The saga of Africans and their descendants who returned to the Bight of Benin from Brazil in the nineteenth century—known in Benin and Nigeria as Brazilians, Agudas, or Amaros—has long captured the imagination of scholars. The single most intensive phase of return occurred in the late 1830s, following a Muslim-led slave uprising in the province of Bahia known as the Malê rebellion. Many other freed people migrated during later periods of the century.Footnote 1 Islam helped catalyze the early phase of the returnee movement, and most towns with Aguda quarters have mosques founded by returnees at different points in the nineteenth century. Still, as Elisée Soumonni observes, Muslim returnees have received little attention from scholars, most of whom have emphasized Catholicism’s importance in Aguda identity. Lagos is no exception, even though many of its Aguda families are known to be predominately Muslim.Footnote 2
This article examines the history of Muslim returnees by reconstructing the life of Saliu Salvador Ramos das Neves, founder of one of the oldest “Brazilian” mosques in Lagos. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic data from both sides of the Atlantic, the paper investigates his path from enslavement in Oyo and life in Bahia during the time of the Malê uprising, to freedom and eventual return to Lagos, where he became a leader among Muslim returnees. In tracing the story of his individual life, we also examine the role of other Muslims in the history of return to Lagos, underscoring Islam’s centrality in the making of Lagos’s Brazilian quarter and relating Saliu Salvador’s biography to the experiences of other Muslim returnees, in Bahia and in Lagos. Finally, the paper demonstrates that Muslims played an active role in the dynamic commercial and affective relationships that linked Africans in Brazil and West Africa during the nineteenth century.
The biographical approach that structures our article yields fine-grained information about individual subjects and their worlds, which tends to remain opaque when macro-historical methods are used, as recent historiography of the Black Atlantic shows.Footnote 3 Saliu Salvador’s biography yielded crucial information about his family and other personal relationships that were critical to his success as a freedman in Brazil. Many of those relationships were still important when he died four decades after leaving Brazil, illustrating the vital role of such networks in returnees’ lives.
Given our subject’s geographic mobility, sources from both sides of the Atlantic are integral to our analysis. Working with disparate sources, however, creates challenges. Most basically, returnees often were known by different names in different places, which sometimes changed across time, complicating efforts to trace them. The founder of Salvador Mosque, for example, appears in Brazilian documents as Salvador Ramos das Neves, but in Lagos his descendants remember him as Ramos Saliu Salvador. When discussing his life in Bahia, we have opted to refer to him using the names that appear in records there; in the section of the article dealing with Lagos, we refer to him as Saliu Salvador, in keeping with popular memory.
Enslavement and First Years in Bahia
In 1857, when Salvador Ramos das Neves left Brazil, he was around 54 years old and had been in Brazil for nearly three decades. His descendants’ family oríkì mentions Ilorin, an important city in the kingdom of Oyo, perhaps his place of birth.Footnote 4 This suggests that he was enslaved during the political turmoil that assailed Ilorin and the surrounding region in the 1820s. The city’s ruler, Afonja, who held an important military post in Oyo, had been dissatisfied with its leadership for years. Much of Oyo’s enslaved population was Muslim, and in 1817 Afonja formed an alliance with them, rebelling against the Aláàfin [king] of Oyo. Around 1823, however, Afonja’s erstwhile allies turned on him and he was killed. From that point on, Ilorin fell under the control of the Sokoto Caliphate, becoming a strategic vantage point for expanding an ongoing jihad into Oyo’s territory. Around ten years later, Sokoto’s armies razed Oyo-Ile, the kingdom’s capital.Footnote 5
Many of the captives seized during these and other conflicts in the Yoruba-speaking region were taken to the coast and sold into the Atlantic slave trade, whose main markets at that point were Brazil and Cuba.Footnote 6 Like most other Yoruba speakers who ended up in Brazil, Saliu was shipped to the city of Salvador da Bahia, capital of the province of Bahia and one of the biggest slave ports in the Americas. There, he was purchased by an African couple, Luis Ramos and Felizarda Rosa das Neves. On 15 August 1830, they took Saliu to their parish church, where he was baptized with the name Salvador, meaning savior, a common given name in Brazil.Footnote 7 The same day, the couple baptized three other captives. Like Salvador, they were described in their baptism records as Nagô, a term that in Bahia referred to any Yoruba speaker.Footnote 8 As freed Africans who had gone on to become slave masters, Luis Ramos and his wife were not unusual in Brazil, where an abolition movement would only take shape in the second half of the 1800s. Moreover, in the late 1820s Brazil was experiencing a boom in the trade in enslaved Africans, creating a buyer’s market that made slave ownership more accessible to those near the bottom of the economic pyramid, including Africans such as Luis Ramos and his wife.Footnote 9 By 1830 the vast majority of Africans arriving in the city were Nagôs, most of them captured during the Oyo, Owu, and Egba wars. Islam was present in these regions and some of those arriving in Bahia were already Muslims, especially those from Oyo.Footnote 10 Others converted in Bahia where there was already a diverse Muslim community that included Hausas, Bornos, Baribas, Nupes, and Fulanis.Footnote 11 It is unclear at what point in his life Saliu adhered to the teachings of Mohammed, but the stature he quickly attained among Muslims after his return to Lagos indicates that his faith dated back to his years in Brazil, if not earlier.
The parish of Pilar, where Salvador’s master and mistress lived, was near the port, nestled along the base of a steep coastal escarpment. An area of warehouses and slave markets, Pilar also had a small residential district, home mainly to slave traders, sea captains, sailors, porters, barbers, and others employed in maritime commerce or its service sector. According to an 1855 census, Africans and Creoles (i.e., Brazilian-born Blacks with no racial mixing), nearly all of them enslaved, made up about 40 percent of the parish’s population.Footnote 12 Freed African residents tended to be involved in its dominant economic sectors, usually performing types of work they had been trained for during their enslavement. This was probably the case with Luis Ramos, whose former master, a slave trader, lived in Pilar.Footnote 13 After obtaining his freedom, Ramos remained in the parish, moving to an area known as Mangueira.
In urban Brazil, the type of work performed by captives varied depending on their age and gender. Strong young men, for example, were often trained as porters, stonemasons, or carpenters. Women often worked as hawkers, selling food of various types. Enslaved vendors received payment directly from the customer, turning over a fixed sum to the master each week according to a predetermined agreement. Anything over that amount was the vendor’s to keep, a system that facilitated saving up to buy one’s freedom.Footnote 14
Salvador was trained as a barber. One of the most lucrative trades open to Africans in Brazil, barbering involved not only cutting hair and shaving beards, but also performing curative procedures of the times, especially bleeding and cupping. Barbers’ expertise in such practices made them sought-after to work on slave ships, where poor sanitation, diet, and crowded conditions led to the outbreak of diseases.Footnote 15 On land, barbers were called upon to treat captives’ ailments, especially the newly arrived, who were often weak and in poor health. Moreover, as João José Reis argues, because of barbers’ expertise as healers, they could purchase ailing captives at bargain prices, later nursing them back to health—and profitability. This may help to explain why freedmen who were barbers often owned relatively large numbers of slaves.Footnote 16 Given that Salvador was a barber and lived in a district where most employment opportunities were related to the slave trade, it is likely that he worked in that economic sector, whether on land or at sea. Moreover, as a resident of the parish where arriving captives disembarked, he was in a privileged position to receive news from Yorubaland, including subjects that weighed heavily on the minds of Africans in Brazil, such as the wars that had led to their enslavement and the fate of family and friends left behind.
The Malê Uprising
Early in 1835, a major Muslim-led slave revolt exploded in the city, becoming known as the Revolta dos Malês [Malê Rebellion], from the Yoruba word ìmàle, meaning Muslim. Although the rebels included some Nupes, the leaders were mainly Yoruba speakers, many of them from Oyo.Footnote 17 One, a freedman whose Brazilian name was Aprigio, had been enslaved by Geraldo Roiz Pereira, a freedman who lived a stone’s throw away from Luis Ramos.Footnote 18 As some of the few freedmen in a parish where most Africans were in bondage, Pereira and Ramos had probably known each other for years. Pereira shared a cultural bond with Ramos’s wife, Felizarda: both were Jejes, an ethnonym that referred to Gbe-speaking peoples from the kingdom of Dahomey and the surrounding region.
Aprigio and Salvador were undoubtedly well-acquainted through their masters and as fellow Oyo they shared an important bond. Moreover, Aprigio worked in Mangueira, very close to Salvador’s master’s home (Figure 1). While waiting for customers, Aprigio led Muslim prayer sessions and taught his countrymen to write Qur’anic verses, accumulating a following. From this, we may surmise that he was an alfa or Islamic teacher. Although he moved to the center of the city after gaining his freedom in 1831, Aprigio continued to work in Mangueira, thus maintaining contact with his followers.Footnote 19 Salvador almost certainly participated in Aprigio’s prayer sessions.
Figure 1. Map of Salvador da Bahia, c. 1851. The grey rectangle marks the approximate boundaries of Pilar Parish. The red circle indicates the Mangueira district, where Salvador Ramos das Neves lived and where Aprigio worked. The red oval shows where Aprigio lived during his enslavement, and the white circle shows where he resided as a freedman. Detail of Carlos Augusto Weyll, “Mappa topographica da cidade de S. Salvador e seus suburbios,” c. 1851.
Source: Biblioteca Nacional (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil).
Aprigio’s new home, shared with some of the rebellion’s leaders, became one of the epicenters of the uprising. The scene of the first battle, it was also where planning sessions were held.Footnote 20 Salvador’s mistress, Felizarda, testified against Aprigio, as did several other Mangueira residents. They stated that they had seen him leading his countrymen in “prayers in their language,” and that he conducted writing sessions using the same “strange letters and characters” found on papers among the rebels’ possessions. They had also seen him preparing white tunics like the ones used by the rebels in battle.Footnote 21
Whether Salvador participated in the uprising is unclear. What is clear is that he was not one of the nearly three hundred Africans who were arrested, over twenty of whom, like him, were enslaved residents of Pilar Parish. Many of the accused were jailed for the mere possession of papers with Arabic writing on them, such as Julião Nagô, a friend of Salvador’s who was eventually absolved.Footnote 22 Aprigio, however, was found to be one of the main conspirators, and he was one of the few who received a death sentence.Footnote 23 Many others, found guilty of lesser offenses, were sentenced to prison terms or brutally flogged. In addition, some two hundred freedmen were deported to Africa.Footnote 24 In the face of the anti-African, anti-Muslim backlash that swept the city, many others, including non-Muslims, left voluntarily. They settled in coastal towns of the Bight of Benin, especially Ouidah and Agoué, where some became important in the growth of Islam.Footnote 25
The return migrations of the 1830s stand out because of the sheer numbers of people involved. But they occurred within a longstanding context of voyages to the Bight of Benin by Africans, both enslaved and freed, who worked in the Atlantic slave trade.Footnote 26 Several of those accused in the Malê uprising had recently been to the continent.Footnote 27 Aprigio’s own master, freedman Geraldo Roiz Pereira, had made a number of trips to Lagos, accompanied by enslaved assistants, some of whom continued working in the African trade after obtaining their freedom.Footnote 28 Paradoxically, the Bahian capital’s role as a slave port enabled a small but significant part of its African population to maintain contact with the continent of their birth. These voyagers served as messengers who brought news of events in their homelands, sometimes even precious information about the fate of those who had been left behind. As we will see further on, this pattern continued after the end of the slave trade, via freed people engaged in legitimate commerce.Footnote 29
Life as a Freedman
The return migrations of the late 1830s abruptly transformed the demographics of Bahia’s freed African community. Many of those who left were longtime residents and prosperous, respected figures. Nagôs and members of other ethnic groups that practiced Islam, such as Hausas, Bornos, and Nupes, formed a disproportionate number of the travelers.Footnote 30 For Muslims who stayed in Brazil, the rebellion’s aftermath reshaped their way of life. Anti-Islamic prejudice remained high for many years and those who were enslaved or enjoyed little privacy learned to conceal their faith, often abandoning protocols on prayer schedules and diet.Footnote 31
Salvador’s master died at the end of 1837. Three years later, Salvador purchased his freedom from the widow, Felizarda Rosa das Neves.Footnote 32 The manumission letter was drawn up in the office of two wealthy slave traders, José Alves da Cruz Rios and his brother Joaquim Alves da Cruz Rios, who signed as witnesses to the transaction.Footnote 33 Their role in Salvador’s manumission suggests that he worked for them in some capacity, either aboard their slave ships or in their warehouse for newly arrived captives.
As a freedman, Salvador assumed surnames borrowed from his former masters, as was the custom in Brazil, becoming known as Salvador Ramos das Neves. As Luis Ramos had done, Salvador continued residing in the parish where he had lived during his enslavement. Although we located many documents that shed light on his life as a freedman, none illuminates his involvement in Islam. Indeed, like many other freed Africans, both Muslims and those who worshiped African deities, Salvador continued to engage in the sacrament of baptism, a fundamental Catholic rite.
This should not be interpreted, however, as evidence of religious conviction. In Brazil, Catholic records performed important bureaucratic functions in addition to religious ones. Catholic baptism, marriage, and death certificates had the weight of legal documents. Baptism certificates in particular were necessary for personal identification, a point that comes up in the travel account of an Ottoman imam who visited Brazil in 1865. He noted with astonishment that Muslims in Brazil “submerge their children in the water of the baptismal basin,” because failure to present proof of baptism could be interpreted by the authorities as a ruse to conceal enslaved status.Footnote 34 For the masters of enslaved people, baptism records were considered proof of ownership. Moreover, in Brazil, as in other parts of Latin America, the bonds of fictive kinship created by godparenting, termed compadrio in Portuguese, performed important social functions. At times, they signaled the existence of affective ties; at others, they formalized relationships of mutual, albeit unequal, obligation.Footnote 35 Captives’ godparents were especially important in the latter sense: they were usually chosen by the master for reasons that were more strategic than emotional.Footnote 36
Salvador participated in baptism rituals both as a godfather and as the master of captives. In his first years after manumission, he was godfather to several captives belonging to the Cruz Rios family, revealing that he remained within their sphere of influence. In 1843, for example, he participated in a collective baptism involving twenty-odd bondsmen owned by the family.Footnote 37 Some others baptized that day belonged to members of its patronage network, including a few Africans such as Salvador. That day, he stood as godfather to one of the Cruz Rios family’s slaves and baptized one of his own, christened Manoel, the first of various captives that Salvador would acquire during his time in Brazil.Footnote 38
While still a captive himself, Salvador had formed a stable union with Maria Luiza da Conceição, an enslaved Nagô woman. In 1837, she bore a daughter named Tecla, apparently their first and only child. Although her mother was still in captivity, Tecla was baptized as free. Her godfather was a white notary public, a choice that brought the promise of well-placed support in the event of any problems with the authorities.Footnote 39 By 1843, Maria Luiza had obtained her freedom as well, but she and Salvador never formalized their union through a church wedding, perhaps a sign of limited engagement with Catholicism.Footnote 40 At some point, Salvador took a second common-law wife, a Nagô woman named Camilla Guimarães, ten years younger than Maria Luiza. It is unclear when this new relationship began, but it was probably formalized in mid-1853, when Camilla purchased her freedom from her master.Footnote 41 There is no evidence of any offspring born in Bahia, but she and Salvador later had children in Lagos.
When Brazil’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade ended in 1850, barbers lost one of their most important sources of income. It may have been in response to this change that Salvador opened a barber shop a few doors from his residence on the Rua da Mangueira. Although some barbers plied their trade in open squares, those who had the means often rented commercial spaces to offer their clients more comfort and privacy.Footnote 42 In addition to being trained in Brazilian healing practices, some barbers had parallel expertise in African ones and played important roles in religious communities that worshiped the òrìṣà and the vodun. Footnote 43 Little is known about Muslim barbers in Brazil, making it difficult to know whether they too employed an eclectic approach to healing the ailments of body and spirit, but it seems likely.
Certain healing practices were sanctioned by orthodox Islam, such as ingesting the water used to rinse writing boards or using amulets containing Qur’anic verses. Still, most Muslims in Brazil did not limit themselves to orthodox Islam, borrowing extensively from African practices, much to the chagrin of the Ottoman imam mentioned above. At various points in his account, he bemoaned local Muslims’ refusal to refrain from divination, geomancy, and numerology. Reports from later periods also highlight Muslim heterodoxy in Brazil.Footnote 44 Given this context, it is probable that both Salvador’s Islamic practice and the healing techniques he employed in his barbering were influenced by Yoruba beliefs.
By January 1855, Salvador owned a barber shop, as noted by a census worker who also visited his home. His household was one of the largest on the block and one of only two headed by an African. The census report provides a detailed picture of the household’s composition (Table 1). Of the fourteen people living there, four were described as free: Salvador, Maria Luiza, Camilla, and Tecla. Ten others were described as Salvador’s slaves: three men, three women, and four children.Footnote 45 This was a relatively large number of enslaved people for an urban household, especially given that Salvador and his wives were former captives themselves, working their way up from poverty.Footnote 46
Table 1. Census report on the household at 38 Rua da Mangueira
Source: 1855 Census, APEB, Governo da Província, Recenseamento, Documentos Avulsos 1824–1873, Maço 1602. Information in this table is given as it appears in the census report.
The labor performed by these enslaved men and women was undoubtedly fundamental in allowing the household’s free members to accumulate the capital that paid for their eventual return to Lagos. Two of the men, barbers like their master, probably worked alongside him in his shop. One, Manoel, had served Salvador for over ten years. The other, Joaquim, a more recent acquisition, was probably still an apprentice. No occupation was given for the third male captive, Antonio, nor is it clear when he entered the household.Footnote 47 The census taker also neglected to record occupations for any of the women, even the enslaved ones, but it is likely that they all worked under the supervision of Maria Luiza, the senior wife, as vendors in food markets or as hawkers in the streets, the predominant economic activities of African women in urban Brazil.Footnote 48 Despite Camilla’s free status, according to Yoruba norms she was subordinate to Maria Luiza, having entered the household after her.Footnote 49
Most of the social and kin relationships described in the census report are confirmed by other documents, but at times significant differences emerge. For example, although Christina and Joanna were described by the census worker as belonging to Salvador, notary records show that their legal mistress was Maria Luiza.Footnote 50 Moreover, Maria Pursina—described in the report as enslaved—had been free since 1853, when Salvador gave her a manumission letter, identifying her as “the daughter of my slave Felicidade.” In 1857, when he requested permission for her to travel to Lagos with him, he again described himself only as her former master. Many years later, however, in his will, he referred to Pursina as his daughter.Footnote 51 It is thus difficult to know whether she was his biological child or he simply considered her to be one.Footnote 52
During Salvador’s final years in Bahia, he continued to utilize the Catholic institution of godparenting, but his strategy shifted. Rather than deploying it to create client-patron relationships with elite families such as the Cruz Rios, he invested in forming a more horizontal and largely African social network. His new compadres were freed Africans, often fellow Nagôs who lived nearby.Footnote 53 In 1849, for example, he stood as godfather to the daughter of his friend Julião, who had been arrested but found innocent in the Malê rebellion. In 1852, he was godfather to the only child of Nagô barber Primo Mendes dos Santos.Footnote 54 Still another compadre was Nagô freedman Pompeo Monteiro, whose eldest child was Salvador’s goddaughter.Footnote 55 The relationships of trust and mutual support between freedmen that godparenting ties created and strengthened frequently withstood the test of time. As with many other returnees, in Salvador’s case these ties spanned the Atlantic.Footnote 56
Returning to Africa
Early in 1850, Pompeo Monteiro traveled to Africa, leaving his wife and daughter in Bahia.Footnote 57 His voyage occurred at the vanguard of a wave of new migration by freed people of West African origin who were leaving Brazil to resettle in the continent of their birth. Some had begun their journeys in other parts of Brazil, especially Rio de Janeiro and Recife. Pompeo’s trip appears to have been a reconnaissance mission: by 1856 he was back in Bahia, where he requested passports for his entire family to accompany him back to Onim, as Lagos was then known in the Lusophone world.Footnote 58 Like him, many other men leaving Bahia at that time traveled with wives and children. This trend represented a change from the previous decade, when most freed Africans crossing the Atlantic from Bahia were single men who worked on slave ships or in slave “factories” in African ports.Footnote 59
As mentioned, Brazil withdrew from the Atlantic slave trade at the end of 1850, delivering a fatal blow to that employment sector. In December of the following year Britain bombarded Lagos and deposed its ruler, ending the town’s role as a slave port. It is sometimes assumed that this change in Lagos’s status infused new life into the returnee movement, by turning the town into a safe haven.Footnote 60 Yet as early as 1848, more and more freed people were already traveling to West Africa with permanent resettlement in mind, judging from the increasing percentage of freedwomen and children receiving passports.Footnote 61 The timing of this demographic shift calls into question the idea that the increase in permanent migration was sparked by a reduced risk of re-enslavement.Footnote 62 Whatever catalyzed the change, the number of women and children receiving passports remained high and by 1860 Lagos had emerged as the preferred destination of Africans leaving Brazil.Footnote 63
Salvador Ramos das Neves and his household joined the exodus to Lagos in early 1857, less than a year after Pompeo relocated there. A number of factors probably motivated the decision, including financial ones. Since the beginning of the decade, the provincial government had been drastically increasing the taxes targeting freed Africans. Discrimination against Muslims was probably another issue. In 1853, an underground Qur’anic school was raided by the city police, who seized writing tablets and other supplies. In response, a group of Muslims petitioned the authorities for religious freedom, to no avail. A few months later, a Nagô alfa named Rufino José Maria was arrested in the distant province of Pernambuco, under trumped-up charges of inciting insurrection. He was eventually exonerated, but the case had already received attention from major newspapers. Given that Muslims in Bahia were lobbying for the right to practice their religion, there is little doubt that they were aware of Rufino’s arrest.Footnote 64 Then in 1855, a devastating cholera epidemic swept Brazil, killing thousands of people in Bahia alone.Footnote 65
On 20 January 1857, Salvador sold Felicidade her freedom for the high price of 1 conto de réis. Footnote 66 Her manumission letter is the earliest concrete indication that the family was beginning to liquidate assets in preparation for leaving for Africa. Over the following weeks, most of the family’s other captives bought their freedom or were sold. Salvador gave power of attorney to his friend and compadre Primo Mendes dos Santos, entrusting him with the family’s two remaining captives.Footnote 67
In March, Salvador applied for passports for himself, Maria Luiza, Camilla, and Tecla (now eighteen years old).Footnote 68 His application also named several children who had appeared in the census report as enslaved. One, as already mentioned, was Pursina, Felicidade’s daughter. The girl’s older brother, João, was also on the list, as was Christina’s daughter, Maria Isabel.Footnote 69 The latter had recently been freed at no charge, but the mother, like Felicidade, had paid dearly for her manumission.Footnote 70 Neither of the two women traveled with the group, perhaps owing to tensions over the cost of their freedom. Felicidade, however, ended up going to Lagos twenty years later, where she rejoined her children and former master, as discussed later on.
The party appears to have left Bahia on the French brig Naplousin, which had recently arrived from West Africa with a load of palm oil, country cloths, kola nuts, shea butter, and other merchandise. After the slave trade ended, a smaller commerce in non-human commodities, especially palm oil, continued between Bahia and the Bight of Benin. When the Naplousin returned to Africa on 7 April, in addition to a cargo of sugar cane spirits it carried 120 travelers, Salvador and his household undoubtedly among them.Footnote 71 The voyage was slow, hampered by the easterly winds that prevailed in those latitudes. The Naplousin did not reach Lagos until the end of May.Footnote 72
Settlement in Lagos
New emigrants from Brazil typically stayed on arrival with friends or acquaintances who had returned to Lagos before them, until they could buy a house of their own or acquire land and build one.Footnote 73 For Saliu Salvador and his party that may have meant Pompeo Monteiro. The hospitality and assistance immigrants received from their hosts began a longer process of rebuilding their lives and recreating communities of identity and support in Lagos.Footnote 74
The family undoubtedly returned to Africa with some capital saved from the sale of their property in Bahia. Quickly, however, they would have wanted and needed means of earning income in Lagos. Saliu Salvador, his wives, and his grown daughter may have brought small quantities of goods from Brazil to trade after their arrival. When Primo Mendes dos Santos died in 1861, he identified himself in his will as the “correspondent” of Salvador Ramos das Neves, meaning that the two had a business relationship.Footnote 75 Most likely, their business involved shipping trade goods to one another. On the African end, the most common exports to Bahia were those carried by the Naplousin in 1857, especially country cloths and palm oil. The latter was used in cooking by African and African-descended people and as an industrial lubricant, among other things. On the Bahian end, tobacco and sugar-cane liquor were common. After his partner’s death, Saliu Salvador would have had little difficulty finding another commercial correspondent among the many freedmen in Bahia who provided such services for returnees in West Africa. Following the abolition of the slave trade to Brazil, an active, if smaller, commerce in non-human commodities continued between Lagos and Bahia, although it declined dramatically in the last two decades of the century.Footnote 76 While Saliu Salvador probably continued to be involved in small-scale commerce, trade did not define his identity.
Saliu Salvador also likely continued to work as a barber in Lagos, a service in demand in the town. As a learned Muslim, he probably derived income from making and selling charms and amulets, some of which were designed to have healing powers.Footnote 77 His wives and grown daughter Tecla contributed to their own support probably by hawking provisions, cooked food, or Brazilian wares in the streets or from the steps or windows of their residence. Alternatively, they may have provided services such as sewing or laundering.Footnote 78 The children who accompanied Saliu Salvador from Brazil contributed labor appropriate to their ages and gender. The contributions of youths were vital to the economic life of households in Lagos and the wider region.Footnote 79 Saliu Salvador and Maria Luiza had been economically successful in Bahia, despite their subordinate status and the oppressive conditions in which they lived. In Lagos Salvador showed similar drive, but his top priority appears to have been religious teaching not business. When he died in 1895, his estate was valued at under £100.Footnote 80
Lagos land records reveal that in April 1865, Salvador Ramos das Neves received a grant to a plot in Faji, an area near the center of Lagos island where many returnees were settling. Britain had annexed Lagos a decade after the 1851 bombardment. The new colonial government soon began to issue land grants in recognition of prior occupation, not as a means of allocating vacant land. Saliu Salvador therefore must have acquired his land some time before, via purchase or a grant from the ọba (king) or a chief. By the time he received his grant, he and his family may have been using the land for several years.Footnote 81 By early 1866 around 260 crown grants had been issued. About 15 percent of them went to returnees from Brazil.Footnote 82 Saliu Salvador was thus in the forefront of an important change taking place in local land tenure, as were other Muslim returnees. One, Ventura Grillo alias Momo, who reached Lagos in 1859, also received a land grant in 1865 and was almost certainly a part of Salvador Saliu’s social network. The two men may have known each other in Bahia, where Grillo lived in a parish adjacent to Pilar. Members of the two families later intermarried and became important in the early history of Inabere Mosque, founded in the 1920s.Footnote 83 Another important Aguda Muslim leader, Alfa Tairu Akinosho Eko, who founded an eponymous mosque in 1882, received three land grants.Footnote 84
The land Saliu Salvador acquired was in a desirable location in the eastern part of Faji, and it became an important asset. New immigrants were constructing houses and other buildings in the neighborhood, which gradually altered the landscape of the central portion of the island. By 1868, three major east-west thoroughfares had been created: Bamgbose Street, Tokunboh Street, and Igbosere Road. Narrow cross streets intersected them. Salvador’s plot fronted on Bamgbose and ran along Joseph Street to its intersection with Igboṣere Road (Figure 2). West of it lay an open space that later became known as Campos Square and was regarded as the center of Popo Aguda, the Brazilian quarter. Close to Saliu Salvador’s plot stood St. Peter’s Anglican church and school, opened in the 1850s and attended by some Aguda children.Footnote 85 A few blocks to the southeast, the Société des Missions Africaines (SMA) founded Lagos’s only Catholic mission in 1868.Footnote 86 Saliu Salvador’s land lay smack in the heart of the Brazilian quarter, and it was near the center of the growing colonial town and expanding Atlantic port.Footnote 87
Figure 2. Map of Lagos, c. 1885–1890. The darker area shows the approximate limits of Faji, where many returnees from Brazil settled. Note that the mosque founded by Saliu Salvador lay several blocks east of Alagbayun, the town’s first Brazilian mosque. Still further to the east was Tairu Eko Mosque, perhaps a reflection of the fact that it was founded somewhat later. Inabere Mosque came into being in the 1920s.
Sources: Jean Herskovits Kopytoff, A Preface to Modern Nigeria: The “Sierra Leonians” in Yoruba, 1830-1890 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 90–93; Michael J. C. Echeruo, Victorian Lagos: Aspects of Nineteenth Century Lagos Life (London: Macmillan, 1977), 18–19; TNA, UK, “Town of Lagos, West Africa, 1891,” CO700, Lagos 14.
In this changing neighborhood, Saliu Salvador erected a dwelling. His household initially consisted of those who came with him from Brazil, but its size and composition changed during his lifetime. Family trees created by contemporary descendants of his son Sabiu provide insights into the family structure, but they do not identify his children’s mothers. Nor do they name the children’s spouses. However, utilizing information from Catholic records and Salvador Ramos das Neves’s last will and testament, we have been able to fill in some of the gaps (Figure 3).Footnote 88
Figure 3. First generations of the Salvador family.
Sources: Moshood Adegoke Salvador, Beyond a Dream: A Memoir (Lagos: Self-published, 2014), ix; Salvador family Youth Program, “Birth Map of Salvador’s Grandfather”; Lagos Baptism Register and the will of Salvador Ramos das Neves.
In Lagos Saliu Salvador took two more wives, Fatuman and Rafiatu. We were unable to find information about the latter, but Fatuman was the Lagos-born daughter of a Brazilian returnee, Higino Pinto da Fonseca, whom Salvador knew from his time in Bahia. She and Saliu Salvador had two children, a daughter named Amina and a son, Sabiu.Footnote 89 Both Maria Luiza and Fatuman died before their husband, but in his will, Saliu Salvador named two wives who survived him: Camilla alias Asana and Rafiatu.Footnote 90 After Maria Luiza’s death Camilla became his senior wife. She appears to have been the mother of his daughter Aishat and his son Sani. Judging from their lack of Catholic names, we assume they were born in Lagos. Catholic names were acquired at baptism, which was obligatory in Brazil but optional in Lagos, where it often depended on the mother’s wishes. Rafiatu was probably the mother of some, perhaps all, of Salvador Saliu’s five remaining daughters: Ramatu, Memunat, Rabiatu, Rekiatu, and Binatu, also presumably born in Lagos.
Many of the females in the second generation probably left the household on marriage or entry into informal domestic unions. Tecla, for example, had her first child in 1862 with Firmino Jacob dos Santos, a Creole returnee. In the 1870s, she had children with two other men.Footnote 91 Later still, Maria Pursina married a prominent Aguda Muslim, José Aruna Martins, as did Aishat, whose husband was Joaquim de Oliveira, alias Tairu Danmola.Footnote 92 Eventually, all of the daughters born in Lagos probably formed domestic unions through formal marriage or other means. While these unions were intact, the women may have lived outside Saliu Salvador’s household, although they enjoyed rights to return to it.Footnote 93 Saliu Salvador’s two sons Sani and Sabiu still lived in his household at the time of his death, as did João, who had come with the family from Bahia.
Intermittently, other people also lived in Saliu Salvador’s household. Felicidade and Antonio, formerly enslaved by Salvador in Bahia, returned to Africa in 1877.Footnote 94 It is unclear what became of Antonio, but Felicidade evidently entered the household at that time. Even though she was the mother of Maria Pursina—who Saliu Salvador identified as a daughter in his will—he did not name Felicidade as a wife, although she still lived in his household when he died in 1898. Friends and co-worshipers newly arrived from Brazil likely also found temporary lodgings in the house on Bamgbose Street, as did apprentices and students of Islam.
Household heads enlarged their dwellings in stages, as the demand for space arose. By the end of his life Saliu Salvador’s dwelling included two corridors and multiple rooms, with a yard and gardens behind. In addition to that property, located on the western side of Joseph Street, he owned two houses on the east side of the street, adjacent to Salvador Mosque. At the time he wrote his will, he supplemented his income by renting out space in all three of his houses, which he managed as a single compound.Footnote 95 Although his descendants no longer own the properties adjacent to the mosque, to this day, the family compound lies at the corner of Bamgbose and Joseph streets, directly across from Salvador Mosque (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Salvador Mosque and the family compound today. View of Salvador Mosque (left) and the family compound (right), separated by Joseph Street, seen from Bamgbose Street looking south. Source: Google Maps (accessed 19 August 2023).
Founding a Mosque, Building a Religious Community
According to a recent survey conducted by the municipal government of Lagos, there are eight Brazilian mosques on Lagos Island today, six of which date back to the nineteenth century: Alagbayun, Salvador, Olosun, Obadina, Oloro, and Tairu Eko.Footnote 96 A seventh, Inabere, was founded in the early 1900s, as already mentioned. In most cases, oral traditions give conflicting dates of their founding, a problem that is perpetuated in written sources.
The mosque named after Saliu Salvador Ramos das Neves provides an excellent example. Some sources claim it dates back to the late eighteenth century, but an inscription above the entrance to the building states that it was founded in 1848. However, Lasibat Danmola, Saliu Salvador’s great-grandson, gave the year as 1858, which fits well with the information we have uncovered about when the mosque’s founder arrived in Lagos.Footnote 97
If Lasibat Danmola’s memory was correct, it would appear that from the time Saliu Salvador settled in eastern Faji, he began holding prayer sessions there, perhaps initially in the open air and later inside his house. L. B. Adams classifies Salvador as one of Lagos’s many ratibi mosques, which began in residences with the support of their heads.Footnote 98 Just when Salvador Mosque began to be publicly recognized and attract a larger congregation is less clear. The first written evidence of it comes in 1878, when J. A. O. Payne’s Lagos and West African Almanack listed a mosque on Joseph Street, still the location of the temple today.Footnote 99 The free-standing structure that by then housed the mosque was probably built initially of mud and bamboo and was improved gradually, as funds became available. Its current façade, evidently the result of twentieth-century renovations, bears little resemblance to the original facades of other Aguda mosques, which were influenced by nineteenth-century Brazilian architectural aesthetics.Footnote 100
Only one land grant in the name of Salvador Ramos das Neves or his wives Maria Luisa and Camilla can be traced between 1863 and 1872. Yet there were apparently four properties: his dwelling on the western side of Joseph Street and the mosque and two other houses on the eastern side. It is possible he acquired the properties to the east separately, through conveyances or deeds of gift, in which case he would not have required crown grants to secure his title. Or he may have acquired crown grants to the eastern plots after 1872, when our data end.
One point is certain. Salvador Mosque was not the first place of Islamic worship in Lagos founded by returnees from Brazil. According to Chief Adekunle Alli, an authority on Islam in Lagos, the first Brazilian mosque on the island was Alagbayun, located on a side street behind Tinubu Square, with three others later branching out from it: Salvador, Olosun, and Inabere.Footnote 101 Although Chief Alli gives 1819 as Alagbayun’s founding date, there is no evidence that the returnee community in Lagos dates back that far, nor even that it resulted from the exodus of the late 1830s.Footnote 102 As noted earlier, some families in Ouidah and Agoué descend from Muslim freedmen who left Bahia then. In Lagos, however, no trace has been found of anyone arriving at that time, not even Ajadi Luis Daupele, who was convicted of participation in the uprising and whose deportation sentence specifically mentioned Onim (Lagos).Footnote 103 According to Gbadamosi, the first returnees from Brazil arrived in Lagos around 1841. Indeed, there is considerable evidence of freedmen from Brazil in the town during the 1840s, most of them employed in the slave trade.Footnote 104 It is probable, therefore, that Alagbayun was founded sometime in the 1840s, or perhaps as late as the early 1850s.Footnote 105 The subsequent founding of Salvador Mosque, farther to the east, may have occurred in response to the increasing number of Aguda Muslims settling in that part of the city in the 1850s who wanted mosques close by.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, when Saliu Salvador Ramos das Neves and other Muslim returnees were arriving in Lagos, conditions were propitious for the expansion of Islam. A moment of crisis following the British bombardment, when the Chief Imam and several prominent local Muslim traders and war leaders fled to Epe with Ọba Kosoko, did not last. While a significant number of the Muslim exiles remained in Epe, many others soon returned, as later did their former ọba.Footnote 106 Over time, Lagos’s Muslim population steadily grew, through immigration (from the interior, Sierra Leone, and Brazil), conversion, and biological reproduction. Population figures are inexact. They show, however, that between 1851 and 1900 Muslims consistently outnumbered Christians; by the end of century, they formed a majority of the city’s population.Footnote 107 Throughout the period, moreover, indigenous and colonial political authorities permitted Muslims to worship openly.Footnote 108
During Saliu Salvador’s early years in Lagos, Islamic institutions were just beginning to develop in the town. A Central Mosque under the authority of a Chief Imam existed by the 1840s, but it did not exercise tight control over the settlement’s many neighborhood mosques, then important sites of Islamic expansion.Footnote 109 Individual Muslims leaders such as Saliu Salvador established mosques near where they lived and built congregations around them. Payne listed twenty-seven such sites in his 1878 Almanack, and there were probably others.Footnote 110
The reputation of Muslim leaders for Qur’anic learning and piety increased their ability to attract followers. So too did their reputation for skill in less orthodox matters, such as making powerful charms and being able to harness the forces of the spirit world.Footnote 111 Immigrants from Brazil, Sierra Leone, and parts of the interior gravitated to religious leaders who shared their histories and experiences. While the identities of most of those who worshipped at Salvador Mosque in the nineteenth century are unknown, the majority were undoubtedly returnees from Brazil. They probably included Ventura Grillo, Pompeo Monteiro and, toward the end of the century, Saliu Salvador’s sons-in-law José Aruna Martins and Tairu Danmola.
Strong congregational life characterized Yoruba mosques. In Lagos, male leaders known as Giwas headed neighborhood Muslim associations charged with mobilizing believers to organize funerals, marriage rituals, and infants’ naming ceremonies, as well as vibrant Islamic festivals.Footnote 112 The teamwork that went into planning and staging such events promoted mutual support and helped propagate faith in Islam. Thus, in addition to providing returnees with a place of prayer, Salvador Mosque and its affiliated associations helped build solidarity among them. At some point in the late nineteenth century, Salvador Mosque, like others in Lagos, must have created a governing body, to which its ownership passed. When its founder wrote his will, stating how he wanted his property divided, no mention was made of the mosque.Footnote 113
Periodically, itinerant alfas and imams from the north passed through the town spreading knowledge about Islam and energizing the faithful. One such teacher, Salaiman, who arrived in Lagos in 1875, provoked a lasting doctrinal split by insisting that the Qur’an was all sufficient for religious guidance and that other Islamic texts then also venerated in Lagos should be abandoned.Footnote 114 The mosque founded by Tairu Akinosho Eko followed Sulaiman, but it was apparently the only Brazilian mosque to do so. Despite the schism, Gbadamosi argues that in the final quarter of the nineteenth century Muslims in Lagos were “confident” of their religion and that leaders who had arrived from Brazil—such as Saliu Salvador, Ventura Momo Grillo, and Tairu Akinosho Eko—contributed to that self-confidence.Footnote 115
Fragmentary evidence suggests that Saliu Salvador commanded respect beyond his own household and Faji’s Muslim population, playing a broader leadership role. In 1877, when the British colonial government introduced a new Supreme Court as part of a major judicial reform, “Senhor Salvador” represented “Brazilian Emigrants” during the crowded inaugural ceremony.Footnote 116 A decade later, during the celebrations for the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria’s reign, when a group of Aguda men wrote a letter to the governor congratulating Her Majesty, Salvador Ramos das Neves was among the eighteen signatories. At the bottom of the list, “Senhor Salvador” signed a second time on behalf of his “followers,” presumably members of his mosque.Footnote 117
Muslim Returnees and Catholicism
Many studies of Brazilian returnees stress Catholicism’s importance as a symbol of Aguda identity. Yet little is known about how Muslim returnees engaged with the religion into which they were baptized during their enslavement.Footnote 118 In Saliu Salvador’s case, after arriving in Lagos, he appears to have put the religion firmly behind him. His name does not appear in Catholic parish records. However, even as he distanced himself from Catholicism—probably the result of increasing focus on Islam—his family and household remained religiously heterogeneous. Both his senior wife, Maria Luiza, and his eldest child, Tecla Maria das Mercês, were identified in his will only by Catholic names, without Muslim aliases. Some accounts today describe Maria Luiza as having been a Catholic. Parish records show that her daughter Tecla had four children who were baptized as Catholics and that she was active as a godmother.Footnote 119
On the other hand, Saliu Salvador’s second wife, Camilla Guimarães, at some point embraced Islam, judging by her Muslim alias Asana.Footnote 120 The names of his other two wives, Fatuman and Rafiatu, indicate that they were also Muslims. Moreover, none of Saliu Salvador’s Lagos-born children appears to have been Catholic. Maria Pursina and Tecla, both born in Bahia, are the only daughters not identified by Muslim names in the will. As already mentioned, Pursina’s husband was a prominent Muslim and some of their children were baptized. Still, by 1910 an SMA priest described them as apostates.Footnote 121 Aishat’s husband, whose Yoruba name was Danmola, is remembered as having converted to Islam in Lagos, receiving the Muslim name Tairu and eventually becoming an alfa. Although the couple baptized their two sons, they gave them a Muslim upbringing. Rufau Danmola, their second son, went on to become imam of Inabere Mosque, also making the pilgrimage to Mecca.Footnote 122 Thus, the marriages of both Aishat and Pursina cemented alliances with important Aguda Muslim families.
Although Islam evidently predominated within the family, the fact that João, a good Catholic in the eyes of the priests, still lived in Saliu Salvador’s dwelling when he wrote his will in 1895 shows that the Muslim leader tolerated religious difference.Footnote 123 The religious identity of Maria Pursina’s and João’s mother, Felicidade, is unknown, but no Muslim alias is mentioned for her in the will, so she too may have retained an association with Catholicism, and perhaps òrìṣà worship as well. The latter was extremely common in Lagos, even among returnees.Footnote 124 The subject has received little attention from scholars, but evidence is emerging from other towns that some Aguda Muslims simultaneously engaged in ancestral religious practices.Footnote 125 In the case of Saliu Salvador’s family, however, his will gives no Yoruba names for any of his family members, perhaps a sign of distance from òrìṣà worship. While Saliu Salvador was a Muslim religious leader, and while his family and probably also his household were majority Muslim, both were also religiously diverse.
The provisions Saliu Salvador made in his will, written three years before his death in 1898, confirm his commitment to the Christian and Muslim members of his family and household. Most significantly, he bequeathed the parlor and another room in the house on the western side of Joseph Street that he used as his own personal space, plus a yard connecting them to Igboṣere Road, collectively to all of his children and to their heirs and assigns forever, without differentiating based on religion.Footnote 126 The bequest was a clear sign that he wanted them, in perpetuity, to identify and act as one family. Many other men in Lagos at that time used their wills to turn their personal residences—however small—into “family houses” in which all of their descendants would forever enjoy usage rights.Footnote 127 Saliu Salvador also allocated specific spaces within his three houses to individual children or groups of them, plus their heirs and assigns. Tecla, for example, was to have the corridor and yard that her late mother had inhabited. In addition, Saliu Salvador directed that his surviving wives, Camilla and Rafiatu, should be allowed to use specific spaces during their lifetimes.Footnote 128
Saliu Salvador did not overlook his former slave Felicidade, mother of Pursina and João. Although the latter was evidently the son of another man, both he and his mother were to be allowed to remain in the spaces they inhabited when Saliu Salvador wrote his will. However, rights to the rooms did not extend to João’s descendants. Clearly, Saliu Salvador provided for these two differently than he did his wives and children.Footnote 129
Not all Aguda Muslim leaders in Lagos followed Saliu Salvador’s example in eschewing involvement in baptism. An interesting case in point is Tairu Akinosho Eko, mentioned above, who came to Lagos in 1854 along with his wife and children.Footnote 130 Although the family has many Muslim descendants, Tairu Eko is also an ancestor of several prominent Catholic Aguda families, notably the Alakijas.Footnote 131 He himself appears eight times in early Lagos parish records, baptizing children born to him in Lagos.Footnote 132 However, he never acted as a godfather, not even to any of his numerous Catholic grandchildren. His Brazilian-born daughters, on the other hand, were extraordinarily active as godparents, especially his daughter Doroteia, who had over twenty godchildren between 1864 and 1883.Footnote 133
Such engagement with Catholicism, particularly at the social level represented by godparenting, was common among returnees who were born in Brazil, even Muslims. A good example is João Jacob de Souza Marques, recalled as an important figure at Alagbayun Mosque.Footnote 134 Born in Rio de Janeiro, he was brought to Lagos as a child by his mother, an African freedwoman. As an adult, he baptized seven children born to him by five different mothers and also acted as a godfather.Footnote 135
Clearly, Muslim returnees’ relationship to Catholicism varied from person to person. Like João Jacob, those who had been baptized into Catholicism as infants in Brazil tended to view the religion as a symbol of Aguda identity. For the African-born, who had arrived in Brazil in the holds of slave ships and as freedmen there continued to participate in Catholic rituals because of their bureaucratic and legal functions, the return to Lagos often became an opportunity to break away from a religion that had been externally imposed. This was clearly the case with Saliu Salvador. Yet others, such as Tairu Eko, continued to selectively participate in Catholicism. A similar pattern is seen in other Muslim Aguda communities, where families tended to embrace heterogeneous religious practices and beliefs.Footnote 136 Whether or not Muslim returnees who were heads of households maintained a personal connection to Catholicism, they did not forbid their kin or other dependents from doing so, a rule that probably also applied to òrìṣà worship.
Muslim Networks Connecting Lagos and Brazil
The return to Africa by freed men and women is often envisioned as a definitive rupture with the anguished place of enslavement, in direct opposition to the “door of no return” commonly evoked as a metaphor for enslaved people’s forced departure for the Americas. In Brazil, however, where a significant number of enslaved and freed men were employed in Atlantic commerce, the picture was often very different. During the slave trade and later on vessels engaged in other types of commerce, they traveled back and forth between Bahia and Africa. Among those who eventually resettled in West Africa, the pattern was inverted: many returnees remained connected to Brazil as traders.Footnote 137 Saliu Salvador Ramos das Neves is a case in point. In Bahia, his work as a barber put him in a privileged position to maintain contact with Africa, either traveling there himself or having contact with others who did so. Likewise, after migrating to Lagos, he continued to be connected to people in Brazil, such as his partner and compadre Primo Mendes dos Santos.
However, neither of them appears to have traveled themselves. Instead, they relied on networks of friends and acquaintances who did travel and who assisted them by relaying oral messages, carrying letters and gifts, and keeping a watchful eye on merchandise.Footnote 138 A number of people in the family’s immediate circle probably acted as intermediaries in this sense. Firmino Jacob dos Santos, father of Tecla’s oldest child, was involved in trade to Bahia, exporting African goods such as kola nuts, shea butter, and black soap.Footnote 139 Bernardo Rodrigues, with whom she had two children in the early 1870s, also made regular trips to Brazil, first as a sailor and later as a ship’s captain.Footnote 140 Aishat’s husband, a palm oil trader, made at least one trip to Bahia. Last but not least, after Saliu Salvador’s death, his widow Camilla/Asana, by then the household’s senior member, traveled there herself.Footnote 141
Perhaps the family’s most important contact in Bahia was Fatuman’s father, Nagô freedman Higino Pinto da Fonseca, whom Saliu Salvador had known since before leaving Bahia.Footnote 142 Higino also lived in Lagos for some time, receiving a crown grant in 1864. However, he soon went back to Bahia, where he opened a stall in the city market. His wares included African goods such as shea butter and country cloths, some probably supplied by his daughter and her husband.Footnote 143 By the time of his death in 1896, Higino’s assets included six real estate properties and a sizable amount of money in bank notes.Footnote 144 Fatuman had preceded her father in death, so he bequeathed her share of his estate to her children, Amina and Sabiu. But in order to claim the inheritance—a townhouse worth four contos de réis and another two contos in bank notes, a tidy sum by Brazilian standards—court papers had to be filed in Bahia.Footnote 145 Power of attorney was given to Joaquim Pereira da Costa, a returnee who lived up the street from the family’s mosque. Also known by the Muslim name Bakare, he was a trader who went regularly to Bahia.Footnote 146
Brazil’s African population had been declining since the end of the slave trade, but in the late 1890s there were still around five hundred Africans in the city of Salvador da Bahia, around a third of whom were Muslims according to a contemporary scholar. There was a mosque led by an imam and a number of alfas. Footnote 147 One of these alfas was Nagô freedman José Maria alias Salu, whom Higino chose as executor of his estate, a choice that highlights the latter’s involvement with Bahia’s Muslim community. Other major Brazilian cities, especially Rio de Janeiro and Recife, were also home to followers of Mohammed.Footnote 148 Surely well-known to their Lagos brethren engaged in trade with Brazil, these enclaves could offer lodging and assist with other practical matters.Footnote 149 They probably also constituted a clientele for religious articles more easily available in Lagos than Brazil, such as amulets, writing boards, tessubas and copies of the Qur’an. When the visitors from Lagos were alfas or imams, they were likely welcomed as teachers and consulted as diviners and amulet makers, as Ayodele Ogunnaike has suggested.Footnote 150
Indeed, many Lagos-based Muslims did business in Brazil in the late nineteenth century, including Aishat’s husband, Joaquim de Oliveira alias Alfa Tairu Danmola, who went to Bahia for a month in 1887, probably to tend to his interests in the palm oil trade.Footnote 151 João Jacob de Souza Marques, active in the Alagbayun Mosque, made at least three trips to Brazil between 1884 and 1898, taking with him products such as kola nuts and “medications,” possibly herbs used in traditional healing.Footnote 152
During the last two decades of the century, Muslim names became common on the passenger lists of ships traveling between Bahia and Lagos. Often groups of names appear together repeatedly, revealing that Muslims, like other Agudas, tended to travel in the company of people they knew. A good example is Oseni Antonio, probably a member of a Lagosian Aguda family that played a crucial role in the history of the Alagbayun and Inabere Mosques.Footnote 153 Always accompanied by other Muslims, Oseni made three trips to Brazil, taking merchandise such as country cloths, kola nuts and African pepper.Footnote 154 He first arrived in Bahia on 20 January 1884, traveling with a returnee named Luis Mama and three other men who used the Muslim title Giwa as a surname.Footnote 155 The former, a trader who had been crisscrossing the Atlantic since the mid-1870s, adopted the name Mama—a diminutive of Mamadou, a variant form of Mohammed—in 1877, after his second trip to Lagos, which suggests that he converted to Islam while there.Footnote 156 Like Oseni, the three Giwas were on their maiden voyage to Brazil. A month after arriving, they left Bahia for Rio de Janeiro, guided by Mama. At the end of April, Oseni joined them and three months later the entire group returned to Bahia, along with a new traveling companion, Manoel Musa Balthazar, a trader based in Lagos who went to Brazil frequently. On 28 September, all six—Oseni, Mama, Balthazar, and the three Giwas—set sail for Lagos, now accompanied by Bakare.Footnote 157 Their overlapping itineraries, involving temporary separations followed by reunions in a distant city and a collective return voyage to Africa, required careful planning that was motivated by shared business dealings and probably also by affective bonds in which religious identity played a role.
Oseni Antonio’s last voyage to Bahia began in early 1898, when he disembarked along with Manoel Musa Balthazar. The latter returned to Lagos later that year, traveling with Saliu Salvador’s widow Camilla, as well as Firmino Jacob dos Santos and João Jacob de Souza Marques. Oseni, however, remained in Bahia until April 1899. During Oseni’s last few months in the city, Bakare arrived with the mission of filing the court papers for Fatuman’s children’s inheritance. Once the paperwork was complete, the two men booked passages back to Africa on the brigantine Alliança, by then one of the few remaining vessels going to Lagos. Bakare had purchased a considerable amount of merchandise, much of it probably acquired in his capacity as the children’s legal representative. The goods included over three hundred barrels of tobacco, fifty of which were consigned to Camilla, under the alias Asana das Neves, as well as foodstuffs such as sugar and coffee, and practical items such as shoes and a sewing machine. Oseni also had merchandise aboard, although in much smaller quantities, as did Luis Mama and many other passengers. Some of the cargo had been consigned by prominent Aguda merchants in Lagos, including Joaquim Francisco Branco.Footnote 158
The Alliança left Bahia on 10 April 1899, with sixty-one passengers aboard, many of them Muslims. But the ship was caught in the doldrums. Supplies of food and water ran low and disease broke out, taking the lives of twelve people. Six decades later, one of the survivors, Romana Maria da Conceição, recalled her amazement at the intense devotion of the Muslim passengers, who in the face of death, disease, and hunger unfailingly kneeled on deck, their heads bowed toward Mecca, performing their prayers. When the vessel reached Lagos on 24 June, the colonial authorities placed it under quarantine, fearing yellow fever. Three months later, the passengers were finally allowed ashore, but all their belongings were burned by the British.Footnote 159
Barred from unloading its cargo in Lagos, the Alliança returned to Bahia, where local authorities determined that the merchandise aboard should be auctioned off if it went unclaimed for thirty days. Given that most of those who had cargo on the ship were far away in Lagos, the deadline barely gave them time to receive the news of the impending sale of their property, let alone return to collect it. Moreover, for those with relatively small amounts of merchandise aboard, the cost of returning to Brazil to claim the proceeds of the auction was greater than what they stood to gain.
Bakare, however, who was responsible for about a third of all the ship’s cargo, was one of the few passengers who rushed back to Bahia to file a claim, arriving in March 1900, after the auction had already taken place. Receiving reimbursement was a drawn-out and complicated affair. Some of the merchandise was unaccounted for and some had been damaged or had spoiled in transit. To make matters worse, owners were charged for the cost of shipping their property back to Bahia and for unloading it after arrival.Footnote 160 For Amina and Sabiu, the Alliança fiasco meant the loss of whatever part of their inheritance Bakare had with him on board, whether in cash or in goods. For Africans in Brazil who dreamed of emigrating to Lagos but feared giving up the security of their lives in Bahia, the Alliança affair confirmed their worst fears about the risks involved: the passengers who managed to escape death lost everything but the clothes on their backs. For returnees in Lagos involved in trade with Brazil, the incident marked the nadir of a downward spiral in commerce that had been worsening for years. After the end of the slave trade, commerce between Brazil and Lagos had continued due to the demand for palm oil in Brazil and for tobacco and cane spirits on the coast, but by the 1870s the trade’s economic importance was dwindling. As trade declined, so did the movement of ships carrying people and commodities between the two places.Footnote 161
When Bakare left Bahia at the end of 1901, after more than a year of lobbying for reimbursement, he traveled on the Cecília, the first ship to depart for Lagos since the Alliança’s fatal voyage nearly two years before.Footnote 162 The Cecília’s journey eastward across the Atlantic, with thirty passengers aboard, was the last direct voyage from Bahia to Lagos, marking the end of a long era. From then on, travelers leaving for Lagos were obliged to take two ships: one to Dakar or the Canary Islands, then another bound for the Bight of Benin.Footnote 163 The social and religious networks between Lagos and Brazil had been sustained by trade, and as the latter withered, the former became difficult to sustain. For the generation coming of age in early twentieth century Lagos, including the descendants of Salvador Ramos das Neves, voyages to Brazil would become the stuff of tales told by elders. In Brazil, the twilight of contact with Africa coincided with the gradual disappearance of the African-born population, becoming a turning point for African religious practices, including Islam. Òrìṣà worship, known as Candomblé in Bahia, survived the transition and, with some changes, eventually thrived, but Muslim communities were harder hit. Within a few decades they were all but extinct in Brazil, their descendants being absorbed into Candomblé, Catholicism, or both.Footnote 164
Conclusion
The evidence presented in this article sheds new light on the history of Muslims in the nineteenth-century Brazilian Black Atlantic. Although Silva et al. have recently argued that few enslaved Muslims arrived in Brazil in the first half of the century, João José Reis points to a significant Muslim presence during that period.Footnote 165 Our evidence supports Reis’s point, by demonstrating that Muslims were an integral part of the returnee movement that gained force in 1835 following the Malê uprising and continued until the end of the century. Saliu Salvador Ramos das Neves was part of a wave of Muslim freedmen who left Brazil in the 1850s. Some, like him, had probably witnessed the Malê Rebellion and experienced the anti-Muslim discrimination that followed it. Their arrival in Lagos contributed to Islam’s growing strength in the town.
Saliu Salvador’s biography also clarifies certain aspects of Aguda history in a more general sense, by revealing some of the mechanisms utilized in Brazil by future returnees to achieve manumission and economic security. In Saliu Salvador’s case, his expertise in an occupation in demand in the slave trade drew him into a patronage network involving elite Bahians, thus facilitating his upward mobility. At the same time, he forged horizontal personal relationships that provided support, opened opportunities, and continued to be important long after his return to Africa. In Lagos, the household that had formed in Bahia, involving complex ties of blood and fictive kinship, expanded into an extensive family unit with numerous descendants to this day.
In the port of Bahia, Saliu Salvador had access to news from across the ocean about changing conditions on the West African coast, probably including the advantages and disadvantages of the various towns with Aguda quarters. When Saliu Salvador left Brazil he opted to settle in Lagos, then the region’s most important port. As a Yoruba speaker, he was probably also drawn by the town’s predominantly Yoruba population. Moreover, Lagos already had a vibrant Muslim population, undoubtedly important to co-religionists returning from Brazil.
Following the end of the slave trade to Brazil, strong markets between it and the Bight of Benin sustained trade and travel between the two regions. But after 1880, the scale of trade deteriorated and profit margins shrank. Small traders, many of them freed people, assumed a larger share of what remained, relying on networks structured by family and religious ties but with little cushion for absorbing losses. In this context, the Alliança affair had catastrophic consequences.
The existence of networks linking òrìṣà devotees in Brazil and colonial Lagos, postulated by J. Lorand Matory, has since been documented by other scholars, whose work demonstrates that such networks extended back to the first half of the nineteenth century, when Ouidah played a greater role.Footnote 166 The archival evidence presented in this article shows that after 1850 similar networks existed among Muslims, although when exactly they emerged is unclear. Not only were some of the enslaved already Muslims upon arrival in Brazil, others converted once there. A fair number later obtained their freedom and returned to the Bight of Benin region. Some became traders who traveled back and forth, connecting followers of Mohammed on both sides of the Atlantic. The evidence we have presented of Muslim agency in commercial networks between Brazil and Lagos lends support to Ayodeji Ogunnaike’s claim that Islam, like òrìṣà worship, had become a transatlantic religion.Footnote 167 Still, evidence of the circulation of Islamic religious knowledge and practices, which undoubtedly also occurred, remains elusive. We hope that our work will help open pathways for future research on the subject.
Acknowledgements
We dedicate this paper to the memories of Lasibat Danmola and Chief Adekunle Alli. The former, a great-grandson of Saliu Salvador Ramos das Neves, shared information about his ancestor that paved the way for our research. The latter’s pioneering work on the Brazilian mosques of Lagos was fundamental to our work. We also thank Chief Hakeem Danmola, head of the Salvador family, and Taiwo Lolade Salvador, a fifth-generation descendant, for their generosity in sharing information about their ancestors. We are grateful to Titilola Natasha Marinho, who kindly shared documents from her own ongoing research on the history of Lagos’s Aguda families, also conducting interviews on our behalf, as well as to Oluremi Da-Costa of the Brazilian Descendants’ Association for helpful conversations and contacts. History in Africa’s editor-in-chief, Lorelle Semley, and three anonymous reviewers provided important comments on the manuscript.
This manuscript has not been previously published nor is it under review for publication elsewhere.
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