Conceição, Albina Maria da
- José Maia Bezerra Neto
Extract
an emancipated African who challenged her illegal re-enslavement in nineteenth-century Brazil, was born in Luanda, the capital of the Portuguese colony of Angola, probably in 1846. As proof of origin or place of birth, Albina’s right chest carried a hot-iron brand characteristic of the African coast in the form of an “I,” acquired when still young. As a young child, she was abducted by a slave merchant and transported to the Americas. The slave ship that carried her across the Atlantic was captured at sea under antislavery measures intended to suppress the slave trade from Africa to Brazil. Formally, the trade had been banned since November 1831, yet it continued to exist in the form of contraband trade until finally extinguished by the Brazilian parliamentary act of 4 September 1850, known as the Eusébio de Queiróz Law.
Sent on to Rio de Janeiro capital of the Brazilian ...
A version of this article originally appeared in The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography.
