## Introduction  
The above sentence was recorded in 1830 by the French traveller H. Furcy de Bremoy. An African freedman was watching the ships in the port of Rio de Janeiro from a distance, on one of the mountains surrounding the city centre. De Bremoy asked him what he was doing, and the above was his reply. The traveller writes that this man, called José, was a skilled carpenter and was gathering all his savings in order to return to Angola, from where he had been taken to be enslaved. He managed to obtain his freedom, after 10 years of enslavement in Rio de Janeiro, and built a cabin on that same mountain, from where he would watch the boats, amplifying his desire to return. José's story is told in far greater detail in the 1833 publication by the traveller and, although it might have been somewhat romanticized through the eyes of the foreigner, it may well have had its desired ending (De Bremoy, 1833).  
During the nineteenth century, many African freedpersons and their descendants left various regions of the Americas - Brazil in particular - and headed for Africa. Such migratory movements were already taking place even  
before the eighteenth century, though they were less frequent and most journeys were ones made by individuals. By the nineteenth century, however, the return journey from Brazil was often being made collectively, in ships loaded with groups of Africans, many accompanied by friends and family members in the same situation.