Look around at this plaza and this little church. This was once Santa Rita Square, which once held the first cemetery to accept black people who had arrived dead after the long sea crossing. They were buried right here next to the church.
The black people who died after being put on display at the market on Direita Street, today known as Primeiro de Março Street, were also buried here. But were they really buried? No: they were piled in a ditch, their corpses exposed to the sun.
According to historian Júlio César Medeiros da Silva Pereira, this kind of “burial” was one of the reasons why the viceroy, the Marquis of Lavradio, banned the burial of slaves on church land and ordered the creation of a new cemetery in the Valongo region outside of the city. The Valongo region also had new slave market. The Marquis once said that enslaved people would never leave Valongo, “not even in death.”
The Church continued to manage the new cemetery, and burials continued in the form of mass open-air graves. On August 25, 1826, slave trader Miguel F. Gomes Filho sent 10 slaves to the cemetery in just one day. Their bodies were thrown into a pit together, one on top of the other. They were slaves from Benguela, Angola, and had died of smallpox. The ship that took them to Brazil from Africa carried 559 slaves and arrived in Rio de Janeiro on November 21, 1825. The ship’s documents, examined by the historian, show that 16 slaves died along the journey.