## The issue of identity  
The early 1970s saw the publication of the first more extensive academic study by a university researcher on the history of the freedpersons who returned from Brazil. This work was by Michael J. Turner, a young African-American historian on a Ford Foundation scholarship, and was the result of his research work, from the late 1960s onwards, on the 'return of Afro-Brazilians to West Africa' (Turner, 1970, p. 23, 1975). Turner's research work included a bibliography produced in Portuguese and in English, interviews carried out during his fieldwork, new data and new ideas. In this publication, he argued that the identity forged by the returnee communities was created under pressure from the Indigenous groups that rejected them. He suggested that the experience of these Africans, who were seen as foreigners on their home continent, was comparable with that of the other black returnees (freedpersons, free people of colour and recaptured  
Africans) arriving in Sierra Leone or Liberia, who experienced serious problems with the African societies in the regions to which they migrated.