1560 to 1851 · Africanspan
Bahia trades tobacco for people on a route of its own
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Salvador da Bahia took in close to 1.4 million captive Africans, which places it among the largest slaving ports that have ever existed. Its supply line was unusual. The rest of Brazil bought in West Central Africa; Bahia dealt with the Bight of Benin, thousands of kilometres up the coast. The reason was what Bahia had to offer in exchange. Tobacco grown behind the city was cured and twisted into rolls that buyers at Ouidah preferred to anything shipped from Europe, and Bahian sugar travelled with it. Local merchants financed and fitted out their own vessels, and the currents of the South Atlantic let those vessels reach Africa and return without a European partner, a European port or a European licence. The demographic result was specific rather than general. The people brought into Bahia were largely Ewe and Yoruba speakers, arriving in numbers large enough to keep their languages and their forms of worship whole, and the city has been built on that inheritance ever since.
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