Slaves' mass grave is grim reminder of Brazil's racist legacy

[emad]

· Activists say little has changed for black youths
· Burials likened to deaths from drugs conflicts

Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Friday December 30, 2005
The Guardian


When the bones started to appear at the back of his crumbling house in central Rio de Janeiro, Petrucio Guimaraes' first reaction was to call the police, not the archaeologists.

"After the first centimetre of concrete we started seeing all these bones," said Mr Guimaraes, 58, who had been underpinning his 19th-century home. "I thought it must have been some kind of massacre."

Mr Guimaraes and his wife, Ana de la Merced, had unearthed what is thought to be one of the world's largest slave burial grounds, a mass grave where thousands of corpses were abandoned by Brazil's slave traders in the 18th and 19th centuries.


When the archaeologists arrived at the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos (Cemetery of the New Blacks) in Gamboa they uncovered 5,563 bone fragments and teeth. Experts say as many as 20,000 bodies may have been buried in the area, most of them African men aged 18-25 who had died during the three-month sea journey to Brazil or soon after arriving.
"In truth it was a ditch into which they threw the bodies," said Antonio Carlos Rodrigues, the former president of Rio's black rights council. "When they dug it up you could see skulls on top of other skulls, bodies piled up on each other." Between 1550 and 1888, when slavery was officially abolished, at least 3 million African slaves were shipped to Brazil by the Portuguese. The port district of Gamboa found itself at the centre of this trade. The area was also home to so-called casas de engordo (fattening houses) where slaves were fed before being sent to work in the plantations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/brazil/story/0,12462,1675307,00.html

[malaise]

1. How sad

there are hundreds of thousands of our people in mass graves across this hemisphere.