João Diamante was gripped by a sense of belonging as he stepped out of the airport terminal thousands of miles from his birthplace in Brazil.
“The first thing I felt was that I was at home,” recalled the 33-year-old celebrity chef from Rio. “Nobody looked at me like they were afraid of me because of the colour of my skin … On the contrary, I saw people just like me. I saw similarities.
“I’d never been there before,” Diamante said of his arrival in Benin’s largest city, Cotonou, last year. “But I was certain this was a place I knew: its smell, its music, its dance, its sound, the noise of car horns, the atmosphere.”
The Brazilian chef was familiar with his surroundings in a way, despite it being his first trip to Africa. Diamante was born in Salvador – the Blackest major city in the country with the largest black population outside Africa – and grew up steeped in the Afro-Brazilian culture and cuisine produced by the uprooting of millions of enslaved Africans who were forced to travel to the South American country to work in goldmines or sugar and coffee plantations.
About 40% of the estimated 12 million enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic between the 16th and 19th centuries came to Brazil, which was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888.
Diamante, whose full name is João Augusto Santos Batista, believes his ancestors were forcibly brought to Brazil from the west African region around what is today the Republic of Benin in the 19th century. Two centuries later, he is reconnecting with his family’s African roots and even hopes to become a citizen of Benin thanks to a new law that offers Afro-descendants from around the world a pathway to citizenship.
“I’m already trying to work out the paperwork … I want a Brazilian passport and a Beninese passport,” the chef said during an interview at his restaurant in a port-side area of Rio known as Pequena África (Little Africa) because of its well-established Afro-Brazilian community. “It’s about belonging, about who I am, where I come from, my lineage and my family,” he added. “Lots of people dream of having a US or a European passport. I dream of having a Beninese passport because Africa is where I’m from.”
Benin’s citizenship scheme – proposed by its president, Patrice Talon, and approved by lawmakers in October – calls itself an attempt to heal “the deep wounds” inflicted on Africa and those taken from it during centuries of enslavement.
According to the law, the initiative is open to “any person in the world who … has sub-Saharan African ancestry [and was] deported outside the continent in the context of slavery”. Such people, it says, have the right to consider Benin “their homeland” and request a passport.
The law has sparked particular interest in Brazil given the large number of enslaved people transported there from ports along what was called Africa’s “slave coast”, between what is today western Nigeria and Benin and Togo.
“There’s a really strong connection [between the two countries],” said Marcelo Sacramento, Benin’s honorary consul in Salvador, the capital of Bahia state in north-eastern Brazil.
“More than a million Beninese came to Bahia during the days of slavery … Just think what that means [in terms of today’s population] … That’s millions and millions of Brazilians,” added Sacramento, who reported having already been approached by numerous Brazilians interested in taking up the offer.
Sacramento said the government of Benin, which has a population of about 15 million people, did not expect tens of millions of citizens of Brazil, which has a population of 215 million, would suddenly seek citizenship because of the new law. Rather, Talon “wanted to turn Benin into the gateway for the African diaspora to return to Africa” and boost the number of Afro-descendant tourists traveling back to “their motherland”. Brazilian and Beninese authorities hope a low-cost flight connecting Salvador with Cotonou will be inaugurated at the end of the year, slashing the time it takes travelers to move between the two nations from more than 20 hours to less than six.
Benin is not the first country in the region to embrace a return of the descendants of enslaved people.
In the 1970s, the American superstar musician Nina Simone enjoyed a three-year stint living in Liberia, where thousands of formerly enslaved African Americans had migrated to in the 19th century, to escape the impact of racial segregation.
Nearby in Ghana, 2019, the 400th anniversary of enslaved Africans in the United States, was dubbed the Year of Return. The president, Nana Akufo-Addo, granted citizenship to 200 African Americans and removed visa requirements for a number of Caribbean countries. His government also lobbied for diaspora Blacks to return and live in the country, citing the example of the prominent intellectual and civil rights activist WEB DuBois who accepted the government’s invitation in 1961 and lived there with his wife until his death two years later.
Since then, thousands of tourists have flooded the west African state, especially in December, further entrenching the party culture now known colloquially there and in Nigeria as Detty December. But locals also say the influx of returnees has triggered a cost of living crisis and the strange case of dollar-denominated real estate listings in Ghana. Elsewhere, Gabon has also offered citizenships to a few prominent African Americans including the rapper Ludacris and actor Samuel L Jackson.
In order to prove their sub-Saharan ancestry, those wishing to become citizens of Benin will have to provide documentation and take a government-approved DNA test – a method some question.
“DNA tests are not ancestry tests,” said Agustín Fuentes, an anthropology professor at Princeton University.
Fuentes said genetic testing services could reach certain conclusions about someone’s ancestry by comparing their DNA samples with samples from different parts of the world. “They’re just saying … ‘Given our whole database, you look a lot like these folks whose DNA we have from Lagos, Nigeria … So we’re going to tell you that your ancestry is in west Africa.’”
But such tests could not specify from which point in the past the indicated geographic “ancestry” came. “I think Benin’s intent is good,” said Fuentes, but he believed DNA testing was not a “totally scientific” way of ascertaining someone’s ancestry.
Diamante, who made a four-part documentary about his return to Benin, voiced excitement about the prospect of deepening his ties to the land of his forefathers.
While traveling through Benin, he visited The Door of No Return, a beachside memorial arch built to remember the Africans shipped to the Americas.
“It was devastating … We were shamelessly pillaged … it was one of the cruelest things humanity could have done,” Diamante said of the monument in the town of Ouidah, which was one of Africa’s busiest ports for the trafficking of enslaved people during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Two centuries later, Diamante has opened a restaurant near the ruins of Rio’s Valongo wharf, where hundreds of thousands of enslaved people were sold at the start of the 19th century. Its menu celebrates Afro-Brazilian culture and food, fusing the flavors of Rio, Bahia and Benin.
After obtaining Beninese citizenship, the chef wondered if he might one day run a restaurant in the west African country too. “Our mission now is to resist and to celebrate all those who died so we could be here today,” Diamante said.
