Luís Gonzaga Pinto da Gama (21 June 1830 – 24 August 1882) was a Brazilian (self-taught 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.
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 June 21, 1830, 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.
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.