The Returnees: Saro, Amaro and Agudá
The Yoruba people who came back, from Sierra Leone and from Brazil and Cuba, and what they built in Lagos: the mosques, the Brazilian quarter, the newspapers, and a babaláwo who carried Ifá back across the Atlantic.
Two return migrations reshaped nineteenth-century Lagos. The Saro came from Sierra Leone, mostly people freed from intercepted slave ships or their children, English-speaking and Protestant. The Amaro or Agudá came from Brazil and Cuba, mostly people who had bought or been granted their freedom after decades of enslavement, Portuguese-speaking and largely Catholic, though a substantial number were Muslim. By the 1880s the Brazilian returnees alone were about nine percent of the population of Lagos .
They arrived into a Yorubaland that had exported them, and they brought back skills, capital, literacy, religion and building trades acquired on the other side of a crossing they had not chosen. They are the reason Lagos looks the way it does, and the reason Ifá is practised in Bahia today in a form recognisable to a Yoruba babaláwo.
Two returns, two characters
The Saro migration ran from the 1830s, out of Freetown to Badagry, Abẹ́òkúta and Lagos. Its members had been liberated at sea by the British anti-slavery squadron, settled in Sierra Leone, converted, schooled in mission schools and given English names. They returned as clerks, traders, teachers, printers, clergy and later lawyers and doctors, and they staffed the mission enterprise and the colonial administration. Samuel Àjàyí Crowther, Samuel Johnson, James Johnson and Otonba Payne all belong to this group, and they are treated in their own files. Jean Herskovits Kopytoff's study is the standard account .
The Amaro or Agudá migration was different in kind. These were people who had survived the Middle Passage and years or decades of enslavement in Brazil and Cuba, obtained freedom, and paid their own passage back, in significant numbers after the Malê revolt in Bahia in 1835 and the repression that followed it. They came with trades: masonry, carpentry, joinery, tailoring, cabinet-making, baking. They came Catholic, or Muslim, or with òrìṣà practice intact and often all three within one family. And they came speaking Portuguese, which is why Yoruba retains a small vocabulary from it and why Lagos Catholic families still carry names like da Silva, da Costa, Pereira, dos Santos and Vaughan .
The term Agudá is used across the Bight of Benin, in Lagos, Porto-Novo, Ouidah and Cotonou, for the same community, and its members retained a distinct identity for generations .
What the Agudá built
Their most visible legacy is architectural. The Brazilian quarter of Lagos Island, Popo Aguda, was built by returnee master builders in a style brought back from Bahia: two-storey houses with arched windows, stuccoed and moulded facades, ironwork balconies, external staircases and elaborate plaster ornament . The style is now called Afro-Brazilian or Brazilian Baroque, and it was, deliberately, a statement. People who had been property built houses that announced they were not.
João Baptista da Costa is the master builder normally credited with the design and construction of the major Afro-Brazilian mosques of Lagos, including the Shitta-Bey Mosque and the Central Mosque, drawing on the Baroque churches of Bahia for his forms .
The Shitta-Bey Mosque is the best documented single building. Ground was broken in 1881 and the building was completed on 7 February 1892, financed by Mohammed Shitta, a wealthy Sierra Leonean-born Muslim merchant, at a cost variously reported between three thousand and seven thousand pounds. Da Costa designed it and was assisted by an indigenous builder named Sanusi Aka. It opened on 4 July 1894 at a ceremony presided over by the Governor of Lagos, Sir Gilbert Carter, and attended by Ọba Oyekan I and by Edward Wilmot Blyden. At that ceremony Shitta was given the title Bey and the Ottoman Order of the Medjidie, third class, by Sultan Abdul Hamid II, which is why he is known as Shitta-Bey .
Look at what that single event contains. A Sierra Leonean-born Yoruba Muslim merchant financed a mosque in Lagos, designed by a Brazilian returnee in the style of Bahian Catholic churches, built with an indigenous Yoruba craftsman, opened by a British colonial governor in the presence of the Ọba of Lagos and a West Indian-born Liberian pan-Africanist, and honoured by the Ottoman Sultan. That is the nineteenth-century Atlantic world in one building, and the building is still standing.
Martiniano Eliseu do Bonfim (1859 to 3 November 1943)
Bonfim ran the return in the other direction, and he is the single most important individual link between Yoruba religion in Nigeria and Candomblé in Brazil.
He was born in Salvador, Bahia, in 1859, to freed African parents connected with the Terreiro da Casa Branca do Engenho Velho, the oldest documented Candomblé house in Brazil . He is also known as Ojé L'adê and by the name Ajimúdà.
In 1875, at sixteen, he travelled with his father Eliseu do Bomfim, an import-export trader in Yoruba goods, from Salvador to Lagos, for education and apprenticeship. He stayed nearly eleven years. He attended the Church Missionary Society school at Alápákó Fàájì in Lagos, became fluent in English and Yoruba, and, alongside the mission schooling, was trained in Ifá and initiated as a babaláwo .
That combination is the point. He was a Brazilian-born son of freed Africans, sent back to Yorubaland, who acquired both a Victorian mission education and full Ifá initiation, and then took both back to Bahia.
He returned in 1886, worked as an English teacher to affluent Afro-Brazilians, and traded back and forth across the Atlantic, functioning as the principal link between Bahia and the returnee community in Lagos . In Candomblé he held an important position in the cult of male ancestors, babá egum, and a senior post at Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, and he is described as the last babalaô of Bahia in the older literature .
He was president of honour of the major Afro-Brazilian Congress held in Bahia and led the União das Seitas Africanas, the first association of Candomblé temples, which was an act of institutional defence at a period when Candomblé was subject to police repression . He worked with the anthropologists Nina Rodrigues and later Ruth Landes and Édison Carneiro, and he is one of the very few practitioners of his generation whose own account was recorded and published, in the autobiographical material now published as O babalaô fala .
He died on 3 November 1943, and his death was reported in the Bahian and Rio newspapers.
Other figures of the returnee world
Mohammed Shitta-Bey (died 1895), the merchant who financed the mosque, and evidence that the returnee elite was not uniformly Christian .
Taiwo Olowo and Oshodi Tapa, in Kòsọ́kọ́'s commercial faction in Lagos, treated in the Lagos file.
John Payne Jackson (1848 to 1918), editor of the Lagos Weekly Record, and the Lagos press generally, which was a returnee institution.
Jacob Kẹ́hìndé Coker (1866 to 1945), the Ẹ̀gbá planter who financed the African Church movement.
Herbert Macaulay (1864 to 1946), Crowther's great-grandson, whose career belongs to the twentieth century and is treated in the later files of this section.
The uncomfortable part
Some returnees, on both sides, participated in the slave trade after their own liberation. Brazilian returnee merchants in Lagos, Ouidah and Porto-Novo included men who traded in enslaved people, and the commercial networks that carried freed people home were in some cases the same networks that carried enslaved people out. The best known case, Francisco Félix de Souza at Ouidah, was a Brazilian slave trader rather than a returnee of African birth, but the returnee communities of the Bight of Benin included his descendants and his associates, and the boundary between the returnee merchant and the slave merchant was not always a boundary.
This corpus states that without elaboration and without using it to diminish the returnee communities, whose members were overwhelmingly people rebuilding lives after enslavement rather than profiting from it. The point of stating it is that the Atlantic system did not sort people into victims and perpetrators, and a history that does is not describing what happened.