Rio Backyard Once Served as Dumping Ground for Slaves

The remodeling project at a 19th century home in Rio’s old Gamboa district had come to an abrupt halt: Laborers digging in the yard to check the foundations had found human bones. Thousands of them.

The homeowner, Ana de la Merced Guimaraes, soon learned that her house was sitting on the Cemiterio dos Pretos Novos -- Cemetery of New Blacks -- a crude burial ground for African slaves that historians had thought was lost.

Ten years later, the city wants to preserve the discovery as a rare window into Brazil’s colonial past -- and one of the saddest pages in its history.

“It’s certainly one of the city’s most important discoveries,” said Andre Zambelli, head of Rio’s Cultural Heritage Department. “It shows how the slave trade happened, confirms what’s in textbooks, puts history in our hands.”

Workers have recovered 5,563 bone fragments and teeth, some rounded or carved in styles characteristic of people that once lived along the Congo River in Mozambique, another former Portuguese colony, and in South Africa. They also found pieces of fine English china, stoneware and African clay pipes, dishes and metal ornaments that had been dumped as trash at the same site.

Rio officials consulted experts from New York City, where a burial ground was discovered in lower Manhattan during construction of a skyscraper in 1991, with the remains of at least 419 slaves or free blacks who had been interred during colonial times. The U.S. government designated the site a National Historic Landmark in 1993.

“It’s the same connection, a re-encounter with African history, labor and culture,” Zambelli said.

Rio estimates that its cemetery is larger. It is likely that more than 20,000 Africans were buried there between 1769 and 1830, Zambelli said, but no one knows exactly because no records were kept. They were the bodies of slaves who died before they could be sold.

Brazil was the New World’s biggest market for African slaves. Of an estimated 10 million Africans brought to the Americas, nearly half were taken to Brazil where they worked in gold and diamond mines or on coffee and sugar plantations.

When Rio became Brazil’s capital in 1763, residents began objecting to the squalid slave market in downtown streets, near the palace where the Portuguese royal family took up residence after fleeing Portugal ahead of Napoleon’s invading army in 1807.

So the market was relocated to the marshy Gamboa district, which became the unofficial graveyard for slaves after a Roman Catholic churchyard filled up. Bodies were piled in stacks on the street and often burned before burial under a few shovelfuls of soil.

The way the bodies were treated rankles rights activists.

“It was Rio’s holocaust,” said Marcelo Monteiro at the Municipal Council for the Defense of Black Rights. “Few people know about it. We’re rediscovering a story that was erased.”

Haidar Abu Talib of the Muslim Charity Society said many of the slaves buried in the cemetery were Muslims. He said that even after slavery was abolished in 1888, former slaves remained “invisible,” and that some Brazilians would prefer to keep it that way.

“When slavery ended, the government -- run by the elites that always benefited from slave labor -- wasn’t concerned about making ex-slaves full citizens,” Talib said at a ceremony for Black Consciousness Day. “Even today, their descendants are victims of social injustice.”

Although almost half of Brazil’s 183 million people are black or mixed-race, the country’s cherished self-image as a “racial democracy” is a myth. Most of the poorest Brazilians are black.

Blacks comprise 70% of the poorest tenth of Brazilians and 16% of the wealthiest tenth, the U.N. Development Program reported. Afro-Brazilians earned an average of $74 a month in 2000, less than half the pay for whites in 1980, the U.N. said.

Rio officials want to bring black history more into the open by creating a walking tour and putting the cemetery on tourism routes. “We want to make an open-air museum, with a tour from the docks to the cemetery, with bilingual folders and a map showing where slaves were displayed and sold,” Zambelli said. “Africa contributed to the founding of the city.”

But Guimaraes, the homeowner, is skeptical about whether the city would invest in the cemetery that her workers stumbled on. Officials have done little to preserve the bones, she said, and rains washed away some exposed remains. And her neighbors resent that she told the city about the cemetery.

“I don’t have anybody’s support,” she said. “People ask me why I’m doing this, but the more I learn about how the Africans were abused and realize it’s been forgotten, I swear they won’t forget it here, not while I have the strength.”