Isabel and Luiz Gama are part of History – 08/04/2023 – Elio Gaspari

The Ministry of Human Rights extinguished the Princess Isabel Order of Merit and, on the same day, created the Luiz Gama award. At first glance, it ended up with a badge created by Bolsonaro and exalted the figure of a black abolitionist. With the simultaneity, the government performed a petty and useless act. Bolsonaro would like to see a Brazil without Luiz Gama. The commission wants a Brazil without Isabel’s badge. Both are part of the same story. By mutilating her, no one wins.

It is one thing to create an award to exalt the memory of Gama, a black man sold in 1840 by his white father. He ran away, graduated in law, fought for abolition, achieved the liberation of hundreds of blacks and died in 1882, without seeing her. Quite another is to revoke Isabel’s Order of Merit. No power of the Republic can erase the fact that it was she, as regent during her father’s travels, who signed the Ventre Livre laws, in 1871, and the abolition laws, in 1888. Both initiatives had been approved by the Chamber and the Senate.

Isabel was a pious princess, erased by the figure of D. Pedro 2nd. Barring an accident in her youth, when she poked a friend’s eye out, she has never harmed anyone. To the horror of some courtiers, she was a friend of the black engineer and abolitionist André Rebouças. He recorded in his diary that on May 4, 1888, the princess had a shelter built for 14 escaped blacks. (In May 1988, abolition was a matter of course. It is worth remembering that, in March, São Paulo landowners beat and killed prosecutor Joaquim Firmino de Araújo Cunha in front of his family, for protecting escaped blacks.)

If the PT commissariat did not like the creation of the Princess Isabel Order of Merit, it would only have to forget about it, not granting the badge.

The simultaneous removal of the Order and the creation of the Luiz Gama award was petty. They belong to different worlds, the princess lived upstairs. Gama battled on the bottom one. He defended slaves, denounced the crimes of farmers. He was a radical.

In the white abolitionism of illustrious figures such as Joaquim Nabuco there is the fight against slavery. In Luiz Gama’s are flesh and blood blacks, like Brandina, Antonio and Raimundo.

His radicalisms were all right. Not only in abolition, but also in the Republic. He was prophetic when he reminded D. Pedro II that the people, in a “chant to freedom”, could repeat April 7, 1831, repeating his father’s “sinister banishment”. (Eight years later, without the people taking part in the scene, Pedro and Isabel were banished. They would die in France.)

In 1881, a group of admirers of Luiz Gama formed a commission to pay for a painting depicting him. Here is your answer:

“[Empreguem] the money collected, with some assistance, if necessary, in the freeing of a slave, which I will indicate. In this way, we will all render humanity a very important service, deserving of better appreciation than the canvas, on which they intend to immortalize me in oil.”

Nowadays, the lawyer Luiz Gama would bother the authorities by denouncing the police raids that kill “suspects”, almost always black, in the poor neighborhoods of the cities.

Service: The complete work of Luiz Gama, with 11 volumes, was organized and annotated by the historian Bruno Rodrigues de Lima. Published by Editora Hedra and available online.

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