Lélia Gonzalez

Lélia de Almeida was born on the first of February 1935 in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, the eighteenth of twenty children of Acácio Joaquim de Almeida — a Black railroad worker — and Urcinda Serafim de Almeida, an indigenous-descended domestic servant. The family migrated to Rio de Janeiro when she was seven, and she completed her secondary education at the Colégio Pedro II — one of the few Black girls in the cohort. She took degrees in history and philosophy from the State University of Guanabara and a master's in social communication, qualifying as a teacher of philosophy by 1962.

She taught philosophy and culture at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro for thirty years. From the mid-1970s she became the principal theoretician of Afro-Brazilian feminism — building from the international Black feminist correspondence of Angela Davis and Audre Lorde a specifically Brazilian framework that she named amefricanidade. The framework — first articulated in her 1988 essay A categoria político-cultural de amefricanidade — proposed that the Black and indigenous populations of the Americas constituted a transnational diasporic civilisation whose recognition was prerequisite to any politics of liberation in the hemisphere.

She co-founded the Movimento Negro Unificado in 1978 — the largest organisation of the second Brazilian Black movement — and Nzinga: Collective of Black Women in 1983. She stood for federal deputy in 1982 for the Workers' Party and for state deputy in 1986 for the Democratic Labour Party. Neither campaign was successful.

She suffered a heart attack and died in her sleep at her Rio de Janeiro apartment on the tenth of July 1994, at fifty-nine. Her collected essays — published only posthumously in 2018 as Primavera para as Rosas Negras — established her in the present generation as the founding philosopher of Afro-Brazilian feminism.

She is honored here as the theoretician of amefricanidade.