ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the Obra Nova de Língua Geral de Mina (1741), a manuscript by the Portuguese writing clerk Antonio da Costa Peixoto documenting a variety of Gbe spoken by Africans and afro-descendants in eighteenth-century Brazil in the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais. The 42-page glossary contains a series of complex expressions and short dialogues from all areas of everyday life, with their Portuguese equivalents. This proof of the vitality of an African language in an overseas slaveholder colony is remarkable but can be explained through the specific sociohistoric, economic and cultural conditions of this complex, dynamic goldrush society. Peixoto's strategic proposal was designed to persuade the colonial administration that the appropriation of the African vernacular by slave owners would help secure the settlers’ wealth and safety and increase the influence and efficiency of the administration. The manuscript, in which Peixoto alternates between the perspective of European colonisers and that of the enslaved and free(d) Africans, offers a unique sample of expressions and dialogues reflecting complex and shifting relations of power and subalternity. The social interactions they reveal match historical descriptions emphasising the relative autonomy and socio-economic status that some Africans, including a number of women, managed to acquire.
