Salvador embodied Africa in more ways than the preservation of Yoruba religion, as highlighted last week. Our Candomblé-believing tour guide, who used to be Catholic, also told us how the memory of the bravery of enslaved Yoruba Muslims in the 1800s is inspiring a small, as yet insignificant but nonetheless symbolic historical reconnection with Islam in the city.
In 1835, African Muslims, predominantlyYoruba, led an armed rebellion against slavery and the racial order in Salvador that left dozens of rebels and several of their opponents dead. Known in Brazilian historical records as the Malê Revolt, the uprising included both enslaved and free Africans.
As people familiar with the Yoruba language know, ìmàle means Muslim and Ẹ̀sìnÌmàle means Islam, literally the religion of the Malians, a nod to the fact that Islam reached Yorubaland through Malians.
So, the Malê Revolt basically means Muslim revolt. Although Yoruba Muslims predominated, Hausa and other African Muslims also participated. Interestingly, while Bahia received particularly large numbers of enslaved people from West Africa, the rest of Brazil drew more heavily from West Central Africa, especially present-day Angola and Congo.
After the failed Malê Revolt, surviving Muslim Africans were imprisoned, flogged, closely monitored or deported to Africa. Several of the deported, particularly the Yoruba ones, chose to return to Lagos where they built mosques and shaped Islam to this day.
The 1835 Malê Revolt occupies an important place in Afro-Bahian historical consciousness even among strongly Christian Afro-Brazilians, our tour guide told us. The Salvador carnival organization MalêDebalê, for example, deliberately invokes Malê resistance through its name, music and public messages about racism and Black political struggle.
What I’d call symbolic Islam became institutionally visible again in Salvador around the early 1990s with the emergence of the Centro Cultural Islâmico da Bahia, which intentionally looked for a Yoruba Muslim from Nigeria’s Osun State by the name of Sheikh Abdul Hameed Abu Bakr Ahmad to head it since 1992.
Although Salvador, and Brazil in general, is defined by the crucible of racial tension, we found remarkable racial harmony in everyday relational encounters. We saw little overt racial anxiety in ordinary social interactions. In all the cities we visited, we saw families dining where one member looked white, another Black and yet another mixed-race. Everybody seemed to get along well in spite of racial differences.
Of course, this masks deep, race-induced structural inequalities in wealth distribution. My wife and I like to walk long distances both for health reasons and to feel the real, raw pulse of places. On the routes we walked in both São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the wealthiest neighborhoods, marked by stupendously spellbinding marble splendor, were overwhelmingly white while the grubbiest neighborhoods were overwhelmingly Black.
One Boni Sobrinho, a mixed-race sociology doctoral student and university lecturer we met at the Federal University of Bahia who identifies as Black because his father is Black, told us Brazilian racism, unlike American or European racism, wears a permanent, genial smile, which helps conceal its viciousness and lend it acceptability.
He has a point. When we dined in historic, high-end restaurants such as São Paulo’s Figueira Rubaiyat, which is constructed around an enormous, roughly 130-year-old fig tree, we were often the only Black diners. But no one fixed us with curious stares to suggest we didn’t belong there, the sort of stares Black people can encounter in parts of Europe and the United States.
Well, for all the loud echoes of Africa in Brazil, it is also very European. This wasn’t just the result of Brazil’s Portuguese colonialism but also of the deeply assimilationist nature of the colonization. From 1808 to 1821, for example, Rio de Janeiro became the seat of the Portuguese court and the effective center of the Portuguese Empire. Then, from 1815 to 1821, Brazil was elevated from colony to kingdom within the formally constituted United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves.
It was an extraordinary inversion of colonial hierarchy. Brazil became the only colonial possession to serve as the seat of the colonial power that ruled it. It would be akin to the British monarch relocating to Lagos and governing the United Kingdom from there.
Echoes of that inversion have somehow survived to this day. Brazil’s economy is now many times larger than Portugal’s and Brazilian cultural production has long flowed back toward its former colonizer and shaped Portuguese cultural consumption. In global communication, we study this reversal of the conventional center-to-periphery flow of culture as a classic example of “contra-flow.”
Yet, Brazilians are so wedded to the Portuguese language that English has surprisingly little everyday reach. Were it not for Google Translate, we would have had a hard time communicating with many people. In all my international travels, I have never been to any country where I encountered as much resistance to English as I did in Brazil.
São Paulo is very European in its architecture and lush greenery. But its seemingly endless, grinding traffic seems to have no parallel anywhere in the world. An Uber driver told us that congestion gets so severe that some wealthy residents use helicopters to move around the city.
While the city of São Paulo looks European, its premier university, the University of São Paulo, like the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, reminded me of a Nigerian university campus. USP, incidentally, is not a federal university but a public university funded by the state of São Paulo and is widely regarded as Brazil’s leading university.
Although the physical structures of the public university campuses we visited were unremarkable, at least compared with American and European universities, Brazil’s leading public universities are generally more prestigious and more competitive to get into than private universities.
At the primary and secondary levels, however, the pattern often reverses, with private schools enjoying stronger reputations than public ones. Historically, this produced the striking paradox in which students educated in expensive private schools disproportionately won places at prestigious, tuition-free public universities while many public-school students ended up in tuition-charging private universities.
Affirmative-action policies have sought to disrupt that paradox. Federal universities now reserve at least half of their places for students who attended public secondary schools, with additional provisions based on income and racial identity.
I particularly looked forward to visiting Rio de Janeiro because its status reminds me of Lagos. Both are former national capitals that never surrendered their cultural and economic centrality. Instead of flying there from São Paulo, we deliberately took a long-distance bus so we could see more of Brazil’s countryside. Our bus, a better version of America’s Greyhound service, was basically an airplane on the ground.
I was struck by the fact that although the bus was not full, we left at the scheduled time. I joked to my wife that that was the greatest evidence that Brazil wasn’t a Third World country, along with electricity access of almost 100 percent and an adult literacy rate of about 95 percent.
In Nigeria, commercial road transport often doesn’t depart until all, or most, seats are occupied, which means advertised schedules can be aspirational. Even air travelers are accustomed to schedules that can dissolve into hours of delay.
The six-and-a-half-hour journey was a visual delight. Much of it followed the Via Dutra, one of Brazil’s most important highways, connecting its two largest cities through the Paraíba Valley, one of the country’s richest and most heavily industrialized regions.
The civil engineering along the route is a marvel. Highways have been blasted through, around and beneath mountains across terrain that would seem extraordinarily difficult to build on. As the road curls around steep mountains, the bus takes you high above valleys where lines of cars appear tiny below. The sight both excites and scares.
Retaining walls, anchor systems and elaborate drainage structures help stabilize slopes and reduce the danger of mudslides during heavy rains. Just as striking was the attention to environmental restoration. Areas disturbed by road construction were covered with greenery to encourage vegetation to return. In a country of dense forests and mountainous terrain, ecological preservation is plainly not an abstract concern.
By the time we arrived in Rio de Janeiro, the landscape had changed dramatically. We stayed about a mile from the central district and walked roughly 20 minutes to the archaeological remains of Valongo Wharf, surrounded by the modern city. An estimated 900,000 enslaved Africans passed through Valongo, which UNESCO describes as the most important physical trace of the arrival of enslaved Africans on the American continent. It was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2017.
One thing that repeatedly struck us in Brazil was the country’s forthrightness about the history of slavery. At the museums and historical sites we visited, the past was neither prettified nor glossed over.
We also visited the Museu do Amanhã, or Museum of Tomorrow, whose exhibits invite visitors to consider how human actions today will shape life over the next 50 years. Its striking futuristic architecture, set dramatically beside the water, is almost as memorable as the exhibitions.
Our visit to Cristo Redentor, or Christ the Redeemer, was another highlight. People from every part of the world and from many different faiths made the journey to this extraordinary monument. We took the train for about 20 minutes up Corcovado Mountain and emerged at the summit overlooking Rio. The panoramic view of the city, mountains and coastline was simply breathtaking.
That, finally, was the Brazil we encountered. It is neither entirely Europe transplanted nor Africa preserved, but a restless Euro Africa on American soil where conquest, slavery, survival and reinvention remain visible in the architecture, food, faiths, faces and rhythms of everyday life.
