The Center Holds: Lélia Gonzalez and the Black Soul of Brazil

“A gente não é minoria, não, tá? A cultura brasileira é uma cultura negra por excelência.”
— Lélia Gonzalez

In a country that continues to deny its own reflection, Lélia Gonzalez held up a mirror and demanded that Brazil look into its Black soul. Anthropologist, philosopher, feminist, and militant, Gonzalez was more than a trailblazer—she was a cartographer of the silenced. At a time when public discourse still tiptoed around race and gender, she named what others refused to see: that Brazil is not merely influenced by Black culture—it is Black culture.

Today, amid resurging fascism, femicide, and anti-Black violence dressed in institutional clothing, her words strike not as memory but as method. They offer a compass for navigating the structural fog of modern Brazil—and a blueprint for cultural decolonization across the Global South.

The Mother Tongue of Resistance

Born in 1935 in Belo Horizonte to a Black domestic worker and an Indigenous railway worker, Lélia Gonzalez grew up navigating the terrains of racism, patriarchy, and classism—an experience that became the core of her scholarship and activism. Moving to Rio de Janeiro, she became a professor of anthropology, dedicating herself to studying the intersections of race, culture, and gender.

But Gonzalez didn’t just analyze society from the ivory tower—she spoke it in the streets. Her writings mixed academic rigor with street vernacular, most notably in “Linguagem do Corpo Negro” (The Language of the Black Body), where she introduced the radical idea of “Amefricanidade”—a fusion of América + África—to describe the cultural and political identity of Afro-descendants in Latin America.

“Amefricanidade” wasn’t a linguistic whim. It was a refusal. A refusal to accept the erasure of African roots from national narratives. A refusal to see Black women as anything other than historical protagonists.

From Samba to Senate: A Woman of Many Fronts

Lélia Gonzalez’s political engagement was not limited to ink and theory. She co-founded the Movimento Negro Unificado (MNU) in 1978—at a time when publicly denouncing racism in Brazil was revolutionary and often dangerous. In the same breath, she became one of the early voices of Black feminism, bringing to the fore the specific experiences of Black women erased by both white feminism and male-centric Black activism.

She ran for public office several times and advocated for racial quotas long before they became law. She stood with domestic workers, favela youth, Candomblé priestesses, and sex workers—not as charity, but in radical solidarity. She called on institutions to acknowledge that "epistemicide"—the killing of knowledge systems—was happening daily in classrooms that dismissed Afro-Brazilian history.

Why She Matters—Now More Than Ever

Brazil today remains haunted by the myth of racial democracy—a fantasy Gonzalez spent her life dismantling. The reality is raw: police kill Black Brazilians at alarming rates, favelas are militarized, and the media remains stubbornly Eurocentric in its depictions of beauty and belonging. Despite making up over 56% of the population, Black Brazilians continue to be underrepresented in politics, media, and academia.

Meanwhile, cultural production rooted in Afro-Brazilian life—samba, funk, capoeira, culinary traditions—is either criminalized or sanitized for elite consumption. Gonzalez's insight that “Blackness is the foundation, not the exception”becomes a critical lens for understanding this cycle of appropriation and erasure.

And it’s not just about Brazil. Across the Lusophone world—from Angola’s Kuduro to Mozambique’s Marrabenta, from Portugal’s Afro-diasporic neighborhoods to São Tomé’s postcolonial canvases—the struggles Gonzalez mapped remain painfully relevant. Her concept of Amefricanidade anticipates the cultural entanglements now being explored by transnational movements and decolonial thinkers worldwide.

The Future is Amefrican

In a time when global Black liberation feels both urgent and imperiled, Gonzalez’s voice offers not just critique, but healing. She refused to see Afro-Brazilian culture as marginal, folkloric, or supplemental. Instead, she positioned it as epistemology—a way of knowing, making, surviving, and loving that predates the plantation and outlives the republic.

To read Lélia Gonzalez today is to confront uncomfortable truths and envision expansive futures. It is to ask: What would our cities, schools, and parliaments look like if they were truly shaped by the Black women who built them? What if we stopped asking to be included—and started claiming what was always ours?

Final Echo

Lélia Gonzalez died in 1994, but her ideas are blooming across quilombos, collectives, and classrooms. In the shadow of authoritarian nostalgia and neoliberal amnesia, her words are not a eulogy—they are an instruction manual.

She does not ask to be remembered.

She dares us to rebuild.

Further Reading & References:

Gonzalez, Lélia. Lugar de Negro (with Carlos Hasenbalg)
Gonzalez, Lélia. A categoria político-cultural de amefricanidade
Ribeiro, Djamila. Quem tem medo do feminismo negro?
Werneck, Jurema. Estelizacao de mulheres: Um desafio para a bioética?