What can the unfolding of a single life tell us about the broader historical processes which animated the African diaspora in the nineteenth century? That is the question implicitly posed in the geographically sprawling The Story of Rufino: Slavery, Freedom and Islam in the Black Atlantic, written by historians João José Reis, Flávio dos Santos Gomes, and Marcus J. M. de Carvalho. The book is part of a larger biographical turn in the field, as one of several recent intimate historical portraits that follow the complicated life trajectories of inhabitants of the Black Atlantic. Other notable titles include Atlantic Bonds: A Nineteenth Century Odyssey from America to Africa and Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World.Footnote ¹ Of particular interest to historians of Africa, The Story of Rufino spends considerable time tracing political developments in West and West Central Africa, which by the 1840s had become hotspots of both transatlantic slaving and British abolitionism.

First published in Portuguese in 2010 and now translated for English-speaking audiences, it follows the life of Alufá (the term for Muslim leader or imam in the Yoruba language) Rufino José Maria. (His chosen name of Abuncare only becomes central in the second half of the book.) Rufino's life story, pieced together from testimony taken during a police interrogation following his 1853 arrest on suspicion of leading an insurgency of Recife's Black population, forms the basis of a ‘social history of the transatlantic slave trade’. The book also draws on collections of slaving ship papers, court testimonies taken in Sierra Leone, as well as contemporaneous reports from various regions of Brazil. This rich material allows the three authors to create a biography which offers a panoramic view of the interconnected Atlantic world during the period.

Rufino witnessed many momentous upheavals, beginning with the collapse of the Oyo Empire 1817. A young Rufino became one of the unfortunate casualties of civil wars in the region which attended the Sokoto Caliphate's expansion. Ultimately enslaved and transported to Brazil, he became part of a large household headed by a mixed-race apothecary named João Gomes. As one of Gomes’ many African-born captives, Rufino enriched his owner by becoming a ‘slave for hire’, working for wages outside the household. His occupational specialization is unclear, but he was eventually sold to the south and labored as a cook in both Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre.

At the time of Rufino's arrival, the domestic slave trade between Brazil's old sugar producing core in the northeast and the emerging coffee growing region in the south was booming. As was the transatlantic slave trade, despite increasing abolitionist pressures from Great Britain. The Story of Rufino is especially successful in establishing the profound social and political unrest fomented by both slave trades in the 1830s and 40s. Though Rufino's involvement is never firmly established, the book contextualizes his arrival with simultaneous upheavals on both sides of the Atlantic. The ‘intense political turbulence’ was marked by ‘growing opposition to the sectors associated with Portuguese interest, along with demonstrations in the streets and agitation in the press by liberal radicals and republicans’ (19).

In particular, the Africanization of Brazil's population created varied social worlds which were bubbling with religious and political ferment. In addition to the well documented Malê revolt in 1835, the authors detail several subsequent rebellions, including the Farroupilha revolt from 1835–45. The first and last sections of the book provide remarkable insights into the depth and frequency of African resistance to slavery and racial hierarchy in Brazil, revealing the profound social tensions and violence caused by slavery and the constant fears of insurrection by the enslaved, most commonly spearheaded by recently arrived Africans, especially Muslims like Rufino. These findings will be of special interest to historians of slave warfare in the Atlantic.

In addition to tracing African resistive networks, the middle section of the book reveals the operations of the illegal slave trade to Pernambuco. Once freed, Rufino actually joined the slave trade, sailing on a slaving ship as a cook and mariner. Like many African-born men, he found his unique skills marketable in the dirty business of slaving. During this period the slave trade was eminently deadly, with slave mortality jumping to 15.1 per cent. But the economic incentives remained. Following the criminalization of slave trading in 1831, illegal slavers increasingly turned to international financial relationships to keep their clandestine business afloat. Here, the narrative greatly enriches scholarly understandings of the quotidian financial and labor operations of the clandestine slave trade to Brazil. The authors paint a convincing portrait of a sophisticated criminal enterprise with expansive commercial connections throughout the Atlantic world. Brazilian slavers relied on American-built ships, and they employed multi-national crews. Though Brazil had already declared independence from Portugal, Brazilian merchants in the slave trade still depended on financing by subjects of the Portuguese empire. A high degree of commercial integration required the coordination of Portuguese, Angolan, and Brazilian merchants to effectively mount a cargo.

These new economic relationships were countered with only occasionally effective British suppression efforts, which included the use of the Royal Navy to capture ships suspected of involvement in illegal slaving. It was thus that Rufino entered the archival record again. The Anglo-Brazilian Mixed Commission Courts established in Sierra Leone helped to make the new British Crown Colony financially viable through the taking of slaving ships as prizes to be auctioned off to British merchants. Ships on which Rufino was employed were seized by the British twice, the first occurring while he was on the crew of the ship Ermelinda in 1841. During his time in Sierra Leone, he connected with the proselytizing Aku (Yoruba-speaking) Muslim community in Fourah Bay near Freetown. He learned to read and write in Arabic and engaged in a religious education that served him well after his return to Brazil following trial of Ermelinda's crew.

Although the book provides a rich portrait of Brazil and West Africa during the period, Rufino does remain enigmatic in large portions of the narrative. His story is largely determined by the events surrounding him. The exception is a nuanced discussion of his religious life. He was arrested in Recife, surrounded by Islamic materials and pupils, clothed in an agbada, a ritual tunic. He seems to have made his living by predicting the future and curing illnesses through the removal of harmful spells, for a mixed community of Africans, mixed-race people, and whites. The African man's large and faithful following made him dangerous in the eyes of authorities, the book argues. It becomes clear in the closing pages of the monograph that Abundcare (formerly Rufino), like Domingos Álvares, was a Black Atlantic intellectual who provided answers and remedies to the practical concerns of a range of the city's inhabitants.Footnote ² He did so by drawing on specifically West African intellectual resources. Abuncare's decision to join the African Muslim community in Brazil is highlighted by the authors as a choice — one made in the context of a numerically significant, but frequently persecuted larger African community in late-slave-trade-era Brazil.

The Story of Rufino uses a life history — exceptional as it was — to illuminate a broader story about the centrality of African slavery and slave trading to economy of the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic. His ‘reverse’ diasporic journey, from the slaving ships of Brazil to colonial Sierra Leone demonstrates the multidirectionality of the lives of many Africans uprooted in the slave trade, in this he was unusual but not completely unique.Footnote ³ Unlike other African diaspora intellectuals such as Domingos Álvares, who contested the hegemony of Atlantic slavery and empire, Reis, dos Santos Gomes, and de Carvalho trace the contradictions of Abundcare's politics. He labored and invested in the transatlantic slave trade, while embracing a religious community which Brazilian political elites feared would undermine their Christianized slaveholding society. His activities made him vulnerable to police harassment, but he seemingly never embraced open rebellion against the state's authority like other enslaved and freed Africans. His ‘accommodations’ to Brazil's slavocracy strikingly illustrate transatlantic slaving's hegemonic power, even for people violently dispossessed by the traffic.