II The history of the Aguda

The Aguda did not exist as an established ethnic or cultural group in Brazil before the return movement. In fact, the term designates a heterogeneous group of people that emerged between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, consisting of former African slaves from Brazil, Afro-Brazilians, as well as Portuguese and Luso-Brazilian slave merchants who conducted their business in the Bight of Benin. The Aguda, strictly speaking, thus include descendants of both Africans and Europeans who were not necessarily part of the same migratory flow. Moreover, the two subgroups kept slaves who were eventually assimilated into the community.Footnote ⁹ The community’s diversity, specifically of its African/Afro-Brazilian component, is also reflected in its ethnic and religious makeup, as it encompasses Yoruba, Hausa, Nupe, Ewe, and Mahi people, as well as Catholics, Muslims, and followers of Vodun and Orisha.Footnote ¹⁰ It is important to keep in mind that not all Aguda are necessarily Brazilian returnees. The latter term applies only to the Africans and Afro-Brazilians who settled in their (ancestral) homeland in West Africa.Footnote ¹¹ It seems that many Africans and Afro-Brazilians returned to the general area and cultural sphere of their (or their ancestors’) upbringing.Footnote ¹² Amos notes that the number of a few thousand returnees across the Bight of Benin may seem insignificant compared to the almost five million African slaves who were shipped to Brazil; however, despite their low number, they “were able to develop a very successful informal settlement system that created Afro-Brazilian communities along the coast of West Africa.”Footnote ¹³ Far from being isolated, these returnee communities kept in contact with each other, sustaining economic and personal relations. According to Ana Lúcia Araújo, the Aguda, “represent 5–10 percent of Benin’s current population.”Footnote ¹⁴ In the case of Nigeria, it is estimated that by 1889, “one in seven Lagosians had lived in Cuba or Brazil,” which corresponds to about 14 percent of Lagos’ population at the time.Footnote ¹⁵ Descendants of the Tabom peopleFootnote ¹⁶, a name given to the Brazilian returnees in Ghana, exceed 5000 people today.Footnote ¹⁷ Unfortunately, there are no reliable numbers for Togo, as the history of the Brazilian returnees was practically erased from the national narrative following the assassination, in 1963, of Togo’s first president Sylvanus Olympio, whose grandfather arrived from Brazil in 1850.

One of the most prominent Aguda of Luso-Brazilian descent was the slave trader Francisco Félix de Souza (1754–1849). He is generally considered the patriarch of the Brazilian community in West Africa as he facilitated the arrival of the Brazilian returnees. His biography is intimately connected to the city of Ouidah (Benin), which was one of the major ports along the Slave Coast. This city, and several others along the coast (Agoué, Badagri, Aneho), still “have districts that he founded, all of them called Adjido—a bastardization of the expression “Deus me ajudou” (God helped me).”Footnote ¹⁸ De Souza was given the honorary title of Chacha by Ghezo, the ruler of the Kingdom of Dahomey, after supporting a coup in 1818 against Ghezo’s brother—then king—Adandozan. Notably, Souza encouraged the return movement of Africans and African descendants from Brazil to the Bight of Benin, particularly to Ouidah. The reflux was originally sparked by the Malê slave rebellion, which took place in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil) in 1835.Footnote ¹⁹ Inspired by the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) and political changes in Brazil, Muslim slaves in Bahia, supported by freedmen, rose up against their masters. The Malê revolt was ultimately unsuccessful and led to the deportation of 200 rebels and exiles to Ouidah.Footnote ²⁰ Following the uprising, restrictions against, and surveillance of, free Blacks and African Muslims were put in place throughout Brazil. This included efforts to thwart their economic success, as “[t]hey were denied the possibility of owning property and were subjected to severe taxation.”Footnote ²¹ Their chances to find work were also reduced by the Brazilian government’s policy of branqueamento, or “whitening,” which triggered a massive arrival of European immigrants after the abolition of slavery in 1888. Consequently, several thousand Africans and Afro-Brazilians left Brazil to escape racism and lack of economic opportunities. “Many of them settled in Ouidah; others went to Agoué, Lomé, Porto-Novo, Grand-Popo, and Lagos.”Footnote ²² Aguda history thus involves not only forced but also voluntary, if reluctant, migration.

Upon their arrival, the Aguda “attempted to continue following the model of the Luso-Brazilian slave society […] because several returnees became slave merchants, therefore playing a crucial role in the illegal slave trade between Brazil and the Bight of Benin.”Footnote ²³ Ana Lúcia Araújo refers to the specific example of a Mahi man from Hoko who was enslaved in the early nineteenth century, took on his master’s name, Almeida, and settled in Agoué (Benin), where he “became a very prosperous slave merchant and continued traveling back and forth between Brazil, the Bight of Benin, and West Central African slave ports. His will, opened in July 1857 in Salvador (Bahia), shows he was a prosperous man who owned houses and dozens of enslaved men and women.”Footnote ²⁴ The Aguda maintained connections to Brazil and other returnee settlements along the West African coast not only through the slave trade but also through the trade of agricultural and handcrafted products, such as kola nuts, cotton, rubber, garments, shea butter, and “ethnic goods” related to Candomblé practices.Footnote ²⁵

Relations between the Brazilian returnees and the local population were not unproblematic. The Aguda were often perceived, and perceived themselves, as an elite group thanks to their Western manners, dress, education, and desirable skills that enabled them to become economically successful. They worked as carpenters, bricklayers, masons, painters, shoemakers, tailors, and locksmiths. The most prosperous among them owned plantations and trading companies. Easily identifiable by their names, such as da Silva, Almeida, Santos, Oliveira, Da Rocha, and de Souza, the “Brazilians” spoke Portuguese and introduced a new form of architecture in West Africa: the Luso-Brazilian colonial style called sobrados. These Aguda family houses are two- to three-story townhouses, often containing a shop on the ground floor. The Aguda’s architectural contributions to the built environment are most strikingly displayed in Lagos’ Brazilian Quarter, Popo Aguda, where Joao Esan da Rocha, a former slave and Brazilian returnee, constructed the famous Water House in the nineteenth century. Esan, followed by his son Candido, built “massive wealth on the business of selling water and other commodities.”Footnote ²⁶ The distinctive Afro-Brazilian architecture reflects the Aguda’s understanding of modern urbanity, as they introduced different designs, technologies, building materials (such as bricks), and conceptions of space, creating “new forms of indigenous knowledge in the region.”Footnote ²⁷ The local elite eventually started to commission Aguda craftsmen for their building projects, which led to the detachment of architectural style from cultural identity, becoming instead a mark of the owners’ social status and “progressive ideals.”Footnote ²⁸ Gradually, Afro-Brazilian architecture changed the urban landscape along the coast of the Bight of Benin.

Besides the contentious and divisive issues of the slave trade and assimilation to Western culture, there was also the question of collaboration with the colonizers. “The new generations of Afro-Brazilians born and raised in Africa were steeped in a tradition of trading—first in slaves and later in goods—and had knowledge of several European languages. It was natural that they were soon drawn into the role of agents for the various European trading companies established around the coast.”Footnote ²⁹ A number of Aguda “obtained administrative positions as clerks, interpreters, and traders, thus consolidating their privileged place in colonial society.”Footnote ³⁰ They acted as mediators between the local population and the colonial administration, using this opportunity to carve out a new space for themselves after the abolition of the slave trade. However, this intermediary position also allowed them to take on political leadership roles and to contest conditions under the colonial regimes in West Africa (British, German, and French). Sylvanus Olympio, a prominent member of the powerful and richissime Olympio family in Togo, participated in anti-colonial and nationalist movements, eventually leading Togo to independence in 1960 and becoming the country’s first president. Essien reports another example from Ghana where “British officials arrested Brazilian-African leaders […] together with Gã maŋtsɛmɛi when they revolted against the Compulsory Labor Ordinance of 1897. These and other incidents demonstrate the Brazilian-Africans’ contribution to anti-colonial nationalism.”Footnote ³¹ However, historical accounts still marginalize the role of Brazilian returnees as agents of social and political change.

III “Material Imagination”: Recovering history through fiction

Kangni Alem, and possibly Florent Couao-Zotti, relied on the work of French photographer and self-taught ethnographer Pierre Verger (1902–1996), who spent much of his life in Salvador de Bahia and produced a large body of literature on the cultural transfer between Brazil and West Africa. Most notably, his work Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le golfe de Bénin et Bahia de todos os Santos du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (1968) proved influential for scholars studying this phenomenon. As his correspondence and research notes reveal, over the years, Verger worked with several Aguda informants from Benin. During his stay in 1953 in Benin, he was initiated into Ifa, a Yoruba religion and system of divination. On this occasion, he received the name Fatumbi, meaning “he who is reborn in Ifa.”Footnote ³² Verger saw himself as a “messenger between Africans and their descendants on either side of the Atlantic,” which is why he “encouraged the members of the Aguda community with whom he was in contact to travel to Brazil.”Footnote ³³

Togolese writer Kangni Alem was an avid reader of Verger’s Flux and Reflux and went to Brazil on several occasions, visiting Rio, Salvador de Bahia, and Recife. Les Enfants du Brésil is not Alem’s first novel on the topic. In 2009, he published Esclaves, which focuses on the lives of Brazilian slave trader Francisco Chacha de Souza and Miguel do Nascimento, originally a high official in the Kingdom of Dahomey, who was abducted and sold into slavery in Brazil in the early nineteenth century. Les Enfants du Brésil takes place in the present time and revolves around the narrator Candinho Santana, a marine archeologist from West Africa, specializing in the transatlantic slave trade. It also features Santana’s best friend Djibril, a descendant of Miguel, the protagonist in Esclaves. The narrator travels to Brazil to share the results of a UNESCO-funded archeological expedition that identifies and documents sunken slave ships. The novel alternates between present-day scenes of Santana visiting different cities in Brazil, accompanied by locals, and scenes of his childhood in TiBrava, a fictitious West African country. Alem’s novel investigates the history of slavery from both sides of the Atlantic, establishing a transoceanic kinship between TiBrava and Brazil, which culminates, symbolically in the marriage between the narrator Santana and the Brazilian anthropologist Dalva.

Santana is himself a descendant both of Portuguese settlers and African slaves brought to Bahia in the eighteenth century. His ancestor was involved in the Malê revolt just like Djibril’s ancestor Miguel. Born in TiBrava, Santana perceives Brazil as the mythical ancestral land whose memory was passed on to him through the stories of his grandmother Carnelia Esperança de Pereira who insists that “[n]ous ne sommes pas d’ici.”Footnote ³⁴ Carnelia Esperança instilled in her grandson the pride of being a Brazilian, the glorious heir of former slaves, the offspring of a long line of heroes. Santana, and the Aguda community as a whole, feel superior to other Africans, whom he qualifies as “racaille” and “crotte de l’humanité.”Footnote ³⁵ The arduous inventory of Portuguese names that Santana recites to show off his family connections also conveys the belief that the Aguda have been entrusted with a civilizing mission:

The protagonist’s relationship with his best friend Djibril is particularly interesting, because Santana eventually finds out that Djibril is also an Aguda who descends from Miguel do Sacramento, called the Malê, a Muslim slave expelled after the 1835 Mâle revolt. Djibril’s ancestor was brought to Brazil and sold to a Portuguese sugar mill owner in Recife. He dropped his Portuguese name upon his return to Agoué, which is why Djibril’s genealogy had been obscured for so long. Before becoming best friends with Djibril and acknowledging him as a fellow Brazilian, Santana takes pleasure in mocking his religion and supposedly trivial origins: “Je suis peut-être gros, mais je suis Brésilien. T’es quoi, toi? Petit musulman zéro, ton papa zéro, ta maman zéro. Tu sais toi ce que ça veut dire Brésilien? […] fils d’hypocrite bouffeurs de cochon.”Footnote ³⁷

The novel thus evokes a striking difference within the Aguda community regarding their relationship with Brazil. On the one side, it is a space of identification for the Catholic Agudas of mixed origins (European and African), anchoring a past that is still present; on the other side, it represents a past that has been intentionally left behind by the descendants of Muslim slaves who rebelled against the plantation system. Djibril’s family has integrated into the local community, while Santana’s family purposefully cultivates their status as otherness.

Despite his pride and arrogance, Cadinho Santana is capable of critically assessing his own community. He admits that the Aguda have carefully constructed a false story around their arrival in West Africa. Instead of admitting that they escaped from slavery, persecution, and racism in Brazil, their collective narrative promotes the idea of enlightenment and progress. Santana concedes that it was more advantageous for the Aguda “de proclamer que la plupart des retours furent volontaires et mus par le sentiment d’être utile à ses frères restés dans l’ombre, en projetant sur eux la lumière de la civilisation acquise chez les maîtres blancs.”Footnote ³⁹ Evoking Frantz Fanon, he describes them as “des peaux noires masques blancs, des héritiers de Noirs aliénés par un long séjour au Brésil, et qui se considéraient fondamentalement différents des autres Noirs par le raffinement de leur culture métisse […], des porteurs du flambeau de la civilisation.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Moreover, Alem’s work reveals that the moral high ground from which the Aguda look down on everyone else is nothing but an artifice when the secret of Santana’s grandmother, Carnelia Esperança de Pereira, is revealed toward the end of the novel. The proud matriarch of the Brazilian family admits to having had a relationship with an archbishop, which resulted in a pregnancy. She confesses that she abandoned her son to preserve her family’s honor, thus condemning him to a life of poverty, forever separated from his roots.

When Santana visits Brazil, he explores the cities of Rio, Recife, and Salvador, whose landmarks, streets, people, and architectural styles are a witness to colonial history. These three Brazilian cities are put into relation with his hometown—the city of TiBrava, capital of the homonymous country and a fictionalized version of Togo’s capital, Lomé. Oloukpona-Yinnon notes that the novel deploys a number of clichés resulting from the narrator’s (and author’s) position as a tourist. Scenes in Brazil inevitably involve Candomblé rituals, mentions of Xangó and Yemanjá, samba, the Copacabana, feijoada, caipirinha, and beautiful women who seduce the narrator.Footnote ⁴¹ The latter is particularly fascinated by the obvious African influence in Salvador when he discovers a Brazilian street vendor who sells food that Santana knows from home and speaks his African language without realizing it. However, the Brazil–West Africa connection works both ways in the novel. The narrator’s grandmother likes to be called Dona Beija, after the heroine of a famous Brazilian TV soap opera. She lives in TiBrava on a street called Rue des Brésiliens in a house built in the Portuguese style; this is proof that Afro-Brazilians left visible traces in TiBrava’s built environment. Yet, as in the real Lomé, the Brazilian architectural and cultural heritage is threatened by decay and the passing of time. The history of the Aguda, while increasingly erased from the city’s morphology, continues to exist in a few street names, family traditions, and the Aguda’s collective memory.

The second last chapter of Alem’s novel reminds us that Togo’s first president, Sylvanus Olympio, was of Afro-Brazilian descent. The Olympio family built a business empire and contributed substantially to the expansion of the city of Lomé. Sylvanus’ grandfather, Francisco, who was of Portuguese, African, and Indigenous origin, arrived from Brazil in 1850. He became involved in the slave trade and, after its abolition, made his fortune through trading companies and plantations. Even though Sylvanus Olympio is not named explicitly, the informed reader will recognize his famous words pronounced during his independence speech on the April 27, 1960—“La nuit est longue, mais le jour vient.”Footnote ⁴² He would be assassinated in 1963, only three years after he took office. Alem’s novel pays homage to another Togolese politician of Brazilian ancestry, Tavio Amorin, who was the leader of the Panafrican Socialist Party and an opponent to President Gnassingbe Eyadema’s regime, and was assassinated in 1992 at the age of 33.Footnote ⁴³

Unlike Kangni Alem, the Beninese writer Florent Couao-Zotti is himself an Aguda descendant through his maternal grandfather. In an exchange with Blaise Aplogan, he states:

Les Fantômes du Brésil recycles Romeo and Juliet as an intertext, retelling the tragic love story in the context of tensions between the Aguda and non-Aguda communities in Ouidah, Benin. Couao-Zotti opts for a fragmented narrative structure that features two different voices—one that is omniscient telling the story of Anna-Maria; the other speaks to the main character Pierre without revealing their identity. Anna-Maria, the youngest daughter of the powerful do Mato family, falls in love with Pierre Kuassi, a jobless electronics technician whose mother is a laundress. The do Matos are descendants of emancipated slaves from Salvador de Bahia who arrived in Benin, the homeland of their ancestors, about 150 years earlier and brought with them their style of dress, their masks, the samba, and their names inherited from Brazilian slave owners—da Piedad, do Santos, Laureano. After a warm welcome by the local population, the returnees are quickly branded as different based on their culture, religion, and language: “sont-ils vraiment des nôtres? Pourquoi ne parlent-ils pas nos langues? Cette manière de s’habiller, de se coiffer, de se chausser, est-ce bien d’ici? Pourquoi préfèrent-ils aller à l’église du Blanc plutôt que de célébrer le sabbat des dieux que cette terre à toujours portés?.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The returnees recreate their version of Brazil in Ouidah by introducing their architecture, the Aguda carnaval called bourignan, the feijoada—a stew made with beans and meat –, and their Catholic practices and rituals. For example, the novel describes at length the funeral of one of the Aguda patriarchs “Manuel da Gonceiçao de la branche des Monteiro Toledo [qui] a rejoint ses ancêtres, de l’autre côté de la mer, à Bahia de tous les saints. Ainsi dit-on des Agoudas morts du sommeil du juste, au bout d’une vieillesse paisible et insouciante.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Interestingly enough, the novel’s typescript reproduces this otherness by italicizing the word Agouda and making it stand out from the rest of the text.

Divisions increase within the community because the Brazilians resent the Africans, accusing them of having captured and sold their ancestors to slave traders. “[À] celui qui a vendu notre père au Blanc, on ne peut pas lui adresser des sourires de félicitation. À celui qui a échangé notre mère contre la pacotille, on ne peut pas tresser autour de sa tête des couronnes de César.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Over time, there emerges a clear demarcation line between the Brazilian quarter and the other neighborhoods in Ouidah; “Les allées et venues entre le quartier Brésil et les autres quartiers, si elles devinrent plus fréquentes au fil des ans, se limitaient à l’essentiel et aux élémentaires de la courtoisie.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Once a symbol of splendor, Couao-Zotti’s work portrays a Brazilian neighborhood that has faded with time, “il n’y avait que peu de choses qui pouvaient rappeler à la mémoire la présence du passage des Brésiliens. En effet, seules quelques maisons aux claustras stylés, aux arcades sculptées, avec leurs toits coniques et leurs balcons tarabiscotés distribuaient, sous les yeux des historiens et des amateurs, des bribes éparses des résurgences bahianaises.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The old slave market, called Square Chacha, serves as a reminder of Francisco de Souza’s slave-trading activities with Portuguese, British, and French merchants in Ouidah. Except for this single allusion, Couao-Zotti chooses not to explore the participation of the Aguda in the slave trade, focusing instead on the historical responsibility of the local population.

Any form of alliance between the two communities is discouraged. The Aguda refuse to mix with non-Aguda whom they consider backward and uncivilized: “Mais regardez-les: ils sont demeurés rustres; ils n’ont d’habits que pour cacher leur nudité; ils n’ont de chaussures que pour éviter de marcher sur les ronces. […] Bref, une civilisation de la négation et de la survie.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Their social status is superior to the other inhabitants because they are rich merchants, plantation owners, and priests. The do Mato family, like the other Aguda families, lives in a villa and employs servants. Another illustrious and wealthy patriarch of the Aguda community in Ouidah is Joao Alfredo de Nascimento, who was born in Bahia, arrived in Ouidah at the age of 15, and built his fortune with the production of, and trade in, palm oil. Pierre’s mother complains that the Aguda think of themselves as “yovos”Footnote ⁵¹—a Fon word meaning “foreigner” or “white person,” evoking the complex question of Aguda identity and race. On the one hand, the Brazilians are proud to descend from enslaved Africans who gained their freedom; but on the other hand, their mores, behavior, and ideals align with Western ideas of biological determinism and essentialism. As Capone notes, “c’est en cela que réside le principal paradoxe de cette histoire transnationale: les anciens esclaves retournés en Afrique ne se pensent pas en tant que membres arrachés aux peuples africains, mais en tant qu’élites ‘illuminées’ et ‘évoluées’ grâce à leur proximité avec la culture et le pouvoir des Blancs.”Footnote ⁵²

Despite his mother’s warnings, Pierre pays no attention to the Aguda’s endogamic practices, thinking “que cette exigence appartenait aux rivages lointains du passé, là où étaient allées échouer […] les superstitions et les croyances issues du Moyen Âge.”Footnote ⁵³ He does not realize that among the Aguda “pure essence, la descendance est sacrée autant que les liens du mariage. Le sang-mêlé, métissage forcé auquel la communauté a été confronté là-bas à Bahia, est farouchement inconcevable ici.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The do Mato family does not look favorably upon Anna-Maria’s relationship with Pierre. Once they discover the couple’s plans for marriage, her mother exclaims: “Ma fille ne peut pas salir sa race en allant épouser ce jeune prétentieux, non!”Footnote ⁵⁵ Not only is Pierre’s race an issue, so too is his ancestry; “Non seulement il est de la mauvaise souche, mais ses ancêtres ont été les serviteurs zélés des négriers.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The non-Aguda are perceived as a possible source of contagion and contamination for the Aguda bloodline that would taint the memory of those who survived slavery and returned to their ancestral land: “six générations en arrière, de la sueur et du sang versés dans les champs de café et de coton au Brésil, les fouets du maître qui claquaient sous la canicule, les morts, les révoltes, l’affranchissement puis l’arrivée sur les plages de Ouidah. Six générations sans sang mêlé, sans bâtardise, sans rayure.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The novel clearly identifies some of the returnees as mixed-race, which casts serious doubt on the Aguda discourse of racial purity. Given the Shakespearean intertext, the ending is, of course, tragic for both lovers. Anna-Maria’s and Pierre’s suicides by drowning follow an attack by Anna-Maria’s brothers and the realization that their love does not have a future in this community. Pierre’s uncle reminds them that “cette histoire implique des gens d’ici et d’ailleurs, elle implique le passé et l’avenir de milliers de personnes. Vous ne pouvez pas faire comme si le monde n’existait pas!.”Footnote ⁵⁸ The novel closes with a scene in which the two lovers reunite in the afterlife, delivered from social exclusions, the weight of history, and ethnocentrism.

Les Enfants du Brésil and Les Fantômes du Brésil clearly display many similarities in their treatment of the Aguda community, including their enslavement in Brazil, the return to West Africa, the founding of an Afro-Brazilian community, their elitist status, and the conflict with the local population. Both works are also similar in their discussion of the Agudas’ endogamic practices, religion, westernization, economic success, cult of the ancestors, and architectural heritage. There are, however, important differences that I would like to point out as well. Alem concentrates on two subgroups of the Aguda, namely the Muslim Aguda and the Catholic Aguda of mixed origin, whose histories go back to the same events but diverge upon their return to West Africa. Couao-Zotti rather, emphasizes the rift between the Aguda and non-Aguda communities through his Romeo-and-Juliet adaptation that suggests the impossibility of reconciliation. Moreover, both novels do not give Brazil the same status, as their titles eloquently demonstrate. Although it is considered the mythical homeland of the Aguda community in both texts, Brazil’s presence remains elusive in Les Fantômes du Brésil because it is not an actual plot location. Like the ghost of times past, it haunts the text through the characters’ vague historical allusions to Salvador de Bahia. Any tangible connections to Brazil had been severed long ago. Furthermore, Couao-Zotti’s novel is the swan song of a sterile and decaying Aguda community, which survives artificially, organizing their lives around obsolete principles and “phantom memories.” The author explains:

In contrast, the main plot line in Alem’s novel takes place in Rio, Recife, and Salvador. The protagonist Santana reconnects with the home of his “Brazilian” ancestors and discovers that the two sides of the Atlantic share a past and, to a certain degree, even a present.

Kangni Alem incorporates historical and ethnological data in Les Enfants du Brésil to shed light on the history of slavery and the Brazilian returnee community in Togo. It is certainly not a coincidence that the narrator’s Brazilian wife is an anthropologist and the narrator himself an archeologist who does archival research in Brazil. Indeed, the novel contains several passages detailing a number of both Afro-Brazilian cultural practices (maracatù, candomblé, celebration of Bonfim) and Aguda traditions (celebration of bouriyan, songs, food). They are supplemented with accounts of (actual) sunken slave ships and the lives of historical figures, real and imagined. Alem qualifies his novel as “material imagination,” because it is based on sources and verifiable information while also manipulating these sources to tell a compelling story.Footnote ⁶⁰ I argue that Alem appropriates and transforms ethnography and historiography to make sense of the past, to piece together fragments left behind by the transatlantic slave trade. Les Enfants du Brésil retraces, and makes visible, the legacy of the Aguda in Togo as it was practically erased under the regime of Eyadéma Gnassingbé, who participated in Sylvanus Olympio’s assassination and served as Togo’s president until his death in 2005.

For Alem, fiction is a medium that creates a space for restoration, dialogue, and self-interrogation. He engages with outside sources, such as Verger’s archives, while also producing an ethnography from within, that is, from a Togolese perspective. “[W]ith its double scope—views from both inside and outside,” these “poetics of ethnography,” to use Christina Kullberg’s term, “give a particular insight into the narrative construction of a self.”Footnote ⁶¹ It allows one to rethink “the self in terms of relations between here and there, between home and the world.”Footnote ⁶² Couao-Zotti’s approach to the subject is even more personal, as he is an Aguda himself. In addition, the situation in Togo is quite different from Benin, where the Brazilian returnees and their descendants were never subjected to this form of discrimination. Couao-Zotti’s starting point is the memories and practices of his own people, which he transposes into his writing. However, the integration of ethnographic elements such as religious events, celebrations, and songs has a different function in Les Fantômes du Brésil. Its focus is not the recovery of Aguda history but the realization that the Brazilian heritage is disappearing and that the community cannot do anything to prevent it.

Finally, the slave trade represents another point of diversion in both novels. In Alem’s novel, this topic is center stage, with the plot revolving around an archeologist working for a UNESCO project on enslaved peoples. Alem’s novel acknowledges that, historically, both the Aguda and Africans were involved with the slave trade: “Nous sommes un people de vendeurs d’hommes, ne l’oublions jamais.”Footnote ⁶³ Couao-Zotti’s novel concentrates solely on the local population’s responsibility in the enslavement of the Aguda ancestors. The latter are represented as the survivors of a brutal system who achieved the impossible by making their journey back to West Africa as free people. Les Fantômes du Brésil highlights this aspect in a scene that takes place at the “Door of No Return,” a monument to the enslaved Africans deported from Ouidah. Against all odds, the Aguda ancestors stepped once more through that door upon their return, writing a new, different chapter of transatlantic history.

IV Reverse diaspora

The image of the Aguda meeting at the “Door of No Return” in Ouidah reveals the community’s particularity and significance, which contrasts with historical discourses that have marginalized the return movement of former slaves and black freedmen, especially from Latin America. This is all the more reason to read the novels against the concept of “return mobilities.”Footnote ⁶⁴ The relocation of Brazilian returnees to West Africa lasted for over one hundred years and, consequently, involves different forms of return mobilities, generations, and notions of “home.” One thus has to distinguish the first-generation return, “where it is the original (e)migrants who are returning,” and the return of second and subsequent generations, “including historically remote ancestral return, also known as ‘ethnic return’.”Footnote ⁶⁵ While historically, the Aguda return movement encompasses direct and ancestral returns, Alem and Couao-Zotti focus on first-generation returnees and their descendants. The slave ancestors of the do Mato family settled in Ouidah in the nineteenth century, and Djibril’s ancestor Miguel do Sacramento returned to TiBrava after the Malê revolt as the result of what Adamson calls transactional forced migration (TFM).Footnote ⁶⁶ These first-generation, or direct, returns problematize the idea of homeland, because, as King and Christou argue, “the question to be asked is ‘Return to where, precisely?’ Back to the ancestral village? […]; or back to a town or city in the homeland which offers better social life and employment chances?.”Footnote ⁶⁷ The novels give no information about the precise origin of the returnees. The reader is forced to speculate, but history suggests that it seems likely that the Brazilians returned to the general cultural sphere of their upbringing.

More importantly, the novels expose “the way that the collective memory of migration, exile, and the homeland produces both a profound sense of ethnic consciousness and identity, and a narrative of return which is shared by the community.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Such narratives are inherited and cultivated by subsequent generations, as Alem’s Caminho Santana and Couao-Zotti’s do Mato family so eloquently demonstrate. In both cases, their Aguda identity is shaped by a collective memory that obscures uncomfortable truths, such as the Aguda slave trade in Les Fantômes du Brésil or victimization, exploitation, and illicit relationships in Les Enfants du Brésil. Instead, it endorses a direct line of descendance, cultural difference, economic success, and the civilizing mission in Africa. The return narrative, therefore (biologically, culturally, socially), separates communities, defining identities based on an ethnocentric worldview. In both novels, (most of) the Aguda do not want to mix with the local population, even after several generations. This raises the question whether there is such a thing as a complete return, given that the returnees’ “idealized memories have often ‘frozen’ the past in a nostalgic time-warp.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The returnees and their descendants hold on to their “Brazilianness” and, in so doing, sustain a diasporic status, which raises the question whether the return is merely physical.

Return migration scholars have pondered whether “the diaspora as such only exist[s] ‘in diaspora’, so that it dissolves upon return.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Does a return, or counter-diasporic migration, necessarily lead to de-diasporization or rather to re-diasporization?Footnote ⁷¹ Christin Hess proposes the term “reverse diaspora” to describe a return that “leads to complex identity negotiation processes in which belonging to the previous country of residence can become so dominant that it replaces the historical homeland as what is felt to be the genuine ancestral home.”Footnote ⁷² Although Hess studies ancestral returns in Europe, some of her conclusions elucidate the situation of the Afro-Brazilian Aguda.Footnote ⁷³ She refines Tom Trier’s concept of reverse diaspora formation, which he describes as “a continued diasporic existence in the homeland, marked by an alienation from [the home] society and a post-migration identification with and elevation of [the former host] culture.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Hess points out that a return to the “homeland” is not always successful. “‘Success’ is defined here as leading to the outcome one would expect from the homecoming of a diaspora—that its members would merge, perhaps not seamlessly but under generally favorable circumstances, with the majority population.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Integration and/or acculturation would allow them to “be recognized as fellow ‘brethren’ by the majority population, and, perhaps most important, ‘come home’ emotionally and tangibly.”Footnote ⁷⁶ However, as Hess’s study shows, reverse diasporas are not always successful in this sense, as they do not necessarily lead to de-diasporization. On the contrary, the returnees’ identity and “[t]heir sociocultural characteristics distinguish them from the socialization and sociocultural markers”Footnote ⁷⁷ of the countries they return to, which triggers a process of re-diasporization.Footnote ⁷⁸

Alem’s and Couao-Zotti’s novels emphasize that the Brazilian returnees have lost certain aspects of their Ewe, Hausa, Yoruba, and so forth identities, given the experience of slavery, forced acculturation, and westernization in Brazil. The imagined similarity and common ancestral background turn out to be insufficient because much separates them from the local population: worldview, language, religion, dress, and occupation. Met with the suspicion, social envy, and even rejection of the local population, the Brazilian returnees keep their distance, which, in turn, reinforces segregation. The returnees withdraw into ethnic enclaves, such as the Brazilian quarters in Ouidah and TiBrava to “preserve their separate identities, and create a feeling of familiarity and security.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Another reason for this might be the interiorization of social and racial hierarchies enforced by the colonial system in Brazil. Hess concludes that by “mobilizing a discourse of the superiority of their […] origins, [the returnees] were able to generate a resourceful response—a form of capital—out of ascription and rejection. It is noteworthy, however, that such capital often focused on the context of the country of previous residence, rather than on the historical homeland.”Footnote ⁸⁰

As Alem’s and Couao-Zotti’s novels show, success is indeed relative, depending on who makes that judgment. The majority of the Aguda themselves certainly consider their return to be successful, not in the sense of complete integration but rather in that of sustained difference. While their African diasporic identity in Brazil was generally attached to a low social status, discrimination, and slavery, their Brazilian diasporic identity in West Africa signifies an elevated social status, economic success, and considerable political influence. This brings me to Heidi Dahles’s work on returnee economies. She writes that “[t]he long-standing engagement of diaspora communities in their countries of origin produces significant flows of financial and human capital, networks of social capital, knowledge and technology, and political support.”Footnote ⁸¹ She studies how different forms of capital that returnees bring back to their homeland generate economic and social change in their home countries, emphasizing their agency, resourcefulness, and creativity. Both novels address the economic and cultural capital of the returnees, that is, the fact that they speak European languages, are literate, and have acquired skills that are highly in demand. The Aguda contributed to developing a particular architectural style in West Africa, new forms of entrepreneurship, as well as domestic and export production (particularly palm oil). Nonetheless, having been subjected to the colonial system in Brazil, the Aguda also returned to Africa carrying the torch of the Western civilizing mission, disregarding local social structures. As Dahles writes, “Returning diaspora bring along their often complex, opaque, and ambivalent economic and political agendas,” which can generate a process of “democratization in their home country” or “focus on personal profit and accelerate the depletion of natural resources and enhance social injustice” (79).

Alem and Couao-Zotti both suggest a “Brazilianization” of the Aguda following their return to the West African “homeland.”Footnote ⁸² This aligns with Hess’s observation that “reverse diasporas are likely to display many or all of the features of diasporic existence in the host state. However, these processes now occur in the nominal homeland and often with a reverse reference point of belonging and home—that is, frequently aimed at the previous country of residence, not uncommonly referred to and idealized as the genuine, authentic homeland.”Footnote ⁸³ The diaspora, that is, Brazil, becomes the “home” with which the returnees identify, while the historical homeland in West Africa takes on the role of a host society, emphasizing the relative nature of both “host” and “home.” However, it is important to note that there exists a variety of coping mechanisms—one example being Djibril’s family, who did not cultivate but rather erased their Brazilianness in order to reclaim their Muslim African identity.Footnote ⁸⁴ The difference between Santana’s and Djibril’s family reveals that many returnee communities “exhibit […] multilayered and parallel identities and patterns of belonging.”Footnote ⁸⁵

While Hess’s concept of reverse diaspora helps us to better understand the situation of the Brazilian returnee communities, it does not account for the specific context of slavery. Hess’s study of Germans and Greeks who returned from the Soviet Union to Greece and Germany identifies gradual acculturation over time, partly imposed by the Russian/Soviet State which discouraged “the retention of ethnic identity and promot[ed] ‘russification’.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Still, Greeks and Germans retained, or had strong awareness of, their original ethnic identity for generations—even if some of their cultural practices were “seen as antiquated, dated, and often conservative” by native Greeks and Germans.Footnote ⁸⁷ Tensions between the German and Greek returnees and the native populations were partially based on a historical disconnect. The returnees seemed to be coming from a bygone era because they had held on to their German/Greek identity abroad for so long.

In the case of the Aguda, the situation seems to be reversed because enslaved Africans and subsequent generations were not necessarily able to retain their ethnic identity.Footnote ⁸⁸ Slavery constitutes a unique, and particularly brutal, form of diasporic dispersal, in which Africans were purposefully separated from their people, forbidden to speak their languages, practice their religions, and enact their cultures. They experienced forced and quasi-immediate acculturation, starting with renaming and baptism. Any display of their African identity was stigmatized and largely prohibited. Upon their return to West Africa, they did not perform an “outdated” ethnic identity that had somehow survived in Brazil. On the contrary, the “brazilianized” Aguda consider West African culture and society as archaic and claim to be more modern, enlightened, and civilized than the native Africans. Consequently, the rift between returnees and locals was not caused by conflicting, that is, modern and antiquated, enactments of the same ethnic identity (as in the case of the German and Greek returnees). Rather, it stems from the opposition of two divergent identities. It is quite telling that in Couao-Zotti’s novel, the Brazilian returnees are called “foreigner” or “white people” by the locals indicating that the Brazilian other is also racialized. The Aguda do not use overcompensation strategies to appear “more African” but to appear “more Brazilian.” This is the exact opposite of what Hess observed in German/Greek returnees, who accentuate their German or Greek identity to avoid stigmatization (as foreigners or Russians/Soviets).Footnote ⁸⁹

Another intriguing difference between Hess’s study and the situation of the Brazilian returnees is linked to social mobility. Hess describes that returning Greeks were perceived as inferior to the native population: “on arrival in Greece, a large number of Soviet Greeks, unable to use their occupational qualifications gained in the Soviet Union, started selling goods such as household utensils and linen in Greece’s ubiquitous open-air markets. […] This created an image of the newcomers as Russians, and in Greece—even worse—as poor Russians […].”Footnote ⁹⁰ While some Greek and German returnees could not benefit from their cultural capital gained in the Soviet Union, the Brazilian returnees were able to make use of their learned skills—education, trade, craftsmanship, and languages—which then allowed them to acquire economic and social capital in Togo and Benin. These formerly marginalized and enslaved individuals, as well as their descendants, succeeded in forming an elite community in West Africa that helped shape the region. However, this compelling success story of upward social mobility remains entangled in colonial dynamics and reproduces inequalities and exclusions in its own way.

Les Enfants du Brésil and Les Fantômes du Brésil illustrate how return migration contributes to the formation of cultures and identities on both sides of the Black Atlantic. The Brazilian returnees first left their mark as West Africans in Brazil and then as Brazilians in West Africa, significantly influencing the communities they entered into. Drawing on historiography and ethnography, Kangni Alem and Florent Couao-Zotti reimagine the history of the Aguda from their respective perspectives, both to restore a lost national narrative and to expose obsolete social practices. The novels also address the Aguda’s complex negotiation of self and home, which warrants a reexamination of the notion of reverse diaspora. Return migration ensuing from colonization and slavery produces specific dynamics that scholarship, in both history and literature, still needs to engage with in more detail. As the analysis of Les Enfants du Brésil and Les Fantômes du Brésil has shown, the return is never the last chapter of a diasporic journey but the beginning of a new one.