SWP in Brazil: The Search for the Camargo

In 2016, SWP began its first collaboration in Brazil with the NEAFRICA research collective, investigating the Brazilian side of the São José Paquete D’Africa in the archives of Maranhão. In 2022, SWP launched a new collaboration with the AfrOrigens Institute, to search for the Camargo, the last ship documented to have carried enslaved Africans to Brazil in 1852.

AfrOrigens was co-founded by an interdisciplinary group led by researchers from the Universidade Federal do Sergipe in collaboration with the Afro-descendant community of Quilombo Santa Rita do Bracuí, who are direct descendants of those enslaved people smuggled into Brazil on the Camargo. The traumatic landing and fiery scuttling of the vessel, and their forced march inland, register vividly in the Bracui community’s oral history. This history has long been central to the community’s struggle to affirm its identity and secure its legal rights, underwriting intense interest in discovering and protecting this site.

 

The announcement of this new SWP collaboration in July 2023 at the National Archives in Rio de Janeiro sparked significant media attention and bolstered the Bracuí community’s efforts to press for its legal rights, while also fostering wider public discussions about the plight—and the fight for rights—of other Afro-descendant communities across Brazil. The story of the Camargo, which was captained by a U.S. citizen from Maine, also testifies to the deep and troubling entanglements between Brazil and the United States that were so vital to the prolonging of the Transatlantic slave trade throughout the nineteenth century—and whose effects have resonated ever since throughout Brazilian, American, African, and global history.

As one of the newest members of the SWP network, AfrOrigens aims to bring Afro-descendant communities together with interdisciplinary researchers, media specialists, and others, to recover and educate the public about repressed pasts. It is committed to research-driven collaborations that protect threatened cultural and natural heritage, while addressing the enduring legacies of historic injustices and advancing human rights by empowering Afro-descendant communities to participate in and benefit from this work. 

Through its participation in SWP’s pilot training program (SWP Academy) in Mozambique in 2023 and 2024, AfrOrigens is also contributing to SWP’s global mission of building new knowledge, capacity, and collaborations—not only locally and nationally but also internationally.