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[^0]:    6 On the work of enslaved and freed Africans in the slave trade and other commerce between the Bight of Benin and Brazil, see Hicks, 2015, chapters 3, 4.  
The biographies show the importance of family, godparenting, slave ownership, ritual practice and initiation, and ethnolinguistic identity in rebuilding lives and worlds violently ruptured by slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. Both Iyá Nassô and Shetelu entered Brazilian slavery with kin and attached great importance to maintaining these and other family relations throughout their lives. Tellingly, Iyá Nassô and José Pedro, who placed Shango worship at the centre of their activities, were careful to give their marriage the sanction of the Catholic Church and thus the protection of the Brazilian State. Francisco Gomes attended to his relationship with Ayebomi and her mother from the time of the trio's reunion in the 1830s until the women's deaths many years later. His example may have helped inspire Luisa Ajatu to return to West Africa and her family a decade after he did.  
Francisca da Silva and José Pedro Autran in Brazil and Francisco Gomes de Andrade back on the African coast, all used the Catholic institution of baptism to construct dense networks of relations with slaves and their owners, free infants and their parents. The godparenting networks thus formed bound the parties involved in a web of mutual, if sometimes hierarchical, obligation. In this way, all three extended the number and reach of their patrons, clients and dependents. In nineteenth-century baptisms, the role of the godfather was crucial while that of the godmother was optional. Nevertheless, Francisca da Silva's Catholic union with José Pedro Autran gave her unofficial access to her husband's godchildren.