As experiências de sujeitos escravizados na Vila São Sebastião do Maraú: província da Bahia no século XIX.

Abstract

The South Bahia’s province, has always been stigmatized for having a low population density and for not having been one of the great agro-exporting centers in the 19th century. Bringing these “negative” characteristics, for a long time, the idea (itself) consolidate that the southern’s village didn’t bring any relevance in the bahian’s view, before the cocoa farming’s expansion in the 20th century. Discovering the specifics of the village of São Sebastião do Maraú, we realized that south’s villages represented a lot in bahian’s view, because was up to them and other province’s location to supply Salvador and it’s concave with a variety of foods, of which the most important was cassava flour. A Society that made extensive use of enslaved’s labor and their descendants, aurond this specialized supply agriculture, reproduced in micro school practices of brazilian’s slavery. Enslaved, free and freed men built relationships of solidarity, kinship, respect and, of course, conflict, be it veiled or explicit. The 19th century, was the stage for slave system’s desintegration, the institution lost more support, and collapsed in the face of the slaves' attacks and the abolitionist movement, the womb freedom law (promulgated in 1871),gave new opportunities for freedom and contestation to the enslaved, who started to use their devices to face the harshness of slavery. The Maraú’s slaveds knew in dicerning way how to observe the transformations of brazilians slavery in the second half of the 19th century, when they realized such transformations, they started to develop collective or individual freedom projects. For the enslaved, it seems that freedom was a collective project, which integrated their entire blood family and, when possible, the spiritual too. In this way, the family represented for the enslaved people a safe place of solidarity and affection. Such perceptions are made possible by using a variety of documentation and a methodology based on deep analysis which makes visibility of realities possibleealities that could be neglected by other approaches. From a quantitative and qualitative treatment, we seek to highlight the experiences of individuals who, reduced to slavery, cried for freedom.