Brazil touting its rich black heritage

Brazil is booming with black tourists. Long a vacation hot spot, the country is now receiving legions of African-American visitors who are lured by more than its sunny resorts and the annual Carnaval extravaganza. With more black citizens than any country outside Nigeria (Brazil is home to at least 70 million people of African descent), it is quickly becoming a destination of choice for black Americans interested in the history of the hemisphere and the plight of their enslaved ancestors.

On his second visit here in less than a year, Jones came back to Brazil to learn more about people like Anastacia, a legendary 18th-century slave who was killed after speaking out when she was raped by one of her owners. Others come to learn about candomble, a religion that blends Roman Catholicism with tribal African lore, or capoeira, a martial art that evolved when slaves disguised fight training as a dance.

"There's so much to discover, a lot of important history and culture," says Angela Wade, a health inspector from Berkeley, Calif., before heading to an Afro-Brazilian dance performance one evening here.

Marlene Melton, founder of African Ventures Inc., a New York-based tour operator that recently added Brazil to a once exclusively African roster of destinations, says African-Americans are eager "to embrace any semblance of culture linked to our own history. The African influence in Brazil is very intense and pervasive."

Many other US travel agents and tour operators are beginning to offer black-oriented packages to Brazil, too.

Clarence Smith, the African-American entrepreneur who founded Essence magazine, recently launched Avocet Travel, a New York-based company that plans next year to offer flights and tours to Salvador, a city on the northeast coast that is the locus of the African legacy in Brazil.

"This is one of the few places where people can go and find African culture replicated and unsullied," says Smith in a telephone interview from New York. "We want to build a bridge and make it easier to get there."