A Coffee Plantation in Brazil Enslaved Africans. Centuries Later, Their Descendants Have Taken Over.

Two hundred years ago, the São José do Pinheiro coffee plantation farm in Brazil was one of the most opulent estates in the country. It was owned by one of Brazil’s richest men, José de Souza Breves, who owned eight other estates in the region. Pinheiro was his headquarters, with a 20-room palace filled with artworks and a 48-bed hospital for enslaved workers. Today, Pinheiral, a town of 24,000 people named after the farm, occupies the area where it once stood. Remnants of the palace, covered in graffiti and surrounded by dense vegetation, have become a public space called the Park of the Ruins. The former headquarters of a slaveholding empire has been claimed by descendants of those who were once forced to work there.

The Brazilian government has secured funding to transform Ruins Park into a museum and school of jongo, an Afro-Brazilian tradition that mixes music, dance, spirituality, and storytelling. The project, which is part of the Jongo de Pinheiral group, aims to reclaim land once belonged to a slaver and now belongs to the descendants of those who were enslaved at Pinheiro. The group organized a festival featuring 18 different jongo groups at Pinheiro, where coffee beans were spread out to dry under the sun in the 1800s.

The performances usually involve just two people at time, most often a man and a woman, who dance in the ring. There is no choreography; everyone dances as they wish. Mestre Fatinha, the leader of the Jongo de Pinheiral, said that jongo was a way of communication for Black people, engaging in politics, courting each other, and worshipping the orixás [deities from the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé].

According to Rafael Galante, a historian and ethnomusicologist, the word “jongo” originates from the Bantu language family, to which most of the Africans brought to Brazil in the 19th century belonged. There is no consensus on its exact meaning, but one interpretation suggests that it refers to a communal space for political, social, and religious mediation.

Jongo is practiced by at least 14 traditional communities in the Brazilian south-east, many of which are remnants of quilombos, another Bantu-origin word that, during Brazil’s 350 years of slavery, referred to communities established by escaped enslaved people. Although jongo is not a religion, there is spirituality involved. Some songs refer to the orixás and Catholic figures including Saint Benedict the African. Mestre Fatinha, along with musician and artistic director Marcos André Carvalho, is leading the project to transform the Pinheiro estate’s ruins into a memorial for Black people.

In addition to the museum and the jongo school, the plans include a restaurant, a visitor center, a library, and the preservation of the ruins, which have deteriorated significantly after years of neglect. The entire project is budgeted at 5m reals (£705,844, or $890,513), but the Brazilian government has only approved 300,000 reals (£42,351, or $54,817) for the development of an executive project. Construction is not expected to start until next year.

The Pinheiro estate was once one of the greatest symbols of Brazilian slavery’s opulence, and the people who survived all that violence are now claiming that space to transform it into a memory center.

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