Africans) arriving in Sierra Leone or Liberia, who experienced serious problems with the African societies in the regions to which they migrated.  
In the early 1980s, Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha published a work considered to be a watershed in terms of knowledge about the freedpersons who returned from Brazil (Da Cunha, 1985, 2012). This was the first book to be written exclusively on the subject and published in Portuguese since, at that time, Verger's work had not yet been translated and any previously published texts had been articles in journals of limited circulation. The book dealt with the issue of identity construction within the Brazilian community in Lagos, Nigeria. The study consisted of a theoretical discussion based on in-depth historical research and field work carried out in Lagos. ${ }^{5}$ Moreover, it presented an approach to the experience of the freedpersons in Brazil's slave society, considering aspects of the personal subordination faced by many Africans even after securing their freedom, and the fact that these freedpersons were seen as 'undesirable' in the eyes of the authorities and of society. This work went on to serve as a reference not only for the further study of the freedpersons who returned from Brazil, but also for other works examining aspects of black rebellion in nineteenth-century Brazil.