SAO PAULO — Among the many chilling and beautiful objects at the Afro-Brasil Museum -- a rusty slave collar, a striking photo of actress Ruth de Souza, kaleidoscopic Bahian ceremonial clothes -- there are several artworks that harmonize the rich, tortuous heritage of black Brazilians.
One is Emanoel Araujo's abstract black steel sculpture "Baobab," named for the gnarly tree that grows in parts of Africa. According to legend, black captives sold into slavery would walk around the tree renouncing their names, their parents, their ancestors and their culture before boarding ships to their grim future lives on New World plantations.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, December 06, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 44 words Type of Material: Correction
Afro-Brasil Museum: An article in Monday's Calendar section about the Afro-Brasil Museum in Sao Paulo, Brazil, said that Brazil was the world's last country to officially abolish slavery. It should have said it was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery.
An estimated 3 million to 5 million Africans were brought to Brazil between the beginning of Portuguese colonization in the 1500s and 1888, when the South American giant became the world's last country to officially abolish slavery. That's roughly six to eight times as many as came to the United States. About half of Brazil's current population is classified as black, compared with around 12% of the United States'.
As director and founder of the ambitious 3-year-old museum, Araujo hopes that his institution will encourage Brazilians of all colors as well as foreigners to recognize how those slaves and their tens of millions of descendants have indelibly stamped their country's culture.
"The museum has as its beginning principle to include the blacks in the history of Brazil, in a way that [they] will not be only the slave but also one of the colonizers that contributed to the art, to technology, to design and to all the periods of richness," says Araujo, who assembled the museum's holdings from his personal collection of 4,000 artworks and artifacts, which he amassed over several decades and formerly stored in three private houses.
An ambiguous past
Since Brazil's inception, the place of blacks and black culture always has been "ambiguous and perverse," says Araujo, a native of the very African-influenced city of Amaro da Purificacao, Bahia, where the legendary Tropicalia singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso also grew up. Araujo says that in his hometown, formerly a wealthy colonial center of sugar cane production, social standing was based more on affluence than skin color.
