Critical Interventions

Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture

ISSN: 1930-1944 (Print) 2326-411X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcin20

Africanisms inside a Museum from Brazil

Renato Araújo da Silva

To cite this article: Renato Araújo da Silva (2015) Africanisms inside a Museum from Brazil,
Critical Interventions, 9:2, 123-139, DOI: 10.1080/19301944.2015.1111581

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19301944.2015.1111581

Published online: 07 Dec 2015.

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 AFRICANISMS INSIDE A MUSEUM FROM BRAZIL

jo da Silva, Museu Afro Brasil
Renato Arau
If you want to understand me
Come look over my soul of Africa,
In the groans of the blacks in the wharf
(…)
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And nothing else ask me
If it you want to know me …
That I am no more than a cowrie shell of
meat
where the Africa’ s revolt froze
its swollen cry of hope.
(No
emia Abranches de Sousa, Not
ıcias,
“Moçambique 58” Review, 1958)
There is a museum in Brazil in which the old
quarrel between Frazer and Herskovitz was re-
established with a new striking force. Whether
from the point of view of art, African and Afro-
Brazilian material culture and intangible cultural
heritage, the Museu Afro Brasil, headquartered in
Ibirapuera Park in S~ao Paulo, preserves and
discusses African roots as one of the founding
cultures of Brazil. When Edward Franklin Frazer
(1894 1962) and Melville J. Herskovitz
(1895 1963) questioned each other whether
there was, or even up to what level Africanisms in
the Americas was possible, they didn’t yet have
enough data and would no doubt be surprised
today if they could see the cultural retentions that
make Brazil a “small Africa” in the core of South
America.1 The first Brazilian intellectuals to pore
over this matter took great strides in this direc-
tion, and did so from the path left by important
intellectuals such as Luis Gama (1830 1882),
Ó 2015 Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture
Andr
e Rebouças (1838 1898), Joaquim Nabuco
(1849 1910), Jos
e do Patroc
ınio (1854 1905),
Manuel Querino (1851 1923) and Raimundo
Nina Rodrigues (1862 1906). These pioneers
were followed by an intellectual movement that
emphasized personalities such as Lima Barreto
(1881 1927), Oliveira Vianna (1883 1951),
M
ario de Andrade (1893 1945), Arthur Ramos
(1903 1949), Gilberto Freyre (1900 1987),
Jos
e Correia Leite (1900 1989), S
ergio Buarque
de Holanda (1902 1982), Caio Prado Junior
(1907 1990), Edison de Souza Carneiro
(1912 1972), Jorge Amado (1912 2001),
Guerreiro Ramos (1915 1982), Florestan
Fernandes (1920 1995), Darcy Ribeiro
(1922 1997), Milton Santos (1926 2001),
Octavio Ianni (1926 2004), and Fernando Hen-
rique Cardoso (1931), among many other Brazil-
ian spokespersons. Among the major foreign
intellectuals that “Afro-Brazilianized” themselves
were the French sociologist Roger Bastide
(1898 1974), the anthropologist Pierre Verger
(1902 1996), the North-American ethnologist
Ruth Landes (1908 1991), and the Argentinean
visual artist Caryb
e (1911 1997), etc. But even
if one disputes whether or not an Africanism
existed in the Americas, there is certainly a place
where these Africanisms exist unequivocally and
where memory and history merge in visual
works and objects of everyday life, recreating
concepts and polishing mirrors in which certain
identities can see themselves and in which the
soul of Brazil has been able, in great style, to
reAfricanize itself.
Critical Interventions 9, Issue 2 2015
 124 | Arau
jo da Silva
MUSEU AFRO BRASIL: A BRIEF HISTORY
The Museu Afro Brasil opened on October
23, 2004 in the presence of then President Luiz
In
acio Lula da Silva (b.1945). The museum was
created through the tireless dedication of its
director, the artist Emanoel Ara
ujo (b. 1940),
born in Bahia, in Santo Amaro da Purificaç~ao, a
small town that lies in the northeast of the coun-
try, where he counted among his childhood
friends world famous singers Caetano Veloso
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(b. 1942) and Maria Beth^ania (b. 1946). Rising
quickly in the civil service to become Secretary of
Culture of the city, Araujo later led the Pinaco-
teca of the State of S~ao Paulo. He held this posi-
tion for 10 years, bringing the artworks of
Auguste Rodin to an exhibition in 1995, which
attracted 150,000 visitors and afterwards initiat-
ing the Museum’s effective work of art education
and expanding its popularity in Brazil. More
than 30 years ago, the artist began collecting art-
works that expressed Afro-Brazilian identity, but
his interests as a collector, however, were expan-
sive. He collected an enviable amount of visual
artworks of important Brazilian and foreign
artists, as well as a large number of period objects.
Even unconsciously, part of this collection
already included works by black artists and mesti-
zos who were heavily represented in the collection
he donated to the Association Museu Afro Brasil,
the institution responsible for managing the
newly created Museum’s collection. Emanoel
Araujo’s donation constituted more than 80 per-
cent of the museum’s initial collection (Figure 1).
In fact, the history of Emanoel Araujo’s
attention to the black question in Brazil is much
older than his collection history. As a preamble
to my discussion on the uniqueness of the Museu
Afro Brasil for the cultural life of the country, I
would like to highlight here at least two major
events that had significant ramifications for the
Critical Interventions 9, Issue 2 2015
institution Araujo later developed in S~ao Paulo
from the viewpoint of the arts produced by blacks
and their descendants: a visit to Nigeria in the
1970s and to the United States, in the 1980s.
First, there was a great impact from his trip to
Nigeria in 1977 to participate in the “Second
World African Festival of Arts and Culture”
(FESTAC, 1977), in which 45,000 people from
around the world witnessed presentations of tra-
ditional art performances and drama from across
the vast African and African diaspora. There were
also major exhibitions of masks and traditional
African sculptures, musical instruments and
architectural technology, as well as works by con-
temporary artists. In search of a theoretical foun-
dation for a global unity of black aspiration,
intellectuals from over 40 countries presented
more than 260 papers on topics related to black
culture at the festival. Emanoel Araujo, who was
then 37 years old, was fascinated by what he saw
during this cultural festival in Nigeria. This
period planted a seed of what would become for
Araujo a new take on racial consciousness in the
act of collecting. The first African objects he
collected date from this period (Bevilacqua,
2015, p. 7).
Araujo encountered several important figures
and places during his FESTAC ’77 tour. He was
invited to visit a Nigerian man with the Brazilian
name of da Silva, a descendant of Afro-Brazilians
returned to Africa after the end of slavery. He
also traveled to Oshogbo, Ibadan, and Ile-Ife, the
political and religious center of Yoruba culture.
His visit to Nigeria, therefore, left a deep mark
on Emanoel Araujo as man and art collector. He
seemed to have been greatly nourished by Yoruba
culture, with its multiple links to Brazil. Another
important aspect of his development was that, in
1988, Araujo was invited to give engraving classes
as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Art, at the
City College of New York, USA. He was assisted

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Figure 1. Museu Afro Brasil. Popular Festivities Collection. Photographer: Nelson Kon, 2011.
in this endeavor by teachers such as Haskell
Hoffenberg and the African art scholar George
Nelson Preston;2 Araujo also lived in Harlem just
like Mr Preston, whom he befriended, a friend-
ship that lasts to this day. In 1987, Preston had
written an article about the visual work of
Emanoel Araujo, considering it a “Brazilian
Afrominimalism” and relating it to African artistic
expression. Preston also helped him procure Afri-
can artworks from the New York art market, thus
expanding his collection. The reality of black
Harlem of the 1980s and contact with African
American activists, who fought for civil rights
16 years earlier, deeply impacted Araujo’s think-
ing on the Afro-Brazilian question (Preston,
1987). In the same year that he was a professor at
AFRICANISMS INSIDE A MUSEUM FROM BRAZIL | 125
New York, several celebrations marking the cente-
nary of the abolition of slavery occurred in Brazil.
Buoyed by his encounters with civil-rights
activists and the discourse of black identity,
Emanoel Araujo decided it was time to conduct
deep research on black participation in the arts in
Brazil.3 Therefore, for 16 years before he founded
Museu Afro Brasil, the artist started to organize
various commemorative exhibitions with the
theme of black identity in Brazil, not merely as a
“laboratory” for the creation of the Museu Afro
Brasil, but to create exposure for black artists in
the country’s art scene. His activities during this
period can be interpreted as markers of a much
broader reformulation of the culture and history
of Brazil from the Afro-Brazilian perspective,
Research
 126 | Arau
jo da Silva
which was hitherto almost non-existent.4 These
exhibitions also led to a maturing of his curatorial
ideals and culminated in the inauguration of the
Museu Afro Brasil, at the beginning of the
twenty-first century. Relevant exhibitions devel-
oped by Emanoel Araujo held in different muse-
ums of that time include the remarkable “A M~ao
Afro-Brasileira” (The Afro Brazilian Hand, 1988)
commemorating the centenary of the abolition of
slavery (Araujo, 2010, pp. 103 155). The exhi-
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bition tracked the visual production of Brazilian
black artists from the Baroque (eighteenth cen-
tury) to the contemporary era (twentieth and
twenty-first centuries). Other notable exhibitions
such as “Vozes da Di
aspora” (Voices of the
Diaspora, 1993), paid tribute to the artist Rubem


Valentim, who died in 1991, and “Brasil Africa
Brasil” (Brazil Africa Brazil, 1992), held at the
Pinacoteca do Estado de S~ao Paulo in honor of
the 90th birthday of French anthropologist Pierre
Verger (1902 1996), who lived in Brazil and
was, along with another French sociologist Roger
Bastide (1898 1974), largely responsible for the
systematic study of African Brazilian religiosity.
Another important exhibition “Os Herdeiros da
Noite” (The Heirs of the Night: Fragments of
the Black Imaginary, 1994) featured the works of
artist Master Didi (1917 2013), an important
priest for ancestor worship (Egungun worship) in
Itaparica Island, northeast of the country. Others
include “Negro de Corpo e Alma” (Black, Body
and Soul, 2000), as part of the “Mostra do
Redescobrimento” (Rediscovery Exhibition), and
finally, “Para Nunca Esquecer: Negras Mem
orias,
Mem
orias de Negros” (Never to Forget: Black
Memories, Memories of Blacks, 2001).
FOUNDATION OF THE MUSEUM
As his collection expanded, the idea of estab-
lishing a museum took shape in Araujo’s mind.
Critical Interventions 9, Issue 2 2015
However, lack of historical understanding and
awareness of the importance of such a museum
prevented the realization of such a project. This
was, in large part, due to the stagnant policies
related to racial issues that were prevalent in
Brazil well into the early twenty-first century.
After a long struggle by Araujo for the realization
of his project, which gradually accrued other sup-
porters, the year 2003 saw a large “cultural turn”
in national politics that created more beneficial
conditions for the establishment of a museum of
Afro-Brazilian art. Passage of Federal Law
10.639/2003, which made compulsory the teach-
ing of African and Afro-Brazilian history and
culture in public and private schools and all facets
of the educational system, was an important
step forward for Afro-Brazilians from a political
point of view. The mandatory law created a need
for teachers and enhanced representation of Afro-
Brazilians in areas other than manual labor.
It also encouraged educational activities that
related Brazilians to the reality of their African
heritage.
The awareness of the African contributions
to national culture generated an “Afro” renais-
sance in Brazil, and also anxiety about the
absence of systematic studies of its deepness and
historical importance. It exposed the lack of
textbooks and teaching materials specifically
related to the positive contribution of Africans to
Brazilian culture, except on the subject of slavery.
It was now necessary to represent Africans and
their descendants no longer as mere subjects of
historical abuse or as passive figures of manual
labor, but as active agents and bearers of techno-
logical processes and African production techni-
ques that made key contributions to the
economic and cultural development of the coun-
try (Libby, 1993, pp. 468 471). The need to
popularize these contributions to national culture
demonstrated the importance of the Museu Afro

Brasil project, which was expected to help over-
come the country’s contentious history of bias
against its black citizens.
The history of Brazil, distorted by the horror
of slavery, is inextricably linked to the economic
and cultural contributions of Africans and their
descendants. However, the African presence is
also closely linked to all Brazilians through
various quirks of history. In the first decades of
Portuguese exploitation of the territories that
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became Brazil (from 1500 onwards), there were
no European women available to Portuguese
men, only women of African and indigenous ori-
gins. The historical shortage of white women in
colonial Brazil and resulting racial mixing created
the mestizo, whose genetic diversity and multi-
cultural history shaped a specific social context.
Furthermore, the combined technologies and
knowledge of enslaved Africans and indigenous
peoples were indispensable to the young colony.
They brought important advances in iron-work-
ing, tropical medicine and in other fields of
knowledge whose traces can still be found in
many aspects life in Brazil. African farming tech-
niques of shifting cultivation, expertise in wood
and stone sculpture, technical knowledge of how
to find ores, techniques of iron forging for much-
needed tools, and the use of gold to produce glit-
tering jewels, successfully Africanized Brazil while
contributing to its technological development.
The country’s obvious dependence on African
labor to produce sugarcane, gold, cotton, rubber,
tobacco, and coffee (among other products),
ensured that trans-Atlantic slavery lasted longer
in Brazil than in any other country in the Ameri-
cas. From about 1530 and decades after 1888,
when slavery was abolished in the country, slave
ships and shipments arrived by the thousands,
even years after the first English prohibitions
against export of African slaves (1831). About
5 million Africans landed on the coast of Brazil
AFRICANISMS INSIDE A MUSEUM FROM BRAZIL | 127
during this period, composing then the majority
of the population of Brazil (Moura, 2004, p. 52).
Their cultural impact on the arts, music, dances,
foods, and the national language influenced even
the Iberian masters (Figure 2).
The native “Indian” people enslaved in Brazil
did not develop expertise in ironworks, which
they viewed as a technology embedded in the
notion of “fighting” against nature. Rather, the
exuberance of nature meant that the native
Indian was perfectly adapted to the abundance of
natural resources. Brazil has about 15 percent of
all river basins in the world and even today, after
500 years of deforestation, it still has the second
largest forest reserve in the world. The natives
were perfectly adapted to hunting and fishing,
and there was no natural necessity for them
to develop ironworks. On the other hand, the
Africans expatriated to Brazil during the slave
trade came from regions of Africa that had long
used high-impact technologies in farming and
were expert ironworkers (farming tools were
uniformly made of iron). Blacksmithing was an
integral aspect of their traditions. Thus, the
Portuguese of early colonial periods, attentive to
African knowledge in working all sorts of metals,
took advantage of and introduced this African
knowledge to Brazil in favor of Portuguese inter-
ests and those of other European peoples who
benefited directly or indirectly from slavery.
Brazil’s indigenous peoples also did not
develop extensive farming models with a view to
creating food surplus and were unaware of
notions of surplus production, material wealth
accumulation and extensive industrialized agri-
culture. On the other hand, the Kingdoms of
Kongo and Loango, for example, from where
many African slaves in Brazil originated, had a
population of approximately two million people
when the Portuguese first arrived in Brazil in
1500.5 The Portuguese marveled at how these
Research
 128 | Arau
jo da Silva
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Figure 2. Museu Afro Brasil. Slave ship installation. Photographer: Nelson Kon, 2011.
African kingdoms were able to supply so many
people with food without extensive agriculture
and other food technologies. The export of
African labor to Brazil allowed the Portuguese to
take advantage of African farming techniques and
direct this to large-scale agriculture for generating
profit (Figure 3).
Moreover, unlike the indigenous regions of
the Andes, the indigenous peoples enslaved in
Brazil did not develop techniques for exploiting
gold. In contrast, African people such as the
Mande, the Akan in Ghana (which used to be
called the Gold Coast for the vast amounts of
gold exported from this region), and Berber peo-
ples of North Africa, among others, had devel-
oped important techniques of gold extraction and
Critical Interventions 9, Issue 2 2015
manipulation to create jewelry and various objects
that added value to the raw material. Their
knowledge was very useful to the Portuguese who
exploited gold mining in Brazil since the seven-
teenth century to the tune of almost a hundred
tons of pure gold, which flowed into Portuguese
coffers. African slaves and their descendants, who
were once useful to Portuguese interests,
remained useful to the Brazilian elites, because
the economy was totally dependent on slave labor
until the end of the nineteenth century.
Slave labor shaped the social settings and its
effects are still quite visible in Brazil today. Thus,
the establishment of a museum to demonstrate
these facts through collections of historical and
artistic objects would lead to a new perception of

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Figure 3. Museu Afro Brasil. Work and Slavery (permanent collection). Photographer: Nelson Kon, 2011.
how important and influential its black citizens
were to the constitution of the country’s culture.
For example, African women and their descend-
ants were vital to the nation’s growing urbaniza-
tion. In each house there were black Brazilian
women known as escravo de ganho (slave of gain),
who worked outside the home marketing prod-
ucts (Alencastro, 2000). There were also those
who worked in the house, whether doing tradi-
tional housework or working as wet-nurses. The
white children who were raised by these women
and their African descendants absorbed much of
African culture from them. The result is that in
their way of being and speaking and in all other
aspects of culture, Brazil has become Africanized
entirely (Figure 4).
AFRICANISMS INSIDE A MUSEUM FROM BRAZIL | 129
Therefore, speaking about an Afro-Brazilian
culture in Brazil is to some extent redundant.
Even the sons and daughters of the masters dur-
ing the period of slavery were surreptitiously
introduced to culture models brought from
Africa, which needed to be preserved. Therefore,
the emergence of this museum in S~ao Paulo, in
the economic center “whitened” due to the Bra-
zilian Government policy of massive European
immigration from the late nineteenth to early
twentieth centuries, makes it possible to highlight
relegated forms of Afro-Brazilian art and culture,
and aspects of Brazilian history that had never
been addressed in museums.6
The true extent of African influence in Brazil
is still contentious. African and Afro-Brazilian
Research
 130 | Arau
jo da Silva
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Figure 4. Museu Afro Brasil. Alembique Still and Sugar Loathe. Photographer Nelson Kon, 2005.
presence are not only visible in “popular culture”
but also within “high culture” (Araujo, 2014,
p. 6). One can speak of the black and mestizo
impact on the visual arts in the works of Antonio
Francisco Lisboa (Aleijadinho c.1730 or
1738 1814), Mestre Valentim (c.1750 1813),
Jos
e Te
ofilo de Jesus (1758 1847), Frei Jesu
ıno
de Monte Carmelo (1764 1819), Verissimo de
Freitas (born in the mid-eighteenth century and
died in the early nineteenth century) and Joa-
quim Jos
e da Natividade (eighteenth century).
Recent research work of Maestro Marcelo
Antunes Martins through the “The Mulatto Mas-
ters” project reveals that all Brazilian composers
of classical music in the eighteenth century were
children or grandchildren of slaves, such as, two
Critical Interventions 9, Issue 2 2015
of the greatest Brazilian composers, Father Jos
e
Maur
ıcio Nunes Garcia (1767 1830) and Car-
los Gomes (1836 1896).7 Similar research
reveals the great impact of African-descended
peoples on Brazilian literature and other aspects
of national culture (Figure 5).
Black writers were also vital in Brazilian liter-
ature. These include luminaries, such as Cruz e
Souza (1861 1898), Lima Barreto
(1881 1922), Lino Guedes (1897 1951),
Solano Trindade (1908 1974), and Oswaldo de
Camargo (1936). Among the greatest writers,
one may count Machado de Assis (1839 1908)
a major name in Brazilian literature, M
ario de
Andrade (1893 1945), patron of modernist lit-
erature in Brazil, and the poet Paul Leminsky

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Figure 5. Museu Afro Brasil. Brazilian Baroque. Photographer: Nelson Kon, 2005.
(1944 1989). In the area of philosophy, Tobias
Barreto (1839 1889) and Farias Brito
(1862 1917) were equally important pioneers.
Given the immense influence of African-
descended peoples within Brazilian national cul-
ture, the question arises: would any other
museum narrate the participation of blacks in
decisive battles in the history of the country, such
as in the Paraguayan War (1864 1870), or the
black involvement in the expulsion of Dutch
invaders in 1654? Where else could Brazilians
learn about Henrique Dias, the black governor of
Pernambuco who, along with Felipe Camar~ao
(1580 1648) and Vidal de Negreiros
(1606 1680), was responsible for the expulsion
of the Dutch in this northeastern state? What
AFRICANISMS INSIDE A MUSEUM FROM BRAZIL | 131
other museum in Brazil documents the revolt of
the Males (1835), Bahia’s struggle for indepen-
dence (1821 23), black participation in the
Constitutionalist Revolution of S~ao Paulo
(1932), or the creation of numerous newspapers
we call now “black press” in defense of the
Republican ideals. It is damning that no other
institution among about 77 museums of the city
of S~ao Paulo preserves this memory visually and
artistically, so this task was left to the Museu Afro
Brasil.8
It is true that there is another museum, the
Museu Afro Brasileiro in Salvador, Bahia, in the
northeast, which opened in 1982 and has a close
connection with S~ao Paolo’s Museu Afro Brasil.
However, Museu Afro Brasileiro in Salvador is a
Research
 132 | Arau
jo da Silva
university museum connected to the Federal Uni-
versity of Bahia.9 It is extremely important to
promote discussion about Africanisms of Brazil
in S~ao Paulo, as an economic and financial center
of the country and for being a place that prides
itself on having more residents of Italian descent
than almost all population of Italy.10 S~ao Paulo is
also one of Brazil’s cultural centers and it is essen-
tial that the city becomes “self-aware” of its
blackness.
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The Museu Afro Brasil is not an ethnological
or African art museum a role already fulfilled
by the Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia da
Universidade de S~ao Paulo.11 It also cannot sim-
ply be described as a “Black Museum,” nor is it a
folk museum restricted to a largely misunder-
stood “folk art.” Rather, it documents the impact
of African and Afro-Brazilian arts and technolo-
gies on the social history of Brazilian art (Araujo,
2006, pp. 11 15). The curatorial perspective,
developed by Emanoel Araujo, defined the
Museu Afro Brasil, above all, as “Brazil’s
Museum” and, moreover, an “Art Museum” a
museum that blacks, whites, Asians and indige-
nous peoples would recognize as Brazilian, and
that “Afro-Brazilian” cultural engagements were
none other than the manifestations of Brazil itself
and Brazilians in general. This Brazil would,
however, still be recognized as “black” in a poetic
and artistic way and even genetically.12
The creation of institutions that celebrate the
contributions of African traditions to Brazil made
it possible to politicize the issue of museum
representation. The Museu Afro Brasil therefore
has a double self-consciousness as a locale for the
preservation of art and material culture, histori-
cal/cultural knowledge and intangible culture.
Political support for the creation of institutions
of this nature would never have been possible
without awareness of and the need to redress the
historical omissions of black life in Brazil. This is
Critical Interventions 9, Issue 2 2015
evident in the process through which the
museum became nationalized. The Associaç~ao
Amigos do Museu Afro Brasil (Association of
Friends of the Museu Afro Brasil) on December
7, 2004 fought to legalize and raise funds for the
museum by gathering together members of civil
society with non-profit organizations who gener-
ated the technical, material and financial means
to preserve and conserve the museum’s art collec-
tion. Ordinance 44,816 of June 1, 2004 estab-
lished the Museu Afro Brasil as a public facility
in S~ao Paulo City Hall with a prominent space in
Ibirapuera Park. It now occupies a building
loaned by the city (Padre Manoel da Nobrega
Pavilion) designed in the 1950s by Brazil’s most
prestigious architect Oscar Niemeyer
2
(1907 2012), with around 12,000 m of floor
space (Figure 6).
In its implementation phase, with the coordi-
nation of Emanoel Araujo, the museum assembled
a multidisciplinary team of consultants to define
the fundamental theoretical criteria for the creation
of long-term assets, and develop programming.
Emanoel Araujo (through the Association of
Friends of the Museu Afro Brasil) loaned the
museum 1100 artworks to start. The museum’s
collection has since grown to 6000 works.
Early in the second half of 2005 the Depart-
ment of Programs and Cultural Projects (SPCC)
invited the Museu Afro Brasil to become a “Point
of Culture.” On July 6, 2005, the then Municipal
Secretary of Culture, Mr Carlos Augusto Calil,
formalized the agreement between the Associa-
tion of Friends of Museu Afro Brasil and the
Department of Culture. The realization of this
agreement within a government framework was
important for the later establishment of the
Museum as an OSCIP (Civil Society Organiza-
tion for Public Interest) on April 4, 2006. It
brought to the museum a volume of financing
and human capital and elevated its standing and

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Figure 6. Museu Afro Brasil. Outside view. Photographer: Nelson Kon, 2011.
programs. However, later that year the city of S~ao
Paulo revoked the initial decree that designated
the Museu Afro Brasil as a public institution,
making it a private, non-profit organization. The
City honored its previous commitment to use
Niemayer’s building and permitted a one-time
transfer of R$1.200,000,00 year (equivalent at
the time to about US$600,000), which was insuf-
ficient for the Museum’s expenses. However, 18
May 2009 saw the signing of decree 54,343 by
the former Governor of the State of S~ao Paulo,
Jos
e Serra, with the support of the then Secretary
AFRICANISMS INSIDE A MUSEUM FROM BRAZIL | 133
of State for Culture, Jo~ao Sayad, and Secretary
Chief of Staff, Aloysio Nunes, recreating the
Museu Afro Brasil as an OS (Social Organiza-
tion). The reconfigured institution was now a
public cultural facility managed by a private insti-
tution (Museu Afro Brasil Association) charged
with preserving museological heritage in order to
“establish and develop museums and cultural
processes involved in memory, identification,
study, conservation, documentation, socio expo-
sure and action of tangible and intangible heri-
tage expressions Afro-Brazilian, indigenous,
Research
 134 | Arau
jo da Silva
national and international.” (Araujo, 2006,
11 15).
THE MUSEU AFRO BRASIL IN NUMBERS
The recent celebration of the first decade of
the Museu Afro Brasil shows an enviable level of
productivity. By 2011, the Museu Afro Brasil
had produced about 30 exhibitions at an average
of 2.5 new exhibitions per month. The Museum
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also provided free admission for 10 years until
September 15, 2014 when they instituted a nom-
inal charge (with half price for students) but still
allowed free access two days a week. Within its
three-floor and 12,000 m2 of space, the perma-
nent collection now occupies more than 4500m2,
while 2000 m2 are reserved for temporary exhibi-
tions arranged on the other two floors of the
building. There is an auditorium, named after
actress Ruth de Souza (b. 1921), with seating for
150 people, and also used for meetings, seminars,
film screenings, dance and theater.
In the past decade, despite several economic
setbacks, the Museu Afro Brasil has produced
more than 150 temporary exhibitions, and
received free of charge hundreds of thousands of
visitors through its educational program, guided
tours and art workshops. Public and private
schools in the State of S~ao Paulo include visits to
the museum in their educational programs. Fre-
quent visitors include social activists, Afro-Brazil-
ian religious groups, human rights institutions,
racial equality groups, university researchers and
representatives of national and international insti-
tutions. It also receives a very large number of
tourists keen to visit one of the largest museums
in the world focused on the African heritage in
global culture.
Additionally, the museum hosts temporary
exhibitions, seminars, lectures, conferences, film
screenings, book launches and other social events.
Critical Interventions 9, Issue 2 2015
It also produces publications including books,
catalogs, newspapers and magazines. The organi-
zational structure of Museu Afro Brasil is divided
into work centers. Each center has a responsibility
appropriate to its area, but also collaborates with
the other groups to develop their professional
activities. The executive sectors oversee produc-
tion, communication, finance, administration,
maintenance and installation, collection of keep-
ers, cleaning, concierge, fire and security among
other practical activities. The work centers are
linked to curatorial staff responsible for the con-
ceptual focus of the museum and for maintaining
its commitment to African and Afro-Brazilian
culture, history and art.
LIBRARY
The Carolina Maria de Jesus Library was
founded in May 2005, seven months after the
inauguration of the Museu Afro Brasil. Emanoel
Araujo donated about 1000 publications to form
the library’s initial collection, while the Petrobras
oil company donated 400 books from the collec-
tion of the professor Carlos Eugenio Marcondes
de Moura (b. 1933). The library now has over
11,000 items including books, journals and peri-
odicals, theses, posters, multi-media materials,
and calendars, among other documents, on topics
ranging from the African heritage in the culture
of the Americas, history, geography, literature,
cinema, music and visual arts of Africa, Brazil
and the world. The library also has a newspaper
library with about 3000 clippings from newspa-
pers and magazines on topics related to African
and Afro-Brazilian culture.
The library collection covers a wide range of
topics but its specialty is on art, and the history
of the slave trade in Latin America, the Caribbean
and the US which makes it a singular collec-
tion in Brazil, also due to major donations of rare

books received by the library since its foundation.
Main donors include, among a multitude of
anonymous persons, the collector Ruy Souza e
Silva (b. 1948), and the photographer Leonardo
Kossoy (b. 1943), both of whom, since 2006,
have provided significant donations. In addition,
Pedro Martins (b. 1950), son of the visual artist
Aldemir Martins (1922 2006), generously
donated his father’s library to the Museu Afro
Brasil, in 2014.
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The library is named in honor of a female
recycling worker who had only two years of
elementary school education, which did not
stop her from becoming a nationally and inter-
nationally famous writer. Carolina Maria de
Jesus (1914 1977) wrote on the difficulties of
being a poor black woman who challenged the
establishment. Her famous diary (Quarto de
Despejo Child of the Dark, 1960) was trans-
lated into 14 languages and was an interna-
tional bestseller. This feat was achieved thanks
to support from the journalist Audalio Dantas
(b. 1929) who discovered her manuscript by
chance in 1958, while covering the news of
the creation of a municipal park and saw there
a disheveled woman admonishing some young
hoodlums (she threatened to document their
actions in her book). Dantas inquired about
the book and, when he read drafts of the man-
uscript, he was impressed with the literary
quality and critical force Carolina Maria de
Jesus showed in her narrative about poverty in
the slums, and the impact of class and color
prejudice on her life. Two years later, in 1960,
Quarto de Despejo (literally translated as
“Dump Bedroom” or “Bedroom of Waste”)
was published in English as Child of the Dark:
The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus. The
Carolina Maria de Jesus library in its institu-
tional role contributes to the training and edu-
cation of teachers, students, researchers and
AFRICANISMS INSIDE A MUSEUM FROM BRAZIL | 135
sundry visitors to the museum on African and
African Brazilian contributions to the nation.
EDUCATION
The educational center mediates the interac-
tion of visitors with the museum’s collection.
The educational staff develop workshops on art
and culture, disseminate training courses and
seminars, and produce publications that help
construct new representations of the contribution
of black peoples to Brazilian society. The training
of art educators in the Museu Afro Brasil enhan-
ces their allegiance to the museum’s primary
objectives. To manage a cultural institution is to
manage cultural goals; educators at the Museu
Afro Brasil are therefore intellectuals who also
often deal with quotidian issues of museum
management.
PROJECTS
In addition to developing exhibition pro-
grams and partnerships with public and private
sectors through the mobilization of technical,
financial and human resources, the project work
group has a dual nature: in addition to providing
technical support for the development, monitor-
ing and implementation of projects, it is also
responsible for identifying and including projects
that contribute to the museum’s cultural focus. It
formulates projects that help maintain the
museum’s own vision as a prominent place to
highlight African and Afro-Brazilian cultures,
among other aspects of global culture.
RESEARCH
Although in its initial plans, the museum
provided for the creation of a Center of Reference
and Documentation of the black memory this
project has not yet been established.
Research
 136 | Arau
jo da Silva
The Research Center is however tasked to
take stock of the museum’s database, and help
manage specialized collections that provide edu-
cational or exhibition support materials. It pre-
pares textual and visual materials by synthesizing
and compiling data and analyzing documents
from various sources. It is expected the Research
Center will disseminate the results of its investiga-
tions and make them freely available to the gen-
eral public.
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editing images, developing catalog designs and
covers, and creating invitations, posters, certifi-
cates, in print and electronic formats. The
communication staff provides specialized per-
sonnel who disseminate timely information
about the museum’s activities with awareness
of the historical processes and the theoretical
contexts that guide the museum.
CONCLUSION

The effacement of the history of African tra-
ditions in Brazil and the Americas created an
ideological Eurocentric version of history that
limited the participation of blacks to slavery and
to forced labor, with negative consequences for
future generations. Thus, the Research Center
has a duty to undo the invisibility of cultures of
African origin in Brazilian and international
contexts.
In its decade of existence, the Museu Afro
Brasil has diligently pursued the documenta-
tion and preservation of African traditions and
Afro-Brazilian cultural memory, which was
marginalized for four centuries out of Brazil’s
515 year history. The creation of a law in
2003, which made compulsory the teaching of
African history and culture and Afro-Brazilian
schools, was not the only reason, but greatly

DOCUMENTATION
This is a relatively recent addition to the
Museu Afro Brasil working groups, but it has
already made strides despite having, for now, a
staff of only one person, the database technician
Dalton Delfini Manziero. The unit is responsible
for documenting administrative, curatorial and
educational records and cataloging of historical
materials. It is also developing a searchable data-
base about the museum’s holdings designed for
general public use. Above all, it is charged with
the responsibility of supplying the demand for
documents related to historical, artistic and insti-
tutional memory through systematic organization
of data related to specific aspects of the museum’s
management.

EDITORIAL AND COMMUNICATIONS

The Editorial Center oversees the Figure 7. Museu Afro Brasil. Iemanj
a (Goddess of
museum’s publications by creating layouts, the Sea). Photographer: Nelson Kon, 2011.

Critical Interventions 9, Issue 2 2015


encouraged the creation of the Museu Afro
Brasil, because it created the possibility of
meeting a new educational demand for Afro-
Brazilian history and culture. The Museum is,
however, an art museum and not an ethnology
museum or a museum solely for blacks. Its
focus on specifics issues of Afro-Brazilian life
in Brazil makes it distinct from all other muse-
ums of art in the nation. The discourse of
Africanisms in Brazil has been complicated by
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the cultural avalanche of its European immi-
grants and most Brazilians, although of African
descent, still do not identify themselves as
such. However, the Museu Afro Brasil reiter-
ates the African identity of Brazil in general
while positing a cultural acknowledgement of
the Africanisms flowing from this identity as a
future heritage of all Brazilians (Figure 7).
NOTES
Renato Ara
ujo da Silva (renatoaraujinho@gmail.com)
is a researcher and philosopher specializing in ancient
and pre-Socratic philosophy. Since 1999 he has been
engaged in projects directed by Marta H. L. Salum
(Lisy) on African Art and jewelry in the Museu de
Arqueologia e Etnologia da Universidade de S~ao
Paulo. In 2009, he attended the USA Department of
State international visitor leadership exchange pro-
gram focused on “Cultural Heritage of the African
Diaspora.” He has worked in the Museu Afro Brasil
since 2005 and is widely published.
This essay is dedicated to the visual artist and educator
Sarah Ruth Barbosa (1960 2010) (in memorian) and
to my lovely wife Alessandra Mara Gomes de Melo.
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the
author.
1 Map in Brazil (March, 2015). Retrieved from
On this subject see: Marcussi (2011, pp. 1 11).
2 http://www.fomezero.gov.br/noticias/ibge-divul
Preston opened the Arts Studio in 1959, hosting
readings of poets of the Beat generation, such as
AFRICANISMS INSIDE A MUSEUM FROM BRAZIL | 137
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and Frank
O’Hara. Today he is the director of the Museum
of Art and Origins, 430 W 162nd St, New York
City.
3
Seminal papers on this issue may be quoted:
Lody (1985); Munanga (1989; 200); Nasci-
mento (1981); Preston (1987); Piau
ı (1974);
Salum (1993; 2000; 2004); Valladares (1976;
2000).
4
Carneiro da Cunha (1983) was one of the most
important scholar of his generation to develop
new visions on the afro-brazilian material cul-
ture. The oldest works include: Querino (1938;
1954); Ramos (1940; 1946); Rodrigues (1976).
5
See Bustin et al. (1963) and Thornton (2001).
6
In Zanini (1983) is possible to take an overview
in the history of Brazilian art with some remark-
able indications on the Afro-Brazilian heritage in
arts.
7
This research resulted in the recording of a
Compact Disc with over 11 classical composers
of black ancestry; Os Mestres Mulatos Sinfo-
nieta dos Devotos de Nossa Senhora dos Prazeres
(The Mulatto Masters Sinfonietta of Devotees
of Our Lady of Joy).
8
Please visit Museu Afro Brasil. Retrieved from
http://www.museuafrobrasil.org.br
9
Not to mention that it is located in a city where
78.15 percent of the population are of African
descent, a totally different dynamic from the 37
percent of African descent in S~ao Paulo, accord-
ing to official statistics in 2010. The official cen-
sus from Brazil is developed by the IBGE
(Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics).
http://www.ibge.gov.br/english/ (March, 2015).
10
Italian migration to S~ao Paulo started in the
1870s, 370 years after the coming of the first
Africans. There are today, in any case, more than
6 million Brazilians of Italian descent in S~ao
Paulo city alone, according to the official census
of 2010. See also the Black People Distribution
gamapa-de-distribuicao-de-negros-no-brasil
Research
 138 | Arau
jo da Silva
11
See: Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology
from Sao Paulo University (March, 2015).
Retrieved from http://www.nptbr.mae.usp.br/
12
The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statis-
tics (IBGE) found that, under the self-declara-
tion of discretion, in which the person surveyed
identifies their skin color, between 2008 and
2010, peoples self-identified as blacks and mesti-
zos now make up the majority (51%) of the pop-
ulation in Brazil. See also, in comparison, “in
2014 US Census Bureau estimated 45,672,250
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African Americans in the United States meaning
that 14.3% of the total American population of
318.9 Million is Black”: (March, 2015) retrieved
from http://blackdemographics.com/
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