The slave trade to Brazil and the rest of America was a business as inhuman as it was gigantic that could be extremely lucrative. It involved investors, insurers or ship captains who did the accounting. One of them recorded, after docking with the human cargo in Rio de Janeiro in 1762, the income from the sale of the Africans brought by force, deducted the value of the captives killed during the voyage, and, in the expenses chapter, It included maritime transportation, his salary, pay to the priest who baptized five captives, “the feeding of the slaves for 76 days, at 60 reales a day and the sales commission, 6%,” as reported in Escravidão, an award-winning trilogy about that cruel period. The slave trade became one of the pillars of the Brazilian economy. A century and a half after abolition, the Brazilian Federal Public Ministry has just opened a case to investigate the responsibility of the Bank of Brazil (BB) in the sale and purchase of human beings.
The Bank of Brazil is one of the best-known brands in the country, the fourth largest savings entity. Omnipresent. Of mixed ownership (the Government owns 70% of the shares), it has 75 million clients (a third of the population) and branches in almost every corner of the country. More than half of the 203 million Brazilians are descendants of the five million Africans kidnapped in Africa who were transported to the other side of the Atlantic on slave ships (in the US they are only 13%).
The initiative to analyze this chapter in the bank’s history came from a group of historians. Scholars specialized in slavery more than in this savings entity founded in 1808, which was born shortly after the arrival of the Portuguese Court in Brazil. Many of those who first contributed funds to create the BB were traffickers of Africans who, in exchange for their support, received noble titles. It was especially after 1830, when Brazil, under pressure from England, prohibited the sale and purchase of Africans, that the business became more lucrative and increased its size exponentially with the consent of the empire.
The Federal Public Ministry, which in Brazil also exercises the functions of ombudsman with the mission of ensuring human rights, ensuring memory or combating racism, immediately picked up the gauntlet. After analyzing the academics’ request, at the end of September it opened an investigation, a step that was widely disseminated, and called the Bank of Brazil to a meeting on the 27th. The ministers of Racial Equality and Rights are also invited to the meeting. Human Rights of the Government headed by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in addition to some of the 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. He explains on the phone that “any Brazilian institution of the 19th century was directly or indirectly related to human trafficking or slavery.” He adds that the bank was chosen because it is one of the few institutions born at that time that still exists, although it has undergone several refoundations throughout these more than two centuries. “This is a debate that already exists in other countries and we are very behind,” he points out, before adding that in Brazil “the slavery chapter was normalized” “without questioning in all this time that the bank that bears the name of our nation was founded on slavery.”
The historian details that, in 1853, the main private shareholder of the Bank of Brazil was one of the largest traffickers of Africans, 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 voyage could translate into 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 it in the final days. They also covered the bodies of Africans with oil. All with the aim that, when docking, those men and women would be stronger (or less weak), look better and be able to sell them at a better price, according to the story. Escravidão. The magnate De Sá was one of the richest men in the empire, patron of a theater and owner of estates.
Julio Araujo, one of the members of the Public Ministry, who signed the decision to open this investigation, explains that the priority objective is to open the discussion: “This is a very important, crucial issue that has to enter the public agenda, in the debate,” he says over the phone. After contacts between the bank, the public ministry and historians, the researchers’ objectives are to broaden the focus to incorporate black activist movements and the rest of society. Araujo emphasizes that the end of this process is not yet written: “We do not know if the bank is going to recognize violations, if it is going to ask for forgiveness, if it is going to deepen the investigation of its history. The priority now is to put the issue on the agenda.”
Historian Campos has been pleasantly surprised by the speed and disposition with which the entity responded to the opening of the case. “The Bank of Brazil has the capacity to recount its history, to investigate its archives, and thus participate in the reconstruction of that past erased from our history.”
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