George Negus Negus: In the last few years, Brazil’s native Indians have won worldwide support for their battle to preserve their way of life in the Amazonian jungles. Unfortunately, however, the same can’t be said for another group of Brazilians. 01.35.07
Descendants of the two million African slaves brought to the country by the Portuguese in the 1700s. Brazil was the last country in the world to abolish slavery. Now it’s proud to have a constitution that actually outlaws discrimination.
Despite this, racism in Brazil is rife. To be a black Brazilian, virtually guarantees a life of poverty. Until very recently in Brazil, the term ‘black pride’ was almost meaningless. But as Peter George found on a recent trip to the state of Bahia, that’s starting to change.
Children walking through village Drum music 02.19.01
George: For centuries it’s been like having a guilty secret that you can’t hide.
Perhaps forty percent of Brazilians have slave blood running in their veins. And because of their dark skin, most are condemned to poverty.
The message of America’s black civil rights movement, and of the battle against apartheid in South Africa is only now just starting to lap at the shores of Brazil.
Map Brazil Drum music 03.04.05
Capioera classes George: The sound of African drums once terrified Brazil’s Portuguese masters. 03.14.11
George: The drums, and capioera — a martial art the slaves brought with them from Africa — seemed to bode rebellion.
Drums
George: The Portuguese outlawed capioera. So to keep the spirit of dissent alive, the slaves transformed it from martial art to dance.
Today the drums beat out a different message, one that heralds a newly emerging pride in an ancestry that once provoked shame.
Argument between black and police on street Argument 04.05.11
George: Relations between the authorities and descendants of the African slaves who still live here have never been easy.
Trumpet
George: But at carnival time, there’s music to ease the tensions.
Music
Billy and Peter George walking down street George: As slaves, Billy Arquimimo’s ancestors paved the streets he walks on today. 04.39.19
Billy: Five years ago many of these houses were completely damaged and in very bad condition.
George: And it was a dangerous area, was it?
Billy: Yes, very dangerous.
Musician in street Drum music 04.59.19
George: From black ghetto to international tourist destination — the area called Pelhourino has been transformed in little more than three years. A huge success. Perhaps. But to make way for the tourists, the black inhabitants, for whom Pelhourino was home, were forced to move out. Out of sight, out of mind.
Billy Billy: The government of this country, normally they are white and they don’t care about black people, about black situations. 05.29.09
They do everything to say that there is no racism in this country. And also, there is democracy as well. But what we can see all the time is a lack of democracy here.
White Brazilians Singing 05.54.03
George: Though slavery was abolished a hundred and seven years ago, Brazil’s power and wealth is still concentrated in the hands of the fair-skinned, while for the most part, blacks go on serving white masters just as their ancestors did.
Children playing drums on street Drums 06.15.19
George: Today, there are signs that some black children are learning to take pride in their colour and their ancestry.
Drums
George: These children belong to a group called Olodum that started in the ghetto of Pelhourino a decade ago, to give black people a chance to take part in Carnivale.
Olodum took black music, black culture, and black pride on to the streets, and in ten years it’s grown into a movement that now runs schools and refuges for the children of the poor.
Drums
Billy and Peter George Billy: Black culture here was finished for a while, because it was not important to talk about black culture. But because of Olodum, we restarted to discuss about all these problem, all these culture. You know, we cannot forget that we came here from Africa. 07.07.22
Carnivale George: It’s early evening. People start arriving hours before the carnival’s most highly anticipated moment — Olodum’s appearance in the Square of the Slaves. 07.30.11
Drums
George: Olodum has toured the world. Its themes and its drums have been taken up by popular western musicians like Paul Simon and Michael Jackson. But the message is aimed at Brazilians — black and white.
Olodum performing Drums
George: Three decades after Martin Luther King launched the black civil rights movement of the United States, Olodum not represents the birth of a Brazilian movement by blacks to want to assume their rightful place as equal citizens of their country. 08.11.02
Drums
Super: MARIA de LOURDESUnified Black Movement Maria: We saw the happiness of being together and that wasn’t just to dance. No, that was a way of saying that we are a group. We are a force when we are together and we have to continue together fighting for our rights, for our dignity and for our development as humans in Brazilian society. 08.30.14
Kids playing George: A growing number of black movements have begun to take their future into their own hands. 09.02.21
In the past decade, a group called Ax’e has rescued 3500 destitute and abandoned children from the city streets. It feeds them, schools them, finds jobs, and helps to send them back to their families.
Super: ALBERTO PITAAx’e Movement Alberto: Drugs, police violence especially — which is something everyone knows goes on — hunger — all these are destructive things that take the goodness out of these children’s lives. So Ax’e tries to give them a future. 09.29.12
Fabio singing and playing football Singing 09.51.16
George: Can you describe to me the sort of condition that Fabio was in when he arrived here?
Alberto: Fabio, like the other boys is here, because each has a real need. They are not here just to have fun during the carnival or for the carnival instruments. They are here because they want to regain their place in society.
Fabio walking down street George: Until now, Fabio’s place in society has been the slums or the streets of Salvador. 10.35.20
Fabio Fabio: Most street kids steal, do petty crimes, beg, sniff glue — and when they see anything valuable, like watches or wallets, they just grab them. I was scared sleeping on the streets, so I kept on the move. I thought either the police or some bum would kill me — so I’d keep on the move all night, until daybreak. 10.45.04
Fabio’s brothers and sisters George: Fabio’s home is a couple of rooms. Five brothers and sisters and a mother, who alone, supports them with whatever occasional jobs she can find. 11.08.06
Fabio’s mother Fabio’s mother: When he was on the streets I couldn’t sleep. I felt like all mothers when they can’t feed their children. I was terrified that he’d become a victim of street violence — that someone might even kill him. 11.19.13
George: It’s a source of pride for a family with so little to celebrate that Fabio will now go back out on to the streets — wearing Ax’e’s Carnival costume. So coveted, that richer children’s parents will pay up to $400 for the privilege of wearing it.
Fabio’s mother: I worried so much for Fabio because he’s my eldest son. I have many children but I’d miss them terribly if I lost even one. 11.55.20
Preparation for Carnivale Singing 12.05.03
George: Ax’e’s motif this year is the North American Indian tribe, the Apaches — a nation with who Ax’e’s leaders feel some kinship, if only in their suffering at the hands of white colonists.
George: Black leaders see Carnivale as merely a truce — five days in which black and white can temporarily bury the hatchet. But there is another front on which the battle for equality has to be fought.
Children in shanty town George: Beyond the black centre of Salvador, likes the real black heartland. 12.45.06
In countless shanty towns where millions of black Brazilians live, the growing message of black consciousness loses momentum.
Maria Maria: Organisations that could help us are not interested in the black community organising itself. They don’t want the Negroes to become politically conscious because the greater part of the black mass is not conscious at the moment. We’ve come to believe that we’re inferior people in this society, the ugly people, the dirty people, the dumb people, and we’re the clumsy people of this society. 13.11.16
Colin with slave register Colin: It’s the name of the slave, the African nation they belong to, how they were marked. The majority were apparently branded, were baptised... 13.43.17
George: Colin McLean is a brother of the Columban order who’s been ministering to slave descendants in the shanty town of Novella Constituenta for almost a decade.
Shanty town George: Colin McLean says the brand of slavery remains so deeply etched in the memory of black people, that even today, shanty town dwellers rarely question their lot, rarely challenge their role at the bottom of Brazilian society. 14.03.24
George: Driven by the demands of daily survival, few blacks in the favellas have time for political organisations.
Lourdinha and Colin Lourdinha Nunes is an exception. 14.31.07
Lourdinha: It’s a very slow process but it doesn’t make me angry . It just makes me realise that the struggle has to continue, and we have to keep at it.
George: Lourdinha thinks the white establishment’s most powerful weapon is control of the mass media, with its constant depiction of a white Brazilian ideal.
Magazines Lourdinha: In Bahia we are black and it’s sickening when they have propaganda extolling the virtues of blue eyes and blonde hair. 15.08.06
Lourdinha and Colin with George McLean: You’ve got here what looks to be a racial harmony — everybody arrives and sees blacks and whites walking down the street together, and thinks it’s all wonderful. but the control is there, it’s not in the law, but everyone kind of knows the social controls. 15.18.08
George: So it comes down to one phrase, doesn’t it? That one phrase is ‘everyone should be of good appearance.’
McLean: Good appearance, that’s a great phrase, yes. You’ll find in advertisements in many newspapers, even today, the phrase good appearance normally means, if it’s in an advertisement, if you’re black don’t even apply for this job.
Lourdinha Lourdinha: It means white — and in particular, you have to be white. The ideal to be aimed at is white. 15.47.18
Maria Maria: We Negroes need to become conscious of out situation, but Brazilian society needs to change too — in the way it looks at the Negroes — the way it treats the Negroes, and the way it receives Negroes into Brazilian society. We are the great excluded — the great marginalised people. 16.02.22
Carnivale Singing 16.28.03
George: Salvador’s black Carnival has begun to spread the message, but international acclaim and commercialism could still easily diminish it.
Brazil puts on its best, most glossy face for Carnivale. Undesirable images, like the tens of thousands of street children who roam the cities, are mostly swept out of sight, lest they spoil the celebration.
Maria Maria: These cultural groups bring values, which this society needs, because it’s morally bankrupt. The values in the society are worn out. But we want to make it very clear that our position is not just to offer happiness, but that it must be a happiness with responsibility — a happiness with dignity. 17.15.16
Boy singing Singing/drums 17.32.05
Olodum George: The drums of Olodum will continue to beat out the growing demands of Brazilian blacks for recognition and dignity. 17.47.01
Now they must find their own Martin Luther King — someone to unify and to lead them — then their demands will become both insistent and irresistible.
Drums
Descendants of the two million African slaves brought to the country by the Portuguese in the 1700s. Brazil was the last country in the world to abolish slavery. Now it’s proud to have a constitution that actually outlaws discrimination.
Despite this, racism in Brazil is rife. To be a black Brazilian, virtually guarantees a life of poverty. Until very recently in Brazil, the term ‘black pride’ was almost meaningless. But as Peter George found on a recent trip to the state of Bahia, that’s starting to change.
Children walking through village Drum music 02.19.01
George: For centuries it’s been like having a guilty secret that you can’t hide.
Perhaps forty percent of Brazilians have slave blood running in their veins. And because of their dark skin, most are condemned to poverty.
The message of America’s black civil rights movement, and of the battle against apartheid in South Africa is only now just starting to lap at the shores of Brazil.
Map Brazil Drum music 03.04.05
Capioera classes George: The sound of African drums once terrified Brazil’s Portuguese masters. 03.14.11
George: The drums, and capioera — a martial art the slaves brought with them from Africa — seemed to bode rebellion.
Drums
George: The Portuguese outlawed capioera. So to keep the spirit of dissent alive, the slaves transformed it from martial art to dance.
Today the drums beat out a different message, one that heralds a newly emerging pride in an ancestry that once provoked shame.
Argument between black and police on street Argument 04.05.11
George: Relations between the authorities and descendants of the African slaves who still live here have never been easy.
Trumpet
George: But at carnival time, there’s music to ease the tensions.
Music
Billy and Peter George walking down street George: As slaves, Billy Arquimimo’s ancestors paved the streets he walks on today. 04.39.19
Billy: Five years ago many of these houses were completely damaged and in very bad condition.
George: And it was a dangerous area, was it?
Billy: Yes, very dangerous.
Musician in street Drum music 04.59.19
George: From black ghetto to international tourist destination — the area called Pelhourino has been transformed in little more than three years. A huge success. Perhaps. But to make way for the tourists, the black inhabitants, for whom Pelhourino was home, were forced to move out. Out of sight, out of mind.
Billy Billy: The government of this country, normally they are white and they don’t care about black people, about black situations. 05.29.09
They do everything to say that there is no racism in this country. And also, there is democracy as well. But what we can see all the time is a lack of democracy here.
White Brazilians Singing 05.54.03
George: Though slavery was abolished a hundred and seven years ago, Brazil’s power and wealth is still concentrated in the hands of the fair-skinned, while for the most part, blacks go on serving white masters just as their ancestors did.
Children playing drums on street Drums 06.15.19
George: Today, there are signs that some black children are learning to take pride in their colour and their ancestry.
Drums
George: These children belong to a group called Olodum that started in the ghetto of Pelhourino a decade ago, to give black people a chance to take part in Carnivale.
Olodum took black music, black culture, and black pride on to the streets, and in ten years it’s grown into a movement that now runs schools and refuges for the children of the poor.
Drums
Billy and Peter George Billy: Black culture here was finished for a while, because it was not important to talk about black culture. But because of Olodum, we restarted to discuss about all these problem, all these culture. You know, we cannot forget that we came here from Africa. 07.07.22
Carnivale George: It’s early evening. People start arriving hours before the carnival’s most highly anticipated moment — Olodum’s appearance in the Square of the Slaves. 07.30.11
Drums
George: Olodum has toured the world. Its themes and its drums have been taken up by popular western musicians like Paul Simon and Michael Jackson. But the message is aimed at Brazilians — black and white.
Olodum performing Drums
George: Three decades after Martin Luther King launched the black civil rights movement of the United States, Olodum not represents the birth of a Brazilian movement by blacks to want to assume their rightful place as equal citizens of their country. 08.11.02
Drums
Super: MARIA de LOURDESUnified Black Movement Maria: We saw the happiness of being together and that wasn’t just to dance. No, that was a way of saying that we are a group. We are a force when we are together and we have to continue together fighting for our rights, for our dignity and for our development as humans in Brazilian society. 08.30.14
Kids playing George: A growing number of black movements have begun to take their future into their own hands. 09.02.21
In the past decade, a group called Ax’e has rescued 3500 destitute and abandoned children from the city streets. It feeds them, schools them, finds jobs, and helps to send them back to their families.
Super: ALBERTO PITAAx’e Movement Alberto: Drugs, police violence especially — which is something everyone knows goes on — hunger — all these are destructive things that take the goodness out of these children’s lives. So Ax’e tries to give them a future. 09.29.12
Fabio singing and playing football Singing 09.51.16
George: Can you describe to me the sort of condition that Fabio was in when he arrived here?
Alberto: Fabio, like the other boys is here, because each has a real need. They are not here just to have fun during the carnival or for the carnival instruments. They are here because they want to regain their place in society.
Fabio walking down street George: Until now, Fabio’s place in society has been the slums or the streets of Salvador. 10.35.20
Fabio Fabio: Most street kids steal, do petty crimes, beg, sniff glue — and when they see anything valuable, like watches or wallets, they just grab them. I was scared sleeping on the streets, so I kept on the move. I thought either the police or some bum would kill me — so I’d keep on the move all night, until daybreak. 10.45.04
Fabio’s brothers and sisters George: Fabio’s home is a couple of rooms. Five brothers and sisters and a mother, who alone, supports them with whatever occasional jobs she can find. 11.08.06
Fabio’s mother Fabio’s mother: When he was on the streets I couldn’t sleep. I felt like all mothers when they can’t feed their children. I was terrified that he’d become a victim of street violence — that someone might even kill him. 11.19.13
George: It’s a source of pride for a family with so little to celebrate that Fabio will now go back out on to the streets — wearing Ax’e’s Carnival costume. So coveted, that richer children’s parents will pay up to $400 for the privilege of wearing it.
Fabio’s mother: I worried so much for Fabio because he’s my eldest son. I have many children but I’d miss them terribly if I lost even one. 11.55.20
Preparation for Carnivale Singing 12.05.03
George: Ax’e’s motif this year is the North American Indian tribe, the Apaches — a nation with who Ax’e’s leaders feel some kinship, if only in their suffering at the hands of white colonists.
George: Black leaders see Carnivale as merely a truce — five days in which black and white can temporarily bury the hatchet. But there is another front on which the battle for equality has to be fought.
Children in shanty town George: Beyond the black centre of Salvador, likes the real black heartland. 12.45.06
In countless shanty towns where millions of black Brazilians live, the growing message of black consciousness loses momentum.
Maria Maria: Organisations that could help us are not interested in the black community organising itself. They don’t want the Negroes to become politically conscious because the greater part of the black mass is not conscious at the moment. We’ve come to believe that we’re inferior people in this society, the ugly people, the dirty people, the dumb people, and we’re the clumsy people of this society. 13.11.16
Colin with slave register Colin: It’s the name of the slave, the African nation they belong to, how they were marked. The majority were apparently branded, were baptised... 13.43.17
George: Colin McLean is a brother of the Columban order who’s been ministering to slave descendants in the shanty town of Novella Constituenta for almost a decade.
Shanty town George: Colin McLean says the brand of slavery remains so deeply etched in the memory of black people, that even today, shanty town dwellers rarely question their lot, rarely challenge their role at the bottom of Brazilian society. 14.03.24
George: Driven by the demands of daily survival, few blacks in the favellas have time for political organisations.
Lourdinha and Colin Lourdinha Nunes is an exception. 14.31.07
Lourdinha: It’s a very slow process but it doesn’t make me angry . It just makes me realise that the struggle has to continue, and we have to keep at it.
George: Lourdinha thinks the white establishment’s most powerful weapon is control of the mass media, with its constant depiction of a white Brazilian ideal.
Magazines Lourdinha: In Bahia we are black and it’s sickening when they have propaganda extolling the virtues of blue eyes and blonde hair. 15.08.06
Lourdinha and Colin with George McLean: You’ve got here what looks to be a racial harmony — everybody arrives and sees blacks and whites walking down the street together, and thinks it’s all wonderful. but the control is there, it’s not in the law, but everyone kind of knows the social controls. 15.18.08
George: So it comes down to one phrase, doesn’t it? That one phrase is ‘everyone should be of good appearance.’
McLean: Good appearance, that’s a great phrase, yes. You’ll find in advertisements in many newspapers, even today, the phrase good appearance normally means, if it’s in an advertisement, if you’re black don’t even apply for this job.
Lourdinha Lourdinha: It means white — and in particular, you have to be white. The ideal to be aimed at is white. 15.47.18
Maria Maria: We Negroes need to become conscious of out situation, but Brazilian society needs to change too — in the way it looks at the Negroes — the way it treats the Negroes, and the way it receives Negroes into Brazilian society. We are the great excluded — the great marginalised people. 16.02.22
Carnivale Singing 16.28.03
George: Salvador’s black Carnival has begun to spread the message, but international acclaim and commercialism could still easily diminish it.
Brazil puts on its best, most glossy face for Carnivale. Undesirable images, like the tens of thousands of street children who roam the cities, are mostly swept out of sight, lest they spoil the celebration.
Maria Maria: These cultural groups bring values, which this society needs, because it’s morally bankrupt. The values in the society are worn out. But we want to make it very clear that our position is not just to offer happiness, but that it must be a happiness with responsibility — a happiness with dignity. 17.15.16
Boy singing Singing/drums 17.32.05
Olodum George: The drums of Olodum will continue to beat out the growing demands of Brazilian blacks for recognition and dignity. 17.47.01
Now they must find their own Martin Luther King — someone to unify and to lead them — then their demands will become both insistent and irresistible.
Drums