Escravidão – Volume I: Do Primeiro Leilão de Cativos em Portugal até a Morte de Zumbi dos Palmares

Gomes begins the book not in Brazil, but on a dock in Portugal, in the city of Lagos, in the year 1444. There, a group of people brought by force from the African coast is put up for auction in front of the court and the local population. The scene is recorded by the chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara, an employee of the Portuguese crown, whose description became one of the first written accounts of this kind of trade headed for Europe.

The author chooses this scene as his starting point because it is where the mechanism that would repeat for almost four centuries is born all at once: people kidnapped, separated from their families, treated as merchandise and sold to the highest bidder. Zurara describes weeping and pleading at the moment of sale, but he also tries to justify the act as a spiritual good, an argument the Church and the crown repeat whenever they need to legitimize the business.

The book insists on making clear that slavery did not reach Africa with the Portuguese ship. African societies already enslaved prisoners of war, debtors and people convicted of crimes long before the first European set foot on the coast. In most cases, this internal slavery had limits: it could be temporary and did not completely cut a person's ties to their own land and language.

The Atlantic trade turns this local practice into an outward-facing chain, large in scale, permanent and based on race. African kingdoms and merchants who already dealt with prisoners of war begin selling some of these people to European middlemen, in exchange for cloth, firearms and other goods. Gomes is careful to show this without removing European responsibility or treating the whole continent as a passive audience.

The book maps the African kingdoms that entered the trade, each with its own logic of power. Kongo, in Central Africa, even maintains formal diplomatic relations with Portugal, exchanging letters and sending a representative to the European court, while at the same time supplying people to the Atlantic market.

Farther south, the kingdom of Ndongo, in what is now Angola, becomes one of the biggest suppliers of the trade headed for Brazil, amid constant war with the Portuguese on the coast. On the other side of the continent, Dahomey and Benin build part of their own political economy around capturing and selling prisoners, using internal trade routes that had existed for centuries.