5 Francisca's petition is transcribed in Reis, 2003, p. 466.  
for Africa, accompanied by over a dozen former slaves, many recently freed, including Marcelina Obatosi and her two young children.  
The memory of the group's odyssey is preserved in the oral traditions of one of Brazil's oldest candomblé temples, Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká, whose shrines were created by Iyá Nassô, probably during her first years as a freedwoman, if not before. According to one version of the story, the group's journey back to Africa ended in the Yoruba city-State of Ketu. However, newly uncovered evidence from the Republic of Benin shows that they went to Ouidah, where they received land from the Dahomean king, Gezo. There, Iyá Nassô's husband became involved in exporting kola nuts, and perhaps other products, to Brazil. He and his wife also established a new religious community, undoubtedly with the participation of her sons and the family's former slaves, some of whom, including Marcelina's children, had been freed only on the condition that they remain with their former owners until the latter's death. Having paid for her freedom, Marcelina was bound by no such restriction. In 1839, she returned to Bahia, where she assumed leadership of Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká. Twenty years later, one of her daughters joined her, suggesting that by then Iyá Nassô and her husband were dead. Today, Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká is one of Brazil's most respected candomblé temples. In 1986, it was designated a national historic site.  
The subject of our second biography is Francisco Gomes de Andrade, also known by the African name Shetelu, who was one of the founders of the AfroBrazilian community in Lagos (Mann, 2016). Like Iyá Nassô, he was enslaved during the instability and warfare that accompanied the fall of the Oyo empire. Unlike her, he was not born at the centre of the empire, but in the allied kingdom of Owu on Oyo's southern frontier. While Iyá Nassô was enslaved as an adult, Shetelu was captured as a youth between about 1815 and 1825.