This study examines the history of the sugar economy and the peculiar development of plantation society over a three hundred year period in Bahia, a major sugar plantation zone and an important terminus of the Atlantic slave trade.
The origins of Maculelê (a ring dance) are obscure. Of the many stories and theories, one associated with the material culture of sugar work states that: "during the slavery era in Brazil, the slaves in the sugarcane plantations would gather and play Maculelê as a game to vent their anger and frustration from being slaves. At this time, machetes were used instead of sticks. Sticks were later incorporated for safety reasons. However, some experts still use machetes."
Brazil, a Portuguese colony, received ten-times more African slaves than the numbers transported to North America. The programme Brazil-An Inconvenient History looks at those estimated 4 million people with whose blood, sweat and tears Brazil was built. Without them none of Brazil's present-day success and appeal would exist. Using contemporary testimonies, this film takes a hard look at Brazil's dark history through the eyes of those slaves. They lived in squalid conditions on remote plantations or in teeming cities harbouring fatal diseases. Most Africans survived only seven years in this 'New World'. Some, however, did survive to create a new culture a fusion of African and European. This new ethnicity permeates and explains the modern Brazilian way of life.
"The first African slaves were taken by the Portuguese in 1443. The Portuguese began the trans-Atlantic slave trade to supply their Brazilian sugar plantations. Late in the seventeenth century, after tobacco and sugar plantations were established in North America and the Caribbean, the English created the Royal African Company, ending the Portuguese and Dutch monopolies. From that time until its demise in the nineteenth century, the slave trade was dominated by the British" (Curtain, 1969).
Archaeological research on two sugar plantations of the Chapada dos Guimaraes region of West Brazil, the engenhos (sugar mills) of Rio da Casea and Agua Fria, has provided an opportunity to study the organization and use of these spaces by planters, free laborers, and slaves.
A commonwealth within itself: the brazilian sugar industry 1550-1670
This article studies the basic characteristics of the Brazilian sugar economy between 1560 and 1660, when it became the main sugar producer in the Atlantic world.
African retentions of Capoeira Angola
The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationship between the African aesthetics and the African retentions of Capoeira Angola. It explores the overlooked, yet essential, characteristics of Capoeira Angola from an African perspective.