The Influence of Africa on Brazil and of Brazil on Africa

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Abstract
No aspect of Brazilian relations with Africa deserves more attention than the study of the African in Brazil. The chroniclers described their types, qualities, virtues and defects in a few sweeping and stereotyped generalizations which, as was only natural, were no more accurate than their accounts of the Indians. But if the latter, from the beginning, had defenders of their liberty and a more extensive and careful protective legislation, the Negroes endured captivity for a long time without a voice being raised in their defence, except for Padre Antonio Vieira, who exhorted them to resignation in his sermons, and Padre Manuel Ribeiro da Rocha, who condemned the slave trade and proposed the liberation of slaves. Bishop Azevedo Coutinho, on the contrary, who was connected with land-owning interests, defended slavery as a ‘licit trade’, a ‘kind of commerce’ whose legitimacy had never been doubted among the nations since antiquity, and he attacked the ‘reformers of France’. The works written by Ribeiro da Rocha and Azevedo Coutinho are unique in the annals of the defence of liberty and of slavery.

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