Brazilian largest slave market´s rediscovery: what to make of it?

Abstract

In early 2011, during an outstanding archeological excavation in the port area of Rio de Janeiro city, stones that belonged to the wharf where hundreds of thousands of African slaves disembarked, later on to be sold in the old Valongo market, were found, a place held to be the largest of its kind in Brazil in between the 18^th and 19^th centuries. Buried and erased from the urban texture of Rio for nearly two centuries, in 2012 Valongo has become a milestone in the Historical and Archeological Circuit of the Celebration of African Legacy, with both educational and tourist characteristics, within the context of shifting the city-planning reform of the docks area, also called as the Marvellous Port Project. This essay discusses the possibilities of (re)reading today a part of the history about this city and also Brazil’s, a history associated with the African slave trade and slavery, which in many aspects was not told. The emerging of these ruins in the 21^st century arouses questions as to how and by whom Brazilian history was and is configured.