28/05/2026
Reparation business getting interesting
Thank you Mr President
On July 27th 1825, a brig called Espadarte (Swordfish) docked in Rio de Janeiro and unloaded its expensive cargo: 422 Africans forcibly shipped across the Atlantic from Angola. It was the first slave shipment known to have been organised by José Bernardino de Sá, then a clerk at a Rio trading house.
Over the following 25 years, undeterred by a law that theoretically made the slave trade illegal in 1831, Sá would be responsible for trafficking at least 19,000 Africans to Brazil – and become one of the empire’s richest men in the process. By the time of his death in 1855, Sá was a viscount who owned countless buildings in Rio, a handful of rural properties on the south-eastern coast, three ships and more shares in the Banco do Brasil than any other individual.
For a long time, the connection between Sá’s fortune, the illegal and lucrative sale of enslaved Africans, and one of Brazil’s biggest and oldest banks was not widely known even among economic historians, because of a normalisation of the 19th-century slave trade, said Thiago Campos Pessoa, whose work helped shed light on Sá’s trafficking activities.
The historian is part of a group of scholars who have extensively researched how slavery shaped Brazil and its institutions, and who are now striving to bring their findings out of academic circles and into the public debate.
Their research prompted prosecutors to launch an unprecedented inquiry into historical links between the slave trade and the Banco do Brasil, which is being asked to propose ways to make reparations.
SOURCE:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/26/brazil-slavery-reparations-slave-trade-banco-do-brasil
