Revolution of the Ganhadores

The Revolution of the Ganhadores, also known as the 1857 African porters' strike, was a labor strike that involved African porters, known as ganhadores, in the Brazilian city of Salvador, Bahia. The strike began following the passage of a city ordinance that changed the way the ganhadores operated in the city. The strike ended in a partial victory for the strikers, as the city council replaced the ordinance with another one that did away with some of the more unpopular provisions.

During the 1800s, ganhadores were crucial to the transportation of goods through Salvador. The trade was dominated by both enslaved and free people of African descent who worked together in self-governing groups known as cantos. While the ganhadores were given a great deal of freedom to move through the city, fears of a slave revolt, in the vein of the Malê revolt of 1835, prompted the government to try to exert more control over the ganhadores. In 1836, the provincial government of Bahia enacted a law that required ganhadores to register with the government, wear identification tags, and operate under the direct supervision of captains, which replaced the canto system. The law proved extremely unpopular, not just with the ganhadores, but with the general public as well, and by the following year, the canto system was restored, and the law became unenforced. In 1857, the city council of Salvador enacted a new law modeled after the 1836 act which again required ganhadores to register and wear metal identification tags around their necks. Ganhadores were required to pay a fee for the tags, while freedmen also had to provide a guarantor who would take responsibility for the ganhador. To protest the new law, ganhadores in the city went on strike on 1 June, the same date that the law went into effect.

The strike effectively shut down transportation inside the city. Local newspapers reported on the strike with front-page stories and noted the impact that the action was having on the local economy. Within days, the president of the province, João Lins Cansanção, Viscount of Sinimbu, ordered the city council to rescind the fee requirement from the law. However, the strike continued, and within a week, the city council announced that they were repealing the law, replacing it with a new one. This new law still required ganhadores to register and wear identification tags around their necks, but it removed the registration fee and changed the rules regarding freedmen so that they no longer had to have a guarantor, but instead just a "certificate of guarantee" from an authority or a respectable citizen. With these changes, the strike continued, but more ganhadores registered and returned to work, and by 13 June, the Jornal da Bahia newspaper reported that the strike had effectively ended.

According to Brazilian historian João José Reis, the strike was the first general strike in Brazil's history. He attributes the partial success of the strike to the solidarity among Salvador's Afro-Brazilian community and sees the event as an early example of pan-Africanism that would become more common throughout Bahia in the late 1800s.