Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines

Abstract

The history of the return of Afro-Brazilians to Africa has received attention from scholars in several countries and in several languages.These works have focused on the Afro-Brazilian communities established in West Africa in the 19th century, in the territories that would become today's states of Benin (formerly Dahomey) and Nigeria.Nevertheless, very little has been written about the Afro-Brazilian communities of Togo and Ghana 1 .This study intends to be a preliminary exploration of the history of Afro-Brazilians in Togo.Using, as a point of departure, the history of one of Togo's most prominent families, the Olympio's, the author intends to show the impressive amount of influence that the Afro-Brazilian community had in the economic and political life of the country during a discreet time period between 1882 (just before the beginning of the German colonization) and 1945 (in the midst of the French colonial period, at the end of the Second World War and the beginning of Togo's march to its independence achieved in 1960).The phenomenon of Afro-Brazilians returning to Africa began in the first half of the 18th century and lasted until the beginning of the 20th century.Scholars have estimated that between 3,000 and 8,000 Afro-Brazilians returned to Africa during that period.The movement began as a natural yearning of freed slaves to return to the motherland that they had never forgotten.Later on, it became a reaction to the lack of opportunities for advancement and to persecutions and restrictions launched by the Brazilian authorities against blacks.Indeed, several slave revolts in Brazil, notably in the state of Bahia, in the first decades of the 19th century had led the government to enact severe * A slightly different Portuguese version of this paper has appeared in Afro-A ´sia, No. 23,

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