The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom, and Islam in the Black Atlantic

by Joïo Josï Reis, Flïvio dos Santos Gomes, Marcus J. M. de Carvalho, Sabrina Gledhill

Overview

Winner of the Casa de las América Prize for Brazilian Literature, The Story of Rufino reconstructs the lively biography of Rufino José Maria, set against the historical context of Brazil and Africa in the nineteenth century.

The book tells the story of Rufino or Abuncare, a Yoruba Muslim from the kingdom of Oyo, in present-day Nigeria. Enslaved as an adolescent by a rival ethnic group, he was captured by Brazilian slave traders and taken to Brazil as a slave sometime in the early 1820s. In 1835, after being enslaved in Salvador and Rio Grande do Sul, Rufino bought his freedom with money he made as a hired-out slave and perhaps from making Islamic amulets. He found work in Rio de Janeiro as a cook on a slave ship bound for Luanda in Angola, despite the trans-Atlantic slave trade having been illegal in Brazil since 1831. Rufino himself became a petty slave trader. He made a few voyages before his ship was captured by the British and taken to Sierra Leone in 1841 for trial by the Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission to determine if it was equipped for the slave trade, since there were no slaves on board. During the three months awaiting the court's decision, Rufino lived among Yoruba Muslims, his people, and attended Quranic and Arabic classes. He later returned to Sierra Leone as a witness in a court case and attended classes with Muslim masters for almost two years. Once back in Brazil, he established himself as a diviner — serving whites and blacks, free and slaves, Brazilians and Africans, Muslim and non-Muslims — as well as a spiritual leader, an Alufa, in the local Afro-Muslim community. In 1853 Rufino was arrested due to rumors of an imminent African slave revolt. The police used as evidence for his arrest the large number of Arabic manuscripts in his possession, the same kind of material the police had found with Muslim rebels in Bahia thirty years earlier. During his interrogation, Rufino told his life story, which is used to reconstruct the world in which he lived under slavery and in freedom on African shores, aboard slave ships, and in Brazil.

An extraordinary Atlantic history carefully pieced together from the archives, The Story of Rufino illuminates the complexities of slavery and freedom in Africa and Brazil and the resilience of ethnic and religious identities.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190224363
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	01/08/2020
Pages:	324
Sales rank:	1,126,536
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

João José Reis is Professor of History at the "Three of the leading historians of slavery and the African diaspora in the South Atlantic have teamed up to bring us the remarkable story of Rufino José Maria, also known as Abuncare. Through painstaking research in a vast range of sources, the authors enable us to follow Rufino's travels across the Atlantic and back, through slavery and a degree of freedom, as both a victim and a participant in the transatlantic trade. Rufino's story is, in many respects, an exceptional one, but his struggles, compromises, and accomplishments as an African and a Muslim vividly illuminate the many worlds he inhabited during the waning decades of a trade whose tragic imprint is still visible on both sides of the Atlantic." — Barbara Weinstein, New York University |k Y Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia and Divining Slavery and Freedom, among other books.

Flávio dos Santos Gomes is Professor of History at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and the author of Communautés d'esclaves insoumis, among other works on Brazilian and Caribbean slavery.

Marcus J. M. de Carvalho is Professor of History at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and the author of Liberdade: rotinas e rupturas do escravismo and other works on slavery in Brazil.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

Part I
Chapter 1: Rufino's Africa
Chapter 2: Enslaved in Bahia
Chapter 3: Enslaved in Porto Alegre
Chapter 4: Farroupilha and Freedom
Chapter 5: Freedman in Rio de Janeiro
Chapter 6: Rio de Janeiro, A City in Fear

Part II
Chapter 7: Rufino Joins the Slave Trade
Chapter 8: Luanda, Slave-trading Capital of Angola
Chapter 9: Readying the Ermelinda
Chapter 10: Rufino's Employers
Chapter 11: Passengers, Shippers, and Cargo
Chapter 12: The Ermelinda Goes to Sea
Chapter 13: The Equipment Act
Chapter 14: Sierra Leone
Chapter 15: Among Akus and African Muslims
Chapter 16: The trial of the Ermelinda
Chapter 17: Dirty Tricks
Chapter 18: Back to Sea

Part III
Chapter 19: Counting the Costs
Chapter 20: Rufino's Recife
Chapter 21: A Man of Faith and Sorcery
Chapter 22: Tense Times in Rufino's Recife
Chapter 23: A Free Man
Chapter 24: The Muslims of Recife and a Doctrinal Dispute

Epilogue
Sources and Works Cited
Index

Editorial Reviews

"The narrative demonstrates how enslaved Africans did not simply acquiesce to slavery; rather, they challenged the tyrannical systems exploiting them, and the book is replete with glimpses of this revolutionary zeal. Additionally, the work challenges lazy categorisations that seek to present a binary relationship between Islam and Blackness, highlighting how Black African communities sought to preserve their religious tradition, even through the horrors of the transatlantic slave trade." — Haroon Bashir, Muslim World Book Review

"Three of the finest Brazilian historians of slavery of their generation...bring to us an innovative and imaginative biography of a transatlantic enslaved sojourner whose life and travels reveal the complexities of the slave system in the South Atlantic....Fluidly translated, rarely does a book so impressive in its research and conceptualization convey its message in so accessible a narrative that it can be used to great advantage by both graduate and undergraduate students. This is one of the finest books to date on slavery and its complexities in the nineteenth-century South Atlantic." — Stuart B. Schwartz, Hispanic American Historical Review

"This microhistory of the Atlantic world puts into stark relief Brazil's manifold and complex connections with Africa. By brilliantly reconstructing the life of a single individual, the authors provide a multilayered and broad canvas of the South Atlantic during the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. This is social history at its best." — Roquinaldo Ferreira, University of Pennsylvania

"A brilliant study, The Story of Rufino explores the blurred lines between slavery and freedom for black men in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World and the pervasive role of the transatlantic slave trade in the Brazilian economy. It also stresses the role of violence and fear in terrorizing black people. Rufino had a life replete of adventures and misadventures in a turbulent Atlantic. Thanks to the research of Reis, Gomes, and Carvalho, readers can follow the paths of an exceptional Muslim man, whose life was not so different from other enslaved Africans." — Mariana P. Candido, Mariana P. Candido, author of An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and Its Hinterland

"This tour de force biography of an African-born enslaved man who purchased his freedom and became involved in the slave trade complicates our understanding of the Atlantic slavery. Rufino's exceptional and cosmopolitan trajectory, in a world where slavery was pervasive, is a lesson of cultural resistance and resilience." — Ana Lucia Araujo, Howard University

"Three of the leading historians of slavery and the African diaspora in the South Atlantic have teamed up to bring us the remarkable story of Rufino José Maria, also known as Abuncare. Through painstaking research in a vast range of sources, the authors enable us to follow Rufino's travels across the Atlantic and back, through slavery and a degree of freedom, as both a victim and a participant in the transatlantic trade. Rufino's story is, in many respects, an exceptional one, but his struggles, compromises, and accomplishments as an African and a Muslim vividly illuminate the many worlds he inhabited during the waning decades of a trade whose tragic imprint is still visible on both sides of the Atlantic." — Barbara Weinstein, New York University

"Rufino's story makes for an excellent case study of the complexities of the African Diaspora and the Black...Teacher-scholars in global history will find the book a useful volume for tying together threads from histories of Atlantic slavery, Islam in West Africa, Britain's suppression of the slave trade, and the illegal slave trade in Brazil. Instructors will find The Story of Rufino appropriate for undergraduate courses and graduate seminars that involve these topics, as well as courses on the Black Atlantic...the book's discussion of Rufino's healing business in Recife is a welcome addition to other studies of medicine and healing knowledge in the Black Atlantic." — Christopher Blakley, World History Connected

"Readers should welcome the publication of this ambitious and deeply researched book, whether our primary interests lie in slavery and emancipation in the United States or across the Americas, in Atlantic history, or in African history. Indeed, one of the major contributions of this book is the depths to which its authors have gone to engage in the histories of West and West Central Africa, setting a new standard for Americas-based scholars investigating the lives of Africans who may have been violently forced across the Atlantic but for whom the spiritual and personal connections to their homeland remained strong." — Yuko Miki, American Historical Review

"A vivid microhistory that brings together the histories of slavery, illegal slave trade ventures, and Islamic communities in West Africa and Brazil...Rufino's narrative also brings into focus the development of both syncretic and orthodox forms of Afro-Brazilian Islam in nineteenth century Brazil...Teacher-scholars in global history will find the book a useful volume for tying together threads from histories of Atlantic slavery, Islam in West Africa, Britain's suppression of the slave trade, and the illegal slave trade in Brazil. Instructors will find The Story of Rufino appropriate for undergraduate courses and graduate seminars that involve these topics, as well as courses on the Black Atlantic." — Christopher Blakley, World History Connected

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