1581 to 1851 · Africanspan
Bahia buys from a different Africa than the rest of Brazil
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Salvador da Bahia sat inside the Brazilian slave trade and ran on a separate supply. Recife and Rio de Janeiro drew their people from West Central Africa. Bahia drew most of its own from the Bight of Benin, several thousand kilometres up the coast. The reason was what Bahia had to sell. Tobacco grown and cured in the Reconcavo, the belt of country behind the bay, was wanted at Ouidah in a way no European commodity was, and Bahian sugar went across with it. The port therefore did more than receive. It financed, built and dispatched its own voyages to Africa, run by merchants who answered to nobody in Lisbon. What that produced was a city with a specific African population rather than a general one. Ewe and Yoruba speakers arrived in numbers large enough to hold their languages, their orisha and their forms of association together, and the religious and social architecture of Bahia has rested on that foundation ever since.
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