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Luiza Mahin

Luiza Mahin was born some time in the 1800s in either the Gulf of Benin, West Africa or Bahia (her exact place of birth and birth date are uncertain) and claimed to be of African royalty. Based on her surname, she is assumed to be of the Mahi tribe from the Nagô (a subgroup of the Yoruba) nation who were practitioners of Islam. Luiza Mahin is most iconically known to have been very involved in many of the slave revolts and uprisings that occurred in Bahia during the early half of the nineteenth century. She was a key player and strategist in the Malê Revolt as she helped to distribute messages in Arabic to others involved. It is said that had the Malê Revolt been successful, she would have been declared the “Queen of Bahia”. It’s not clear whatever happened to Luiza Mahin. Some reports say she escaped to Rio de Janeiro, was found and arrested before being deported to Angola. Other tales say that she escaped to Maranhão where she settled and helped to influence Afro-Brazilian culture there. She had at least one son, Luiz Gama, who was a well-renowned Bahian poet and abolitionist who had this to say about her:

“I am the native son of a black African woman, free, of the Nagô nation, whose name is Luiza Mahin, pagan, who always refused baptism and christian doctrine. My mother was short, thin, beautiful, the color of jet black unglazed, teeth white like snow. Haughty, generous, a sufferer, and vengeful.”

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Understanding Afro-Brazilian Feminism

With regard to feminism, the following brief articles offer some insight on the Afro-Brasileira experience:

{Racial divides in Brazilian feminism can be traced to a foundational chasm in relationship to work. “We speak of the issue of the ditch,” dos Santos explained, “we realize the feminist movement is by white middle-class women and that these white women are demanding their right to go to work, while the poor black women, have been in the market ever since.”}

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Lélia Gonzalez: Afro-feminist

Lélia Gonzalez was an intellectual and activist of the Movimento Negro (Black Movement) in Brazil and primarily responsible for the development of black feminism in Brazil. Gonzalez was born in 1935 and grew up to challenge the reality of social vulnerability by achieving her Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, confronting racism and sexism in the social sphere, and organizing political actions while producing scholarly works. She was a member of the Unified Black Movement (MNU), an organization that changed the history of Black activism in Brazil in the 1970s. Gonzalez is credited with connecting common experiences of black women from Latin America and bringing those experiences to a national debate about the condition of black women and colonization. She was one of the few black women in Brazil who had the opportunity to participate in international discussions of the feminist movement and connect with organized Black women in Latin America and in the African diaspora as a whole. From this experience, Gonzalez advocated the construction of an Afro-feminist agenda in Latin America since Black women, in different contexts, were subjected to similar conditions of inequality and discrimination. Gonzalez’ theory of the intersectionality of race, social class, and gender as articulated categories of social marginalization is still the subject of debate in Brazil in the studies of Black women.

In 2010, the government of the state of Bahia created the Lélia Gonzalez Award to encourage public policies towards women in Bahian municipalities.