where a lot of us have our past too.”
Vianna has done just that. A few years ago, she, her sister and a cousin commissioned two historians to look into Domingos Custódio Guimarães, the Viscount of Rio Preto – their ancestor, an enslaver who still today is remembered around his former coffee plantations in Rio state’s Paraíba valley region as a local benefactor.
“One of the things I wanted to do was try and deromanticise the Viscount’s image,” said Vianna, the founder of a podcast production company.
In October, Vianna and her relatives discussed the findings of this research on one of her podcasts, in the hope that other families might be spurred to do the same. But in an indication of the obstacles that such initiatives encounter, the historians were unable to uncover much information about the individuals the Viscount had enslaved, nor trace any of their descendants alive today.
Brazil has seen an incipient public conversation about how institutions benefited from slavery and should consider reparations. Attention is slowly turning to individuals and families too, amid questions on how information contributing to truth and memory might fit into restorative justice efforts.
“I think I have a responsibility … to make my family documents public. But whether that counts as reparation, I don’t think it’s my place to say,” said Vianna.
What reparation efforts might look like in a country where more than half of the population suffers from the racist legacy of slavery is a complex discussion which must involve the Black rights movement, activists say.
“I like this understanding of reparations … as a form of racial literacy,” said Lucimar Felisberto dos Santos, a 56-year-old historian and civil rights activist who has written a book about her family that retraces the life of her parents, who were born half a century after abolition in conditions that were very similar to those of their enslaved forefathers.
“For a very long time, young Black people did not have a right to understand their past … So when you give the Black population this right to memory, you are making reparations,” Felisberto said.
