Abdias do Nascimento

Abdias do Nascimento was born on the fourteenth of March 1914 in Franca, in the interior of São Paulo state, the son of José Ferreira do Nascimento — a cobbler and lay minister of the Methodist Church — and Josina Pereira do Nascimento, a candy-maker and seamstress. He completed his secondary education at the Colégio Lindolfo Collor and qualified as an accountant before being conscripted into the Brazilian Army in 1929. He served eight years and resigned at the rank of sergeant after refusing orders to participate in the suppression of the 1935 Communist uprising.

He moved to Rio de Janeiro and in 1944 founded the Teatro Experimental do Negro — the first organised Black theatre in Latin America. The company, which operated for the next twenty years, was simultaneously an artistic platform, a literacy programme and an organising centre for the post-war Black Brazilian civil rights movement. It produced the first Portuguese-language productions of Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones (1945), Albert Camus's Caligula (1949) and the original plays of Nelson Rodrigues and Lúcio Cardoso written for Black casts.

Forced into exile by the military dictatorship in 1968, he taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo for the next thirteen years and developed the political philosophy he called quilombismo — the framework that situated maroon-republic self-government as the unrealised Afro-Brazilian alternative to both liberal capitalism and Soviet socialism. He returned to Brazil at the 1981 amnesty and was elected federal deputy and then senator for Rio de Janeiro for the Democratic Labour Party. He was the first Afro-Brazilian senator to introduce comprehensive racial-equality legislation, much of which entered the Constitution of 1988.

He died at the age of ninety-seven on the twenty-third of May 2011 in Rio de Janeiro.

He is honored here as the founder of organised Black Brazilian cultural and political life.