Africans in Brazil:
Some Highlights
The Brazilian Carnival is deeply influenced by African culture;
Embratur - Africans in Brazil
Many historians estimate in 12 million the number of Africans captured and shipped to Brazil, between 1532 (the date of the beginning of the traffic) and 1888 (the date of the abolishing of slavery in Brazil). Of these 12 million people, around 1 million died on the boats, before even reaching Brazil. The African enslaved came mainly from Angola, but also from more northward places such as Nigeria, Benin or Congo…
Death rates were very high among the Brazilian enslaved: the enslaved life expectance didn’t exceeded 8 years in the hard conditions of sugar plantations or in the gold mines; from the perspective of the owner, it was more advantageous to buy new people than maintaining the existing ones in good health, for many years.
The African culture survived better in Brazil than in North America, due to the more liberal politics of the Portuguese. Owners didn’t separate enslaved families (the law prohibited it), and the enslaved could buy their freedom, which wasn’t a very surprising fact even in the earlier colonial times. African religious brotherhoods, supported by the Catholic Church and Jesuit missionaries, backed the process and raised the money…
In the seventeenth century, significant numbers of the enslaved escaped from the sugar plantations, and found independent “quilombos” in remote areas (the quilombo was a sort of Black Kingdom, following the lines of traditional African ones, with a king, a government council, an army, and a priest class). The most renowned was the Quilombo of Palmares, in the state of Alagoas. It lasted for more than fifty years, till 1697, and its leaders and followers committed mass suicide, when defeated, refusing to return to the previous condition of enslavement.
The nineteenth century was the century of slavery abolition, but also a century of spectacular insurrections, such as the 1835 ‘Male Uprising'. Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1862, the echoes of the Caribbean and North American Black movements, and the Brazilian Anti-Slavery Society founded in 1880 (with the backing of the king D. Pedro II), have inspired the slavery abolition (1888) and, in a certain extent, the insurrections.
Today, people of African heritage represent about 5 per cent of Brazilian population, a rate far beyond the 15% of 1940 official census. That’s a direct consequence of the miscegenation of the Brazilian people. Thus, the African element in Brazil's ethnic composition is very visible, as it is the influence of the African culture, mainly in Bahia. Salvador da Bahia is, undoubtedly, the African Brazilian state capital. Its music, its cuisine, its religion forms, and its way of life are largely of African origin.
Geographically, Brazil is the largest country in Latin America. It spreads across almost half (47.3%) of South America, and occupies a total area of 8,547,403.5 km2. It is the fifth largest country in the world after Canada, the Russian Federation, China and the United States. Except for a small number of islands, Brazil is a single and continuous land mass. The Equator passes through the northern region, near Macapá, and the Tropic of Capricorn cuts through the south of the country, near São Paulo. Brazil’s east to west extension (4,319.4 km) is almost equivalent to its north to south distance (4,394.7 km). The country borders French Guiana, Suriname, Guiana, Venezuela and Colombia, to the north; Uruguay and Argentina, to the south; and Paraguay, Bolivia and Peru, to the west. Ecuador and Chile are the only two countries on the South American continent that do not border Brazil.
The official language is Portuguese; however, the accent and the intonation are very different from what one hears in Portugal and other former Portuguese colonies. If you have ever bought airline tickets to Portugal you will know just how different the accent is. Some people say that Brazilians speak “Brazilian”, just like Americans can say they speak “American”, and not English. And there are also many Brazilians who are descendants of immigrants and who speak German and Italian, especially in cities in southern Brazil.
The mix of races has made Brazil a culturally rich and at the same time unique country. This process began with the Indian, the African and the Portuguese, but in a short time, immigrants from around the world began to arrive. The result was a people, open to everything new, a people only found in Brazil. Because of this tremendous diversity, Brazil is one of the last places on earth where no one is a foreigner, where one can change one’s destiny without losing one’s identity and where each and every Brazilian has a little of the entire world in his or her blood.
Source: http://www.brazil-travel-guide.com/Black-In-Brazil.html
Source: http://200.189.169.141/site/en/sobre_brasil/index.php
Access date: April 14, 2009
Costa Rica:
The Republic of Costa Rica
Most African-Costa Ricans, who constitute about 3% of the country's population, descend from Jamaican immigrants who arrived during the 1880s to work in the construction of railways connecting the urban populations of the Central Plateau to the port of Limón on the Caribbean coast, as well as the enslaved who were brought during the Atlantic trade of enslaved African people.
On December 1, 1948, President José Figueres Ferrer of Costa Rica abolished the country's army after victory in the civil war in that year. In a ceremony in the Cuartel Bellavista, Figueres broke a wall with a mallet symbolizing the end of Costa Rica's military spirit. In 1949, the abolition of the military was introduced in Article 12 of the Costa Rican Constitution. The budget previously dedicated to the military now is dedicated to security, education and culture; the country maintains Police Guard forces. The museum Museo Nacional de Costa Rica was placed in the Cuartel Bellavista as a symbol of commitment to culture.
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Jamaica: Africa Lives
 
The legacy of Africa lives on in Jamaica in countless ways. It is most evident in the ethnic composition of the Jamaican people; in the Jamaican language called patois whose grammar and pronunciation are heavily influenced by the Twi language spoken in West Africa; in Jamaican music and dance; in religious worship and rituals; and in food and dress. Thus, the history of Jamaica over the past 500 years has been marked by the courage of the Jamaican people in their triumphant struggle for freedom and justice and by their unrelenting resistance and determination in the face of adversity and discrimination. Modern Jamaica is built on a historical legacy of genocide perpetrated against the island’s indigenous peoples, on the experience of over three hundred years of enslavement and oppression suffered by the Jamaicans of African origin and on the interplay between Europe, Africa, Asia and the Middle East in the building of a proud, free and progressive nation in the heart of the Caribbean.
Source: http://www.embassyofjamaica.org/ABOUThistory.htm
$18 Million for Violence
Prevention in Jamaica
Kingston, Jamaica (April 9, 2009) The capacity of Government and targeted communities to attain a more peaceful, secure and just society, will be enhanced with an allocation of $18 million in the 2009/10 Estimates of Expenditure, for the Jamaica Violence Prevention and Sustainable Development Programme. This project, which commenced in January last year, has to date been successful in setting up the Ministry of National Security's policy directorate, including crime prevention and community safety, and a gang symposium.For this year, the project aims to enhance the design of violence prevention strategies and policies. This is in addition to enhancing the community safety, restorative justice and small arms strategies. Capacity building of the National Security Ministry, the Ministry of Justice, the National Security Strategy Implementing Unit and the National Fire Arm Licensing Authority, will also be a priority this year. The project will support the development of community safety plans; increase the effectiveness and coherence of international support; and enhance safety in targeted communities. Funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the project is slated for completion in December 2010. The 2009/10 Estimates also make provisions for the Jamaica Violence Prevention, Peace and Sustainable Development - Jamaica Constabulary Reform Programme, with an allotment of $16 million.This project sets out to implement the recommendations of the strategic review of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF). It is anticipated that for this fiscal year, the project will transform the culture of the JCF; develop and launch the brand and image of the JCF; and establish a new and effective accountability system, which will ensure zero tolerance towards corruption. The project is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and is scheduled for completion in March 2010.
Source: http://www.jis.gov.jm/parliament/html
Source:http://www.wordtravels.com/Travelguide/Countries/Jamaica/
Photos
Access date: April 14, 2009
African-Costa Rican History
The first Africans that arrived to Costa Rica came with the Spanish conquistadors. Enslavement and its trade was common in all the countries conquered by Spain, and in Costa Rica the first Africans seem to have come from specific sources in Africa- Equatorial and Western regions. The people from these areas were thought of as ideal because they had a reputation for being more robust, affable and hard-working than other Africans.
During the seventeenth century, the elite from the then capital city of Cartago invested in cacao farms in Matina, in the Atlantic region. The African enslaved worked and lived in these farms, isolated from the rest of the country; the owners only went to oversee the crops once a year. However, the following century witnessed a gradual lessening of the abysmal differences between Africans and their white owners. Thus, by the time of the independence of Costa Rica from Spain (1821), slavery was a disintegrating institution. The Federal Assembly of Guatemala declared the abolition of slavery in the region in 1822, but this law didn't get fully authorized in Costa Rica, until April 17, 1824. By the time that the law was established, the enslaved population in the country was considerably low, since a lot of the enslaved had been freed previously.
In 1871 the railroad to the Atlantic started being built. Henry Meiggs Keith, an American hired by the Costa Rican government, was in charge of this monumental ordeal. He insisted in utilizing African people for clearing the forest and building the railroad tracks, hence several workers arrived from the Caribbean, Panama and other countries, but in 1872 the first group of Jamaicans entered the country. These Jamaicans and their descendants would become the main inhabitants of the region, thus providing the basis for a culture that was entirely different from any other in the country. The two large Jamaican migrations occurred at the time of the railroad construction and in the next century, for the banana plantations owned by the United Standard Fruit Company. If it hadn't been for this influx of African population, Costa Rica wouldn't have become the world's largest producer of bananas in 1911.
By the 1920s, the African population had improved its economic status dramatically, through their own farms or through their jobs with the banana company. However, since they weren't even considered citizens of Costa Rica, they didn't possess legal rights to own land. In the 1930s many white moved into this region and took over the land of these Africans. Many African people had to migrate to Panama or other countries when they were dispossessed of their land or even of their job at the banana company. Due to these repressive circumstances, many people of African heritage workers organized strikes and labor unions, and they even participated with Figueres (revolutionary leader) in the 1948 Civil War, after which they won citizenship and full guarantees.
The story of the African population in Costa Rica started, as does the story in most American countries, with enslavement. From the beginning this group of people was indispensable in agricultural chores and in cacao and later on, banana plantations. Their participation was also central in the construction of the railroad that would connect the interior of the country with the coast, thus, with the rest of the world. However, African people didn't only contribute to the economy and progress of the nation, since elements of their culture, such as their language, religion, food and music, shaped a whole new culture in the Caribbean, and eventually extended to the rest of the country.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Costa_RicaSource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_RicaSource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Costa_Rican Resource: http://thestudyofracialism.org/about5817.htmlResource: http://www.blacktino.netPhoto: http://vamos.epsy.cr/
Accessed: April 19, 2009
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