Luís Gonzaga Pinto da Gama (21 June 1831 – 24 August 1882) was a Brazilian lawyer, abolitionist, orator, journalist and writer, and the Patron of the abolition of slavery in Brazil.
Born to a free black mother and a white father, he was nevertheless made a slave at the age of 10, and remained illiterate until the age of 17. He judicially won his own freedom and began to work as a lawyer on behalf of the captives, and by the age of 29 he was already an established author and considered "the greatest abolitionist in Brazil".
Although considered one of the exponents of , works such as Manuel Bandeira's "Apresentação da Poesia Brasileira" do not even mention his name. He had such a unique life that it is difficult to find, among his biographers, any who do not become passionate when portraying him – being himself also charged with passion, emotional and yet captivating.
He was a black intellectual in 19th century slave-owning Brazil, the only self-taught and the only one to have gone through the experience of captivity. He spent his life fighting for the abolition of slavery and for the end of the monarchy in Brazil, but died six years before these causes were accomplished. In 2018 his name was inscribed in the Steel Book of national heroes deposited in the Tancredo Neves Pantheon of the Fatherland and Freedom."Panteão da Pátria: os 43 heróis e heroínas do Brasil". UOL, 04/07/2018
Panorama from the time São Paulo, where Gama lived for forty-two years, was in the middle of the 19th century a still small provincial capital that, with the demand for coffee production from the 1870s on, saw the price of slaves reach a level that made their urban possession almost prohibitive. Until this period, however, it was quite common the property of "rent slaves", on whose work their owners drew their source of sustenance, alongside the so-called "domestic slaves".
It had a population ten times smaller than that of the Court (Rio de Janeiro), and a very strong presence of legal culture because, since 1828, one of the only two law schools in the country had been established there, the Largo de São Francisco Law School, which received students from all over the country, coming from all social strata – besides the children of the rural oligarchy, members of the intellectual elite that was being formed at the time (Gama defined it, then, as "Noah's Ark in a small way").
Childhood and slavery Luís Gama was born on 21 June 1831, at Bângala street Nº2, in the centre from the city of Salvador, Bahia. Even with little information about his childhood, it is known that he was the son of Luísa Mahin, a freed African ex-slave, and the son of a Portuguese fidalgo who lived in Bahia. At the age of seven, his mother traveled to Rio de Janeiro to participate in the Sabinada revolt, never to meet him again. In 1840, his father ended up in debt with gambling, so he resorted to selling Luís Gama as a slave to pay his debts. There is no evidence that his father sought him out after that. As an adult, Gama understood that when he was sold he was a victim of the crime of "Enslaving a free person, who is in possession of his freedom.", provided in Article 179 from Criminal Code of the Empire of Brazil, sanctioned shortly after his birth. Furthermore, due to the fact that the revolts that took place in Bahia led to the prohibition of the sale of slaves from this province to other regions of Brazil, the sale and transport of Luís Gama to São Paulo was constituted as contraband.
In an autobiographical letter he sent in 1880 to , he describes his birth and early childhood thus:
Lígia Ferreira, one of the researchers who has most studied Gama's life, points out that this information could not be verified, although she stresses that the sobrado where he was born still exists; the register of his baptism could not be found, and adds to this the fact that the omission of his father's name from his account casts doubt on his real identity.
Researchers Lisa Earl Castillo and Wlamyra Albuquerque announced the discovery of new documents in the Bahia State Public Archives that they claim contain previously unpublished information about Luiz Gama’s life, which could lead to new theories regarding his birth, childhood, and parentage.
Among the documents found was the alleged baptismal record, registered at the Parish of the Blessed Sacrament and St. Anne in the city of Salvador in October 1831, which is said to have been the first baptism—in contrast to the second baptism, which is said to have taken place years later but has never been found:
Luis Parvulo
On the second of October, eighteen hundred and thirty-one, in this parish church of the Holy Sacrament and St. Anne, I solemnly baptized and anointed with the holy oils LUIS, a mixed-race child, three and a half months old, son of Luiza, a slave of Maria Rosa de Jesus, unmarried, residing in this parish; his godfather was Antonio Agostinho, unmarried, residing in the same parish. And for the record, I have drawn up this entry, which I have signed. The Vicar, Manoel Coelho de S. Payo Menezes.
Put up for sale, he was rejected "for being Bahian". After the Malê revolt, a stigma was created that Bahian captives were rebellious and more likely to run away. He was taken to Rio de Janeiro where he was sold to Antonio Pereira Cardoso, a slave trader who took him to be resold in São Paulo. From the Port of Santos, Gama and the other slaves were taken on foot to be sold in Jundiaí and Campinas. With all the buyers resisting buying him because he was from Bahia, Gama began working as a domestic slave on the ensign's property, washing and ironing clothes, and then became a , working as a seamstress and shoemaker in the town of Lorena.
Freedom and adulthood In 1847, Luís Gama had contact with a law student, Antônio Rodrigues do Prado Júnior, who stayed at his master's house and taught him the alphabet. The following year Gama was already literate and had taught the ensign's children to read, which he used as an argument in favor of his alforria, which was not successful. With this, Luís Gama was able to prove his freedom and joined the army in 1848. It remains unclear, however, the artifices used by Luis Gama to obtain his freedom, and it is suggested that he may have used the testimony of his father – whose identity he was careful to keep obscure. There is also the theory that Gama would have run away from the estate and argued that he was free because he could read and write, which were skills that most slaves did not possess. He was part of the City Guard from 1848 until 1854, when he was imprisoned for 39 days due to "insoburdination" after "threatening an insolent officer" who had insulted him. Before that, in 1850, he had married Claudina Fortunata Sampaio.
Even while serving in the army, he was chosen to work as a copyist for official authorities in his spare time, since he had good calligraphy. In 1856, he was hired as a clerk at the São Paulo Police Department, in the office of Francisco Maria de Souza Furtado de Mendonça, a counselor and law professor. With the knowledge of Francisco Mendonça and having his library at his disposal, Luís Gama further studied the subject of law until he made the decision to graduate from the Largo de São Francisco Law School. However, the students of the Faculty were against it, making it impossible for Luís Gama to enroll, so he began to study on his own, as attending classes as a listener and became a "rábula", the name given to the individual who had enough legal knowledge to be a lawyer, even without a law degree. After acting in slave cases, Gama was dismissed from his position at the Secretariat of Police, in 1868, due to pressure from who were dissatisfied with the freedoms won by the rábula. Gama defined his dismissal "for the good of the public service" as a consequence of the work he had been doing to free slaves who were in an illegal situation, in addition to denouncing the system's abuses, or, in his words
Literature
Gama was a reader of the Vida de Jesus (Life of Jesus), by the French philosopher Ernest Renan, originally published in 1863 and soon translated in Brazil, being one of the first to refer to it in the country. His only work, originally published in two editions (1859 and 1861), Primeiras Trovas Burlescas, placed him in the literary pantheon of Brazil only twelve years after he learned to read. This book, dedicated to Salvador Furtado de Mendonça, a magistrate who taught at the Largo de S. Francisco and who also managed his library there (which allows us to infer that he facilitated Gama's access to his collection), also has poems by his friend José Bonifácio the Younger, attached. The third edition of the work only came out posthumously, in 1904.
Poetry: the "Orpheus with a curly top" Recalling the figure of the Greek poet Orpheus, and alluding to his curly hair, Gama was called "Orpheus with a curly top", and mastered both lyric and satirical poetry.
His poetics is written in the first person, without hiding his own origin and without failing to proclaim his blackness; at the same time, he does not fail to use the traditional images of his time, such as mythological evocations (like Orpheus, Cupid, etc.) or the poets of the past (like Lamartine, Camões, for example).
However, Gama reverts these images to his condition: the muse is from Guinea, Orpheus has "curly top". In portraying white society, he uses strongly satirical images:
He builds, from the elements of white culture, the antithesis to the culture and civilization of the blacks, filling them with elements of traditional poetry; thus, he contrasts the "Guinea muse" to the Greco-Roman muses; the dark granite to the white marble; the marimba and the cabaço to the lyre and the flute:
In his verses, he traces an image of himself that is far from the figure of the "poor wretch" or sufferer that figures in the blacks painted by contemporary white poets like Castro Alves. Gama hits himself with the same fierce criticism with which he attacks the system, belittling his own value before the prevailing cultural standards, which he implicitly accepts:
Gama even ironizes the situation of the black man, cut off from wealth, the sciences, and the arts:
Goat "Goat" (Bode) was a term used in Gama's time to make pejorative references to black and pardo people, more specifically, "gathering of mixed-race people", and the poet himself was the target of these offenses. Thus, in 1861, in the poem Quem sou eu? also known as Bodarrada, Gama used the term ironically to satirize Brazilian society, while affirming human equality regardless of color:
Abolitionist activism
Journalism and Freemasonry Part of Luís Gama's abolitionist activism resided in his activity in the press. He began his journalistic career in São Paulo, together with cartoonist Angelo Agostini; both founded, in 1864, the first illustrated humorous newspaper in that city, called (Lame Devil), which lasted from October 1864 until November 1865. Before this, however, he had been an apprentice printer at O Ipiranga and had worked in the editorial staff of Radical Paulistano. His actions as a journalist and lawyer, as early as 1869, had made him one of the most influential and popular figures in the city of São Paulo. Despite this, Gama did not become a rich man and kept what little money he had to donate to the needy who came to him. Luís Gama was the only black abolitionist in Brazil to have experienced slavery.