All Topics Here! This page is only here for references purposes.Home to at least 70 million people of African descent, Brazil is fast becoming a top destination for those interested in the plight of their ancestors. BY PAULO PRADA Special to The Herald
SALVADOR, Brazil - Greg Jones sits on a sandstone bollard in the colonial heart of this tropical tourist capital. As the bongos of a percussion ensemble beat through a window overhead, he smiles at a visitor and relishes the thought of another 10 days of vacation. ''I'm just trying to sit here and soak it all in,'' he says. He's not talking about the sunshine. Jones, an African-American electrician from northern California, is in Brazil on an ''African heritage'' tour. Arranged by an Oakland travel agent, the tour is designed to steep visitors in the culture and history of Afro-Brazilians, descendants of the millions of slaves brought to Brazil after Europeans first arrived five centuries ago. On his second visit here in less than a year, Jones came back to Brazil to learn more about people like Anastacia, a legendary 18th-century slave who was muzzled and killed after speaking out when she was raped by one of her owners. Others come to learn about candomble, a religion that blends Catholicism with tribal African lore, or capoeira, a martial art that evolved when slaves disguised fight training as dance. 'IMPORTANT' VISIT ''There's so much to discover,'' says Angela Wade, a health inspector from Berkeley, Calif., before heading to a performance of Afro-Brazilian music on a recent visit to Salvador. ``A lot of important history and culture.'' Brazil is booming with black tourism. Long a vacation hotspot, Brazil is now receiving legions of African-American visitors who are lured by more than its sunny resorts and the annual Carnaval extravaganza. With more black citizens than any country outside Nigeria -- Brazil is home to at least 70 million people of African descent -- it is quickly becoming the destination of choice for black Americans interested in the history of the hemisphere and the plight of their enslaved ancestors. ''African Americans are eager to embrace any semblance of culture linked to our own history,'' says Marlene Melton, founder of African Ventures Inc., a New York City-based tour operator that recently added Brazil to a once exclusively African roster of destinations. ``The African influence in Brazil is very intense and pervasive.'' Many other U.S. travel agents and tour operators are beginning to offer black-oriented packages to Brazil, too. Clarence Smith, the African-American entrepreneur who founded Essence magazine, recently launched Avocet Travel, a New York-based company that plans next year to offer flights and tours to Salvador, the locus of the African legacy in Brazil and a city at present unserved by direct flights from the U.S. EXPLODING MARKET ''This is one of the few places where people can go and find African culture replicated and unsullied,'' says Smith. ``We want to build a bridge and make it easier to get there.'' Travel itself is more common than ever for African Americans. As blacks in the U.S. become increasingly affluent, they are traveling more than Americans as a whole. From 2000 through 2002, a period in which economic and security fears kept overall growth in travel by U.S. citizens to a mere 2 percent, travel by African Americans grew by twice as much, according to a 2003 study by the Travel Industry Association of America. And as they look beyond the U.S., many African Americans are discovering Brazil as an alternative to the Caribbean, a region where the African culture -- like that of the U.S. -- is perceived to have been more diluted than it has in Brazil. ''There is an intensity to the African experience there that you don't get in the Caribbean or North America,'' says Thomas Dorsey, publisher of SoulofAmerica.com, a Los Angeles-based website that tracks African-American travel. African culture endured here, researchers say, because Brazil received many more slaves over a longer period of time than any other country in the Americas. Its ports -- particularly Salvador and the surrounding state of Bahia -- took delivery of as many as 5 million Africans over three centuries; the U.S. received some 750,000 over roughly two centuries. ''You had a far greater presence and influence of native Africans for longer,'' says Stuart Schwartz, a professor of history at Yale University. The country, of course, is no paradise. Poverty in its major cities makes Brazil's urban crime rate one of the highest in the world. And blacks remain the poorest segment of Brazilian society, fueling a racist undercurrent that thrives despite the country's renown as an ethnic melting pot. ''There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed if this is to become a touristic ideal,'' says Handy Withers, an African American from Virginia who this year opened A Casa das Portas Velhas, a 15-room luxury hotel in Salvador. But the potential, he admits, was alluring enough for him to leave a decadeslong career in fashion and invest more than $1 million in the venture. Tourism even inspires some African Americans to work to improve the lot of their Brazilian counterparts. After working as a human rights volunteer in Zimbabwe, Simone Manigo Truell, first came to Brazil for Carnaval in 1998. After several return trips, she quit her job as a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and in June moved to Salvador to run Levantamos, a nonprofit organization she founded to raise money for Afro-Brazilian community groups. ''I just had to give something back,'' she says. ``I've never felt more African than here.'' Now here a line of observations about the subject, in italic.
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FIRST SUBJECT HERE This is a simple test for the gringos. Almost any adult Brazilian will know 80% of the answers. AND SO IT IS THIS TEXT CONTINUES UNTIL IT IS LONGER THAN THE LITTLE IMAGE, SO THAT WE CAN SEE HOW IT WRAPS AROUND. |
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