The Male Revolt of Bahia

Among the millions of Africans carried into slavery in Brazil, the largest destination of the entire Atlantic slave trade, were many Muslims, for the trade drew heavily on the Islamised peoples of West Africa, the Yoruba (called Nago in Brazil), the Hausa and others, among whom were men of learning literate in Arabic. In the city of Salvador, the capital of Bahia, these enslaved and freed African Muslims, known by the Yoruba word Male, formed a community that kept its faith in secret under slavery: they prayed, kept the fast, wore amulets inscribed with verses of the Qur'an, and held clandestine classes in which teachers taught the faith and the reading and writing of Arabic. In January 1835 this community planned and launched a revolt against their enslavers and against the slave society of Bahia, an uprising organised in part by Muslim teachers and timed, by many accounts, to the end of Ramadan, with the rebels going out in the white caps and gowns of their faith. It was the largest urban slave revolt in the history of Brazil, and it sent a wave of fear through the slaveholding society of the Americas. But the rising was betrayed and was crushed within a single night and morning of fierce fighting, with many of the rebels killed; and the reprisals that followed were savage, the survivors executed, flogged, imprisoned, or deported back across the ocean to Africa, and the practice of Islam and the possession of Arabic writings made the object of a fearful repression. The Male revolt is remembered as a striking and tragic witness to the faith, the learning and the unbroken courage that enslaved African Muslims carried with them into the heart of the New World, and to their refusal to submit. This scene depicts the silent aftermath of the revolt in the streets of Salvador; in keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, and the violence is not depicted.