U.S. Blacks Seek a Part of Their History in Brazil

Attorney Ray Williams heard about it from the shoeshine man in his Newark, N.J., office building.

Laureen Greene, marketing director for a New York City college, had seen a small ad in Upscale, a monthly magazine aimed at African Americans.

Tanya Stewart, project manager for the Chicago Housing Authority, got the word from her boss.

So, unlike most first-time tourists to Brazil, each bypassed the famous beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the restaurants and night life of Sao Paulo and the northeastern resorts of Recife and Fortaleza and came to Salvador, a city rarely mentioned in the United States as a vacation destination.

They came in search of a lot more than a good time. They were looking for part of their history, their culture and a sense of themselves.

Before the year is over, about 5,000 African Americans will have made a similar sojourn to this city of 2 million for exactly those reasons.

Quietly, Salvador, Brazil’s first capital, the entry point for millions of African slaves during the 16th and 17th centuries and a city steeped in Afro-Brazilian culture and history, has become a cultural Mecca for many African Americans.

“The number of black people coming here from America has really been increasing,” said reception manager Helvecio Alves at Hotel da Bahia, checking in still more African Americans just two days after nearly 200 had left.

“Here, our culture is originally from Africa--the food, the religion, the rhythm of the music. They come for that. Of all the tourists, nobody seems to enjoy it as much as they do. They always say they are coming back.”

Sipho Bellinger of Lexington, Mass., and Nailah Randall of Pasadena were two who returned this year. They met here two years ago, married a year later and celebrated their first anniversary by returning to Cachoeira, a nearby village where they first encountered each other while at an annual Afro-Brazilian commemorative ceremony.

Salvador and the surrounding state of Bahia are known to vacationers for the same attractions that bring tourists to many other parts of Brazil. “Ah, Bahia,” said Maria Amelia Santana, a librarian at the U.S. Consulate in Rio de Janeiro. “Beautiful beaches and beautiful women.”

But while those are the lures for thousands of Germans, Italians, Spanish and French who make up the preponderance of Salvador’s tourist trade, they are not what brings African Americans to this coastal city.

Largely through word of mouth, they have heard about Boa Morte (the Good Death), an annual religious ceremony and festival commemorating members of a women’s organization that since slavery has struggled to preserve the culture; or capoeira , a martial-arts form that Colonial-era slaves disguised as a ritualistic, acrobatic dance; or candomble , the distinctly Brazilian religion that combines Catholicism and the deities of Nigeria and Angola.

Or they know of Pelourinho, a Salvadoran neighborhood that is the cultural heartbeat of the country for African Brazilians, or of the variety of food and dress similar to those in Angola and other parts of western Africa.

“Bahia is the common denominator for people of African descent,” said James Lee, a Rockefeller Foundation scholar and lecturer who has lived in Brazil off and on for 19 years. “All of them can come to Bahia and find something that is reminiscent of their own culture.”

That is what brought James Wright, a Boeing technical instructor originally from Georgia but now living in Saudi Arabia, to Salvador with his wife, Lillie. They attended a jazz festival here.

“But we only came because it was in Bahia,” he said. “There are jazz festivals all over Europe which are closer and cheaper to get to, but we wanted to experience the culture.”

Carol Adams, director of resident programs for the Chicago Housing Authority and Tanya Stewart’s boss, was officially there for an Afro-Brazilian women’s conference.

“But I really came for the Boa Morte festival,” she said. “This is my third time here, and I’m thoroughly intrigued with the sisters of the Boa Morte. I’m also very interested in the black diaspora. They have more cultural survival here than anywhere in the diaspora. You might see some traces in other places, but mostly our cultural memory was wiped out.”

Aldon Morris, a sociology professor at Northwestern University, was there as part of his studies of black political movements, “but I came here precisely because I had heard about Bahia.”

He brought his wife, Kim, a social worker in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, and their two children. “I’ve never been to Africa, but when I walk down the streets, see the clothes, the shops, the food, the art, I feel like I’m in Africa here,” Kim Morris said. “And the people just seem to embrace us like we’re one. That’s what I’d expect in Africa.”

But that’s not what usually happens when African Americans travel to Africa, according to some who have visited there.

“Sometimes, Africans tend to look down on African Americans,” said Egerton Bullock, 34, a former Wall Street bond trader who spent three months in Bahia. “I was in the Ivory Coast for a month, and many (there) would rather not deal with African Americans.”

Many African Americans have had similar experiences in Africa, and they have recounted them to others.

“I think African Americans are received here better here than on the continent,” said Williams, the attorney whose Brazilian shoeshine man advised him to make the trip. “We have more in common.

“We share a slave history and, even more important, I think there’s more of an effort to preserve the culture. I picked up a lot of history that I just didn’t realize. Walking down the streets, I could just imagine the people coming off the slave ships. The culture and tradition that’s here is unbelievable.”

The African American connection to Bahia was formed in earnest nearly 20 years ago. In 1976, LINKS Inc., an organization of African American women, held a conference in Salvador. Two years later, academics from the Atlanta University Center organized a gathering that brought a diverse group of 500 to Bahia.

“We brought down all kinds of people--artists, filmmakers, historians, politicians, sociologists,” Samella Lewis, an art historian, retired Scripps College professor and one of the key figures at that conference, said from her Los Angeles home.

“The idea was to take people who could advance the culture in terms of bring information back to African Americans. We thought it was important to go there, since Brazil has the largest black population outside of Nigeria and the cultural center of that black population is Bahia.”

The biggest and most recent push came in 1988, when the National Conference of Artists, a coalition of black painters, sculptors, art historians and photographers, held a convention in Bahia to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Brazil’s abolition of slavery.

“That put a lot of artists who had been looking at Africa in touch here, and they began to see how much African retention is here,” said Paul Goodnight, a Boston painter. “They went back to the United States and began spreading that message.”

Bahians have also reached out to embrace African Americans. During last year’s Carnival, the raucous pre-Lenten celebration, samba schools in Bahia chose as the theme for their celebration the African American fight for freedom and adorned their costumes with pictures of Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King Jr. and Fannie Lou Hamer.

What many African Americans are beginning to realize, Lee said, is that the black cultural experience in this hemisphere is as vital and important as the cultures in Africa and that Bahia is a linchpin between the two.

“Bahia is the only real sense of where the culture from Africa landed and became a New World culture. After nearly 500 years, people are beginning to learn that there’s a culture here in the New World that’s important. . . ,” Lee said.

“Now they are beginning to realize that there are certain things that are unique and special and only could have come out of our experiences here. . . . And if you want to explore the two, Bahia is the place.”