A Biografia Científica de João Manso Pereira e a contribuição africana e afro-brasileira para o desenvolvimento da Química no Brasil

Abstract

In 2023, it will be 20 years since the approval of Law 10.639/2003, which establishes mandatory teaching of African and Afro-Brazilian history and culture in education, aiming at the development of an education that favors respect and appreciation of differences ethnic-racial and the fight against racism. Unfortunately, the implementation of this law in schools and universities is still small and superficial, one of the main problems reported in the literature is a Eurocentric teaching, the lack of didactic materials, the absence of the subject in the teacher training course, mainly in the teaching of Science and Chemistry. Therefore, the present study aims to present a scientific biography on the black chemist João Manso Pereira, as  didactic resource that contributes to the approach of  Afro-Brazilian history and culture articulated with the history of Chemistry in Brazil, highlighting the work carried out by João Manso in the colonial period in the most different scientific and technological activities such as the analysis of samples from mining; the improvement of distillation with its proposal to improve alembics for the production of brandy; the production of the nitreiras and their political action in the inconfidência carioca, the construction of the biographic is based on the Critical Historiography of Science which makes a historical analysis of the particular, singular and universal, enabling an approach to the history of science contextual, that values internal and external aspects of science, stimulates criticality and enables an anti-racist science teaching.

Keywords: Black scientists, History of Chemistry in Brazil, Ethnic-Racial Education