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Brazil
black history
by Henry Louis Gates Jr, April 8, 2011
Less than 5 percent of the 11.5 million Africans wrenched
into slavery ended up in the United States. That is one reason
Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr. decided to explore the
lives and cultures of blacks from Brazil to Haiti, from Peru
to Mexico, in his new PBS television series.
I
first learned that there were black people living somewhere
in the Western Hemisphere other than the United States when
my father told me the first thing he had wanted to be when
he grew up. When he was a boy about my age, he said, he wanted
to be an Episcopal priest because he so admired his priest
at St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Cumberland, Md., a black
man from some place called Haiti.
I
knew by this time that there were black people in Africa,
of course, because of movies such as Tarzan and TV shows like
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and Ramar of the Jungle. And then,
in 1960, when I was 10 years old, our fifth-grade class studied
"Current Affairs," and we learned about the 17 African
nations that gained their independence that year. I did my
best to memorize the names of these countries and their leaders,
though I wasn't quite sure why I found these facts so very
appealing. But my father's revelation about his earliest childhood
ambition introduced me to the fact that there were black people
living in other parts of the New World, a fact that I found
quite surprising.
It
wasn't until my sophomore year at Yale, as a student auditing
Robert Farris Thompson's art-history class, the Trans-Atlantic
Tradition: From Africa to the Black Americas, that I began
to understand how "black" the New World really was.
Professor Thompson used a methodology that he called the "tri-continental
approach" -- complete with three slide projectors --
to trace visual leitmotifs that recurred among African, African-American
and Afro-descended artistic traditions and artifacts in the
Caribbean and Latin America, to show, à la Melville
Herskovits, the retention of what he called "Africanisms"
in the New World. So in a very real sense, I would have to
say that my fascination with Afro-descendants in this hemisphere,
south of the United States, began in 1969, in Professor Thompson's
very popular -- and extremely entertaining and rich -- art-history
lecture course.
In
addition, Sidney Mintz's anthropology courses and his brilliant
scholarly work on the history of the role of sugar in plantation
slavery in the Caribbean and Latin America also served to
awaken my curiosity about another Black World, a world both
similar to and different from ours, south of our borders.
And Roy Bryce-Laporte, the courageous chair of the program
in Afro-American studies, introduced me to black culture from
his native Panama. I owe so much of what I know about African-American
culture in the New World to these three wise and generous
professors.
But
the full weight of the African presence in the Caribbean and
Latin America didn't hit me until I became familiar with the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, conceived by the great
historians David Eltis and David Richardson and based now
at Emory University. Between 1502 and 1866, 11.2 million Africans
survived the dreadful Middle Passage and landed as slaves
in the New World.
And
here is where these statistics became riveting to me: Of these
11.2 million Africans, according to Eltis and Richardson,
only 450,000 arrived in the United States. That is the mind-boggling
part to me, and I think to most Americans. All the rest arrived
in places south of our border. About 4.8 million Africans
went to Brazil alone. So, in one sense, the major "African-American
experience," as it were, unfolded not in the United States,
as those of us caught in the embrace of what we might think
of as "African-American exceptionalism" might have
thought, but throughout the Caribbean and South America, if
we are thinking of this phenomenon in terms of sheer numbers
alone.
About
a decade ago, I decided that I would try to make a documentary
about these Afro-descendants, a four-hour series about race
and black culture in the Western Hemisphere outside of the
United States and Canada. I filmed this series, Black in Latin
America, this past summer, focusing on six countries -- Brazil,
Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Mexico and Peru -- choosing
each country as representative of a larger phenomenon. This
series, airing on PBS television, is the third in a trilogy
that began with Wonders of the African World, a six-part series
that aired in 1998. That series was followed by America Behind
the Color Line, a four-part series that aired in 2004.
In
a sense, I wanted to replicate Robert Farris Thompson's "tri-continental"
methodology to make, through documentary film, a comparative
analysis of these cardinal points of the Black World. Another
way to think of it is that I wanted to replicate the points
of the Atlantic triangular trade: Africa, the European colonies
of the Caribbean and South America, and black America. The
book accompanying Black in Latin America expands considerably
on what I was able to include in that series. You might say
that I have been fortunate enough to find myself over the
past decade in a most enviable position: to be able to make
films about subjects about which I am curious and about which
I initially knew very little, with the generous assistance
of many scholars in these fields and many more informants
I interviewed in these countries.
The
most important question that the PBS series and the book attempt
to explore is this: What does it mean to be "black"
in these countries? Who is considered "black," and
under what circumstances and by whom, in these societies?
The answers to these questions vary widely across Latin America
in ways that will surprise most people in the United States,
just as they surprised me.
Henry
Louis Gates Jr. is editor-in-chief of The Root and chairman
of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. The
Black in Latin America series airs over four weeks on PBS
stations around the U.S. The accompanying book, from which
this excerpt is drawn, will be published by NYU Press in March.
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