The Smell of the Cage1

of the advancing civil rights movement in the United States that, in November of 2008, citizens of this country elected a black man to the offi ce of President. Barack Obama is not personally descended from African slaves; still his ascension to the highest elective US offi ce, despite the lingering liability of his skin color, represents a true benchmark in a sordid history of abuse that is intimately related to the European pillage of the New World. The history of European enslavement of Africans for the purpose of forced labor in transatlantic colonies describes a cultural atrocity whose fl ames burned brightly in the American South, but, we might note, longest in Brazil, where, beginning in the 16th century, hard labor in sugar cane production and mining operations was transferred by the Portuguese from the deteriorating indigenous slave populations into the hands of imported Africans. Here as in other New World colonies, slavery well outlived its abolishment in Europe—in 1761 in Portugal,2 or with the Slave Trade Act effectively frozen in the British Empire in 1807 until its eventual prohibition in 1834.3