Ghosts in Rio de Janeiro

Inside page from Folha de São Paulo

2001. We had been living in Rio for three months with a vague plan to stay there, an idea that ended abruptly after a gunfight outside of the children’s playground we used to frequent. Back then I was still afflicted by the compulsion to metronomically visit famous works of architecture. On this particular day I was looking for Lucio Costa's Apartamentos Proletários, a flat roofed modernist housing prototype built in 1926. Situated down near the old Rio docks, it was two hours before I found it, customised out of all recognition and predictably nothing like the antique photograph in the guidebook. I continued my journey down the hill past the Cemitério Ingleses. Dislocated in time with sad tufts of grass, old English names and lost stone angels, it sat forgotten amidst the warren of crumbling pastel stucco and colonial ruins. Tarpaulins hung between the gravestones and somewhat appropriately it had been occupied by homeless families. The intense afternoon heat thickened and mingled with the sensory memory of gold, coffee and African bodies. I turned into a cobbled street of modest single terraced houses. And then it happened, and not for the first time, a visceral bodily and cerebral convulsion. It had been a while. I tremble, stumble, and am overcome by a dizzying chill. The hair on the back of my neck sizzles. They, and it is definitely they, are here, and there are many of them. Close to fainting, I looked for shade inside what turned out to be an Afro-Brasilian community centre in an old colonial institution. It contained a small exhibition on the history of African Brasil. Images of doctors, painters, and writers of African descent hung on the walls alongside the story of the estimated five thousand Quilombos, settlements built by runaway slaves that are scattered across Brasil. A giant etching of the greatest of these the Quilombo dos Palmares has pride of place. A well organised thirty thousand strong town of free slaves, native peoples and fugitive Europeans, it was ruled by the fabled African king Zumbi and grew to be so economically powerful that it began to rival the Portuguese crown, a crime for which it was violently destroyed. We start talking to one of the centre’s directors. She explains a little about the history of the place and about the project in the street out front. In sight of the ornate gates of the Anglican cemetery there had once stood an African cemetery between 1790-1815. I tried to think of the funeral processions passing each other and making eye contact. One mumbles in malaria English and bears a coffin dressed in a ceremonial cloth that is lowered into a solitary hole in the ground and covered by a marble slab. The other reverberates with Umbundu whispers and carries the emaciated corpse of an African princess decorated with traces of Angola that is laid into a humble pit. This was not an ordinary residential street that I had been walking along. It was the resting place of hundreds of Africans too weak to walk past the European graveyard up the hill to the fattening house next to the slave market. Subsequently buried under the cobbled streets and houses, evidence of the cemetery had regularly surfaced over the years.  It was a secret long known by local residents and finally commanded the mapmaker's pen when in the excavations for a house, bones and African artefacts were found buried in the ground. The homeowner had decided that this time there would be no cover up. The press descended. On the front elevation of the house was hung a banner on which was written a simple phrase, "From here a new history of Brasil begins."