‘Africa is where I’m from’: why some Black Brazilians are moving to Benin
Published: 29/Jan/2025
Source: The Guardian (London)
West African country is offering citizenship to descendants of enslaved persons taken from the continent, sparking huge interest in Brazil
By Tom Phillips and Tiago Rogero in Rio de Janeiro and Eromo Egbejule in Abidjan
João Diamante was gripped by a sense of belonging as he stepped out of the airport terminal thousands of miles from his birthplace in Brazil.
“The first thing I felt was that I was at home,” recalled the 33-year-old celebrity chef from Rio. “Nobody looked at me like they were afraid of me because of the colour of my skin … On the contrary, I saw people just like me. I saw similarities.
“I’d never been there before,” Diamante said of his arrival in Benin’s largest city, Cotonou, last year. “But I was certain this was a place I knew: its smell, its music, its dance, its sound, the noise of car horns, the atmosphere.”
The Brazilian chef was familiar with his surroundings in a way, despite it being his first trip to Africa. Diamante was born in Salvador – the Blackest major city in the country with the largest black population outside Africa – and grew up steeped in the Afro-Brazilian culture and cuisine produced by the uprooting of millions of enslaved Africans who were forced to travel to the South American country to work in goldmines or sugar and coffee plantations.
About 40% of the estimated 12 million enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries came to Brazil, which was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888.
Diamante, whose full name is João Augusto Santos Batista, believes his ancestors were forcibly brought to Brazil from the west African region around what is today the Republic of Benin in the 19th century. Two centuries later, he is reconnecting with his family’s African roots and even hopes to become a citizen of Benin thanks to a new law that offers Afro-descendants from around the world a pathway to citizenship.
“I’m already trying to work out the paperwork … I want a Brazilian passport and a Beninese passport,” the chef said during an interview at his restaurant in a port-side area of Rio known as Pequena África (Little Africa) because of its well-established Afro-Brazilian community. “It’s about belonging, about who I am, where I come from, my lineage and my family,” he added. “Lots of people dream of having a US or a European passport. I dream of having a Beninese passport because Africa is where I’m from.”
Benin’s citizenship scheme – proposed by its president, Patrice Talon, and approved by lawmakers in October – calls itself an attempt to heal “the deep wounds” inflicted on Africa and those taken from it during centuries of enslavement.
According to the law, the initiative is open to “any person in the world who … has sub-Saharan African ancestry [and was] deported outside the continent in the context of slavery”. Such people, it says, have the right to consider Benin “their homeland” and request a passport.
Read further: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jan/29/black-brazilians-moving-to-benin-africa