Brazil reckons with the life and legacy of an abolitionist

Luiz Gama had a keen understanding of injustice from a young age. His mother told him she had been captured in west Africa and taken to Brazil in chains. Freed by the time Gama was born in 1830, she continued to participate in slave revolts—by some accounts she organised them—and disappeared when the boy was seven. Gama’s father was a Portuguese nobleman with a gambling habit. When his son was ten, he illegally sold him into slavery in order to pay off his debts.

Thanks to a law student who frequented his master’s house, Gama learned to read and write; the student also instilled in him an interest in the law and encouraged him to prove that his enslavement was unjust under Article 179 of the criminal code, which prohibited “enslaving a free person”. As an adult, Gama wrote a volume of satirical poems and attended Largo de São Francisco Law School as a listener (professors and fellow students objected to his formal enrolment on account of his race). Via the courts, Gama went on to free around 500 slaves. He led the debate on abolitionism in print, too, in Diabo Coxo, a journal he founded in 1864, as well as major newspapers. He died in 1882, of complications related to diabetes, before seeing his ultimate aim realised. Princess Isabel signed a law abolishing slavery in 1888.