Brazil may well represent the land of slavery par excellence, perhaps having imported some 40 percent of all Africans transported through the transatlantic slave trade. With males accounting for nearly 68 percent of those imported, the initial major preoccupation was the cultivation of sugarcane. More specifically, the second half of the sixteenth century through the seventeenth saw the steady expansion of sugarcane in northeastern Brazil, especially in the provinces of Bahia and Pernambuco. The late-seventeenth-century discovery of gold and diamonds in southwestern Brazil led to the intensification of captive imports, with most going to the provinces of Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, and Goiás.Sugar production caught its “second wind” between 1787 and 1820, and the enslaved people were again brought into coastal areas, following the weakening of the gold and diamond boom after 1760. The rise of coffee and the diversification of crops in central and southern Brazil in the 1820s furthered the continuation of the slave trade, so it is no exaggeration to conclude that Brazilian society was founded on the backs of African and indigenous labor.

Of all the Africans imported into Brazil, it would appear that some 73.2 percent were taken from West Central Africa, largely Congo and Angola, where Muslims were few indeed. Muslim populations were certainly among those emerging from the Swahili coast and its environs, which contributed some 17.3 percent to the total number of imported captives, while the Gold Coast, another region from which some were probably Muslim, made up only 2.5 percent of the total.