According to the historian Manolo Florentino, there are many more bones of girl and boy slaves buried in the port zone than the 28 skeletons which have already had their bones brought together and studied. “This is more than enough reason to understand that that region cannot simply be ‘revitalised’. It needs to be studied extensively, and that requires investment,” said the teacher from the Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences, at Rio de Janeiro’s Federal University (UFRJ).
For that reason, Florentino was apprehensive about the construction of a VLT (light rail vehicle or tram), exactly on Pedro Ernesto street, the address of the Cemetery of New Blacks. He thinks that more research should have been undertaken first. “I would like the VLT to have been installed there without harming future archeaological digs there, which show themselves to be increasingly necessary in that area,” he said. According to the president of the Company of Urban Development of the Port Zone of Rio (Cdurp), Alberto Silva, the rails were installed according to the rules of the Institute of National Historic and Artistic Heritage (Iphan), and nothing was found on their route.
For Manolo, a continual technical prospection is necessary, to define the real extent of the cemetery. According to the estimate of the journalist Laurentino Gomes, more than 20,000 bodies of slaves must have been buried in the Valongo region, by the time the slave market was deactivated in 1830.
“That area should be the setting of a great archaeological and genetic study for accurate analysis of the bones that are found there, with a large multi-disciplinary team, involving professionals such as anthropologists and historians too. In the USA, where the black movement demanded this, this work was done on the East Coast, as it was in the Caribbean. I don’t see initiatives like this in the Brazil,” said Manolo Florentino.