# First stories  
The first academic writing on the subject can be found in works dating back to the nineteenth century, at the time of the very formation of communities of returnees from Brazil in certain cities on the African continent. One of the first known individuals to address this point was Élisée Reclus, a French geographer and anarchist who published a work entitled Nouvelle géographie universelle : la terre et les hommes (1876-1894). He devoted a few pages to the idea that the trajectories of the Brazilian communities of the Bight of Benin served as catalysts for progress in this location, in the context of the end of the Atlantic slave trade and the implementation of what he deemed legitimate trade. In 1874, the Brazilian Antonio Joaquim de Macedo Soares published a study on the presence of the Portuguese language as spoken in Brazil, in which he pointed out the specifics of the use of this language among returnees from the country on the African coast (De Macedo Soares, 1942).