An Atlantic Postscript: The Built Brazil of the Bight of Benin

In this powerful text, Titilola L. N. Marinho and Gabriel Weber join forces to narrate the Agudá legacy—descendants of Afro-Brazilian returnees who, after enslavement in Brazil, resettled along the West African coast. Starting from the Great Mosque of Porto Novo, it examines how architecture became a vessel for memory, identity, and belonging across fractured histories. Tracing Titilola’s family’s journey from slavery to return, it reveals how both the built environment and surnames encode both trauma and resilience, resisting erasure and redefining Atlantic modernity through fragments reclaimed, remembered, and reimagined.

At the axis of the street, two towers rise in perfect symmetry. They frame the façade with quiet insistence, crowned by a triangular pediment that appears at first glance to offer stability and order. A central opening interrupts the wall, guiding the eye toward the center of the elevation, to what seems the entrance of a longitudinal, nave-like interior. To the foreigner, it suggests the familiar diagram of a church. Yet for the attentive gaze, something unsettles the recognition. Against the backdrop of dusty red earth and the piercing blue sky, the building conjures not only the memory of a church but the mirage of a colonial temple, floating as though carried from a Latin American landscape.