Image: Valongo Wharf (Author’s own)
And so in November 2011, the city council created the ‘Circuit of African Heritage’. Valongo Wharf is its main attraction, along with nearby pre-existing sites which had received little or no institutional attention until that point. These included:
a) slave market areas, parts of which were replaced by the Jardim Suspenso do Valongo (Valongo Hanging Gardens) during the belle-époque urban regeneration of the early twentieth century.
b) the Cemitério dos Pretos Novos (Cemetery of New Blacks), a slave burial ground that was accidentally found in 1996 during renovation works on a local house.
c) the Pedra do Sal (Rock of Salt), an area that is largely associated with the origins of samba music in Rio
d) the Centro Cultural José Bonifácio, a rather dilapidated centre that was initially established by the City Council in 1994 to honour Afro-Brazilian culture.
A Working Group was also created to provide policy-makers with advice about the creation of the Circuit. The group included bureaucrats from the council’s Department of Heritage Affairs and the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage, but it also included researchers, representatives of civil society, and leaders of black social movements. In addition, it integrated government agencies which worked for the promotion of black rights at the local, state, and federal levels, and which mediated between black civil society and the higher spheres of public administration. As part of this participatory spirit, the direction of the working group was handed to the President of one of these bodies: Rio de Janeiro’s Committee for the Rights of the Black Population.. The group was expected to produce a document of recommendations (carta de recomendações) that should be taken into account by the Mayor’s Cabinet when implementing policy related to the Circuit.
In addition, the City Council of Rio de Janeiro undertook institutional work to promote the inclusion of Valongo Wharf on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Rumours have also spread about the possible establishment of Rio de Janeiro’s first Afro-Brazilian museum in the area. The aim has been to transform the Circuit into a focus of memory tourism, and as a result a number of historical tours are already taking place, sponsored by the financial umbrella of the City Council and local NGOs. Since 2011, a number of celebrations of Afro-Brazilian heritage funded by Rio’s City Council have occurred along the Circuit.
Image: Event at Pedra do Sal
The creation of the Circuit and the process of participation that it established in Rio is something revolutionary in Brazil, a country which traditionally made only limited efforts to preserve the memory of slavery and to enhance black history. This attitude of forgetting has been linked, by and large, to crystallised imageries of Brazil as a place of racial harmony and democracy, and has automatically been reflected in politics of urban heritage. Things have gradually changed since the late 1980s with the emergence of multiculturalism in Brazil and its growing recognition through legislation, particularly with the implementation of racially-based affirmative action policies in favour of Afro-Brazilians since 2003. The creation of the Circuit reflects the culmination of multiculturalism in Brazil and its questioning of racial mixture (at least in part) as the essence of national identity. The recent development of heritage policies in Rio’s port area, has also been influenced by the UNESCO’s growing focus on slave heritage. The UNESCO’s Slave Route Project (created in 1994) has had some effect in Brazil, but only very recently
While growing multiculturalism and international attention towards slave heritage influenced the creation of the Circuit, another important factor for the building of black heritage has been the city’s urban regeneration. The excavations that unveiled Valongo Wharf happened as a result of water pipeline works for the Projeto Porto Maravilha (Wonderful Port Project). This is a massive urban intervention scheme that reshaped the decayed harbour neighbourhoods ready for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. It echoes the experience of similar areas in Baltimore, Barcelona and Buenos Aires.
Interestingly, though, remembering slave and black history was not an initial goal of the Porto Maravilha Project. The objective of regeneration was mainly about the gentrification of the port area, equipping it with tourist and business infrastructure (hotels, shopping malls, skyscrapers, banks) and attracting upper class residents. The few heritage plans it did contain were the creation of the high-technology Museum of the Future (Museu do Amanhã), and the renovation of the pretty belle époque buildings existing in the area. Another part of the process was the planned evictions of lower class (and black) residents (the large majority in the harbour) and the rising value of the land and buildings, which has more than tripled over the last decade. In the nearby favela of Providência, for example, the City Council noted that 586 of the 1,250 or so houses were to be demolished to make space for middle-upper class residential developments and tourist infrastructure, while another portion of the buildings would be demolished for safety reasons. There was concern not just about the physical removal of lower class residents, but also about the dramatic rise in living costs in the area, an indirect factor for the gradual displacement of vulnerable groups.
But with the finding of Valongo Wharf the situation changed quite radically. Black history has in fact suddenly and unpredictably started to occupy a central place in the regenerating port area, producing a two-fold scenario whose outcome in terms of social equality is not yet fully predictable:
- On the one hand, the enhancement of black heritage contributes to greater land values (the same process that, in fact, threatens the permanence of lower class groups in the area). There is also a possibility that it will be the big tourist and cultural enterprises who will make most of the profit.
- The official black heritage of the port area is becoming increasingly accessible to local communities. Interviews conducted in the local favela of Providência show that some dwellers have started referring to Valongo Wharf and the Circuit of African Heritage as a political means to support resistance against evictions and processes of gentrification. Local cultural groups have claimed support and inclusion within the heritage policies. At the national level, Valongo Wharf and the Circuit of African Heritage are also being appropriated by slavery reparation movements, which have been spreading through Brazil since early 2015 to claim further rights for Afro-Brazilian groups.
This story of Rio’s black cultural heritage therefore unveils historical patterns of inequality and suggest its possible reiteration in the region, but also shows us symbolic and material opportunities for the empowerment of Rio’s Afro-Brazilian communities. Only the future will say if Afro-Brazilians will be subjects or simply objects of the growing trend of ethnic tourism and heritage commoditization in Rio de Janeiro’s harbor.
Andre Cicalo is a research associate at the Brazil Institute, King’s College London. He is the author of the book “Urban Encounters: Affirmative Action and Black Identities in Brazil”, published by Palgrave (2012) and winner of the LASA Prize 2013. You can find out more about black heritage in Rio de Janeiro in this short documentary film.
The research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° PIOF-2012-327465. The work presented here reflects only the author’s views and the European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.
Top Image: J.P. Engelbrecht CC-BY 3.0
