Oliveira's life story provides insights into a larger pattern of mobility across the Atlantic. This pattern is also illustrated by the trajectory of Antonio Vaz Coelho, a black freedman born in Brazil, who 'made several voyages to Ardrah [Porto-Novo], where he at last settled, and became a very respectable trader' by the end of the eighteenth century (Dalzel, 1793, p. 169). Others used membership of brotherhoods in port cities in Africa and Brazil to travel back and forth across the Atlantic (Parés, 2014).  
Such Atlantic crossings were furthered by a backlash against free blacks in the wake of the 1835 Muslim rebellion in Salvador, Bahia (Reis, 2003, pp. 465-7, 479-95; Castillo 2011, Vol. 2, pp. 27-51). Noticeably, they overlapped with the rise of anti-slave trade activities, which prompted the decentralization of shipments of captives along the African coast. Against this backdrop, some returnees settled in coastal communities and became active in the illegal trade  
(Costa e Silva, 2004; Law, 2004, pp. 186-211; Law, 2016). However, it would be mistaken to associate the back-to-Africa movement only with the slave trade. While transatlantic voyages, mostly to Lagos, were fuelled by Afro-Brazilian religiosity, they were also driven by continuing social and trading ties between Africa and Brazil (Matory, 2005; Parés and Castillo, 2015, pp. 13-43; Cunha, 2013; Lindsay 1994; Guran, 2000; Strickrodt, 2015; Souza, 2008; Mann, 2013; Falheiros, 2013; Castillo, 2016; Silva, 2016; Parés, 2017). In Africa, a strong sense of religiosity, particularly around Catholicism, was central to the making of an 'Agudá' identity (Parés, 2015).