This dissertation analyzes the wills left behind by African-born ex-slaves in nineteenth-century Salvador in order to shed light on the lives that they led in the Bahian capital upon their arrival as slaves from Africa, and upon the re-acquisition of their freedom through the alforria system. The material assets and the slave ownership of libertos are studied in depth, as well as their religiosity, and the larger world and networks within which they operated in their Brazilian lives, with a specific eye towards African agency and processes of community formation. The qualitative and in-depth study of post-mortem testaments and inventories as meaningful texts in their own right provides the opportunity to decipher the individual voices of freed Africans, as well as to acquire insight into their Bahian worlds. The relationships, affective ties, and kinship networks of libertos, as well as their efforts to exercise agency and deliberation over their own lives, and the lives of others to whom they were connected, also become evident in the process. The testaments also make it possible to acquire a deeper understanding of African cosmologies in Brazil, through the ways in which libertos understood the passage from the worldly life to the afterlife, the meanings they gave to death, to funerals and other last rites. Understandings of justice, legality, and honor also come to the forefront, while the complex context of nineteenth century Bahia (and Brazil in general) constitutes the constant backdrop against which all these discussions acquire meaning. Understanding the lives, belief systems, and connections of African libertos also has important repercussions for understanding the experiences of Africans and their descendants in slave societies all over the Atlantic World. Insights deriving from the in-depth analysis of libertos' wills have important implications for furthering our knowledge with regards to the Atlantic slave trade, slave ownership, and enslavement, as well as processes of identity and community formation, retention, adaptation, and resistance in the African Diaspora as a whole.
