4 Workers, vagrants and tough guys in Bahia, c. 18 60–1950
Bahia, our Bahia
The capital is Salvador
He who doesn’t know capoeira
Can’t give it its true value
(Ladainha or capoeira ‘prayer’ as sung by M.Pastinha)Imperial Bahia
Salvador and the Bay of All The SaintsSince colonial times the development of Salvador has been intrinsically linked to the plantation economy of
its hinterland, the Recôncavo. The term stands for the area surrounding the Bay of All the Saints (see
Figure 4.1). Its clay soils—the heavy massapês or the lighter salões—resulted ideal for growing sugar cane
and contributed to make the Recôncavo one of the key sugar producing regions of colonial Brazil. The first
cane plantations and sugar mills, using Mediterranean techniques and native Brazilian slave labour, were
founded as early as the 1530s. Working and living conditions under slavery as well as ‘Old World’ diseases
resulted in the rapid extermination of the natives, so that already by the 1580s the majority of the field
hands on the plantations had been substituted by Africans. During the seventeenth century the Recôncavo
became the prime sugar-producing region of the world. The owners of the sugar mills, or engenhos (a short
form for the production unit consisting of the cane fields and the mill where the cane was processed into
sugar) constituted, together with the merchants, the elite of colonial society.^1
Even though sugar production in the Recôncavo shared many features with other plantation regions of the
Americas, some peculiarities are worth mentioning. The technicalities of sugar making required a sizeable
group of skilled workers on each engenho, many of which were slaves, thus contributing to the social
differentiation among the captive population. Sugar cane was not only grown by mill owners, but also by
cane farmers called lavradores. If a regular sugar mill needed at least 100 slaves to plant the sugar and keep
the mill working, lavradores cultivated smaller plots of land with as few as half a dozen or a dozen slaves.
They depended on the mill owners for the processing of their cane, who often also were the owners of the
land they cultivated. As a result, lavradores were subjected to mill owners by a variety of mechanisms and
often resented that dependency. Even though they all aspired to become mill owners, most never managed
to climb up the social ladder. They therefore constituted an important middle sector of rural society. During
the eighteenth century many cane farmers were of mixed ancestry or ‘coloured’. The existence of