The Crime at Valongo Wharf: A Novel

The Crime at Valongo Wharf pays homage to the many thousands of enslaved Africans who were brought ashore at Rio de Janeiro’s Cais do Valongo, the quay that was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2017. The novel’s historical backdrop is between 1809 and 1821, when the Portuguese Court established itself in Rio after the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. The story revolves around the murder of Bernardo Lourenço Viana, a Portuguese slave trader and innkeeper, a social climber of cruel and ruthless character. The twin narrators are Muana, a Macua Mozambican slave girl, and Nuno Alcântara Moutinho, a dark‑skinned “mazombo” (native Brazilian) who is the son of a Portuguese priest and a free African woman. Both narrators had motive enough to kill the murder victim, as did two other enslaved people in the household: Roza the cook, whom Viana raped with impunity, and her protector, Mariano, a gay Angolan slave.

Eliana Alves Cruz’s novel, translated from the Portuguese by David Brookshaw, artfully explores the political interests and social relationships at play in Rio de Janeiro at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In her work as a Black Brazilian author, Alves Cruz is seizing agency over the narrative and history of Afro‑Brazilian women of the past.