Fluid Diasporas: Afro-Brazilian Healing Networks and Dual Diasporic Identities in Salvador and Lagos, 1835–1914.

• In Event: Migration, Africa, and Healing

Description for Program

The transatlantic slave trade disrupted African history, displacing millions to the Americas Among the enslaved were skilled practitioners—healers, birth attendants, and artisans—who shaped reproductive and healing practices. Despite extensive scholarship on how and why enslaved Africans transformed European institutions in the Black Atlantic. Yet, their specific contributions to reverse diasporic networks in health across the Atlantic remain underexplored.
This paper focuses on Afro-Brazilian returnees and their socio-medical contributions to colonial Lagos between 1835 and 1914, this study underscores the fluidity of diaspora as a concept that transcends static notions of homeland and exile. The returnees’ experiences in Salvador, Brazil, shaped their socio-medical practices, which they adapted and integrated into Lagos’s reproductive health systems upon their return. Through their settlements and institutions, these returnees reinvigorated traditional healing practices while influencing the emerging biomedical reproductive infrastructure of colonial Lagos.
This research reimagines migration and diaspora as emotive, spatial, and transformative phenomena. It examines how Afro-Brazilian communities spatially organized themselves within Lagos, blending Afro-Brazilian and local Yoruba healing traditions. Their settlements, such as the Brazilian Quarters, became sites of socio-medical innovation and interaction. These communities maintained trans-Atlantic healing networks while adapting to the unique reproductive health challenges of colonial Lagos. This paper argues that the diaspora is not merely a space of displacement shaped by slavery and colonialism but also a realm of strength and agency, fostering trans-diasporic welfare and socio-medical innovation.

Author

• Ridwan Muhammed, University of Kansas