The slave trade to Brazil and the rest of the Americas was an inhumane and gigantic business that could be extremely lucrative. These were investors, insurers or ship captains who did the accounting. One of them, after the human cargo docked in Rio de Janeiro in 1762, recorded the income from the sale of the Africans brought by force, deducted the value of the prisoners killed during the voyage and added the following in the expenses chapter: The sea transport, his salary, the payment to the priest who baptized five prisoners, “the feeding of the slaves for 76 days, at 60 reales per day and the sales commission, 6%,” as in Escravidão, an award-winning trilogy, chronicles this cruel time. The slave trade became one of the pillars of the Brazilian economy. A century and a half after the abolition, the Brazilian Federal Ministry has just opened a case to investigate the responsibility of the Bank of Brazil (BB) in the sale and purchase of people.
The Bank of Brazil is one of the country’s best-known brands and the fourth largest savings bank. Omnipresent. The mixed company (the government owns 70% of the shares) has 75 million customers (a third of the population) and branches in almost all parts of the country. More than half of Brazil’s 203 million people are descendants of the five million Africans kidnapped in Africa and transported to the other side of the Atlantic on slave ships (in the US it is only 13%).
The initiative to analyze this chapter of banking history came from a group of historians. In this savings bank founded in 1808, which arose shortly after the arrival of the Portuguese court in Brazil, the scholars were more specialized in slavery. Many of those who first contributed funds to the founding of the BB were African traders who received titles of nobility in exchange for their support. Especially after 1830, when Brazil banned the sale and purchase of Africans under pressure from England, the business became more lucrative and expanded exponentially with the empire’s approval.
Engraving of parts of a Brazilian slave ship published in London in 1830.R. Walsh (Arquivo Nacional do Brasil)
The Federal Ministry of Public Power, which also performs the functions of an ombudsman in Brazil with the mandate to guarantee human rights, preserve memory or combat racism, immediately took up the gauntlet. After analyzing the scientists’ request, it opened an investigation at the end of September, a move that received wide publicity, and called the Bank of Brazil to a meeting on the 27th. The ministers for racial equality and rights are also invited to the meeting. Human Rights of the government led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and some historians. The Bank of Brazil quickly made itself available to investigators to “accelerate the repair process.”
One of the historians is Thiago Campos, a researcher at the Oral History Laboratory of the Fluminense Federal University. Over the phone, he explains that “every Brazilian institution in the 19th century was directly or indirectly linked to human trafficking or slavery.” He adds that the bank was chosen because it is one of the few institutions founded at that time that still exists, although it has seen several re-foundations over these more than two centuries. “This is a debate that already exists in other countries and we are far behind,” he emphasizes, before adding that in Brazil “the slavery chapter has been normalized,” “without questioning in all this time that the bank that bears our name. “The nation was founded on slavery.”
The historian states that the most important private shareholder of the Bank of Brazil in 1853 was one of the largest African traders, José Bernardino de Sá, who “landed more than 20,000 people”. [en puertos brasileños] in more than 50 trips.” These were times when a single trip could mean a fortune, as long as the majority of the human cargo survived the journey.
To save money, traffickers limited the slaves’ food rations during the sea voyage and increased them in the final days. They also covered the bodies of Africans with oil. All with the aim of making these men and women stronger (or less weak), looking better and being able to sell them for a better price when docked, according to Escravidão. The magnate De Sá was one of the richest men in the empire, patron of a theater and owner of land.
The Banco do Brasil headquarters in Brasilia, in October 2019. Adriano Machado (Portal)
Julio Araujo, one of the members of the Public Ministry who signed the decision to open this investigation, explains that the primary objective is to open the discussion: “This is a very important, crucial issue that is placed on the public agenda “The debate has to be,” he says on the phone. After contacts between the bank, the public ministry and historians, the researchers’ goal is to broaden the focus to include black activist movements and the rest of society. Araujo emphasizes that the end of this process has not yet been written: “We do not know whether the bank will acknowledge violations, whether it will ask for forgiveness, whether it will deepen the investigation into its history.” Now the main thing is that to put the topic on the agenda.”
Historian Campos was pleasantly surprised by the speed and disposition with which the company responded to the opening of the case. “The Bank of Brazil has the ability to tell its story, examine its archives and thus participate in the reconstruction of this past erased from our history.”
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