The lives of Africans were not limited to enslavement and the destruction of their previous forms of social organization. After the remarkable experience of crossing the Atlantic, millions of lives were reinvented even under terribly adverse conditions. New devotions, family formations, languages, new foods: everything had yet to be done in the different forms of resistance mobilized for survival. And survival was the greatest resistance, not to mention that learning to tell one's own story in a way that was understandable to the interlocutors one wanted to reach was undeniable proof of vitality. [...] The author did not let himself be intimidated by the unusual source in the environment of professional historians in Brazil and tackled subjects on which authoritative authors seemed to have already said it all, such as the meanings of freedom for those who built them. Facing these challenges is proof of Rafael's intellectual maturity. If this proof serves to qualify him in his craft, the book also brings the reader a fine, well-constructed and pleasurable writing.