A Brazilian, likely the slave trader Luis Antônio de Andrade, eventually bought Shetelu and had him christened Francisco. Luis Antônio worked in the Brazilian slave trade at Molembo, north of the Congo River, in the 1820s, and at Lagos, then the leading slaving port along the Bight of Benin, in the 1830s and 1840s. Francisco's general absence from Bahian records during the 1820s and 1830s suggests that Luis may have purchased him in West Africa, not Brazil, and that Shetelu's first experience of chattel slavery occurred in Atlantic Africa rather than in the New World.  
Clear evidence places Francisco in Lagos during the 1830s, working with his owner in the Atlantic slave trade. While there, Francisco encountered two members of his family from Owu, which had been defeated and destroyed in 1822. One was a younger woman named Ayebomi, who he later said was related  
to him through his father, and the other was her mother, Ayiku. Ayebomi too had been enslaved as a very young child along with her older sister Ajatu, possibly at the same time as Shetelu. Ayebomi, however, had not been sold into the Atlantic trade, but rather to a Yoruba-speaking woman in the nearby town of Ijebu-Ode. After several years, she was redeemed and reunited with her mother, by then living in the town of Abeokuta, founded by refugees in 1830. During their unexpected reunion, Shetelu told Ayebomi and her mother that he had seen Ajatu in Brazil, where she had been christened Luisa.